Frenchman's Creek Read online

  "Why did you not have a woman on board before?"

  He smiled, his mouth full of bread and cheese, but he did not answer.

  "I forgot to tell you," she said, "what Godolphin said the other day."

  "And what did he say?"

  "He told me that there were ugly rumours about the countryside, because of the men belonging to your ship. He said that he had heard of cases of women in distress."

  "In distress about what?"

  "The very thing I asked him. And he replied, to my choking delight, that he feared some of the country-women had suffered at the hands of your damned scoundrels."

  "I doubt if they suffered."

  "So do I."

  He went on munching bread and cheese, glancing aloft now and again at the trim of the sails.

  "My fellows never force their attentions upon your women," he said, "the trouble generally is that your women won't leave them alone. They creep out of their cottages, and stray upon the hills, if they think La Mouette is at anchor near their shores. Even our faithful William has trouble that way, I understand."

  "William is very-Gallic."

  "So am I, so are we all, but pursuit can sometimes be embarrassing."

  "You forget," she said, "that the country-women find their husbands very dull."

  "They should teach their husbands better manners."

  "The English yokel is not at his best when he makes love."

  "So I have heard. But surely he can improve, upon instruction."

  "How can a woman instruct her husband in the things she does not know herself, in which she has had no intuition?"

  "Surely she has instinct?"

  "Instinct is not always enough."

  "Then I am very sorry for your country-women."

  He leant on his elbow, feeling in the pocket of his long coat for a pipe, and she watched him fill the bowl with the dark harsh tobacco that had lain once in the jar in her bedroom, and in a minute or two he began to smoke, holding the bowl in his hand.

  "I told you once before," he observed, his eyes aloft at his spars, "that Frenchmen have a reputation for gallantry that is not merited. We cannot all be brilliant our side of the channel, while the blunderers remain on yours."

  "Perhaps there is something in our English climate that is chilling to the imagination?"

  "Climate has nothing to do with it, nor racial differences. A man, or a woman for that matter, is either born with a natural understanding of these things or he is not."

  "And supposing, in marriage for example, one partner has the understanding and the other has not?"

  "Then the marriage is doubtless very monotonous, which I believe most marriages to be." A wisp of smoke blew across her face, and looking up she saw that he was laughing at her.

  "Why are you laughing?" she said.

  "Because your face was so serious, as though you were considering writing a treatise on incompatibility."

  "Perhaps I may do so, in my old age."

  "The Lady St. Columb must write with knowledge of her subject, that is essential to all treatises."

  "Possibly I have that knowledge."

  "Possibly you have. But to make the treatise complete you must add a final word on compatibility. It does happen, you know, from time to time, that a man finds a woman who is the answer to all his more searching dreams. And the two have understanding of each other, from the lightest moment to the darkest mood."

  "But it does not happen very often?"

  "No, not very often."

  "Then my treatise will have to remain incomplete."

  "Which will be unfortunate for your readers, but even more unfortunate for yourself."

  "Ah, but instead of a word on-compatibility, as you phrase it, I could write a page or two on motherhood. I am an excellent mother."

  "Are you?"

  "Yes. Ask William. He knows all about it."

  "If you are so excellent a mother what are you doing on the deck of La Mouette with your legs tucked up under you and your hair blowing about your face, discussing the intimacies of marriage with a pirate?"

  This time it was Dona who laughed, and putting her hands to her hair she tried to arrange the disordered ringlets, tying them behind her ears with a ribbon from her bodice.

  "Do you know what Lady St. Columb is doing now?" she asked.

  "I should love to know."

  "She is lying in bed with a feverish headache and a chill on the stomach, and she will receive no one in her room except William, her faithful servant, who now and again brings her grapes to soothe her fever."

  "I am sorry for her ladyship, especially if she browses on incompatibility as she lies there."

  "She does no such thing, she is far too level-headed."

  "If Lady St. Columb is level-headed why did she masquerade as a highwayman in London, and dress herself in breeches?"

  "Because she was angry."

  "Why was she angry?"

  "Because she had not made a success of her life."

  "And finding she had not made a success, she tried to escape?"

  "Yes."

  "And if Lady St. Columb tosses on a bed of fever now, regretting the past, who is this woman sitting on the deck beside me?"

  "She is a cabin-boy, the most insignificant member of your crew."

  "The cabin-boy has a monstrous appetite, he has eaten up all the cheese, and three-quarters of the loaf."

  "I am sorry. I thought you had finished."

  "So I have."

  He smiled at her, and she looked away, lest he should read her eyes and think her wanton, which she knew herself to be, and did not care. Then, emptying his pipe on the deck, he said: "Would you like to sail the ship?"

  She looked at him once again, her eyes dancing.

  "May I? Will she not sink?"

  He laughed, and rose to his feet, pulling her up beside him, and they went together to the great wheel, where he said a word to the helmsman.

  "What do I do?" asked Dona.

  "You hold the spokes in your two hands-thus. You keep the ship steady on her course-thus. Do not let her fall away too much, or you will catch the big foresail aback. Do you feel the wind on the back of your head?"

  "Yes."

  "Keep it there then, and do not let it come forward of your right cheek."

  Dona stood by the wheel, with the spokes in her hands, and after a moment she felt the lifting of the ship, she sensed the movement of the lively hull, and the surge of the vessel as she swept forward over the long seas. The wind whistled in the rigging and the spars, and there was a sound of humming, too, in the narrow triangular sails above her head, while the great square foresail pulled and strained upon its ropes like a live thing.

  Down in the waist of the ship the men had perceived the change of helmsman, and nudging one another, and pointing, they laughed up at her, calling to one another in the Breton patois she could not understand, while their captain stood beside her, his hands deep in the pockets of his long coat, his lips framed in a whistle, his eyes searching the seas ahead.

  "So there is one thing," he said at last, "that my cabin-boy can do by instinct."

  "What is it?" she asked, her hair blowing over her face.

  "He can sail a ship."

  And laughing, he walked away, leaving her alone with La Mouette.

  For an hour Dona stood her trick at the wheel, as happy, she thought to herself, as James would be with a new toy, and finally, her arms tiring, she looked over her shoulders to the helmsman she had relieved, who stood by the wheel watching her with a grin on his face, and coming forward he took the wheel from her again, and she went below to the master's cabin and lay down upon his bunk and slept.

  Once, opening an eye, she saw him come in and lean over the charts on the table, jotting down calculations on a piece of paper, and then she must have fallen asleep again for when she woke the cabin was empty, and rising and stretching herself she went on deck, aware, with a certain sense of shame, that she was hungry again.
br />   It was seven then, and the ship was drawing near the coast with the Frenchman himself at the wheel. She said nothing, but went and stood by him, watching the blur of the coast on the horizon.

  Presently he called out an order to his men, and they began to climb the rigging, little lithe figures, hand over hand, like monkeys, and then Dona saw the great square topsail sag and fall into folds as they furled it upon the yard.

  "When a ship comes in sight of land," he said to her, "the topsail is the first thing that shows to a landsman ashore.

  It is still two hours to dusk, and we do not wish to be seen."

  She looked towards the distant coast, her heart beating with a strange excitement, and she was seized, even as he and his men were seized, with the spirit of superb adventure.

  "I believe you are going to do something very mad and very foolish," she said.

  "You told me you wanted Godolphin's wig," he answered.

  She watched him out of the tail of her eye, intrigued by his coolness, his quiet, steady voice, just the same as it was when he went with her fishing on the river. "What is going to happen?" she said. "What are you going to do?"

  He did not answer immediately. He called a fresh order to his men, and another sail was furled.

  "Do you know Philip Rashleigh?" he said after a while.

  "I have heard Harry speak of him."

  "He married Godolphin's sister-but that is by-the-way. Philip Rashleigh is expecting a ship from the Indies, a fact which came to my ears too late, otherwise I should have taken steps to meet her. As it is, I presume her to have arrived at her destination within the last two days. My intention is to seize her, as she lies at anchor, put a prize crew on board, and have them sail her to the opposite coast."

  "But supposing her men outnumber yours?"

  "That is one of the risks I take continuously. The essential thing is the element of surprise, which has never failed me yet."

  He looked down at her, amused by her frown of perplexity, and her shrug of the shoulder, as though she considered him crazy indeed.

  "What do you suppose I do?" he said, "when I shut myself in my cabin and make my plans? Do I stake everything on a turn of luck? My men are not idle, you know, when I seek relaxation in the creek. Some of them move about the country, as Godolphin told you, but not with the intention of causing women to be distressed. The distress is a minor detail."

  "Do they speak English?"

  "Of course. That is why I choose them for this particular work."

  "You are exceedingly thorough," she said.

  "I dislike inefficiency," he countered.

  Little by little the line of the coast became distinct, and they were entering a great sweeping bay. Away to the west she could see white stretches of sand, turning to shadowed grey now in the gathering dusk. The ship was heading north, sailing towards a dark headland, and as yet there seemed to be no creek or inlet where a vessel could lie at anchor.

  "You don't know where we are going?" he asked.

  "No," she answered.

  He smiled, saying nothing, and began to whistle softly under his breath, watching her as he did so, so that at last she looked away, knowing that her eyes betrayed her, and his also; they were speaking to each other without words. She looked out over the smooth sea towards the land, the smell of it came to her with the evening breeze, warm cliff grass, and moss, and trees, hot sand where the sun had shone all day, and she knew that this was happiness, this was living as she had always wished to live. Soon there would be danger, and excitement, and the reality perhaps of fighting, and through it all and afterwards they would be together, making their own world where nothing mattered but the things they could give to one another, the loveliness, the silence, and the peace. And then, stretching her arms above her head and smiling, and glancing back at him over her shoulder she said to him, "Where are we bound then?"

  "We are bound for Fowey Haven," he told her.

  Chapter XII

  THE NIGHT WAS DARK, and very still. What breeze there was came from the north, but here, under the lee of the headland, there was none of it. Only a sudden whistle in the rigging now and again and a ripple across the face of the black water told that a mile or two off-shore the breeze still held. La Mouette lay at anchor on the fringe of a little bay, and close at hand-so close that you could toss a pebble onto the rocks-rose the great cliffs, shadowy and indistinct in the darkness. The ship had come stealthily to her appointed place, no voices were raised, no commands given as she bore up into the wind to drop anchor, and the chain that dropped through the padded hawser gave a hollow muffled sound. For a moment or so the colony of gulls, nesting in hundreds in the cliffs above, became restive and disturbed, and their uneasy cries echoed against the cliff face and travelled across the water, and then, because there was no further movement, they settled again, and the silence was unbroken. Dona stood against the rail on the poop-deck watching the headland, and it seemed to her that there was something eerie in the stillness, something strange, as though they had come unwittingly to a land asleep, whose dwellers lay under a spell, and these gulls that had risen at their approach were sentinels, placed there to give warning. She remembered then, that this country and these cliffs which were another part of her own coast, must be for her, this night at any rate, a hostile place. She had come to enemy territory, and the townsfolk of Fowey Haven, who at this moment were sleeping in their beds, were alien too.

  The crew of La Mouette were gathered in the waist of the ship, she could see them standing shoulder to shoulder, motionless and silent, and for the first time since she had started on the adventure she was aware of a tiny prick of misgiving, a feminine chill of fear. She was Dona St. Columb, wife of an English landowner and baronet, and because of impulsive madness she had thrown in her lot with a pack of Bretons, of whom she knew nothing but that they were pirates and outlaws, unscrupulous and dangerous, led by a man who had never told her anything of himself, whom she loved ridiculously without rhyme or reason, a thing which-if she stayed to consider it in cold blood-would make her hot with shame. It might be that the plan would fail, that he and his men would be captured, and she with them, and the whole band of them would be brought ignominiously to justice, and then it would not be long before her identity would be established, Harry brought hotfoot from London. She could see in a flash the whole story blazed over the country, the horror and the scandal it would cause. A sordid tarnished air would cling upon it, there would be smutty laughter in London amongst Harry's friends, and Harry himself would probably blow his brains out, and the children be orphaned, forbidden to speak her name, their mother who had run away after a French pirate like a kitchen-maid after a groom. The thoughts chased themselves round her head, as she gazed down at the silent crew of La Mouette, seeing, in her mind, her comfortable bed at Navron, the peaceful garden, the safety and normality of life with the children. And then, looking up, she saw that the Frenchman was standing beside her, and she wondered how much he could read in her face.

  "Come below," he said quietly, and she followed him, feeling subdued suddenly like a pupil who was to receive chastisement from his master, and she wondered how she would answer him should he chide her for her fear. It was dark in the cabin, two candles gave a feeble glow, and he sat down on the edge of the table considering her, while she stood in front of him, her hands behind her back.

  "You have remembered that you are Dona St. Columb," he said.

  "Yes," she answered.

  "And you have been wishing, up there on the deck, that you were safe home again, and had never set eyes on La Mouette."

  There was no reply to this, the first part of his sentence might be true, but the last could never be. There was silence between them for a moment, and she wondered if all women, when in love, were torn between two impulses, a longing to throw modesty and reserve to the winds and confess everything, and an equal determination to conceal the love forever, to be cool, aloof, utterly detached, to die rather than admit a thing so p
ersonal, so intimate.

  She wished she were someone else, whistling carelessly, hands stuck into breeches pockets, discussing with the captain of the ship the schemes and possibilities of the coming night, or that he was different, another personality, someone for whom she felt no concern, instead of being the one man in the world she loved and wanted.

  And there was a flame of anger in her suddenly, that she, who had laughed at love and scorned the sentimental, should be brought, in so few weeks, to such shaming degradation, to such despicable weakness. He got up from the table and opened the locker in the bulkhead, and brought out a bottle and two glasses.

  "It is always unwise," he said, "to set forth upon an adventure with a cold heart and an empty stomach, that is, if one is untrained to adventure." He poured the wine into a glass, leaving the other empty, and gave the full one to her.

  "I shall drink afterwards," he said, "when we return."

  She noticed, for the first time, that there was a tray on the sideboard by the door, covered with a napkin, and he went now and brought this to the table. There was cold meat, and bread upon it, and a slice of cheese. "This is for you," he said, "eat it quickly, for time is getting short." He turned his back on her, busying himself with a chart on the side table, and she began to eat and drink, despising herself already for the reluctance that had come upon her on the deck, and when she had eaten some of the meat, and cut herself a slice of bread and cheese, and had finished the glass of wine he had poured for her, she felt that the doubts and fears would not return, they had been, after all, the outcome of chilled feet and an empty stomach, and he had realised this from the beginning, understanding her mood in his strange incalculable way.

  She pushed back her chair, and he turned, hearing the sound, and he was smiling at her, and she laughed at him in return, flushing guiltily, like a spoilt child. "That is better, is it not?" he said. "Yes," she answered, "how did you know?"

  "Because the master of a ship makes it his business to know these things," he said, "and a cabin-boy must be broken in to piracy rather more gently than the rest of my crew. And now to business." He picked up the chart he had been studying and she saw that it was a plan of Fowey Haven, and he placed it before her on the table.

  "The main anchorage is there, in deep water, opposite the town," he said, putting his finger on the plan, "and Rashleigh's vessel will be lying about here, where his vessels always lie, moored to a buoy at the entrance of this creek."