Stormchild Read online

  We opened still more champagne, though I, who would be taking Stormchild down channel when the tide ebbed, only drank two glasses. It was a sad, bittersweet day; a parting, but also a beginning. I went to find my daughter, but I also went to fulfill a dream that had given such joy to Joanna—the dream of living aboard a cruising boat, of following the warm winds and long waves. I was going away, leaving no address and no promise of a return.

  At midday, as the tide became fair, my guests climbed back onto the pontoon. Friends shouted farewells as the rain slicked Stormchild’s teak deck dark. I started the big engine. Billy disconnected the shoreside electricity, then slipped my springs, leaving the big yacht tethered only by her bow and stern lines. David was the last to leave the boat. He gripped my hand. “Good luck,” he said, “and God bless.”

  “Are you sure you won’t come?”

  “Good luck,” he said again, then climbed ashore. I looked ahead, past Stormchild’s bows, at the rain-beaten river, down which Joanna had sailed to her death, and from where Nicole had sailed into oblivion. Now it was my turn to leave, and I glanced up at the hill where my wife and son were buried, and I said my own small prayer of farewell.

  People were shouting their goodbyes. Most were laughing, and a few were crying. Someone threw a paper streamer. Billy had already let go the bow line and David was standing by the aft. “Ready, Tim?” he shouted.

  “Let go!” I called.

  “You’re free, Tim!” David tossed the bitter end of the aft line onto Stormchild’s deck. “Good luck! God bless! Bon voyage!”

  I put the engine into gear. Water seethed at Stormchild’s stern as she drew heavily and slowly away from her berth. Next stop, the Canaries!

  “Goodbye!” a score of voices shouted. “Good luck, Tim!” More paper streamers arced across Stormchild’s guardrails and sagged into the widening strip of gray-white water. “Bon voyage!”

  I waved, and there were tears in my eyes as the streamers stretched taut, snapped, and fell away. One of the boatyard staff was sounding a raucous farewell on an air-powered foghorn. “Goodbye!” I shouted one last time.

  “Mr. Blackburn!” A small and determined voice screamed above the racket, and I glanced back across the strip of propeller-churned water, and there, crammed among my friends and dressed in a baggy sweater and shapeless trousers with her bulging handbag gripped in a thin pale hand, was the lady from Kalamazoo. Jackie Potten had surfaced at last. She had not let me down after all. “Mr. Blackburn!” she shouted again.

  I banged Stormchild’s gearbox into reverse. White water foamed and boiled as the propeller struggled to check the deadweight of over twenty tons of boat and supplies. I slung a line ashore, David and Billy hauled, and ignominiously, just thirty seconds after leaving, I and my boat came home again.

  Jackie Potten was panting from the exertion of running through the boatyard carrying a suitcase and her enormous handbag. “A man at the marina office said you were leaving, and I just ran,” she explained her breathlessness, “and I can’t believe I caught you! Wow! This is some boat! Is it yours?”

  “Yes, mine.” I ushered Jackie into Stormchild’s cockpit where I introduced her to David and Betty, who, alone of the rather bemused crowd who had come to bid me farewell, had returned on board the yacht. My brother now behaved with an excruciating gallantry toward her. He invited her down into the saloon, enjoining her to watch the stairs and not to crack her skull on the companionway lintel.

  “I tried to telephone you from London Airport”—Jackie talked to me all the way down into the saloon—”but they said your home number was disconnected, and then I telephoned the boatyard and they said you were leaving today, and I would have been here hours ago, but British Rail is some kind of joke. They just pretend to run a railroad. Anyway I caught a bus in the end, which was kind of interesting. Is this some cabin! Are those books for real? You read Yeats?”

  “The Yeats belonged to Nicole,” I said. I had put a lot of Nicole’s books onto the shelves, which were equipped with varnished drop bars to hold their contents against the sea’s motion.

  “Is this really a stove? That’s neat. I didn’t know you could heat boats. And a carpet! Wow! This is more comfortable than my apartment!”

  David, standing beside me at the chart table, watched Jackie explore the big saloon. “I see I did you an injustice,” he said softly.

  “Meaning?”

  “She’s hardly a Salome, is she? Or a Cleopatra. Not at all the sultry Jezebel I had imagined.”

  “I hired her for her journalistic skills,” I said testily, “not for her looks.”

  “Thank God for that,” David said with amusement, and Jackie, in her voluminous and colorless clothes, did look more than ever like some drab, wan, and orphaned child, an impression that was not helped by a brown felt hat of spectacular ugliness.

  “Can I use this?” Jackie Potten referred to the saloon table, where she sat and spread some crumpled and dirty papers. “I have to account for your money, see? I guess I really did some pretty dumb things, and I’m not really sure that I separated out all Molly’s German expenses from mine.”

  “You took Mrs. Tetterman to Germany?” I interrupted to ask.

  “Sure! But not on your money. Really!” She sounded very anxious.

  “Guide’s honor?” David, instantly divining the girl’s innocence, could not resist teasing her.

  “Guide’s honor?” Jackie frowned at him. “Oh, you mean like Girl Scouts? Sure, Scout’s honor. Except maybe some of the receipts got muddled and that’s why I need to run through the paperwork with you, Mr. Blackburn, because you never said that Molly should go, but she kind of insisted and she’s really hard to turn down, know what I mean? And she speaks German, too, so it was a real help having her along, but we got those tickets you book thirty days in advance and we traveled midweek, only my ticket cost a lot more because I had to come here as well and Molly didn’t. She’s flying straight back to Detroit, while I’ve come to report to you. I don’t think we were really extravagant. I mean we stayed at this real fleabag. It was weird. They had a pool, which I thought was kind of neat, but the Germans swim naked! These fat guys, right? Really gross! Molly said it was just natural and healthy, and she went skinny-dipping with them, but I couldn’t do it, I really couldn’t. And the food was awful—they don’t know what vegetarian food is—”

  “Quiet!” I sang out.

  “I was only trying to tell you.” Jackie made another valiant effort to keep going, while David and Betty were trying hard not to laugh aloud.

  “Quiet!” I had entirely forgotten this girl’s capacity to talk. I put a finger on my lips to keep her silent as I walked slowly to the cabin table. Once there I put my hands on the table’s edge and bent toward Jackie Potten’s indignant, pale face. “Did you find out why Caspar von Rellsteb sailed to Europe four-and-a-half years ago?” I asked her at last.

  “That’s exactly what I was about to tell you!” Jackie said very indignantly. “Yes, I did!”

  “Oh, blessed girl,” I sat opposite her. “So tell me now.”

  “I was already telling you!”

  “OK.” I held my hands up in mock surrender. “Please, continue.”

  “Molly insisted on going to Hamburg, because that was where von Rellsteb’s mother came from. Molly said two heads were better than one, and it really was a good idea, because she speaks German, and she found this lawyer and he was terrific! He had a cousin who lives in Detroit, and I guess that helped, because we could tell him all about Detroit and he was really interested, because he’s never been to the States and he was thinking of going, in fact, he was thinking he might go this Christmas, and Molly—”

  “Jackie!” I snapped. “I do not care where your Goddamned Hamburg lawyer will spend his Christmas. I want to know about Caspar von Rellsteb!”

  David was half choking with laughter, while Betty, who was used to organizing the waifs and strays of society, looked as though she wanted to tuck Jackie under
her arm and carry her away for a proper feed. Jackie, astonished at my reproof, gazed wide-eyed at me for a few seconds, then looked contrite. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but the thing is that Friedrich, that’s the lawyer I was telling you about, was really terrific and he didn’t charge us a penny, and that was what I was trying to explain to you, because you’ve got to review these accounts”—she pushed the untidy pile of scruffy papers toward me—”to see that we didn’t spend your money unwisely, and Friedrich, and this is what I’ve been trying to tell you all along, only you keep interrupting me, knew all about the von Rellsteb legacy, because it was quite a celebrated case, and he dug all the papers out of the archives and he gave Molly and me copies, and, of course, we paid for the photocopying, you’ll see it down there at the bottom of page three, there, see? Twenty-nine marks? And that’s cheap for photocopying, because in America you probably pay ten cents a sheet, in fact, a place near my house charges fifteen cents a sheet! Fifteen! And we paid much less for two copies each of a hundred and ten pages. I’ve got a proper receipt for the photocopying as well.” She dug through her vast bag. “I know I’ve got it. I remember putting it aside.”

  David, hugely amused by Jackie, had gone to the table where he leafed through her carefully handwritten accounts. “What’s this?” He demanded with mock sternness. “Six marks and thirty-seven pfenning on ice cream?”

  “Oh, gee.” Jackie blushed with embarrassment. “I told Molly we shouldn’t have bought the ice cream, but she said it was all right, because we deserved some reward for all our work, and the food was really terrible. All those sausages, which neither of us would eat, and we’d run out of our own money and we just wanted some ice cream. I’ll pay you back, Mr. Blackburn, truly I will.”

  “You can have the ice cream,” I said magnanimously, “if you tell me about Caspar von Rellsteb.”

  She did, though it took her the best part of a half hour. Betty made us all tea and we sat in the big stateroom, listening to the wind sigh in the rigging and to the rain patter on the coach roof and to the small waves slap on Stormchild’s hull, as Jackie Potten slowly unveiled the mystery.

  Caspar von Rellsteb’s father, Jackie said, was not alive, but had died in the air battles at the very end of the Second World War. Caspar von Rellsteb had discovered his father’s identity when he went through his mother’s papers after her death, and the same papers suggested that he might have a claim on his dead father’s considerable property. He had sailed to Germany to make that claim, taking with him a letter, in which, shortly before his death, Oberstleutnant Auguste von Rellsteb had bequeathed his whole estate to Caspar’s mother, Fraulein Eva Fellnagel. The letter, written from a Luftwaffe station late in the war, was hardly a legal will, but Auguste von Rellsteb left no other instructions for the disposition of his property before he was killed when his Focke-Wulf 190 was shot down by an American Mustang. The legal status of the letter was challenged by the estate’s trustees, but the German judges had dismissed the challenge and upheld the validity of Oberstleutnant Auguste von Rellsteb’s last wishes. Caspar von Rellsteb had won his case.

  “So how much did he inherit?” Betty, quite caught up in Jackie’s breathless retelling of the story, asked.

  “It’s kind of hard to say,” Jackie answered, then explained that the legacy went back to the early nineteenth century when a certain Otto von Rellsteb, the youngest son of a landed Junker family from East Prussia, had crossed the Atlantic to the newly independent Republic of Chile. Otto von Rellsteb, like thousands of other hopeful Germans, had gone to buy land at the southern tip of South America, an area so popular with German immigrants that it had been nicknamed the New Bavaria. Otto, unable to afford the richer farmland on the Argentine pampas, had purchased a huge spread of cheap coastal land in Chile, where he had established his finca, his estate, and where he had raised thousands upon thousands of sheep. He had also discovered an easily quarried deposit of limestone on his finca and, thus provided by nature, he had prospered, as had his descendants until his great-great-grandson, Auguste, hating the bleak, wild, stormy coast, and detesting the sound of sheep, and loathing the dumb, insolent faces of his workers, had returned to Europe where, glorying in the Reich, he had joined the Luftwaffe, impregnated a whore with his son, then died in a blazing aircraft for his führer.

  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.