The Ebb Tide (5 page)

It wouldn’t do, St. Ives said, to surface in the Pool, or in some other part of the river busy with shipping, and run afoul of a ship’s hawser, or come rushing up from below to tear a hole in a ship’s bottom. And of course as long as we were afloat, we traveled at the whim of the current, whereas we had some hope of controlling our movements if we could find the bottom in still water. How to accomplish this feat—that was the thorny problem, although St. Ives had clearly taken it up as a challenge. We clanked into something unseen, spun slowly, and continued on our way. I let in another burst of air. Through the port I could see what must have been the remains of a wrecked coal barge slide past, and I realized that all manner of debris lay on the river bottom, most of it half buried in muck. It would have made fascinating viewing, no doubt, under different circumstances.

St. Ives allowed more water into the ballast tanks, and we sank again, settling momentarily, a cloud of mud rising around us and obscuring our sight. We found ourselves toppling forward as the river pushed against us, and it was only by flushing water out of the ballast tanks that we managed to right ourselves once more, bobbing along eastward again, careening this way and that way in a manner that was soon sickening, as if we were afloat in a laundry tub. I let in more of our precious air, which we seemed to be breathing up at a prodigious rate. Directly after that we were cast in shadow, a shadow that stayed with us for some time before passing on.

“A ship,” St. Ives said, looking upward through a port. “Out of the Pool rather late.” He took his chronometer from his pocket and peered at its face. “The tide is making, or nearly, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Yes, sir,” Hasbro put in. “Just past midday, given the moon’s activities.”

“Excellent,” St. Ives said, winking at me.

I nodded my hearty assent, although truth to tell I know little about the tides. What I cared about at that moment was for the craft to cease its constant, rollicking, drunken behavior.

“We’ll have a period of slack water soon,” St. Ives told me by way of explanation. “Enough time, I very much hope, to find our way out of the river, ideally downstream some small distance, where we’ll cause less of a sensation. Air, Jack.”

“But when the tide turns,” I said as I reached for the lever yet again, “won’t that merely propel us back upriver?” I recalled the corpse that had visited us earlier. Quite likely it would continue to navigate the same shoreline, upriver and down, at the whim of the tides and with no end to its travels until it simply fell apart or was hauled in by a dredger’s net.

“Absolutely,” St. Ives said. “It won’t matter to us, though. Don’t give it a second thought.”

“Ah?” I said, wondering at this. Certainly it
seemed
to matter.

“We’ll be suffocated before the tide flows again,” St. Ives assured me. “Almost without a doubt. There’s no telling how much air we’ve been blessed with, but even if the tanks were full, with three of us breathing up the surplus we’ll be dead as herring in a couple of hours. You can bank on it.”

This silenced me, I can assure you, although St. Ives hadn’t meant for it to. He was merely making a practical observation. For another half hour or more we floated and bumped and spun our way downriver, in and out of the shadows of moored or passing craft. I found that I had become unnaturally conscious of my breathing, and so I began breathing unnaturally, gasping now and then with no provocation, mimicking the wheezing of the air in the pipes. What had seemed a spacious chamber had shrunk to the size of a pickle barrel, and I fidgeted about, trying to occupy myself by peering out the ports, spotting no end of mired flotsam—a wagon wheel, a tailor’s dummy, a chest half buried in silt and enticingly bound shut with heavy rope, probably containing gold coins and Java pearls the size of goose eggs, but already disappearing behind us.

“Air, Jack.”

It seemed to me that the rush of air was labored now, as if the pressure were low. But I was distracted from that frightful thought when I became aware that we were slowing settling again to the bottom. River mud swirled up around us so that for a moment we could see nothing at all. St. Ives consulted a compass among a small array of instruments, and when the murk settled he pointed out a long, curved wooden beam, a ship’s keel perhaps, lying half exposed on the river bottom. “That’s our bearing,” he said. “Along the edge of that beam. Due north.”

He began to manipulate the motivating levers once again, carefully now, waiting for the muddy water to clear time and again to get a view of the sunken keel so that we could take another creeping step. We edged around impediments sideways, like a crab, and two or three times backed away from a cavernous sort of rocky pit. Twice we mired ourselves in weeds and had to tug ourselves free. The broken end of the keel was far out of sight behind us now, and St. Ives was navigating by compass alone, adjusting and readjusting our direction of travel, none of us speaking or moving more than was strictly necessary. How much time passed, I couldn’t say, nor could any of us guess whether we were twenty feet from shore or sixty, whether we would creep out onto dry land, or bang up against the base of a cliff and find ourselves no nearer salvation than we ever were.

Again I opened the air valve, but the flow was feeble, a tired hiss, and the air in the chamber was distressingly thick. I tried to distract myself by watching our progress, but it was too frustratingly slow, and there was little of interest to be seen in the river, which was perpetually murky now in the slack water. Hasbro, who had either been asleep or in deep meditation, said, “I beg your pardon, sir?” and I had no idea what he meant until I heard the echo of my own voice in my ears, and I realized that I had been talking out loud, like a mad man, and with no idea what I had said.

“Nothing,” I told him with the rictus of a smile. “Just musing.”

“Best not to talk at all,” St. Ives said.

I decided to try closing my eyes, but despite my best efforts, I couldn’t rid my mind of the watery clanks and thumpings that accompanied our slow progress across the bottom of the Thames. Abruptly there came into my mind the morbid notion that I was nailed into a coffin and had been dumped into the sea, and that I was suffocating in the darkness. My eyes shot open and I sucked in a great gasping breath of air, but there was no nourishment in it, and I sat there goggling like a rock cod drawn out of deep water.

“Are you quite all right, sir?” Hasbro asked.

I nodded a feeble lie, but noticed through the port just then that bits and pieces of floating debris had apparently begun swirling past us from downriver, and that the clouds of silt were clearing much more quickly. I was filled with a sense of doom. We had missed our tide, it seemed to me, and I was persuaded that we should throw open the hatch and try our luck with the river, abandoning the loathsome chamber…. Hasbro, God bless him, handed me the whisky flask in that dark moment, and I took a grateful draft before handing it back to him.

Very shortly we began to make a certain haste over a flat and sandy bottom, and my spirits lifted. I was conscious of the water brightening around us, and up through the port I could see what looked like a silver rippling window, which must, I knew, be the surface of the river. Then the chamber was out into the atmosphere, the water level declining along the glass. We staggered ashore until we were waist deep and could go no farther. Gravity, St. Ives told us, had gotten the best of us as our buoyancy decreased, and we risked breaking our legs if we ventured onto dry land.

I swung out of the open hatch like a man plucked from the grave, and leapt down into the river as into a bath, inflating my lungs with air that was as sweet as spring water, splashing my way to shore like a frolic at Blackpool. Recalling that moment of freedom even now makes me wax metaphoric, although the memory fades quickly, and I’m reminded of how close I had come to shaming myself with my fears and my weaknesses. If I were a younger man today, with a more frail sensitivity, I might revise this account, and cast a more stoic light on myself, perhaps adding a small moment of personal glory. But be it only ink on paper, that would be to commit the same fearful folly again, and with a lie on top of it. Surely there’s more virtue in the truth.

We had made our way, we soon discovered, to the lower edge of the Erith Marshes, almost to the bend above Long Reach. No one had seen us emerge—another bit of luck. Three hours later the diving chamber sat atop the bed of a wagon, affixed to a swivel crane and fenced in by empty crates to disguise its shape, all of it tied down securely and covered in canvas. We found ourselves on our way merrily enough, north to Harrogate now, where St. Ives told us we would replenish the compressed air at Pillsworth’s Chemical Laboratories, and then on across the Dales and around the top of Morecambe Bay for a rendezvous with Merton’s Uncle Fred at his cottage in Grange-over-Sands. We were in need of a sand pilot, you see, to go along with our map and our diving chamber. We had no time to waste if we wanted to catch the 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.