The Ebb Tide

CHAPTER 5 Hesitate and You’re a Drowned Man

We held a sort of council of war there in the wagon, mapping out our campaign so that we proceeded according to a stratagem rather than a whim. It seemed to us that the ruse with the map must have borne fruit. Surely there would have been some way for Frosticos to prevent our flight in the chamber if he suspected that we possessed the true map. He was sure of himself, apparently, and that was a solidly good thing. And yet if we were wrong in this notion, we dared not return to the Half Toad or to St. Ives Manor at Chingford-by-the-Tower, lest the Doctor’s henchmen lurked about, on the lookout. We wanted simply to be quit of them, now that we had the means to make use of the map, and so we decided to make straightaway to Morecambe Bay in time to catch a particularly low tide. And yet we had some small matters of business in London, having to do with Tubby Frobisher, which I undertook to accomplish while St. Ives and Hasbro rattled away north with all possible speed.

It was an added bit of good fortune that Tubby could walk abroad without exciting the suspicions of our enemies, and could convey the tragic details of our untimely deaths to the newspapers, where he had a useful acquaintance who wrote for the Times and occasionally for the Graphic. It was reported that our diving chamber, with three suffocated bodies inside, had been washed up onto a rocky strand near Sheerness, where it was found by fishermen. The scientific community mourned: much lamented passing…eccentric genius…intrepid explorer, and so forth. St. Ives, vilified just months earlier over the incident of the burning squid, was lauded by paragons of science, and there was, Tubby informed us, talk of a bronze bust in a plaster niche at the Explorers Club.

It was all very gratifying, I can tell you. And of course before the news was revealed publicly, Tubby had looked in on Merton and then had scurried like Mercury himself down to Scarborough to alert Mrs. St. Ives and my own dear wife to the nature of the fraud. (Neither of them were quite as taken with our cleverness as they in all fairness should have been, we discovered later, especially when Tubby regaled them with his secondhand accounts of the flaming meteor over the Yorkshire Dales and the floating cattle and dead parson and other salient and half understood details.)

We knew little of this, of course, except that I had set Tubby into motion. It wasn’t the first time, by the way, that St. Ives had been mourned, and I wondered whether it was a good enough ruse to further confound a man like Hilario Frosticos. But then perhaps he wouldn’t need further confounding, since he already possessed what he understood to be Kraken’s map. We would soon know, for better or ill.

St. Ives drove the wagon beneath a full moon, Hasbro and I sitting beside him, along a seldom-used dirt track that winds down from the forest below Lindale and carries on beyond Grange-over-Sands down to Humphrey Head, which was our true destination. We had ridden in secret along this same road a decade ago, engaged in a similar mission. That had turned out badly, as Tubby had pointed out, and taken all the way around we had fared scarcely better this time, at least so far, despite the success of our flight down the Thames and our subsequent hasty journey to the environs of Morecambe Bay.

The trees grew more stunted when we drew nearer the water, blown by sea winds as they were, and we found ourselves moving along at a slow pace, creaking over sea wrack and shingle covered with blown sand, the wind in our faces. The moon illuminated the road, thank God, or we might have met Kraken’s fate, for there were innumerable creeks flowing out of Hampsfield Fell to the west, most of them half-hidden by dead leaves and low-growing water plants, and the place had a dangerously marshy quality to it that kept me on edge, ever on the lookout for bogs and sand pits. Several times we stopped to search out a crossing — ships timbers sunk into the mire — but midnight finally found us near the village of Grange-over-Sands.

The tide was turning by then, and we hadn’t much time to lose, unless we wanted to wait another day for a second chance. But of course every hour that passed made it more likely that Frosticos would become aware of our little game with the forged map, if he weren’t already aware of it. It was our great hope simply to avoid him, you see. Unlike Tubby Frobisher, we had no pressing desire to feed him to feral pigs or to anything else. We meant to keep him at a safe distance, smugly busy with his own fruitless search, never knowing that we were still pursuing the device in our own more useful way.

The moon was bright, and the broad expanses of infamous sand, cut by rivulets of seawater, appeared to be solid, with shadowy hillocks and runnels that hadn’t been visible an hour ago when we had first come in sight of the Bay. It seemed quite reasonable that a person would venture out onto the sands for a jolly stroll, to pick cockles or to have a look at some piece of drowned wreckage that lay half buried off shore, only to have the place turn deadly on the instant, the tide sweeping in with the speed of a sprinting horse, or a patch of sand that had been solid yesterday, suddenly liquefied, without changing its demeanor a whit.

The opposite shore seemed uncannily near, although it must have been four miles away. We could see the scattered, late-night lights of Silverdale across what was now a diminishing stretch of moonlit water, and farther along the lights of Poulton-le-Sands and perhaps Heysham in the dim distance. There was considerable virtue in the clear, illuminated night, but an equal amount of danger, and so I was relieved when the track turned inward across a last stretch of salt marsh and away from the Bay, growing slightly more solid as the ground rose. We quickened our pace, climbing a small, steep rise, hidden by a sea wood now from the watching eyes of anyone out and about on the Bay.

Soon we rounded a curve in the track, and there in front of us stood Uncle Fred’s cottage, which he called Flotsam. It was very whimsical, built of a marvelous array of cast off materials that Fred had salvaged from the sands or had purchased from the seaside residents of that long reach of treacherous coastline that stretches from Morecambe Bay up to St. Bees, where many a ship beating up into the Irish Channel in a storm has found itself broken on a lee shore. Looking out over the Bay was a ship’s quarter-gallery, with high windows allowing views both north and south. In the moonlight the gallery appeared to be perfectly enormous, a remnant of an old First Rate ship, perhaps, and it made the cottage look elegant despite the whole thing being cobbled together, just as its name implied. The cottage climbed the hill, so to speak, most of it built of heavy timbers and deck planks and with sections of masts and spars as corner posts and lintels. On the windward side it was shingled with a hodgepodge of sheet copper torn from ships’ bottoms. It was a snug residence, with its copper-sheathed back turned toward the open ocean, and the sight was something more than attractive. There was a light burning beyond the gallery window, illuminating a long table already set for visitors. Someone, I could see, sat in a chair at the table — perhaps Uncle Fred, if he were a small man.

What amounted to something between a widow’s walk and a crow’s nest stood atop the uppermost room, giving Fred a view of the sands from on high. I noticed a movement there, someone waving in our direction and then disappearing, and the door at the side of the gallery was swinging open when we reined up in the yard. I was fabulously hungry, and weary of the sea wind and anxious to get out of it, if only for a brief time. Uncle Fred stepped out with what turned out to be a boy following along behind him.

“The ubiquitous Finn Conrad,” St. Ives said, laughing out loud to see him there. I wasn’t quite so pleased, although I kept silent. I hadn’t revealed my suspicions about the boy to St. Ives and Hasbro, because, to tell you the truth, I felt a little small about doubting him. If he was who he appeared to be, then I was a mean-spirited scrub. If he was an agent of Frosticos, then I was a fool, and perhaps a dead fool. But what on earth was he doing in this out of the way corner of the Commonwealth? I’m afraid I stood staring at him, dumfounded.

Finn nodded at us, touched his forehead in a sort of salute, and said he hoped we were feeling fit. “I’ll see to the horses, sir,” he said to St. Ives. “I rode bareback in Duffy’s Circus, before they sent me aloft. Three years as stable boy.” He took the reins and led the horses around out of the wind, strapping on feedbags with an easy confidence.

It turned out that Finn had brought with him a letter of introduction from Merton, in order to “set things up,” as Merton had apparently put it. Finn had traveled into Poulton-le-Sands by any number of conveyances, and then had come around over the bridge with a kindly farmer before making his way down the north side of the Bay on foot, having run most of the distance. He would have crossed the sands if the tide allowed, he said, in order to do his duty. St. Ives said that he very much believed it. I believed it, too, but his duty to whom?

Merton had been expansive in his letter, the incident at the shop seeming to be a rare piece of theatre now that he was removed from it. He laid out the details of the hiding of the map, the production of the forgery, and an account of St. Ives’s eagerness to search for whatever it was that had gone down into the sands all that long time ago. There was a mention of the timely appearance of young Finn, whom he recommended without reservation. Even the armadillo made its appearance upon the stage. Uncle Fred, in other words, was in the know, as the Americans might say. Who else? I wondered darkly. But soon we found ourselves in the lamplit cottage looking at a joint of Smithfield ham, boiled eggs, brown bread, a pot of mustard, another of Stilton cheese, and a plate of radishes.

“You gentlemen have your way with that ham and cheese,” Fred told us, rubbing his hands together as if he were even more pleased than we were, “and I’ll fetch us something to wet our whistles.”

“Amen,” I said, my doubts abruptly veiled by the sight of the food, and it was fifteen minutes before we slowed down enough to say anything further, when Fred abruptly announced that it was time to go.

He looked remarkably like Merton, but not half so giddy. There was an edge of authority to him that made you think of a ship’s captain — something that came from a lifetime of dangerous work in the open sea air, I suppose. Merton had revealed to us that his uncle had lost three people to the tide in the early days, and that he had lost his complacency at the same time, as he watched them being swept away into deep water, and he standing helplessly by. He wasn’t a large man, but there was a keen, wind-sharpened look in his eye, and he was burnt brown by the sun. I found that I was heartened by his rough-and-ready presence. He listened as St. Ives told him what we meant to do, his eyes narrowing shrewdly. His nephew’s letter hadn’t mentioned the diving chamber, but had revealed only that we would want a pilot. It was the diving chamber that threw him.

“It’s madness,” he said. “You’ll join the rest of them at the bottom of the sands.”

“Almost without a doubt,” St. Ives said, sitting back in his chair. “Clearly we need your help with this.”

“You’ll need help from a more powerful personage than Fred Merton,” he said.

“Granted,” St. Ives told him, “but Fred Merton is the one man on Earth that we do want. We’ll trust to providence for the rest.”

Fred sat silently, watching out the window, where the wind blew the sea oats and the moon shone low in the sky. “You mean to captain this vessel?” he asked St. Ives, who nodded his assent. “And you,” he said to me, “you’ll go along as crew?”

The question nearly confounded me. Fear, still dwelling in my mind from our previous jaunt in the chamber, showed me its ugly visage. Another moment of hesitation, and that visage would be my own. Finn was a youngster, of course, and St. Ives wouldn’t consider his going along, not under these circumstances. Hasbro’s arm was still tied up in a sling…. I nodded my assent as heartily as I could.

Fred stood up abruptly from the table, checked his pocket watch, and nodded toward the door. The rest of us followed him out into the wind, which was sharply cold after the comfort of the cottage. Finn brought the horses around, an enviably game look on his face, and he clambered up onto the seat, holding the reins. We cast off the tarpaulin and saw to it that all was shipshape with the chamber and crane and the crane’s mechanical apparatus — a block and tackle rig running through a windlass mechanism with a heavy crank. It was double-rigged, and would allow for the separate lowering and raising of the diving chamber and a grappling hook. Our duty if we found the box was merely to grapple onto it securely, and then to stand aside and let the power of the windlass haul it out.

“Once we’re out onto the sands,” Fred said to us, “the full ebb will leave us high and dry. It’ll be warm work then, because when the tide returns, it’ll be with a vengeance. When I say we pack it in, that’s just what we do, quick like. Hesitate, and you’re a drowned man. Do you hear me, now?” He looked at each of us in turn, as if he wanted to see in our faces that we would obey the command. I answered, “aye!” and nodded my assent heavily, becoming a drowned man not being one of my aspirations.

We set out at once, Uncle Fred and Hasbro in a two-wheeled Indian buggy going on ahead, and the rest of us in the wagon, with Finn handling the reins. The track along the edge of the sands was solid enough out to Humphrey Head, which is a small, downward-bent finger of land smack in the center of the top of the Bay, covered with grasses and with stunted trees growing on its rocky, upper reaches. It afforded us no shelter at the edge of the sands, either from the wind or from the view of others out and about on the Bay, and of course there was no time to concern ourselves with these “others,” in any event.

The tide was still declining, and as it withdrew it revealed surprisingly deep and narrow valleys as well as broad sand flats, the water vanishing at a prodigious rate. Entire shallow lakes and rivers, shimmering in the moonlight, appeared simply to be evaporating on the night air. It was the sand flats that were worrisome, because they might be solid or they might be quick, the difference discernible only to the practiced eye of a sand pilot.

We left the buggy tethered to a heap of driftwood that stood well above the tide line, and straightaway ventured out with the wagon, Finn still driving, Hasbro up beside him, and Uncle Fred walking on ahead, prodding the sand with a pole to be doubly sure, Kraken’s map in his hand. Where was I, you ask? I was already ensconced in the diving chamber along with St. Ives. As you might have discerned, I had no desire to be there, and even less now that I was within that confined space, but either my natural timidity or what passed for courage still prevented my saying so. The hatch stood open to the night air, for which I was grateful.