Monsoon

by Wilbur Smith

  Dorian whistled and clapped his hands in triumph while all three of the Beatty girls, who had been following his courtship of the bird from the deck below, shrieked with delight. When he came down at the end of the watch, Caroline kissed him in front of the officers of the deck and the on-duty watch.

  ‘Girls are so soft!’ Dorian told Tom, when they were alone on the gundeck, and gave a realistic imitation of puking.

  Over the next few days Mollymawk grew tamer and more confiding towards Dorian. ‘Do you think he loves me, Tom? I shall want to keep him for ever as my pet.’ But on the eighth morning when they climbed to the masthead the bird had disappeared. Though Dorian whistled for him all that day, he was gone, and at sunset the child wept bitterly.

  ‘What a baby you are,’ Tom said, and hugged him until he stopped snuffling.

  On the morning after Mollymawk disappeared, Tom took his usual seat on the bench against the bulkhead in Master Walsh’s cabin. When the three girls arrived, late as usual, for the day’s lessons, he resisted the temptation to look in Caroline’s direction. He was still simmering with indignation at the way she had treated him. Sarah Beatty, who still hero-worshipped him, and was for ever plying him with small gifts, had today made him a paper rose as a bookmark, which she presented to him in front of everyone else in the cabin. Tom flushed with humiliation as he mumbled a churlish thanks, while behind Sarah’s back Dorian held an imaginary baby in his arms and rocked it. Tom kicked his shin and reached for his books and slate, which he kept in the locker under the bench.

  When he glanced at the slate, he saw that someone had rubbed out the algebra equation with which he had been struggling the previous day. He was about to accuse Dorian of the crime when he realized that the culprit had replaced his convoluted chalk scribbling with a simple line in a flowery script: ‘Tonight at the same time.’

  Tom stared at it. The handwriting was unmistakable. Dorian and the younger girls still had a childlike uneven scrawl, and Guy’s hand was stolid and lacking in any art. Although he still hated Caroline to the depths of his soul, he would have recognized her handwriting anywhere and at any time. Suddenly he became aware that Guy was craning across, trying to read the slate over his shoulder. Tom tilted it to hide it from him and with one thumb smeared the chalk letters until they were indecipherable.

  He could not stop himself glancing across to where Caroline sat. She seemed oblivious as always to his presence, absorbed in the book of poetry that Master Walsh had lent her, but she must have sensed his eyes on her because the one ear that Tom could see peeping out from under her bonnet in a tangle of curls slowly turned a deeper shade of pink. It was such a striking phenomenon that Tom forgot he hated her and stared at it in fascination.

  ‘Thomas, have you completed the problem I set for you yesterday?’

  Walsh roused him and he started guiltily. ‘Yes, I mean no – I mean almost.’

  For the rest of that day Tom was in a stew of emotion. At one minute he determined to scorn the tryst she had proposed and laugh in her face the next morning. He even uttered the scornful laugh aloud, and every person in the cabin stopped what he or she was doing and looked up at him expectantly.

  ‘Is there some gem of wit or erudition that you wish to share with us, Thomas?’ Walsh asked sarcastically.

  ‘No, sir. I was just thinking.’

  ‘Ah, I thought I heard the wheels rumbling. But let us not interrupt such a rare occurrence. Please continue, sir.’

  All that day his feelings for Caroline oscillated from adoration to angry loathing. Later, when he sat high in the crow’s nest, he noticed nothing except that the waters seemed as violet blue as her eyes. Dorian had to point out to him the pale feather on the horizon where a whale spouted, and even then he viewed it without interest.

  When he stood beside his father and made the noonday sight through the aperture of his backstaff, he remembered the feel of a soft white bosom pressed to his face, and his thoughts drifted away.

  When his father took the navigation slate from his hands and read his working, he turned to Ned Tyler. ‘Congratulations, Mr Tyler. During the night you must have sailed us back into the northern hemisphere. Send a good man to the masthead. We should be making a landfall on the east coast of America at any minute now.’

  Tom had no appetite for his dinner and gave his cut of salt beef to Dorian, whose appetite was legendary and who accepted it with alacrity then wolfed it down before Tom could change his mind. Then, when the gundeck lanterns were trimmed down for the night, Tom lay unsleeping in his corner behind the gun carriage and went over his preparations again and again in his mind.

  The magazine key and tinderbox were still where he had left them in their niche above the door. He had been waiting for an opportunity to return the key to his father’s desk, but none had presented itself. Now he was deeply grateful for that. He had decided by now that he loved Caroline beyond anything in the world and that he would not hesitate to lay down his life for her.

  At seven bells in the first watch he crept from his pallet, and paused to see if anyone had seen him rise. His two brothers were smaller dark shapes beyond Aboli’s bulk, stretched out on the deck in the dim light of the shuttered battle lanterns. Stepping over the huddled, snoring bodies of the rest of the crew he made his way unchallenged to the companionway.

  Once again the lamp was burning in his father’s cabin and Tom wondered what always kept him awake until after midnight. He moved softly past and could not prevent himself from stopping again beside the girls’ cabin. He thought he heard soft breathing beyond the bulkhead and, once, the sound of one of the younger girls talking in her sleep, a few gabbled words. He passed on and took the key from its hiding-place, and went into the magazine to fetch out the lantern, light it and replace it in its gimbals.

  By this time he was so overwrought that he jumped at every strange noise in the running ship, the scuffle of a rat in the bilges or the rattle and knock of a loose piece of rope or rigging. He crouched beside the magazine door and watched the foot of the ladder. This time he did not doze so he saw her bare white feet the moment they came hesitantly into view. He whistled softly to reassure her.

  She stooped and looked at him. Then she came down the last few steps of the ladder with a rush. He ran to meet her, and she came into his arms and clung to him. ‘I wanted to say how sorry I was that I struck you,’ she whispered. ‘I have hated myself for that every day since then.’

  He could not trust himself to speak, and when he remained silent she lifted her face to him. It was merely a pale luminescence in the poor light but he stooped to kiss her, searching for her mouth. She moved towards him at the same moment and his first kiss was on her eyebrow, the next on the tip of her nose and then their mouths came together.

  She was the first to pull back, ‘Not here,’ she whispered. ‘Somebody may come.’

  She followed him willingly as he took her hand and drew her through the door into the magazine. Without hesitation she went directly to the rack of powder bags, and drew him down beside her. Her mouth was open to his next kiss, and he felt the tip of her tongue fluttering on his lips, like a moth at the candle-flame. He sucked it in.

  Still mouth to mouth she tugged at the drawstring that closed the top of his shirt and when she had it loose she thrust one small cool hand down into the opening and caressed his chest.

  ‘You are hairy.’ She sounded surprised. ‘I want to see.’ She lifted the front of his shirt. ‘Silky. It feels so soft.’ She pressed her face to his chest. Her breath was warm and tickling. It excited him in a way he had not known before. A sense of urgency came over him, as though she might be whisked away from him at any moment. He tried to loosen the ribbon that closed her nightdress but his fingers were clumsy and unskilled.

  ‘Here.’ She pushed away his hands. ‘Let me do that.’ He was vaguely aware that she was behaving differently from their last meeting here in the magazine: she was assertive and sure of herself. She was acting more like Mary or on
e of the other girls he had been with at High Weald. All at once he was convinced that his intuition had been accurate. She had done this before, she knew as much as he, or perhaps more, and the knowledge goaded him on. There was no longer cause for him to hold himself back.

  She knelt up, lifted the nightgown over her head in one movement and dropped it to the deck. She was mother naked now, but all he saw were her breasts, big, round and white, seeming to glow like two great pearls, hanging above him in the gloom. He reached for them, filling both his hands with their soft abundance.

  ‘Not so hard. Don’t be so rough,’ she warned him. For a while she let him do what he wanted and then she whispered, ‘Touch me! Touch me there, like before.’

  He did as she asked, and she closed her eyes and lay quietly. Gently he moved over her, careful not to alarm her. He eased his breeches down to his knees.

  Suddenly she tried to sit up, ‘Why did you stop?’ She looked down. ‘What are you doing? No, stop that!’ She tried to wriggle out from under him but he was much heavier and stronger than she was, and she could not move him.

  ‘I won’t hurt you,’ he promised. She pushed ineffectually at his shoulders, but slowly she gave up. She stopped struggling and relaxed under the insistence of his touch. The rigidity went out of her body. She closed her eyes and started to make that soft humming sound in the back of her throat.

  Suddenly her whole body convulsed and she gave a soft cry. ‘What are you doing? Please, no! Oh, Tom, what are you doing?’ She struggled again, but he held her very tightly, and after a while she lay quietly in his arms. Then both of them started to move in unison, in the natural rhythm as old as man himself.

  Long afterwards they lay together with the sweat cooling on their bodies, their breathing steadying until they could speak again.

  ‘It’s late. Agnes and Sarah will be awake soon. I must go,’ Caroline whispered, and reached for her nightgown.

  ‘Will you come again?’ he asked her.

  ‘Perhaps.’ She drew the gown over her head, and tied the ribbon at her throat.

  ‘Tomorrow night?’ he insisted.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she repeated, slipped off the rack and went to the magazine door. She listened there, then peeped through the crack. She pushed open the door just wide enough to slip through and was gone.

  Gradually the Seraph sailed out of the tropical latitudes and on into the south. The days cooled and, after the stifling heat they had endured, the wind came sweet and fresh out of the south-east. This temperate ocean swarmed with life, clouded green with krill and plankton. From the masthead they could make out shadowy shoals of tuna, endless streams of huge fish effortlessly overtaking the ship, on their mysterious perambulations through the green ocean.

  At last the noonday sun-shot proved that the ship had made her southing, and at thirty-two degrees south latitude Hal brought the bows around for the final run down to Good Hope.

  It was a relief to him that the end of this leg of the voyage was approaching, and that they must soon be making their landfall. Only the previous day Dr Reynolds had reported to him the first cases of scurvy among the crew. This mysterious affliction was the curse of every captain undertaking a long passage. Once a ship had been at sea for six weeks, the foul miasma that bred the disease might overtake the crew and strike them down without reason or warning.

  The two sick men were merely the first of many, Hal knew. They had shown the surgeon their swollen, bleeding gums and the first dark bruises on their bellies, where blood was weeping under the skin. No man could account for this pestilence, or for the miraculous manner in which it vanished, and its victims were cured, once the ship reached port.

  ‘Let it be soon, Lord!’ Hal prayed, and looked to the empty eastern horizon.

  Now, as they approached the land, pods of dolphin joined them, riding the bow-wave, dodging back and forth under the hull, rising again on the far side and curving their glistening black backs through the surface, finning high with their flat tails beating, eyeing the men in the rigging with a bright eye and fixed grin.

  This was the ocean of the great whales. On some days they saw their spouts blowing white on the wind wherever they looked from the masthead. The mountainous creatures wallowed and cavorted on the surface. Some were longer than the Seraph’s hull, and they passed so close that the boys could see the barnacles and growths of sea life that encrusted their bodies as though they were reefs of rock, not living creatures.

  ‘There is twenty tons of oil in each fish,’ Big Daniel remarked to Tom, as they leaned together on the bowsprit, and watched a leviathan rise from the depths, a cable’s length ahead, and lift its massive bifurcated tail to the skies.

  ‘That tail is as wide across as our mizen yard,’ Tom marvelled.

  ‘They do say they’re the biggest creatures in creation.’ Daniel nodded. ‘At ten pounds the ton of his oil, we might do better at chasing whales than pirates.’

  ‘How could you ever kill a thing that big?’ Tom wondered. ‘It would be like trying to kill a mountain.’

  ‘Dangerous work, it is, but there’s them that do it. The Dutch are great whale-hunters.’

  ‘I should like to try,’ said Tom. ‘I should like to be a great hunter.’

  Big Daniel pointed down the bowsprit as it rose and fell across the horizon. ‘There’s much to hunt where we are going, lad. It’s a land swarming with wild creatures. There are elephants with ivory tusks longer than you are. You may get your wish.’

  Tom’s excitement was heightened with each day’s run. After they had made the sun-shot, he went to the stern cabin with his father to watch him mark the ship’s position: the line on the chart crept ever closer to the great landmass, shaped like the head of a horse.

  His days were so filled with excitement and frantic activity that he should have been exhausted by nightfall. Most evenings he managed a few hours’ sleep before midnight, but then he woke eagerly at the end of the first watch, and crept from his pallet.

  He no longer had to beg and cajole: Caroline came to the magazine every night of her own accord. Tom found that he had aroused a wildcat. She was no longer hesitant or modest, but matched him in the urgency of her passion, giving vent to her emotions with voice and savage excess. Tom often carried away with him the evidence of their meetings: his back scratched by her long fingernails, his lips bitten and bruised.

  However, he had become careless in his haste to keep their assignation each night and had a number of close calls. Once, when he was passing Mr Beatty’s cabin, the door opened suddenly and Mrs Beatty stepped out. Tom just had time to pull his cap over his eyes as he slouched past, and disguised his voice. ‘Seven bells in the first watch, and all’s well,’ he croaked hoarsely. He was tall as any man aboard now, and the passageway was dimly lit.

  ‘Thank you, my good man.’ Mrs Beatty was so flustered at being caught in her nightclothes that she ducked back into the cabin as if she were the guilty one.

  On more than one night he felt he was being followed as he crept down from the gundeck. Once he was certain he had heard footsteps coming down the companionway behind him, but when he doubled back nobody was there. On another occasion he was leaving the lower deck in the small hours, at the end of the middle watch, when there came the clump of sea boots down the ladder from the quarterdeck. He only just had time to duck back when Ned Tyler came down the passage towards his father’s cabin. From the shadows he watched him knock at the door, and heard his father’s voice from within.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Ned Tyler, Captain. Wind’s freshening. She could carry away a spar if we drive her on. Permission to take in the staysails and reef the main course.’

  ‘I’ll be on deck right away, Ned,’ Tom’s father replied. A minute later he burst out of his cabin shrugging on his pea-jacket, and passed a few feet from where Tom lay as he ran up the companionway to the deck.

  Tom reached his pallet on the gundeck just as the boatswain’s whistle shrilled and Big Daniel’s voic
e boomed out in the darkness, ‘All hands to shorten sail.’ Tom had to pretend to rub the sleep out of his eyes and join the rush of men up into the blustery night.

  It was in his nature not to be alarmed or cowed by these narrow escapes, and perversely he became emboldened by them. Nowadays there was a strut to his stride like that of a young rooster, which made Aboli grin and shake his head. ‘This is the son of the man!’

  One morning when the ship had been put about on the port tack, and her motion had eased to a long rise and thrust through the green Atlantic rollers, Tom was among the topmastmen coming down from working the canvas. Suddenly, for no reason other than high spirits and cockiness he stood up to his full height on the yard and danced a High Hornpipe.

  Every person on deck froze with horror as they watched Tom’s suicidal antics. Forty feet above the deck, Tom performed two full passes, three to the measure, on bare tiptoe, one hand on his hip and the other over his head, then he jumped on the shrouds and slid down to the deck below. He had had enough sense to make certain that his father was in his cabin at the time but before the day was out Hal had heard about the escapade and sent for Tom. ‘Why did you do such a stupid, irresponsible thing?’ he demanded.

  ‘Because John Tudwell told me I wouldn’t dare,’ Tom explained, as though this was the best reason in the world.

  Which perhaps it was, Hal thought, as he studied his son’s face. To his astonishment, he realized that he was looking at a man, not a boy. In the few short months of the voyage Tom had toughened and matured beyond all recognition. His body was work-hardened, his shoulders had filled out from the constant exertion of climbing in the rigging and handling canvas and sheets in a heavy blow, his arms were muscled from the hours of sword drill with Aboli each day, and he balanced like a cat to the ship’s pitch in the southern rollers.