The Wreck Of The Mary Deare

Patch looked at me, his face grey, the eyes deep-sunk. ‘I don’t know,’ he breathed. His lips were all cracked and rimed with salt. He frowned, trying to concentrate his mind. ‘Tide’s west-going. Be with us in two hours.’ He dipped his hand in the sea and wiped salt water over his face. ‘Shouldn’t be long.’

Not long! I gritted my teeth. The salt was behind my eyeballs, in my mouth; it pricked my skin. The dawn’s chill gripped me. I wished to God I’d never met this gaunt stranger who rowed like death at my shoulder. My mind blurred to a vision of Mike and our plans. And now the future was dead, Sea Witch gone and nothing in the world to think about but the Minkies, with each stroke an agony.

The sea at dawn had been empty. I could have sworn it had been empty. I had searched it carefully — every trough, every swirl, every sudden humped-up heap of water. There had been nothing — absolutely nothing. And now, suddenly, I was looking at a speck away over Patch’s shoulder. The sun was coming up in a great ball of fire and the clouds that streaked the east were glowing orange and blazing to red at their edges — and all this vivid surge of colour, imprinted in the sea, seemed designed solely to show me that speck etched black in silhouette. It was a boat with two oars and a man rowing.

Ten minutes later the fog folded its clammy blanket round us again. The speck blurred and vanished. And at that moment I thought I heard a bell, very faint to the east of us. But when we stopped rowing it was gone. There wasn’t a sound, except the sea. It was all round us in our grey, boxed-in world — the wet slop of water. But a little later there was a murmuring and a sucking in the veil through which our eyes couldn’t see, and almost immediately the fog darkened, became black, and a shape slid past us like the towering superstructure of a battleship. It was there for an instant, blurred and indistinct, a great mass of black rock with the swell frothing gently at its base, and then it was gone as the tide hurried us on. ‘My God! We’re there,’ I gasped.

We had stopped rowing and all around us was the murmur of the sea. Another rock appeared out of the grey curtain of the fog, a sinister pillar of rock like a crooked finger that slid stealthily by with a froth of white water at its foot as though it were sailing past us. For a moment that damnable fog almost convinced me that I was in a geological nightmare in which the rocks steamed through the water under their own power. And then a swell came up, grew big and broke suddenly. Water surged over the gunn’l and we were thrown backwards as the dinghy hit a submerged rock. The tide swung us round and dragged us clear before the next swell broke. We were soaked, the dinghy half full of water. It was hopeless to go on with the tide swirling us through a maze of dangerous rocks. We had reached the Minkies, but in an area of reefs almost twenty miles by ten we had no hope of getting our bearings. ‘We’ll have to wait till the fog clears,’ Patch said. ‘It’s too dangerous — almost dead low water.’

In the lee of an ugly island of rock we found a little inlet where the water was still, like glass, tied the dinghy to an upended slab and clambered stiffly out. We stamped and moved about, but the sweat still clung to us in an icy film and we shivered under our sodden duffle coats. We ate the last of our chocolate and talked a little, grateful for the sound of our voices in that cold, dismal place.

I suppose it was inevitable that Patch should have talked about the Mary Deare. We were so close to her, frustrated by the fog. He talked about Rice for a bit and then he was telling me about Taggart’s death. He seemed to want to talk about it. ‘Poor devil!’ he whispered. ‘For the sake of that girl of his he’d sold his soul in every port in the Far East. He’d ruined his health and drunk himself stupid, engaging in every shady deal that would pay him more than a captain’s wage. That’s why they got him up from Singapore.’

‘Did Gundersen engage him then?’ I said.

‘Probably. I don’t know.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Whoever it was, they picked the wrong moment. The old vulture was going back home to his daughter, and he wasn’t going to sink a ship on his last voyage.’

‘And so Dellimare got rid of him — is that what you’re suggesting?’ I asked.