Bernard Cornwell - Wildtrack

I sat for a long time as the pain ebbed away from my spine. The moonlit sky seemed almost luminous above the black trees which edged the river. The Romans had seen this river thus, and they must have stared into the dark deep woods and wondered what strange misshapen creatures moved like wraiths among the leaves. It must have seemed a weird, hostile place, and I wondered if some Roman officer had been wounded here and then gone back to Rome where he fell in love with a dark-haired girl who rejected him for a hairy Phoenician sea-captain. Damn Jill-Beth, and damn Mulder, and damn the fact that I could not slip my moorings on this high tide and take Sycorax to sea. I straightened my right leg and pressed my foot against the bridge deck hard enough to stab a lance of pain up my thigh. I went on pressing, welcoming the pain as evidence that the leg would mend. I pressed till there were tears cold on my cheeks.

Applause sounded from Bannister’s house and I knew he must be announcing his entry for this year’s St Pierre. I opened a beer and drank it slowly. Bannister could sail without me. From this day on I wanted sailing to be a whim, dictated only by wind and sea. I wanted to wander and drift through a busy world, freed of tax and bills and the loud voices of politicians and pompous men.

Perhaps Medusa was right, and perhaps I was a layabout, and perhaps I was too stupid to make a proper living, but, God damn it, I was not a piece of television slime.

I drank another beer. Silver-edged clouds were heaping above Dartmoor to make aery and fantastic battlements that climbed higher and ever higher as the ocean winds were lifted by the slopes above the Tamar. I decided I would rig the boat with my last savings and I would sail south, penniless, just to escape Bannister and Angela. I would strap my right knee, lay in a stock of painkillers, and disappear.

Jill-Beth Kirov’s voice stirred me from my morose thoughts. I raised my head over the cockpit’s coaming and saw her walking down the lawn on Fanny Mulder’s arm. “I won’t see anything!” I heard her say.

“You’ll see fine, girl.”

She stopped at the river wall and stared at Wildtrack . “It’s so beautiful!”

Mulder pulled a dinghy to the garden steps. Jill-Beth laughed as she stepped down into the small boat and I felt the sting of jealousy.

She’d preferred Mulder to me, or to any other man at the party for that matter, and my pride was offended. A daft thing, pride. It had once driven me up a hill on an Atlantic island to meet a bullet.

I heard Jill-Beth’s soft laughter again as Mulder rowed the dinghy the few strokes to Wildtrack . He helped Jill-Beth on to its long rakish deck, then gave her the full guided tour of the topsides. He turned on the deck lights that were mounted beneath the lower spreaders and their brilliant light showed me Jill-Beth’s dark hair and strong jaw and bright excited eyes. I stayed still, a shadow within a shadow, watching.

They stood in the aft cockpit and I could hear every word they said because water carries sound as cleanly as glass carries light.

And suddenly, very suddenly, I forgot my misery because Jill-Beth was encouraging Mulder to tell the story of Nadeznha Bannister’s death. “I’d gone forward, see?” Mulder pointed to the mast. “The kicking-strap had worked loose.”

“And Mrs Bannister stayed here?” Jill-Beth asked.

“She liked being aft in a big sea, and that sea was a bastard. But nothing we hadn’t seen before. Then one broke and pooped us. She just disappeared.”

Jill-Beth turned and looked at the array of lifebuoys and Danbuoys that decorated Wildtrack ’s stern. “She wasn’t wearing a harness?”

“She could have taken it off for a moment, you know how you do? Maybe she wanted to go forward? Or maybe it bent. I’ve seen snaphooks bent straight in a gale. And it was a crazy night,” Mulder said. “I didn’t see she’d gone at first, you know, what with being busy with the kicking-strap and the water everywhere and the boat bucking like a jack-hammer gone ape. Must have taken me five minutes to get back to the wheel.”

Jill-Beth stared up at the masthead where the string of lights was bright above the floodlights. “Poor girl.”

“ Ja .” Mulder pulled open the aft cabin hatch. “A drink?” Did I sense a hesitation in Jill-Beth? I prayed for her to say no. I didn’t want to watch her go into that aft cabin with its wide double bunk. She said no. “I’ve got an early start in the morning, Fanny, but thanks.”

“I thought you were interested.” He sounded hurt. “I mean I’ve still got that night’s log down here if you want to see it.” She hesitated, but then her curiosity about Nadeznha Bannister’s death swayed the issue. “Sure.”

It was like that moment when, during a calm, the water shadows itself beneath the first stirrings of a killing wind. For these last weeks, as I had lost myself in the restoration of Sycorax , I had forgotten the stories of Nadeznha Bannister’s death. But other people had not forgotten. Harry Abbott had warned me off the stories, but here was an American girl stirring up the dangerous rumours. And the dead girl’s father was American too. It was a cold wind that was disturbing my calm. I shivered.

Wildtrack ’s deck lights were doused and the cabin lights glowed through the narrow scuttles until curtains were snatched across the glass.

I thought of what I’d heard. It matched the evidence given to the inquest, and made sense. A safety harness would have saved Nadeznha Bannister’s life, but safety harnesses are not infallible. A harness is a webbing strap that encases the torso and from which a strong line hangs. At the end of the line is a steel snaphook that can be attached to a jackstay or D-ring. I’d known a snaphook open simply because it was wrenched at an odd angle. I’d known them bend open, too. Snaphooks were made of thick, forged steel, but water is stronger than steel, especially when the water comes in the form of a breaking ocean wave. I imagined a heavy following swell, lifting Wildtrack , surging her forward, then dropping her like a runaway lift into the deep trough. The next wave would steal the wind from the sails, there’d be a moment of unnatural quiet, then Nadeznha Bannister would have heard the awesome melding roar as the great tongue of breaking death curved over the stern. She might have looked up to see her death shredding high and white in the night above her. If she had unsnapped her harness for a moment she would have screamed then, but too late, because the cold tons of white water would be collapsing on to the boat to turn the cockpit into a maelstrom of foam and berserk force.

Wildtrack would have staggered, her bow rising as her stern was pile-driven downwards, but a good boat would survive a pooping and Wildtrack would have juddered upwards, shedding the flooding water. But Nadeznha Bannister would already have been a hundred yards astern, helpless in the mad blackness. The wind would have been shrieking in the rigging, the decks would have been seething, and her cries would have been lost in the welter of foam and wind and banging sails.

Or else she was pushed. But the cries in the darkness would have been just as forlorn.

Then, from Wildtrack ’s aft cabin, Jill-Beth screamed.

The scream was more of a yelp, and swiftly cut off as though a hand had been slapped over her mouth. I detected panic in the quick sound, but the music on the terrace was far too loud for anyone but me to have heard the truncated scream.

I picked up a full beer bottle and hurled it. Wildtrack lay no further than good grenade distance away and the bottle crashed with a satisfying noise on her main coachroof. The second ricocheted off a guardrail and shattered a cabin window, the third missed, but the fourth bottle broke against the metal mainmast and showered fragments of glass and foaming beer on to the boat.