“What is?” I demanded too angrily.
“Oh, Daddy.” She sighed and looked at her mother, who was making soothing noises and telling Nicole to look after herself.
“You don’t know anything about this man!” I attempted one last line of attack.
Nicole shook her head in denial of my anger. “Caspar’s a good sailor, and he means to do something about a filthy world, and that’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Her head went up as she recovered some of her usual defiance. “I want to make a difference. I want to leave the world a better place. Is that so bad?”
Oh God, I thought, but there was no way of dissuading the young when they discovered the world’s salvation was in their passionate grasp. “I love you,” I said awkwardly, and I tried to give her all the money in my wallet, but Nicole would not take it. Instead she kissed me, kissed her mother, then, cuffing tears from her cheeks, ushered us both ashore.
Joanna and I walked to the car, then drove to the Cross and Anchor from where we could watch the tideway. Joanna nursed a gin and tonic, while I drank beer. After a half hour we saw Erebus shove off from the pontoon and motor out into the fairway. All three girls were now on deck, and all were wearing pale green clothes.
“Nicole looks happy,” Joanna said wistfully. She had fetched a pair of binoculars from the car and now offered me the glasses. “Don’t you think she looks happy? And maybe this is just something she has to work out of her system.”
“It’s what that superannuated hippie is working into her system that riles me,” I said grimly. Then the hippie himself appeared on the catamaran’s deck, dressed in his shorts with his white hair tied into a long ponytail. There was something goatlike about him, I thought, and something very disturbing in the girls’ matching clothes, which somehow suggested that they had uniformly humbled themselves before von Rellsteb’s authority.
“He’s a very charismatic man,” Joanna said unhappily.
“Balls.”
“He defused you.” Joanna stroked my hand as the clumsy catamaran motored past us toward the sea. The tide was flooding, which suggested von Rellsteb planned an eastward passage, perhaps back to Germany. I focused the binoculars to see that Nicole, who did indeed look happy, had taken the catamaran’s wheel, while Caspar von Rellsteb was winching up the mainsail. The Erebus’s sail was banded in broad stripes of white and pale green, the same green as the odd uniform clothes that Nicole and the other girls were wearing.
“She’s enlisting in a very good cause, Tim,” Joanna said as she watched her daughter sail away.
“She’s volunteering for a floating harem,” I insisted.
“They’re young,” Joanna said patiently, “and they’re full of idealism and hope. Besides, Nicole’s always been an environmentalist, and surely that’s better than getting arrested or having abortions?”
“She’ll have that goat’s baby instead?” I demanded angrily.
“They just want to clean up a polluted world,” Joanna said. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Except I don’t think that bastard’s a real environmentalist. He’s an opportunist. He knows how desperately the young want a cause, so he attracts them with a load of earnest-sounding claptrap, then turns them into his private harem.”
“You don’t know that,” Joanna said patiently.
“If he’s such a wonderful environmentalist,” I demanded, “then why are his engines so filthy?” The Erebus’s twin exhausts were leaving a dirty cloud of black smoke to drift across the river. “I should have stopped her.”
“You couldn’t have stopped her,” Joanna said, her eyes on the departing catamaran. She paused for a long time, then looked sadly at me. “I’ve never told you this, Tim, because it’s so very unfair and so very stupid, but Nickel blames you for Dickie’s death.”
“Me?” I stared at Joanna. The accusation was so unexpected and so untrue that, instead of shocking me, it merely surprised me. “She blames me?”
“Because you encouraged Dickie to join the army.”
“Oh, Jesus,” I swore in exasperation. “Why didn’t she talk to me about it?”
“Lord knows. I don’t understand the young. I’m sure she knows it isn’t really your fault, but—” Joanna, unable to finish the thought, shrugged it away. “She’ll be back, Tim.”
But I was beyond such hopeful consolations. I was watching my daughter, who blamed me for her brother’s death, sail into the unknown. Legally she was a grown woman, able to make her own choices, but she was still our daughter, and now our only child, and I had just lost her to a man I had instinctively hated at first sight. I also knew I had handled my confrontation with Caspar von Rellsteb very badly, but I had not known how else to cope with the man I now thought of as my daughter’s abductor.
“Nicole’s tough.” Joanna tried to find more reassurance as we watched our daughter expertly steer the catamaran through the Bull Sands Channel. “She’ll use him and his ideas to get what she wants, and then she’ll come home. He’s an attractive man, but I doubt he’s clever enough to keep her, you mark my words. She’ll be home by Christmas.”
But Nicole was not home by that Christmas, nor by the next. She did not write to us, nor did she telephone. Our daughter had disappeared, gone we knew not where with a man we could not trace on a boat we could not find. She sailed away and she never came home, though Fletcher, my grimly unpleasant policeman, still insisted that Nicole had come back like a thief in the night to plant a bomb that had killed her mother and had been meant to kill her father, too.
“No.” I dismissed Fletcher’s allegation scornfully.
Fletcher’s knowing smile derided my denial. “Is she still in your will?” he asked. When I did not answer, he assumed correctly that Nicole was. “She gets everything, does she?” he insisted.
“It’s none of your business.”
“Change your will.” Fletcher ignored my anger. “Cut her out. So even if the next bomb does get you, she won’t profit from it. We don’t want the wicked to flourish, do we, Mr. Blackburn?”
“Don’t be so offensive,” I snapped at him, but even to myself the retort sounded futile and, for the first time in my life, and despite my fame as a solo sailor, I felt entirely alone.
The public interest in Joanna’s murder faded as the months passed and no one was arrested. The newspapers found juicier bones to chew, while the police transferred their efforts to fresher crimes that were more easily solved. Joanna was forgotten.
My life recovered, then limped on. To my astonishment the London attorney, Miller, bought Stormchild after all, or rather he and his partners purchased the boat which they announced was to become a “client hospitality facility.” The law firm paid a decent price, then offered my yard yet more money to have the boat rigged and launched. Miller demanded that her name be changed from Stormchild to Tort-au-Citron, which was evidently some kind of legal joke, and though I told him it was bad luck to change a boat’s name, he insisted it was not my luck that was at risk but his, and so I had the new name painted on Stormchild’s transom. Miller and a group of loud friends came from London to take the newly christened Tort-au-Citron on her first voyage. They did not hoist the sails, but merely motored beyond the bar, where they anchored and drank champagne in the summer sunshine before bringing the beautiful boat back to the yard. “Can you keep her until a delivery crew fetches her?” Miller asked me.