Mrs Fullbright shut her eyes briefly as the ship gave a particularly malignant roll, and Hero said consolingly: “I read somewhere that some famous Admiral—Nelson I think—never cured himself of being seasick, so I don’t see that you need worry. Do you think you could manage a cold drink if I fetched you one? Some lemon water?”
Amelia Fullbright shuddered and closed her eyes again. “No thank you, honey. Just sit and talk to me. I like to hear you talk. It takes my mind off this horrible rolling and pitching.”
“What would you like me to talk about?”
“Yourself Your young man.”
“He’s not mine yet,” Hero assured her hastily.
“But I feel sure he will be. He sounds very charming; and so suitable in every way. Though I could wish he were not quite so closely related. A first cousin!”
“But he isn’t, you know. In fact, he is no blood relation at all. Clay is Aunt Abby’s son by her first marriage, and his father’s name wasn’t Mayo, but something long and unpronounceable that he changed to Mayo because two of the syllables sounded like that, and it saved time—his own father had emigrated from Hungary and his mother was Polish. I believe she was very beautiful, and they say Clay gets his looks from her; though Aunt Abby must have been pretty too when she was young. Clay was only six months old when his father died, and Papa once told me that it was a mercy that he did, because it seems that he was addicted to drink and gambling, and in the end some dreadful woman shot him in a Dance Hall—imagine! It must have been terrible for Aunt Abby, but fortunately she met Uncle Nathaniel about five years later, and married him. Though Cressy—that’s my cousin Cressida—wasn’t born until nearly six years after that. Yet in spite of everything, I think Aunt Abby always loved Clay best Which is odd, don’t you think? I mean, when his father had treated her so badly, and Cressy was Uncle Nat’s child?”
Amelia smiled faintly and said: “With some women, I guess it has to be a man.”
“But Cressy is so pretty; and she is the baby of the family.”
“I’m sure your uncle loves her best.”
“Yes, that’s true. Cressy can do anything with Uncle Nat. He did not at all want to take her to Zanzibar, because he was afraid that the climate would not suit her and that she would catch some dreadful disease, or die of heatstroke or sunstroke or something; and Aunt Abby too. He meant to leave them both behind, but Cressy teased him into taking them. She is very young. And very sentimental and romantic.”
“And Mr Mayo? Is he romantic too? I hope he does not take after his father!”
“Oh, no!” said Hero, shocked. “Not in the least, I assure you. In character he is wholly from Aunt Abby’s side of the family, and her father was a deacon. His appearance may be romantic, but he is really a most sensible person and not at all frivolous like Cressy. He is much older than her, of course. Cressy is only seventeen—no, she must be almost eighteen by now! But Clay is twenty-nine.”
“High time he was married,” commented Amelia drowsily. “I hope you do not mean to keep him waiting much longer, honey, or he will be so difficult…for a young wife.”
Her lashes fluttered and closed and she did not speak again, and presently Hero became aware that she had fallen asleep.
The cabin rocked and swung and tilted, lifted up and up, creaking and shuddering, and sank again with appalling swiftness to the accompaniment of a crescendo of noise in which it was impossible to separate the sound of falling furniture from the crash of cataracts of water sweeping across the reeling deck. But except for the heat Hero was aware of no discomfort, and she was gratified to find that the frenzied motion of the ship was, if not precisely pleasant, at least greatly to be preferred to the sluggish inactivity of the past ten days. She had already taken the precaution of removing anything movable to a safe place, and as Mrs Fullbright continued to sleep and there seemed to be little chance of obtaining a hot meal while the Norah Crayne flung herself to and fro in this abandoned manner. Hero made her way to the saloon where she collected a handful of ship’s biscuits and retired with them to her own berth to copy her chaperone’s excellent example.
The night that followed had been anything but peaceful, for the Norah Crayne, her masts bare and her stay raised for a storm spanker to keep her head up and the wind and the sea on her bow, plunged and reared like an unbroken colt on a lead rein, and when she fell off, her bows swooped down into a cross sea, and with nothing to lift her the ocean leapt aboard and raged boiling along her decks.
Dawn broke grey and reluctant through heavy black clouds and furious rain, and thunder rolled across the tossing desolation while lightning flashed and the gale screamed in the rigging. The rain and spray between them had reduced visibility to a matter of yards, and the sea had combed the clipper’s decks of anything movable. Her boats were gone and their davits had been smashed to matchwood, but still the storm showed no signs of abating, and Captain Fullbright kept the pumps going and wondered how far his ship had drifted off course.
The Norah Crayne’s passengers, with one exception, had remained prudently in their berths. The exception being Miss Hollis, who had not only managed to dress herself (no mean feat in that rolling, pitching pandemonium), but had actually made her way to the saloon where she had drunk a pannikin of cold coffee and eaten a hearty meal consisting of salt beef, pickles and biscuits. After which, on finding that there was still no assistance that she could render to Amelia, she had returned for a time to her own cabin. But it had been far too dark to read or sew (even if the violent motion of the ship had not precluded either occupation) and there had been nothing to do but he and look up at the ceiling, or endure with closed eyes the unpleasant sensation of being lifted up for dizzying, interminable moments of time, only to be dropped again with a long jarring rush that seemed as though it must end with the entire vessel being engulfed and dragged under by the enormous seas.
Hero had always thought of herself as being sensible and level-headed; but the gloom and the incessant creaking, grinding, deafening tumult, and above all those terrible downward swoops into unseen gulfs, began to tell on her nerves, and presently the uncomfortable thought crept into her mind that the narrow, high-sided berth in which she lay bore a depressing resemblance to a coffin.
She had heard stories of ships that had vanished in storms and never been heard of again, and once, when she was a little girl, one of her Crayne cousins had told her how, when on a voyage to Rio de Janeiro, he had seen a great ship under full topsails slide into a long watery hollow and disappear—run under in a wild waste of ocean. If a similar fate should overtake the Norah Crayne, she would know nothing about it until the cabin door burst in and the black water swirled up to the ceiling. She would not even be able to get out of her berth, but would be trapped there and drowned, and the whole, desperate, straining ship would become one vast wooden tomb, sinking slowly down through leagues of cold darkness until it came to rest at last on the quiet ooze of the sea floor.
Perhaps the frenzied motion of the ship was making her a little lightheaded, for her imagination suddenly presented her with a vivid and startlingly unpleasant picture of great eels and octopuses slithering down the wrecked companionways and through the cabin doors to batten on the bodies of the drowned, while sharks swam hungrily past the blind portholes and between the tangled rigging outside…
Hero dismissed the horrid fancy with an effort; angry with herself for entertaining such absurd notions and beginning to wonder if it had been really wise to eat salt beef and pickles for breakfast. For there was no disguising the fact that she was not feeling at all well, and it could not possibly be seasickness, because Mr Marrowby had told her that once she had got her “sea-legs’ she would never need to suffer from such a thing again. And she was sure she had acquired those weeks ago. But either Mr Marrowby was wrong or else the heat had had a deleterious effect upon the beef, for she was certainly feeling distinctly queasy.
The cabin tilted at an acute angle as the ship struggled up the long slope
of a watery mountain, and as it reached the top grey daylight peered through the porthole and the rain and spray hissed against the glass as the Norah Crayne balanced briefly on an even keel. Then the bows crashed down and they were falling again, rushing downward into darkness with the seas roaring up and over the glass; down and down until it seemed impossible that they could ever rise again; to bring up with a shock and a jar and a savage roll, as the dead weight of hundreds of tons of water swept across the deck, and the Norah Crayne struggled upwards once more; sluggish, dizzy and punch-drunk, but still gallantly fighting back.
“I can’t stand this!” said Hero, speaking aloud into the stifling, heavy darkness: “If I stay down here I shall only be sick, and I will not be sick. I will not!”
She crawled out of her bunk, and groping for her shoes in the grey gloom, put them on and left the cabin. It was not an easy matter to remain upright, and she was bruised and giddy by the time she reached the door at the top of the saloon companionway. The bolts were stiff, and when she had drawn them it was a hard struggle to force the door open, for the wind was leaning against it at gale force. But with the aid of a momentary lull she managed it at last, and was out in the open—breathless and instantly soaked and realizing too late the incredible folly of her behaviour.
She must, she decided, have been sick or mad or both to venture up on deck in a storm of such magnitude, and the sooner she returned to the safety of her cabin the better. But that was easier thought of than done, for the door had slammed shut behind her and once again the wind was holding it closed. Hero discovered to her horror that she could neither get a satisfactory grip on the wet handle nor pull on it, for the gale forced her hard against the dripping panels and drove the breath from her body. Pressed against the closed door and struggling to breathe, she was aware for the first time of panic, for although the morning was far advanced and she knew it must be close on noon, the day still seemed almost as dark as the night had been; and seen from the open deck the storm appeared infinitely worse and far more terrifying than anything her imagination had pictured for her.
Enormous iron-grey hills of water, foam-streaked and furious, reared up against the black storm-clouds and the jagged lightning, and tossed the helpless ship to and fro; playing with it as though it were a wounded mouse in the grip of a gigantic cat. The helmsman, lashed to the wheel, fought grimly to keep her head to the wind; but the gale was a living thing, lifting the labouring ship, dropping it, flinging it aside and snatching it up again.
Hero released one shaking hand and attempted to clear her eyes of the rain and spray that slashed across the deck, and as she did so a boiling cauldron of foam sprang over the bow, and catching her about the knees, broke her loosened hold on the door handle and swept her away to bring her up with bruising abruptness against the side of the charthouse. Her skirts cling to her in drenched folds while her abundant hair, whipped from its chignon, streamed out on the wind like long ribbons of wet brown seaweed. She was aware of a heavy body blundering against her; of wet oilskins and a furious, incredulous face. A hand gripped her arm and fragmentary words reached her above the howling of the gale:
“What in thunder…doing up here? This ain’t passenger’s weather!…Get out of it! Get below! Get…’ The wind tore the words away and a crash of thunder drowned them.
Once again the greyness was ripped by a livid blaze of lightning, and she heard the man shriek ‘Christ!‘ And saw in the same instant what he had seen—
There was another ship out there, bearing down on them. A schooner in irons, broached to and unable to get her bows back in the teeth of the wind; her foremast gone and her rat-lines trailing. A thing as deadly as a charging tiger or a hidden reef.
The hand that gripped Hero’s arm released its hold and its owner raced towards the wheel, and shouldering the spray-blinded helmsman to one side, wrenched the spokes hard over. But Hero could not look away. She could only watch the schooner plunge towards them, knowing that this was death. In a moment—in less than a moment—it would strike, and there would be a rending crash of timber and the crack of falling masts, and then the sea would boil over the wreckage and suck it under, and no one would ever know what had happened. She would not have to make up her mind about Clay after all. Or about anything else. There was no time—no time—
The Norah Crayne, answering to her helm, fell off to starboard into the trough of a cross sea, and a long grey cliff of water lifted out of the storm and fell upon her, racing across the tilted deck, waist high and ruthless. It whirled Hero’s wet skirts about her knees, and knocking her down, carried her with it as though she had weighed no more than a shuttlecock. She snatched wildly at a stanchion and missed; saw for a brief, terrifying moment that there were no rails left at the far edge of the steeply sloping deck and nothing to hold on to. And then she was rolled over and over, blind and deaf, and tilted overboard in a cataract of boiling foam.
No one had ever taught her to swim, and it would have made no difference if they had, since no swimmer could have fought that furious sea. A mountain of water dragged her under and threw her up again, and for an instant rain and spray lashed at her face. But before she could do more than gasp for air she was down again, choking and struggling. A second wave caught her and swung her up and threw her into something that tangled about her arms and her helpless body, and she grasped frantically at it and felt rope between her numbed fingers.
For a period of time that seemed endless, but which could not have lasted for more than a few minutes at the most, she clung there, fighting to keep her head above the angry sea, and gulping alternate air and water as the waves dragged her down and tossed her up again. And then at last the rope drew taut and she was being drawn up, hauled in hand over hand as though she had been a mackerel on a line, to be dragged bruised and bleeding and three parts drowned on to a tilting deck that was mercifully solid.
Hands caught her wrists and ankles, and among a medley of voices that yelled above the gale she caught an odd and entirely incredible sound. Laughter…
Someone was shouting with laughter, and someone else—or perhaps it was the same person?—said: “A mermaid, by God!” And laughed again.
And then suddenly they were all slipping and sliding along the deck in another swirling fury of foam, and the whole wild, wet, horrible world turned black, as Miss Hero Athena Hollis lost consciousness for the first time in her life.
5
There was a weight pressing down upon her back. Pressing down and lifting again and then descending once more. Her hands were strained uncomfortably behind her and were being roughly and rhythmically thrust outwards and brought back again, and altogether she had never felt so sore and sick and uncomfortable in all her short and pampered life. Not even when Barclay’s groom, Jud Hinkley, had been teaching her to ride, and she had been thrown from the back of a bolting horse on to hard and sun-baked ground…
Somewhere quite close to her someone was making a hideous groaning noise as though they were in pain, and it was several minutes before she realized that it was she herself who was responsible for this abominable sound.
She struggled feebly and attempted to turn over, and in immediate response to that movement the hands that gripped her wrists relaxed. The man who had been kneeling above her and applying a rough and ready form of artificial respiration turned her on her back, and she found herself looking up into the face of a complete stranger.
During the nine long weeks of the voyage Hero had come to know every member of the Norah Crayne’s crew, at least by sight, but this was someone she had never seen before. A fair-haired man with a thin, deeply sunburned face, a cleft chin and a pair of remarkably pale eyes.
Hero passed her tongue over her swollen lips and tasted a saltness that was not of the sea, but blood welling from a cut on her lower lip. She grimaced weakly and attempted to sit up, but finding the effort beyond her strength, forced her voice to a croaking whisper:
“Where is…Captain Fullbright?”
“Captain who?”
It was, she thought vaguely, an educated voice. Then he must be a passenger. She could not understand it. Unless for a brief, ridiculous moment it crossed her mind that she might be dead and the fair-haired man the soul of some drowned sailor sent to set her on her way. But if she were dead she would surely not be in such pain, and it was an undeniable fact that every single part of her body was bruised and aching.
She could feel the warm, steady trickle of blood from her cut lip and from another cut on her temple, and there seemed to be a haze before her eyes; a haze full of odd, dancing lights. Her gaze moved slowly from the man’s face, and she saw that she was lying on the floor of a strange cabin, though it still pitched and rolled as dizzily as her own had done. A passenger’s cabin.
She said in the same husky whisper: “Why haven’t I…seen…you…before?”
The stranger laughed and said: “No reason why you should, is there?”
A faint flicker of indignation arose in Miss Hollis, and she said more strongly: “You were the one who was laughing. Why did you laugh? It was not at all funny.”
The man laughed again with regrettable heartlessness, and said: “Perhaps not to you. But it isn’t every day we hook a mermaid.”
His voice was curiously clipped, while at the same time possessing a faint suggestion of a drawl. An English voice, thought Hero dizzily. Why, I believe he’s English!
The man came to his feet, and bending down lifted her as easily and carelessly as though she had been a side of bacon, and deposited her in a large leather-covered chair that seemed to be screwed to the cabin floor. Standing over her he looked very tall. Taller than Captain Fullbright—or Clay.
He said: “You’re an exceedingly lucky young woman. You ought by rights to be drowned, and but for a miracle you would have been. However, I suppose the same could be said for all of us. That was the closest I’ve ever been to the next world, which is saying a good deal. Here, you’d better take a drink of this to replace some of the water we’ve tilted out of you.”