Bernard Cornwell - Sea Lord

“Not exactly.” I found a chart and showed her how the Decca course would take us straight across the islands of Guernsey and Jersey. “So what we’d have to do,” I said, “is put in another waypoint here,” I pointed to a patch of sea north of the Roches Douvres, “then make St Helier the second waypoint.”

“Waypoint?” she asked.

“Posh name for destination. You pick the waypoint and the machine tells you how to get there.”

She looked at the electronic display which was showing a small bent arrow and some apparently meaningless figures. “What’s it telling us now?”

“It’s assuming we’re trying to sail the direct line to St Helier, so it’s telling us that we’re a tenth of a nautical mile off course to port, travelling at 3.2 knots, on a heading of 162 true, and that we should be heading 137 true.”

She stared admiringly at the display. “I thought you master mariners did it all with sextants?”

“Most of the time we do,” I said, “because you run out of Decca range as soon as you leave Europe.”

So then she wanted to see the sextant. I took her up to the cockpit and showed her how to bring the sun down to the horizon. She wanted to try for herself, so I settled back and watched as she braced herself against the companionway. She was worth watching. She was wearing a shirt and jeans, and had her short black hair tied back with a band. “It’s green!” she exclaimed when she first saw the sun in the mirror, then frowned as a quiver of her right hand jarred the sun loose. A moment later she managed to hold the sun steady on the mirror, then bit her lower lip in fierce concentration as she moved the index arm. The trick of it was to move the index arm to bring the sun down, while holding the rest of the instrument absolutely steady so that the horizon stayed fixed in the sight glass. “Done it!” she said triumphantly.

“Read me the scale.”

She had done it, too. I checked by taking my own sight. “Is that all there is to it?” she asked mockingly.

“That and a lot of very tedious mathematics. It’s also a bit trickier to do when the boat’s heaving up and down in a rough sea, or if you’re trying to find one star among a million, but on the whole that’s all there is to it.”

The genoa slapped a protest at the fading wind. I switched off the Decca and put the sextant away. I let Jennifer steer, though there was little to do for the wind was dying on us. “Whistle,” I said to her.

“Whistle?”

“It’s supposed to bring the wind.”

She laughed, but didn’t try the old magic. I stretched myself lazily on the leeward thwart. “Shouldn’t you be working?” I teased her.

“Of course I should be working.”

“Why aren’t you?”

“Because I’m rich and spoilt, and can take days off when I like. Isn’t that what you expected me to say?”

“Is it true?”

She made a face. “Partly. Which is why I usually work very hard.” She hauled in the mainsheet, but it didn’t make the boat go any faster. “I also wanted to be with you,” she added in a shy and surprising explanation. She had not looked at me as she spoke.

I said nothing, waiting till she caught my eye. “Mutual,” I said then. Happiness sometimes comes in cloudbursts.

There was a pause as we shared that happiness, then, in friendly warning, she deliberately broke the mood. “But don’t be too hopeful, John Rossendale. Hans has my heart, such as it is.”

“Lucky Hans.”

“Except this is work really,” she said hastily, perhaps wondering whether she had said too much and was now trying to draw a little of it back. “If we’re going to get the painting back, then I have to co-operate with you, don’t I?”

“Absolutely.”

We sailed on in companionable silence. The coast was nothing but a dark blur in the shimmering haze. A small workboat sped past a half-mile to starboard. I’d watched it approach from astern, but it had made no effort to come near us. I stared at it through the binoculars and saw that it carried a half-dozen hopeful men with sea-angling gear. I could not see Garrard on the boat, so I relaxed. It was getting warmer, so I stripped off my shirt, then lay back again and pillowed my head on the coiled genoa sheet.

“Sleepy?” Jennifer asked.

“Just lazy. I’m not used to being chauffeured.”

“Don’t you get bored with sailing alone?”

“I don’t always sail alone.”

She thought about that for a while. “Girls?”

“Thank God, yes.” I told her about the hitch-hikers who wandered the trade-wind routes; how they lived from island to island, boat to boat, and one summer’s day to the next.

“They make me feel very dull,” she said.

“I can’t think why. You seem very exotic to me.”

“Exotic?”

“Rich, beautiful and engaged to the King of Swiss processed cheese.”

She laughed. “I can’t think why you’re so nasty about Hans! You only met him twice, and he was perfectly pleasant to you.”

It was my turn to betray an intimacy; to offer her some vulnerability of my own. “I dislike him because he’s engaged to you. I’m jealous.”

She smiled acceptance. “How nice.”

It was that kind of morning. Flirtatious and happy, and the flirting sometimes veered very close to something deeper, but we both avoided it. I wasn’t going to hurry her. One learns patience at sea, and I would be patient.

By late morning we had entirely lost sight of land. The wind had died to nothing and the sea was slapping petulantly at Sunflower ’s hull. We simply wallowed in a long, lazy swell. The small fishing boat was drifting a mile away. I guessed the men had abandoned hunting inshore for bass and had come out to the deeper water to find mackerel.

Jennifer stood up and, rather decisively, peeled off her jeans and shirt. The abruptness of the gesture somehow invested it with importance, as though she had taken another deliberate step on the road to intimacy. She was wearing a yellow bikini. I had been right: she did look good in a bikini. In fact she looked wonderful, and I said as much.

“I didn’t think you’d be able to resist a comment,” she said tartly.

“And I very much hoped I wouldn’t be able to resist one.”

The hull rocked in the small waves as the sails slatted from side to side. Jennifer abandoned trying to sail Sunflower , and instead stretched herself out on the opposite thwart. She lay with her head towards the stern, while mine was nearer the cabin so we could look at each other across the cockpit. “Daddy didn’t want me to go to the Azores,” she said suddenly.

I assumed Daddy was Sir Leon. “Why not?”

“He thought Inspector Abbott should go. I persuaded him that I stood a better chance of convincing you.”

“If you’d have dressed like that, you’d have succeeded.”

“If we become friends,” she said, “will you persist in making sexist remarks?”

“Yes.”

She smiled. “You are a philistine.”

“So why did you go to the Azores?” I asked.

She paused for a heartbeat, wondering whether to offer the confession, then looked across at me. “Because I wanted to see you.”

“I thought that must have been it,” I said complacently.

“You are a bastard!”

I grinned. “For someone who wanted to see me, you weren’t very friendly.”

“What was I supposed to do? Jump into your boat singing ‘I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No’?”

“It might have broken the ice.” I sat up momentarily to check that no shipping threatened to run us down. Nothing did. The only vessel in sight was the mackerel boat which had drifted slightly closer. I lay down again. “I very nearly did go back to England with you.”