Bernard Cornwell - Wildtrack

I went topsides. I looked back, but the rain had already driven Angela away from the wharf. The kitten, astonished by its new home, glared at me from the cabin steps. “I’ll call you Angel,” I said.

Angel hissed at me. The hair on her back bristled. I hoped she was a sea cat. I hoped she’d bring me luck.

I passed the pub and wondered when I would see it again.

Someone, recognizing the boat, waved from the window, and I waved back. I knew that in far-off seas I would remember that bar as a place of idle talk and lustrous beer, but then I had to tack in the village’s narrow reach and the manoeuvre took my mind off the anticipated nostalgia. I saw faces watching me from the holiday-makers’ cars which were parked on the riverside. The tourists saw a business-like boat loaded for a voyage. There was nothing glossy about Sycorax now; she was lashed tight in the evening’s rain and her beauty was that of a functional craft ready for the ocean. The kitten scrambled up to the cockpit and bared its tiny teeth at me. I scratched her under the chin, then watched as she leaped up to the coachroof where she began to sharpen her claws on the dinghy’s lashings. “Angel,” I tried out the name. “Angel.” I hadn’t filled in my Form C1328, Part One, to inform Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise that I was travelling abroad. Bugger Form C1328.

I didn’t have Sycorax’s registration papers, the lack of which would mean bureaucratic aggravation in foreign ports. Then bugger the bureaucrats, too; the world had too many such dull killjoys and Sycorax would sail despite them.

Ahead of me now were the town quays, then the river’s entrance where the half-gale was smashing waves white across the bar. The clouds were bringing an early dusk beneath which the homely lights gleamed soft from windows in the town. The blue-neon cross on the gable of the Baptist church flickered like lightning and I said a prayer for my small ship that was going down to the big seas. Rain slashed down at us, and the kitten protested to me from inside the cabin’s hatch.

Car lights flashed from the stone jetty by the town boatyard. As Sycorax drew closer I saw the blue Porsche parked there and knew that Angela had come to see us off. She ran down to the fuel pontoon and waved both arms at me. I waved back and I wondered why the farewell was suddenly so enthusiastic when, a half-hour before, it had been so cool. “I like the cat!” I shouted as loud as I could.

“Nick! Nick!” Then I saw she was beckoning. I pushed the tiller over, sheeted in on the new tack, and let the boat glide up towards the pontoon. Two big motor cruisers were moored there and I watched as Angela climbed over the poop of the larger boat. She stood outboard of its guardrails, holding on to a stanchion. She carried a bag.

I put Sycorax ’s head to the wind and let the tide carry me alongside the cruiser. Angela threw the bag on to the foredeck, waited a second, then caught my hand and jumped into the cockpit.

I pushed the tiller to starboard and sheeted the jib across to turn our bows. I saw that Angela had left her car door open and its lights still burning.

“Are you sure?” I asked her.

“Of course I’m not sure, but…” She sounded oddly angry with me.

“But what?”

Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. “It’s your leg. You’re going to kill yourself out there, Nick.”

“I’ll be fine, I promise.”

“And you said it would be quicker with two people on board.”

“That’s true.” I let the sails flap. “But not if one of them is seasick.” I wanted her to come more than I could possibly say, yet I was using arguments to make her stay behind.

She bent back her left ear to show me an adhesive patch. “The chemist says they’re infallible.” She must have bought the patch when she had gone to fetch my pills and potions, which meant she must have been debating this action for hours.

“It’s going to be rough out there,” I warned her. I was letting Sycorax drift on the current in case Angela wanted me to take her back to the pontoon.

“If you give me a choice now,” she said, “I might not stay.” I did not give her the choice. Instead I gave her the tiller and hauled in the sheets. “Hold this course. See the white pole on the headland? Aim for it.”

I fetched her bag from the foredeck and hoisted the staysail. I was so happy I could have walked on water.

Then Sycorax’s bows hit the waves at the river’s bar, the first cold spray shot back like shrapnel, and the three of us were going to sea.

PART FOUR

Part Four

Angela was seasick.

For hour after miserable hour, day after night, night after day, she lay shivering and helpless. I tried to make her spend time in the cockpit where the fresh air might have helped, but she shrank away from me. She stayed in the cabin’s lee bunk, wrapped in blankets, and retching into a zinc bucket.

The kitten was fine.

The kitten seemed to think a world permanently tipped away from the wind and battered by a half-gale was a perfect place. It slept in Angela’s lap, giving Angela the one small pleasure she could appreciate, while in the daylight it roamed the boat, performing daredevil acrobatics which made me think it was bound to be washed overboard, yet the little beast had an instinct for avoiding the rush of sea. Once I saw her leap up to the mainsail’s tack. She clung to the cotton, legs splayed, as a sea thundered over the coachroof to shatter on the tethered dinghy. The kitten seemed to like the mainsail after that and would sometimes scamper up the sail as I bellowed hopelessly that she’d tear the cotton with her claws. She’d get stuck up by the gaff jaws, looking like a small black spider on a vast chalk wall, but somehow she always found her way down. Her other favourite place was the chart table and every time I opened a chart she would leap on to it and curl up by the dividers. Then she’d purr, defying me to throw her off. I navigated from cat hair to cat hair.

There was little else to steer Sycorax by. The sky stayed clouded, the nights dark, and, once we had left the Irish lights behind, we were blind. I could not make Bannister’s fancy radio-direction finder work; all that happened when I pressed its trigger was that a small red light would glow, then nothing. Finally, in a fit of tired temper, I hurled the damn thing into the sea with a curse on all modern gadgets. I told myself, as I had told myself a million times before, that the Mayflower had reached America without a silicon chip, so I could too.

So, like the Mayflower , we thrashed north-west under a press of sails. Angela had the lee bunk, the bunk tipped away from the wind, which meant she could not fall out, so I used the weather bunk and snatched hours of sleep curled against the canvas straps that held me in place. I made Thermos flasks of soup that Angela pushed irritably away. I had never been seasick, but I knew well enough what it was like. For the first day she feared she was dying, and thereafter she feared she was not. So much for the chemist’s adhesive patch.

Sycorax thrived. She seemed to be telling me that she had endured enough nonsense in the last months, and this was what she was born to do, and she did it well. There were the usual crop of small problems in the first days. The jib clew began to tear and I temporarily replaced it with the storm jib and spent an evening sewing the stiff cotton tight again. The caulking round my chimney lifted, which was my own fault, and I spent a wet two hours tamping it back. The short-wave radio gave up its ghost after just two days and no amount of coaxing, banging or cursing would bring it back to life. The lack of the radio was more serious than the loss of the radio-direction finder, for without the short wave I could not check the accuracy of my key-wound chronometer. We were sailing by God, by guess, and by the Traverse Tables until the sky cleared and I could take a sight in the hope that the chronometer was keeping good time. There was a deal of water in the bilges whenever I pumped her, but I’d expected that. The caulked seams would tighten soon enough.