Ten days later the general cargo vessel Morbihan was setting out from Queen’s Dock in the port of Glasgow. Her destination was Le Havre on the north coast of France and the Chief, Bernie and I were all on board.
We had shared a farewell dinner at Li Jing’s house the evening before. The Chief had taken charge of the cooking, while Li Jing entertained us with stories from every part of the globe.
Bernie was downcast the following morning—he didn’t want to say goodbye to Li Jing.
“You are a useless boxer, Bernie Brodie,” she said, holding his huge hands in her small hands. “But you are a good man! And you’re capable of a lot more than you think you are. Make sure you find a job that makes you happy. You’d make a good gardener. The flowers and palms in my conservatory are going to miss you. And the birds, too.” 467
To the Chief and me, Li Jing said, “It was nice to get to know the two of you. Come back once you’ve got the Hudson Queen back in service. She is a Clyde Puffer when all is said and done, and the Firth of Clyde is her home water.”
Our voyage to Le Havre in the Morbihan proved troublesome. No sooner had we gone over the landing stage in the Queen’s Dock than Bernie broke out in a cold sweat. The Chief wondered whether he was falling sick with flu, but I knew better. Bernie was terrified at the thought of the voyage.
The Chief signed on as third engineer and Bernie and I were set to shovelling coal. I saw how hard Bernie struggled to do a good job as a stoker, but his fear took all his strength away. He’d been seasick several times before we even reached open water. Then he just went and lay down in the coal box and stayed there for the rest of the voyage. The Chief and I took turns to cover his shifts for him so that the other stokers wouldn’t get annoyed.
The Chief tried talking to Bernie to find out what the problem was, but Bernie didn’t want to say anything. He just shook his huge head and shut his eyes tight.
“It seems he’s afraid of something,” the Chief said to me when Bernie was out of earshot. “But what could it be? Is it the sea itself that terrifies him?” 468
I nodded. That’s what it was.
“But why?” the Chief wondered.
I shrugged my shoulders. It was still a mystery even to me.
We docked in Le Havre after three days at sea. Our original plan had been to try to find another vessel to carry us farther south, preferably all the way to the Mediterranean. But the Chief had other ideas now.
“Life at sea doesn’t seem to be Bernie’s cup of tea,” he said to me. “And the storms in the Bay of Biscay are no joke at this time of year. So I think we should continue our journey on gentler waterways.”
That’s why the next stage of our journey was spent on a coal barge, sailing up the Seine from Le Havre to Paris. We spent several sunny days chipping off the rust, swabbing the deck and shovelling coal as the barge puffed its way between the fields, pastures and villages of the beautiful landscape of Normandy. Bernie had so much to look at that after a while he forgot he was actually on a boat.
I enjoyed my time on board as well, but my thoughts kept returning to Scotland and to the things that had happened during the last six months. Most of all I thought of Bernie’s old 469photograph of him and Moira on the staircase in the Highland Orphanage.
Did the photograph mean that Bernie and Moira had grown up in the same children’s home as Rose Henderson? Well, that certainly seemed to be the case. And it would explain how both Moira and Bernie knew of Rose’s father, Shetland Jack.
Though, in fact, none of that was of importance any longer. Not for the Chief and me, anyway. We had gone to Glasgow to find out who the necklace belonged to and all we had to do now was deliver the pearls to Rose Lafourcade. After that we could go back to Lisbon and Ana and Signor Fidardo. How I longed to see them again!
We reached Paris on the afternoon of the fourth day. Even at a distance of several miles we could see the mighty Eiffel Tower rising towards the clear blue sky. I counted seventeen splendid stone bridges crossing the Seine before we reached the centre of the city. The streets along the riverside were crowded with people, bicycles, cars, buses and horse-drawn carriages. New sounds and new smells came one after another.
It was early evening by the time the Chief, Bernie and I had finished our work on board and could sign off. Before we went 470ashore, the Chief asked whether the skipper knew of any cheap hotels in the district.
“There are always rooms to rent in the Latin Quarter,” he said and told us how to get there.
Darkness fell and the streetlamps were lit. There were people everywhere, moving around beneath the budding trees that lined the quays and boulevards. Long rows of open boxes were laid out along the streets by the Seine, and these boxes were full of books. People were jostling to thumb through them, read them and discuss them loudly with one another and with the booksellers.
The whole business seemed familiar in some sort of way. Could I have heard of these boxes of books at some point?
We were just about to leave the quay and turn into the narrow streets to find a hotel for the night when someone shouted at us.
“Hello there! Sally Jones! Is it really you?”
I turned round and saw a woman standing by one of the book boxes and waving. It took me a few seconds to recognize her.
It was Sylvie Dubois, the ticket seller from Brockdorff’s Funfair. 471
And suddenly I understood why the book boxes seemed so familiar. Sylvie Dubois had told me about them.
“Sally Jones!” she said, pressing my hands when I went over to her. “What on earth are you doing here in Paris?”
The Chief and Bernie had caught up with me. The Chief looked baffled, but he and Sylvie Dubois introduced themselves to one another and the Chief was told how she and I had become acquainted.
“Now, my dears,” Sylvie said, “we must sit down and have a chat!”
She closed her book box and led us to a nearby café. The Chief told her we were on our way back to Lisbon after some time in Scotland. Sylvie Dubois, for her part, told us she had left Brockdorff’s Funfair just a few months earlier. Her son, François le Fort, had met a girl in Milan and decided to stay there.
“He’s happy,” Sylvie Dubois said, “and so am I! At last I’ve been able to come back to Paris and to my book box.”
The Chief thought for a moment and then asked, “That fellow who ran the merry-go-round… Harvey Jenkins… Is he still working for Brockdorff’s Funfair?”
“I assume so,” Sylvie said. “Why do you ask?”
“Sally Jones and I have some unfinished business with him,” the Chief said. 472
Sylvie Dubois looked hard at us, but before she got round to asking what the Chief meant by that, he said, “You don’t happen to know where the fair might be at the moment, do you?”
Sylvie Dubois thought about it and then said, “Assuming that Director Brockdorff is following his regular itinerary, the fair should just have arrived in Munich. I imagine they’ll be putting up their tents now in a park close to Wiener Platz, their usual place…”
She was cut off by a nearby church clock striking five o’clock.
“Heavens! How time flies!” she said. “I must get back to my books. I’ve got hold of a first edition of Zola and a gentleman from the Bibliothèque nationale is coming to look at it.”
We said goodbye to Sylvie Dubois and set off into the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter. We soon found a small hotel cheap enough for us to rent a draughty attic room with three rickety iron-framed beds.
Both Bernie and the Chief fell asleep under the coarse blankets almost immediately. But I lay awake, thinking things through. The Chief hadn’t said anything yet, but I was pretty sure he’d want us to go to Munich and find Harvey Jenkins. And that’s what we ought to do. Rose Lafourcade had every 473right to know what happened to her father and Jenkins was likely to be the only one who knew.
Out through our dusty, cracked attic window, I could see a big, red full moon above the roofs of Paris. There was something ominous about it.