Trade Wind (8 page)

“I can’t stand this!” said Hero, speaking aloud into the stifling, heavy darkness: “If I stay down here I shall only be sick, and I will not be sick. I will not!”

She crawled out of her bunk, and groping for her shoes in the grey gloom, put them on and left the cabin. It was not an easy matter to remain upright, and she was bruised and giddy by the time she reached the door at the top of the saloon companionway. The bolts were stiff, and when she had drawn them it was a hard struggle to force the door open, for the wind was leaning against it at gale force. But with the aid of a momentary lull she managed it at last, and was out in the open—breathless and instantly soaked and realizing too late the incredible folly of her behaviour.

She must, she decided, have been sick or mad or both to venture up on deck in a storm of such magnitude, and the sooner she returned to the safety of her cabin the better. But that was easier thought of than done, for the door had slammed shut behind her and once again the wind was holding it closed. Hero discovered to her horror that she could neither get a satisfactory grip on the wet handle nor pull on it, for the gale forced her hard against the dripping panels and drove the breath from her body. Pressed against the closed door and struggling to breathe, she was aware for the first time of panic, for although the morning was far advanced and she knew it must be close on noon, the day still seemed almost as dark as the night had been; and seen from the open deck the storm appeared infinitely worse and far more terrifying than anything her imagination had pictured for her.

Enormous iron-grey hills of water, foam-streaked and furious, reared up against the black storm-clouds and the jagged lightning, and tossed the helpless ship to and fro; playing with it as though it were a wounded mouse in the grip of a gigantic cat. The helmsman, lashed to the wheel, fought grimly to keep her head to the wind; but the gale was a living thing, lifting the labouring ship, dropping it, flinging it aside and snatching it up again.

Hero released one shaking hand and attempted to clear her eyes of the rain and spray that slashed across the deck, and as she did so a boiling cauldron of foam sprang over the bow, and catching her about the knees, broke her loosened hold on the door handle and swept her away to bring her up with bruising abruptness against the side of the charthouse. Her skirts cling to her in drenched folds while her abundant hair, whipped from its chignon, streamed out on the wind like long ribbons of wet brown seaweed. She was aware of a heavy body blundering against her; of wet oilskins and a furious, incredulous face. A hand gripped her arm and fragmentary words reached her above the howling of the gale:

“What in thunder…doing up here? This ain’t passenger’s weather!…Get out of it! Get below! Get…’ The wind tore the words away and a crash of thunder drowned them.

Once again the greyness was ripped by a livid blaze of lightning, and she heard the man shriek ‘
Christ!
‘ And saw in the same instant what he had seen—

There was another ship out there, bearing down on them. A schooner in irons, broached to and unable to get her bows back in the teeth of the wind; her foremast gone and her rat-lines trailing. A thing as deadly as a charging tiger or a hidden reef.

The hand that gripped Hero’s arm released its hold and its owner raced towards the wheel, and shouldering the spray-blinded helmsman to one side, wrenched the spokes hard over. But Hero could not look away. She could only watch the schooner plunge towards them, knowing that this was death. In a moment—in less than a moment—it would strike, and there would be a rending crash of timber and the crack of falling masts, and then the sea would boil over the wreckage and suck it under, and no one would ever know what had happened. She would not have to make up her mind about Clay after all. Or about anything else. There was no time—no time—

The
Norah Crayne
, answering to her helm, fell off to starboard into the trough of a cross sea, and a long grey cliff of water lifted out of the storm and fell upon her, racing across the tilted deck, waist high and ruthless. It whirled Hero’s wet skirts about her knees, and knocking her down, carried her with it as though she had weighed no more than a shuttlecock. She snatched wildly at a stanchion and missed; saw for a brief, terrifying moment that there were no rails left at the far edge of the steeply sloping deck and nothing to hold on to. And then she was rolled over and over, blind and deaf, and tilted overboard in a cataract of boiling foam.

No one had ever taught her to swim, and it would have made no difference if they had, since no swimmer could have fought that furious sea. A mountain of water dragged her under and threw her up again, and for an instant rain and spray lashed at her face. But before she could do more than gasp for air she was down again, choking and struggling. A second wave caught her and swung her up and threw her into something that tangled about her arms and her helpless body, and she grasped frantically at it and felt rope between her numbed fingers.

For a period of time that seemed endless, but which could not have lasted for more than a few minutes at the most, she clung there, fighting to keep her head above the angry sea, and gulping alternate air and water as the waves dragged her down and tossed her up again. And then at last the rope drew taut and she was being drawn up, hauled in hand over hand as though she had been a mackerel on a line, to be dragged bruised and bleeding and three parts drowned on to a tilting deck that was mercifully solid.

Hands caught her wrists and ankles, and among a medley of voices that yelled above the gale she caught an odd and entirely incredible sound. Laughter…

Someone was shouting with laughter, and someone else—or perhaps it was the same person?—said: “A mermaid, by God!” And laughed again.

And then suddenly they were all slipping and sliding along the deck in another swirling fury of foam, and the whole wild, wet, horrible world turned black, as Miss Hero Athena Hollis lost consciousness for the first time in her life.

5

There was a weight pressing down upon her back. Pressing down and lifting again and then descending once more. Her hands were strained uncomfortably behind her and were being roughly and rhythmically thrust outwards and brought back again, and altogether she had never felt so sore and sick and uncomfortable in all her short and pampered life. Not even when Barclay’s groom, Jud Hinkley, had been teaching her to ride, and she had been thrown from the back of a bolting horse on to hard and sun-baked ground…

Somewhere quite close to her someone was making a hideous groaning noise as though they were in pain, and it was several minutes before she realized that it was she herself who was responsible for this abominable sound.

She struggled feebly and attempted to turn over, and in immediate response to that movement the hands that gripped her wrists relaxed. The man who had been kneeling above her and applying a rough and ready form of artificial respiration turned her on her back, and she found herself looking up into the face of a complete stranger.

During the nine long weeks of the voyage Hero had come to know every member of the
Norah Crayne
’s crew, at least by sight, but this was someone she had never seen before. A fair-haired man with a thin, deeply sunburned face, a cleft chin and a pair of remarkably pale eyes.

Hero passed her tongue over her swollen lips and tasted a saltness that was not of the sea, but blood welling from a cut on her lower lip. She grimaced weakly and attempted to sit up, but finding the effort beyond her strength, forced her voice to a croaking whisper:

“Where is…Captain Fullbright?”

“Captain who?”

It was, she thought vaguely, an educated voice. Then he must be a passenger. She could not understand it. Unless for a brief, ridiculous moment it crossed her mind that she might be dead and the fair-haired man the soul of some drowned sailor sent to set her on her way. But if she were dead she would surely not be in such pain, and it was an undeniable fact that every single part of her body was bruised and aching.

She could feel the warm, steady trickle of blood from her cut lip and from another cut on her temple, and there seemed to be a haze before her eyes; a haze full of odd, dancing lights. Her gaze moved slowly from the man’s face, and she saw that she was lying on the floor of a strange cabin, though it still pitched and rolled as dizzily as her own had done. A passenger’s cabin.

She said in the same husky whisper: “Why haven’t I…seen…you…before?”

The stranger laughed and said: “No reason why you should, is there?”

A faint flicker of indignation arose in Miss Hollis, and she said more strongly: “You were the one who was laughing. Why did you laugh? It was not at all funny.”

The man laughed again with regrettable heartlessness, and said: “Perhaps not to you. But it isn’t every day we hook a mermaid.”

His voice was curiously clipped, while at the same time possessing a faint suggestion of a drawl. An English voice, thought Hero dizzily.
Why, I believe he’s English
!

The man came to his feet, and bending down lifted her as easily and carelessly as though she had been a side of bacon, and deposited her in a large leather-covered chair that seemed to be screwed to the cabin floor. Standing over her he looked very tall. Taller than Captain Fullbright—or Clay.

He said: “You’re an exceedingly lucky young woman. You ought by rights to be drowned, and but for a miracle you would have been. However, I suppose the same could be said for all of us. That was the closest I’ve ever been to the next world, which is saying a good deal. Here, you’d better take a drink of this to replace some of the water we’ve tilted out of you.”

He reached for a tin pannikin that stood in a wooden holder against the wall, filled it from a silver flask, and finding that her hands were too bruised and nerveless to take it, held it to her mouth while she drank.

The fiery liquid burned Hero’s throat and brought a stab of agonizing pain to her cut lip, but though she coughed and choked she managed to swallow a reasonable quantity of it and was grateful for the glow of warmth it brought to her cold stomach. But the relief was only temporary, for presently she began to shiver violently and found that she had to clench her teeth to prevent them from chattering. She wished that she could lie down somewhere—anywhere. On the floor if necessary, but preferably in her own berth. If only she could contrive to get back to her cabin and out of these dreadful sodden clothes she could crawl into her berth and go to sleep. But there was something that must be said first, and she frowned in an effort to concentrate, and forcing the words between her chattering teeth said: “D-did you…w-was it you who p-pulled me out?”

“Among others.”

“T-then I have to t-thank you for s-saving my life. I am t-truly grateful.”

The tall man grinned and said: “It’s your guardian angel you should thank, my girl. I didn’t arrange to snarl you up in that mass of torn rigging, and it was that and nothing else that saved your life. We only had to haul you in. And by the look of you we gave you a pretty rough time in the process!”

Hero attempted to return his smile, but found that her mouth was so cut and swollen that the effort was too painful, and abandoning it she asked instead for Mrs Fullbright: “If she is n-not too ill I w-would like to see her, please. A-at once. And if you w-would be so k-kind as to ask the Captain to come here—”

“He’s here,” said the tall man briefly. “I’m the Captain. You’re on the wrong ship, young woman. No Mrs Fullbrights here. In fact no other woman of any sort, which is a piece of bad luck for you. Or good luck, whichever way you choose to look at it.”

He grinned at Hero, who said incredulously:‘It isn’t true. It can’t be. This is the
Norah
—”

She stopped suddenly, and her right eye—the other had made contact with a bollard and was already too swollen to see out of—widened in horror. “Why—it must have have been
your
ship that ran us down.
This
ship!”

“You mean who just missed running you down. That’s right. Though I have to admit that it was no thanks to us that we are not all providing food for the fishes at this moment That helmsman of yours is a hell of a smart seaman, and I’d like to meet him. He snatched his ship out of the way as neatly as be damned, with less than an inch to spare and without so much as scraping our paint Here’s to him!”

He drained the pannikin, and setting it down, turned his attention to more practical matters: “I must get back on deck and you’d better get out of those clothes and between blankets. Think you can manage it?”

“I—I’ll try,” shuddered Hero.

The man laughed again, and said: “You won’t find it too difficult, for you left half you: clothes on a broken spar, and we cut your laces. You’d better take over my bunk: it doesn’t look as though I shall be needing it for some considerable time—if ever!”

He jerked his chin in the direction of the narrow berth that occupied one wall of the cabin, and picking up a dripping oilskin, shrugged himself into it and went away; moving as easily as though the ship had been drifting in a flat calm instead of lurching violently to a howling hurricane.

The door closed behind him and presently Hero dragged herself painfully out of the chair and discovered that the stranger had spoken no more than the truth on the subject of her clothes, for her dress was in shreds. The bodice hung loose to the waist with every button gone, and the laces of her stays had been cut Even so it required prodigious efforts to remove the tattered remains, and it was probably the brandy more than mere will-power that lent her the strength to do it, and, when the last sodden garment had fallen to the floor, to stagger across to the bunk and crawl under the blankets.

She did not know how long she slept, but when she eventually awoke it was to find that someone had lit a curious oriental lamp of pierced bronze that swooped and swayed to the motion of the ship, throwing a scatter of dancing stars across the walls of the darkened cabin. Watching them, she had fallen asleep again, and then later on someone had lifted her head and given her water to drink. There had been a time, too, when the sun had been shining. But on each occasion she had fallen asleep again almost immediately, and when at last she awoke to full consciousness the lamp had again been lit.