It might have been minutes, hours or days. Maggie didn’t know how long she’d been standing, but when the cabin door opened with a burst of spray, Tommy de Lange was there again.
He found the gun cabinet and with a key unlocked it, pulled a carbine from the rack, and pocketed cartridges before locking it again.
He stood in front of Maggie, quite close, and croaked, ‘All right?’
Maggie, soaked and shivering, rocked in front of him and could only open and close her mouth.
He held up the rifle and said, ‘The other schooners might be close. We have to fire shots to warn them.’
She might have mouthed a reply. She couldn’t hear herself speak.
‘It’s dark as a grave out there, Mrs Porter.’
As Tommy left, Maggie noticed only now that the lightning was distant, all but gone.
She heard the shots distinctly this time, spaced perhaps a minute apart, but she lost count.
Tommy came back some time later to search for more cartridges.
‘The others?’ she tried to say. Was there ever a time when the roar of the wind hadn’t been a part of her life?
Tommy shook his head. ‘Lightship,’ he yelled, pointing behind him.
‘Slipped her moorings?’
‘Lightship’s to port. Doubt she’s moved an inch.’ ‘God.’
‘Mrs Porter. I told you that we’re dragging in the
right
direction.’ Tommy tried to smile as if this was good news. ‘Out to sea.’
Maggie Porter felt her ears pop.
Her daughter was crying again, loudly.
She became slowly aware that something had happened. She heard it all quite clearly. There was Alice, and the grinding of the ship’s planks against each other, and the shouting of men above.
The dreadful roaring of the wind had stopped, even though the schooner was rolling violently.
She heard herself say to Alice, ‘Hush hush,’ and the very sound of the words seemed to come from someone else.
The door opened and Porter’s large form stumbled into the cabin.
‘Maggie?’ His voice was hoarse.
‘Yes.’
‘Alice?’
‘Yes. Please God, tell me it’s over.’ She staggered towards him and he reached her before she fell.
Through the open door of the main cabin behind him, a pre-dawn twilight had replaced the black roaring mouth she had expected to see. The waves were mountainous but there was no wind. No rain.
‘Is it over?’
Porter, his voice cracking, said, ‘We have to hurry.’
‘Why?’
He re-lit the lantern. The main cabin was still awash, the floor covered in debris. Porter then led Maggie, with Alice in her arms, out of his cabin and held the lantern up to the barometer, still screwed to the wall.
He said aloud, ‘My God. Twenty-six inches. My God! My God! Maggie, listen to me. It’s the eye. We’re no longer in Bathurst Bay. The wind’s coming back soon and you’ll have to brace yourself. We have no steerage. The whaleboat’s gone.’
‘But there’s no wind,’ she said stupidly.
‘Not for much longer. With luck, we’ll ride it out and the wind will back off from here on in. I’m afraid you’ll have to bear it for a while longer.’
‘But I can’t.’
He led her back to his cabin, put the lit hurricane lantern on the ceiling hook, kissed the top of Alice’s head, and was gone.
Alice had fallen asleep and Maggie reached for the lantern and unhooked it. She was desperately tired, sick and scared, but she had to check on Daniel Jones and the Japanese diver.
She stumbled down the corridor to the sick bay, still clutching Alice. The door had been wrenched from its hinges and its splintered remains were amongst the rubbish washing over the floor.
She pressed her shoulder against the wall for support and stepped inside the cabin. The lantern revealed the dreadful evidence of what must have been torture for the sick men.
The Japanese diver was lying unconscious or dead in a corner. The floor was strewn with smashed crates, bags, tins, bottles, all sliding and rolling about in a mad dance.
Jones remained in his hammock, but it had swung around several times and he was wrapped tight as if he’d been a meal for a giant spider.
Only his face was visible. The bandage had come off, there was blood all over the hammock. The water was pink.
Maggie took a step closer, but then heard the wind coming back, a hiss and wail growing louder. She staggered back to Porter’s cabin, shut the door, and
wedged herself hard against the wall, holding the baby tight.
With a roar the schooner was lifted and thrown sideways. The lantern swung into the roof and went out. She felt the cabin shake and rise, and she was sliding along the floor as the schooner rolled slowly, heavily, over.
There was a splintering crash behind her, the cabin window burst in and water poured through, knocking Maggie onto her back.
Alice slipped from her arms, into the darkness.
The roaring of the wind was instilled with something more dreadful: the silence of a baby.
Maggie swept her empty arms through the dark cabin crying, ‘Alice,’ and in her blindness she stepped forward and fell.
Under water the eternal wind was deadened but the groaning of the schooner was more dreadful. She felt along the floor for the corner of the bunk.
She pulled herself up and only when the roar of the wind reached her ears did she know that she could breathe. The only voice she could hear was in her mind and it screamed over and over, ‘Baby my baby my baby!’
Maggie tried to stand and was thrown against a wall. Her arms groped around. She found the door, her fingers slid down and touched the latch. It was still
closed, the void now measurable, four walls and the window through which the sea pumped, faintly luminous and green now.
‘Oh God no, please not that,’ but as she turned towards the window she was pitched backwards again, hitting her head hard against the bunk.
Her fingers floated. They brushed the nightdress.
It surged away and her hand followed it into the dark. Her fingers touched the nightdress again, grabbing it, the fingernails digging into her palms determined never to let go. She pulled it to her.
She felt the familiar weight. Then she touched a cold leg and she picked up her baby feeling her face, lips, eyes closed. She put her cheek against the tiny mouth and felt no breath.
With a tremendous effort, Maggie slid her back up against the wall and, holding Alice upside down by one foot, hit her hard on the back.
And Alice, like a baby newly born, coughed and cried.
‘Thank God, thank God!’
Holding her tight against her breast, Maggie cried too.
The cabin filled with their tears.
The crew of the
Zoe
huddled together between the rocks. Sam lay under them, unable to rise.
‘My leg hurts,’ he said.
Great fingers of wind reached around and tried to pluck Willie off and he stumbled with each gust.
At some stage, another man climbed out of the dark and down into their hole. They made room for him.
‘Where did you come from?’
‘
Flora
,’ said the Manilaman and there was nothing more to say.
The lightning had provided the only light by which to see, but now it was far away, blinking out. Each man lost the sense of the others. He concentrated on keeping the noise out of his head.
And then something seemed to pass. They heard the waves crashing against the rocks. They
heard
the waves. The wind had stopped.
Willie put a finger into his ear and worked it around. He looked up. There was a grey light and he thought he saw a white bird.
After a time he stood, and peered over the boulder. Bathurst Bay re-emerged in the pre-dawn light.
Nearby, incredibly, was a lugger. It was impossible in the grey light to tell which one it was. Its mast had snapped and it rolled wildly in the confused sea, but its anchor had apparently held.
Soon he saw someone crawl onto the deck. Willie yelled, and eventually the other men behind him stood up on the rock and started yelling, and the man on the lugger waved back and for a long time they were all laughing.
Beyond the lugger in a mist, Willie saw the shape of a schooner. It appeared to be the
Sagitta
, her topsail spars still attached to the mast.
Willie was still waving when Sam tugged at his leg.
‘Get down.’
‘It’s over,’ said Willie. ‘The
Sagitta
is afloat.’
‘The devil’s not done yet.’
Willie thought Sam might be raving and he knelt down, saying slowly, still marvelling at the sound of his own voice, ‘We will get you fixed up. They will send a boat.’
‘No, they won’t,’ said Sam. ‘Listen, Willie. It’s not over. The wind’s coming back. Can you hear it?’
Willie listened. The waves were still pounding the rocks, but he could also hear a tearing, hissing noise.
‘Look,’ said Sam, on his back, staring straight up at the sky. Willie looked up. There were faint stars above him, but they were winking out.
The hissing grew louder.
Sam grabbed his arm and said, ‘Pray with me,’ and with a roar the wind knocked Willie over.
The
Crest of the Wave
was breaching. In its belly, Maggie stood with a foot on the floor and the other on the door. She pinched the baby and herself, to make sure she hadn’t fallen asleep, to make sure she wasn’t dreaming within the nightmare.
The water washed around her waist and she hardly had the strength to hold Alice above it. She realised how easy it would be for them both to drown in the captain’s cabin.
She waited for the floor and the wall to return to a less absurd angle, or to complete the inversion. Surely it was not possible for the schooner to be held like this forever between the throw and the blow.
The schooner took another lurch and then she did have her feet on the door. My God, she thought, we are going over.
Would the boat crack like an egg, the maelstrom sweep them away, or would they simply plunge to the bottom of the sea?
It was not possible to believe that Alice could die. Alice had to live. It was only a matter of finding the means by which she was meant to be saved.
There was nothing in this cabin that could carry a baby and float. They had to get out.
She felt for the door latch with a foot. She found it, and with her big toe she pressed down. It wouldn’t open. The door was stuck in its jamb. The wind and the sea were wringing the schooner between them like a wet towel and it had twisted the cabin out of shape.
Maggie kicked the door hard with her heel. It gave way like a gallows’ trap door and she plunged with a rush of water down the main cabin. When the slide stopped, she found she was again in water. Now it was up to her breasts.
Maggie held Alice over her shoulder and looked about. The lantern in the main cabin was miraculously still alight and hung from the ceiling at such a mad angle that it kept striking the upper deck.
The water was choked with splintered furniture, papers, clothes. The body of the Japanese diver had been washed from the sick bay and was floating face down. She wondered for a moment if this was the raft sent by God for dear Alice.
A thump near her head made her look up.
The sound was of an axe. They must be breaking through the deck! Oh my God, they were sinking and
couldn’t reach her in the flooding cabin. She imagined William desperately chopping away at the planks as the crew set off in the whaleboat. No! There was no whaleboat any more.
And no—the sound above the wind was of a tree splintering and falling: he was chopping away the masts. She’d read of such things. When all was lost, the captain cut away the masts. What happened next? Lash the women to a spar.
Slowly, the floor became the floor again, and the wall the wall. The Japanese diver floated by.
And the wind, with less to complain about as the schooner was reduced to a hulk, found a lower pitch.
A little while later, the cabin door opened.
Porter looked beaten.
He waded through the water and gathered both Maggie and Alice under his arms, holding them for a long while before saying, ‘We’re sinking.’
‘No. Windows,’ Maggie said hoarsely. ‘Look.’ The windows in the main cabin were black holes through which water poured with each wave. ‘Plug them.’
Porter shook his head. ‘There’s a hole.’
Maggie said, ‘Not rolling much.’
‘We’re heavy with water.’ A wave hit the deck above and water gushed again through the window, creating its own wave across the cabin pushing the dead diver before it. They both ignored it. Porter’s face was grim.
‘Abandoning ship?’ she asked.
‘Maggie, the whaleboats are gone.’
Maggie nodded. ‘Some hope?’
‘None.’
‘Lie to me now.’
He tried to smile.
‘How long?’ said Maggie.
He shook his head and said, ‘We’ll lash something together for a raft. I’ll be down to get you.’
He looked so desolate that she smiled at him, to reassure him that she was comforted.
‘Say goodbye to us,’ she said.
Alice stirred feebly in Maggie’s arms. Porter leant down and said, ‘Kiss Dada,’ and she dutifully turned her head and put her mouth on his cheek.
Maggie then reached up and pulled his head towards her, found his lips and kissed him hard. He turned and climbed the steps, back into the storm.
The hurricane cast its eye over Bathurst Bay and moved on. The eye did not look down on Barrow Point, further south, where Dr Roth, Constable Kenny and the troopers sat head to head under their single grey blanket, shivering and hardly aware of each other’s existence any more.
Kenny sang every song his father knew, and discovered he knew none for himself. The salt rain had lashed his back for so long that the softened skin split and the wind worried his shirt into the cracks. He cried out with each blast but no one heard.
The ridge had been swept clean. There was nothing between his back and the sea, and nothing could keep the dreadful roaring of it out of his ears, not fingers, not the third rendition of ‘The Last Rose of Summer’.
When the wind abruptly changed direction, they all fell sideways in a heap.
In a heavy trance each man crawled to another and
held out a hand, and in this way they rebuilt their little island.
Roth put his nose against Kenny’s, yelling, but he had either lost his voice or Kenny his hearing. Kenny saw defeat in the Protector’s eyes for the first time, so he closed his own and sent his mind elsewhere.
He thought of home, in New South Wales, of the vision of the farm years ago when he rode away before dawn: cold ashes, sleeping dogs, a light frost on a ploughed paddock. A ribbon of mist traced the river. His last view of his childhood home was from a hill looking down at the house, grey and small and still asleep. It had broken his heart at the time, but he had gone to Queensland.
Kenny dredged up the exquisite pain of homesickness, of grief, and dwelt on it. He wanted to go home. He wanted to live. Most of all, he wanted Hope Douglas.
What day was it?
Sunday.
‘
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned
.’
He’d sworn at the troopers. Lost patience with Dr Roth. Struck the man in his hospital bed. Had carnal thoughts. About a woman who was almost white. Was it a sin to love Hope Douglas? If he had never been told that she was black, he would never have known. Would their children be black or white? It suddenly occurred to him that Hope might not even be
aware
that she was black. The whole thing now seemed absurd and in the face of death, laughable.
‘
Hail Mary, full of grace
…’
God answered by shaking the hill beneath him.
And then there was a new sound, the hiss of a giant serpent. He looked between his knees. The devil was rising from the earth.
They all stood at the same time looking at the ground under their feet. The blanket flew off like a witch into the darkness. For a terrible moment, Kenny believed the sand ridge was collapsing
backwards
into the sea.
But no, water was pouring over the ground, he was standing in a stream that surged suddenly to his knees.
The sea was pouring inland.
He laughed at this new absurdity. He was on a hill!
A wave hit him in the small of his back and he stumbled forward as the current pushed him, and he had to run with it so as not to fall into that black river.
His legs moved faster as the water surged around him.
A tree trunk stripped white loomed in front of him and he wrapped his arms around it and held on.
In a lightning flash Kenny saw the entire ocean sweeping inland, down the far side of the dune into a black hole on the other side. The wind screamed with a new voice, the sea rose and the world was drowned. Trooper Davey staggered past, held an arm out to him and Kenny reached out, but Davey fell and vanished into that black hole.
In horror, he tried to climb the tree as it began to collapse.
And just when he thought he would certainly be swept away and drowned on a
hill
, God appeared to change His mind again and the water simply vanished, as if He’d taken the plug out of His bath.
Kenny was still holding the tree, but he could see the sand beneath his feet. He did not trust his senses any more.
When Kenny finally did let go of the tree, he crawled along the ground the way he had come.
He found Roth. The lightning had stalked off again. The retreating sea and the wind still had one roaring voice, but the Protector sat on the now-bare sand and let the wind buffet him.
Kenny slumped to the ground beside Roth and waited for the end, whatever form it might take.