Run Afoul Page 8

  George sent Midshipman Dicken and the two expedition boats back to the Vincennes with a scribbled message requesting a survey, a carpenter, and a carpentering crew at first light. As he watched them disappear, and worked his sore shoulders to ease them, he abruptly became aware of how quiet it was, with just the rhythmic thud of the Osprey pumps to be heard, and the gush and ripple of water. The hulking shapes of shipyard gear rose up against the stars. He was sure he was alone, but when he turned round, he found that Captain Coffin was standing just behind him.

  They looked at each other in the darkness, and then Captain Coffin said again, “Thank you.”

  George still couldn’t decide if he was being sarcastic or not, and was too tired to think about it, so he snapped, “Midshipman Keith was right, you know. You were too slow to put down the helm.”

  “It was your lookouts who failed to see the jangada,” the other tartly pointed out. Then he sighed deeply and said, “But I thank you. Many others would have shoved free of me by force, and then left me to sink.”

  An abrupt light flared across the quay as someone lit a cresset on the Swallow, and in its flickering glow Rochester could see how exhausted and drawn the other man looked. It was very understandable, he thought—Coffin’s ship had looked magnificent as she flew along with all her sails set, and now she was little more than a wreck. Not only was she totally unfit for sea, but, until she was fixed, no one could even live on board of her.

  Regretting his loss of temper, he said, “What about your cargo?”

  “Tortoiseshell. We’ll unload it tomorrow, and once dried, it should be fine. In fact, I’ll probably put it on the local market. There’s no point in warehousing it for the time it will take to get the Osprey mended.”

  Thank heavens it hadn’t been sugar, or rice, George thought. Then he wondered what price tortoiseshell fetched in Rio. To him, the cargo sounded very exotic. He supposed it had been loaded in some place like Manila, but thought that Coffin might have traded for it in some island in the Fijis, or that maybe his boys had gathered it themselves, picking it up on farflung beaches. They looked adventurous enough, he thought, and remarked, “Your crew seems very young.”

  “Those six lads are cadets,” Captain Coffin said briefly, apparently unsurprised by the abrupt change of topic. “It’s a Salem custom.”

  “Ah,” said George. Undoubtedly, they were sons of prominent Salem shipmasters, shipowners, and merchants, and some would have brilliant careers in front of them. “Six is quite a number,” he observed.

  “They pull their weight, believe me—and I like them, anyway,” Captain Coffin said. “Men bring problems on board that would have been better left on shore, but boys are uncomplicated.”

  George silenced, abruptly remembering that this man had sailed away from Salem when Wiki was sixteen years old. He thought how Wiki must have envied the cadets who had sailed with his father instead of himself.

  Then Captain Coffin said with a hint of dry humor, “I couldn’t help but notice that your first lieutenant is very young, too.”

  “Seventeen,” said George ruefully. “And with an amazing capacity for doing the wrong thing—but he does the wrong thing so cheerfully that we have no trouble forgiving him, and so he survives to err yet another day.”

  To his surprise, the other man laughed, and before he knew it, George found himself inviting him to spend the rest of the night on board the Swallow—“And whichever of your hands are not on duty.”

  “I’ve sent the boys to the lodgings we use here, and the rest are tending the pumps. The mate is in charge of the lads; they’ll be fine.”

  Rochester led the way up the gangplank that had been slung from the starboard side of the brig, and then through the small saloon to his tiny private cabin, which was crammed to bursting with just his berth, a sofa, and his chart desk and chair. As he took the chair, he observed, “You sound as if you come to Rio quite often.”

  “The market’s good, and I have a good friend here.” Captain Coffin sank back on the sofa with a deep sigh, and when George offered brandy, he accepted gratefully. For a long moment there was silence, as both men slowly relaxed. Then, with a sharply intelligent glance across the rim of his glass, Captain Coffin observed, “You make me very curious, Captain Rochester.”

  “I do?”

  “Busy as we have been, I couldn’t help but notice you studying me a lot of the time—and, right now, you’re doing a great deal of that.”

  George smiled rather sheepishly, because he couldn’t help casting constant glances at this man, and mentally comparing him with his son. Up until today he had thought that Wiki was the epitome of a New Zealand native—smoothly brown-skinned and muscular of physique, with long, snaky, black hair, and a nose that was Roman in profile, but flat in full-face view. Indeed, Rochester had suspected that when Captain William Coffin had claimed the quick-witted twelve-year-old Wiki as his son, he had been indulging in wishful thinking.

  However, the resemblance was remarkable—especially when the color of the eyes was considered. Wiki’s eyes, like this man’s, were light brown in repose, but had the same ability to change to gray with anger. The eyebrows, too, were the same—fine, black, arched, and very expressive. There were differences that fascinated him, too—Captain Coffin’s ears, for instance. They stuck out a little, while Wiki had neat, lobeless, Polynesian ears, set close to the sides of his head.

  “In fact,” Captain Coffin remarked, after waiting in vain for an answer, “you remind me much of a butcher sizing up a side of beef.”

  George was surprised into a hoot of laughter, suddenly liking this man.

  “And, what’s more, you knew my name—and yet I don’t believe we’ve ever met.”

  “I am sure we have not,” Rochester agreed, and leaned back in his chair with an amiable grin. “But I know your son, Wiki.”

  “Wiki?” Coffin echoed. His expression went blank.

  “There’s quite a resemblance,” George assured him.

  “Good God, is there?” Captain Coffin seemed absurdly pleased by the revelation. “Have you been shipmates?”

  Rochester paused again, before he said gently, “We met eight years ago—at a college in New Hampshire.”

  Both he and Wiki had been sixteen, and had been sent to the missionary college as a punishment. On the first day, when George had galloped out of his grandparents’ carriage into the dim college portal, he had fallen over Wiki, who was glaring at the massive door. After they had picked themselves up George had spotted Wiki’s brown skin and black hair, jumped to the conclusion that he was one of the benighted Indians he was to be taught to save, and with a braying adolescent laugh had declared, “Should be converting you, old chap, not knocking you down!”

  Luckily, there had been strength in George’s gangling limbs, or Wiki would have finished him off in the first murderous rush. Instead, George had fended him away and talked very fast, and the boys had launched a friendship that despite their different seafaring careers—one in the U.S. Navy, the other traipsing from one New England whaleship to another—had lasted eight years.

  Captain Coffin sighed, and said, “You must be George.”

  “Aye,” George admitted.

  “Wiki told me how you both absconded from the college.”

  George shook his head and grinned. “We didn’t take long to get acquainted with the local Abnaki tribe, and after that, hunting the forest with the Indians was a damn sight more attractive than sitting in a dusty classroom. We got away with it for quite some months—because the college administration was laboring under the romantic delusion that we were converting the Indians, I think. Then they found that the Abnaki were converting us, and all hell broke loose, so we jumped out a window in the middle of the night, and paddled off down the Connecticut River in a birchbark canoe.”

  Captain Coffin’s expression held more than a hint of envy. “Quite an adventure,” he commented.

  “Aye,” said George. It had been the first of many adventu
res. “Neither of us was missionary material,” he went on frankly. “My grandparents sent me there after I’d refused to carry on in the family law firm. Dusty books and deeds were most emphatically not my passion. It took just four months in the office for me to understand that, but my grandfather hoped the missionary teachers would put me straight.”

  “Rochester? The law firm of Boston?”

  George nodded.

  “And you’re a scion of that house? I can see why your grandfather was disappointed. But you managed to persuade him that you prefer the navy?”

  George smiled and said, “Wiki and I would have been happy to ship with the first skipper who would take us, but my grandfather refused to contemplate a scion of the family going to sea on anything less than a navy ship, and got me a commission as a midshipman. The U.S. Navy was impossible for Wiki, but, as you know, your wife’s brother was a Nantucket whaling captain, who shipped Wiki as a favor to her.”

  Captain Coffin winced. He said in a low tone, “When I left my son at home, I didn’t expect…” Then he broke off, paused, and burst out, “I couldn’t take him with me when I returned to the Bay of Islands—but I had not a single goddamned notion that my wife would send him to that college!”

  “So what did you think would happen?” George queried dryly.

  “I wanted to go back—to see Wiki’s mother, goddamnit,” Captain Coffin exclaimed without answering, and then fell into a deep silence, staring into space while George watched him. Outside, it was very quiet, with just the faint thud of pumps and the occasional echoing voice to betray that others were awake in the depths of the night.

  Then Captain Coffin said softly, as if he were talking to himself, “I taught her how to dress her hair in the French style, and she washed herself from head to foot with soap before coming to bed.”

  “You were fond of her?”

  “I loved her.”

  George paused, carefully choosing his words, and then said, “You married her—after their fashion?”

  Captain Coffin looked up, his expression curiously defensive. “You have to understand that at the time it was dangerous to trade in the country without the support of a rangitira—a local chieftain. Because of her father’s influence, no one would try to steal from me, or cheat me—or eat me.”

  “So it was just a business arrangement?”

  “You could call it that, I suppose,” Captain Coffin said with an expression of self-disgust. “I’d come to the Bay of Islands to trade tobacco for sperm-whale teeth with the whaling skippers who congregated there at the time, because whale teeth were the best currency possible in Fiji, where I hoped to find a freight of pearl shell. But after Rangi’s father gave her to me, I stayed the whole summer, trading in pork and potatoes, acting as a middleman for the tribe, learning their ways. Then, damn it, I sailed home, and married Huldah Gardiner. I returned next voyage, but Rangi was wed—in their fashion, as you say. She showed me our son—our boy, named after me—and we remained friends, but our love affair was ended. She was utterly loyal to her husband—just as she had been to me.”

  “And when Wiki was twelve?”

  “I asked her to give him to me—to let me take him home. Huldah and I had not had children, and…” Captain Coffin broke off, and then exclaimed again, “I couldn’t take Wiki back to the Bay of Islands.”

  “Not even for a visit?”

  “If I did, he’d be a fully tattooed warrior and probably dead by now. Europeans who call the Maori treacherous couldn’t be further from the mark—they are proud and revengeful, particularly of treacherous acts. Before the advent of the European, their wars were skirmishes—hand-to-hand combat, honor satisfied after just a few fatalities. But then they learned about our guns. We traders and whalers traded muskets to the northern tribes, and they set out on the warpath, taking white mercenaries as advisors. Can you imagine what it was like, with one side armed with muskets, and the other with traditional weapons? Thousands were killed, thousands. I saved Wiki from that, so how could I take him back?”

  George was silent a moment, mulling it over. It sounded logical, he thought, but, while he didn’t pride himself on having a deductive brain—not like Wiki—he thought that even he could see the flaw in the argument.

  He said, “So why did you go back to New Zealand at all?”

  William Coffin frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “If you had gone to the Orient, or anywhere else but New Zealand, you could have taken Wiki with you.”

  There was a long silence, and then Captain Coffin burst out, “All right—I was angry with him!”

  “On account of a woman?” guessed George shrewdly.

  “Aye!” Captain Coffin exclaimed, and then looked surprised. “You know about Wiki and women? Oh, you’re friends, so of course you do,” he said impatiently before George could speak. “But, my God, I doubt you know the half of it! I was once forced to buy off the father of a Marblehead milkmaid after he’d found his daughter and my boy together in his byre—and Wiki was just fourteen!”

  “My,” said George, impressed.

  “Two years after that, there was a friend of mine who married a girl who was just eighteen, less than half his age—an utterly unsuitable match, but he was quite besotted. Indeed, he was so delighted at landing such a young, beautiful bride that he entertained his friends at his estate for a whole week before the wedding, and during that week the girl and Wiki—”

  “Had a passionate affair,” said George.

  He already knew about it, and had met the girl, too, and had found her strikingly beautiful, but also boldly seductive. Every time her huge, languorous eyes had slid sideways to smile secretly into his, George had helplessly pictured what it would be like to take her to bed. However, he could scarcely inform Wiki’s father that his strong belief was that sixteen-year-old Wiki had been used by a pretty little tart who was determined to make the most of her last week of freedom, so he kept his mouth shut.

  Captain Coffin grimly nodded. “And they didn’t bother to be discreet about that passionate affair. Just an hour before the wedding ceremony, they waltzed together, and the familiar way they fitted into each other’s arms … Well,” he said, and sighed. “They made it obvious that they were lovers—even though she was wearing her wedding dress! Everyone saw it—it became the gossip of the village—and Wiki didn’t seem to care that he had shamed me.”

  “And so you punished him by leaving him behind when you sailed?”

  “Aye,” said Captain Coffin grimly. “And it was one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. At the time, I was too angry to think. I expected to be back from voyage within twelve months, and find him still in Salem, a year older, and a year wiser. I believed that we would pick up where we had left off, only on different terms. Instead, I got home to find he had gone to sea. Now, we only meet up in port, usually by accident, and that for a few days, at the most. Where, for a while, I had a son, I now just have a friend.”

  He was quiet, staring into space, and then looked back at George and asked quietly, “Where is Wiki now?”

  “Great heavens!” exclaimed George. “Didn’t you know? He’s with the exploring expedition!”

  Nine

  First light dawned with no sign of a survey party from the Vincennes, or even a carpentering gang, let alone Wiki. The only visible activity in or near the shipyard was upon the survey ship Peacock, which was hove down fifty yards away—and even that wasn’t much, just a few caulkers dangling on lines on the exposed side of her hull.

  Captain Rochester and Captain Coffin stood on the jetty staring out to the flagship Vincennes as if they could glimpse Wiki on her deck. She lay anchored off the island called Enxados, where the old convent gleamed in the early sun, framed by the grass of a hilly meadow.

  “Wiki should have heard about the accident by now,” Captain Coffin said at last. He turned and studied his poor ship again, and the sad way she leaned to keep her wounded side clear of the mud.

  “Aye,” said G
eorge grimly. “And Wilkes should have read my message, too.” Though both men, being shipmasters, were accustomed to nights with little sleep, their tempers were strained. After another half hour their patience evaporated, and they took one of the brig’s boats out to the Vincennes.

  Captain Wilkes, whom they found in conference with the second-in-command of the expedition, Captain William Hudson, was in an even fouler mood. His eyebrows snapped down as Captain Coffin was announced, and he didn’t bother to introduce him to Captain Hudson, who had evidently come from the shipyard to report on the progress of repairs on the Peacock.

  Instead, he resumed his cross-examination of Hudson, saying impatiently, “How long? Come on, give me a date! An estimate!”

  “Impossible,” Hudson exclaimed. “They’re all foreigners—and there’s no accounting for their style of work. My God, bring a gang of ’em to the Boston Navy Yard, and the crowds would line up in wonder. Where five of our men can put a seam on a ship, it takes five dozen of ’em, every single man waiting for a signal before they heave a mallet.”

  “And is she as badly off as we suspected?”

  “Right now, she’s utterly unfit to go to Cape Horn, let alone into high southern latitudes.”

  “The mizzenmast?”

  “Has to be shortened by eighteen inches. It ain’t as if those string-shanked bastards at the navy yard didn’t know she was rotten—they patched up the worst hole with putty and ropeyarn, and then painted it over.”

  “My God! Evil and dishonor! Did they ever do anything to further the expedition? No, they bloody well did not!” Captain Wilkes closed his eyes tight, and George could see that he was shuddering with rage. Then he opened them, and exclaimed, “And, on top of that, I’ve had a bloody insulting letter from Commodore Nicholson, in reply to my perfectly sensible explanation for the lack of a gun salute! And where the hell is the storeship Relief, I ask?”