The East Indiaman Read online

  ‘At once, Kite Sahib.’

  Kite spared a fleeting thought for the two women down below. Was this a judgement for their dissolute intention? And how long had Sarah and Nisha been intimate? God, what a time to discover such a tumult of passion and lust! What did Harper know of this? And had he been embroiled in any similar such wild behaviour while he, Kite, had been on deck attending to the safety of the schooner? Then, as if summoned by the diabolical thought, Harper was beside him, tucking his own shirt tails into his breeches and looking to windward with concern written plain on his ugly features.

  ‘Hurricano!’ he said quaintly and, without awaiting any response from Kite, set about checking the lashings on the boats on their chocks amidships. In a few minutes the deck of the schooner seethed with activity. With the helm down and the staysail backed, the Spitfire curtseyed to the sea, swooping over the underlying swells that had grown appreciably in height and period in the last few moments. The halliards were cast off their pins and the gaffs lowered. The flogging canvas was bundled away and lashed secure; out on the bowsprit men tamed the fluttering jibs and then, with much shouting, Harper was rousing out a scrap of trysail made of heavy-duty canvas and running it up the mainmast while up forward the Bosun was preparing to hoist a storm staysail. Among this movement, Kite was pleased to see McClusky checking for loose gear and doubling the lashings on the guns. It reminded Kite of something else.

  ‘Mr McClusky!’

  ‘Sir?’ McClusky turned, expectantly.

  ‘When you have attended to the guns, do you and the Bosun go below and check the cargo is secure. Set up additional toms, if you think it necessary and then have the well pumped dry.’

  ‘Aye, aye, sir!’

  Kite turned and looked to windward again. The warmth had gone out of the sun. Now the sky immediately above the horizon was so dark that it might almost be described as black. By contrast the line of the sea was etched in a lighter tone and Kite could already see the effect of the stronger wind as the hitherto unbroken line now rucked up into the jagged saw-teeth of distant wave crests. It would be upon them within an hour, he guessed, two at the very most, and perhaps sooner. His thoughts ran hither and yon, like a weaver’s shuttle. He felt the mental cramp of indecision, staring round the deck as if goaded by some instinct that urged him to do more. Then Sarah was on deck beside him. She was dressed in shirt and breeches and there was no hint of the violent passions that had so lately stirred the trio in the cabin.

  ‘It is an hurricane,’ Kite said, his voice flat, non-commital. ‘You must prepare Nisha for the worst.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, but she did not draw away. After a moment’s pause, while Kite thoughts tossed between an urgent need to attend to his ship and the pricking diversion of unbidden lust, she said, ‘William, I would not have you think…’

  ‘Not now, Sarah,’ he breathed distractedly, looking away, ‘for God’s sake, not now…’

  ‘Grant me one moment’s attention.’ He swung back to her. ‘Remember always, William, that it is you I love.’

  They held each other’s gaze for several long seconds and then he said, ‘And I you,’ whereupon she smiled and looked away, bright-eyed, turning to go below as the Spitfire leaned to a heavy swell and Harper came aft to demand his attention.

  ‘She’s as snug as we can make her, sir. It wants only McClusky to report the hold secure.’

  Kite nodded. Suddenly he recalled what had been subconsciously troubling him and, at almost the same moment, Rahman caught his eye and Kite beckoned him over. ‘Gentlemen, we all know what we are about to endure. We are, however, in a quandary for we have not located the un-named bank and with so powerful a wind to the eastward are in danger of being driven ashore on the Paracels to loo’ard. We cannot therefore run off before the wind unless its first onslaught is favourable. At the moment we continue to make northing, but God alone knows whether it will veer…’

  ‘It will veer, Kite Sahib,’ Rahman announced emphatically, ‘in fact it has already begun to shift…’

  The three men looked aloft at the pendant at the main truck.

  ‘Very well,’ Kite replied, ‘we shall head north and somewhat to the east while we may, but the instant this becomes impossible and we are cast towards the west, we must heave-to.’

  ‘If we can lay to the north-east, that will do, will it not?’ Harper asked.

  Both Kite and Rahman nodded vigorously. ‘Whether or not we find the bank, we have to hope that the reports that there is no less than ten fathoms over it are accurate. We shall have to risk passing over the top of it in over to guarantee avoiding the Paracels.’

  Spitfire lay over to a violent gust and, with the precipitate change that Kite had found preposterous in one of Herr Haydn’s operas, the sky grew dark and the surface of the sea skittish. Within a quarter of an hour it was blowing a full gale and Kite had sent below as many of the hands as he could. Warned by Harper, the cook had doused the galley fire after brewing up two large kettles of salt-pork and biscuit and the men now fed on the hot mess in anticipation of many hours without cooked food.

  Kite had no appetite, but urged by Harper, he took a bowl of the stuff on deck. He was reluctant to go below and confront the two women, fearing the tumult of his emotions if he did so, for an odd temptation to abandon the schooner to her fate and to drown himself in sensuality before providence drowned him in a watery grave, seemed set fair to overwhelm him. He fought off this seductive distraction, mystified by the event of that early morning. He was no longer a young man and had past the best of his middle years. Many men considered themselves old at his age, content to sit in the sun and watch their grandchildren play. Was that the strange imperative? That he had no children, let alone children’s children, of his own? Perhaps; and did such a powerful impulse prompt him to mate with the receptive Nisha?

  Good God, what would Harper think?

  And then Harper loomed alongside him like a spectral conscience made manifest, his ugly face poked close to Kite as he shouted above the now howling gale, ‘your tarpaulin, Cap’n.’

  Kite took the stiffened oiled canvas cover-all and drew it about him.

  ‘I’ve seen the women are all right in the cabin, Cap’n.’

  Kite stared at him, seeking some sign in his expression that told Kite he knew of the improprieties his mistress had been guilty of, but there was nothing other than Zachariah’s plain, honest ugliness confronting him.

  ‘Nisha may well be fearful in the coming hours, Zachariah.’

  ‘Sarah will look after her, Cap’n, don’t you fear.’

  No, Kite thought, he need not fear that. Sarah that swore she loved him, could yet enjoy a secret intimacy with the voluptuous Indian. Sarah, Sarah…

  All he could do was nod acknowledgement of Harper’s well-meant reassurance and brace himself as a sea slapped at Spitfire’s quarter with a thud that made the entire hull tremble and sent a column of water high into the air where it was blown apart by the wind and swept the deck like buck-shot.

  Kite and Harper cannoned into one another and Harper shouted, ‘For what we are about to receive… I’d better get another pair of hands on the helm to man the relieving tackles.’

  Kite braced himself and Spitfire began to roll and scend under the onslaught of the wind and sea. Even though only two scraps of canvas were exposed to the brunt of the gale, the schooner was driving through the sea, her bow wave roiling up under her figurehead as she thrust the mass of water aside in her headlong flight.

  The power in such a wind was impressive, as was the strength of the little vessel whose fabric bore this impetus and converted it through the cunning of her builders and riggers, and the skill of her crew, from the movement of a mass of air in one direction, to the passage of a ship and her cargo in another.

  Kite stretched out a hand to grasp a backstay for support. He felt the thrum of it as it transmitted some of this energy downwards into the timbers of the hull. He was stung by spray driving incessantly through the a
ir as the noise of the wind rose to a shriek. If he was foolish enough to expose the flesh of his face to it, it not only tore at his skin, but seemed to distort his very own features.

  And yet he knew that the shriek was but an overture to the taifun itself. The great wind of the Chinese and the cyclone of the Bay of Bengal, were like the hurricano of the West Indies. The mature wind blew with the booming thunder of great guns and the sea, whipped by its master, lay down in obedience, excoriated into wet air which filled every crevice of the world with the sting of salt. Moreover Kite had guessed after his previous experience in the Atlantic, that the taifun blew in a vast, circular motion, and that a ship, caught and almost mobile within the system of the great storm, no matter how fast she drove through the water, would be subject to a change in the wind’s direction. What might now be a fair wind, might soon be foul and at some unknown distance under their lee lay spread the reefs, islets and islands of the Paracels.

  The thought was sufficient to cause a cold sweat to break out along his spine, to join the runnels of water which had defied the tarpaulin and trickled uncomfortably down his back. He tried to master the dynamics of the revolving system but could do no more than acknowledge that the slow veer of the wind would entrap them in its central eye where, he knew, the seas would rear in cataclysmic and random violence, reminiscent of the beginning and the end of all things.

  All day they endured this onslaught. As the darkness of the night closed about them they were deluged with rain after which came an horrifying torrent of small birds which fluttered about their feet in such numbers that they crushed them underfoot, smearing their blood and feathers across the planking. On into the next dawning day nature raged with all its malevolent force, and clinging on to his labouring schooner, Kite felt along with fear for the coming hours a sublime feeling that if death claimed him at that moment, it would be supremely apt. Alongside this wild and transcendingly wondrous joy came another thought, that the violent stirrings of his own blood had possessed some of this overwhelming character, that his individuality had been subsumed by a more compelling tribal compulsion, driven by powers utterly beyond any rational comprehension.

  As the typhoon boomed its way towards the first of its mighty climaxes, Kite knew with a conviction that was as powerful as any instinctive urge, that he had been as simultaneously empowered and diminished by the experience of that sensual link between the three of them as he was by the experience of enduring the typhoon. The great wind that raked the surface of the South China Sea was a mighty physical reflection of the sensual turmoil that had ripped through the presumptions and pride of William Kite, merchant and mariner. Moreover, Kite thought sublimely as the wind bellowed in its fulsome triumph and he clung to the straining backstay, there was little to chose in their natural power.

  Then, as if to lend majestic mystery to this gross perception, the stay upon which he relied, suddenly parted, its lower end striking him across the face and shoulder like a whip in the hand of God. In the same instant the whole structure of the hull shuddered as, in a succession of fractures, it was followed by the weather rigging of the main topmast which collapsed to leeward and thrashed about aloft, wounding the cross trees and making a ravel of ropes and lines thirty feet above the deck.

  In the two days that followed they suffered no more damage to their rigging. After a struggle aloft they managed to pass lines round the flailing main topmast, restraining it sufficiently to prevent further mishap. Instead the level of water rose in the well so that the hands were obliged to pump for prolonged periods at frequent intervals. It was clear that Spitfire’s hull had suffered some damage, but Kite’s anxiety for the state of the schooner was far exceeded by worry about her position. Locating the ten fathom bank was important in that it provided the only reliable guide as to their relative location to the far greater danger of the Paracels, but it proved impossible for even a single reliable cast of the lead to be taken and the only slight indication that they might have closed the reef was an increased breaking of the waves which Kite, Rahman and Harper thought might have betrayed the proximity of the reef. But having, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, convinced themselves that this was indeed the case, one of the men swore he had seen a small island to the southward. The temptation to dismiss this as a mere self-deception was too easy, and Kite had to take the report seriously, though no studying of the chart could square the two events, given the wind conditions and their likely drift under the tiny scraps of canvas they now bore. Did Kite lay the greater credence upon the sighting of supposed breakers by the officers, or the more terrifying but unverifiable appearance of the island spotted by a mere seaman? He pondered this for some time, aware that if the latter was the case then it was inconceivable that they had not ripped the bottom out of the vessel long since.

  Of course, Kite could not entirely dismiss this hypothesis as being fantasy. There was the evidence of the increased intake of water and, on the balance of probabilities, he thought that they had made more leeway to the east than otherwise, in which case not only could the island have indeed been there, but the breakers might not have been the ten fathom bank, but something shallower, a part of the complex submarine obstruction making up the Paracels. As his tired mind fumbled towards this inhospitable conclusion he knew that he must himself assume the latter.

  And yet what could he do about it? To let the schooner run off before the wind might place them in a worse condition, while remaining hove-to at least retained a measure of control and left them nearer their last observed position, for all the good that that meant. As everyone else aboard the storm-tossed Spitfire, when not required to do their stint at the pumps, tend a fraying rope or stand a trick at the helm, grabbed what rest they could, Kite remained on deck. It was impossible for him to sleep and he kept his lonely post except when doubt nagged him and sent him below to stare at the sodden chart. Not that he gained any comfort from its blank and unsounded places, for there was no science in his contemplation. Instead he seemed like a water-diviner, lacking any forked hazel twig. It was as though he held out his experience above the inscribed paper, hoping that it would give off some palpable exhalation from which he might in some way detect a fact.

  But the chart was no dynamic underground spring; it was only a poor imperfect work of man and much in want of improvement. Instead, Kite’s numbed brain succumbed to the vague but terrifying suggestion of providential displeasure. He had behaved grossly and the wind was the agent of God. Standing braced in the creaking cabin he felt like an allegorical figure, flanked by the soporific and prone bodies of Sarah and Nisha rolled in their blankets, pallid and half-conscious, devoid of any passionate pretensions. To add to the retributive air, empty bottles, those symbols of ultimate dissolution, rolled to-and-fro across the sodden deck in allegorical reproach.

  As the lurid sunsets faded into the gloom of night, Kite wearily returned to the deck and lashed himself to the rail, conscious of the muttered curses of the toiling helmsmen, of the occasional comment of the officers as the watches rotated, and the dim glimmer of the binnacle light which mocked their inability to do more than keep the schooner close to the wind. But, with biblical conformity, on the third day the sun rose to a moderated wind, appearing briefly through the scud. The great boom of the typhoon had gone and even the shriek of its passage through their straining rigging sounded exhausted rather than malevolent.

  As the wind finally dropped during the succeeding hours that day, Kite, his quadrant tucked into the crook of his arm, waited for the sun to show its pale face through the persisting veil of cloud. In the end it was Harper who caught a meridian altitude, snatching the instrument from Kite as he slumped in utter exhaustion under the weather rail, a loop of line about his waist, indifferent to the mate’s cry that the sun seemed likely to emerge sufficiently to be navigationally useful.

  Perversely Harper’s triumph was as ephemeral as the solar data he applied to his observation. The parallel of latitude ran east to west, sixteen degrees
and fifty-six minutes north of the equator, a line which on their chart sliced through the northern sector of the Paracels. They might lie anywhere along that imaginary line and the knowledge that they had not been driven clear of the danger only increased Kite’s concern when he was finally informed. But the wind came now from the southern quarter and at least progress could be made to the northwards, enabling them to break out of the encirclement of the reefs.

  Later that day they took soundings and found no bottom with the twenty-fathom lead-line. Nor was there any sign of land nor breakers to be had from the masthead. Kite turned in properly that evening in the knowledge that they were clear of the Paracels. Only the dull clunk, clunk of the pumps reminded him that they were not yet safe.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Of Wood and Water

  At the cry of land Kite stirred to full consciousness. He had been lying half-awake for some time, unwilling to surface and admit the truth of his real existence, preferring to remain in the penumbral world of the somnambulist rather than take up the burden of responsibility. But even this personal retreat could not resist the temptation of such a cry and, even if he had resisted, here was Sarah rushing into the cabin to rouse him.

  On deck almost the entire ship’s company was assembled, so much desired was some resolution to all their uncertainties. Land, but what land? Kite could not see it at first; he was still fuddled by sleep. Experience made him raise his eyes from their scouring of the line of the horizon and there it was, a few degree up in the sky, the rounded summit of high land faintly distinguishable from the slightly lighter tone of the surrounding sky.