Stormchild (16 page)

Jackie Potten carefully unfolded a photocopied map that she pushed across
Stormchild’s
cabin table. “It’s there,” she said, “all that’s left of the von Rellsteb
finca”

I did not look at the map. Instead my mind was reeling with the sudden understanding that the Genesis community was not in Alaska after all, but in Patagonia.

“How big is the estate?” David turned the map toward him. It was not a very helpful map, showing hardly any detail, but instead just some shaded-in islands that rimmed the wild western coast of South America.

“Caspar inherited about twelve thousand acres,” Jackie said. “The estate lost a good deal of land when Allende was in power, but Pinochet restored most of it to the German trustees. General Pinochet really liked the Germans, you see, and I guess he was kind of hoping that a German might go back and live at the
finca.
There’s evidently a really big farmhouse, and there are still some industrial buildings left at the quarry, because they went on extracting limestone right up until the Second World War.”

“The land can’t be worth anything,” David said dismissively.

“But what a perfect hiding place,” I said, and I pulled the photocopied map toward me and saw that Otto von Rellsteb had made his
finca
in the Archipielago Sangre de Cristo, the Islands of Christ’s Blood, in the Magellanic region of Chile, at the very end of the earth, in the last land God made, in the remotest region any man might search for his enemies; in Patagonia.

I knew something about the Patagonian coast, because I had once made plans to take a British army expedition there, but those plans had collapsed when the Ministry of Defense had tediously demanded either scientific or military justification for the jaunt. Perhaps I had been lucky in the Ministry’s obduracy, for, though there are one or two wilder places than Patagonia, there is no coast on earth where the sea and wind combine to vent such an implacable and relentless anger. Patagonia has a coast out of a nightmare. It is a seashore from hell.

It is a coastline that is still being formed, a coastline being ripped and burned and forged from the clash of volcano and tectonic plate, and of ocean and glacier. On a chart the coast looks as though it has been fractured into islands so numerous they are uncountable. It is a coast of dizzying cliffs, murderous tidal surges, howling winds, whirlpools, sudden fire, and crushing ice. It is the coast where the massive fetch of the great Pacific rollers ends in numbing violence. From the Gulf of Corcovado to the northern limit of the Land of Fire are five hundred miles of ragged islands about which the wild sea heaps and shatters itself white. There are no roads down that coast. A few wild tracks cross the Andes from the grass plains of the Argentine, but no roads can be built parallel to the tortuous Chilean coast, so the only way to travel is by boat, threading the narrow channels between the inland glaciers and the outer barrier islands. Yet even the innermost channels offer no certain safety to a mariner. A Chilean naval ship, taking food to one of the coast’s rare lighthouses, was once trapped in such a channel for forty days as the frenzied Pacific waves pounded the outer rocks and filled the sky with stinging whips of freezing spume. Within the channels, where thick growths of kelp clog propellers and thicker fogs blind helmsmen and lookouts, williwaws or
rafa-gas,
which are sudden squalls of hurricane-force wind, hurtle down the mountainsides to explode the seemingly sheltered waters into frantic madness. Such winds can destroy a boat in seconds.

The coast, inhospitable though it is, still has its few inhabitants. A handful of ranches cling to the islands and mainland hills; there is one fishing settlement with the unlikely name of Puerto Eden, and one surviving limestone quarry which still extracts stone, but otherwise the long savage coast has been abandoned to the seas and to the winds, to the smoking vents of volcanoes, to the glaciers, and to the earth tremors, which reveal that this is a place where a seam of the planet is still grinding and tearing itself into ruin. The nightmare coast comes to its end in the “Land of Fire,” the Tierra del Fuego, at Cape Horn where, before the Panama Canal was dug, the great ships used to die, and where the biggest seas on earth still heap and surge through the narrow and shallow Drake Passage which runs between the Land of Fire and the northernmost tip of Antarctica. It is a horrid coast, a bitter coast, a dangerous and rock-riven coast, where men and boats die easily. It was also a coast which, if I was to find my child and let her loose from a madman’s thrall, I would have to search.

“Remember Peter Carter-Pirie?” I asked David.

“I was just thinking of him.”

“Carter-Pirie?” Betty asked.

“He was a mad Royal Marine,” I explained, “who used to sail a wooden boat to unlikely places. David and I met him in Greenland when we were guinea-pigging survival gear for the army, and he rather excited us at the prospect of sailing the Patagonian coast. He’d been there a couple of times, you see, and I remember he told us quite a bit about it.”

“And none of it particularly good,” David said grimly.

“He said the bird life was remarkable,” I reproved David’s pessimism. “Lots of condors, steamer ducks, penguins, that sort of thing. If I remember rightly Carter-Pirie went there to prove that Patagonia was the breeding ground for the greater-crested snipe or something like that.”

“There is no greater-crested snipe,” said Betty, with the easy authority of an expert, “though there is a Patagonian hummingbird; the green-backed firecrown.”

Jackie Potten was staring at the three of us as though we had lost our collective marbles. “Hummingbird?” she said faintly.

“I’d rather like to see that hummingbird,” David said wistfully.

“Patagonia can’t be a very comfortable place for a hummingbird,” I suggested. “I thought they sipped nectar in warm climes?”

“It can’t be a very comfortable place for von Rellsteb and his Genesis community either”—David was peering at the map—”if indeed they’re there?”

“Where else?” I asked.

“But Patagonia means rather a drastic change in your plans, Tim, does it not?” David inquired.

“Not really.” I spoke with an insouciance I did not entirely feel. “It just means that I turn left when I reach the Pacific, instead of turning right.”

“You mean.” Jackie Potten frowned at me.

I glanced across the table at her. “Oh, I’m sorry, I never told you where I was going, did I? When you arrived I was just leaving to find the Genesis community.”

“In this?” She gestured round
Stormchild’s
spacious saloon.

“It’s a great deal more suitable than a Ford Escort,” I said very seriously.

“You were just leaving?” She ignored my feeble jest. “But you didn’t know where to look!”

“I had a mind to try Alaska,” I explained, “but I would probably have tried to telephone you as soon as I reached the far side of the Atlantic, and I guess you’d have told me to try Patagonia instead.”

“So now you’ll just go to Chile?” Jackie seemed astonished that such a decision could be made so lightly. “How do you get there?”

“Sail south till the butter melts, then turn right.” David offered the ancient joke.

“I’ll sail south to the Canary Islands,” I offered more sensibly, “and wait there till the trade winds establish themselves, then I’ll run across to the West Indies. After that it’ll be a brisk sail to Panama, and I’m guessing now, because I’m not familiar with the waters, but I imagine it will be easier to go west into the Pacific, then dogleg back to South America rather than fight the Humboldt Current all the way down the coast. And with any luck I should be in Chile by March next year, which will be toward the end of their summer and, if there’s ever a good time to sail in Patagonian waters, late summer is probably that time.”

“Wow!” Jackie Potten said in what I took to be admiration, but then it was her turn to astound me. “Can I come?”

Stormchild
sailed on the next tide, just after midnight. She slipped unseen down the river with her navigation lights softly blurred by the light rain. Instead of the champagne parting and the paper streamers there had only been David and Betty calling their farewells from the pontoons, and once their voices had been lost in the night there were only the sounds of the big motor in
Stormchild
’s belly, the splash of the water at her stem, and the hiss of the wet wind. That wind was southerly, but the forecast promised it would back easterly by dawn, and, if the forecast held good, I could not hope for a better departure wind. It was blowing hard, but the big, heavily laden and steel-hulled
Stormchild
needed a good wind to shift her ponderous weight.

I raised sail at the river’s mouth, killed the engine, and hardened onto a broad reach. The wake foamed white into the blackness astern as the coastal lights winked and faded in the rain that still pattered on the deck and dripped from the rigging. The green and red lights of the river’s buoys vanished astern, and soon the only mark to guide
Stormchild
was the flickering loom of the far Portland light. I had lost count of how many times I had begun voyages in just this manner; slipping on a fast tide down-channel, making my way southerly to avoid the tidal rips that churn off the great headlands of southern England, then letting my boat tear her way westward toward the open Atlantic, yet however many times I had done it there was always the same excitement.

“Gee, but it’s cold,” Jackie Potten said suddenly.

“If you’re going to moan all the way across the Atlantic,” I snapped, “then I’ll turn round now and drop you off.”

There was a stunned silence. I had surprised myself by the anger in my voice, which had clearly made Jackie intensely miserable. I felt sorry that I had snapped at her, but I also felt justified, for I was not at all sure that I wanted her on board
Stormchild,
but the notion of Jackie accompanying me had energized David and Betty with a vast amusement, and they had overriden my objections with their joint enthusiasm. Betty had taken Jackie shopping, returning with a carload of vegetarian supplies and armfuls of expensive foul-weather gear that I had been forced to pay for. I had ventured to ask the American girl whether she had any sailing experience at all, only to be told that she and her mother had once spent a week on a Miami-based cruise ship.

“But you can cook, can’t you?” David had demanded.

“A bit.” Jackie had been confused by the question.

“Then you won’t be entirely useless.” David’s characteristic bluntness had left Jackie rather dazed.

Dazed or not, Jackie was now my sole companion on
Stormchild,
which meant I had the inconvenience of sharing a boat with a complete novice. I could not let her take a watch or even helm the ship until I had trained her in basic seamanship, and that training was going to slow me down. Worse, she might prove to be seasick or utterly incompetent. All in all, I was sourly thinking, it had been bloody inconsiderate of David and Betty to have encouraged her to join the ship.

There was also another and murkier reason for my unhappiness. I had felt an inexplicable tug of attraction toward this odd little stray girl, and I did not want that irrational feeling to be nurtured by the forced intimacy of a small boat. I told myself I did not need the complication, and that this girl was too young, too naive, too idealistic, too noisy, and too pathetic. “I thought you had a job to go home to,” I said nastily, as though, being reminded of her employment, Jackie might suddenly demand to be put ashore. “Aren’t you the
Kalamazoo Gazette’s
star reporter?”

“I was fired,” she said miserably.

“What for? Talking too much?” I immediately regretted the jibe, and apologized.

“I do talk too much,” she said, “I know I do. But that wasn’t why I was fired. I was fired because I insisted on going to Hamburg. I was supposed to be writing some articles on date rape in junior high schools, but I thought the Genesis community was a better story, so I left the paper. And now I’ve got a chance to sail the Atlantic, so you see I was quite right. Molly says that we should always take our chances in life, or else we’ll miss out on everything.”

“It’s a pity to miss out on roast beef,” I said nastily. “What is all that sprouting shit you brought on board?”

“It isn’t shit,” she said in a hurt voice. “You put seeds in the trays, water them twice a day, and harvest the sprouts. It’s a really good, fresh source of protein.”

I glanced up at the pale mass of the mainsail. “Did you know that Hitler and Mussolini were both vegetarians? And so was the guy who founded the KGB?”

There was a pause, then Miss Jackie Potten showed me another side of her character. “I know you’re captain of this ship,” she said, “but I think it’s important that we respect each other’s beliefs, and that we don’t mock each other’s private convictions. I kind of think that’s really crucial.”

I had just been told off by a floozy young enough to be my daughter. I was so mortified that I said nothing, but just clung to the big wheel and glanced down at the binnacle to make certain we were still on a course of 240 degrees.

“Because we all need our private space,” Jackie went doggedly on, evidently translating my silence as incomprehension, “and if we don’t recognize each other’s unique human qualities, Mr. Blackburn, then we won’t respect each other, and I really believe that we need to share mutual respect if we’re to spend so much time together.”

“You’re right,” I said briskly, “and I’m sorry.” I meant the apology, too, though my voice probably sounded too robust to convey the contrition I genuinely felt, but I had been boorish and Jackie had been right to protest. She had also been very brave, but it was evident, from the embarrassed silence that followed, that the display of defiance had exhausted her courage. “Is there anything I can do to help, then?” she finally asked me in a very small and very timid voice.

“You can call me Tim,” I said, “and then you can go below and make me a mug of coffee, with caffeine and milk, but no sugar, and you can get me a corned beef sandwich with butter and mustard, but nothing else, and certainly with nothing green in it.”