flapped noisily.
It was Kydd’s first experience at laying out on the yardarm. It was one thing moving out on a steadily pulling set and drawing sail, as he had already done with Doud, and another to achieve something on a loose cloud of flogging canvas.
The captain of the top was unsympathetic. “Weather yardarm, cully,” he ordered.
“Where the sport is!” said Doud cheerfully – he would pass the weather earring, the most skilled job of all. Kydd just looked at him.
A heavy creaking of sheaves, and the topsail yard began to lower. The spacious maintop seemed crowded with men, and Kydd took a sharp blow in the side from the men working the reef tackles, which, pulling up on the appropriate reef cringle, had to take the deadweight of the sail.Doud grinned at Kydd as they waited. “Be ready, mate,” he warned.
“Trice up and lay out!”
“Go!” Doud yelled, and swung onto the yard. The inboard iron of the stuns’l boom was disengaged and the boom tricer hoisted it clear. Doud moved out quickly to the farthest extremity of the yardarm and turned to straddle it facing inwards.
With his heart in his mouth Kydd followed. As he had learned, he leaned his weight over the thick yard until his feet were firmly in the footrope, pushing down and back, and arms clinging to the yard inched his way outward. It was worse than he had expected. The increasing beam seas were causing a roll, which was magnified by height – over to one side, a sudden stop, then an acceleration back to the other in a dizzying arc. In front and beneath him, the hundred-foot width of topsail boisterously flapped and tugged, and he knew he was being watched from below.
“Get movin’, you maudling old women!” the captain of the top shouted.
Sailors were being held up by his slow movements, but he couldn’t help it. It was heart-stopping to be up there, with nothing but a thin footrope and the yard – and empty space beneath his feet to the deck far below. He knew that soon he would not even have the yard to cling to – both his hands would be needed for work.
He looked down at the deck and the sea sliding past below, so foreshortened at the height of a church steeple.
This was how Bowyer had met his death.
“Haul out to windward!”
The men inclined to leeward and leaned over the yard, bracing against the footrope. Seizing one of the reef points, they heaved the sail bodily over toward Doud at the end. Kydd had no option but to follow suit. It needed all his courage to let go his hold on the yard and balance precariously forward, elbows clamping, and grab one of the points.
“Heave, yer buggers – let’s see some tiger!”
It took three pulls and Doud had his turns over the cleat and through the earring on the sail in its new, reefed position. Inclining the opposite way, they hauled out again, achieving the same thing on the lee yardarm. Seized at its ends, the sail’s central bulge was now slack and ready for reefing.
Kydd glanced at the men next to him. They worked calmly, industriously, thumping the sail into folds on top of the yard; first small, then larger, pinning them in place with their chests while they leaned down to get another, fisting and slapping the milling sea-worn canvas into place.
There was not much science in Kydd’s efforts, but at least he did not let his reef escape. It was with real satisfaction that, holding it in place with the forward reef point, he brought the other up and secured it with an eponymous reef knot.
“Lay in, you lazy swabs!”
He joined the others on the maintop, and met Doud with a grin that could only be described as smug.
The carpenter pursed his lips. It wasn’t a bad leak as far as it went, but it was in an awkward place. They were standing in the carpenter’s walk, a cramped tunnel of sorts that went round the sides of the orlop, giving access to the area between wind and water in times of battle. It was an eerie sensation, to feel rather than hear the underwater gurgling rush on the outside of the hull. Kydd struggled along behind the carpenter’s mate, with a bag of heavy shipwright’s tools.
The carpenter bent to take a closer look. His mate obligingly held the lanthorn lower, into the black recesses behind a hanging knee. Water glistened against the blackened timbers of the ship’s side.
“Maul,” the carpenter said, after a moment. Kydd handed him the weighty tool. A couple of sharp blows at an ancient bolt started it from its seating. Kneeling down, the carpenter gave it a vigorous twist.
A furious half-inch-thick jet of water spurted in, catching Kydd squarely.
“Devil bolt!” the carpenter said. The bolt might have looked sound from the outside, but inside, there was nothing but falsework, crafty peculators at the dockyard having made off with the interior of the long copper bolt. “You’d better get down to the hold and take a squint, Nathan. This won’t be the only beggar,” he told his mate.
The deck grating was lifted clear, and the man dropped down into the blackness of the hold. The lanthorn was passed down to him.
They could hear him moving about, but then there was silence.
“See anything?” the carpenter called. He was driving an octagonal oak treenail into the gushing bolt hole with accurate smashing hits, the water cutting off to a trickle, then nothing.
There was no reply. “Nathan?” he called again, kneeling down to look into the hold. He was pushed out of the way abruptly by the carpenter’s mate. His eyes were staring, his face was white, and he was trembling.
“What’s to do, mate?” the carpenter asked softly.
The man gulped and turned to face him. “I s-seen a g-ghost! Somethin’ down there – it’s ’orrible. I gotta get out’ve it!”
The carpenter clicked his tongue. “Well, here’s a to-do.” He hesitated for a moment and said, weakly, “Now, Kydd lad, you go below and sort it out for us, my boy.”
Kydd sensed the man’s fear and felt an answering apprehension. There was nothing wrong with being afraid of ghosts, it stood to reason. He looked at the hole where the grating had been, then back at the carpenter.
“Go on, I’ll come if you hails!” the carpenter mumbled.
With the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end, Kydd cautiously dropped down on top of the casks. He looked around fearfully.
There was nothing. He accepted the lanthorn, but its light was lost in the pervasive blackness and he could see little. The stench was unspeakable.
Nervously he moved away from the access hole and crept toward the edge of the casks. Before he reached them he became aware of a sudden discontinuity in the blackness on his left.
It took all his willpower to turn and confront it. It was a dim but defi nite ghostly blue-green glow, there at the edge of his vision, shapeless, direful. He froze. The light seemed to flicker in the dark of the farthest reaches of the hold but it didn’t come closer. His eyes strained. The light strengthened, still wavering and indistinct. Something made him move forward. He reached the edge of the casks.
“Is all well, lad?” came an anxious call from the grating.
A muffled acknowledgment was all Kydd could manage.
The glow was still far off, down there in the shingle. There was no alternative. He slid over the edge and landed with a crash of stones. He looked up. The light was at a different angle now and seemed to be hovering, uncertain.
Heart hammering, Kydd crunched cautiously toward it. The source of the light lengthened and grew in definition, nearer, and the light of the lanthorn reached it, swamped it. The sickly sweet stench was overpowering, and he gasped with horror. The ghost was a dead body, what was left of Eakin, the cooper’s mate, his putrefying remains luminescing in the blackness.
With
“Kydd on the wheel, sir?” said Doud, whose trick at the helm it was.
“Certainly,” Tewsley said, and nodded at the quartermaster, the petty officer in direct charge of the wheel. The man looked dubious, but stood back.
The easy breeze meant that only one helmsman was needed at the man-high wheel, but Doud directed Kydd
