King of the Sea

Chapter 13

Chapter 13

Lawrence continued on toward Farringdon for the tram out to Highbury, on which he'd pick tomorrow's winners. It was too late to bank his winnings now. He'd have to hide them carefully; he was sure Mrs Johnson was nursing her suspicions. Ever since he'd offered Emma a couple of quid to let him touch her up. Emma must have ratted on him. Two quid was almost three months' earnings for her, so you couldn't blame her for boasting how she'd turned it down. But old Pruneface Johnson would have sniffed a rat at once. Half a crown was more the mark for a lad his age on a salary of nix-nihil per annum.

He slid the fiver from his jacket pocket down into the one inside his trouser belt and buried his face in The Pink 'Un while he waited for the tram. This had been his daily ritual even as a schoolboy, when all his wagers had been on paper only, betting against himself in a little pocketbook where he kept the tally. Lawrence the bookmaker had lost close on eighty five quid by the end of the year, even though Lawrence the punter had never bet above five bob on any race - - though, to be sure, a five-bob treble that comes up can be worth twenty quid or more on the third horse. Now, thanks to his early start in the game, Lawrence virtually carried the form book around in his head, only needing to refresh it each day to keep it in tip-top, bookie-milking condition. In the eight or nine months since last summer, when he started at Furnival's, he'd won nearly two hundred pounds more than his chief clerk took home in a year.

He had to keep reminding himself of it: Two hundred quid was a lot of spondulicks and don't you forget it, Lawrence, me old pal or you'll go and do other rash things like offering two quid to the likes of Emma Harding. But he couldn't help smiling every time he thought of it; she'd have been worth every penny. Pretty little thing. Perhaps she'd thought it over since then? Changed her mind, maybe. He shouldn't have sprung it on her.

His fancy began to reshape the incident the way it might have gone until the reverie grew so hot and Jas pleasurable he had to tear himself reluctantly from it and concentrate on tomorrow's card, instead. The tram was nearing the top of Cannonbury Road before he settled on Daddy's Girl in the two-thirty at Sydenham and Tomahawk in the four o'clock at Shelburne Park; two bob to win and five for a place. And another thirty-eight bob to him if they both came up. Every little helps, as the sailor said when he pissed off London Bridge at low tide.

When the tram drew near the halt at Highbury Circus, the conductor happened to be on the front platform, beside Lawrence and a couple of others who were waiting (at the wrong end) to alight - which was how Lawrence overheard him say to the driver, "Blimey, she's still there!"

"I see that," the other responded.

Incuriously Lawrence stared at the waiting line ahead to try and guess who they might mean ... and then blinked his eyes and stared again.

Talk of the devil, it was undoubtedly Emma Harding standing there! Waiting for him? Must be. Bad news at home? His heart missed a beat. Something had happened at home ... his mother ... or Catherine. They were ... He deliberately did not pursue the notion. But why else would she be still there, in the conductor's own words? Obviously she was waiting for him. He was the only member of the family who ever used this tram.

Then he saw she had a battered cardboard suitcase and an old Gladstone bag at her feet, at which point the mystery passed beyond all practical guesswork. The driver gave the reins a sudden twitch, hauled at the brake, and the tram came groaning to a halt.

"Does this go to Whitechapel?" Emma shouted across the road to the driver.

The man started to direct her to the appropriate stop in the Ball's Pond Road but Lawrence cut across with, "Emma! What on earth are you doing here?" He leaped down in one bound and skipped across the carriageway to her, earning the curses of a draymaster, who had hoped to get by before the tram disgorged its passengers.

She stared at him in surprise. Then, to his acute embarrassment, she cried out, "Oh, Mr Lawrence!" and burst into tears.

HE GREAT STORM, which was at that moment testing Cap'n Troy's seamanship to the limit, and whose portents were soon to cause the waterman, Harry Wicks, to utter his dire forecast, had not even begun to stir the air over the Humber. A heavy, oily fog drifted upriver, clinging to the waters and turning the noonday brightness to a dreary amber twilight. The masts and funnels of the ships on the quay opposite Swallow were no longer visible, as they had been an hour earlier. The crew became uneasy, anxious, and Neil Troy began to feel for himself what his father had so often said that fog was the seaman's bitterest enemy.

This Humber fog did not stretch in a uniform cloud over the town of Hull, and its docks and ships; rather it drifted in patches, some thick enough to obscure your view of your own hand, others so meagre you could see clear across the decks.

Slim, the fat bosun, clapped a familiar hand on Neil's shoulder. "Tis the ghosts of all the drowned seamen, matey," he said, "come to warn us not to put to sea."

He had timed his comment perfectly for at that moment the command came from the bridge, "Let go head rope. Quarter ahead."

There was a blast from the ship's hooter. The deck began to throb to the beat of the pistons below. A dark shape, vaguely remembered as the side of a warehouse on the quay, grew paler and vanished. It was the only landward sign that Swallow was moving at last.

Both watches were on deck for, like the Horsa in Tilbury which Lawrence was at that moment clearing to sail - nothing was done in port that could not be done cheaper on the way down the estuary, wharves charged demurrage but the tideway was

free. "Right, lads! Let's get this ..."

Another blast drowned the bosun's orders. Into its dying echo he called, "All ashore that's going ashore!" In a softer tone he added, "And if you can find it, let us know."

Men laughed reluctantly, not that they found it unfunny but the density of the fog worried them. Their only gauge of the ship's speed was the drift of what Slim had called "ghosts" along the deck toward the stern; and, since the breeze was off the sea, it made them appear to be going at a fair rate of knots. To compound matters, a ship in steam on the farther quay sounded her siren at that moment; the vapour magnified its intensity so that it seemed alarmingly close. They cursed Swallow for being a steamship; no vessel with sails could even think of putting to sea in a fog like this, with both wind and tide against her.

But the pilot knew the river well enough to keep them out of trouble. The "policeman" in the bow sang out his sightings of each chequered can buoy within moments of the pilot's prediction that it was coming up. All hands meanwhile settled to their tasks, some to clearing the decks of dunnage, others to timbering the hatches. Later came the tarpaulins, neatly tucked around the combings, "like a virgin's knickers," as Slim commented to Neil, who laughed hugely. The carpenter was hammering in the wedges as the policeman called out his final sighting, the white can buoy with cage and light, which marks the southern limit of the Humber estuary.

The men straightened their backs and made exaggerated noises of relief. "All right, all right," Slim cried. "Rogers and Willis, port and starboard lookouts. The rest of you, ten minutes for cocoa."

"And rum," Thomson, the leading seaman, added.

"Kind of you to offer, matey," Slim rejoined. "Come on, Mister, you and me's the only ones with any spirit left. We'll get the cocoa." His final survey challenged any man to add the explanation that he and Neil were also the only ones who had not bent their backs for the last hour. But their grins said it for hem as they shuffled off to the forecastle. Slim and Neil turned back toward the galley kiddley.

"Cocoa for a hundred and fifty, chef!" the bosun called through the porthole as they passed. The cook had it all ready for them, a steaming urn

with quantities measured precisely for ten. "And the

Vienna pastries?" Slim asked with a wink at Neil. "Burnt them," the cook replied solemnly. "You'll have to go without today."

The Swallow made a sudden rolling heave as she passed beyond Spurn Head and met the German Ocean. Neil felt the first rumblings of nausea.

The young man's position as cadet aboard Swallow was ambiguous. He was not an officer, though that I was his destiny. He called the officers "sir" and the men by name; the men called him Mister, and the bosun or this particular bosun - sometimes called him matey. He did not engage in the purely manual tasks of the crew, such as battening down hatches, but he was supposed to learn the true skills of seamanship, from the handling of ropes to taking his turn at the helm.

All these tasks he had tried to learn on the Orestes, but things had gone wrong there in ways he still could not understand. His papa had said he might do better on a little tramp like Swallow. "She's nearer the water," he explained. And it was true, though Neil still couldn't see how that helped.