King of the Sea

Chapter 28

Chapter 28

"How rash of her. Did she give you any reason?" Now he wished he hadn't started this hare. He'd only done so to add conviction to his story. To round it off and bury it. But now it was up and running he had no choice but to run with it and steer it as far from danger as possible. He knew Aunt Daphne well enough to realize that, if he strayed too wide of the truth, she'd be onto it like a fox terrier. And once she owned the line on a lie she'd not rest till she'd harried it all the way to earth. "Er, she said she's just a boring, empty-headed girl from a dirt-common family... not good enough for me. Such rot!" "I see. And what did you say to that?"

Lawrence came to a halt; they were now about a half way up the asphalt path. "Oh, I tried to make her see that she wasn't, at least not to me. I mean, education isn't the sole measure of a person, is it?" "No," Daphne allowed. "There's also breeding and taste and gentility. But..." Her tone wandered fastidiously. "I shouldn't have thought - on the face of it, mind you, and not knowing the young person terribly well - I shouldn't have thought her scores in those departments ..."

"What about simple goodness?" Lawrence asked pugnaciously. "And what about the sort of person a person could have been if only they'd been given a chance in life?"

"Ah!" Her solemnly mocking tone suggested that she could just remember having been so quixotic once herself, but oh, so long ago. "Yes, of course what about them?"

Of those six words the first three were a soothing foil to the final three, which came at him like a rapier. "Well," he said, turning the thrust over the arm. "It's all water under the bridge now."

"Lawrence," she said, putting just enough edge into the word to make him realize that unless he told her a lot more than he had done so far, she'd start getting blunt with him. Such understandings between people 1 expressed in the merest intonation of a single word - usually take a lifetime to establish; but with Daphne Dowty a week was enough. Lawrence, having known her all his life, was now almost certain she already knew everything. She'd probably even followed him to Emma's rooms in Upper Street. Or perhaps she only suspected something was afoot and was now fishing for more. Any direct challenge on his part would be fatal; she'd have the whole truth out, flayed and dissected, in seconds. His best hope of avoiding such a fate now was to give her enough to chew on. At least he could continue talking about the whole affair in the past tense, still; for one of the good features about Aunt Daphne's rather oblique character was that she'd withhold any blunt, direct questions as long as she felt she was getting somewhere.

"May I be utterly frank, Aunt?" He took her arm and resumed their stroll. "Oh dear!" she sighed, and then surveyed him

with an speculative eye. "How you've matured since starting to work in the City! Or is it the Dramatic Society at work? Don't I remember a line like that in the play you did before Christmas? Do you have to be utterly frank, dear? Can't you just give it me in little hints?" The smile turned steely as she concluded, "I'm quite good at them, you know."

Lawrence drew a physical deep breath before taking a metaphorical plunge. "I am... I mean I was entirely to blame. When I came home from the City - that day she got the boot - I mean, I just felt so sorry for her..."

"Yes, about that, by the way ..." Daphne decided to feed him some of what Catherine had told her without, of course, revealing her source. Also, she saw a chance to kill one or two other birds with the same stone. "It so happens I walked through the Circus about forty minutes before your tram drew up to see Mrs Drew, as a matter of fact. D'you know her? She lives down Upper Street just beyond where you met Catherine and me just now." He admitted he did not know the lady. "Such a tragedy! She fell under a horse shortly after that. She's in hospital still. Her son is in the Choral

Society." "Mrs Drew...?" Lawrence made a lightning decision to reserve a bit of ground ... just in case. "It does vaguely ring a bell. Anyway?"

Yes, anyway, I saw your Miss Emma Harding waiting for a tram there at the top of Cannonbury Road, almost opposite... what's the name of that little street? It escapes me for the moment." "Ah... Compton Mews, was it?" He suggested the

next street down from Goldsmith's Place. "Something like that. Anyway, she let two or three go by - which did make me wonder what tram she was, in fact, waiting for. You don't suppose she could have been waiting for the one that eventually brought you?"

"Oh, of course she was." His admission startled her but she was swift to recover her place. "Really? How extraordinary! Did she have any reason to suppose you'd go to some heroic length to help her in her straits?"

It struck him as quite extraordinary that he had never questioned Emma's motives in waiting there. Now, having to speak almost without thought, he decided to put the worst possible construction on her actions knowing that Aunt Daphne never ques tioned anything scurrilous. "She wanted to try and snare me in some way - get her revenge on the mater through me, and all that, don't you know."

"Snare you?" It wasn't a real question, just the first thing that came into her head to give her time to think.

But Lawrence was onto it. "In a rather obvious way, I should have thought, Aunt Daphne." His tone suggested that his aunt's naïveté amazed him.

"My, my, Lawrence," she said calmly. "You do rather take one's breath away at times." She did not, however pause in her energetic stroll up the hill. "So you foiled her, did you? Got her to chuck you! How clever!"

"If only ..." He hesitated. "What, dear?"

"That's what I meant when I said could I be utterly frank. You see, I rather fell for her. That's the amazing thing. I'm so full of her, I think about nothing else, and there's no one I can talk to about it. So I wondered if I could talk to you, Aunt Daphne? There's no one else."

"Such a testimonial! Oh dear, well, I did ask for it, I suppose. It serves me jolly well right." They had reached the front door of her house by

now.

"Come in," she suggested eagerly. "We'll have oodles and oodles of crumpets by the fire. Just what a growing young man - I must stop saying boy, mustn't I! Yes just what a growing young man - needs, eh?"

"Oh yes jolly, what!" Lawrence replied wanly. He did not, of course, intend telling his aunt anything like the whole truth just enough to enable her to help him see his way forward.

S IR HECTOR SHAW, founder and senior partner in the Shaw & Eggar Line, came to New York in person, early that May. His first business there was to summon Frank to the company's offices in West Forty-Second Street, by Pier 82. An old seadog himself, he had started before the mast in the 'thirties and worked his way up to master, and then owner, by superb seamanship and innate ruthlessness - qualities he saw in the young (to him) Troy.

Frank, knowing the Old Man had an unrivalled nose for information, was afraid that news of his "marriage" might have somehow leaped all the intervening parties and landed at the rim of Sir Hector's ear; if so, this interview would be the parting of the ways between himself and Shaw & Eggar. It was with some misgiving, therefore, that he marched down the slope at the end of the street toward the company's offices not that any who saw him - would have guessed it. There were many in that area who knew him, of course, if only by sight - sailors and longshoremen. To them he seemed as ever, Cap'n Troy, the whispering volcano walking tall, stiff as a mainmast of steel, and radiating that kind of contained menace which commanded respect, if only out of self-interest.

Frank himself was more acutely aware of his reputation and the effect it had on those around him than ever before. The contrast between his ironclad exterior and the turmoil within made sure of that. He could still hardly believe he had actually gone through with the marriage. From time to time he would remember the scene as if it were a particularly vivid dream, or a monstrous, far-fetched yarn told under slack canvas, waiting for a breeze. Still less could he believe that her brother and his wife in New Haven had accepted and acquiesced in his reasons for keeping the marriage quiet: "When Hilda died I took a solemn vow I'd never marry again. I've told every man and dog who ever sailed under me that my only wife is the sea. That's my reputation, my power of command. If it ever gets out that a girl half my age fluttered an eyelash and made me her slave, I'm for the breakers. No, if I'm to sail under different colours, I need time to get new papers ..." And so on. And they had swallowed it!

What a frightening glimpse of power that had given him which was curious, because it was the same power as he exercised daily, whether at sea or at home, and it had never disturbed him before. He was so accustomed to being obeyed that he no longer questioned the cause; he simply knew in his bones that he was the sort of man whose orders were carried

out. There seemed to be a kind of instinct in people, a need for leadership, that made them obey him. And what was his need? Whose call would he obey? Not Sir Hector's. Not any man's, nor any woman's either - not even Teresa's, in the end.

Death, perhaps? That had certainly been true in his younger days. Then he needed to look Death in the eyes almost daily, touch its shrouds, smell its chill breath and cheat it of its victory, one more time. In all the universe there was no thrill to equal that.

But somehow, on the night he ran Phoenix aground, that phase of his life had come to an end. Now he courted thrills by which he meant dangers less physical kind: exposure, ruin, disgrace. Like three captious jesters, they spiced his waking with their - of a jeers at the safe, respectable world; like three unctuous courtiers, they flattered his retiring with their cries of "One more day, Cap'n!" and "You've done it again!" What would Sir Hector say if he knew the sort of man who now paused and smiled to himself at that

august threshold!

He tapped respectfully on the chairman's door. "Come in!" It was a familiar and forbidding bark; his spirit fell.

He entered to find the Old Man standing half way between his desk and the door, waiting to shake his hand. That had never happened before.

Face to face at last, Frank felt in reverse all the feelings he inspired in others. Sir Hector, though all of eighty years old, still stood six foot two, still shook your hand with a grip that made pythons sound friendly. His huge, craggy forehead sprouted a more luxuriant growth of eyebrow than ever - twin thickets from beneath which he ambushed you with eyes that could cut diamonds. "Good of you to come so quickly, Troy," he said. "You're looking well.

You've made a good recovery." "Complete, I think, sir. I hope you had a fair crossing?"

A faint smile creased the leather face. "Fairer than yours! Do sit down." He waited for Frank to obey and then crossed the room to a plan chest beside the door, saying, "Stay where you are," over his shoulder.