Bernard Cornwell - Sea Lord

“Tea,” I greeted her. “The milk’s reconstituted. Sugar?”

“No sugar.” She picked her way across the wreckage of the cabin and nervously sat opposite me. “No milk either, please.”

“Rum instead of milk?”

She shook her head, then brushed her fingers through her hair. I saw that she was pretty. Even with a cut face, frightened eyes, and a mucky damp sweater she was pretty.

“Did that bastard take the forecabin apart?” I asked.

“Not as badly as this cabin.” She shuddered suddenly. “I was waiting for you in the cockpit when they arrived. There were two of them, but only one came aboard. I thought he was a friend of yours.” She shivered again and momentarily closed her eyes. “Thank you for frightening him away.”

“My pleasure.” I put a mug of tea in front of her. “Sorry there’s no lemon. Does the pipe smoke bother you?”

“No.” She cradled the tin mug in both hands, found it too hot, and quickly put it down. She glanced around the ransacked cabin, and grimaced. In the cold damp air Sunflower ’s accommodation seemed dispiriting and drab. The girl took a deep breath, then looked across the table at me. “I’m Jennifer Pallavicini.”

I did not respond. I had been half expecting her to tell me more about the thin man, but instead she had offered me the formal introduction, so I just smiled an acknowledgement.

“Doesn’t the name mean anything to you?” There was a trace of indignation in her voice.

“Should it?”

“We’ve been writing to you for three years!”

I shrugged to show that none of her letters had reached me, then sipped my tea which I’d generously laced with rum. The heat of the liquid scalded the tender patch where the tooth had been drawn, and I winced. “Your letters are probably mouldering in General Deliveries all over the world. I’m sorry.”

“We wrote care of your mother.”

I half smiled. “I wasn’t the favourite child. She never even sent me a birthday card, let alone other people’s letters.”

“So then we heard you’d come home for your mother’s funeral,” she continued, “and because you never replied to our letters, I was sent down to find you.”

To her it all made sense; to me, none. My mother had never forwarded a letter to me, I had never heard of Jennifer Pallavicini, and I wondered how she had discovered that Sunflower was moored in Salcombe. I had also noted that she had been sent to find me, implying that she was merely a messenger. “Who sent you?” I asked.

She gave me an almost hostile look. It was clear that Miss Jennifer Pallavicini was recovering very swiftly from her encounter with the thin man. This was a tough girl, I suspected, and that realisation made me look more closely at her. There was a lot of character in my visitor’s face; a face blended of intelligence, beauty and determination. A formidable girl, I thought, and not one to take lightly. “So?” I prompted her.

“I work for Sir Leon Buzzacott.”

“Ah,” I said neutrally, though in truth her answer made complete sense. Buzzacott was the rich man who had almost bought Stowey’s Van Gogh, then been denied it. He had never hidden his bitter disappointment. Buzzacott, one of the City’s most glittering financiers, had established his own art collection, the Buzzacott Museum Gallery, at his country house. He believed that too many of Britain’s art treasures were crossing the Atlantic or going to the Japanese, and he had sworn to stop the haemorrhaging flow of paint. The Van Gogh had been his proudest acquisition, filling a great gap in his collection, and it evidently still rankled that the painting did not hang on his museum’s wall.

“What exactly do you do for Sir Leon?” I asked.

“I’m the curator of nineteenth-century Europe.” It seemed either a large task or an excessive boast; anyway, it made me smile, which annoyed her. “Damn you,” she said.

“Damn me?” I was taken aback by the sudden hostility. I’d saved her from a worse beating, lent her clothes, made her tea, and now she was treating me like a piece of scum.

She closed her eyes in exasperation. “Sir Leon has never relinquished his hopes of acquiring the painting. Naturally a new price will have to be negotiated, but Sir Leon will match any offer you may receive. Indeed, my lord…”

“John,” I interrupted her.

“Indeed, Mr Rossendale,” she continued as though I hadn’t spoken, “Sir Leon will accept any reasonable valuation which, in present market terms, must make the painting worth at least twenty million pounds.”

It’s easy to pretend not to care about money, to say that a blue-water sailor only needs enough cash to keep the rust out of the hull and to patch up the sails and to buy a few bottles of hooch and tins of stew. That derision of money is the chorus of the sea-gypsies; how we’ve escaped the vulgar greed of the world, how we even feel sorry for the pin-striped business executives rushing towards their bypass surgery because of the stress of making money, and we’re so proud that we’ve escaped the love of the filthy stuff, and we profess not to care about it and even to despise it, but then along comes a dark-haired girl who casually says her employer is willing to lay out twenty of the big ones, and so I gaped at her and wondered if she was mad, or if I was going deaf. “Twenty?” I asked weakly.

“Millions,” she said firmly.

“Wow.” I grinned. I told myself that I didn’t care about money, but twenty million smackeroos? The art world must have gone mad in the last four years. My mother had thought she had done well to negotiate a price of four million, and she’d been assured that was at least one million above the highest auction price. But twenty? At least twenty, Jennifer Pallavicini had said. “You could buy a lot of boat for twenty big ones,” I said wistfully.

“You could indeed,” she said icily.

“There’s just one snag,” I went on, “which is that I don’t have the painting.”

“But you know who does.” It wasn’t a question, but a statement. This girl, just like my sister and the rest of my family, was convinced of my guilt.

“No,” I said gently, “I don’t.”

Jennifer Pallavicini sighed, as though I wilfully exasperated her. “Before she died,” she said flatly, “your mother found evidence of your guilt. She told us as much. One of your accomplices confessed.”

“Whoopee,” I said, “except it isn’t true.”

“Your mother wished to confront you with that evidence” – she ignored my denial – “and to make one last appeal to you.”

I leaned back. The washboards were out of their slots and rain was flicking down into the cabin. I rubbed my face and winced as I put pressure on my sore gum. I looked up at the barometer, which happily wasn’t broken, and saw that the air pressure was rising. Too soon for me. I needed a few days to make my repairs, but as soon as the next depression had passed up-channel I’d use the backwash of northerly winds to take me away from England.

“And that man” – Jennifer Pallavicini shivered at the memory of the thin man – “told me you’d come home to sell the painting.”

That caught my attention. “He said what?”

“That you’d come home to sell the painting. But he said it wasn’t yours to sell.”

I stabbed at the faltering tobacco in my pipe with a shackle-spike. “So if his argument was with me,” I asked, “why go to work on you?”

She seemed to consider whether or not to answer, then gave a small shrug. “When he first came aboard he asked me if I knew anything about the painting and I was foolish enough to say I did. When I told him I worked for Sir Leon he wanted to know how much we were paying you for the painting, and just when you were going to produce it. I said we had no agreement, and he didn’t believe me.”