Scoundrel

in the back pages of every European yachting magazine. I dared not specify American ownership for fear of prompting an unwelcome curiosity about my motives, but by asking the boat’s hailing port I was able to weed out every nationality except the American vessels. I thought I had found what I wanted in the German port of Langeoog, but the boat, though owned by an American, lacked either a State Registration Certificate or any Coastguard documentation. “Does it really matter?” the broker, a stout Frisian, asked me. “Over here we’re not so particular.”

But I was being very particular, and so I went on searching until, just before Halloween, a brokerage in Cork, Ireland, sent me details of an American cutter moored in Ardgroom Harbour off the Kenmare River.

I gave Hannah my apartment keys and made her promise to check the fax and the telephone answering machine each day, then I flew to Cork where I hired a car and drove west to Ardgroom Harbour. I borrowed a fisherman’s dinghy and sculled myself out to the yacht.

She was called Rebel Lady and I almost dared not inspect her in case my first impression turned out to be false. My first impression was that she was perfect.

Rebel Lady was an American-built, American-owned, forty-four-foot cutter with a double-ended dark green hull that had been battered by rough seas and streaked with an ocean’s dirt. She had clearly been designed for long voyages for a windmill generator whirled at her stern beside an elaborate self- steering vane. Gulls had streaked her with their droppings and weed grew at her black-painted bootline, yet, despite her shabby condition, she looked almost brand new. A pathetic hand-lettered “For Sale” sign was attached to her starboard shrouds, while her hailing port, lettered like her defiant name in elegant black and gold, was Boston, Mass. Rebel Lady even had her Massachusetts registration number still painted on her bows, which meant that if her papers were intact then, for my purposes, she would be ideal.

I found her keys hidden in the locker where the broker had told me to look and let myself into her saloon, which smelt of stale air, sour clothes and salt. The boat appeared to have been momentarily deserted by her crew, for a kettle stood on the galley stove and two plastic plates had been abandoned in a sink half full of water. A sneaker lay on its side by the portside bunk while a sweatshirt advertising a restaurant in Scituate, Massachusetts, had been discarded on the cabin table. Arched across the coachroof’s main beam was a row of handsome brass instruments: a chronometer still ticking obediently away to Greenwich Mean Time, a barometer, a thermometer, and a hygrometer for measuring the air’s humidity as a gauge of the likelihood of fog. There was a depth sounder over the chart table, a VHF radio, a log, a wind-speed and direction indicator, a fluxgate compass and an expensive Loran receiver. Also above the chart table, among a row of books, I saw the traditional yellow jacket of Eldridge’s Tide and Pilot Book and the sight gave me an almost overwhelming pang of homesickness. I could not resist taking down the well-thumbed book and turning the familiar pages with their tables of high and low water at Boston, the current table for the Cape Cod Canal and the charts of the tidal currents in Buzzards Bay and Nantucket Sound. The book reminded me that I had been away from my home waters for much too long; seven years too long.

I sat in the swivel chair of Rebel Lady’s chart table and thought how she would make a fine boat for Cape Cod; a good boat to sail down east to Maine or hard south to the Chesapeake Bay. I closed my eyes and heard the water splash and ripple down her flanks, and the sound somehow reminded me that this would also be a lonely boat. God damn Roisin, I thought, for all the dreams she had broken, because forty-four feet was too long a boat for a lonely man. All I needed was a small shoal-draft cat-boat to sail single-handed around Nantucket Sound, but Rebel Lady was the boat I would buy and Rebel Lady would one day be my retirement boat, my lonely home away from my Cape Cod house.

I called the broker from the public telephone of a bar in Ardgroom and learned that Rebel Lady belonged to an American doctor who, taking a summer’s sabbatical, had sailed with his three sons to search for their family’s Irish roots. Instead he had learned that the summer pastime of sailing in sun- drenched Boston Harbor did not easily translate into enduring a stinging force-nine gale in the mid-Atlantic. Seasick, shaking, terrified and with a broken wrist and a fractured rib, the good doctor had made his Irish landfall and sworn he would never again set foot on a small boat. He and his sons had flown home in the comfort of an Aer Lingus Boeing 747 and left the Rebel Lady swinging to a mooring in Ardgroom Harbour. “He’ll take whatever you’ve a mind to give,” the Cork broker told me with a refreshing honesty, “but it would be a criminal shame to give the man less than seventy-five thousand punt. She’s a fine boat, is she not? But it’s a pity she’s green.” He was lamenting her color for, in Irish superstition, green was an unlucky color for a boat.

I did not care about Irish superstition, only about American bureaucracy. “You’re sure you’ve got all her papers?”

“As I said before, I’ve got every last one of them. They certainly like their paperwork in America, do they not? I’ve even got the original bill of sale, so I have. The boat’s a mere two years old, and she’s only ever had the one owner.”

“What’s the owner’s name?”

“O’Neill. A Dr. James O’Neill. A grand man is the doctor, but a better physician than a sailor, I should think.” It was a delicate judgment, very Irish in its balancing of a criticism with a compliment.

“I’ll be paying you cash,” I said, “if that suits you.”

“I think it might,” he said cautiously. My God, of course it suited him. Tax evasion is Ireland’s national sport and I had just given him a championship year. “Say seventy thousand?” I said, just to spoil it a little.

He paused for just a second, then accepted. “It’s a bargain, Mr. Stanley.” I had given my name as Henry Stanley.

I drove back to the harbor where a sudden west wind was flicking whitecaps across the sheltered gray water and slanting a sharp rain off the ocean. I sculled myself back to Rebel Lady, chucked the pathetic “For Sale” sign overboard and, using my rigging knife, prised away the manufacturer’s plate from the side of her coachroof. I copied the hull identification number from her transom and the serial number from the engine, then, my oilskin drenched from the sudden cold rain, I drove back to Cork where, in a smoky bar, I treated the broker to a pint of stout and paid him seventy thousand Irish pounds for the boat. It was a steal, but undoubtedly Dr. James O’Neill would be well pleased to be rid of the cause of so much of his discomfort. It was an old story; men bought boats as a fulfillment of their dreams, only to have a single ocean passage turn the dreams into nightmare. Atlantic islands like the Azores or the Canaries were notorious for the bargains their harbors offered; yachts abandoned after just one leg of a long-planned voyage.

The broker, who was doubtless on a generous commission, counted the pile of notes happily. “You’ve bought yourself a good vessel, Mr. Stanley,” he said as he forced the folded pile of banknotes into a jacket pocket, then he watched hopefully as I counted another stack of punt bills on to the table. “And what would they be for, Mr. Stanley, if I might ask?”

“I’m paying you to look after her. I want the mast off her, and I’d like her brought ashore and scrubbed down. Then cover her with tarpaulins. I’ll send you word when I want her launched and rigged again, but it may not be till next summer.”

“No problems there.” The broker eyed the punt bills.

“And I want a new name painted on her stern,” I said.

“Changing a boat’s name?” He sipped his stout, then wiped the froth from his moustache with the back of his hand. “That means bad luck, Mr. Stanley.”

“Not where I come from.” I pulled a beer mat toward me and wrote the new name in big block capitals on its margin. “Roisin,” I said the name aloud, “and she needs a new hailing port, Stage Harbor. And no ‘u’ in harbor. You can do that? I want it in Gaelic script, black and gold.”

“It shouldn’t be a problem.” He thumbed the edge of the punt bills. “But if there is a snag with the work, then how can I reach you?”

“That money’s my guarantee that you won’t have any snags.”

“So it is, so it is.” The notes vanished into a pocket.

As I left the bar I scorned myself as a sentimental fool for painting a dead girl’s name on the backside of a green boat. I caught a glimpse of my bearded face in a hatstand’s mirror in the hallway of the bar and, for a change, I did not look quickly away. Instead I frowned at the reflection as though I was looking at a stranger. I did not like what I saw, I never had. The face was hag-ridden, redolent of too much bad conscience. I remembered Seamus Geoghegan sitting in a car with me on some wet dawn; after a long silence, he had sighed and said that thinking never made a man happy. He was right, and mirrors made me think of myself, which was why I owned so few of