The Smugglers (16 page)

As I plodded along the beach, I came to the footprints I'd left in my rush from the schooner, and a thought occurred to me – a desperate last hope. I scuffed through the black stones and the shells at the edge of the mud. I got down on my hands and knees. I crawled and I groped and finally found what I wanted: Dasher's jerkin of corks.

It was loose and bulky on me, but it was the best I could do. I tied the strings as tightly as possible and waded down through the mud, into the sea. The breeze had hauled around to blow softly from the land, but there was no sign of fog, and that pleased me. The thought of losing my way and drifting off to God knew where was enough to start my knees knocking.

The water was bitterly cold, and as it rose to my stomach, my breath came in short little gasps. The jerkin bunched around my arms, and I was chest-deep in the Channel before I felt my feet lift from the bottom. I tipped backward, then forward, and the sensation of floating –so strange to
one who'd never learned to swim–filled me with an instant panic. I thrashed and kicked; I clung with a death grip to the jerkin of corks. And round I spun, round and round as I beat the water into froth, nearly screaming from my fright. Then my feet touched the bottom again, and I stood there until I'd gathered myself. I knew I had to get out to the
Dragon.

Slowly my panic subsided. I found I could move forward as a dog would, by paddling my arms and my feet. I aimed myself toward the schooner, pushed off from the mud, and went forward at a crawl.

The rising tide was stronger than the breeze. I went toward the
Dragon
so slowly that I seemed to make no head-way. The groundswell lifted me and dropped me in the troughs, and salt water lapped at my mouth and my nose. Yet each time I looked up, the masts were a little bit taller and the bulk of the hull loomed a bit closer. And I'd gone too far to turn back when I heard the voices come across the sea.

“Cut it,” said Crowe. “Cut the damn thing. We'll never need it again.”

The
Dragon
wasn't deserted at all.

Soon I saw figures on the foredeck. Crowe and two others. I heard a steady, hammering pulse, and at once I knew they were cutting the anchor cable. So the schooner was floating already, and any moment the men would make sail. I paddled and kicked. And with a pop of threads, and then another, the corks started coming loose from the jerkin.

They floated past me, borne by the breeze. First two or three, then half a dozen, they spun and leapt in the ripples
of water. Absurdly, I grabbed for them, and my motions brought others loose. For the first time I felt the sea at the back of my neck. I was starting to sink.

The hammering stopped. I heard the slither of rope as the cable fell from the rail. The
Dragon
turned, slowly at first, and then faster. A pair of boats tied to her stern followed with a jerk and a nod, like goslings behind a goose. The jib went up, and then the mainsail, and the schooner gathered way.

I threw myself forward. I no longer paddled but swam, reaching far out before me, taking handfuls of water, pulling myself through the swell the way a man would climb a cliff. The last of the boats swung toward me, and I reached up and grabbed on to the transom. But I was a moment too late; it pulled from my fingers and slipped away. A cork-filled eddy went behind it.

All alone in that black of sea and sky, I felt the panic returning in a rush. I forced it down and kept on going. The water rose to my chin.

Even now I like to think that the
Dragon
turned to fetch me. I like to think she saw me somehow and tried her best to save me. But it was only Captain Crowe. He had taken the schooner in to shore on a winding, twisting path, and he took her out the same way. He jibed and came back, and the big wooden jaws of the dragon ate through the swells. The teeth were high above me, then buried in the sea. They rose and fell and rose again, then snatched me from the water.

It seemed the greatest bit of luck at first, and I lay resting within the jaws as the water coursed around my legs. Then
the
Dragon
turned again, to sail from the lee of the cliffs, and every wave overwhelmed me. The figurehead became my prison, the teeth the bars to hold me in. The bow soared up, then hurtled down, and I was buried in the sea. And the motion that I had loved to watch on the outward journey was now a nightmare sure to drown me.

I shouted for help, with no thought of who might respond. I would have been happy to see Captain Crowe himself come climbing down to haul me out from there. But with the roar that the figurehead made, I was sure no one could hear.

The bowsprit dipped, and half its length was buried in a wave. I rode the dragon's mouth toward the sea and then beneath its surface. The water hit me like a pile driver, and when the schooner lifted, I tumbled back. I slammed against a bulk of wood that trembled and groaned behind me. The schooner threw me forward; the water hurled me back. The wood rattled each time I bashed against it. And I heard a voice in all that racket, a voice as high as a boy's but old as all the hills. “Who's there?” it said. The ship herself, I thought. “Who's there at the mouth of the dragon?”

Up I soared, the schooner climbing from the sea. She rolled and took me down. The water burst through the teeth, slammed against my chest. And the wood gave way behind me. I somersaulted backward in a flood of boiling sea, down through the throat of the dragon, into the hull of the ship.

I lay on a planked floor, staring up at a withered old man who held in his hands a panel of wood. I could look beyond him, right through the bow and the teeth of the dragon.

“Knock me down with a feather!” said he. “Where the devil did you come from, boy?”

I was too surprised to answer. The schooner dipped her bow again, and a blast of water shot through the hole. It poured across the deck and washed me down against the planking and the ribs. The man struggled forward and pressed the panel over the hole. It fit exactly, locking in place, sealing us into darkness.

“And now me candle's gone out,” said the man. “Oh, this is the end. This is the bleeding last straw, this is.”

I heard him groping round, banging on wood and metal. Then came the tap of a flint, and sparks flew in a fluny from his hands. “You see what you'Ve done?” he said. “You'Ve got me tinder wet. Blast you.”

There were more sparks, and then a faint glow, and at last a flame as he held a candle to the tinder. He held it high above him, and the light made a yellow circle on the overhead. His hands were big and pale, his nose enormous. Hair as white as cotton thread grew in thick tufts from his nostrils and his ears. I knew at once that he was the same old man I'd seen lurking on the dock in France, the one who had passed in front of the
Dragon
and never appeared again.

“Who are you?” I said.

“I'm Fleming Pye,” said he. “And more's to the point, who are
you?”

T
he old man would tell me none of his story until he'd heard every detail of mine. Then he hurled questions at me, beginning each one with a cry of “Tell me this!”

“Tell me this!” he said. “Just what do you plan to do now?”

I shrugged. “I have to get the ship back somehow. They're going to scuttle her for certain.”

“Tell me this! How many are up there?”

“Three at least,” said I. “Maybe more.”

“And that's including Turner Crowe.”

“Yes, it is.”

“He's a rascal,” said Fleming. “He's a wily old eel of a man.”

“How do you know him?” I asked.

“Used to sail with him, boy. Until he sold me out to the French. Until he left me to rot in prison.”

Fleming mounted the candle on the top of his tinderbox. It skittered all over the deck as the
Dragon
sailed along. And in its dim and hazy light I saw how this hidden space extended down the ship in narrow aisles as cramped as rabbit warrens. This would be the place, I thought, where French spies had waited out their trip to England, emerging from the bow like water rats in the safety of the night.

“I'm the only one left,” said Fleming. “There was twenty men sailed with Turner Crowe, when we went privateering. There was sixteen alive in seventy-nine when the French took us on the last day of September, just after dawn. That was the last sunrise I saw for twenty-two years. Now tell me this! You know what I want? The only thing that I want? ”

“To kill Captain Crowe,” said I.

He laughed. He sat in a crouch in that dank, foul-smelling place, and he laughed until I thought it would shake his old bones apart. “Kill Captain Crowe?” he said. “You can't kill a devil, boy. You can't kill the father of evil.”

“What, then?” I asked.

“I want to get home to me woman. She's all I've got left in the world. I've forgotten what me house is like, but I remember me Sally like it was yesterday I saw her.”

“Is that Mrs. Pye?” I asked foolishly.

“Sally Pye,” he said, and smiled. “Tell me this! Do you know her?”

“I've met her,” I said. “She waits for you at the Baskerville Inn.”

“Oh, the poor thing,” said Fleming. “The poor, simple thing. 'Wait here,' I told her. 'Wait for me here.' And she
did, the poor thing.” His eyes closed. He combed with his fingers the wiry tufts that grew from his nostrils. “Tell me this! Is she every bit as pretty? Is her hair more gold than gold itself? Is her skin as smooth as porcelain?”

I didn't know what to say. I thought of the haggard old woman going blindly through the inn. And I suppose I waited a moment too long.

Fleming's face, which the smiles had made young again, aged in an instant. “Tell me this!” he said. “Is she all right? Is she well?”

I couldn't bear to tell him the truth, so I shifted the conversation. “We were there,” I told him. “We anchored just under the inn.”

“I knew it,” said he. “I said to myself, 'That's the mud of St. Vincent I'm smelling.' The mud and the apple trees. And I could hear that little brook that bubbles down from the cliffs. But the panel was jammed and I couldn't get it open. It needed a bang. It needed a blow from beyond.”

“You could tell all that without a look outside?”

“Why, sure,” said he. “I've come to this place a hundred times. There were nights I could stand at the wheel and not see the binnacle. I couldn't see me hands on the spokes, or me feet on the deck, but I could always get back to the Baskerville.”

“Could you take us into Dover?” I asked.

“In me sleep,” said Fleming.

I had a scheme that seemed too wild to tell him. I watched the candle slide toward the bow, and I asked, “Can we get from here to the lazarette?”

“Of course,” he said.

“And could you steer the ship from there?”

The candle slid the other way. Fleming shoved out his foot and stopped it. “Tell me this!” He took the tinderbox in his hands. “Do you want me to take her to the Eastern Docks or the jetty under the castle?”

He led me aft to the lazarette by way of a panel that opened on hinges. He held it ajar until I'd gone through behind him.

“When I close this,” he said, “there's no going back. The only way in there is through the dragon's mouth.”

“It's all right,” I said. “We're not going back.”

The sound the panel made was like a tomb being sealed. There was a thud and a dull click of hidden latches. Fleming went before me, guarding the flame of his candle.

In the lazarette, we watched the tiller sliding back and forth. The steering lines hung in lazy curves that snapped taut as the wheel turned above us. I imagined it was Crowe himself steering the ship to her doom. But faintly through the decking came the sound of his bagpipes, a slow and funereal march.

Fleming looked up. In the candlelight he seemed older by centuries. “He played that song when we took the
Sentinelle,
a little brig we stumbled on a hundred miles from St. Helena. He played it as we watched her burn. There was women on there. And children. We took the boats and burned her.”

“But you took the people in the boats,” I said.

“No. Just the boats.” He put his fingers in his ears and stuffed the hair inside them, then turned toward the tiller.
“We'll have to cut the lines,” he said. “Have you got a knife?”

“No,” I said. Then, “Yes, I do.” Crowe had thrown me Harry's knife to cut away the lashings on the hatch. I had put it in my boot. But now, when I searched for it, I found it was gone.

“Never mind,” said Fleming. “It's just like Crowe to keep things shabby. He likes his rats' nests, don't he, though? These lines are loose enough we can pull them from the drum.”

“And you'll steer with the tiller?” I asked.

“Tell me this!” said he. “Have you heard of Cape da Roca? We had the wheel shot off there. This was seventy-six. Shot clean from the deck. I steered all the way to Gibraltar down here. Three hundred miles it was.”

Well, he had been half his age then. But if he thought he could still manage the task, I was willing to let him try. No matter what happened, we'd be no worse off than we were.

“Just give the ropes a heave,” said Fleming. “Wait till the helm's amidships.”

It wasn't long to wait. The massive tiller groaned across the deck and shivered at the center line. We put our weight on the ropes and stripped them from the drum.

Freed from its lines, the tiller hurtled toward us. The deck tilted so violently that we grabbed at each other for balance and still went staggering down toward the hull. We fell in a heap against the planks. The steering ropes twisted and writhed as someone above us turned the wheel. But the tiller, thrown hard to the side, didn't move at all.

We helped each other up from the deck. Fleming's arms, where I held them, were no thicker than those on a rocking chair.

The tiller was level with his waist, and he leaned across it. Like a man pushing a gate, he walked it across as the rudder banged and rattled. I felt the
Dragon
turn; the deck came quickly level as the schooner gathered way. Water passing by the rudder made the tiller tremble. And poor Fleming trembled with it; from head to toe he was shaken like a puppet.