Or Else My Lady Keeps the Key

TEN: A Bawdy Catch

FOR A WHILE THEY took turns baling, until the rain stopped at last. John’s hearing returned by degrees, as the ringing faded from his ears. They rode the surge up and down.

“Have we any rum?” said Mr. Tudeley at last.

“No,” said Sejanus.

“What about food or water?”

“No.”

There was a lengthy silence, and at last Mr. Tudeley said: “I have read, in some books, that savages in the tropics will leap from their canoes into the water, when they spy a great fish swimming thereunder, and stab it with their knives and wrestle it back into the canoe. Would you perhaps give that a try, sir?”

“I was born in Massachusetts,” said Sejanus wearily. “I can dig for clams. If I have a clam rake.”

“Oh. I see.” Mr. Tudeley sounded petulant. “Well. Perhaps it won’t be necessary. Perhaps we’re near land. I descried land off to the west, at least I think it was the west, shortly before we wrecked. Had anyone listened to me and steered for it, I daresay we might now be at a secure anchorage in some pleasant harbor. May I say, Mr. James, that you owe me an apology for your contemptuous dismissal of my suggestion?”

“Oh, shut your mouth,” said John. He couldn’t make out the change in Mr. Tudeley’s features, in the dark, but he felt the lurch as Mr. Tudeley sprang to his feet.

“Damn you, sir! I shan’t be spoken to in that manner, do you hear me?” Mr. Tudeley screamed, and sprang forward with his fists raised. “Not by you nor any other grinning ruffian, ever again!”

Perhaps he meant to fling himself on John. John thrust out his open hand, with rather more force than he had meant to use, and caught Mr. Tudeley square in the chest. Mr. Tudeley teetered back and stepped with both feet on the gunwale of the boat. There he danced a long second, his arms windmilling frantically as he tried to regain his balance while the boat tilted dangerously to that side. Both John and Sejanus threw themselves forward to grab him, and collided. Their combined weight was enough to capsize the boat. John heard Mrs. Waverly say a word he hadn’t thought ladies knew, before he went under the dark water.

He broke the surface with a harsh gasp and looked about frantically for the boat. It glimmered faintly a little way off, keel upmost, and if it hadn’t been painted white he’d have missed it. He swam for his life and caught hold, dragging himself up its side just as a pair of white arms appeared from the other side, clawing and grasping. He nearly yelled in horror, thinking it was a sea-phantom; but it was only Mrs. Waverly. She caught hold of his hands.

“Where are the others?” she asked.

“Don’t know,” said John.

“Here I am,” said Sejanus out of the near darkness, and after a moment’s splashing he found them and grabbed hold of the keel. “Did we lose Winty?”

“Good riddance,” growled John.

“Damn your eyes, you whoreson dog,” said Mr. Tudeley, who had swum up beside him.

“Mr. Tudeley!” said Mrs. Waverly.

“If you please, Winty,” said Sejanus, with his white teeth flashing in the darkness, “Remember there is a lady present.”

“Oh, sod off,” said Mr. Tudeley. “My apologies, ma’am, I’m sure.”

They tried to right the boat, four or five times, without success; exhausted as they were, at last they desisted and merely pulled themselves as far up the boat’s hull as they could manage, and clung on to the keel. Presently Mr. Tudeley said he couldn’t feel his hands anymore.

“I can see them,” he said, “But it’s as though they belonged to someone else. They’re starting to slip. I shan’t be able to hold fast much longer, and I don’t believe I’ll be able to lift my arms to swim, if it comes to that. I’ll drop straight to the bottom, like a lead plumb bob. Unless that a shark—”

“You stop your noise or I’ll drown you myself,” said John.

“Gentlemen,” said Mrs. Waverly, in a supernaturally calm voice, “If you don’t cease quarreling at once, I shall begin to scream. I shall scream and scream. In truth, I don’t believe I shall be able to stop screaming. And you shall face the choice of either drowning yourselves, or enduring being trapped on an overturned boat with a ceaselessly screaming female. Have I made myself quite plain?”

“Yes, ma’am,” they all replied.

“How nice. Sejanus, could I trouble you to catch hold of Mr. Tudeley’s wrists, in order to keep him from slipping off the boat? And he in turn shall anchor you. Thank you. Mr. James, would you please hold my wrists in the same manner? Very good. And now, gentlemen, I shall teach you all a merry and diverting catch to pass the time.”

“What?” said John.

“We are going to keep our spirits up by singing,” said Mrs. Waverly, a hint of steel in her manner once more.

“I have sung my last damned hymn,” declared Mr. Tudeley.

“It isn’t a hymn, Mr. Tudeley. It is quite indecent. My late husband learned it from a drinking companion at Oxford. It is a song, in fact, about an ugly woman. Now, which of you is a baritone?”

Nobody answered, and presently she warned “I’ll start screaming…”

“I’m a tenor!” said Sejanus.

“I’m a countertenor!” said Mr. Tudeley.

“Well, what’s a baritone sound like?” said John, who had sung in the choir at St. Augustine’s as a boy but found more interesting pastimes once his testicles had descended.

“Deep, like a bull. I think you’re a baritone or a bass,” said Sejanus.

“I suspect he is too,” said Mrs. Waverly. “Now then, Mr. James, I shall teach you the first part of the catch.

“Taking his beer with old Anacharsis

Quoth surly Swashbuckler, ‘Your wife, sir, mine arse is!’ ”

“Madam!” said Mr. Tudeley, appalled. Sejanus chuckled.

“Sing it, Mr. James!”

John repeated it, fearful of her tone, some three or four times before they all agreed he had the melody pat.

“Now, Mr. Tudeley, it will fall to you to sing the lines of the ancient philosopher. I am sure you’ll prove equal to the task.

“ ‘Vous avez,’ quoth Sage, ‘she’s a homely brown lass,

But after a bumper or two she might pass.’ ”

With trembling voice, Mr. Tudeley sang the verse after her. He was indeed a countertenor.

“What a delightful voice, Mr. Tudeley! And yet I am sure you have never had the benefit of a surgeon.”

“I am fully intact, I assure you, ma’am,” said Mr. Tudeley, rallying a little.

“What a pleasant thought. Now, Sejanus, here is your verse:

“Th’ advice was so right it converted Sir Knight

Who all his life after drank Saturday night.”

Sejanus sang the tenor part clearly.

“Very good, gentlemen! Now, in a round, if you please.”

Hands joined over the keel, they sang the bawdy old catch, and their voices echoed out across the night. After about the fifth repetition John got the joke, and roared his verse lustily as though he sat by a sea-coal fire in Hackney, with a pint-jack of ale in his fist.

They sang it until they were thoroughly weary of it, and then Mrs. Waverly led them in a song about a courtier and a shepherdess, and when they had worn that out John taught them Will You Buy Some of My Fish, and later Mr. Tudeley—to everyone’s astonishment—taught them a song to the tune of The Vicar of Bray that had nothing whatsoever to do with matters ecclesiastical.

The sea grew still. At some hour in the long night the cloud-rack broke up, and stars glimmered through. A sliver of crescent appeared down near the horizon, sending a white trail of reflection across the water.

At some point thereafter, Mr. Tudeley’s rendition of The Stinking Tinker broke off in a hoarse shriek of terror. The others, startled, scrambled as far up the hull as they could manage. John watched Mr. Tudeley, expecting to see him pulled below the surface. Sejanus tightened his grip; but Mr. Tudeley continued to hang there, with a curious expression on his face.

“I believe I’m standing on something,” he said.

And in the silence that followed his remark, John heard what he had not noticed over their music, in the last few minutes: the sound of breakers, beating close by in the night. Now that he looked up and around, he saw that his companions were visible in the gloom, that the night had drained away into pallor, and a dark mass of land lay before them.

It transpired that Mr. Tudeley was standing on a submerged rock. As the light grew greater they saw many black spires and lumps of rock protruding from the sea, with cloudy surges boiling around them. Somehow they guided the overturned boat past, swimming, threading the maze to a narrow crescent of stone-studded beach.

Once on the sand they were able to right the boat at last. John and Sejanus had to go down on all fours and shove it along with their shoulders, to get it above the tideline; they had lost all strength in their hands to grip, after so many hours of clinging on. Mrs. Waverly and Mr. Tudeley stumbled ahead of them, making for a grove of palm trees. There they sat down, plump, upon a sort of lawn of coarse grasses.

“We’re saved,” Mr. Tudeley croaked. Mrs. Waverly only nodded, too weary to speak. John and Sejanus got the boat safely on dry land, with a last grunt of effort, and collapsed on either side in the sand. John lay his head on his arm, meaning to rest for a moment before getting up to spy out where they might be.