LXV

I cannot impress upon you enough the oddity of those initial days at Barfleur before the final act could unfold. It seemed as though I were half at play, and half in the midst of a trap whose mechanism had been set and from which there was no escape; a disaster that could overtake me as well as everyone around me. I tried my best to persuade myself of the first. There was no point in becoming nervous so early in the matter. A hundred and one things might happen to prevent the necessity of fulfilling my promise. But at the back of my mind there was always a moment when a sudden word or memory would send a cold toad of terror down to sit somewhere under my belly-button. Perhaps indeed it never completely went away. But I was young, and even the condemned man eats a hearty breakfast.

Next day, and the day after, and the day after the day after that, I went down to the harbour in my sheepskin coat, untied Perrine, and we rowed about, out beyond the harbour wall when the tide was right – and on the last day when it was almost right…

Perhaps I was impatient, but it is also easy to misjudge the time, especially in a new place. The church bells rang, it seemed to me, at odd times. The fishermen would have told me the time just by looking at the water, but they were out fishing. I was simply not sufficiently experienced in the sea, that was the long and short of it. I intended to wait until the tide was almost out when the water would slacken, and then row out to the rock, but meanwhile I thought I would take a turn outside the harbour while the water was at its height, before the tidal race had started.

Out I rowed, out and about in the wide bay. The flood tide had been higher than usual, someone had said something about a spring tide, but this had not really registered with me. The October sun shone and the water licked the boat, it was very calm, and my thoughts were far away. I mused over the events of the past two years and the people I had met: Juliana and Alice, the little girls Marie and Pippi, my little palfrey Blackberry, the witch Mother Merle, my mother, my father, that dreadful half-brother of mine, Fulk with his hopeless love, Eustace the Bad, the Duke and his intransigent barons, FitzStephen and his passion for his white ship … So many people. What did they think they were doing? They thought they had freedom to choose their way, but weren’t they really like the flotsam in the river at Rouen, carried away like bugs on a branch; scurrying to the left, hurrying to the right while all the time the hungry waves of the wide ocean were waiting to gobble them up…

I did not like these thoughts, and I shook myself and lifted my head to look around me. The water had been so still, but now there were little waves.

Something was happening that had not happened before on my outings in Perrine: the water had started to go out it struck me, rather forcibly, that I had better row back. The quay was not where it had been when I left it. Rowing back, however, was now a problem: the water seemed stiffer. Stupidly, I caught one oar in the air as I rowed harder, and I fell backwards into the bottom of the boat, bumping the back of my head.

I must have been out for a few moments and lay there like a gaffed pollock. When I regained my seat, I could see FitzbloodyStephen had come out of his office and was laughing. At least I thought that was what he was doing, because he was jumping up and down and gesticulating. He, too, seemed to be diminishing. I bent to the oars, but it didn’t seem to make much difference. There was no doubt about it. The shoreline was getting smaller. I was going out to sea.

The water was moving with more urgency out here. A slight breeze was coming in from the north-west and the tide was flowing out against it. My little boat bobbled about in it, and I bobbled with it. Of course I tried and tried to row back to the harbour; I am not an idiot. Well, yes, you probably think I am, because I had been warned about the tide. I just thought I could do it. Nobody likes to be thought a loon; I didn’t want FitzStephen to go back to Juliana with an adverse report.

The fact was, I could make no impression on the flow of the water, indeed all I was doing was exhausting myself. I gave up and leaned panting on my oars. The rocky point where I had walked yesterday drifted past. One or two outlying rocks drifted past as well. I turned the boat round and look back at the jetty. FitzStephen had disappeared. A small group of rocks eased by on the right hand side – sorry, starboard – and then a big jagged bun of stone on the port.

Oh well, I thought, he’ll come and get me. He’s gone to round up some men and they’ll have a bigger boat with more oars which will cut cleanly through the water. He won’t let me just float away … Will he?

And then I thought: Barfleur is a busy harbour, there will be ships coming in, fishing boats, they will give me a tow.

I turned back to look at the sea. There was nothing; it seemed endless. One or two seagulls swopped low over me, hoping that I might split a fish and toss it overboard, but they soon turned away, crying disgustedly. A bigger wave rocked the boat and I was gripped by panic. The shore was half a mile away. There was just half an inch or so of planking between me and drowning. This was how it was going to end. Next stop Guernsey. If I was lucky.

I closed my eyes and said a few prayers, regretting my past wickedness and thinking of my mother, then of Alice who I would never see again.

Perrine and I drifted on, she oblivious to the danger we were in, mounting the little seas with a certain dash while I was almost insensate with alarm. There is a fear some people feel about being in wide open spaces. I had never had it before, but the broad bosom of the sea was having that effect on me now.

I perceived a shape in the water ahead of me. I thought for a moment it might be a distant vessel, but on closer observation it turned out to be another, bigger rock around which the water eddied and sparkled. This must be the Quilleboeuf about which I had heard from FitzStephen. A plan formed in my mind to land on the rock – it was the only thing that would keep me from being swept out – and then, at low water, the tide could bring me in again.

As I approached the rock, which proved indeed to be a bloody great thing, mostly under water when I neared it, dark as a sea monster, I started to row against the current with all my strength so that when my boat hit it would be a gentle contact. On what I judged to be the south side, I noticed what seemed like a little inlet, and I aimed for the safety of this enclosed space. Just before we touched, I shipped the oars, tied Perrine’s painter around my wrist, and when the contact came – a hard rumbling scrape – I scrambled out over the stern and plunged onto the slippery barnacled stone. I was almost submerged by salt water, and bumped my leg, cracked my funny bone, nearly lost Perrine, swallowed a quartful of water, and at length found myself sitting on my rocky island above the waves, lord of one followed by six zero acres of ocean.

The tide hurried past. Perrine jostled uncomfortably on the low rock beside her. I pulled her round to face the flow, so that the tide held her straight, keeping her in position between the two shoulders of the inlet.

I sat and surveyed the scene. All around was sea. Behind me lay a clear route to England. To my right, only half a mile away, was the rocky shore of the Raz de Barfleur, to my left was the open water of the Baie de Seine, in front of me was the way back to Barfleur, a matter of a mile. The tide would cease in five hours or so. I was quite safe on my island. I caught a glimpse of the bottom now, sand and rocks, about ten feet or more below. FitzStephen had told me that the tide hereabouts was famous for its rise and fall. Twenty-five and a half feet, he had said. That was half a foot higher than Honfleur and a foot higher than Cherbourg. The man seemed to take pride in his bastard tides. All I knew was that this blob of rock was going to end up twenty-five feet high, from low tide mark to summit. It was going to be substantial – high as a house – before the tide started coming in again. At the flood, however, for all the rock’s size, its top poked, as I had found, only a few feet above the water.

Since there was nothing for it but to sit it out and wait for the tide to turn, I made myself as comfortable as I could (which was hardly at all), drew my sheepskin coat about me, and set myself to thinking of my plan of action. I could hardly be in a better place to contemplate it. I put the moral dilemma aside for one moment and tried to treat what was manifestly the most horrible crime as an academic project. Yes, a part of me still thought at this stage that there was precious little chance of Juliana’s mad scheme ever happening. That is what I still told myself.

If a ship were to come this way in darkness at just past high water on the ebb tide, the rock could doubtless be avoided if you had a good pilot and a hawk-eyed look-out, and even then you could not be sure. But what about navigating to hit the rock at night, what would you do if that were your game?

There would be help from the current and the stars, so long as the stars were not covered by cloud and you knew which star to steer by. In fact, as the rock was due north of Barfleur harbour, it would be the Pole Star. That was simple enough. I would have to watch the weather, and do a reconnaissance under cover of darkness. Come to that, perhaps I could put a white marker on it, using one of the fishermen’s buoys, and could steer for it – that was assuming I could get hold of that rudder thing old FitzStephen was so pleased about, and was free to use it at the critical moment.

Alternatively, there were various ways of scuppering a ship other than driving it onto a rock, and I imagined myself performing them. I could stove in a plank of the ship below the waterline before she sailed, assuming I had the requisite equipment and would not be seen or heard while I was using it. Or perhaps the application of a rather large gimlet might do the trick, not perhaps the most unobtrusive thing to take on board – or else I could bore a hole in the hull beforehand (if I could bring myself to desecrate a thing of such beauty), cover it with wax, and then unstop it once we were under way. It would be slow to admit the ocean and could be caulked in no time by a passing sailor, but it had been known to work.

When I considered all these other stratagems, though, I concluded there was nothing quite so clever at sinking a ship as a good, simple rock like this big fellow I was now sitting on. He had the makings of tragedy written all over him, and no questions asked.

I patted the rock as if he were a horse. I tried to be insouciant, making an entertainment of my reconnaissance, for there is no point in being a jelly-boy nor yet a hang dog, but I was overcome once again by the most dismal foreboding. It is a large matter to sink a vessel full of people, and it weighed on me, not that it was going to happen, you understand, because something would come up, I was sure of it. Yet, I could not see how Juliana’s plan could be averted. She had it all – and me – worked out like the machinery of Fate itself.

Sitting on the rock in the sunshine now, looking out at the prospect in front of me – the distance from the land, the hungriness of the sea – I tried to imagine a shipwreck at night: darkness would add terror, confusion, isolation; the water would be icy cold; there would be no hope, no help, nothing but the sudden realisation that this was the end, often considered, never expected. There would be noise and commotion, of course, but the whole thing would be far enough from land for it to be mistaken for seabirds, or not be heard at all. It was something that I could never, in my right mind, wish on my worst enemy. On Comte Eustace, if he were on board, or Amaury de Montfort? I decided not to answer that.

Clouds came up and the sun went in. I was cold now, even with my sheepskin coat on, though not as cold as I would have been without it – six hours is a long time when you are sitting on a wet rock in the middle of the sea. A small crab, lodged in a little rock-pool, had appeared. The creature regarded me with an impassive eye and started nibbling at my toe. I lifted my foot up but the creature hung on. I put my foot back in the water. The crab returned to its feast.

No ships or boats came by, though I saw some beating about in the distance. I had been told by FitzStephen that it was considered prudent to approach the harbour with a strong incoming flood, so it seemed we were all waiting for the tide to turn, and a long wait it was. It had been high water at nine that morning and it would be low at around three. The crab grew tired of his nibbling and I grew tired of waiting. It was the cold, and the fear of what I had to do, and the intrinsic uncertainty of the sea that really took the spirit out of me. It might be that I would have stories to tell Alice, or Juliana – or my grandchildren whoever they might be – at some later date, over a roaring fire with a glass of sack in my hand. Then, I would cut a fine figure as I told of my exploits, but now I was a sad creature. I huddled in the no-shelter of the rock. I was wet, the sun was hidden by a further sequence of clouds, and the wind was not a drying wind; it was a wind that simply tickled the wet and made it feel wetter.

More crabs appeared and I noticed one or two shrimps. There were a few mussels on the rock and a selection of limpets. At one stage, I saw several small fish and, further out, a shoal of what might have been pilchards, which surfaced and dived. I set two of the crabs to have a race, but they went in opposite directions. Out in the dark water under a ledge of rock, something big moved that I thought might be a lobster – and indeed, I saw that it was when it emerged a little way from its shelter, driven perhaps by curiosity, or indignation at my encroachment of its habitat. We eyed each other. Lobsters are scavengers, and doubtless it was wondering whether I might be dead. I felt cold enough to be.

‘You shall have feast enough before the month is out,’ I told it.

Mollified perhaps, it withdrew. Patience is everything in the sea.

I was by now beyond cold. Grateful though I was for the sheepskin coat, it had become sodden through my various flounderings. Exercise was virtually impossible. I grew thirsty, but there was nothing I could do about that. Slowly, slow as the shadow on a dial, the water subsided. As I fell to ruminating on my two ladies and the entwining of our fates, all precipitated by that oaf of a comte, the contemptible self-pleased drunkard who is no longer Lord of Breteuil (and serve him right), I had rashly untied Perrine’s painter from my wrist – it was beginning to chafe – and my hand must have slackened and unclenched. I came to my senses just in time to see her starting to bob away. I plunged into the water, soaking myself anew, and grabbed the painter as she floated past the island, scarcely preserving my hold on an overhang of rock as I pulled her in.

I tied the painter in a knot once more around my wrist, and lost myself in thought again, imagining myself back at Breteuil, living again that beautiful, distressful dream.

At last, I noticed the pace of the water began to slacken. My island was now, as I guessed, thirty paces round. I was told later that you could walk on sand here at a really low spring tide. The breeze dropped. The chafing of the sea subsided. The sun came out again.

It had become a perfect late autumn day. I was beginning to warm up now so I waited a little longer, stretching out in the sun; there was no point in going until the tide had really turned, and I confess I was a little nervous about the reception I would get. Soon, the backward quirk of a ripple or two and an eddy curling under the brown wriggle of a seaweed, told me it was time. I steadied myself and, holding each of Perrine’s generous sides, I scrambled onto the seat, and pushed off. The boat held steady in the water for a moment, and then turned obediently towards the shore.

‘What the hell did you think you were d-d-doing?’ said FitzStephen, I thought rather ungraciously, twenty minutes later, when I finally made it back, carried sweetly with hardly more than a gesture at rowing home on the incoming flood.

‘I got caught by the tide.’

‘I warned you about that.’

‘No you didn’t.’

‘How can I work with you if you do not listen? You will have to go. You are a danger to us all.’

‘You thought I had gone to Guernsey, didn’t you?’

‘Yes. And I wasn’t going to come and look for you. I’m not taking the White Ship out before her trials.’

‘Don’t you want to know what I did?’

‘No.’ The man was sulking.

‘I landed on the rock.’

‘The rock? Which rock?’

‘The Quilleboeuf.’

‘You’re joking.’

‘I scrambled out and held on to Perrine. Then we sat and waited.’

‘Impossible.’

I could see he was impressed.

‘Well, I never heard of that before. I can see you can handle a boat,’ he said, ‘and a rock. You had better come inside and get warm.’

Somehow my misadventure had turned into an advantage.