Death on a Longship

by Marsali Taylor

  ‘He flatters me,’ Elizabeth said, smiling, cool. Ted nodded to us both and walked on, and her eyes followed him for two seconds, not more, then flicked back to me, all poise and purpose. ‘Now, have you got the filming schedule for today?’

  The afternoon was spent doing still shots in the middle of the voe. We let the anchor down and just sat there while Favelle posed. Medium shot of Favelle leaning her head against the rigging. Close-up of Favelle with bucket. Favelle gazing out into the distance. Favelle walking between the rowers, smiling her famous smile at each of them. Our hardy Vikings wilted before her like picked buttercups. I even saw one gazing dreamily at her shadow lying across his foot.

  I did end up admiring Favelle’s unruffled patience, pose after pose after pose, followed by a long wait before the next sequence. She took it all in her stride, drawing her green coat around her, and picking up her knitting – a baby coat, from the looks of it. Maybe playing with Charlie was practice.

  He and Inga came out on the inflatable, to do an hour’s filming.

  ‘Cute child shots,’ Anders said resignedly, coming to lean beside me in the stern. ‘They’ll be lucky if he has half the patience she has.’

  ‘A quarter,’ I agreed. We’d reckoned without Favelle’s influence, though. He was happy just to stand there by her, to look out where she pointed, or clap hands and smile over a game of pat-a-cake, or take her hand to walk between the rowers. He even accepted a drink of juice from a pewter beaker, rather than his own cup with the cat in the bottom; if any of us had tried that, there’d have been a major tantrum. Inga stood by, ready to coax when wanted, but Charlie didn’t even look back to check she was still there.

  The hour had stretched into an hour and a half when Charlie began to show signs of restlessness. Inga scooped him up. ‘Home time, baby.’

  ‘No,’ Charlie said, and began to scream.

  ‘He could stay a little longer,’ Favelle said.

  Charlie held his arms out to her, over Inga’s shoulder. ‘Stay! Down!’ The chubby legs kicked furiously, dislodging Inga’s red-amber scarf. Inga twisted him so that they flailed the air, caught her scarf with the other hand and spoke firmly.

  ‘It’ll be his teatime by the time we get home. We need to go now.’

  Favelle blew Charlie a kiss. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, honey.’

  Charlie wriggled furiously. He’d end up in the water at this rate. He gave Inga a slap across the face with the full force of one angry arm, and she responded with a sharp smack on the nappied bottom which stilled him for the time it took to hand him down into the inflatable. I heard Favelle gasp in horror. His wails turned to heart-rending sobs which echoed back across the water at us even over the roar of the inflatable’s engine.

  We had the helicopter back for the following day, to take more ‘at sea’ shots with Favelle prominent on board. She’d got her sea-legs now, in spite of the long kirtle that trailed across the decks and hid the uneven planks beneath her feet. We had luck, too; just as we were about to break for lunch, a school of dolphins came tumbling alongside the boat, grey bodies gleaming. The inflatable stilled its engine; the cameras circled Favelle as she leaned over the side, almost touching the largest dolphin as it leapt up from under the ship, rode the bow wave, and dived again. Favelle was laughing with delight, eyes wide with the wonder of it. Michael came forward and talked to her. She nodded and clambered precariously up the side of the ship to perch behind the dragon head. I moved over to Ted.

  ‘She’s not wearing a lifejacket, Ted, and that dress would drag her down fast.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’s a perfect shot. She won’t fall, Cass.’

  When the dolphins went, Favelle leapt lightly down from her perch. Her voice was breathless, more childish than yesterday. ‘That was so cute. I’d love to be a dolphin, just swimming on and on and on.’ Her face clouded, and her voice became older, more like Maree’s. ‘Except their sonar gets confused by our pollution, and they drive themselves ashore, or they get cut in half by ship propellers, or tangled in tuna nets. If the world doesn’t do something soon our children will never see dolphins the way we just saw them.’

  There was always a little crowd when we returned to the pier. Favelle looked up and gave them the dreamy smile, and a little wave, and when two girls came forward with photos for her to sign, she said, ‘Sure, honey.’ They asked if they could pose with her, and she smiled again and stood with them while the girls’ father snapped away, the two children awed and admiring beside her. It suited her, the green dress, the soft velvet clinging to her high breasts and rounded belly, then falling in long folds to the floor. She posed with them, then turned and posed again for a press photographer, with Stormfugl behind.

  Ted saw that too. He gave her a sharp look but didn’t say anything, just swung down the gangplank and offered his arm, and they went off to the limo together in a fusillade of camera flashes. The look left me puzzled, though. Why shouldn’t she be posing for photographers? Maybe she had some sort of contract with a particular firm, though how you’d enforce that when every six-year-old had a personal mobile phone, I didn’t know.

  I watched idly as the long white limo went round the bend above the marina and along towards Busta. It stopped just above Jessie’s house; sheep on the road, I supposed. I wondered what Ted made of driving in a place where sheep had right of way.

  The third day of filming was dialogue scenes aboard the boat. Only Anders, Gibbie, and I were needed for that. We took her out under engine and anchored, ready to spend the day keeping out of the way of the waiting actors, grips, best boys, make-up girls, and all the other people that seemed vital for filming even a simple conversation between two people. Scene 53, take 1. Take 2. Take 3. They’d all looked identical to me. They’d do three lines of dialogue several times without the camera, then roll it with cameras facing in different directions, ready to be cut together. Ted would look at the versions in a little hand-held video, and then they’d either re-take, after a long, intense discussion between Ted and Favelle, or move on. Moving on meant a long wait while they re-positioned the cameras. Scene 54. Scene 55. Anders lost himself in some swords and sorcery epic, and Gibbie gloomed. I wished I’d brought a book.

  Favelle was good, though. One scene involved a quarrel with her husband, and she spat at him for the camera, then instantly returned to her placid self, knitting in hand, for the next half hour wait. Ted’s face wasn’t as mercurial as hers, or he couldn’t snap in and out of character the way she could, for the defensive look he’d put on for the camera stayed put in between takes too, and he spoke to her roughly when he was moving her position from one scene to the next.

  The inflatable buzzed out with Busta sandwiches for lunch, and mid-afternoon tea and cake. There were pizza wedges in an insulated tray at six o’clock, along with paper plates of Caesar salad. I made a cone of my plate, and Anders and I saved our walnuts for Rat, left sulking in his cage aboard Khalida.

  By eight the light was yellowing, so Ted wrapped it up. The mist that had been hovering to the east all day began to creep towards us. The film crew all headed for the boating club bar, Gibbie climbed into his old Fiat and grumbled off, and Anders and I were left in peace. The next day was our big sailing scene, the landing in Greenland, so we’d need to spend the evening getting decks scrubbed, every inch of rigging inspected, and the sail re-stowed. Rat came out of his cage and ate his walnuts with relish, Anders nipped into the bar by the back way and got us a pint of Belhaven each, and we sat on deck listening to the lap of the waves, and terns chittering on the shore, and the distant hubbub of film people knocking back boating club Chardonnay.

  ‘Gibbie,’ Anders said. ‘I’m not happy about him, Cass. He is beginning to feel …’ He made a circular gesture with his hands. ‘His cooling water intake is blocked.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said.

  ‘He goes over to the rigging, and then he turns and sees I’m looking at him, and he goes very still, then moves elsewhere. I think your friend was
right. He is a little crazy. I do not like him on board ship.’

  I nodded. ‘It’s an awkward one. Not much longer, though, two days of filming with Favelle, a couple of days of wind farm publicity, then that’s us. Job over.’

  Anders made a face. ‘I was enjoying this. I wanted to stay on in Shetland, but my father says my replacement has no feel for engines.’

  ‘I don’t know what I’ll do,’ I said. He gave me a quick look, opened his mouth, then shut it again and rose purposefully.

  ‘Bacon roll?’

  ‘Sounds good,’ I said. ‘I’ll just look at this.’ I gestured at the letters he’d brought with the Belhaven. ‘Half of them will be for the film lot. I wish the postie would take them to Busta, instead of dumping them at “the film boat”.’

  ‘I’ll bring it over.’

  ‘Thanks, Anders.’

  He went off with Rat on his shoulder, and I flipped through the letters. There was a brown envelope for me (the Inland Revenue, noting my arrival back in the UK), half a dozen for Ted, and a handful for Favelle, including an official-looking typed one in a white envelope. I wondered if I should take it over this evening, but couldn’t be bothered. There were two for Michael, one of them in a blue-ink feminine hand. I refrained from turning it over to look at the address on the back. On board ship, when you were living so cheek-by-jowl with others that every trip to the toilet was a public performance, there were strict rules about that kind of thing.

  I put the letters together and leaned back. Gibbie was a problem. I’d been aware of the suppressed rage too, like a head of steam building up, which showed in the roughness he put to the simplest unscrewing of a shackle. For tomorrow, I’d put him on to mooring-rope handling with a couple of the reliable Vikings.

  It was my night to keep watch on Stormfugl. After we’d made her ship-shape Anders headed off, and I took my sleeping bag and a pillow up into Khalida’s cockpit and made myself comfortable. I could smell the ebb weed in the dimness, and hear every sound: a pony tearing grass in the park above the marina, the trickle of the road overflow, a TV set in one of the new houses past the clubhouse. I’d just got settled when a light shone out above me from Jessie’s house: a door opening and closing. I tensed. Gibbie?

  Two darker shapes moved against the grass that led down towards the shore. Voices murmured, intense, then, as they came nearer, I recognised Maree’s walk. They stopped at the fence; the man with Maree looked back up, towards the house, as if wary of being overheard, then leaned towards her. The words floated towards me over the still water.

  ‘I’ll tell her.’ It was Ted. ‘Not yet, though, wait a bit.’

  Maree’s voice was vehement. ‘I’ll tell her, if you can’t work yourself up to it.’

  ‘You can’t just spring something like that on her, for Chrissake.’

  ‘Ted, it’s not going to go away. The longer you leave it, the worse it’ll be.’

  ‘I’m warning you, Maree.’ His voice was ice-hard. ‘Keep quiet, or –’ His tone softened to reasonable. ‘Look, something like this could knock her haywire. Let her get the filming over, and the publicity stuff. A couple of days, what difference will that make?’

  ‘I’m not prepared to keep this to myself.’

  ‘You must. For her sake, you must.’

  Maree made an annoyed sound, turned, and strode away. The rectangle of light winked. Ted waited, leaning forward on the fence wire, looking across the marina; I kept very still, and sensed, rather than saw, the moment when he drew a long breath and turned away. A light flicked on in the house, framing a silhouette: Maree looking out over the still water.

  Chapter Seven

  We set off before first light to arrive at the Hams for half past seven. Mist still wreathed the eastern hills, but here on the west side the sun shone wrinkled gold on Atlantic swell. Seabirds wheeled overhead, squawking indignantly at this invasion of their territory; the salt spray stung on my cheeks and smelt sharp in my nostrils.

  I fretted gently all the way around Muckle Roe. This would be my big test as skipper, to bring the ship in to shore without an engine, just as the Vikings had done, and in this place too. Hams came from the Old Norse ‘hamar’, a landing place. I liked that idea.

  We’d walked the ground last Tuesday morning and decided exactly what line Stormfugl had to follow into the bay, and where she had to beach, then gone back the following evening with Stormfugl under engine, and I’d taken meids, shore features that I could line up one above the other to get me in just the right place. It would be harder under sail, when the wind puffed and curved around the cliffs and fell suddenly when you came into their shadow. That was the problem of working with non-sailors; Ted had this picture of the boat appearing under full sail and just gliding up to the beach.

  ‘We have to make it look easy,’ I told my oarsmen. ‘You know the line, from the other night, and a good few of you know the Hams, and the way the wind funnels around then dies completely. You’ll need to be quick in trimming the sail and handing it before we hit the beach – you can backwater the oars there, so we don’t hit it too fast.’

  Nods; they knew what I wanted.

  ‘And, of course, there may be last-minute changes.’ I grimaced at the headset I had to wear under my felted hat. ‘Good luck.’ I squeezed the headset on and pulled my hat on top. ‘Cass here. We’re ready.’

  There was a crackle in my ear. ‘Just receiving you, Cass,’ Michael said. ‘Coverage isn’t good here, we’re having to go back to hand signals. We’re all set up for your entrance. Ted and Favelle are setting out now.’

  The motor launch bounced across the waves and curved to a halt beside us. Anders held out a hand, and Favelle climbed aboard, moving with confidence in spite of the encumbering dress. Ted followed her and they took up their positions on the swaying deck: the explorer and his wife looking ahead at landfall a thousand miles from home.

  ‘Got them on board,’ I reported. I turned to my Viking troops. ‘Okay, let’s go.’

  As soon as Stormfugl began to move my nerves fell away. My crew handled this ship as if they’d been born raiders. The red and ochre sail fell without a flap, bellied out, and we began to move smoothly forward towards the narrow entrance between two cliffs. It looked like a dead end, a brown-sand beach two hundred yards on, with no shelter from the northerly swell, but those who knew the place turned hard a-port into a perfect anchorage, sheltered by cliffs from the north, with a sickle of pale gold sand for a landing and water so clear you could see your anchor among the cauliflower weed and fanned mermaid’s hair.

  The wind today was coming from the south, funnelling down the valley below the old house they were using to hide the cameras in and curling around the cliff to gather in strength as it came over the water. I expected a gust as we came around the headland, and I’d positioned one of my Vikings ready to take the strain on the tiller with me.

  I felt the wind on my cheek before Stormfugl responded to it. ‘Now!’ The rattle along the side of the boat quickened, and I felt her heel away from the wind. Four hands moved together on the rope, spilling the wind from the sail without it flapping, and she came upright again. I put all my weight against the tiller. ‘Now. Heading up. Sail in.’

  Stormfugl’ s nose came around until it was pointing for the golden beach. ‘On course now.’ The great sail slid in, taut against its hemp ropes. The faces turned to it were intent. My next mark was the cliff on my right. My hands were wet; I wiped each on my velvet tunic and grasped the tiller two-handed again. ‘Start easing the sail.’

  The old house was in my view now. ‘Bearing away. Keep easing. Oarsmen ready.’ We were still going faster than I wanted. ‘Dip oars.’

  Favelle was at the prow, every line of her eager for this new shore. The cameras whirred in my ear. The ruined house was dead above her now. ‘Dip oars – backwater.’ At last we’d come into the still water that echoed the shoreline. The sail deflated and hung lifeless as we slid towards the beach. ‘Lines ashore.’

 
; Two Vikings leapt over the side and caught the prow, then ran up the beach to loop the lines around the rocks. Ted swung ashore after them, then held his hand back to Favelle, the first woman on this new land. Charlie was too wee to work all day, but one of the Vikings had a little boy of similar age and blondness, and Favelle lifted him over the side and set him down on the beach. They came up the sand together, heads high, looking around, and paused at the high tide mark.

  ‘And cut,’ Michael’s voice said in my ear.

  ‘Cut,’ I repeated. My Vikings cheered. Anders clapped me on the shoulder. Favelle was instantly enveloped in a wrap by her personal make-up woman and led to the shelter of her own little marquee which had been put up out of shot. Ted went up to watch the video with Michael, and came back to report that it was fantastic, just what he’d wanted.

  Then, of course, we had to do it again, with Michael on board for close-up shots, and again, for luck.

  I’d brought the mail with me so that I could give it out at lunchtime. I stopped Favelle as she headed for her little marquee, and waved the bundle at her.

  ‘Favelle, this came for you.’

  She was huddling her Viking cloak around her and ducked her head away from me, as if she didn’t want to be looked at when she was at less than her best. ‘Elizabeth …’ she said vaguely, then paused, looked at the typewritten one on the top, and held out her tanned hand for the pile. ‘Thanks, Cass.’ Then she dived into the tent, leaving me staring at the canvas flaps trembling behind her, with a sense of something not right.

  The landowner had opened up his agricultural shed, catering had made pizza and burgers, and we all fell on it like starving wolves. As I ate, I went round with the mail. Michael looked at the feminine handwriting, went a dull pink, and disappeared up the hill to the old house. Ted flipped through his and handed them all to Elizabeth.