The Ebb Tide

conscious of the water brightening around us, and up through the port I could see what looked like a silver rippling window, which must, I knew, be the surface of the river. Then the chamber was out into the atmosphere, the water level declining along the glass. We staggered ashore until we were waist deep and could go no farther. Gravity, St. Ives told us, had gotten the best of us as our buoyancy decreased, and we risked breaking our legs if we ventured onto dry land.

I swung out of the open hatch like a man plucked from the grave, and leapt down into the river as into a bath, inflating my lungs with air that was as sweet as spring water, splashing my way to shore like a frolic at Blackpool. Recalling that moment of freedom even now makes me wax metaphoric, although the memory fades quickly, and I’m reminded of how close I had come to shaming myself with my fears and my weaknesses. If I were a younger man today, with a more frail sensitivity, I might revise this account, and cast a more stoic light on myself, perhaps adding a small moment of personal glory. But be it only ink on paper, that would be to commit the same fearful folly again, and with a lie on top of it. Surely there’s more virtue in the truth.

We had made our way, we soon discovered, to the lower edge of the Erith Marshes, almost to the bend above Long Reach. No one had seen us emerge — another bit of luck. Three hours later the diving chamber sat atop the bed of a wagon, affixed to a swivel crane and fenced in by empty crates to disguise its shape, all of it tied down securely and covered in canvas. We found ourselves on our way merrily enough, north to Harrogate now, where St. Ives told us we would replenish the compressed air at Pillsworth’s Chemical Laboratories, and then on across the Dales and around the top of Morecambe Bay for a rendezvous with Merton’s Uncle Fred at his cottage in Grange- over-Sands. We were in need of a sand pilot, you see, to go along with our map and our diving chamber. We had no time to waste if we wanted to catch the tide.

CHAPTER 5 Hesitate and You’re a Drowned Man

We held a sort of council of war there in the wagon, mapping out our campaign so that we proceeded according to a stratagem rather than a whim. It seemed to us that the ruse with the map must have borne fruit. Surely there would have been some way for Frosticos to prevent our flight in the chamber if he suspected that we possessed the true map. He was sure of himself, apparently, and that was a solidly good thing. And yet if we were wrong in this notion, we dared not return to the Half Toad or to St. Ives Manor at Chingford-by-the-Tower, lest the Doctor’s henchmen lurked about, on the lookout. We wanted simply to be quit of them, now that we had the means to make use of the map, and so we decided to make straightaway to Morecambe Bay in time to catch a particularly low tide. And yet we had some small matters of business in London, having to do with Tubby Frobisher, which I undertook to accomplish while St. Ives and Hasbro rattled away north with all possible speed.

It was an added bit of good fortune that Tubby could walk abroad without exciting the suspicions of our enemies, and could convey the tragic details of our untimely deaths to the newspapers, where he had a useful acquaintance who wrote for the Times and occasionally for the Graphic. It was reported that our diving chamber, with three suffocated bodies inside, had been washed up onto a rocky strand near Sheerness, where it was found by fishermen. The scientific community mourned: much lamented passing…eccentric genius…intrepid explorer, and so forth. St. Ives, vilified just months earlier over the incident of the burning squid, was lauded by paragons of science, and there was, Tubby informed us, talk of a bronze bust in a plaster niche at the Explorers Club.

It was all very gratifying, I can tell you. And of course before the news was revealed publicly, Tubby had looked in on Merton and then had scurried like Mercury himself down to Scarborough to alert Mrs. St. Ives and my own dear wife to the nature of the fraud. (Neither of them were quite as taken with our cleverness as they in all fairness should have been, we discovered later, especially when Tubby regaled them with his secondhand accounts of the flaming meteor over the Yorkshire Dales and the floating cattle and dead parson and other salient and half understood details.)

We knew little of this, of course, except that I had set Tubby into motion. It wasn’t the first time, by the way, that St. Ives had been mourned, and I wondered whether it was a good enough ruse to further confound a man like Hilario Frosticos. But then perhaps he wouldn’t need further confounding, since he already possessed what he understood to be Kraken’s map. We would soon know, for better or ill.

* * *

St. Ives drove the wagon beneath a full moon, Hasbro and I sitting beside him, along a seldom-used dirt track that winds down from the forest below Lindale and carries on beyond Grange-over-Sands down to Humphrey Head, which was our true destination. We had ridden in secret along this same road a decade ago, engaged in a similar mission. That had turned out badly, as Tubby had pointed out, and taken all the way around we had fared scarcely better this time, at least so far, despite the success of our flight down the Thames and our subsequent hasty journey to the environs of Morecambe Bay.

The trees grew more stunted when we drew nearer the water, blown by sea winds as they were, and we found ourselves moving along at a slow pace, creaking over sea wrack and shingle covered with blown sand, the wind in our faces. The moon illuminated the road, thank God, or we might have met Kraken’s fate, for there were innumerable creeks flowing out of Hampsfield Fell to the west, most of them half-hidden by dead leaves and low- growing water plants, and the place had a dangerously marshy quality to it that kept me on edge, ever on the lookout for bogs and sand pits. Several times we stopped to search out a crossing — ships timbers sunk into the mire — but midnight finally found us near the village of Grange-over-Sands.

The tide was turning by then, and we hadn’t much time to lose, unless we wanted to wait another day for a second chance. But of course every hour that passed made it more likely that Frosticos would become aware of our little game with the forged map, if he weren’t already aware of it. It was our great hope simply to avoid him, you see. Unlike Tubby Frobisher, we had no pressing desire to feed him to feral pigs or to anything else. We meant to keep him at a safe distance, smugly busy with his own fruitless search, never knowing that we were still pursuing the device in our own more useful way.

The moon was bright, and the broad expanses of infamous sand, cut by rivulets of seawater, appeared to be solid, with shadowy hillocks and runnels that hadn’t been visible an hour ago when we had first come in sight of the Bay. It seemed quite reasonable that a person would venture out onto the sands for a jolly stroll, to pick cockles or to have a look at some piece of drowned wreckage that lay half buried off shore, only to have the place turn deadly on the instant, the tide sweeping in with the speed of a sprinting horse, or a patch of sand that had been solid yesterday, suddenly liquefied, without changing its demeanor a whit.

The opposite shore seemed uncannily near, although it must have been four miles away. We could see the scattered, late-night lights of Silverdale across what was now a diminishing stretch of moonlit water, and farther along the lights of Poulton-le-Sands and perhaps Heysham in the dim distance. There was considerable virtue in the clear, illuminated night, but an equal amount of danger, and so I was relieved when the track turned inward across a last stretch of salt marsh and away from the Bay, growing slightly more solid as the ground rose. We quickened our pace, climbing a small, steep rise, hidden by a sea wood now from the watching eyes of anyone out and about on the Bay.

Soon we rounded a curve in the track, and there in front of us stood Uncle Fred’s cottage, which he called Flotsam. It was very whimsical, built of a marvelous array of cast off materials that Fred had salvaged from the sands or had purchased from the seaside residents of that long reach of treacherous coastline that stretches from Morecambe Bay up to St. Bees, where many a ship beating up into the Irish Channel in a storm has found itself broken on a lee shore. Looking out over the Bay was a ship’s quarter-gallery, with high windows allowing views both north and south. In the moonlight the gallery appeared to be perfectly enormous, a remnant of an old First Rate ship, perhaps, and it made the cottage look elegant despite the whole thing being cobbled together, just as its name implied. The cottage climbed the hill, so to speak, most of it built of heavy timbers and deck planks and with sections of masts and spars as corner posts and lintels. On the windward side it was shingled with a hodgepodge of sheet copper torn from ships’ bottoms. It was a snug residence, with its copper-sheathed back turned toward the open ocean, and the sight was something more than attractive. There was a light burning beyond the gallery window, illuminating a long table already set for visitors. Someone, I could see, sat in a chair at the table — perhaps Uncle Fred, if he were a small man.