The briny tang of the sea called up another sea, another time. A puzzling collection of images and sensations jostled their way into Marina’s mind. The imagined day on the beach with her mother reappeared, as if floating on the dark water in front of her. She was held tight, against the ropes of her mother’s pearls. They hurt her ear. She tried to pull away, but her mother held her even tighter. The water! The sea! It was splashing up into her face, cold and salty. ‘Mama . . .’ Marina had cried out then, shocked by the chill droplets on her skin. And then she roared as an icy wave caught her foot. But still her mother plunged forward, holding Marina so tightly she couldn’t wriggle free, however hard she tried.
The pictures in Marina’s head were chased away by a yelp. She looked up to see a large wooden crate of dogs on a cart next to her. Who they belonged to she couldn’t tell, but they looked hot and cross in the afternoon sunshine: their coats were so thick Marina thought she could bury her hand in them. One had his tongue lolling out and was panting as if he were a pair of bellows. He had one bright blue eye and one a soft treacle brown.
‘Oh, hello.’ She edged nervously towards him. His eyes made him look curious and comical, not scary at all.
Edward had always said that he wanted to have a ‘whole pack of hellhounds’, but Marina, although she liked dogs, was in truth a little scared of them: they always seemed to snap at her, even the butcher’s sleepy Labrador, who lay in the doorway of the shop on the High Street, eyeing the bags of the customers who stepped over him, hoping for a piece of faggot or some bacon rind.
‘It’s because you fidget,’ Edward had explained one afternoon as he sat on his branch of the copper beech.‘You’ve got to stay calm and let them sniff you.’
‘Urgh, that’s horrible.’ Marina had wrinkled her nose in disgust.
‘How else are they going to get to know you? I suppose you could give them a visiting card with your name on, Marina, but they can’t flipping read!’
These fluffy creatures were unlike any dogs she had ever seen; they looked at her with intelligent curiosity, their ears two triangles atop flat, furry faces. The dog with the odd-coloured eyes put his head on one side, as if he were waiting for her to explain why on earth he and his friends were being kept waiting on the quay of Portsmouth docks.
‘What are you doing here?’ Marina held her hand towards the bars of the cage. ‘Are you in a muddle, too?’
The dog pushed his snout through the wooden slats and sniffed her. His nose was cool and damp. It tickled. She laughed, in spite of herself. She pushed her hand through the cage and stroked his ear. He pushed his head up into her hand. ‘Oh, so you like that, do you?’ she whispered.
‘Perkins? Perkins?’ shouted a sailor with a shiny bald head from the deck of a rather decrepit fishing boat. ‘Get over ’ere. Get those dogs on board! We’re leaving in ten, mate!’
‘I’m here, Brown!’ A tall, lanky man with his hair tied in a ponytail waved his arm dismissively. ‘Quit your caterwauling!’
Perkins. Brown. Marina knew those names! Every letter her father had written to her from every tour he had been on had described the funny things they said. These men were due to be sailing with her father – on the HMS Neptune to Cadiz!
On the side of the rusting hulk, just visible, though most of the paint had been worn away by salt, water and wind, a name: Sea Witch.
The man called Perkins approached the crate. The dogs barked and whined and became restless.
‘’Scuse me, miss.’ He smiled at her. ‘I’ve got to get these villains away, now. They’re going on a long voyage. Come on, boys! I’ll make sailors of you by the time I’m through.’
‘Where are they going?’ Marina asked.
‘Now that would be telling, little lady.’ The man tapped the side of his nose with his finger. ‘And however you look at me with those big, sad green eyes of yours, I can’t tell you! I’m sworn to secrecy.’
Marina tried a little sniff, and blinked, hoping for a tear, just to see if it might prompt the man to tell her something more.
Her beseeching look must have made the man think again. ‘Let’s just say –’ he winked at her – ‘that these little furry lads with their thick, warm coats won’t feel the cold! Oh, yes, they’ll feel right at home!’
He whistled a shanty with great enthusiasm as he pushed the cart towards the boat. But he huffed and bent forward with the effort of getting it up the steep gangplank. ‘What they been feeding you?’ He laughed, good-naturedly. ‘Rocks?’
‘Watch it, Perkins!’ Brown cried as he watched the dogs being pushed up the gangplank. ‘You drop them dogs in the water and Commander Denham will have you pulling the sledge!’
So this was her father’s ship!
Perhaps it was the agitation of the day. Perhaps it was the anxiety over her train ticket and her lack of funds to pay back Miss Smith. Perhaps she was merely hungry: a boiled sweet, two tiny biscuits and an apple is not food enough for a brain to work sensibly. It couldn’t be the fact that her father had lied to her. There must be a reasonable explanation as to why her father was not commanding the Neptune and sailing to Cadiz. But try as she might, Marina could not think of it. She felt strangely lightheaded as she watched the dogs being shoved on to the boat. As she stood there, the sounds
