‘What, exactly?’ someone shouted.
‘It seems it might be difficult to repair –’
At once a murmur of questions rose from the benches. It grew indignant.
Bryant held out his arms: ‘Please! Please –’
‘What do you mean, difficult?’
‘Who’s in charge here?’
The woman in a yellow hat pointed to the boy on her knee: ‘He must eat by six, you know!’
‘I wish someone would just explain …’
‘Oh good God,’ Lady Rafferty scoffed. ‘A little problem and the whole world goes mad!’
‘Quite right, my dear,’ said Sir Basil, who had become somewhat subdued.
Then from the second row of benches, from beside Mrs Franks, came the unwavering voice of the Master. ‘Perhaps you could explain to us, Mr Bryant, what was the flare above the headland?’
Bryant was relieved to be asked. ‘A boat is on its way from Polmayne. If we should need assistance they will be on hand. Please bear with us – everything is being done to ensure our swift return. And Madam,’ he smiled at the woman in the yellow hat, ‘you may rest assured that the young man will get his supper!’
At once the chattering rose again from the benches. Bryant sensed the collective relief that now filled the deckhouse. He had done his job. He went up to the Raffertys. ‘I must apologise – these things can’t be helped.’
‘Of course, of course,’ said Sir Basil.
‘Piffle,’ muttered Lady Rafferty.
Anna too did not believe Bryant. She knew he was telling them only part of the truth. But she still had the strange feeling that she could step away from it at any time.
Opposite her, Parson Hooper clapped his hands. ‘Now, children, what about a story? Would you like that, children, a nice story?’
In the front row of benches Birkin stirred. He grunted, licked his lips, and transferred his head from Lee’s shoulder to Travers’s.
‘Mr Bryant,’ the Master spoke again. ‘By my estimate we’ll be on those rocks before they get a boat to us from Polmayne.’
Everyone fell silent.
Bryant straightened up. ‘I can assure you, sir, that there will be assistance here very soon.’
‘… so, when they were in Egypt’ – Parson Hooper was faltering – ‘the Lord sent many plagues. Do you know what they were, children, what strange plagues there were?’
The children looked at the vicar and saw only his nervousness, and they looked to their parents and saw it there too, and soon it was spreading among the benches like a contagion.
Jimmy was alone in the wheelhouse. He was standing with the weight on his good leg and he was making calculations. Both hands held the wheel and his face was impassive. What was their speed through the water? Next to nothing – but not quite nothing, judging by the helm. The wind was giving them a little westward way. And over the ground? A knot perhaps, no more. How much more ebb would there be, and which way was it taking them? West, of course, but was there any north in it as it approached the rocks, or was it yet working round to the south? South, he thought, and was playing the helm for every inch of south he could get. Less than half a mile separated them from the Curate rock, maybe a third. And what was that in time now – twenty, twenty-five minutes?
Two minutes had passed since the maroons went up. If they had a good launch the lifeboat should be away in another ten. It would take them a quarter of an hour to reach the Golden Sands. More, perhaps, with wind and tide against them. So – twenty-five minutes.
For the first time Jimmy considered his own lifeboat. It had broken free on the way over, but it was still all right. Ten, fifteen people at a time – three or four trips – but who was to say they could land anywhere in this sea? No, they were better off here, on board the Golden Sands.
Even so, he leaned out of the wheelhouse and told Tacker to see that the lifeboat was ready. They might need it in a hurry. Glancing aft, he saw the rocks shadowy against the sun, closer than he’d thought. He went back to the wheel and tried again to use what little way they had to head them south. But something had changed. The wind had veered. A tiny shift, but enough. All the effort with the helm had worked against him. The wind was now pushing them back onto the Curate rock, and he realised that if he had left it, if he had not played the helm, they would have gone clear of the Curate, clear too of the other rocks and drifting into open sea.
Then he saw the ship.
It was not a bad launch. Harris stopped his watch when he saw the boat and said, ‘Eleven minutes and twenty-five seconds!’
Coxswain Tyler had been with his sister. He had been sitting in the sun outside her house at the Crates, and Job and the cart were on the newly-seeded verge before him.
‘They’ve gone again.’ His sister was in the kitchen, and her account of their mother’s feet came through the open window. ‘Swelled up like turnips. Grandma was the same, her legs was just as bad, remember?’
Tyler felt the day’s warmth in the concrete step beneath him, felt the fatigue from his own exertions, and he was only half-listening, kicking at the loose gravel with his boot. ‘Mmm –’
Just for a moment when the maroons went up, he paused on the step. Job flinched at the noise and shuffled his hooves. By the time Tyler’s sister came to the window, she saw only her brother’s back as he ran down the road.
It took him exactly seven and a half minutes to reach the house. The launch crew were well ahead. Second Cox Brad Harris was already there, and as he spoke to him Tyler was pushing his arm into his lifejacket. He came out of the office doing up the straps just as Croyden and the Stephenses and Double and the others arrived from the allotments. Jack had arrived with them, and several other irregulars and some runners.
‘Where’s Red to?’ Tyler called.
‘Up Porth – crewing!’
‘Joe?’
‘He’s there too.’
‘Bloody Stephenses!’
‘I’m here,’ said Edwin Stephens.
Tyler ignored him. ‘Brian?’
‘Got the Reeds. So’s Thomas.’
Tyler shook his head. He crossed the floor and took down the lifejackets. He pushed one at Croyden, one at Jack and one at his own nephew Dougie Tyler. Grudgingly he tossed the last two at Edwin Stephens and his son. Standing beside the ladder he slapped the shoulder of each man as he climbed on board: ‘… five, six, seven …’
Tyler was last aboard, and he gave the signal. The Kenneth Lee started its slide and hit the easterly swell and they all ducked as the spray rose over them. Tyler knocked her into gear and she was already rising to meet the next sea.
First they saw the curve of distant smoke from her stack, then a flash of her white bridge in the sun. She was rising and falling with the swells. A tramp steamer off Kidda Head, three miles away and on a heading to clear the Lizard, sou’sou’west. Jimmy retrieved two red flares from the shelf above the wheel. He left the wheelhouse and shouldered his way past Red Stephens and lit them one after the other. They shot up and shone briefly some fifty feet above the water. He returned to the helm and watched the steamer’s undulating course. Three miles at ten knots – fifteen, twenty minutes, but with the wind with them and the tide …. She was now abeam of them. She disappeared in a trough and her bows emerged and they all waited to see if they were coming round. They were not. She was keeping her course.
‘What’s the service, Ty?’ Croyden was in the bows and he shouted aft, over the noise of the engine. Jack was with him up for’ard, and down the benches each side were the Stephenses and Double and the others. Their faces were red and glowing from the day at Pennance. They stared ahead or at their feet and waited for Tyler to reply.
‘Golden Sands. Disabled upwind of the Cages.’
Jack did not at once equate the Golden Sands with the Garretts’ boat, the boat he knew as the Polmayne Queen. He thought of the hotel first, then he thought of the boat and the Garretts – and then he thought of Anna.
Upwind of th
e Cages.
Of Jack’s four call-outs, three had been false alarms. There had been the Constantine, but with the half-dozen exercises he had taken part in, this place, this squatting beneath the lifeboat’s foredeck with the smell of damp and linseed from the lifejackets, was not one he associated with danger.
It’ll be a false alarm. If the engine had gone, they’d fix it. How many times had something gone on the Maria V’s Kelvin and they’d idled for a while and sorted it out? They would come round Pendhu and there would be that new yellow of the Garretts’ boat and she’d be on her way back, the sun shining on her bows as she surged forward with each of the following seas.
CHAPTER 30
On the for’ard deck of the Golden Sands, all eyes were on the steamer. Red and Tacker and Joseph Stephens were preparing the lifeboat. They had pulled back the cover and were checking the davits, but had stopped while they watched the steamer. Charlie Treneer and Lawrence Rose and Ralph Cameron watched too. They could see her profile with the bridge amidships and her gantries and the smoke blowing sideways. She was abeam of them and in her far-off rise and fall each of them tried to see the first shift in her course.
‘Any more o’ they flares, Tack?’
Tacker dashed to the wheelhouse. Jimmy was standing, eyes ahead, hands firm on the wheel. He did not stir as Tacker fumbled in the locker by his legs. ‘Christ, Jim – there’s some bloody damp in ’ere!’
He fished out a flare and wiped it on his trouser leg. He took it into the open air. Red and Joe and Rose huddled with him inside the coaming. The first match blew out. So did the second. The third flickered against the touch-paper and went out, and the next. Time and again Tacker tried to light it, but the matches flared and went out. Red took the barrel of the flare. ‘It’s bloody sodden, Tack!’
Rose smacked his hand on the gunwale. ‘What sort of tinpot ship is this?’
The seas were butting against the bows. As each one came through they could feel the weight of it trying to drag the boat round, and they all knew that all that kept them from rolling over was the sea anchor.
‘She’s coming!’ Cameron was standing against the foredeck.
Rose looked up. Cameron was pointing to the steamer.
‘She’s coming round!’
The others came to the rail and they could see that the gap between them and the ship was narrowing as she swung round towards them. On the wind came two blasts from her foghorn.
‘Hurrah!’ cried Rose.
Cameron went aft to tell Bryant. There was an odd hush among the passengers.
‘How long, Major Cameron?
‘Ten, fifteen minutes.’
‘Then what?’
‘They’ll put us under tow.’
The news spread fast through the deckhouse. Travers raised Birkin’s sleeping head from his shoulder and went to stand with several others in the doorway.
‘You can see her!’ he called back. ‘Coming straight for us! A mile away!’
‘Thank God!’ said Mrs Bryant.
Even the Master agreed that there was a good chance she would reach them in time.
The pitch was changing, but so slightly that only Jimmy noticed it. Everyone was concentrating on the steamer, but as he played each of the seas with the helm, Jimmy could feel it. The seas were becoming shorter. They were steepening. Deep beneath the Golden Sands, the sea-bed was beginning to rise – towards the first of the rocks, towards the Curate.
The steamer was close now. Those in the bows of the Golden Sands could smell her coal-smoke on the wind. Still a few hundred yards off, she swung round and began to drop back, stern-first. Five or six men were standing high up at the ship’s stern-rail. Beneath them the black paint was chipped and scabs of rust glowed in the late sun and the name was painted in white: Hopelyn, Newcastle.
Jimmy told Tacker and the others to shorten the sea anchor.
Back in the deckhouse the passengers had sat down. The boat’s motion was becoming wilder. Only Travers stayed on his feet. He was leaning against the jamb of the companionway door and the still-freshening wind was flicking at his hair. ‘… three hundred yards … they’re coming in backwards now … two hundred … one fifty …’
‘That’s it!’ said Major Franks. ‘Come on!’
‘… one hundred …’
‘Come on –’
‘Please!’ Mrs Franks put a hand to her chest. ‘Stop him! He’s giving me flutterings.’
‘… eighty, sixty …”
Beside Mrs Franks was the Master. He looked into her eyes and began to whisper.
‘… fifty … They’re going to send a line …’
‘They’re sending a line, my dear!’ repeated Franks.
But Mrs Franks was not listening. She was looking at the Master. ‘That’s better. Yes, much better …’
The Hopelyn was in place. One of the seamen raised his arm. From the bows of the Golden Sands they watched an ellipse of heaving-line rise from the stern and uncoil against the sky. It flopped down into the waves – twenty yards off. They saw the scuff of water as it was pulled back aboard the steamer. The figure of the seaman stepped away from the rail, out of sight. They were dropping back; the stern of the ship was coming in closer.
The man threw the line again and it drifted out above them. The last of the coils spun out and fell, slapping down across the Golden Sands’s foredeck. Red and Tacker both grabbed at it. They began to haul. Others joined them. High up on the Hopelyn’s stern they saw where the line was attached to a loop of wire hawser which came flopping down into the water, across the seas between them and up onto the Golden Sands. Tacker reached for the spliced eye, but already the two ships were moving apart. The slack was slicing up through the water. Tacker leaned forward.
‘Quick, man!’ shouted Cameron. The line slackened for a moment, then began to tighten again. Tacker took the eye in one hand and jammed it over the mooring cleat. He jumped clear. The line pulled tight and the eye narrowed and creaked. He raised his arm.
In the last half-hour the wind had strengthened. Those in the bows could feel it harder on their faces. They could see the lines of spume streaking the water, and the dark corrugations that moved through the troughs and covered the ridges and slopes of the sea all around them. But for now they were watching the hawser. It made a shifting angle between the boats – now slack, now taut. Then they saw the sudden surge of white water at the Hopelyn’s stern and she began to move. The line flicked a curtain of spray upwards, and very slowly the Golden Sands made her first forward progress for thirty-two minutes.
Cameron started to clap.
‘At last!’ hissed Rose.
‘Yee-eee!’
Tacker looked over his shoulder and raised his thumb to the wheelhouse. Jimmy nodded.
When Cameron went aft, Sir Basil looked up at him and said: ‘We’re moving!’
They could all feel the boat going forward beneath them, and a ripple of applause spread across the deckhouse.
‘About time,’ said Lady Rafferty, and closed her eyes.
Tacker and Red and the others were on the foredeck. Five of them were hauling in the remaining anchor chain. It was tricky to keep a grip on the deck and haul at the same time, and now with the boat’s forward motion the bows were slamming down hard into the swells. Each time they fell, the spray came over the bows and fell on them. But they didn’t mind; not now that each second took them another yard from danger.
In the wheelhouse, Jimmy was still struggling with the helm. He was trying to keep the bows steady to lighten the tow. Each time they rose from a trough the warp sliced down into the crest and he lost sight of the steamer. Then they topped the wave and the hawser stretched across the trough to the ship. The glass in front of him was streaming with spray. The bows came up and the wire jerked tight against the cleat. It slackened as they cleared the crest and dropped down into the next. They fell hard to port and the wire jumped clear of the brass fairlead. Jimmy threw the wheel. He watched the warp rasp along the gunw
ale, then cheese-wire down into the wood. He felt the enormous weight of the two ships moving away from each other. The line strained against the cleat. Those in the bows had pulled the anchor in and Tacker was lifting it down off the bows. He propped it on the deck and held it and he too watched the cleat – watched it rip out from the foredeck, bang against the prow and shoot overboard.
The Golden Sands fell back. They were lifted up onto the next wave and for an instant those in the bows saw the whole scene – the steamer off to starboard, the far smudge of Kidda Head, the line of land to the north, the cliffs of Pendhu and the white water around the Main Cages. Then they dropped down a dark slope of water and rolled far over onto their beam. Tacker fell. With a heavy clanking the anchor somersaulted down the deck. It slammed into the bulwarks and toppled, catching Rose on the shin. On the wind his cry carried down through the boat.
Down in the scuppers, Tacker looked up at the weather rail high above him. He was sure they were going over. He saw the anchor tumbling towards him and he rolled to avoid it. Water bubbled up from the scuppers and he thought: ‘We’re going. We can’t go back from this.’ But the boat stopped at the very edge of her balance – then dropped back onto her keel.
On board the Kenneth Lee they were coming under Pendhu; in the lee of the cliffs it was suddenly calm. The sun-coloured rocks rose above them. Echoing overhead they could hear the cry of gulls and fulmars.
They watched the edge of the cliffs ahead and the sea opening out as they came round. One by one the Main Cages slid into view. They could see the seas high against Maenmor, rising fifteen, twenty feet up the rock before falling back. Each time the swells came in they smothered the smaller rocks beside it.
Jack picked out the disturbed water to the east and the Golden Sands beyond it and the steamer to one side. ‘They’re under tow,’ he thought. ‘They’re not far off the rocks but the steamer has them in tow.’ At that moment the lifeboat cleared the lee of Pendhu and the first of the swells picked her up and for a moment everything disappeared in the spray. When they came up again, Jack saw that there was no line between the two boats.
The Main Cages Page 20