The Wreck Of The Mary Deare

He shook his head. ‘No, I don’t think he intended to kill him. I think he just got hold of his liquor and was waiting until the old man was sufficiently softened up to do what he wanted. He couldn’t have known he’d die that night.’ He smiled at me out of the corner of his mouth. ‘But it amounts to the same thing, doesn’t it?’ He had sat with Taggart for several hours that night, listening to a life story told in scraps of delirium — the risks and the crockery and the shady deals … and then two men had been drowned. That was what had started Taggart drinking. ‘Like most of us, he just wanted to forget.’ And he went on, conjuring up the ghost of that dreadful old man, completely absorbed in the tragedy of it, standing there on that rock like a Trappist monk, his body shivering under the limp brown folds of his duffle coat.

He switched suddenly to the daughter… that photograph, what it had meant to him. Her image had been his confidant, his inspiration, a symbol of all his desperate hopes. And then the meeting in St Malo — the shock of realising that there were things he couldn’t tell her, that she knew he was hiding something from her.

‘You’re in love with her, aren’t you?’ I said. We were strangely close, alone together in the eerie stillness of the fog with the sea all round us.

‘Yes.’ His voice had a sudden lift to it, as though even here the thought of her could raise his spirits.

‘Despite what she did to you in Court?’

‘Oh, that!’ He dismissed it. That last night in Southampton — she had come to apologise. And after that he had told her everything — all the things he had confided to her picture. ‘I had to tell somebody,’ he murmured.

He lifted his head suddenly and sniffed at a breath of wind that came to us out of the dripping void. ‘Still westerly,’ he said, and we talked about how soon the fog would clear. He hadn’t liked the look of the dawn. ‘That depression,’ he muttered. ‘We’ve got to reach the salvage ship before it starts to blow up dirty.’ The words were ominous.

And shortly after that we had to go back to the dinghy. The tide had risen, covering the rocks of our inlet, and it kept us constantly on the move then. We were in a strange submarine world where everything dripped water and the floor of the sea rose steadily until the towering bastion of rock had dwindled to a miserable little island barely two feet above the level of the sea. It was two o’clock then and the swell had increased and was showering us with spray as we sat huddled together in the dinghy.

I was barely conscious of time. The fog hung round us, very thick, so that it seemed as though nothing could exist in the whole world except that miserable strip of rock and the ugly, surging water.

We didn’t talk much. We were too desperately cold. We took it in turns to sit and drift into a sort of coma. The tide went down again and the rock re-emerged like some monster lifting its dripping body out of the sea.

It was just after five that the fog began to clear. A wind sprang up and gradually the greyness lightened until it was an iridescent dazzle that hurt the eyes. Shapes began to emerge, forming themselves into rocks, and the sea stretched farther and farther away from us. Above our heads a patch of sky appeared, startlingly blue, and suddenly the fog was gone and the sun shone. We were in a sparkling world of blue-green water littered with rock outcrops.

We made the dinghy fast and scrambled up the barnacle-covered, weed-grown fortress of the rock. It was suddenly very warm, and from the top, which only a few hours before had been a bare, wave-worn little island, a fantastic sight met our eyes. All round us the sea was islanded with rock — mile upon mile of sinister reefs and outcrops — the Minkies at one hour before low water. Beyond the rock islands, we had glimpses of open sea — except to the southwest; to the southwest the islands became so numerous that they merged to form a solid barrier.

The beacon on Maitresse He, which stands 31 feet at high water, was easily identified, and from it Patch was able to get our bearings. The rock on which we stood was on the northern side of the Minkies, about a mile inside the outer bastion of the Pipette Rocks, and he reckoned that the Mary Deare must lie almost due south of us. I have checked since with the large-scale chart and find that he was just about right. But the three miles that separated us from our objective constituted the main body of the reefs. We didn’t appreciate this at the time, nor did we fully understand the extraordinary change in configuration of the above-water reefs that could occur in the last stages of the falling tide.