Bernard Cornwell - Sea Lord

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because you made me feel like a puppet.”

“Something went right, then.”

I laughed. A gull floated above us, decided we weren’t a fishing boat, and slid away. Sunflower ’s sails and her red ensign hung limp, while Charlie’s wind vane at the masthead lazily boxed the compass.

“Mummy likes you,” Jennifer said suddenly.

“I like Mummy.”

“Do you? Yes, I’m sure you do. Men always do.”

“I prefer her daughter.”

Jennifer treated that compliment as merely dutiful. “Did she talk to you about Hans?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“In the first place that he’s dull, in the second that he’s duller, and in the third that he’s very dull. She added later that he’s extremely dull.”

She laughed, but didn’t say anything.

“Is she right?” I asked.

“Mummy’s usually very acute about people.”

I digested that one. I’d left the VHF switched on to Channel 16 and I heard a squawk as someone called the coastguard to report their passage. I waited for the conversation to be switched to the working channel and, in the ensuing silence, looked across the cockpit. “Jennifer?”

“John?” She mocked my solemnity with her own.

Perhaps I wasn’t so patient after all, for I suddenly wanted to short-circuit the morning’s flirtatiousness. “I think I’m in love with you.”

She looked at me for a long time in silence. I wondered if I had spoilt the mood by being too serious, but then she smiled. “How very inconvenient.”

We smiled at each other. I knew then that everything was going to be all right. It really was. Hans had lost. I didn’t know how it had happened so quickly, or what would happen next, but I knew everything was wonderful. Happiness filled me like a great glow.

She sat up, pulled off her headband, and ran fingers through her hair. “I’m told,” she said happily, “that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach?”

“There are alternative routes.”

She stood and gave my belly a reproving slap. “For now, John Rossendale, it will be the stomach. Lunch?”

“I’ll get it.”

“You stay there. I know what food I packed, and you don’t. Besides, you doubtless believe a woman’s place is in the galley, so why pretend otherwise?” She stooped and gave me a very swift kiss on the lips. I made a grab for her, but she was too fast for me. She laughed, and swung herself down the companionway steps.

I listened to her unpacking the food. I was happy, so very happy, transported to some new region of gold-touched, warm and loving contentment.

“Where’s the tin-opener?” she called.

“In the cave-locker behind the sink.”

“Wine glasses?”

“Hanging in a rack over your head.”

“Soup plates?”

“Use the big coffee mugs.”

She began singing ‘I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No’, and I wanted to laugh aloud because I knew she was as happy as I was. Sunflower rocked gently. Small waves slapped at her steel chines. The sky was pale blue, with just the faintest hint of high cloud wisping.

She stopped singing. “Matches?”

“In a waterproof plastic container beside the cutlery tray. You strike the match on the inside of the container lid.”

She started singing again, then stopped almost immediately. “Why won’t the gas turn on?”

“Because you have to switch on the gas feed tap which you’ll find by the engine bulkhead under the companionway steps, and I have to switch the main feed on back here.”

“Then do it,” she said.

“Aye aye, Captain.” I sat up. I saw that the skipper of the mackerel boat had started his engine and was going away from us into the heat haze. I opened the transom locker where I kept the cooking gas bottles. The locker had a drain to the open air, thus, if one of the bottles leaked, the lethal gas would drain harmlessly outboard.

I heard Jennifer grunt as she turned the feed tap which was uncomfortably stiff. She started singing again as she went back to the narrow galley which was midships on the starboard side. I reached into the locker and tried to turn on the main valve. It wouldn’t turn. I heard the rattle as Jennifer opened the matches, and I suddenly realised that the gas valve was already turned on and I had never, ever, left it turned on, not once in four years, which meant that someone else had been aboard Sunflower . I twisted desperately round.

“No!” I roared.

But she struck the match just as I shouted.

And the happiness vanished.

Ask any sailor what they fear most and they won’t cite the sea, or careless merchant ships, or rocks, but fire.

And almost every yacht afloat carries a fire-bomb aboard: the bottles of liquid gas they use for cooking. The gas is heavier than air. If it leaks it settles down to the bilges where it lies, hidden and deadly, waiting for the spark. Some yachts carry a gas detector, but I’d never thought to put one on Sunflower . Instead I relied on the taps: one on the bottle itself, one where the gas pipe enters the main cabin, and the usual taps on the galley stove. I was punctilious about keeping all the taps closed unless I was actually cooking, for there is nothing I fear so much as a gas leak. Most days I hand pumped the bilges, not for any water, but just in case a tiny amount of gas had leaked. The pump will carry it to the outside air, but it was a chore I usually performed in the evening. That day, wallowing in the swell off the hidden Devon coast, the bilge and the cabin sole were unpumped and lethal.

Because while I had been in London, and while the boat had been unguarded, someone had been aboard Sunflower and they had turned the taps and let the silent deadly gas seep into the cabin. The gas doesn’t smell. It just waits for a spark or a flame.

Jennifer struck the match.

And screamed.

It was not an ear-splitting explosion. It was a soft roar. Red flame filled the cabin. I could hear Jennifer screaming beyond the fire’s noise. Her scream seemed to go on and on and on. The fire was thickening with appalling swiftness; flame and smoke pouring out of the open companionway as if it was a chimney. The slatting mainsail was already scorched up to the third reef points.

The noise of the fire was like a seething hiss, beyond which Jennifer’s scream slowly faded.

I was shouting incoherently, merely making a noise to tell her that I was there, and shouting to give myself courage. There were a dozen things I maybe should have done. I should have turned off the main gas valve. I should have dragged one of the fire extinguishers out of the starboard cockpit locker. I should have darted a hand through the fire to grab the VHF microphone and send a Mayday. I did none of them. Instead, and without really thinking, I plunged down into the flame.

I had been turning and shouting in the cockpit as the explosion erupted out of the cabin and I did not pause to think that I was throwing myself down into the fire. I simply kept moving towards the sound of Jennifer’s fading scream. I put my hands on the coachroof either side of the companionway and swung myself down. I dropped into unimaginable pain. It was like falling into the jet-flame of an oxyacetylene lamp and I saw, as I dropped down, how a piercing lance of flame was seething into the cabin from the engine bulkhead. My ankle was on fire, bubbling and spitting. Even through the pain I realised that it was there, where the pipe came through the bulkhead, that the gas line had been cut. I scrambled away from the flame jet and fell against the cabin table. I had to take a breath and filled my lungs with burning gas. I was blinded by heat and smoke, choking and sobbing, and still trying to shout to Jennifer. I wanted to tell her to survive, to hold on, to live. Light flared to my right; a brilliant and searing light as the charts caught fire.