Bernard Cornwell - Sea Lord

The painting had been brought to the family by my mother. She had been left it by her father. She had hung the Van Gogh on the linenfold panelling of her bedroom at Stowey. My mother refused to lend the picture to any exhibition, though once in a while an art historian or a reputable painter would seek permission to visit Stowey, and I remember the awe with which they gazed at the lovely canvas.

It was well protected. My mother’s bedroom had been in Stowey’s crenellated east tower, built for defence, and the mediaeval bastion had been supplemented with the most sophisticated alarms. No one had even tried to penetrate those defences, until the end.

That end came ten years after my father’s death. My mother had fought every month of those years. She had cursed and kicked and clawed at the taxmen. She had challenged their assessments and fobbed them off with small payments torn from the sale of our outlying pastures. She had fought a good fight, but then my brother had gone into the gun room and ripped her fight to shreds.

My brother’s suicide gave the taxmen a new carcass of juicy death duties to chew. My mother, recognising the inevitable, knew that either Stowey or the Van Gogh had to go. Stowey won. She agreed a price of four million pounds for the Van Gogh, but on the very day before it should have left the house, it was stolen. It transpired that my brother had let the insurance lapse one month before his death. The police were certain that only a person with intimate knowledge of the alarms could have penetrated to the gun room where the crated painting had been waiting for the security van. The police were also certain that I was that person.

I had put the painting in the gun room to await collection. I had the key to the room and to the alarm systems. Only I was supposed to know where the painting was. My fingerprints were on the door’s lockplates. On the day after the painting was stolen I sailed across the Channel in a friend’s boat, presumably carrying my loot away. The evidence was all circumstantial, and utterly damning. I was never charged, because my guilt could not be proved, but the whole family was nevertheless certain that I was guilty. I had done it, they said, to spite my mother and because I didn’t want to give the taxmen their ton of flesh. My relatives said I was a rogue, that I’d always been a rogue, and that now I’d broken the Rossendale family with my selfish greed.

The painting was never found. My mother’s fight, and four million pounds, was lost, yet the taxmen and the lawyers still had to be paid, and so Stowey was sold and now caters to well-heeled tourists who gape at a boot cupboard in the belief that a priest starved to death inside. My mother moved into an old rectory on the edge of the moor, and there she slowly died. The family had made me an outcast. And I had fled to sea.

In a yacht called Sunflower .

There wasn’t much I had to do in Salcombe because I didn’t plan on a full provisioning in England. I would fill up with fresh water, put diesel in the tanks and spare cans, and stock enough food to reach Vigo or Lisbon. I wanted an estimate for a new trysail, but even if I could afford it, I would not wait for delivery, but rather have Charlie send the sail to Tenerife. There were a slew of small problems. One of the winches had worn gearing, a bow fairlead needed replacing, and Sunflower ’s bottom was filthy with weed and barnacles. I planned to strand her at low tide on the mud of one of Salcombe’s lakes, then spend a filthy time scraping her clean before giving her a new coat of anti-fouling. She needed a good cleaning inside and out, and my clothes needed a rinse in fresh water. I would have liked to have found a fibreglass dinghy to replace the inflatable, which in turn had replaced a rigid dinghy that had been stolen in Antigua, but that could wait. I wanted a small outboard so I didn’t have to row the tender. The folding bicycle needed brake pads. I needed grease for the stern-gland. There were a couple of rust spots inside the hull which needed quick attention, and there was the bloody tooth which was now flaring up again with all its old intensity.

At first I ignored the tooth on the principle that a pain ignored will go away. It didn’t. Instead it got worse, so, three days after the funeral, I rowed ashore and telephoned dentists until I found one who could see me straightaway. That meant another bus ride, only to be lectured by a pompous little twerp who told me I didn’t brush my gums properly. He said I’d need to make a series of visits while he first drained the abscess, then scraped out the root canal to save the tooth.

“I don’t want it saved,” I said irritably, “just take the damned thing out.”

“But it can be saved, Mr Rossendale.”

“Take it out,” I insisted. Teeth are a human design fault, like appendixes, and all design faults are life-threatening at sea. This tooth wasn’t one of my front ones, so the lack of it wouldn’t make me ugly. Besides, it would be far cheaper for me to have the tooth drawn in England than giving me trouble across the Atlantic where you need to take out a mortgage before you dare see a dentist. The pompous little twerp was unhappy, but finally did what I demanded, grunting and heaving with his pliers. The Novocaine must have been from a weak batch because the extraction hurt like hell, but that was better than drawing the tooth myself a thousand miles to sea. A friend of mine did that once. It took him half a day and the best part of a bottle of Scotch, and when it was done he found he’d pulled the wrong one.

I consoled my pain with a large whiskey in the pub, then went down to the town pontoon where I’d left Sunflower ’s inflatable. No one had stolen her, perhaps because I’d pasted a score of false repair patches on her faded black skin so that she looked as though she was ready to give her last gasp and sink. Her oars were underwater, weighted with a length of chain and tethered by a tatty piece of fraying rope. I retrieved them, then rowed myself slowly out through the murk. It was still raining. Grey clouds were scurrying low over Goodshelter, then depositing a misty and obscuring rain on the moorings. A crabber engine choked into life, but otherwise the estuary seemed as empty as winter. I planned to motor Sunflower up to the drying mud of Callapit Creek. I would spend a few days scrubbing her hull, then go back to sea. I made a mental list of things I needed to buy: galvanised shackles, valve springs, welding rods, an angle grinder, fuses. My face felt swollen, numb and tender.

I stopped rowing and turned to see if I was aiming the unwieldy dinghy in the right direction. I was a quarter-mile from Sunflower and way off course, blown there by the wind which was carrying the dinghy too far to the north. That’s one reason I hate inflatable dinghies; they’re prey to every gust of wind and current.

But if the dinghy was an unwieldy brute, Sunflower looked magnificent. I rested on the oars, admiring her. She looked drab and scuffed among the smart yachts on the other moorings, but her drabness was the result of long sea miles and it gave her the battered beauty of functionalism. She was weather-beaten, tough and practical. Then, as I gazed at her, a man’s head appeared in her companionway. He stared around the moorings, glanced at me for a second, then ducked back into the cabin.

For a moment I was shocked into immobility. I even doubted what I’d seen. Somehow all the years of ocean travel had not diluted the prejudice that blatant thievery is more common abroad than in an English harbour; certainly not in genteel, yellow-wellied Salcombe.

And the intruder, if I had not imagined the whole thing, had to be a thief. I’d left Sunflower ’s companionway locked tight, so he must have broken the big padlock to get inside the cabin. The intruder had not been Charlie, for the man I’d seen had black hair, and Charlie’s thatch was as fair as mine. I wouldn’t have cared if Charlie had broken the cabin lock, then drunk all the whiskey on board, but I was damned if some stranger would steal from me. I began rowing again. As I did so the dark head appeared again in the companionway. I rowed steadily, aiming well away from her, and the man must have decided that I posed no threat for he ducked back down into the cabin. I rowed on, keeping well to Sunflower ’s beam. I knew the intruder might still be watching me through one of the thick cabin ports so I pretended to be going to a mooring north and east of the boat. I didn’t hurry. I did nothing to make him suspicious.