"She is firing!"
It was Celine who'd shouted, who had seen the flash. At the instant came the report, ragged in the wind that also tore the smoke away. And the Biter, helm hard down, was rounding up to stop her headlong dash.
"Kaye's warning us," said Will. "A warning shot."
"Mr. Gunning," Kershaw said, as if in conversation. "I said he knows these waters, he is a seaman born."
"I hope you do, sir!" said Bentley heatedly, and as he spoke the lugger struck, with a stagger and a lurch that threw men and Celine off their feet, and with an appalling, tearing crash brought down the damaged foremast, which toppled forward almost slowly, like a felled tree in a forest, its square black sail spreading out to shroud the waters up ahead.
In the confusion on the deck, Will found his head was close to Kershaw's, and, most bizarrely, Kershaw smiled.
"Ah, that I do," he said. "Indeed."
For a moment, the hull under them was firm as any jetty, but the sensation did not last for long. The wind, which may have paused in the seconds before the squall hit them, tore down with screaming intensity as the night went irrevocably black. The seas, which had lifted them along quite easily, began to strike, and pour, and rend, and swirl across the afterdeck, bursting up as driven, bitter spray as each new wave struck the stern. Will scrambled to his feet to be knocked over instantly, and shot along like garbage in the flood. He hit the mainmast, grabbed on to it, then grabbed Celine as she swept by, coughing and retching water. With the squall came rain, in gigantic, stinging lumps, and out of it, when the sea voided itself into the waist, came Kershaw crawling also.
"Let's get that mainsheet cut," he said, and snaked off to leeward, smiling like a dog. He's mad, thought Will. He's gone completely mad.
Whatever, Kershaw was too late to free the sheet, because the weight of wind in the mainsail broached the lugger, as she lifted to a sea, right round to larboard till she lay along the troughs. In a lightening of the black, Will saw the damaged boat, half full of men, lifted bodily and neatly over side where she landed bottom downwards and bobbed as safely as a duck pond toy. Without hesitation, they made shift to ship their oars, and pulled back towards the lugger to pick up other men. By now the deck was thronged, despite appalling danger from the seas that raked it.
For a minute or two Will was lost, drowned in another comber, and the world blacked out. Then, as lightning began to flicker, he watched the smallest boat lift off the waist-deck, scattering the men who'd cleared her from a mess of fallen gear, and swing along the lee side, still inside the bulwarks but afloat, then come for him as if a charging bull, unmanned and empty, heading to cross the taffrail and away. But as she passed him, Kershaw caught her bow-line in his only hand, swinging himself around a mast-stay to take a turn with it. As the yawl's stem jerked and the hull swung in an afterwards arc over the side and in again, Kershaw let out an awful, cut-off scream as the stay bit deep into his stomach, enough to break his back. The gunwale hit Bentley low across the groin, dissolving his sight into a flash of agony, and when he saw again, the boat with him inside it on the bottom boards was ten feet or more beyond the lugger's stern. Almost in it, by some miracle he could not guess at, was Kershaw draped across the bow, his trunk inside, legs out, and, clinging to the starboard side, Celine and a French smuggler.
"Help me," said Celine. "My arm, my arm."
But Will, try as he might, could hardly move, so violent had the blow across his stomach been. He got to them, and took her shoulder, but he had almost no strength at all to pull. The Frenchman, whose face was pale and desperate, used all his failing energy to get her higher from the sea, then, having looped her arm into the boat, lifted her leg until Bentley could pull her knee on board. Five minutes later, when Celine lay in the bottom vomiting water, the Frenchman gave up the fight, released his hold, and slipped beneath the waves. Kershaw, although he seemed to cling there, was already dead.
Thirty
The lugger had been built of fir for speed and lightness, not long life. Over the next short, endless minutes in the lightning storm, Will saw her breaking up as she was pounded on the Goodwin Sands. He should have gone to her, to aid the desperate men, but there was nothing he could do but wait for his own death. His legs were numbed to uselessness, Celine was sitting on the bottom boards in swirling, slopping water, incapable, and Kershaw never moved. Will shipped one oar over the stern to try to get her prow into the wind and stop her filling, but the dead weight at the stem, and Kershaw's trailing legs, made that impossible; she rolled, and rolled, and slowly filled. It would be a short time only before she was waterlogged and sank.
The blackness of the squall was of a great intensity, but the lightning play, for a time, was almost constant. In it, he saw the Biter's boats run down on the lugger like so many jackals, but not to rend, to save. They came down under rags of sail, filled up with men, then sailed off across the wind to where Gunning had placed the ship, upwind of the banks but towards the Kentish coast to give an angle they could fight to. As the lugger's mainmast went over side as she was pounded into pieces, pass after pass was made, and many men were saved. Kaye's operation, Bentley knew, was cool, and brave, and brilliant. Whatever Celine said about their lordships' attitudes to the lugger's secret work, it seemed inevitable that he must be lauded for it. As he himself, inevitably, would drift to leeward to smash on the shoals, or merely be swamped, and drown.
In one long flicker, Celine was moving. She rolled on to her side, got on to hands and knees, then went forward. She kept her body low, pressing to the thwarts when she came to them, until she reached the bow. Her weight, with Kershaw's, made the many gallons in the bilge rush forward, so the gunwale came alarmingly closer to the broken surface. Will shouted, but she did not hear, and suddenly stood up, thrust her head close to the broken man's to check, then seized him by the shoulders, lifted, and pushed. Another shout, this one of horror and astonishment, still no response. For one instant, he was face to face with Kershaw, then he was gone. No impression of expression, nothing, just a blank. Then Celine twisted, and launched herself back towards the middle, and the yawl rode easier.
"Was he dead?" said William, to the roaring wind, but Celine was feet away, bailing with a canvas bucket, going like a foundry man She was in a sea cloak, on her knees, feet sticking out of it and one shoe lost. The water shot across the side in a pulsing, constant stream. Jesu, thought Will; we might get out of this.
Down to the lee there was still clear water, or clearish anyway. Over to the eastward the breaking seas were worst, but to the west the boat looked to be beyond the vilest jumble. The lugger was lost to sight by now, although Biter's top hamper still appeared in flashes, which were growing fewer by the minute. The squall was passing, although the wind was still extremely hard. Somewhere in the dark not all that far there lay the coast of Kent. For the first time, it occurred to him that they could get to it. Acknowledging its pointlessness, he unshipped his oar from the quarter and joined Celine down in the bilges with another bucket, despite his wrenching stomach pain. She did not speak, but he got a flash of smile. She had her tongue-tip gripped between her teeth. In five minutes of intensive labour, the bottom boards stood proud.