The Sinful Stones (18 page)

He sat on the netting and waited. Nothing happened. Providence was standing again, pointing at the enemies of the Faith, crying no doubt that his prayers had been answered and Sir Francis's senility had been visited on him before he could escape. Despairingly Pibble remembered the effect of salt water on Sister Dorothy and picked up a battered saucepan from the rubbish in the boat.

It would be a grisly risk. If the old man caught cold … perhaps a light sprinkling, and then dry him off with one of his shawls. … He leaned over the bulwark.

Something slammed agonisingly into his back, and he nearly lost the saucepan. Clutching it he began to turn, but the pain caught him again, on the shoulder this time. He ducked down and sideways, looking for his enemy. The stood Sir Francis, eyes popping with rage, walking-stick raised for another blow.

“You damned insolent pup!” he shouted. “I'll have ye cashiered for this!”

“I can't sail the boat!” Pibble shouted back.

“My saints, can't an old man have a moment's peace? Do I have to do everything for you, you cretin?”

Sir Francis lowered his stick and looked round the inlet grunting when he saw the group of Virtues.

“I'll get you out of here,” he said. “Fetch the loony. She can cut the anchor rope. I haven't got long.”

Rita was in the cabin, on her knees, praying under a scarlet riding-light which she'd hung from a hook in the” main beam.

“Come, Countess,” said Pibble. “We need your aid.”

“The stones are my brothers,” she said. “I will cut my die.” Pibble crouched in under the low roof and took her icy, hand.

“Come,” he said. “It is the King's command.”

“There is only one King,” she said in her Sister Rita voice, “and He is waiting for us to build Him His city.”

“Reet,” said Pibble “It is time for you to kill a great snake.”

She looked up, nodded, and rose to a crouch under the low beams. He led her out, plucked one of the gutting knives from where they had been stuck in the bulwark, took her up on to the foredeck and showed her the taut hawser which ran through the guides in the bows.

“Cut it when I call,” he said.

She crouched beside the straining hemp holding the knife like a dagger. Pibble realised he'd have to get the weapon away from her as soon as she'd done her job. He went down to the well behind the mast and found to his despair that Sir Francis was once again poking with his stick at a mound of russet canvas.

“Are you all right, sir?”

“Course I am, you damned ninny, but I won't be if you keep me hanging around much longer. There's a winch under there, with a ratchet; you hoist the sail with it. Run it up steadily. Stop if it gets caught in anything. See that the ratchet-lock is working, so that it doesn't fall down when you let go. Got that?”

“Yes, sir.”

Pibble pointed to the shore. Hope had vanished from the group of monks, but a rounded, dark object was bobbing in the water. A pink arm rose and clove towards the boat with a sturdy stroke. And again.

“My saints,” said Sir Francis, staring, “will I ever get used to the idiocy of truly damned idiots? Let me get aft.”

He tottered off under his mound of shawls. Pibble, clawed and kicked at the brown canvas until he had lugged it clear of a battered old brass winch with a crank-handle that fitted over a square-cut projection from the axle. He started to turn. The locking pin clicked over the cogs. Beside him the brown mound heaved and a long spar rose slowly, hung from four pulleyed ropes along its length. The canvas threshed to and fro in the wind with a fearsome cracking and thumping, but Sir Francis seemed unperturbed so he wound on. Suddenly the winch would turn no more. He looked up and saw that the front end of the sail was taut, held by a series of rings which his winding had pulled up the mast. The spar and the back end of the sail still slapped back and forth. Hope was barely thirty foot away in the water. Pibble ran aft.

“Right,” said Sir Francis. “Hold the sail out as far as you can that side and tell that loony to cut the rope.”

“Kill that snake, Reet,” he shouted.

She laughed at him, delicately.

“
Coupez, comtesse
,” he bawled.

At once the blade flashed down as though she were skewering Marat at his ablutions. Then she had to saw. There came a bang and a rattle, and a lurch that nearly tipped the leaning Pibble out of the boat. The wind seemed to drop and the sail moved away from his reach and hardened into a clean curve. They were moving. The hustling waves rattled on the hull with a different note; the shore rocks drifted backwards. Hope had already turned and was swimming back towards his fellows with the same unflurried stroke.

“Come here,” shouted the old man. “I'm damned near done for.”

You could hear in his voice that it was true. Pibble crouched beside him.

“Steer with this,” said the old man, “and manage the sail with this. Those hags have left it reefed for you. You'll be damned seasick, but tell yourself you're Will Pibble's son, hey, and stick it out. Take the tiller first.”

Pibble settled beside him, wincing at the harshness of the thwart, and took the tiller; he was astonished by the muscular feel of the water.

“Shove it over, you ninny,” said Sir Francis. “You've got to balance the damned sail. Now take these.”

“These” were two ropes which ran to the top and bottom of the sail. Pibble took them in his left hand. Sir Francis grunted and leaned forward over his stick, struggling to rise. He couldn't make it.

“You've spitchered me, you damned interfering ninny,” he said, snarling like a dying vixen.

Pibble looked up and refocused his gaze from the narrowing rocks of the inlet mouth to where Rita stood statuesque by the mast.

“Countess!” he called.

She came with the swoop of a gull.

“My father is ill,” he said. “Pray take him to the cabin and try to make him warm. If he catches cold he will die, and then all will be lost.”

“Alas!” she cried, and took the old man's hand, heedless of the angle of the tiller and the ropes that governed the sail. Her efforts combined with a lurch of the boat to tilt him to his feet, but at the same time tangled the ropes half round the pair of them.

“Look out!” cried Pibble, and leaned round the swaying couple to try and pull the ropes clear of them on the other side. His movement altered the angle of the tiller, just as the struggles of Rita and Sir Francis altered the angle of the sail. The rocks at the edge of his vision seemed to be moving differently, and he looked up from the crazy tangle to see that the boat was now moving, slowly but deliberately, almost straight for the right-hand shore. He pushed the tiller away from him, furious with fright. Slowly the boat's nose began to come round, with the cumbrous turn of a dowager acknowledging a lowly acquaintance at a flower show. They weren't going to make it.

But they did, easily. The curve of their course sharpened as the boat regained speed, and now they were pattering along parallel to the rocks. Rita found a hand to lift the impeding ropes over Sir Francis's head, and the sail stopped its waffling and banged out to its proper position. Craning below the curve of the sail-foot Pibble watched the lee shore edge away.

“Prize nincompoop!” complained Sir Francis, not in his leaden voice but rambling and slurring his words like a drunk. “Prize … your mum was half right … Peace, not Physics …”

“Come, Your Majesty,” simpered Rita. “His Highness comes worthily of a race of heroes. But our first task is to see you to safety.”

The pop eyes looked at her.

“Giddap, then,” he said with sudden liveliness. “If going to drown I'll do it with a bit of young flesh in my hands.”

She smiled and manoeuvred him round. The four-legged bundle of tweed and shawl edged away without turning either of its two heads. Pibble had a sense of rushing inescapably on, such as motor-cyclists experience when they first learn to use their machine, though he could see from the backward march of the cliffs that the boat was barely moving at a walking pace. This sense of speed came partly from the waves in the inlet being so small and close together, but beyond the sheltered water he could see the real waves loitering past, menacing, like the louts from a protection racket looking over an amusement arcade.

The gut of the inlet was a fair-sized target, but he was unable to coax the boat to its centre. Though he could steer—point the bows, that is—at what looked like the safest passage, the wind shoved from the left all the time, nursing him towards the black implacable grinders. A single rock stood eight feet above the water just beyond the entrance, and as the full-scale waves met it they bloomed into white water-spouts. He was worrying which side of it he should try to pass when the first real wave picked the boat up and shook it like a dice in a gambler's paw. He only just stayed upright, bracing himself on the thwart.

Then came the full wind, tilting the mast so far over that the pitted hummocks on the black surface of the wave slid along the gunwale as if all the cold sea were going to pour in, but the boat stayed poised at that angle, while the next wave shook them.

This time he fell; the ropes slid from his flailing hand; he pounced as the coil of rope in the bottom of the boat began to snake away, and hauled the sail back, then grabbed at the swinging tiller. Gasping, he looked about him.

The mast stood more upright now that the sail was eased. But the boat was heading straight for the spouting rock. Gulping he shoved the tiller the other way. The bows nosed, like a dog smelling a stranger's hand, at the limpet-deckled surface and swung suspiciously away. But the passing wave seemed to suck them back and down; a low, drum-like, rasping boom shook the whole boat, and its live movement in the water deadened at the stone touch. They slid along the granite upright, still turning away—as a dog, suspicions allayed, might rub against the stranger's shins. Something checked the sliding for a moment, and the rasping dulled. With a mild explosion the forgotten dinghy shredded on its tether.

Then the next wave was on them, flipping them out again, yards from the deadly menhir; just as Pibble was releasing the pent air from his lungs the spume of spouted water stung down on him. He staggered, as though the ocean had crept up behind him and coshed him with a salt-water club. He shook his head; they'd only shipped a bucketful but Dorothy had received a salt-water slap in the face and was frowning in her stupor. The boat seemed to be sailing reasonably straight, on a course that would soon take them clear of the island to a point where he might be able to spot the lighthouse, the first sea mark on their journey home. Once there, Sir Francis should have come round again. He knew these seas. Pibble's task now was to learn how to reconcile this single-minded wind with the quaquaversal water.

In the trough between the waves the gunwales lay lower than the marching crests; he felt like the mayor of a village beneath a crumbling dam. Then the boat would sidle, untold, up the slope of another menace and there he'd teeter, poised above a tilted world, dizzy as a child tossed to the ceiling by a raucous godfather. But after a while he decided that nothing would go wrong if he kept to this course, the boat, in its lumpish way, seemed to know what it was doing. He looked southeast, over his right shoulder.

From the ridge of the first wave he saw nothing but whirling sea beneath unrelated sky; on the second he located the blurred horizon; soon he was orientated enough to start searching the line of it—and there, as though the pencil had slipped on the ruler, was a notch in its straightness. Nothing else could be Dubh Artach lighthouse. There lay his path, as soon as he was far enough north to be sure of clearing the island. He remembered from the map, and his peerings out of the helicopter, they'd have to make a huge dog-leg southeast, right round lighthouse, to be sure of reaching the Firth of Lorne. Otherwise he'd be in danger of piling them up on the rocks on which David Balfour was wrecked in
Kidnapped
.

Before trying to turn he glanced aft. Clumsey Island was a drab cliff half a mile back; the spouting rock made a white blink against the blackness of the headland. He put ropes between his teeth, raised his left hand and waved Byronically.

Home James.

8

H
e failed to turn. Instead he nearly drowned them all.

Television and the Hornblower books had hitherto been his total knowledge of the sea, but even from them he knew that you couldn't just turn. You had to “come about”, wasn't it? Obviously, if you just pushed the rudder over there'd come a point when the wind got behind the sail and slammed it across hard enough to snap the mast. And there'd be no accounting for the manners of the waves while that was happening. What you did was to point the bows towards the wind, and get round that way.

Nudging the boat round came easily enough, though at the changed angle the waves sprayed high over the bows and stung like hailstones as the big drops hurtled aft. At each change of angle he hauled the sail in another few inches, so that it would have less far to travel when the moment came to turn. There came a point, down in a trough, when all seemed still and poised. He put the helm over.

It was a bad choice. As the sail lost its rigid curve and began to flail and flog, the boat nuzzled boldly into the oncoming wave, prodding its bows into the green meat of it. Instantly, the whole top of the wave flowed in tearing foam across the upper deck and fell in a white cataract into the well. The boat jarred and faltered. Pibble shoved the tiller back to where it had been and watched, helpless with doom, while half a ton of water sluiced through the mound of netting and round his ankles. The sail hardened back into its old place. The boat raised its weary snout from the wallow. They were sailing again, but still north.

When Father was dead, Mother had insisted on dancing lessons, on the grounds that they would be “useful”. perhaps it had been part of a vague campaign against Toger's obliterating puritanism, forcing poor Jamie into Sunday trousers and Sunday shoes on a Saturday afternoon when he could have been up on the Common, and that special shirt with lacy cuffs, and sending him off to the upper room at the Pakenham Arms where Miss Fergusson, daughter of a bishop, held her class in an upstairs room. Four boys and a dozen girls. The girls danced happily with each other, bouncing through the waltzes, while the boys sulked by the wall. But then Miss Fergusson would look up from the piano, stop her shrill iteration of
one
two three, and notice that she was cheating four sets of parents of their shilling-an-hour. Oh then began the torment of his soul. The girl would be bigger, know the steps; four or five bars together the dance would go right and then, inexplicably, an unwanted step would insert itself between the
one
and the two, and he'd be shuffling, lost, until the girl stopped, counted the steps for him with patient disdain, and restarted him for another five bars. And again. And again. Until Miss Fergusson's head was bent once more over the key-board; her heart waltzing with dead officers, and the girls could nod to each other, toss the boys back into hiding and dance off together.

The sea never stopped. It knew its own rhythm, and would sometimes let Pibble into the secret for five loping waves, but then with a lurch and stagger he'd lose the beat and the boat would fumble awkwardly from trough to trough. A particularly bad lurch came as he was trying to nerve himself to the responsibility of continuing north to Tiree in the hope of finding a telephone at midnight and sending for help. If they went much further, Oban would be out of reach. And what would the old man say? Poor old Pibble. Perhaps it would be better to try and turn again …

The boat swooped and then staggered, tumbling Dorothy clean off her hill of netting into the water that sloshed along the planking. For an instant she lay face down, then jerked herself on to hands and knees with a raucous snort and glared at Pibble.

“What the bloody hell are you playing at?” she said.

“I'm sorry,” said Pibble. “There's some dry clothes in the cabin.”

She crawled forward into the dark cavern. She seemed a long time gone, but when she came out she was wearing a jersey and trousers and carrying oilskins.

“You'll need this,” she said sourly, passing one to him. “What's that bloody little whore doing with Frank?”

“She's a schizophrenic,” snapped Pibble.

“She's two bloody little whores, then.”

“We wouldn't have got this far without her.”

“Keep calm I was a bloody little whore myself, once. Where are we, for Christ's sake?”

“We're trying to go over there,” said Pibble, “but I don't know how to turn the boat. I shipped a lot of water last time I tried, so I didn't dare do it again.”

“Well, that's one comfort. I thought the bloody boat was leaking. I'll turn her while you bail. Christ, I could do with a drink.”

“There is a bottle of whisky,” said Pibble doubtfully. “But it would be a great help if you contrived to remain … er …”

“Oh, God!” she said. “Here we go again. If it isn't bloody old Frank who needs me, it's a bloody little copper whose name I've forgotten.”

“Pibble.”

“All right, Mr Pibble, I'll stay this side of swine-drunk.”

Pibble picked up the bottle from under the thwart and handed it to her. She took a healthy swig. And another. He put the ropes between his teeth to snatch it away, but at that moment she lowered it and corked it up.

“That's more like it,” she said. “Right. Give me the tiller.”

At once the prancing of the boat eased. Dorothy sniffed the wind, looked at the sail, fiddled with the ropes, said “lee-oh”, and quite lackadaisically put the helm over. The boat came up into the wind, and a nicely-judged wave twitched it further. The sail flapped across, everything tilted the other way, Dorothy let the sail out and fastened the ropes, which Pibble had been so anxiously clutching, round a cleat, and there they were, sailing southeast.

“Can, you see the lighthouse?” said Pibble.

“Yup. Nip off and see that Frank and the little bint are OK. Then you'd better comeback and bail.”

It was more like a kennel than a cabin; its beams barely three feet above its floorboards; from one of them hung a red riding-light, by whose nasty glow he could see an inch of water slopping in the down-hill corner, its ripples red-ridged in the red light. Rita and Sir Francis were propped on a pile of canvas right up in the far corner, where bows came together. Sir Francis had all the spare clothes draped about him up to his scrawny neck, so that his head protruded from undecipherable parts of trousers and jerseys. It may have been the light, but Pibble thought he saw a different look on the antique features from any he'd yet seen there—less bleak, less fierce, no less selfish. Not all the gurgles came from the slopping water; Sir Francis's lips and gullet were making some of them.

And Rita, smiling her sweet, demented smile, hugged close against him, as close as Love had nuzzled to Pibble on the quay. She was breathing in huge gasps—no, it was the mittened claw moving in scaly caresses under her jersey.

“They look all right,” reported Pibble.

“You've got to admire the old bastard, haven't you? There'll be a loose board under the water there, and you can bail with that saucepan. They won't have a proper pump on a bloody old tub like this.”

She was right about the board. Pibble crouched stiffly and began to scoop in the extra depth made by its removal.

“You're not much of a hand in boats,” she said.

“I've never tried before. Sir Francis, er, lost hold before we got the sail up, but I managed to wake him up enough to get us out of the inlet.”

“Bloody hell! How did you manage that?”

“I gave him another of his pills.”

“That wouldn't do it.”

“I washed it down with neat whisky in mistake for water.”

Dorothy cackled.

“That might,” she said. “A bloody great physical outrage. How did he take it?”

“He hit me with his walking-stick.”

“I bet he did. He's not used to that sort of handling.”

“He's got Addison's Disease, hasn't he?” said Pibble.

“Yes.”

“I read about it in a book in Brother Patience's room. It didn't say anything about, er, periods of inattention.”

“Do you know a lot of old people, Mr Pibble?”

“Not as old as him. My family tend to die younger.”

All two of them. Scoop, scrape, toss, scoop … something seemed to have diluted the acid in her voice a degree or so … three gallons a minute, say, that's thirty pounds. A ton of water would take. . .

“They hate it,” she said. “Being old, I mean. Even if they're sweet old ladies, they hate being dependent, hate being tired, they hate being stupid. And being all three, most of the time. Frank's coped his own way. When he's on the spot, he's just as bloody as ever. When he's not, he's gaga. It's his way of eating his cake and having it. He's too stuck-up to be half-clever, or half-bloody, so when he's not up to it he resigns. The world isn't there at all, as far as he's concerned, except to cosset him until he comes to and takes charge again.”

“I thought the four-hour cycle was too handy to be natural.”

“Oh, it's natural now. But he started it off like that quite deliberately, so that poor bitches like me would be waiting at his door, ready to crawl for him the moment to. Four goes into twenty-four, so it's the same bloody six times each day.”

“How long have you known him?”

“Thirty-three and a quarter years. Since I was nineteen. I took over from a jealous old hag of twenty-eight, and nobody took over from me. Where's that bottle?”

She took another long swig and handed it to him.

“Have a go yourself,” she said. “I wouldn't be so crazy sick for the stuff if I had someone human to talk to. Twenty years it's been since I could nip round somewhere and have a chin-wag with a crony. And it's been worse since we came to this bloody place.”

“Why did you come?” said Pibble, probing one mystery.

“Search me,” she answered. “We were damned poor, of course. Frank gave all his money away, except for a few copyrights on books, when he set up his Foundation, and he hadn't got out of the habit of spending.
He
wasn't going to ask for charity, either. We'd been up on this coast a couple of times before that, doing a bit of sailing, rummaging about like a dog which can't find a bone it's buried; but there were always reporters with their little notebooks and hotel managers fawning and charging us double, and we bolted back to London. Then he had his op; then he gave all the cash away, and all his radio patents and shares, to set up his Foundation; then he got the Peace Prize and we lived on that for a few years. And then, when we were down to our last thousand quid, though there was still a little dough coming in from books and pamphlets, I was washing his feet one morning and he said ‘Ring up Carter Paterson—we're going to live on Clumsey Island'. We left next week.”

“That must have been a shock for you.”

“It was bloody, but I'd got used to the world being bloody by then.”

“When you talk about a little money, coming in from books and pamphlets, how much do you mean?”

“Two or three thousand a year. I've never known a man grudge his taxes like Frank did.”

“Yes, I know,” said Pibble. “He told me … oh, Crippen, what a fool I am!”

“No more than the rest of us. You mustn't let him get you down.”

“I didn't mean that. He came here because it's a charity under the Charities Acts. He made over his copyrights to them, and they don't pay tax. Then when he wanted to write a really lucrative book he didn't fancy their getting all the money. He knew they wouldn't want to let him go, so he sent for me. But meanwhile they'd copied the book and sold it in London, which they'd managed to do because they'd already been dealing in his name with agents and publishers over the other books. It only needed a few forged signatures. Then when I turned up, they knew we'd talk about the book, so they decided to kill him by taking away his pills.”

“What the bloody hell are you talking about?”

Pibble explained it all as Clumsey Island rose larger and nearer on the starboard bow.

“Christ!” she said. “I told you they were bastards.”

“One thing you haven't told me,” said Pibble, “is why he gave his money away in the first place.”

“He never told
me
,” she said. “But I think I've worked it out. He was always funny about money. He was bloody rich but he didn't behave as if it mattered. It was just stuff he happened to have the use of, but he wasn't stuck-up about it, like most rich men are. It was just money he'd sort of
found
, under a stone or somewhere. I'm not saying he was generous, mind you—he was mean. Then he had his op, and after that this disease got him and he was frightened. That was nearly ten years ago. He thought he was dying, and he wanted to take his revenge on the world before he died.”

“Revenge for what?”

“Everything. Look, Mr Pibble, you must sometimes wake up in the night and curse yourself for the things you've done and curse the world for the things it's done to you. You rail at bits of your fate, then, but not at all of it, and not all the time. Frank rails at the whole thing. Everything that's ever happened to him has been unfair. He was dealt this colossal hand and then God cheated him.
My
life's been bloody, maybe, but it hasn't been unfair. Frank's has, he thinks—every second of all those years.”

Pibble was silent, baling. Scoop, scrape, toss.

“The doctors gave him about six years,” said Dorothy. “They were guessing, of course, and worse than usual because no one's ever had Addison's Disease as old as Frank. So he set up the Foundation, partly because it meant that he dictated what happened to the money, but mainly to get the Peace Prize. He worked like a black for that, you know. He nosed about and decided exactly what would catch the jury's fancy, and set up the Foundation as bait; and he started being nice to journalists and being saintly and forbearing in public—I expect it's all in his book, how he pulled a confidence trick on the Establishment. And he'll lash out at Einstein­—he always hated him—and he'll say what a frightful thing peace is, and how war brings the right men to the top and kills off the nuisances …”