On the eve of his proposed departure for North America, Kite ran into Captain Makepeace and, inviting his old commander back to the rented house, agreed to embark a consignment of twenty slaves just then brought in by the Enterprize from Benin. The slaves were destined for Kingston, Jamaica, and Makepeace was not keen to delay loading molasses and rum for England, fretful that, already late in the season, he might be caught by a hurricane before he got clear of the islands.
‘If you’re bound for the American coast, I’d be obliged if you’d look favourably upon the task,’ Makepeace pleaded, as they sat in the small courtyard set behind a high wall separating them from the hurly-burly of the St John’s waterfront. The sun was setting and the sky was suffused with a rich peach hue. Kite was disposed to be cordial and laughingly agreed as the two men drank glasses of mimbo. ‘You have done well, as I predicted,’ Makepeace said, watching Puella as she settled quietly beside them. ‘And you Puella, are more beautiful than I could have imagined.’
Puella lowered her eyes and remained silent; she was uneasy in Makepeace’s presence, unable to adjust to the alteration in his relationship with either Kite or herself. Moreover, she did not want Kite to carry slaves in the Spitfire. The schooner was already loaded with a full cargo of muscovado and rum, some of which was bound for consignees in Savannah, where Kite intended replacing the discharged commodities with cotton. His returns would be modest, but with no personal contacts in Britain he did not wish to venture a speculation on a cargo which would be difficult to sell. However, despite his misgivings, he agreed to purchase a quantity of elephant’s ivory from Makepeace.
‘I hear you are a man of considerable substance,’ Makepeace said as they concluded their transaction.
‘I doubt that I could match your own substance, Captain, but you did me a considerable service when you introduced me to Mr Mulgrave. He was most generous to me as well as to Wentworth, his main protégé. I was quite undeserving.’
‘I daresay you will benefit further from his munificence then,’ Makepeace remarked, helping himself to more mimbo from the jug.
Kite frowned. ‘Oh. In what way?’
‘Why, have you not heard? Mulgrave is dead. I would have thought his attorney, what was his name…?’
‘Mr Garvey,’ put in Puella, sitting up and taking more than a casual interest.
‘That’s it, Garvey, I’d have thought he would have let you know. Well, no matter; Mulgrave has been dead for some time. Garvey will have the details. I’m surprised you knew nothing of it…’
Kite looked at Puella. His expression was contrite; there was no need for words to pass between them: Dorothea had been right. ‘Do you know the manner of his death?’ Kite asked.
‘Yes, he was taking passage in a wherry on the Thames when it was overset by a passing squall.’
‘Then he drowned,’ said Kite, and Makepeace nodded, sipping the mimbo reflectively. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ Kite said and Puella stirred and silently withdrew. The sun had set and the tropical night was swiftly descending upon them; Puella habitually sought her bed early, particularly if Kite was attending to his affairs.
Kite watched her leave, her tall figure upright and walking with that peculiarly fluid grace that suggested regal ancestry. He sensed her isolation and loneliness and his heart went out to her. He was about to make his excuses and hint that it was time for Makepeace to leave, when the captain poured himself another glass of mimbo and looked round the courtyard as the cool of the night eased the white men’s discomfort.
‘I am getting old, Kite, and am of a mind to settle soon. I have a place in Liverpool and I increasingly regret leaving it. So far I have avoided most of the plagues of Guinea, Benin and these infested islands, but a man always runs ahead of the fates. How I have avoided the yaws, I confess I don’t know, but the devil, they say, looks after his own. I now own three ships besides the whole of the Enterprize: I acquired the Adventure, the Endeavour and the Ambition quite recently. The first is a fine frigate-built ship, the second a brig and the third a snow. They were all built as Bristolmen, but Liverpool has entirely eclipsed that port now, and they came cheap. They are all in good condition and now, run on Liverpool lines, are returning healthy profits. I was looking at your schooner today, she would make a small Guineaman it is true, but she would make a better privateer and I hear you already have a letter-of-marque and reprisal in her name.’
Kite nodded, uncertain where this rather smug catalogue of success was leading them. He was not long left in suspense. Makepeace topped up his glass.
‘Well now, Kite, I have a proposition to make to you. With your schooner and a portion of your capital, I wish to offer you a full half-share in the ownership of this little fleet. For myself the capital will secure me some retirement with my family and the peace of mind knowing that you, as a younger man, will continue the business to the mutual benefit of us both. In particular, of course, I shall seek assurances, drawn up by due process, that the inheritance of my children will be protected; in that I trust you implicitly. For you it would be a grand opportunity…’ Makepeace paused. ‘Now, what do you say, eh?’ Makepeace picked up his glass and drank deeply, watching Kite’s reaction.
Kite nodded slowly. The news of Mulgrave’s death, sad though it was, did not he thought, have any further bearing upon his own life. If Garvey knew of it, it was certain Wentworth did. Why Wentworth had concealed it from Kite was a mystery, but not one that Kite, at this late moment, considered worth troubling himself with. He did not know how long Kitty Robertson had been intriguing with Wentworth, but he thought vaguely that she might have had something to do with the matter. It was quite possible, he thought, that she might have been manipulating the younger man for some time long before their betrothal. Wentworth was certainly not the most engaging of the island’s potential lovers, but he was probably the most discreet. More certainly, he was the most liquid in terms of plunderable funds. Kite dismissed the train of thought. Despite the risks, he was wearied of St John’s and felt the tug of England and the rain swept hills of his native Cumbria. For a moment he thought of his father, and Helen, and how the letter he had written to his sister had probably never reached her, for he had received no reply despite giving her the address of Cornelis Verhagen in New York, with whom Wentworth was in regular correspondence. But a shadow still lay over a return to Cumbria and now it confronted him.
‘Well?’ prompted Makepeace.
‘I am attracted by your kind offer,’ Kite temporised, wondering how far he could trust this man whose worst excesses he had witnessed.
‘Go on, something’s troubling you. Don’t you trust me? I am offering you a partnership, Kite, a partnership. I am inviting you become an intimate at my house in the knowledge that you have opinions about my conduct, even evidence of my peccadilloes, that once known in certain places could blight my life – or what’s left of it.’ Makepeace shifted in his chair and sat upright. He was a little drunk, but his thoughts were lucid and his voice only a trifle slurred. ‘But consider, Kite, I trust you, upon my word I do.’ Makepeace paused, letting the import of his words sink in. Then he sighed and added, ‘so you may trust me and tell me what it is you fear by returning to England… Oh yes, I know of your intentions, you have touched upon the matter before, remember?’
‘Well,’ Kite pulled himself together. ‘I should need a house in Liverpool, and it concerns me how Puella would be regarded there.’
Makepeace waved aside the problems. ‘I shall see that you have a domicile befitting your standing as a wealthy sea-captain and merchant. As for Puella, if you don’t become a fool and marry the girl, you may keep her as a mistress in quiet propriety in Liverpool. You have no children, so the matter may be managed, and since she is free, you will have little to concern you. I cannot speak for London, but Liverpool is a rising place and a man with money and standing is not too pressed if he is discreet and does not behave scandalously.’ Makepeace smiled. ‘And I have never seen you as a man likely to behave scandalously… Does that ease your mind?’
‘A little…’
‘There is still the matter of…what is it that ails you, eh?’ Makepeace queried.
‘A murder.’
‘Ahhh. I see.’ Makepeace nodded. He neither saw not comprehended. ‘Would you care to elaborate?’ he prompted.
Kite recounted the unforgettable moments of that afternoon, omitting only his revulsion at the monstrous-headed baby that had lain between Susie’s shuddering thighs. It seemed so long ago, so detached from his present existence under the velvet, star-spangled tropical sky and he had become so different from the long-legged youth who had run in terror from the Hebblewhite’s barn.
When he had finished, Makepeace asked, ‘but you are in fact, quite innocent?’
Kite nodded. ‘Oh. Yes. Though I dream sometimes, less often than in the past but still occasionally, that I did kill the girl.’
‘But that is merely an hallucination.’
‘Yes,’ Kite agreed, ‘of course it is.’
‘Then you have nothing to fear.’
‘How so?’
‘Well, you are innocent in the first place and if, in the unlikely event that you are recognised, or the brothers hear of your presence in Liverpool and the matter is brought before the justices, you are now a man of sufficient means to defend yourself.’
Kite considered the matter. ‘And does this confession not tempt you to withdraw your offer?’
Makepeace shook his head with a smile. ‘I know of few people less likely to commit murder than you, Kite. Your confession, as you call it, alters my proposal not one whit.’
Kite sighed. Makepeace had not seen him butchering French soldiers at Le Gosier. ‘Very well. Though I must make plain that I shall not attempt any concealment. If my name is to be linked with yours, then I shall have perforce to take, as it were, the war into the enemy’s camp and visit my father… If he still lives.’
‘Of course, of course. So we may conclude that to be the principle of our partnership then,’ Makepeace held out the jug to refill Kite’s glass. ‘“Makepeace and Kite” has a certain ring about it, don’t you agree?’
Kite smiled as the mimbo ran darkly into his glass. ‘Let me see how the land lies in Cumbria before we put up a shop-sign in Liverpool,’ he said.
‘As you wish, m’dear fellow. Now to the precise nature of the sum I am asking…’
Kite called for more candles and they discussed figures until late, but when Makepeace reeled out into the night they had shaken hands, each expressing his satisfaction at the proposed new venture.
When Kite woke late next morning, Puella had been up for some time. His head was furred from the rum and the sun beat remorselessly in through the open window. Slowly the events of the previous evening trickled back into his consciousness: the news of Mulgrave’s death, the knowledge that it had been concealed from him, Makepeace’s proposal, his own confession, his acceptance and then the agreed figure completing the transaction. It was also, he realised with a start, the day appointed for the departure of the Spitfire. He had much to do and would have to call on Garvey before sailing.
‘Damnation!’ He leapt from the bed.
Puella came into the room silently as he threw the last of his clothes into a portmanteau, hurriedly preparing to leave the rented house.
‘Kite,’ she said, holding out a scrap of paper, her face a mask.
‘What is it?’ he asked looking up, but she merely waggled her hand impatiently, rustling the paper. The abrupt and almost monosyllabic nature of her communication with him marked the distances that remained separating them. Taking the folded note he opened it. It was written in a vaguely familiar hand that Kite could not identify; he looked at the simple date scrawled upon it.
‘Where did you get this?’
‘Mr Garvey.’
Of course, now he recognised the attorney’s script. ‘You called on Garvey at this time of the morning?’
‘It is not early,’ she said flatly, waiting for the significance of the date to sink in.
Kite looked at the paper again, and then up at Puella. ‘This date,’ Kite began, feeling the lump in his throat, ‘this date… this is when Charlie…’
Puella nodded, her dark eyes filled with tears. ‘It is also the date that Mr Mulgrave died.’
Kite recalled Dorothea’s dark mutterings. ‘Well, I’m damned!’
From Jamaica, Spitfire made for Savannah where she discharged her part-cargo of sugar and loaded cotton bales. It was the height of the hurricane season, but Kite reasoned that he was sufficiently far north to miss the worst and sailed as soon as the schooner was ready for sea.
Clear of the estuary, they headed north-east, the Spitfire slipping easily through the blue water. Flying fish fluttered away from her advancing shadow as it raced over the gently heaving surface of the sea, while a school of dolphins gambolled under her bowsprit, riding the invisible wave of pressure that her thrusting bow forced ahead of her hull.
Kite came below after the morning watch to break his fast to find Puella vomiting copiously. ‘Ah, Puella, you were not sea-sick on the passage to Savannah, is the Atlantic too much for you, my love?’
Her brown skin glazed with perspiration, Puella looked up from the wooden bucket and shook her head. ‘I am with child,’ she said.
Three days out the steady breeze began to pick up during the early forenoon. The schooner was running with the wind and sea on her starboard quarter, the skies were untroubled, but a lumpy swell was building, running up from the south and inclining Spitfire to scend as she raced along. An anxiety began to gnaw at Kite. He cared little for himself or the ship and crew, they were stout enough, but Puella’s condition worried him. She had carried Charlie serenely, but her present pregnancy seemed troubled. His ignorance reproached him; it seemed a lifetime ago that he had masqueraded as a surgeon and now his beloved Puella may well be in need of real help. She was the only woman on board and without Dorothea her isolation and vulnerability filled her with fear. Now the weather worsened and the battening down of the schooner only increased the staleness of the air below, trapping the sharp stink of vomit, so that both Kite and Puella were reminded of the slave-decks of the Enterprize. Kite made Puella as comfortable as possible, but now the motion of the Spitfire and the mephitic air only added to the unfortunate woman’s misery. It was not long before Kite was summoned on deck and compelled to leave Puella.
The Spitfire’s mate, a tall and powerful mulatto named Christopher Jones, drew his attention to the fact that there was an edge to the wind now and a rapid darkening the sky that presaged more than a mere gale.
‘Hurricane coming, Cap’n,’ Jones asserted, ‘we should get all the sails down and let her run off before it.’ Kite stepped forward and looked from the windward tell-tale indicating the direction of the wind, to the wildly swinging compass in its bowl. While he had been below with Puella the wind had begun to shift and they were already two points off their intended course. Kite bowed to the inevitable; at least they had sea room. He looked up at Jones and nodded. The mate was already raising his voice to make himself heard above the steady thrum of the gale in the rigging. The wind was not yet so strong that they would normally take in everything, but prudence dictated they should secure the schooner before the worst was upon them.
‘Leave her a scrap of canvas forrard!’ Kite called in Jones’s ear, ‘the clew of the fore topmast staysail! We’ll luff her and call all hands!’
Jones nodded agreement. ‘Aye. Aye, sir!’
Kite took his station beside the tiller as Jones called out the watch below. The Spitfire’s crew was smaller than during the Guadeloupe campaign, consisting of men willing to try their fortune with a long run across the Atlantic. The promise of prize-money inherent in the well known letter-of-marque that converted Spitfire into a privateer, had proved sufficient of a lure to both the feckless and the ambitious among the unemployed seafarers who idled their lives away along the waterfront of St John’s, Willoughby and Falmouth. These idlers feared the appearance of the Royal Navy’s cutters and launches, sent from English Harbour in search of such likely cannon-fodder. Besides, rates of pay aboard such private ships were better by far than the risks, dangers and uncertain pay in the men-of-war of His Britannic Majesty. Now Kite watched this motley band as it assembled on deck under the direction of Jones. The mate looked aft and nodded.
‘Down helm,’ Kite ordered, lending his weight to the helmsman on the tiller. The Spitfire turned up into the wind, bucking wildly, her bowsprit stabbing first at the sky and then as the advancing walls of grey waves as they surged towards her. As they rose over the summits and the breaking crests roared and seethed past them in tumbling dissolution, they were exposed to the full force of the wind. It tore at them with palpable force, howling in the standing rigging with a malevolent shriek as the sails flogged, rattling the swinging booms and gaffs so that the whole vessel trembled as they were lowered. Kite heard a faint scream as a terrified Puella, trapped below, thought the vessel was flying to pieces. Sheets of spray flew aboard over the bow, to be whipped aft in white streaks, so that the half-dry decks were sodden in an instant, and water streamed from every rope and spar above them. Caught in such a cascade, Kite felt his skin was stung as from a lash, so that he instinctively turned away.
Forward, each watch attending a mast, the gaffs came down and the reefed sails were slowly tamed by lashings, as the crew bent to the task. The square topsails and the outer headsails had been taken in earlier and, after a few minutes, the schooner began to fall off the wind, rolling almost on her starboard beam ends as she swung away. Then the wind caught in the reefed staysail forward and added its power to the turning moment of the tiller. Spitfire crashed like a live and triumphant being over the crest and suddenly ran with the breaking sea, accelerating away from where the constraint of her master had held her for those few, necessary minutes. Now, with only a scrap of canvas set over the stemhead, she tore away before the wind and Kite called for another man to be permanently stationed at the heavy tiller as it kicked in his hands.
‘By heaven, Mr Jones, she runs faster than a horse!’
‘Indeed she do, sir!’ Jones responded, affected by the exhilaration of the moment, with a broad grin. ‘Much faster!’
By now the sky was overcast, the scud lowering like a dark mantle, closing about them in their isolation. Beneath their keel they began to feel the Spitfire responding to the contrary and confusing influences of a cross-swell, at variance with the seas that rolled under them. Now there was another, sideways lurch, an arhythmic and often abrupt roll that caused the following seas to catch up and strike the stern with a hammer blow that shook the hull from stern to stem. Once such a sea boiled over the rail, pouring forward in a torrent of water that swept two men from their feet and carried them forward so that they fetched up against the foremast fiferails in a swirling welter of water.
Half an hour after they had run off before the gale, just as Kite had decided he would relinquish the deck to Jones again and go and tend to Puella, the wind suddenly veered and began to roar with a deepening tone. The change was abrupt, the increase in force incontrovertible. Kite had never heard such a noise before, even when, two years earlier, he had been in St John’s when an hurricane passed to the south of the island, sweeping through the cane fields of distant Martinique with destructive effect. But this was different, the booming roar seemed to contain an unimaginable power to which the former screaming shriek was an insipid prelude.
Jones caught his eye; he was no longer exhilarated. The mulatto’s face was drained of colour, eloquent evidence his fear. Jones hauled himself aft to where Kite stood clinging to the starboard main shrouds.
‘Bad!’ he shouted. ‘Big, big wind, Cap’n.’
‘Aye,’ Kite bellowed back.
‘Bad hurricane, Cap’n! I’ll put lifelines on the helmsmen!’
Kite nodded and let go of his hand-hold and plunged across the deck, fetching up against the binnacle. It took him some minutes before the spray allowed him to see clearly the relationship between the swinging card and the lubber’s line, but it was obvious they were now headed north. Another such change in wind direction and they would be heading north north west.
He puzzled over this for some moments while Jones secured the helmsmen, but could make little sense of it. Perhaps the wind would veer when it next shifted, but something persuaded him otherwise. Fortunately they had sea room and provided there were no other ships in the vicinity which they could run foul of, they would have an uncomfortable but not a fatal experience.
In the next quarter of an hour the wind backed another point. By now the booming roar had dulled their thoughts. Jones put the men onto the pumps to give them something to do, but Kite, as master, could enjoy no such mind-numbing labour. He was left to try and think amid this awesome din. He became slowly aware that a subtle change was occurring. As the violence of the wind rose, the wild motion of the schooner lessened. It took Kite some time to penetrate this mystery until he realised that his vision was almost permanently obscured by the mass of water in the air. It was like a mist that moved with the speed and consistency of bird-shot, a tangible manifestation of the might of the wind. Eventually he realised that the wind in its rising had kicked up a heavy sea, but had now reached such a scale of power, that it no longer did so. Now the wind simply excoriated the sea’s surface, slicing it off it and carrying it to leeward. The air had become half liquid, salty, possessed of mass and density.
At first Kite thought this would ease the burden on the Spitfire, for her motion was far less violent, but in this he was deceived. It took a moment to register, but now she lay down under a constant pressure, and the forces impinging upon her were no longer air, but air that was sodden with a weight of water. Even as the schooner continued to run off before them, the very forces that impelled her were conniving at her destruction, pushing her myriad component parts, those hundreds of scarphs and rebated joints, those butts, tenons and knees all held together with thousands of trenails, iron bolts and copper rovings, to the limits of their individual strengths.
On deck the men huddled unhappily and Kite had to lash himself to the weather rail, the thin line of the flag halliard cutting into him as the wind tried to pluck him from his perch. Even breathing became a labour, so choked was the air with salt water, so high the pressure of the wind upon his body. The mind fumbled through this chaos, and Kite found himself a living contradiction, with every instinct in his being telling him to lie down and curl up like a wounded cat, to make himself as small and insignificant as possible, to let the great wind pass over him in the simple hope that he would survive. Against this was an instinctive urge to reason, for survival depended upon the Spitfire remaining undamaged, providing the means of sustaining them upon the surface of this flattened, scoured and tormented sea. To achieve this it was not enough to let her go; she required nursing, helping through her ordeal in order that she could help them.
But Kite was tired and hungry, battered by the incessant noise, soaked by the wet and driving air, buffeted and bruised by the violent assault of wind and water. As hour succeeded hour he followed the crew, and slowly slipped into a half-conscious acceptance of the inevitable. He lost interest in their compass heading, for the whole world had contracted into this small circle of white and furious water above which the once vast and over-arching sky had contracted into a dull limit of cloud-water, as thick and circumscribing as a fog. His mind seemed capable only of asking a simple and increasingly familiar question: what did it matter? What did it matter?
Nor was Kite the only man upon the Spitfire’s deck to be so afflicted. Those not hunkered down in the lee of some strong point to which they had lashed themselves, stood at the tiller. The two men who struggled to keep the Spitfire before the wind were tiring rapidly; the compass bowl was difficult to see, so they steered by the tell-tales. But their concentration lapsed, their arms ached and they received no relief. Then, as a sea crashed at the stern and stove in the stern windows, canting the deck violently so that one of them lost his precarious footing. The Spitfire drove off to starboard with a heavy larboard lurch from which, as she broached, she did not recover.
Puella screamed as tons of water cascaded through the broken stern windows, smashing in the preventive shutters and filling the cabin with a sudden, cold deluge. Perhaps it was Puella’s thin shriek of terror, or perhaps it was the thin halliard cutting into his waist, that stirred Kite. He was vaguely troubled and roused from his catalepsy by the growing conviction that all was far from well. His mind swam, but he realised he had not heard the clunk of the pumps for some time; and then Spitfire protested again. The rigging to which Kite was seized, suddenly jerked and, despite the roar of the wind the crack from aloft was loud enough to wake a dozing man. The main topmast broke, snapping clean off above the doubling. The spar hung down, swaying and tugging at those ropes that still confined it. These jerked and strained under the load while the schooner fell farther over to larboard. From forward there came a report like the discharge of a gun: the shred of reefed canvas set on the forestay blew out.
Someone sent up a shout as Spitfire lay over on her beam ends and the deck heeled alarmingly. Kite lost his footing and hung from the weather pinrail like a sack of potatoes. The jerk finally alerted him to imminent disaster.
Kite had neither the experience nor the understanding of the great natural forces unleashed against his small schooner to comprehend that, by running off before the wind, his ignorance had contributed to their plight. Nor had Jones, notwithstanding his competence as the mate of an inter-island schooner, the faintest concept of the true nature of the hurricane. But both men, and several of the hands, knew the remedy for their present plight, and Jones’s large frame was soon crouched over the weather rail, a grey silhouette against the sky forward, clinging for dear life with one hand and sawing at the rigging with the other.
The knife seemed to take an eternity to sever the first shroud, then the second was attacked. Meanwhile someone had found the axe and had jammed himself inside the main fife-rails from where he began to hack at the foot of the mainmast. Kite lugged out his own knife and turned to the tarred ropes that strained like iron bars under the load aloft, and all the while the delicate fabric of spars and rigging trembled and shook as the loose main topmast swung wildly hither and thither in reaction to the bucking of the schooner.
But the hull lifted less readily now, sluggish with the amount of water that had been taken aboard, assaulted by the wind and laid over at such an angle that the cunning of her hull lines contributed little to her survival. The beautiful and lively schooner was rapidly disintegrating into a derelict hulk. For several long and tremulous minutes, as the men hacked and sawed, the fate of the Spitfire hung, quite literally, in the balance. Then, with a mighty shudder and a violent windward lurch that nearly flung overboard the energetic seaman forward, the mainmast went by the board, followed by the greater portion of the foremast and the entire jib-boom. The noise of this collapse was snatched away by the wind but the deck was covered by a spider’s web of fallen and tangled rigging, all of it still secured or fouled in the mass of spars and wreckage now alongside. How it failed to entrap anyone was little short of miraculous.
Slowly the Spitfire adjusted herself to this new situation, seeking the equilibrium between the force of the wind and her own exposed surfaces. The drag of wreckage affected the leeward drift and slowly, as rope after rope was cut through by the labouring crew, the Spitfire spun round so that she stabilised with the wind on her larboard bow and the mass of spars and rigging streamed out to windward, still secured by a pair of unsevered larboard shrouds.
With this Kite bawled his relief. ‘Avast there! Leave that raffle for the time being.’ It was no longer banging against the hull and its drag helped hold the schooner almost head to wind, keeping her vulnerable, damaged stern to leeward. Within a moment Jones had all hands turned up and the men at the pumps. The carpenter’s sounding revealed four feet of water in the well. Kite swore; it was impossible that such an intake of water had not damaged the greater part of their spoilable cargo.
As if to reward them for their labour, the wind now began to drop. It died rapidly and the cloud cleared so that the sun shone and speedily dried up the deck. The sudden brightening raised spirits, and grins of relief were visible all round the deck. Kite went below to order the cook to dole out a measure of rum to everyone, then he sought to comfort Puella. He found her crouching sodden in a corner of the cabin, the deck of which was awash. Amid the water slopping up and down were personal effects; a pair of shoes, a fancy hat and a stocking belonging to Puella, some papers, a feathered quill and a shirt belonging to himself. Splintered wood from the window shutters that had been torn out of their frames, added to the mess.
Despite the water washing about her, Puella was fast asleep. Terror and exhaustion had succeeded with her where they had failed with Kite. Bracing himself against the lurch of the schooner he tenderly lifted her and placed her, wet as she was, in the dry cot swaying above the mess on the cabin deck. Slowly the water was draining away, exposing great shards of the shattered crown glass from the windows which lay shining in the sunlight now flooding through the open frames.
Planting a kiss upon Puella’s head Kite glanced out of the shattered windows as he withdrew. Conscious that the schooner was now bucking violently again he went back on deck to find the whole surface of the sea boiling. Flapping and exhausted seabirds were falling aboard, adding the quality of a nightmare to the scene. Kite noticed immediately that the wind had fallen almost dead calm and divined the reason for the chaotic state of the sea. It was liberated from the tyrannical driving of the wind and now flew first from one direction and then the other. It struck him that if each incoming wave was the remnant of the wind’s force, if the waves appeared omni-directional it followed that the wind that had generated them must be omni-directional too.
How could this be? Especially as now there was little wind at all. He went aft, the deck bucking madly so that in a sense this wild and irregular motion was worse than the steady onslaught of the tempest. He managed to work aft and stood at the taffrail, and what he saw seemed like a seething madness as waves slapped into each other, sometimes throwing themselves high into the air and the Spitfire was tossed about betwixt summits and troughs, like a cork in a millstream.
A hint of a steady gust blew his disordered hair across his face, coinciding with a cloud crossing the sun. The passing shadow raced across the surface of the sea which had, in the sunlight, lost its grey aspect in favour of its customary blue. But he sensed no pleasure from this brief warning; he noticed that the direction of the wind was contrary to what it had been. Half understanding the mighty phenomenon, he felt the prickle of alarm. Stumbling forward he bent over the binnacle, peering at the swinging compass card to confirm his partial grasp of mighty events. Another gust of wind swept the deck and he glanced up quickly, but the tell-tale had gone with the mast. Then as if pressing its insistence upon him, the wind picked up and blew steadily. Spray lifted over the rail and pattered across the deck, laying a feather of wet planking as if to confirm its direction.
‘By God,’ Kite muttered to himself, ‘there’s more to come!’
Within the hour the sky was once more overcast and rain swept down in torrents, driving across the deck with an icy chill which was in sharp and uncomfortable contrast with the previous warm, wet salt-laden air. It was now growing dark as night fell. They had had nothing to eat since the previous day, but the wind was increasing all the time and the daylight had not quite faded behind the lowering scud, before the wind shriek had deepened to the booming roar of the returning hurricane.
They kept the pumps going all night as the Spitfire wallowed endlessly, her bow held off the wind by the remains of the wreckage, much of which tore free during the hours of darkness. Towards the end of the night the wind dropped, imperceptibly at first, so that it was some time before the exhausted Kite knew their ordeal was approaching its end as the hurricane finally passed them by. Dawn found the Spitfire left to her fate, wallowing, waterlogged in the trough of the sea.
No semblance of discipline haunted her decks. Men slumped where they fell after the toil at the pumps, or dragged themselves out of the way to lie inert, uncaring, only glad to be allowed to sleep to a gentle rocking. Dawn found them thus, and the forenoon was all but over before some, but not all, were wakened from their slumbers by a piercing shriek.