Dennis Wheatley - The wanton princess

At that moment Roger was holding on with only one hand. In the other he held his flask tilted high, his head thrown back, as he sucked from it the last drops of brandy. The lugger gave a frightful lurch. The tug on his arm tore his fingers from their hold. A second later he was flat on his back.

A wave swept the deck, lifting him high. With both arms outflung he made a desperate effort to seize on something by which he could save himself. The fingers of his left hand fastened on a grating. The breath driven from his body, he clung to it while the water cascaded away beneath him. The suction was terrific. Suddenly the fastenings of the grating gave and it came away. Still clutching it, he was carried across the deck to the low gunwhale of the lugger. It hit him in the back but was not high enough fully to check his headlong descent caused by the heavy list as the ship plunged down the far slope of the wave. His legs were flung up and with a gasp of horror he realized that he had been swept overboard.

28

But Britain Rules the Waves

As Roger went under, his mouth filled with water. The salt in it rasped his throat and nostrils. A great darkness engulfed him. Clinging desperately to the grating with both hands, he kicked out wildly. After a few moments that seemed an eternity he surfaced. Shaking the water from his eyes, he looked about him. The lugger was thirty feet away and now rocketing up another steep slope of dark green foam-flecked water. In her stern he glimpsed Jubert and another man at the wheel. Both had lashed themselves to nearby structures, but neither of them was looking in his direction.

Seized with panic, he gave a loud shout. It was drowned by the roaring of the wind. A wave slapped into his face, blinding him and again filling his mouth with water. He realized then that it was impossible for him to attract their attention. His seasickness forgotten, now that his life was in peril he made an effort to fight down his panic and assess his chances.

Although he was a strong swimmer, he knew that without the wooden grating to support him, in such a sea he could not have kept himself afloat for a quarter of an hour, if that. Only one thing was in his favour; it had been much colder in the cutting wind on deck than it was in the water, for the sea still retained a degree of the warmth it had absorbed during the long summer and autumn. But how long would it be before, tossed hither and thither by the waves and at intervals submerged as their crests broke over him, he became too exhausted any longer to keep bis hold on the grating?

He had only a very vague idea of his whereabouts. On leaving Bordeaux a strong wind had favoured them and, although Jubert had put the lugger about to face the storm, it must have driven them still further to the north-westward. When Roger had gone overboard they had been close on thirty hours at sea, so he guessed himself to be somewhere in the northern end of the Bay of Biscay. There was, therefore, just a chance that he might be driven ashore on the southern coast of Brittany. But no land had been in sight all day, so that hope was a poor one. There was the possibility that before he became exhausted he might be sighted from a ship and picked up. But in such weather no fishing smacks would be at sea and the main shipping route from Spain across the Bay was, almost certainly, a considerable way further out. Grimly he faced the fact that his chances of survival were very slender.

From time to time, as the lugger mounted a big wave, or he was heaved high on one, he continued to catch glimpses of her, but after a quarter of an hour she was lost to sight. Twilight was already falling and soon darkness hid everything from him except the white foam crests in his immediate vicinity.

Every now and then he changed his grip on the grating, sometimes holding it in front of him, at others clutching it with only one hand while gently swimming beside it so as to keep his circulation going. It measured about four feet by three and to have used it as a raft was out of the question as it would have tipped over; but after he had been in the water for an hour or so he tried putting both his arms right over it so that the greater part of it was below his chest. The disad­vantage to that position was that even when holding his head back wavelets slapped into his face; but, at intervals, it enabled him to relieve his arms of the strain of hanging on to it.

The wind lessened and gradually the storm went down, but the night seemed endless and towards morning he began to fear that he could not last much longer. The thought of death brought into his mind Georgina and how she had so nearly drowned in the West Indies. Again he saw the vision he had had of her, then it seemed to change and, instead of him looking down on her, she was looking down on him. A moment later her voice came clearly to him in an urgent, anxious cry:

'Tie yourself to the grating, Roger. Tie yourself to it. Use your cravat.'

Rousing from the lethargy that was overcoming him, he attempted to undo his cravat. As the long strip of white linen was soaking wet it proved a veritable struggle to get it off. At length he succeeded. Terrified, now that he had to use both his hands, that he would be washed away from the grating, he half lay on it while, in fits and starts, he made slip knots in both ends of the cravat. Next he was faced with the hardest task of all—to get both the slip knots under the grating and up through holes in it that were well apart. Again and again he failed and had to lie panting for a few minutes until he had recovered sufficiently to try again. By sheer dogged persistence he eventually had about fifteen inches of the stock stretched under the grating near the far edge, and the two ends protruding above it. With a final effort he wriggled both his hands through the slip knots and the next roll of the grat­ing pulled them tight over his wrists. Now, with his arms stretched out, he lay face down with his head between them while the lower half of his body and legs dangled in the water. Then he lost consciousness.

When he came to he saw Georgina again and she was bending over him. He smiled feebly, thinking it to be another vision. Then it dawned upon him that he was in a ship's cabin, lying in a bunk wrapped in blankets with hot bottles packed all round him. Still he could not believe that he was not the victim of a fantasy, or dead, and that it was his spirit that was looking up into her lovely face.

Tears of happiness were running down her cheeks as she kissed him and said, 'Roger, my heart, just as you saved me, the dear Lord has enabled me to save you. Early this morn­ing I woke and had a vision. I saw you there alone and drowning and knew you to be about to abandon hope. I called to you to tie yourself to the grating you were holding. Then the vision faded. But something told me you were not far off. I pulled on my robe and rushed out to find the Captain of this frigate. He would not believe me, but on my insistence humoured me by agreeing that a special look-out should be kept. When he had called the watch on deck I offered a thousand guineas reward for the man who first sighted you. While I waited, scanning the vast, empty waters for a speck. I thought I'd die of suspense. At last a man in the mizzen top saw you, for the others had failed to catch a sight of you as we passed nearly a mile off. A boat was lowered and they picked you up. To my utter horror, when they brought you aboard I thought it was too late and that you were already a corpse. I pray that never again may I go through such a half hour as that while they were forcing the water from your lungs. Twice they would have given up had I not begged and insisted that they continued. At last you breathed again but were still unconscious and it is two hours since they carried you to my cabin with the sweet assurance that you would live.'