Authors: John Christopher
Some of the horses had either broken free or been washed free from their stalls, and their bodies lay at various points along the hold. Mouritzen recognized the dappled grey that had at first refused the horse-box at Dublin; its coat was dank and slimy, the bright eyes filmed by death. But the great majority had drowned in their wooden stalls; they lay there in two neat rows, and but for their awkward, distorted attitudes, might have seemed to be asleep.
He moved among them, quickly and with distaste, taking note of the difficulties. The warm smell of horse and hay had given way to the cold scents of death and the sea. Corruption was not yet far advanced, but it pervaded the air. He was very glad to get back above decks. He sought out Josef Simanyi, and told him something of the problem.
‘We shall have to open up the No. 2 hatch,’ he said. ‘The broken cover prevents us getting at the other properly. Most of the horses are in that part of the hold. But I do not see yet how we are to raise them.’
Josef asked: ‘Why not?’
‘Nearly all are tied in their stalls. It will not be easy to manhandle them on to a loading mat.’
Josef shook his head. ‘You need no mat. A rope tying all four hooves together will do, if it is strong enough. Then we get a hook under it and lift with the derrick.’
‘Will it hold?’
‘If it is well done it will hold.’
Mouritzen clapped him on the shoulder. ‘That makes you foreman of the hold party. Take Jorgen and Stefan. I will keep Jones here on deck. You will find rope in the aft hold.’
The others were drinking cocoa in the lounge; Mary was serving it. Mouritzen asked her:
‘Where is Annabel?’
‘In the cabin, playing.’
‘You should go up there, too, I think, to make sure she does not come out.’
‘Why?’
He told her, and she nodded slowly.
‘How long?’
‘We shall not finish it today, I think.’
‘I’ll keep her away.’
‘Tell her I will come tonight and tell her a story.’
Their eyes met. ‘Yes.’
By the time the approach of night forced a suspension of operations, twenty-three of the carcases had been lifted and dropped over the side. Apart from one occasion when a rope parted and the body was dropped thirty feet back into the hold, all went smoothly, but the working party that came up from the hold and helped Mouritzen and Jones to batten down the hatch for the night was not a cheerful one.
‘I stink of dead horse,’ Stefan said with disgust. ‘It will take more than a cold shower to wash that smell away.’
‘We’ll get it finished tomorrow,’ Mouritzen said. ‘It has to be done. Otherwise the whole ship would soon stink of it.’
Thorsen said: ‘There is one crushed under the cover. That will be no easy job. I think I take the derrick tomorrow, Niels. You can have the horses.’
It sounded like a joke and Mouritzen accepted it as such. He said:
‘I will see to the thirty-sixth horse.’
‘No.’ Thorsen spoke more loudly. ‘I mean what I say, Niels. You have had it easy today. Tomorrow you can go below and I will stay on deck.’
Mouritzen said sharply: ‘You will do as I tell you, Jorgen. And I also mean what I say.’
Thorsen stared at him for a moment in silent hatred. He turned away, and started to walk towards the cabins, but stopped after two or three paces and came back.
‘Since you are First Officer, you are entitled to give the orders. Is that right?’
‘Yes, that is right.’
‘I was named by Captain Olsen as next in command to you. I am the only other officer of the
Kreya
. Yet you put Simanyi in charge of the hold party.’
Mouritzen nodded. ‘That grieves you?’
‘If we still act under authority, you cannot put Simanyi above me.’
‘Josef has been handling animals, alive and dead, since long before you were born. Do not be stupid, Jorgen. No one is taking away your position. For this one job, the man best qualified must instruct the others.’
‘Instruction and command are two things, not one.’
Josef, Mouritzen saw, was watching and listening.
‘Josef,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow Jorgen commands down below. Is that all right?’ Josef nodded. ‘But you continue to instruct, and Jorgen accepts your instruction.’
Thorsen started to say something, and Mouritzen spoke more loudly:
‘That will do, Jorgen. We want no further argument.’
Mrs Simanyi had Mary with her in the main galley, preparing the evening meal. Annabel was with them. She had developed good sea-legs and seemed quite unperturbed by the fact that the
Kreya
was still rolling in heavy seas. Mary had brought her along from the cabins after the hatch had been re-secured; shepherding her along the narrow deck against the wind and pelting rain she had been forced to realize that the child managed considerably better than she did. Now she was helping the two women in a deft competent way that made Mary extremely proud of her.
‘She is a fine girl,’ Mrs Simanyi said. ‘It will be a lucky man that gets such a wife.’
‘She’s always been good. She’s had to be left on her own more than I liked, but she’s so sensible it hasn’t seemed to matter as much as I thought it would.’
‘How old was the child when your man died?’
She hesitated, unable, as always, to force herself to the quick and easy lie.
‘Only a baby.’
Mrs Simanyi said, with sympathy: ‘That is terrible, to happen to a woman – to be left with a child and no one by. A terrible thing.’
‘It wasn’t too bad.’
‘The mother and the father – they helped, one supposes.’
‘I had some help. And I was able to get a job. I thought …’
She did not finish. Mrs Simanyi hauled out a lump of beef from the cupboard where it had been thawing during the day and slapped it down on the table. Slicing it down the middle, she said:
‘What is it you thought? It is not rude, to ask?’
Mary shook her head. ‘It was just that I expected things would get easier as time went by. I thought it would matter less when Annabel was old enough to go to a proper school during the day.’
‘But no?’
‘Some things were easier. Others not. As she got about more – meeting other children with proper homes – fathers as well as mothers. The more she could understand things, the harder it seemed.’
Mrs Simanyi nodded. ‘And now – you go to Holland to start a new life?’
‘Yes.’
‘That will be hard, too – in a strange country.’
‘I suppose it will. You must have had a lot of that – having to live in strange countries.’
‘Not so much. We circus people carry our country with us.’
‘Yes. I see that.’
Mrs Simanyi sliced and chopped the meat with expert fingers. She said, after a moment:
‘He is a good man, I think – Lieutenant Mouritzen.’
Mary said: ‘He’s been very kind to us.’
‘He is fond of you – and Annabel. One sees that.’
‘You met him when you came across at the beginning of summer, didn’t you?’
‘That’s right. You know, there are some men are hard when they know a woman is weak, needs help – others are more gentle then. That is Niels. He is gentle.’
There were clamps to hold the cooking pots on top of the stove. Mary flicked one open and took the pot over to the table.
‘A woman could trust Niels,’ Mrs Simanyi said.
Mary said, in a voice colder than she had planned:
‘On that other trip – I take it he and Nadya got on well together?’
Mrs Simanyi sighed, and then laughed. ‘She is a fine girl, my Nadya. But she is a wild one. She has the strength of a man; she is stronger than Stefan, and has been since they were little. That is wrong for a woman.’
‘Is it?’
‘Bring me the carrots, Annabel,’ Mrs Simanyi said. ‘And you may eat one – they are clean. You are a good girl. My Nadya, when she was little, would not work in the kitchen with me as you do – always she was out with the animals and the acrobats.’
‘I don’t like animals much, except dogs. I’m going to have a puppy soon.’
‘That will be fine. Go bring me a lump of salt, little one. As big as your hand when it is closed.’ To Mary she said: ‘You think a man who takes one woman lightly is light with all women?’
‘Some men can’t help themselves.’
Mrs Simanyi shook her head. ‘Some women also. The men may make good husbands all the same. The women good wives, too, but that is harder.’
‘Until they meet each other again, or someone like each other.’
‘A wise woman would not mind too much.’
With some bitterness, Mary said: ‘Wise?’
‘Does a woman leave her husband because he breaks a leg, or drinks too much sometimes, or is a bit of a coward, maybe? No one marries a saint.’
‘You talk about the woman leaving. She might be the one that is left.’
Mrs Simanyi heaped vegetables into the pot.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It happens. A young woman left, maybe with a child, children. So she has to work hard and suffer much to keep them. No surprise she gets bitter. But she punishes herself so. And she punishes the child, too.’
‘That’s not true!’ She looked at the older woman. ‘It need not be true.’
‘For a child to be happy, contented, then the mother must be happy. Choosing what is good for the child is not the answer.’
In a low, tense voice, Mary said: ‘Not for the child; for me. I want a husband I can rely on, someone who will care for and look after us both. Nothing romantic, exciting. Just someone solid and dependable.’
Mrs Simanyi surveyed her, smiling. ‘I think you will be lucky. I think you will be luckier than you expect.’
The storms drove the
Kreya
north and west, slackening only long enough for the hope of calm to flare up and then once more be snuffed out. The hold was cleared of the dead horses, although they sweated a couple of hours on the carcase pinned under the shattered hatch cover. After that Olsen had them concentrate on rigging a more dependable rudder, for use when the seas moderated sufficiently. Meanwhile, there was nothing to do but plot an increasingly unreliable north-westerly course on the chart.
‘Iceland?’ Mouritzen asked.
Olsen nodded, pursing his lips. ‘Iceland. Or Spitzbergen. Or Murmansk. We are North of Sixty, I think, and South of Seventy. And somewhere West of Greenwich.’
‘There is a lot of sea in these parts.’
‘And not many ships. We are seven days out of Dieppe. By now we are counted as lost.’
‘I don’t think they have looked very hard for us.’
‘We have heard aeroplanes a couple of times, even if we have seen none. What do you expect? As you say, there is a lot of sea here. We are lucky – we have no one mourning us.’
‘Your mother is alive still, isn’t she?’
‘Yes.’ Olsen produced one of the little Dutch cigars he was fond of smoking. ‘Nearly eighty. A strong woman.’
‘I have both parents,’ Mouritzen said. ‘But three brothers and two sisters. In some things a big family is good. I would not like to have so much hang on one heart, one pair of lungs.’
‘So you will have a big family. But first you must find a wife. Isn’t that how it goes?’
Mouritzen did not reply immediately. He said:
‘Maybe I will not have far to look.’
‘No,’ Olsen said, ‘maybe you won’t. She is a fine woman. Pretty, healthy – I think you could be confident of a big family from her. She will make a good wife, providing you can get over the fact of her previous commitments.’
‘I think I can do that.’
‘Yes.’ Olsen grinned. ‘If not, you can join the circus yourself, eh? You can help her tame the bear, and maybe learn to swing together from the high trapeze. That breeds great trust between husband and wife, I fancy.’
Mouritzen grinned in return. ‘Make jokes if you like. Nadya is a fine girl, but not for me. I leave her to you. We will have a double wedding; perhaps a double christening.’
Olsen shook his head. ‘I think I would sooner marry the bear.’
Katerina had been moved from the cabins to the forecastle, and installed there in the cabin that had once belonged to Carling. Mouritzen had approved this; Olsen knew of it but had not recognized it officially. The cage, it had turned out, had been smashed beyond hope of repair on board ship.
The cabin was at the forward end of the forecastle, well away from the galley and abutting on the lower foredeck. Nadya went there with food for the bear; the supplies that had been brought for the animal’s special use were now used up, and she was being fed out of the general ration store. Nadya brought her carrots and potatoes, a few apples, and some wheaten biscuits, smeared with syrup. She fed these to her, bit by bit, talking to her and brushing her with a stiff brush.
‘It is too stormy yet, my love,’ she said, ‘for you to promenade – cold and wet, weather that does not suit a bear. But when the rain stops and the wind goes down, we will go a small walk together. There is a deck here where you can stroll and no one will trouble you. And then we will get your cabin cleaned and made fresh and nice for a bear.’
She had left the cabin door wide open, and would have heard the noise of anyone approaching down the corridor. She was surprised, hearing a sound and looking over her shoulder, to see Thorsen standing beyond the open doorway, watching her.
‘How did you get here?’ she asked him.
‘From the upper deck.’
‘It will be longer, coming that way.’
Thorsen nodded. ‘But no one knows I am here.’
Nadya stared at him for a moment, and then smiled.
‘Is that to make me tremble? Will you rape me, little Jorgen?’
‘I wanted to see you, to talk to you, and I wanted you to see that I can be discreet.’
‘Yes.’ She smiled again. ‘I think you can be discreet.’ She left the cabin, and closed and locked the door behind her. Thorsen stood beside her. He put his hands on her arms, beseeching rather than demanding.
‘Even in oilskins?’ Nadya said. ‘There is much romance in you, little Jorgen.’
‘Don’t call me that,’ he said. ‘I am as tall as you are.’
‘Yes.’ She surveyed him critically. ‘But a woman wishes a man to be taller. Go put on stilts, little Jorgen, and then come back and perhaps I will love you.’
He clutched her arm more urgently. ‘Come into the next cabin. I have cleaned it up, made it all nice. There is drink there, and some glasses. We can sit and drink together.’