He brought the telescope down to the whirlpool’s near edge where something had caught his eye. It was Kyte, frantically waving back at the ship. Burns ran to midship and called down to Hall in the boat. ‘Out there, Hall! Mr Kyte,’ he roared. ‘Lively, now!’

  ‘No, sir,’ yelled Hall.

  ‘No, sir? You get out there, damn you, or you’ll feel it come Sunday.’

  ‘It’s madness, sir,’ called Hall. ‘The whirlpool, sir. It’ll drag us in.’ But Burns barely heard him because of the roar of the wind and because he was already climbing down the rope ladder, hand over hand, nimble for his great height and weight, down the Morgause’s slick side, past the gun ports, past the level at which her brown paintwork gave way to the black paint, down to the water, into the boat with its astonished crew.

  ‘Obson!’ he called to the boatswain. ‘Is that rope fast to the stern?’

  ‘Aye, sir,’ Obson called back through the rain.

  Burns turned to Hall and the other seven rowers. ‘Now, then. Oars ready.’

  The rowers looked at the whirlpool. It was just over there beyond the waves to the west. They were terrified. Surely, the Captain had gone mad. Yet the Captain’s presence was so imposing, they raised their oars in unison, ready for the row.

  ‘All right, then,’ said Burns. His face was set with a determination they had not seen in him before. He looked almost mad. He was ordering them to possible death.

  He looked once more at the waving arms of Kyte, just visible through the waves. Then he looked back at the crew.

  ‘Now pull away,’ Burns yelled. ‘D’you hear me? Pull away!’

  The oars dropped. The men leaned forward, extending their arms. Then they leaned back pulling the oars, the rain smacking their faces. Then, with surprising speed, the boat left the shelter of the Morgause’s side and ventured out through the waves towards the maelstrom’s edge.

  Burns glanced back to get a view of the ship, receding in the rain. The mainsail was set. The Morgause’s nose was turning south. Maycock was on the quarterdeck shouting commands. So far, so good.

  But what he saw next sent a chill down his neck.

  Standing on the deck, watching from the gunwale, her dress glowing curiously white, her blue eyes like two lights in the gloom, stood the woman.

  Chapter 6

  Burns turned away from the sight of her. Her face had been blank, saying nothing. But her posture said much more. The way she leaned casually on the gunwale with one hand cupping her chin. It was a spectator’s pose. A causal spectator enjoying the dangerous spectacle.

  The spectacle that she created.

  ‘Pull, damn you!’ Burns shouted at the rowers.

  The launch pressed on toward the maelstrom. Waves hit the small bow and splattered over the men. The oars plunged into the water, bent as they took up the strain and pushed the launch forward. In the distance, Kyte’s waving arm, so close to the horrible precipice, disappeared, reappeared, disappeared.

  ‘Onward,’ shouted Burns, and for a moment, he felt like that other seaman, Jason from antiquity, urging the crew of the Argonaut forward into danger. He was an old friend and an invaluable officer.

  But what if it causes the loss of more men? What then?

  The captain’s life. Terrible decisions had to be made for the mission, for the service, for the war, for the honor of his family. There was a Burn’s family motto. It wasn’t exactly appropriate to the situation, but it offered comfort, a sense of duty. Perhaps his famous ancestors had said it to themselves in times of great danger. He said it in his mind and returned to the task.

  Kyte was less than a chain away. Twelve long strokes through the waves. He was not as close to the precipice as it first appeared. The sea could play tricks like that. But he was close enough to the awful, giant vortex to be swept around its huge circumference.

  So why hadn’t he? Why hadn’t he been swept away, just as the Wages of Sin had been swept away? It didn’t make sense.

  Burns caught a glimpse of the Wages of Sin itself, way down in the whirlpool’s gloom, her mainmast gone, her deck almost vertical, swirling ever faster into the deep and darkness.

  ‘Pull, lads! We’re almost there. Mr Hall, the rope.’

  Ahead in the water, Kyte’s face looked frightened and tired. He had thrown off his heavy Navy coat and was swimming in his white shirt and breeches, his face wet, his cuffs undone, his dark hair across his face, his pale chest bare. He was trying to swim towards them, but making no progress. The waves kept knocking him back.

  But they were almost there.

  ‘Oars up!’ yelled Burns. They were close enough and had almost reached the end of the cable they were towing from the Morgause. ‘Keep your eyes on the ship!’ he ordered the rowers. ‘Don’t look.’ If they saw the great yawning vortex they would panic. He, Hall and Obson alone would see it and remember it.

  Burns heaved the rope forward with a great discus throw, way out to Kyte, twenty yards away. Kyte swam to it, grabbed it, went under for a moment, then surfaced, and grabbed it again and began hauling himself toward the boat. His grip slipped a few times and his strength was obviously going, but he was making progress. His face was grim with effort.

  ‘That’s it, Julian!’ Burns called, hauling on the rope himself, the coils dropping at his feet.

  ‘We better hurry, sir,’ said Obson. ‘The ship is moving on.’

  ‘Almost there,’ said Burns. ‘That’s it Julian! That’s it. Hall, there! Prepare to take him on board.’

  Kyte was now ten yards away, holding on with two hands, lying on his side, allowing Burns to do all the hauling.

  But then, without warning, the sea changed. The waters around the whirlpool’s edge, so strangely calm, now began to move. It was if they had been strangely paused, waiting until they had almost pulled Kyte aboard, before suddenly and violently beginning to flow along with the rest of the vortex.

  As is someone were moving them.

  Kyte’s body was whipped sideways. Then the launch was pulled sideways as well. The sea actually surged around them, like a flood. The rope went taught. Kyte was now horizontal in the water. The sea was heaving him away, as if it had a grip on his ankles. Burns hauled on. Pulling against the current.

  But Kyte’s hand slipped. Once, twice, again. Then his other hand slipped, and then he went sailing away at a speed that didn’t seem possible. He went out and away from them, and then swung inward with the current, then paused momentarily as he was swept along the edge of the yawning precipice, then plunged over and down.

  And was gone.

  The rowers, confused by the silence turned and their seats, saw the horror of the enormous hole in the sea, the slick, dark, plunging sides, the unimaginable power of it, the mist rising above it, their captain’s back, the Captain himself, silent with the slack rope in his hands.

  ‘Captain,’ said Obson from the till. ‘Captain, sir. The rope to the Morgause it taught, sir. The ship is making headway south.’

  Burns turned around. The rowers met his eyes, saw his twisted face, then looked down. Obson lowered his eyes too.

  They remained close to the whirlpool’s edge for several moments. Then, the Captain said, ‘Signal the ship, Obson.’

  ‘Aye, sir.’

  ‘Have them haul us in.’

  PART FOUR

  Chapter 1

  The Morgause sailed south. Her provisions were low, her object’s location not precisely known, and her crew spooked.

  The Captain had ordered his two remaining lieutenants to press on, deploying almost the full compliment of sails, but not so many as to risk breaking the new top masts. It was no good straining to catch the Besançon only to lose a mast before they’d even reached the forties. The Morgause could be risked only when the Besançon came in sight, never before.

  So, they carried on, plunging the ship through the rising waves way down beyond the Cape of Good Hope, into some of the loneliest, perilous waters on Earth, far from civilization, far from any passing ships. The temperature in the glass dropped, the wind rose and shifted to the south west and the sea brought forth penguins and large floating chunks of ice. The crew chafed their hands on frozen ropes.

  And the conditions grew worse every morning.

  So too, did the mood. Mr Maycock, who had been a friend of Mr Kyte had developed ill will toward the Captain, blaming him for Kyte’s death. Burns had described to him exactly what happened at the whirlpool’s edge, yet still Maycock smoldered with resentment, speaking only when required, a sullen figure on the quarterdeck. Burns believed the resentment might have originated earlier, perhaps because of Burns’s promotion to captain. Kyte’s death had brought it out.

  The midshipmen, Poole, Morecomb and Frostrup were also upset, though not with the Captain. They were young and Naval life was a constant surprise. The deaths of Mr Kyte and the four Marines had been their first encounters with mortality, and there a little stunned.

  The crew however, had different concerns. The Captain’s bravery and his concern for Kyte had impressed them. You couldn’t fault a man who would go that far for a shipmate, especially when he put his own life out there, not just the lives of the hands. And he had handled the ship well when the bloody great hole in the sea appeared. No, the Captain was all right. Hadn’t won them any prize money, but there was rumored to be plenty on the Besançon—if they ever found it.

  No, it was the run of troubles that worried them. The blue shafts of light—for one thing. Then, the whirlpool. One or two of the men had seen something similar in other oceans, but never anything as huge as that. It was the size of a town back home. And who knew how deep it was? You might as well as how deep is the sea? The thing went all the way to the bottom. Obson said so. Said he saw all kinds of things swirling round in it, not just the poor Wages of Sin. There were other ships in there, a whale, and things he couldn’t name, but which certainly weren’t good.

  Even that was bearable—sort of. Sailors expected to see the strange and the bizarre at sea. No, there were other things causing mutterings in the mess and on the forecastle. The cats, for example. There were gone—all three of them. Then, there were animals in the manger. All of them had died too and the cook said they weren’t to be eaten. Then there were the really strange things. The temperature on the lower deck seemed to be even colder on the main deck, and the main deck was taking on snow

  They all knew why.

  Oh, yes. They all knew why.

  Many wondered why the Captain just didn’t throw her over the side, sending her back where she came. She only made things worse.

  And the further south they went, the worse they expected things to become.

  Chapter 2

  Captain Burns paced along the main deck, moving from aft towards the forecastle. He stepped carefully. Though the boards had been scrubbed and scraped that morning, but ice had formed on them, turning them treacherously slippery.

  The crew huddled here and there in their boat-cloaks of various kinds. Many of these cloaks were improvised and shared with the men on the other watches. The Captain nodded to each station as he walked forward. The men returned wary smiles or touched their foreheads with their knuckles. Burns didn’t sense any ill will—not like Maycock’s ill will. The men were mostly old hands. They knew the life at sea—even at its strangest.

  Even so.

  To keep their minds on the mission, Burns had put them through exhausting firing drills. For two hours he had them running out and firing the guns, practicing the turnaround time between broadsides, main deck and lower deck, port side gun crews and starboard crews. Firing at large ice chunks, standing in as French men-of-war. When the balls had hit, smashing the ice chunks to shards, it was like firing on an enemy. And it had cheered them up, or at least distracted them.

  But their gloominess was expected of course, given what had happened. Sailors attributed dark forces even of the smallest occurrences, such as the cats disappearing. How much more superstitious would they be after blue shafts of light from the sky had nearly sunk the ship. How much more still after a great whirlpool swallowed another ship and an officer? Oh, and no less than three Marines and their captain had been inexplicably hacked up below decks while the passenger’s cabin remained locked from the outside.

  If only they could find the Besançon and engage in a good old fashioned battle with all the guns blazing like hell itself, smashing the timbers of the great black frigate, and swords flashing, and men shouting, with prize money to be won. And that sea-chest of course, whatever was inside it.

  The thought of battle cheered him as he walked forward. Nothing better for a man, he thought. Battle, courage, to risk one’s life for a just cause—and possible enrichment. Nothing better. Nothing. But his mind turned darker as he thought about the other matter, the one unconscious in the cabin below decks.

  He walked all the way to the bow, past the mainmast crew, two of whom were fishing over the side, all the way to where Freer stood watching for ice chunks that might damage the ship. Burns had ordered a sea-level lookout in addition to Evans, Blight and Goodes in the lookout. The ice chunks were becoming a problem. Soon, they would be joined by ice islands. The ice islands were very dangerous things for a ship, especially at night. If only Kyte were here. He and Hirst were the only officers with experience of them.

  Burns watched along with Freer, whose gray pigtail looked as frozen as the ship’s ropes.

  But his mind was on what do to with the woman. He had left her in the cabin in the care of Doctor Bradall, whose fawning had not been diminished by the deaths of Ingham and the three Marines. The woman had been out of consciousness since the whirlpool, and had not spoken. Since she had watched you from the deck. There were questions to be asked, but he wanted his thoughts in order first. The woman was dangerous. The crew knew it, and he knew it more than anyone. Something had to be done. But what was he going to do, throw her over the side?

  What did she want, anyway? If it was the Besançon and its cargo, why didn’t she just use the great ship in the clouds to find where it was and then take it? She didn’t need the Morgause. She didn’t need Burns. So why the charade?

  Are you the captain?

  I am the one in command.

  Burns checked himself. These thoughts of sky ships and women who existed in both dreams and in the sky were mad, weren’t they?

  And yet, at the same time the thoughts weren’t so strange after all. He had seen what he had seen.

  Maybe her motives have something to do with me personally, or my family, something in our past, something we had done, something wrong, something that had been covered up.

  ‘Your ancestor.’

  ‘What ancestor?’

  ‘The one in the north.’

  But all his ancestors were from the north—the north of Britain, anyway, a whole lineage of them, and most of them Navy people of one kind or another.

  He would ask the woman what she meant as soon as she woke up.

  But first, while gazing at the procession of ice chunks, he had thought of an idea. It wasn’t a solution, but it might be the beginning of understanding.

  ‘Whale breeching, sir. Over there,’ said Freer.

  They looked ahead and to port. There it was, rising out of the cold water. It was curved and blue, and massive—almost as long as the Morgause itself. It rose up, spouted, and then curved under again, the enormous flukes of its tail rising for a moment above the waves.

  ‘Nature is a mysterious and wonderful thing, Freer,’ Burns said.

  ‘Aye,’ agreed Freer. ‘Mysterious, rich and strange, sir.’

  ‘Rich and strange, Freer? Why “rich?”’ he said, wondering why Free had used the famous quotation from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

  ‘I meant dangerous, sir,’ said Freer. ‘Mysterious and dangerous.’

  Burns turned and walked aft toward the companionway. He looked at Maycock on the quarterdeck. Maycock was watching the whale with Frostrup. The whale’s arrival also gave him an excuse to avoid his Captain.

  Even so, Burns was about to call out to Maycock, perhaps to compliment him on the words he had spoken at the service for the lost men. But then he thought better. He’d attend to Maycock later and properly. Resentment could not be allowed to fester in one of his officers. For now, there was something else on his mind.

  He climbed down the ladder.

  Gibbons stirred from his station outside the great cabin.

  ‘Cuid de chofaidh No tha brot anns a 'bhirlinn.’ Some coffee? Or there’s some soup in the galley.

  ‘Coffee, Gibbons,’ he said.

  Then he went inside, took off his coat, knelt down and heaved the heavy wooden sea-chest from under his cot and unclipped the catches. He reached in, moved aside his land shirts, his pistols and his compasses. Then he found what he wanted. The oily old notebooks that had belonged to Captain Alexander Burns, one of his great ancestors, six generations back.

  Gibbons was knocking again. The purser, Mr Heydon was outside wanting to talk about the ship’s provisions again. Mr Hirst also wanted to talk about the ship’s heading.

  Burns told him to tell them to come back in an hour.

  Then he took the notebooks over to his table, sat down, and opened the cover of the first book.

  Chapter 3

  The notebook creaked as he opened it. Creaked. Had no-one read them for a hundred and fifty years? The thought made him wonder if they were actually a gift from his uncle Alex, or uncle Alex’s way of clearing out his old cottage back on the Isle of Ewe.

  The first page smelled of mould, but also of the sea, or at least of salt. The notebooks had been recovered from a wreck—or so the family legend went. The handwriting was tiny and thin, but confident in style, written with a quill, and undoubtedly composed on an old vessel of the era, probably swaying on the waves off the coast of England.

 

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