LXVII

All I had to do now was ask a fisherman for a buoy and somehow attach it to the Quilleboeuf rock one night. Finding the buoy was easy for anyone with a little money. I located an old man called Jérôme who had given up fishing because of his back. He was only too happy to make a little cash, and he had a big, white, corky buoy with thirty-five feet of rope and a weight to attach it to the seabed. I told him I was after lobsters, and he tried to sell me his boat, but Perrine was all I needed – Perrine, and a calm night with a good moon, if possible.

I waited three nights and there was cloud, and then there was rain, and then there was a strong wind so the sea was too rough.

A week later, the weather turned mild and calm. The wind dropped, the clouds dissipated, and it was near low tide at around nine o’clock when most honest people were in bed.

I crept out of the inn and made my way to the lean-to where the old fisherman kept the buoy and the tackle. Taking them up soundlessly, I went down to the jetty and placed the cargo in Perrine. I climbed into the boat, when a drunk came lurching by with a skinful of wine. The last thing I wanted was discovery, even by a drunk, so I crouched low over the buoy, embracing it like a bosom friend until the disturbance had gone. And then I set off under the harbour lights, muffling the sound of my oars as best I could. It was all quite different at night. As I pulled away from the mooring on the jetty, past the White Ship, pale as a ghost, and the company of all the vessels in the harbour, I felt scared. Yes, I must admit it; who knows what monsters lurk in the deep? Perrine was stout, but she was a little boat; you could tip her up in a second, broadside to a stiff sea or a leviathan. But none of that was going to happen.

As I pulled away from the harbour, I entered something like a waking dream – sea flat as a looking-glass, moon on the wane but still plenty of it, making a moonpath right up to Perrine, light bouncing off the water from the moon and a million stars. Far away a bell was tolling, solemnly. Perrine swam gently down the current, the lights on shore passing like ships. It was only for a few moments but I had a feeling of mysterious and universal union, and then it was over. I rested on my oars and took a draught from a flask of wine I had brought with me in case I became marooned – or thirsty.

Enough of mysticism, I said to myself sternly, there is a job to be done, and I will never see Alice again unless I do it. To start with: how was I going to find the rock? I could row around for ever and get hopelessly lost.

I knew that the current had previously taken me almost directly to the Quilleboeuf without any navigation necessary on my part. Indeed I had been told that the current here flows due north, which was why the Quilleboeuf was so dangerous to shipping. Follow the Pole Star too closely and you hit the rock; I had been told that many times by the old salts and sailors of Barfleur.

All I had to do was drift and paddle, drift and paddle, and in ten minutes I would turn Perrine’s bow towards the shore, keep a close look-out for the rock over the stern, and hope to see it somewhere in the vast and silent dark. No, don’t be a funk, I would see it.

There was a sudden splash over towards the starboard, or was it the port – harder to tell when you’re facing the wrong way. I have always, as I say, had this slight problem with left and right. Oh, I know where they are intellectually when I have time to think, but in emergency I sometimes get it wrong. Anyway, there was a splash and it momentarily spooked me. What would splash like that unless it was a shark or giant squid? I began to form the impression that I was not alone; someone was following me in a small dark boat, a shape I could almost see, I was certain of it, over there to my right, yes, right…

I felt a slight bump and there I was, dead on target, nuzzling up to the Quilleboeuf Rock which loomed like a mountain in the dark. It seemed I couldn’t miss it – which was good augury for the main event if it ever came. I tell you, I chucked the weighted buoy over the side as near as I could get to the rock, and rowed hell for leather for home. As I rowed, I could see the lovely buoy bobbing about gamely in the water only five feet from the rock, and looking for all the world like an innocent lobster pot marker, possibly too catch the very lobster I had spoken to a few days before. Everything was going to be all right.

And thus, like a child who believes that if he shuts his eyes, he will be invisible, I laid my plans. No one saw me when I tied up at the jetty behind the big ships. No one noticed me enter the inn. I was just in time to catch a cup or two of wine and a kiss (nothing more) from Lisette before I went to bed. Job finished, all done and dusted.