Silver (45 page)

I forget how Mr Tickle ended his speech exactly – his words were probably as simple as ‘Storm coming’. But I knew from the
stoniness of his face that it would not be an ordinary kind of blow. For all this, I did not hesitate when he asked me to come forward with him, so that we could stand together in the prow of the ship, where he would show me what he had seen. I almost wished he had not. The wind was already so powerful we both had to bend double as we went along the deck, and the noise in the rigging was like the shriek of the banshee. When we reached as far as the long nine, I found something more alarming still. The whole sky ahead had been turned into a colossal slab of slate – and apparently weighed as much as slate; where it met the sea, waves were buckling into monstrous troughs and peaks, all of them flicked by the raw light of the setting sun.

‘What is it, Mr Tickle?’ I said – and then, when he did not answer, shouted, in order to make myself heard above the wind: ‘What does it mean?’

This time he heard but ignored me, and instead glanced back to where those of our passengers who were strong enough to remain on deck, and all our shipmates, had gathered around Bo’sun Kirkby at the wheel. Every one of them was staring in astonishment. Natty too. Her face was pressed to a circular window of the roundhouse as if she had been turned into a ghost.

‘I reckon that’s a hurricane,’ Mr Tickle shouted to me at last – which was only what I had already guessed. For all that, his saying the word aloud seemed to galvanise him from the trance into which he had briefly fallen. Bellowing loudly, he summoned Mr Lawson and Mr Creed to come forward again, which they did with great difficulty – and then the two of them swung precariously into the rigging. Seeing them hang there, with hair tousled around their faces, and clothes blustered, made me think of flies in a cobweb, when the wind shudders through it.

‘Down topsail!’ Mr Tickle trumpeted, cupping his mouth with
both hands, and I saw our two shipmates thrill for the order, clinging fast to the rigging as the gale fizzed around them, and the
Nightingale
heaved forward through the deepening waves. Just when it seemed they might be picked from their places and flung into the clouds, the sail came down with a run, and fell half overboard among the racing foam.

Mr Tickle remained like a rock while his orders were carried out – and was still unmoveable when the men beetled down onto the deck again, and stood with their heads tilted backwards to admire their handiwork. Torn fragments of charcoal sky raced overhead, all soaked though and ragged. By now the wind seemed to have risen several further notches, and the banshee-wail made all speech close to impossible. But this did not deter Mr Stevenson, who clambered down from his perch at last, and landed beside us like a bedraggled bird in his tattered old sea-cloak. ‘Too rough for me now,’ he said – or rather mouthed, and left us to decipher from the movement of his lips. Then he hooked both arms though the elbows of Mr Creed and Mr Lawson, and the three of them waddled astern.

When he had seen them safely berthed alongside Bos’un Kirkby, Mr Tickle bent towards me again and laid his lips against my ear; his wet beard wagged against my skin. ‘This calm weather we’ve had lately,’ he said, with a doggedness that seemed remarkable in view of our circumstances. ‘Very useful for our purposes on land, I’m sure. But very decevious.
The calm before the storm
.’ He then straightened and grinned at me with an air of satisfaction, as if the phrase contained a profound truth that he had discovered for himself, which I suppose he had. In any event, it showed he thought our situation had changed from good to serious in a matter of minutes, and required us to do … To do what? It is still shocking for me to remember I had not the slightest idea, and must therefore have thrown him a look of very un-captain-like vacancy.

‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ he said, realising how much at a loss I felt.

I put my hand on his arm, to show I wanted him to continue.

‘Begging you pardon, sir, but I’m thinking retreat might be a wiser action than advance at this point.’

‘Retreat where?’ I asked.

‘Back the way we came,’ he said, speaking slowly to show that he knew he was dealing with a child.

‘To Treasure Island?’

Mr Tickle gave a grim smile. ‘No, not to Treasure Island, Master Jim; that will not be far enough. We need to get ourselves beyond Treasure Island.’

I was so glad to hear this, I almost felt we would be spared any more suffering. But when I saw Mr Tickle’s smile disappear, and watched him take his pipe from his pocket and stick it between his teeth, where he began grinding the stem as though he wanted to pulverise it, I knew better.

‘Quite right,’ I said, to give the impression that I had already arrived at the same conclusion myself.

‘Quite right, quite right,’ he repeated, making the pipe wiggle up and down between his teeth – and then, to show he forgave me my ignorance, patted me on the shoulder before running aft to speak with Bo’sun Kirkby at the wheel; his nimbleness as he did this was astonishing, since the ship was now plunging more and more wildly beneath us, and he did not seem to feel its movements at all.

I followed more slowly, making little dashes from the long-nine gun, to the mainmast, then to the second mast, clinging to each fixed thing so that I could recover some steadiness before setting off again. When I reached the roundhouse, Natty swung open the door to greet me, and I gratefully stumbled inside. As I did so, the bo’sun and Mr Tickle began giving orders that those still on
deck should get themselves stowed safely below, if they did not want to be swept overboard. I had expected everyone to obey at once, since the violence around us was now so great – but several of our passengers were very reluctant: to be shut in darkness was something they had hoped never to endure again. Only when a gigantic wave suddenly clambered over the side of the ship, saturating them all and turning the deck into a mill-race, did they change their minds – several of them wailing and clasping their hands together as Mr Creed and Mr Lawson began to usher them out of sight.

‘Take that infernal bird with you,’ shouted Bo’sun Kirkby, as the rest of the crew prepared to follow behind; I decided this was not because he hated Spot, but was frightened of losing a mascot. In any event, Natty scowled – but obediently lifted the cage from its peg, covered it so that her pet would be quiet, then handed him to Mr Stevenson. To judge by his sour expression, our Scotsman was not at all pleased to receive him. Spot himself seemed much more than disappointed, if his parting remark was any indication. ‘Here we go to glory!’ he squawked as he vanished towards the galley. ‘Here we go to glory!’

With the deck now clear of anyone not lending a hand, and the minimum of sail above us, we then began the very difficult business of turning the
Nightingale
. We might as well have tried reshaping Nature herself. The ship seemed to
buckle
as she floundered into the trough between two enormous waves, with a pitiful squeal of timbers and a shiver that ran from fore to aft – and shook me with a tremor of pure fear. For a moment our fate seemed to hang in the balance, and I thought we might be battered to pieces; when I looked through the windows of the roundhouse at Bo’sun Kirkby, he seemed to be holding back the force of the ocean single-handed, with rain and spray pouring off his sea-cloak as if he were standing
under a water-spout, and his badger-face almost collapsed with the effort of his work. But never more than almost. The
Nightingale
was his ship, and eventually she had no choice except to do as he wanted. With another series of mighty slaps and shudderings, and waves the size of horses galloping over our sides, we came round by slow degrees – then were suddenly free and sailing back the same way we had just travelled.

At this point Mr Tickle took a length of rope and marched forward again, if it can be called a march when a man is clinging to every solid thing he can find, as the wind propels him. When he had fought his way beyond the mainmast he lashed himself to the long-nine gun, where he could keep a lookout for any dangers as they presented themselves. It was a brave act, and left me feeling I must also find some useful function to perform, rather than sit stupefied while others put themselves at risk. But when I suggested this to Bo’sun Kirkby, by gesticulating through the windows of the roundhouse, he shouted at me not to be a fool: I must stay put and keep Natty with me. I opened my mouth to demur as he said this, which made his usual kindness drain out of his face: he told me very sternly that we should consider ourselves lucky not to be confined with the others below deck, since we were young and ignorant. In a less dangerous situation I would have felt myself rebuked; things being as they were, I reckoned he was merely telling the truth. I decided I would not try his patience any further, and contented myself with peering through heavy curtains of rain as they flashed against our windows.

I say we were
sailing
at this point, but in truth it was more like a sort of
flight
, since even a ship as airy as the
Nightingale
could no longer skip along the surface of the sea but plunged from one abyss to another. After a few more minutes of this battering, Natty and I slithered from our bench and knelt on the floor of the roundhouse,
eyes level with the sides of the ship. This might have allowed us to follow each rise and fall as if we were actually a part of the timber. But the confusion of spray and wind was now so great, and the juddering between light and dark so quick, it is more accurate to say we felt rather than saw what happened around us. Every leap forward was an immense labouring effort, followed by a dreadful moment of suspension, then a vault into empty space, then a watery crash that seemed likely to split us apart, then another colossal labouring effort.

I cannot say how long this lasted. In the same way that everything solid in nature seemed liquid and formless, so the usual connections of time were all broken apart. Nothing joined up, and nothing made sense. One minute Natty and I were jumbled together on the floor like puppets. Next we were shielding our faces as an especially fierce wave, vicious as a punch, smashed a window of the roundhouse and showered us with glass before shrivelling away again. Next we were watching the silhouette of Treasure Island rip past us, with spray silvering the dismal summit of Spyglass Hill. Or rather, we thought we saw it; I could not easily believe a place that had contained so much – had given so much and taken so much – could be turned into such a quickly passing thing. Almost into nothing at all.

Perhaps it was this idea of inconsequence that began to change my mood. Or perhaps it was my sense that the
Nightingale
, having survived the opening salvoes of the storm, would not easily be sunk by any further assaults on her. In all events, as the island disappeared behind us again, I realised I was beginning almost to enjoy our ordeal. To see Bo’sun Kirkby clasping his wheel, while such fury raved about him! To find Mr Tickle so thoroughly drenched at his place by the long nine that he appeared to be coated in silver! I thought he must be exulting, rather than
struggling for breath. I was exulting – when I should have been concentrating on humdrum things, such as how to avoid smashing my head into smithereens.

Natty was too surprised, or too frightened, to share this mood of delirium. ‘Have you thought?’ she shouted.

‘Thought what?’ I replied – and felt the words torn out of my mouth.

‘Have you thought what will happen when we reach the coast?’ We were side by side on the floor of the roundhouse, with our backs pressed against a bench and our feet braced against the legs of the table. Sea-water, blowing through our broken window, had saturated Natty’s hair, and her face was alight with it.

I gave a sort of laugh, which was no answer at all.

‘The sea around us is a kind of gigantic basin,’ she went on, pushing her face against my own, to make sure I could hear what she was saying. ‘Eventually we must come up against the edge.’

It seemed absurd for her to take this rational tone when everything about us was in uproar, and I could not help smiling. ‘When?’ I asked her.

‘How should I know when?’ she snapped back, as though irritated by her own tone, as well as mine. ‘When we run out of sea.’

Natty’s annoyance was nothing, compared to the palaver of wind and waves, but it stung me nonetheless – and made me see that I had been so relieved to think I was escaping one kind of danger, I had not realised there might be another still to come.

‘It will be Spanish America,’ I said, as much to myself as Natty, and hauled onto the bench again, so that I could look towards the horizon. All my hilarity left me as suddenly as it had arrived.

‘Most probably Spanish America,’ said Natty. The resignation in her voice surprised me – until she added: ‘My father was there. My father is everywhere. Everywhere we go, we follow him.’

‘We shall see,’ I said, which was not helpful – but I had no appetite for wondering about fathers at that particular moment.

Natty gave me another of her fierce glances. ‘Think!’ she shouted at me, exasperated.

But I could not think. I could only point along the deck towards Mr Tickle. Although the
Nightingale
was still heaving through the water in very unsteady bounds, and sometimes flying above it altogether, my crew-mate had taken it upon himself to untie the rope that lashed him to the long nine, and was attempting to move further forward into the bows. He might as well have tried to wade through a raging torrent; I expected to see him swept overboard at any moment. At the same time, I realised he must have a reason to risk death in this way – and although I could not understand what it might be, I knew I must help him.

Without saying another word to Natty, I heaved open the door of the roundhouse and stepped onto the deck. The rush of wind was immediately so enormous, it was as much as I could do to drag the door shut again, and very nearly impossible to follow where Mr Tickle had already gone. I did not so much walk, or even stagger, along the deck, but crept. Every idea of family, or home, or love was sluiced out of me. Every memory of my father, of the river, of Natty disappeared. Not even the cries of our passengers, rising very faintly through the planks, meant what I would normally have taken them to mean. They were not sounds of fear or desperation, but merely noises. The entire world was myself, and my only wish was to continue living.