Bernard Cornwell - Sea Lord

But I was losing the battle. The hallucinations began. I saw a boat coming to pick us up: it was a great schooner, white-hulled with a reaching bowsprit. The illusion was so exact that I could see the chain bobstay beneath the bowsprit and the gilded wood carving where her figurehead might be. Men leaned over from the bows to pluck us from the water and I reached up to catch their hands and the act of reaching up plunged me underwater and the hallucination vanished in a blow of reality as sea water choked my gullet. I struggled up and pulled Jennifer’s burned head from the water. For all I knew, she was already dead, but I would not let her go. I was crying, not out of pity, but frustration. There was no schooner. There was nothing but the sea and Sunflower ’s funeral smoke and one seagull gliding past.

I saw a beach. It was very close. The beach was long and sandy, backed by low grass-covered dunes. No one was on the beach, but a shingle roof rising above the dunes promised a refuge. I swam towards the beach. The hope of safety seemed to give me a new manic energy and I muttered in Jennifer’s ear that we were going to be all right now, that all we had to do was survive the surf and I’d go to the house and find help. “We’ve reached America,” I said, because now I could see the Stars and Stripes flying from a flagpole in front of the house. The illusion was so damned real that I was even wondering how to persuade an American hospital to treat us when we didn’t have any credit cards, but then a small wave splashed my face and when I opened my eyes again the beach was gone, and the flag and the house had vanished with it and there was only the empty sea and sky. Jennifer was heavy in my arm, the sea was seeping its fatal coldness into me, and the tiredness was filling me with a great weakness.

I almost let her go, but I made myself hold on to her burned flesh. I tried to keep her head above water, but my kicking was becoming more and more feeble so that more and more water broke over my face to sting my eyes and fill my throat. I told her once more that I loved her. She neither made a sound, nor moved.

A helicopter appeared in the sky. I cursed this new hallucination because now I only wanted to die in peace. The helicopter made a huge clattering noise, disturbing me, and I swam feebly away from it in the hope of finding a place of great quiet and slow gentle dying. Again the illusion was crystal clear, even to such details as the helicopter’s shadow sweeping over us and the water churning beneath the blade’s downdraught. I saw the winchman peering down, but I fought the illusion because I dared not cling to such imaginary hopes, yet the mind persisted, and I hallucinated the rope dropping down and touching the water to discharge the helicopter’s static electricity. I cursed the dream.

A wave swamped us. I choked, but this time there was no air to breathe. I had gone underwater. I still clung to Jennifer, but now I was drowning and she was drowning with me. I opened my eyes and found peace. The water’s surface was like a sheet of waving silver above me. No helicopter disturbed that pretty sight. My pain had gone, my ears were filled with the long, hollow booming of the sea, and there was peace and gentleness and a shot-silk silver sky of coalescing wonder.

Then the great shape hammered the silver black, and it seemed that a man was in the water, huge and thrashing and intrusive, and I closed my eyes to get rid of the dream and I let Jennifer go as I drifted away to nowhere and nothing, because it was all over now; it was all over and I was finished and everything was ended.

Part Four

Ulf, of all people, bloody Ulf, was telling me that Sunflower ’s mast was too high and mounted too far aft. He was saying to wake up and move the thing. I tried to tell him to shut up, but his voice droned on. You’re all right, Johnny, he said, you’re not going to die because death is just a mentally induced self-deception, and I told him to stuff his opinions and then I saw that Ulf was dressed all in white and had a black face, and I wondered how the hell he’d ever got into heaven to become a white-robed angel, and I felt a vague surprise that everyone in heaven was black, though it did seem a fairly heavenly solution to an earthly problem, then I wondered how I’d ever got permission to enter heaven myself. “There’s been a mistake,” I said.

“You’re all right now,” said the hallucination of Ulf which resolved itself into a black-bespectacled doctor who was bending over me. “Move your hand,” he said, “that’s good.”

My left ankle and calf were a mass of pain, like the time I’d been stung by a jellyfish off the Malaysian coast. I hissed and jerked as the pain struck me, then tried to explain it. “Jellyfish,” I said.

“My name’s Mortimer,” the doctor said, “Doctor Mortimer. And you’re the Earl of Stowey, yes?”

“John,” I said, “call me John.” A siren was wailing somewhere, and the sound reminded me of Jennifer’s screaming. I turned my head to see I was in a small brightly lit room and there was no sign of Jennifer. “Is she alive?”

“She’s alive,” the doctor said, but I was already responding to the drugs that were sparing me pain. I slept.

It had been the mackerel boat which saved our lives. They had seen the smoke churning up, turned back to investigate, and seen Sunflower burning. They had called the coastguard on Channel 16, who had summoned the Royal Naval Air Service. It had taken just eight minutes from the time that the skipper of the mackerel boat had made his emergency call to the arrival of the helicopter. It had seemed like an hour. Even now, looking back, and having read the coastguard’s log, I cannot believe it was only eight minutes.

My legs were badly burned, I’d inhaled smoke, and my hands and forearms were scorched. It could have been much worse. For Jennifer it was, though just how bad, in those first days, I wasn’t told.

Harry Abbott was my first visitor. I was barely conscious or coherent. I gathered that as soon as the police heard of the burning boat they had feared it might be Sunflower , and had sent a man to the hospital to identify us. I tried to tell Harry it was attempted murder, but he must already have assumed that because I later learned that a police guard stayed in the corridor outside my ward all the time I was in the hospital. I do remember that Harry brought me some grapes that he ate himself. I asked about Jennifer and he just shrugged and said she’d been flown to a big London hospital that specialised in burn victims.

Charlie came the next day. I had never seen him so troubled. I tried to tell him that I was all right, that I would walk again, but Charlie seemed to think he had let me down. “I should have found those two blokes and fucking killed them.”

“You tried, Charlie.”

“Bastards.” He sat beside the bed. “Bastards.”

“I’m going to find them,” I said, “and I promise you they’ll wish they’d never been born.”

“Bastards.” He was too restless to stay seated and began pacing the floor. “What happened?”

I told him about the severed gas pipe. “They did a proper job, Charlie,” I said bitterly. “They must have cut the gas pipe in the engine compartment, then pushed the broken end into the hole in the bulkhead.” They had also done it without dislodging the feed tap inside the cabin, because otherwise Jennifer would have seen the break.

“Didn’t you lock the engine compartment?” Charlie asked.

“It was only a cheap padlock.”

“There you go,” he said hopelessly. It was Charlie who had first taught me how to open a locked padlock; you just brace the loop against something solid, then tap the keyhole end with a hammer. If the lock doesn’t jump open first time, tap harder. There are expensive makes that won’t respond to the treatment, but I’d lost my good padlock when the two men had pulled Sunflower off the grid and my replacement had been a run-of-the-mill lock.