The Smugglers Page 13

  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.

  “Tell me this!” he said. “Do you think you can run up and see if we're on course? Take the candle. And hurry, boy. I'll have her at the jetty before you know it.”

  I went up through the fo'c's'le, to that strange light of a coming dawn, too faint to give color to anything. Ours was a gray ship on a black sea, and across the darkened deck leapt a thing that gave me a thrill of horror. It looked like an enormous spider scuttling along. It tumbled over the planks on thin, stiff legs, then jumped to the rail and vaulted into the void beyond.

  It was only the bagpipes, of course, the captain's green bagpipes. He'd cast them away to tend to a ship that seemed to have a mind of her own. There was no one at her helm, but she kept a steady course toward the land. And try as Crowe might, he would not get her to stray from that.

  All the sails were set, but a madman might have trimmed them. The topsail was braced aback; the mainsail was hauled far to windward with a preventer rigged to hold i there. The canvas fluttered and cracked, yet the Dragon rushed for the rising sun. Only one of the boats was in tow. The other bobbed far from the stern, and I saw two men at the oars, rowing for all they were worth.

  The Dragon went with her roar and her spray, as though Crowe could strip every sail from her spars and still she would spite him. He stood all alone at the mainmast, staring up at the billowing sail. Two halyards held it in place, one to the peak of the gaff and one to its throat, and already he'd thrown off the coiled ropes from their belaying pins. Just a hitch or two at either one held the sail in place, and the ropes lay in ragged piles that stretched and shifted with the Dragon's roll.

  As I watched, Crowe pulled the pin to let the peak go free. The big wooden gaff dropped toward the mast, hauling the rope up through its blocks. The line snapped and twitched around his feet, leaping from the deck in kinks and coils; half the rope vanished in a moment, shrieking through the pulleys. The top half of the mainsail collapsed, but still the Dragon stayed on her course. Crowe kicked at the rope and screamed at the ship. “Damn ye!” he shouted. “Damn ye, round up!”

  I started down the leeward side. Crowe's boots were snared in the loops of rope, and he dragged great coils across the deck. “Ye devil!” he screamed at the schooner. “Ye soulless, black-hearted witch!”

  “When you're through with that,” I said, “I should like a word with you, Captain Crowe.”

  If he remembered those words from his first day on the Dragon, he gave no sign of it. He whirled round, and even in that colorless light I could see the fire in his eyes.

  “So that's it, is it?” he said. “I might have known ye'd come back. There's no getting rid of worms and rot.”

  Chapter 19

  A HANGMAN'S NOOSE

  I stopped only a few paces from Captain Crowe, the mast between us. “The Dragon is going to Dover,” I said.

  “Dover, is it?” He took a step back, a step sideways. I circled with him round the mast. “And who is it ye'Ve got steering down there?”

  “Fleming,” I said.

  Shocked, Crowe staggered back. He fell against the rail and caught himself with the preventer line.

  “He came aboard in France. He was down below, in the place where you hid your smuggled spies.”

  “Damn ye,” said Crowe.

  “You heard him, didn't you? And you thought it was your son down there, tapping. Tapping for you.”

  “Och, ye're a half-wit,” he said. “And Fleming too. Thirty years ago he was a half-wit, and he's no a day smarter.”

  “He's smart enough to take the Dragon from under your nose,” I said. “He's smart enough to steer her.”

  “But do ye see where it is he's steering?”

  “I told you,” I said. “To Dover. To a hangman's noose for you.”

  “Look!” he shouted. “Does that look like Dover up there?”

  I turned toward the bowsprit. There was nothing ahead but empty sea and a flock of gulls in the brightening sky. On the weather side–under the boom–the land was far away now, and passing at a furious rate.

  “The Goodwin Sands are straight ahead,” said Captain Crowe. “And he'll have us on them in an hour, at the rate the tide is making.”

  “You're lying,” I said. “They're miles away.”

  “Ye can see the breakers now.”

  I was hardly aware of his movement. I stared at the sea, at row after row of waves growing smaller and darker as they stretched away, like a staircase laid from the sun. And with barely a twitch of his hand, Crowe freed the preventer, and the mainsail boom crashed across the deck.

  I twisted away, but it struck my shoulder and sent me flying to the rail. I fell against the rack of belaying pins and slumped to the deck. Pain like none I'd ever felt coursed through my back and my arm.

  “I'll kill ye,” said Crowe. “I'll crush ye like a beetle, like a
bumclock. Did ye think ye could get the better o' me? I've seen hundreds die, but none wi' the pleasure I'll feel in snapping your neck.”

  He came toward me, through the tangle of halyards. I pulled myself up, and my hand found the belaying pin that held the mainsail's second halyard.

  “I warned ye,” he said. “Right from the start. 'Steer clear o' the Dragon,' I telt ye. See me hang? Ye won't live so long as that.”

  The Dragon lurched to leeward. It pressed me back against the rail, with a sudden tilting of the deck that might have been. Fleming wrestling with the tiller or might have been the ship herself. Crowe lost his balance and fell into the heap of rope. And I snatched the pin from the rack.

  The mainsail hurtled down the mast. Its enormous weight of canvas and wood, fully a ton or more, hauled both the halyards from the deck at a terrifying speed. They smoked through the blocks as the boom and the gaff and the canvas came tumbling down.

  Crowe looked up. His face was a picture of fear. The line twisted round him, tangled and snarled. Loops opened and closed; they coiled round his neck. And all that weight of sail and wood drew the noose tight around him and yanked him from the deck.

  Ten yards he rose in a second, kicking with his feet, clawing at the rope around his throat. And he hung there, turning slowly round to face the dawn. I thought back to Dasher's tale: “It was a fine Little jig he danced that night ”

  I trembled with shock and relief. I let myself drop to the deck and looked at the sea, at the ship, at anything but the wretched corpse of Captain Crowe swinging high above me. I lay there, my back against the rail, and watched the colors come with the dawning of the day. And up from below came Fleming.

  The Dragon slowly rounded up without him at the tiller. She sat with her topsail aback, jib and mainsail flapping. But I felt in no huny to get her sailing again. I was happy enough to let her drift for a while.

  “I told you so,” said Fleming. “There you are, you see. Right to the dock. Right to – ” He stopped. “Tell me this! Where the devil are we?”

  “You steered the wrong way,” I said.

  He looked at me, at the snarls of rope, up at Captain Crowe. “He's dead. You killed him.”

  “I had to,” I said.

  “I didn't think it was possible.” He went to the halyard and shook it. A curve of line, a wave, soared up and tapped at the captain's boots. Again he shook it, and again, and Crowe swung in his noose like a tolling bell. “You bastard,” said Fleming. He screamed at the body, lashing with the line. “You wicked, wicked bastard! You took me life from me. You robbed me of all me years ! ”

  I got up and led him away. He held on to me, sobbing, as I took him to the rail. “Look,” I said. “The sun's rising now.”

  It came up from the sea, big and bright and gold. Fleming sniffed. He wiped his hand across the hairs that grew from his nose.

  “Oh, it's beautiful,” he said. “There's nothing like a sunrise. There's nothing so fine as a dawn.”

  “Are we near the Sands?” I asked. “The Goodwin Sands?”

  Fleming squinted into the wind. His face was the same chalky white as the cliffs that lay to weather. “That's the South Foreland there,” he said, pointing. “Near the Sands? We've crossed them, boy. Aye, we've come right over the shoals.”

  It was true. In an arc across the stern, a mile or less behind us, the sea was brown and choppy. The tide rippled and leapt over banks of hidden sand.

  “We should have been wrecked,” I said. My hands were shaking. “It was sheer blind luck that saved us.”

  “Luck be damned.” Fleming smiled. “It was the Dragon, boy. That devil, Crowe, had a hold of her heart. But she's free now, the poor old girl.” He patted the top of her cabin. “Oh, she's a good old ship, and she'll take you far and look after you well.”

  We held no ceremony for Captain Crowe. We lowered his body, worked it loose, and heaved it over the side. There were no weights to take him down, no shroud to wrap him in. “I want to think that things are eating at him,” Fleming said. “The birds and the fish and the worms.” Then we connected the steering lines, hoisted the sails, and set a course for the Downs. The helm was loose and sloppy, but the Dragon didn't mind. She went home to the River Stour, to the same jetty that we'd started from. We had no anchor; we had to touch land.

  And there to meet us was the boatman, the one-armed man who had taken my father and me out to the Dragon for the first time. He threw a springline round a bollard and brought the schooner to a stop. Then he stood and stared at me.

  “Hallo!” I shouted.

  “Oh, yes, I remember you.” He spat in the water at the Dragons side. “Where's Turner Crowe? Where's Dasher and the others?”

  “They're mostly dead,” I told him. “Crowe and Mathew, and Harry too. I don't know what's become of Dasher.”

  He looked over the Dragon from bow to stern, from the severed cable to the broken foresail gaff, to the mainsail holed by a cannon shot. He pointed at me with his only arm. “Now don't tiy telling your father it was all like this before you left.”

  Chapter 20

  ONE MORE NAME

  I rode with Fleming, in a coach that took us south. All the way he gazed from the open window, marveling at everything.

  “Smell the grass,” he said. “Smell the trees.” He took a great long breath, then blew it out. “Tell me this! Do we go through Canterbury?”

  “No,” I said. “Its the other way.” It lay on the London road, the way I would have liked to go. But Fleming was dead set on taking me back to the Baskerville. “You can send for your father,” he'd said. “You can wait for him there, and the two of you go on to London.” It had seemed to me he was scared to go alone to a place–and a wife–he hadn't seen since before I was born.

  We came up the bends of the river and on to Sandwich, in through the ancient wall. We passed the Weavers and the huge medieval churches, then hurried out through the wall again at a pace that was far too fast for Fleming.

  “I imagine it's changed a lot,” I said.

  “Not at all,” said he. “Not at all, now that I see it.” He wore a grin as broad as his face. “Every night in me little prison bed I took this trip. North one night and south the next. I got meself in terrible muddles. Once I set off for Faversham, and you know how far that is.”

  Well, it was only a dozen miles. The coach could have carried us there in a little more than an hour.

  “Long way to Faversham,” said Fleming. He turned himself back to the window. “I lost meself out on the marsh.”

  We went through Deal and Walmer, and through the village of St. Margaret's. “I was married here,” said Fleming, pointing to a towering steeple.

  And then we were almost there. Fleming slouched in his seat, and for the first time in the journey we rode for a hundred yards without his talking at all.

  “Are you worried?” I asked.

  He nodded. “I'm older now,” he said. “I don't want to see the look on her face when she gets an eyeful of all me wrinkles.”

  “She won't,” I said. “She can't.” It broke my heart to tell him she was blind.

  “Blind?” He blinked at me. “You mean she can't see a thing?”

  “I'm sorry,”I said.

  “No,” said he. “It's fine. It's a blessing, maybe. That's what I think.”

  It was late in the evening when the coach pulled up at the Baskerville. We watched it go off down the road; then Fleming took a moment to tidy himself. He tugged at his clothes; he smoothed down the hair at his ears and his nostrils. But still he stood at the inn door, staring at the latch. Then it clicked from within, and the door creaked open. And there was Mrs. Pye.

  “Fleming?” she asked. “Is it you?”

  “Aye, it's me.” It was all he said. She flung herself at him, and he tried to hold her away to look at her, but she was seeing him with her hands. They went over his head and his face, over his shoulders and down his arms and up again. They were trembling, until he held them. For a moment
the Pyes swayed together, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip. They fitted like parts of a puzzle, the two of them withered and shrunken in the very same way. Then Fleming turned his head and smiled at me.

  “You were right,” said he. “She's as pretty as she ever was.”

  Father came the next day. We sat at the table where Captain Crowe had scattered out the Goodwin Sands with his bread crumbs. I told him all about the voyage. I admitted to the loss of an anchor.

  “An anchor!” he said. “The devil with that. You could have lost the whole damn ship for all I care, so long as you came home yourself.”

  We made new plans in this place of our old ones. Mrs. Pye sat by the fire as Fleming brought us our glasses and supper.

  “Do you want to say an end to this?” asked Father. “I wouldn't blame you at all, young John. What is it they say: swallow the anchor? Come home to the business, and I'll hire a crew to take the Dragon over to the Indies.”

  “The Indies?” I said.

  He nodded. “I found better buyers there for the wool. Twice the price they'd pay in London.”

  “But that's full across the ocean.”

  “A month away,” said Father. “Another month back. It's what I mean, John. If you've had your fill of sailing, just say the word. There's a desk for you in London.”

  I said, “I'll need a new mainsail.”

  Father laughed. But in truth, it wasn't very jolly. “I suspected that was what you'd say.” He pushed his chair back from the table. “All right, you can go. But this time, you hire the captain.”

  “That sits well with me,” said I.

  “Good.” He slapped his hands on his knees. “Now let's have a look at this list of names.”

  I fetched the packet for him, and we went together through the book. It was even more stained than before, and we could barely make out half the names. But Crowe's was there, and Mathew's too. Hany's I wasn't sure about. And Dasher's? I searched for it from front to back, from back to front again. If Larson had written it there, not so much as a letter was left to be read.