“Sir!” The helmsman noticed Kerem’s signal first. He couldn’t make out quite what the tiny figure was doing, however, because the forepeak was nearly three hundred yards away.
John had some trouble making out what was going on too, until he went out onto the bridge wing and used his binoculars. Then, at full magnification, it became obvious that something was wrong.
He walked briskly back onto the bridge proper, mentally cursing Ben for having left the bridge at just the wrong moment. He picked up the internal phone and dialed the captain’s number.
With the wooden seat firmly wedged under her left arm, Robin crept gingerly down the ladder from the hatchway. The noise down here was incredible, the stench damn near unbearable, the sense of danger absolutely overpowering. The felucca was quite simply — but, thankfully, quite slowly — coming to pieces under her feet. On her right, sloping away at an increasing angle, was the single below-deck area, with the foot of the mast rising immediately ahead at a crazy tilt.
On her left, incredibly close at hand, was the huge, blunt metal blade of Prometheus’s bow. It rose through the crushed and splintered wood almost as though it had always been there. And yet, at the same time, it was an obscene intrusion, horribly out of place. Robin felt as though she were inside Mr. Borden’s skull, just after Lizzie had delivered the first whack, looking out at the axhead.
“HELLO!”
Gripping the seat with bruising force, she stepped off the bottom rung, onto the deck itself.
There was an explosion of sound and movement immediately behind her, from under the ladder itself. This was so unexpected that she jumped forward, swinging on the rope and gasping with shock. The rope slackened at once, dumping her unceremoniously on her bottom. She sat still, looking up.
Beyond the ladder was a cavern of darkness stretching toward the bow. Still dazzled by the early morning brightness she had encountered on the deck, she could not see into the shadows. Even as she looked, however, her vision was aided by shaft after shaft of light. Like searchlight beams, like the light under storm-clouds, flat blades stabbed down in increasing numbers from the edge of that jagged wound as the felucca began to slide off Prometheus’s bow.
And this light revealed, just a step or two behind the ladder but chained helplessly to its perch, a scarlet, yellow, and blue Macaw parrot. And, as Robin watched it, the terrified creature opened its bill and screamed like a frightened child.
“Damn you!” Robin was on her feet at once, her rage beyond expressing — in direct proportion to her own fear. All this. And for a bloody bird! From the bottom of the ladder, looking through the rungs, she yelled at the top of her voice, “We’re going to die! You know that, bird?” The parrot leaped toward her, but was brought up short in a flapping, squawking bundle by the chain.
“We’re both going to sodding die!” At least it had the wit to sit still while she wrestled the chain loose from the perch. Then it jumped easily onto her right shoulder. “I wouldn’t stay there, you dumb SOB,” she warned it, “unless you can swim as well.”
It screamed in her ear.
She stepped back onto the ladder.
The felucca fell into the sea.
CHAPTER TWELVE
It hadn’t been as simple as Ben led Slope to believe that morning a fortnight ago, when he told him of Mariner’s past. It hadn’t been clean, cut and dried, full of simple rights and wrongs. It had been like any human relationship: messy.
Richard, Robin, Rowena, and Bill had met the second the sixties became the seventies at midnight, December 31, 1969. Their yachts were tied side by side at the unfashionable end of that long marina that makes up the seaward side of the main street of St. Tropez.
None of them had any particular reason for being in such a place in such a town when most of their friends were somewhere else anyway. Richard himself, who had bought the yacht Rebecca a few years previously to celebrate his first tanker captaincy, had sailed aimlessly out of Poole, alone, at Christmas and ended up here because there had been severe storms in Biscay preventing him returning. The champagne had been a pointless indulgence. Its cork hit Sir William on the head as he stood in the cockpit of the neighboring yacht. Apologies had led to introductions; introductions to mutual recognition.
Sir William was there with his two girls. It was exactly a year since the death of Lady Heritage and they had all wanted to get away. Why they had come here, none of them seemed to know, but Richard suspected it was Robin’s idea: one of the vivid enthusiasms that seemed constantly to be impelling the gawky, sensitive, brilliant sixteen-year-old.
Certainly, it had nothing to do with the dazzling, slightly bored Rowena, who seemed to be following the debutante fashion of the time — he discovered later, she led it — in approaching everything with a chic ennui. The precociously mature twenty-two-year-old would rather have been almost anywhere else — and she made no secret of it.
Richard would never forget that first sight of her, sitting in the after cockpit of the Heritage yacht, sipping Bollinger, wearing Balmain, like Princess Grace come slumming it down the coast. Nor would he ever forget the fierce, feral passion that simmered just beneath that glacial surface.
How well he had fitted into the family; worshiped by one daughter, beloved of the other. Respected by a man whom he respected. Social calls in London soon became professional ones to Heritage House in Leadenhall Street. Richard’s standing as an in de pen dent tanker captain eventually expanded by his appointment as senior captain to Heritage Shipping. Rowena and he married within the year, a red-eyed Robin as bridesmaid.
Neither of Richard’s commitments to the Heritage family was a sinecure. Keeping Rowena in the style demanded by her position in society soon used up even his salary and he soon came to count himself almost fortunate when commitments to her father kept him away at sea where he at least lived free. But they were five heady, happy years nevertheless. He was building something lasting — or so it seemed. With his father-in-law, one of those hardheaded, down-to-earth northern businessmen who are the backbone of City institutions, he was creating a shipping empire of almost Greek proportions. During his increasingly rare visits home, he was feted as the dashing husband of a leader of the jet set, his name in the society as well as the financial pages; his picture at the front of Tatler as well as in the middle of The Economist. A coming man on every front.
It ended at Robin’s twenty-first birthday party.
She was at the London School of Economics at the time, although her father would much have preferred her to be following in Rowena’s footsteps at finishing school in Lausanne, or with her family friends at Oxford. The party itself was held at Cold Fell, the great house overlooking Hadrian’s Wall in Cumbria, which had come to Heritage with his late wife, Lady Fiona Graham.
Richard and Rowena drove up; Richard, at least, unaware that anything was wrong. The house was full of undergraduates, echoing to youthful laughter for the first time since the thirties when Lady Fiona’s parents had entertained the bankrupt Gertrude Lawrence and the young Noel Coward here, with the others of their set.
Sir William was in his element, dispensing punch and fatherly advice, insisting to one and all, “Nay, call me Bill,” in his rich northern brogue, though none ever dared. Richard had joined him, of course, keeping an eye on all the excited young faces, discreetly checking all the more obvious places where virtue could be lost; feeling almost ancient in the process.