Angela cried then. She had loved Bannister enough to marry him.
She had put flowers in her hair for a handsome man, and now she watched his dream being sunk into two thousand fathoms of water.
Wildtrack freed itself of the tanker’s bows. For a second the yacht’s handsome, blue-streaked hull reared up, a toy boat against the steel wall that broke it, then, sliding and crumpled, Wildtrack was sinking down to where Nadeznha Bannister’s bones lay, down to where there are no storms, and no light, and only silence.
“Oh, Jesus,” Angela said, and it sounded like a prayer. I said nothing, but just watched the tanker recede into the grey nothingness of the ocean. Only when it had at last disappeared did either of us speak again. “Is there an airport at St John’s?” Angela asked in a small voice.
I nodded.
“Nick?”
“It’s all right,” I said, “I understand.” I’d always known that she was no girl for a small boat in a great sea, but I had dared to hope.
Now I knew she would go home and so I set Sycorax’s bows towards the west. West towards Canada, west towards parting, and west away from the unmarked place where the dead would lie in silence while the corroding salt dissipated their bones so they would drift as a nebulous part of the very sea itself until the dying sun would one day boil the oceans dry.
Sycorax dipped her bows to the sea and sluiced green water down her scuppers. She at least had come home, while we sailed on, in silence.
EPILOGUE
It was a hard winter. Frosts, fog and a cold to pierce the very soul.
Yet it was a hard winter in a good place. I liked Newfoundland; it had the virtues of a place where honest folk did decent work.
Sycorax’s stem had been undamaged by the collision with Wildtrack. One copper sheet had ripped loose, but it took just a few minutes’ work at low tide to nail it back into place. I re-rigged the guardrails and had a new storm jib made from heavy cotton. The sail took the last of my savings, but Vicky and I did not starve. I found work, illegally, in a boatyard.
Vicky grew. A rat came aboard and lived just long enough to regret the transgression. Vicky, blooded at last, disdained my congratula-tions and instead stalked along the frost-rimed scuppers with her tail aloft in victory. She was my company now; she and the photograph of Angela that I’d screwed to the bulkhead above the portside bunk.
I stripped the engine down and rebuilt it. I welded a radar-reflector from scrap metal and fastened it below the spreaders. I made my boat ready.
In the early spring I took Sycorax north; not on a voyage, but to test the engine and new jib. We sailed till the sky was brilliant with the reflected sun from the ice-fields. There was a stiff cold breeze coming from the north-west and, well short of the treacherous ice, and beneath a sky rinsed of colour and cloud, I backed the staysails and eased the main so that Sycorax, tractable and steady, lay hove-to.
I had read Angela’s letter a dozen times, now read it one last time.
The inquest had blamed the deaths of Bannister and Mulder on the pressures of modern ocean-racing. Neither Kassouli’s name, nor his presence at Wildtrack’s end, had been mentioned, and my notarized and sanitized affidavit had been given scarcely a glance. The verdict was that the deaths were accidental. Angela thought the film about me could be cut into a fifty-minute programme and would I consider taking Sycorax to England so she could shoot an end sequence? But she did not want me to go home just for that sequence. She had taken over Bannister’s production company and she knew I could help her. Please, Nick, she wrote, come home.
I sat there getting cold, and staring into the shimmer above the brilliant ice. There was a temptation to go home; to trade a medal for comfort and friendship and safety; but it was a temptation to avoid. I was one of life’s plodders; no match for the glittering people who made television and money. Back home I would have to compete with bright, sharp minds. Back home was a world that Kassouli and his likes ruled.
But I had said I would sail to New Zealand. There was no reason for New Zealand; it might have been Utopia or La-la land for all that it mattered, it was just a goal to keep me in the cockpit of my boat and beholden to no one. I’d gazed, one year ago, out of a hospital window and found a star to snare in a sextant’s mirror, and now I was where the star had fetched me. I was lonely, alone with a sea cat, and happy. I competed with no one, felt no jealousy, and wished no man ill. Here, at sea, I could be honest, for to be anything less was to risk the sea’s power. Here there were no bad dreams, no nights riven with tracer or seared by phosphorus, and my leg, like my rebuilt engine, worked most of the time.
So here I would stay. I released the foresail sheets and Sycorax dipped her bows as we turned and as Vicky pounced on the flutter-ing sheets of Angela’s letter. I picked her up and scratched under her chin as Sycorax caught the wind and drove forward.
“So now that we’ve arrived,” I said to Vicky, “where shall we go?”
About the Author
BERNARD CORNWELL is the author of the acclaimed and bestselling Saxon Tales, which include The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman, Lords of the North, and Sword Song, as well as the Richard Sharpe novels, the Grail Quest series, the Nathaniel Starbuck Chronicles, the Warlord Chronicles, and many other novels, including Stonehenge and Gallows Thief. He lives with his wife on Cape Cod.
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BOOKS BY BERNARD CORNWELL
The Saxon Tales
THE LAST KINGDOM*
THE PALE HORSEMAN*
LORDS OF THE NORTH*
SWORD SONG*
The Sharpe Novels (in chronological order) SHARPE’S TIGER*
Richard Sharpe and the Siege of Seringapatam, 1799
SHARPE’S TRIUMPH*
Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Assaye, September 1803
SHARPE’S FORTRESS*
Richard Sharpe and the Siege of Gawilghur, December 1803
SHARPE’S TRAFALGAR*
Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Trafalgar, 21 October 1805
SHARPE’S PREY*
Richard Sharpe and the Expedition to Copenhagen, 1807
SHARPE’S RIFLES*
Richard Sharpe and the French Invasion of Galicia, January 1809
SHARPE’S HAVOC*
Richard Sharpe and the Campaign in Northern Portugal, Spring 1809
SHARPE’S EAGLE
Richard Sharpe and the Talavera Campaign, July 1809
SHARPE’S GOLD
Richard Sharpe and the Destruction of Almeida, August 1810
SHARPE’S ESCAPE*
Richard Sharpe and the Bussaco Campaign, 1810
SHARPE’S FURY*
Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Barrosa, March 1811
SHARPE’S BATTLE*
Richard Sharpe and the Battle of Fuentes de Onoro, May 1811
SHARPE’S COMPANY
Richard Sharpe and the Siege of Badajoz, January to April 1812
SHARPE’S SWORD
Richard Sharpe and the Salamanca Campaign, June and July 1812
SHARPE’S ENEMY
Richard Sharpe and the Defense of Portugal, Christmas 1812
SHARPE’S HONOUR
Richard Sharpe and the Vitoria Campaign, February to June 1813
SHARPE’S REGIMENT
Richard Sharpe and the Invasion of France, June to November 1813