Black Waters (Strong Winds Series Book 5)

by Julia Jones

  Mrs Farran smiled and waved. She was tucked around with coats and rugs and was wearing a thick silk headscarf on her white curls. She looked tiny but triumphant. Martha almost waved as well – except Xanthe could see that Siri was shaking her head and Kelly-Jane was deliberately folding her arms and looking away. Siri understood about dinghy balance. Kelly-Jane understood about Siri.

  Xanthe knew that her pupils wouldn’t be expecting her to wave back. She was shocked that they were there.

  The Commander positioned his motor launch at exactly the right distance for her wake, slight as it was, to fan out in front of Fritha, imperceptibly slowing the Firefly.

  “Interference!” shouted Xanthe.

  The judge’s boat would be anchored somewhere near the mark beyond the island. Much too far away to notice what was happening and, at this moment, she couldn’t see any other race official. Except the Viking. One by one the dinghies she’d already overtaken began catching her up again.

  She tacked. It was strategy not a defeat. She drifted at an oblique angle until she had a clear view of the end of the island and knew that the judge would have a clear view of her as well.

  Miranda was forced to alter course but now it was Xanthe who was ahead of the spreading ripples and was using their momentum to help herself along. How peculiarly satisfying! She gave the girls a nod and a grin that she felt certain they’d interpret correctly.

  Possibly the Commander understood it too. He opened his throttle and swerved away.

  “Neat!” said a familiar voice from astern. There, drifting up river with her dinghy in perfect equilibrium was Griselda. She was sailing Black Star.

  “I thought I could do my bit to keep your sponsors sweet,” she added. “As well as our distinguished visitors, of course. Your sister’s sailing nicely. Plenty of talent on these East Coast rivers, I’ve always said. Ah, well, on I go. I expect I’ll see you later when the wind gets up again.”

  Black Star was overhauling Fritha inch by inch. Xanthe could see Griselda’s lean weather-beaten face, creased with concentration and delight. Then her coach appeared to make the slightest error of judgement. It left an opening for Xanthe to alter course and foul her wind from behind.

  Xanthe didn’t hesitate. She slipped across. Got in the way. Watched Black Star’s purposeful progress falter and slow.

  “Very good,” Griselda called back. “I was afraid you might have learned some scruples while you’ve been on leave.”

  She corrected her own course and began to draw away again.

  Where was the wind? Xanthe sighed in frustration. Fritha couldn’t begin to compete with Black Star and the other top Lasers in these conditions.

  She looked ahead to the leading group, watched them approaching the island. Imperium reached the mark. Madrigal’s progress was silky smooth. She was demonstrating a textbook rolling gybe. She’d need all her momentum to counter the tide, thought Xanthe.

  Then the sail deflated. Imperium stalled. Madrigal glanced at her wrist and pushed her tiller hard away from her. She was swinging the Laser into an eddy, an unsuspected patch where the current set crosswise round Oveseye, following the course of a submerged creek. Within seconds Imperium was slipping out from the shadow of the island and was heading confidently down river in the gossamer breeze. It had been a beautiful, knowledgeable manoeuvre.

  “Very neat indeed,” commented Griselda.

  She spoke rather loudly and Xanthe guessed that she had been meant to hear: that Griselda was telling her that she wasn’t partisan; that she was still supporting Madrigal as well as herself; that they were still her two key competitors for the one top spot

  Xanthe stared intently, lining up the mark against a clump of trees on the further shore, trying to establish the coordinates Madrigal must have used to step onto that invisible tidal conveyer. She noticed Maggi in Kingfisher and one or two others of the leading dinghies trying something similar but without the same success. Madrigal’s placing had been impeccable. Her glance at her wrist was possibly the giveaway.

  The sky had paled and high white wisps of cloud were moving swiftly in the upper atmosphere. Down on the far southwestern bank a vicious purple bruise was spreading up and over the vanishing shore. The instructors accompanying the sailing school groups hurried to gather together their students, take in their sails and attach them securely to the safety boats. The more experienced club racers tensed in anticipation.

  For one last time the water surface seemed to congeal. It glassed and slopped. All the dinghies slowed until they were nothing more than feathers on the tide. Those who had already gybed but who hadn’t succeeded in following where Madrigal had led began to drift helplessly backwards.

  It was as if the weather was holding its breath. The dinghy sailors, watching, held theirs too.

  Then Xanthe spotted a small, multi-coloured raft: four kayaks bobbing together downstream of the mark. She recognised the occupants – David, Kieran, Nelson and Jonjo. She could see that they had their paddles crossed horizontally in front of them, linking them together. She realised that they were looking at her, not at the distant darkness or the spreading cloud. They had no idea of the danger and were waiting to cheer her on her way.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The Chapel on the Wall

  Monday June 3, lw 0900 hw 1508 lw 2108 hw 0330

  The hard, dark line of the wind swept the greying river. Lightning flashed above Fishling and the sky around them howled. Fritha leapt into life as if she’d been galvanised. Her sails were straining, her lee gunwale was almost submerged as she rocketed ahead.

  Xanthe had both feet hooked beneath the toe straps and was hiked out horizontal. She had loosened the sheets as far as she dared but she couldn’t hold the Firefly upright. She didn’t have the weight to maintain her course. Until the squall passed all she could do was abandon the mark, bear away and run.

  She was rounding the island now and rampaging down the river. She saw everything sideways, her head just a few feet from the surface of the water as she strained to keep Fritha from capsize. There was Madrigal; there was Maggi; there were the racers from Meresig and Brittlesey – taut, white triangles against the iron-dark sky. All of them still battling for supremacy as well as for survival. What a race it had become!

  But it was a race she would have to abandon. She had to get back to the kids. How could she find the strength to bring the Firefly round into the wind? How could she drop out?

  An orange RIB tore across her path, leaping and slamming between plumes of spray. The driver was Dominic. He was standing forward, gripping the wheel, peering ahead into the storm. His pale hair was soaked, his face bleached with anxiety as his tall, bony frame absorbed the impact of each smash. He hadn’t gone back to Godwyn.

  The dinghy beside her capsized: another appeared to have blown out its sail. Xanthe lifted herself a few degrees above the horizontal and looked round. Everything that had been blue, mellow and reflective was now slate-grey, foam-flecked, indigo. All the official safety boats were busy. She hoped the Commander had got Miranda and her passengers safely under cover.

  A Laser surged towards her. It was Black Star. She had rounded the mark and was heading down river with her mast jutting forward at a crazy angle. Griselda was letting the dinghy run. It was all she could do. Then, even as Xanthe watched, the whole rig blew out of its step and collapsed. Black Star lurched, swivelled, stopped. Griselda thumped her fist on the gunwale before she began loosening the mainsheet in order to push mast, sail, boom and vang off the hull before she swamped.

  There was nothing Xanthe could do to help. She stared upwards at her own bellying mainsail. F486. The blocked black lettering on the strong white cotton.

  Suddenly she had it. She’d seen this exact sail in storm conditions before. It was in a drawing in one of the many classic racing books on the shelves of the Sailing Academy library. But the sail had been re
efed.

  You needn’t be afraid to reef. That was Elvström’s trick in ’48.

  Griselda hadn’t listened to her warning about Black Star; Xanthe hadn’t listened to Griselda.

  Elvström. The Danish sailor who’d won more Olympic gold medals than anyone (until Ben Ainslie came along) had won his first gold in a Firefly. F 486.

  This was the dinghy. She was sailing an Olympic champion’s boat! Gareth had assumed she would have realised. The Commander of the Saxon Shore had been outraged.

  What else could she remember? This was good history. It was 1948. London – Torbay, actually. Elvström had been a teenager – hadn’t he? Very young, anyway and, crucially, lighter than his opponents. Too light for the Firefly – this actual dinghy! – in heavy winds. So he’d reefed her hard and had survived to win.

  This would be her only chance. She couldn’t wait for the squall to pass; she steered Fritha close under the lee of the island, tore the jib down and put two rolls in the mainsail. Then she thought of the kids and their kayaks and put in two more rolls. Rescuers had to think differently from racers. They needed to be quick, but they also needed to arrive.

  She pointed the Firefly into the wind and headed back upriver. Out of the corner of one eye she saw Griselda coping with the wreckage of Black Star. She was over the stern of the dinghy, gripping the transom and kicking furiously, swimming the Laser ashore.

  The wind shrieked and a flurry of hail pummelled her cheek. It made her want to shut her eyes but she had to keep them open. How could Jonjo not have checked the weather? The hailstones came pinging off the mainsail as if it were a trampoline. Then they turned to rain. Great fat drops bombing onto the water.

  Suddenly she was there, where the kayak raft had broken apart in the wind and waves. She let her mainsheet fly and Fritha stopped. She saw Dominic heaving Kieran into the RIB and Jonjo had his kayak clamped firmly against David’s, holding them both rock-steady. Two out of three.

  Where was Nelson? She twirled her dinghy, staring every-which-way until she saw him coming towards them. There was rain streaming off him. His paddle was flailing and his smile splitting his face in two. She hauled her sheet and sent Fritha darting towards him.

  “What does the sea say when it sees the shore?” he shouted. He must have had that one ready for her.

  “Nothing,” she shouted back, feeling the rain running warm down her own face. Or maybe it wasn’t all rain. Had she ever felt such relief?

  “It just waves!! Go show’em, Cap’n Xanthe!”

  The kids flourished their paddles. Jonjo gave a thumbs-up. Dominic gestured to her to head back downriver to rejoin the race but Kieran, level-headed Kieran, pointed his paddle to the mark.

  He was right. She hadn’t yet rounded it. She’d be disqualified. Though she was out of contention anyway.

  With her reduced rig it was the work of a moment to tack back those extra few metres and pass the buoy on the correct side. The judge’s boat was moored there with a number of dinghies clustered alongside for safety. Madrigal, Maddie and the rest were downriver, almost out of sight.

  Xanthe hoisted her jib and unrolled Fritha’s mainsail twice. Then she was gone.

  Hell, she was so happy she wished she’d unrolled it all. The wind had lost its initial bite and the downpour was flattening the water, but the Firefly was still a two-man dinghy and she was only one girl – albeit with the blessing of her sturdy figure. Once she had rounded Oveseye, it was a long broad reach to the Mell Creek marker. She had to hike out to keep the dinghy flat and, although part of her was beating herself up for her cowardice in keeping Fritha’s mainsail so small, she couldn’t help noticing that she was upright and most people weren’t. The fastest racers – the survivors – were far away. The rest had capsized, retired or been stopped by the organisers.

  She glimpsed one solitary spectator as she passed the place where the pier had once been. Xanthe guessed she was female but she was wearing a long dark raincoat with a hood covering the top part of her face and the visibility was poor. She definitely wasn’t anyone that Xanthe knew but she was waving uninhibitedly.

  At that moment, Xanthe and the woman seemed to be the only two people in the world. Xanthe let Fritha come up for a moment and released one hand to wave back as she passed. It was possible that the woman cheered.

  The rain and wind had eased slightly but the Firefly wasn’t sailing so well. She felt sluggish. Xanthe realised that her dinghy had been filling up with water. This would never have happened in the small well of a Laser but Fritha was big and deep and…boat-shaped. Either she had no self-baling system or it had been overwhelmed by the downpour.

  Xanthe had no choice. She turned the dinghy head-to-wind and baled vigorously as the sails flapped and the minutes passed.

  “1940s design fault there. I wouldn’t have caught you otherwise.” It was Griselda. Somehow she’d re-stepped her mast, refastened her cleats and was back on the water. “Someone made a damn silly error when they rigged this dinghy. It wasn’t you, was it?”

  “No, it was NOT.”

  She emptied the last of the rainwater and swung away down river.

  Griselda was sailing more cautiously now, checking Black Star’s equipment. “Don’t wait for me,” she said. “Push on, for heaven’s sake.”

  It was pointless. Xanthe had already heard the All-Clear sounding repeatedly to greet the finishers as they completed this section of the challenge. She hoped Maggi was okay. Her sister had never enjoyed heavy-weather racing since she had broken her collarbone in an October gale.

  There was no siren for her as she passed St Peter’s and no comment from the loudspeaker. The other dinghies had gone on again, racing for the chapel and the invited spectators would be inside the marquees finishing their lunch and watching events on screen. Presumably all those smacks and barges were running some race out to sea somewhere. If they had cameras with them, beaming back footage, there’d be enough entertainment to content the Deputy High Commissioner and the Hundreth and all those other distinguished visitors. There’d be lavish food and plenty of wine and conviviality with the owners of the historic Little Ships.

  Yet again, Xanthe wondered why.

  She took out the last two rolls from her mainsail and lifted her centreboard to run freely towards the point. The sky was clearing. She could see Laser sails in the distance. Maybe eight or ten, clustered together. She supposed she’d meet them on their way home.

  Miranda came flying down the river. She was something extraordinary at full speed. More rocket than boat. She rounded the point and vanished from sight.

  “You’re dawdling,” said Griselda. Black Star was sailing freely now.

  “Ok then, watch me,” replied Xanthe, adjusting her course. “Any route to the chapel, okay?”

  The tide was almost at its height. She’d give Griselda a race. The Laser was quicker than the Firefly of course and her coach was a former champion, but Griselda wasn’t sailing home waters.

  “OMG!”

  She thought she’d had enough shocks for one day but there was Godwyn being towed slowly down the channel by a Saxon tug on the far side of Shinglehead Spit. Her vivid scarlet was unmistakeable. Dominic had abandoned his post for a single afternoon to watch over the kids in a storm and his father had stolen his life’s work.

  And she’d almost certainly facilitated this by forcing Dominic to use his ‘nuclear option’ to protect Gareth and Igraine. There was nothing she could do to help and she had failed to achieve the single thing that Dominic had asked of her. Beat Madrigal.

  Black Star was sailing like Spray again and Griselda was pulling away fast. She was taking the obvious route, following the marked channel well to the outside of Sales Point.

  Xanthe adjusted her course. There was more than one way to win a race and, if Griselda didn’t notice what she was doing, Xanthe could win this one on navigation.

/>   They were the last to join the small fleet of racing dinghies pulled up on the shell bank before the Chapel of St Cedd. Xanthe would cherish the moment that she and Fritha had shot out from inside the rubble and the sea defences that were protecting the point from erosion and had heard Griselda shout, “Damn!” Everything else was failure.

  Miranda had dropped anchor a couple of metres off, within easy wading distance from the long flat shore. The weather front had passed, the sun was shining, the air seemed washed and luminous. There was even a rainbow arching over the small plain chapel.

  Not so plain today. The building had been festooned with red and gold and purple banners with gilt tassels and black symbols: not only the ubiquitous seaxes but horned helmets and fists clenched inside gauntlets. The banners had been disarranged by the wind and soaked by the rain. They looked wrong and unnecessary in the glowing landscape. The wannabe Viking was posed in front of the ancient building holding an ornate gold cup.

  “Speed alone will count. You couldn’t have put it more clearly,” said one of the Brittlesey racers, an eighteen-year-old who Xanthe recognised as one of their top competitors. “I was here first. I claim the prize for the River Colne.”

  He was relaxed and confident.

  “I was impeded. Harassed all the way by…that.” Madrigal was white with fury, except for two red spots in the middle of her cheeks. She gestured towards Maggi.

  “Wherever I went she was in my way, fouling my wind, forcing me to luff, pushing me across other competitors. She wasn’t sailing to win; all she wanted to do was make me lose. She was sailing me down the fleet from the moment we left St Peter’s. Every one of you must have seen what she was doing.”

  Maggi stayed quiet and smiled: the other sailors nodded and laughed.

  “It’s an accepted tactic in fleet racing,” commented a cheerful lad from Meresig. “I bet you’ve used it yourself.”