The Wind and the Spray Read online

  And the wind and the spray were gone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A WEEK later at nine o’clock ... Laurel had decided to steer clear of time regulations on ships until she was more sure of herself ... the new employee climbed down the hill to Blue’s Bay.

  It was a small tie-up and the two boats moored to it exhausted its length.

  Laurel looked at the modern, lissom, white and tangerine yacht on the left, and her heart soared. A smart, able, up-to-date medium-sized craft, she thought nautically ... and lovely as a song, she added poetically.

  “So sorry,” drawled a voice she well remembered, “to disillusion you, but the Leeward is berthed the same as its name. In other words, lady, you’re looking on the wrong side of the wharf.”

  She turned and saw him before she saw the boat, or rather he stood out as a relief from the boat.

  He did not wear bell-bottoms but salt-bleached khaki pants; he did not wear a cap, his salt-bleached head was bare; nonetheless he looked as much a part of the sea as the sea itself.

  With an effort she focused beyond the blue eyes and saw the Leeward as it was—or as she found it. Not smart; if able, not apparently so; quite old-fashioned; a small craft—and about as lovely as a song out of tune, she thought.

  The blue eyes were regarding her tauntingly.

  “What’s wrong? Scared? What would you have done on the Tom Thumb?”

  “I’m not Mr. Bass, nor am I Mr. Flinders.”

  “You surprise me. I only expected the Tudor kings from an English miss.”

  “I know The Crossing of the Blue Mountains as well,” Laurel said calmly, “so I may be of some use imparting historical knowledge to the children.”

  “They’re not up to knowledge yet, and if they were they’d be on the mainland at school.”

  He still regarded her with the taunting blue eyes. “So you’re scared,” he said again.

  “I am not, but I am”—she paused to lend effect to the words that would come after—“a little deflated.”

  “Deflated?”

  She turned and glanced significantly at the trim white and tangerine yacht, then back to the Leeward again. It had a poky raised deck forward over the forecastle, another poky deck with solid rails amidships, and a third and equally poky deck aft again. It had a clumsy, lumbering look, and her own look said so very clearly.

  This time, really for the first time since she had met him, she thought with inward glee, she had got through the dark leather skin.

  A dull red came into his cheeks. He was pierced. He was affronted.

  “The Leeward," he said jealously, “is roomy, for all its appearance to the contrary. It’s of strong construction, has a shallow draught, takes the ground well.”

  “It also,” said Laurel pointedly, “needs a paint.”

  “Any particular colour scheme in mind? And don’t say that one”—he nodded towards the yacht. “It wouldn’t blend with your hair.”

  He had come on to the wharf and instantly she was aware of the rock again, wave-washed, hard, impenetrable, standing the test of the years.

  He looked down at her bags. “Spread yourself, didn’t you?”

  “I brought only essentials,” she said indignantly. “The other bags are to come.”

  “Other bags?”

  “By taxi-truck.” She nodded to a utility even now descending the steep road.

  “Nice,” he said sarcastically, “to know I shan’t have to worry Mr. Kittey for another ten years. You must have enough there to last a decade at least. I hope you didn’t forget my warning regarding chances of matrimony and bring along a trousseau as well.”

  “I did not,” she said, and seeing the truck pull in, she went across and paid the driver and asked him to stow the bags. He did so, her employer watching him go back and forth and not lifting a finger to help. She knew he was doing it deliberately to embarrass her, to make the number of cases seem even fuller than their number.

  There were quite a few, she admitted, but she had not known what to bring and what to leave behind, and Mr. Kittey, like all agents, she supposed, once he had disposed of her, found he could not spare her any more time. Undoubtedly, the empty niche at Humpback Island successfully filled, his attention now was on the Spinifex ... or the Gibber Desert ... or the Centre ... or—

  “Get aboard,” the Rock said.

  She jumped into the Leeward.

  A thin, gnarled, dried-up little nut of a man, so dried-up it would have been impossible to have guessed his age, came on deck and saluted her.

  “Lucas,” the Rock said briefly. “Miss Teal, Luke.”

  Lucas saluted again, smiling with the salute this time, then he turned to the younger man.

  “When’s Blue Peter, Cap?”

  “As soon as the lady settles in.” The man turned to Laurel and bowed her ironically into the tiny cabin that occupied half of the poky deck with the rails amidships.

  “No need to tell you to stoop down,” he said, stooping down himself. “You’re dinghy-sized, like Luke.”

  He looked at the clothes she had on, sun-ray skirt, paisley overblouse. “Anything more suitable than that in one of those numerous ports?”

  She flushed with annoyance. How had the man wanted her to turn up—in weather-stained drill like his own khaki pants?

  “I have a pair of jeans.”

  “Put them on.”

  She looked around. It was an exceptionally small cabin, just room enough for a minute range and a bunk. It was also a very public cabin. She saw he was grinning at her, “Take after your name, don’t you?”

  “Name?”

  “Teal. They’re the most retiring of all the duck family.” He grinned again. “All right, little green duck, how does this suit you?” He pulled a cord and immediately the cabin was a curtained salon, perfectly secluded, private as a locked room.

  He slipped out to the deck.

  “Why did you say green duck?” she called, foraging in a bag.

  “I don’t know what colour laurels are in England,” he drawled back. “Here they’re of verdant hue. Right, Luke, we’ll push off now.”

  Laurel wasted no time getting into jeans and tartan shirt. She wanted to see the harbour from the deck of the Leeward. Previously she had only seen it from city brows like the one on which Mr. Kittey’s office was situated, or from the Manly ferry on a Saturday when the office was closed.

  She put on rubber thongs and came out on the forward deck.

  They were passing under the Bridge; Blue’s Wharf was on the northern side of the Harbour. The Leeward seemed alarmingly tiny under the great dwarfing steel arch. She only hoped the boat was of strong construction as its captain loyally claimed.

  Circular Quay was left behind, Pinchgut standing like a stone fortress, a dozen little bays with a dozen yellow beaches and red-roofed houses nestling above each beach ... They approached the Heads.

  “Ever been out of the Heads before?”

  “I haven’t even been in. I flew to Australia.”

  “I see.” He regarded her a moment, then regarded the horizon. He looked across to Luke.

  “What do you say?”

  The little dried-up man squinted at the horizon as well. “She’s gonna roll,” he declared at length.

  Her employer turned again to Laurel.

  “How do you think you’ll take it?”

  “I’ve crossed the Channel quite a few times.”

  “That’s no answer.”

  “It is if you’ve crossed the Channel.”

  “I haven’t. I’m a narrow, biased, insular islander who believes his own brand of storms are worse than any other brands. To put it succinctly, I wouldn’t be too cocksure if I were you. Take one of these.” He tossed her a packet of foiled pills.

  “Thank you, I won’t need them.” She tossed them smartly back.

  He seemed about to argue, changed his mind and thrust the pills in his pocket. He turned his attention to the Leeward. Luke was at the wheel which was immediat
ely aft of the little cabin and he was nosing the boat carefully into a swell that was becoming wider and deeper as they approached, cleared, and slipped by South Head. In ten minutes Sydney Harbour lay behind them. They turned sharply south once more, running into a deeper swell again.

  “If we kept on long enough,” drawled the man standing beside Laurel, “we’d probably go into an Antarctic iceberg. Feeling all right?”

  “Of course I’m all right.” She answered indignantly. Here was an Australian, she thought with dislike, who had to have priority in everything, even in weather and water, probably in wind and spray as well.

  “I warned you before, never be cocksure,” he drawled lazily. “I’ve seen even naval men caught out after years of the sea.”

  “But you’re not a naval man,” she reminded him. “You’re a whaleman, an entirely different breed.”

  He ignored that. “No one is charmed,” he stated. “Sure you won’t change your mind?” His hand went to his pocket where he had thrust the pills.

  This time she did the ignoring.

  “How far is Humpback Island?” she asked.

  He raised his brows at that.

  “Surely you were sufficiently interested to ask Kittey about your future headquarters? However”—glancing back to the cabin—“I expect your time was taken up with filling bags.”

  She did not consider it worth while wasting her breath explaining how Mr. Kittey, once she had paid her fee, had turned the next page of his book of positions to be filled.

  “I don’t know how far it is,” she said.

  “Then I’ll tell you. If we make good time, and by the look of that sea I strongly doubt it, we’ll be at the Hump by tonight.”

  “Tonight?”

  “What’s wrong with the night-time? There’s nothing lovelier—and more romantic, I’m told—than moonlight on the water, all that.”

  “Can—can you find your way in the night?”

  “Luke and I could find our way to Humpback if we were dumped in any ocean. On the Pacific Ocean, our home ground you might say, it’s candy, Miss Teal.”

  “Do we stop anywhere?”

  “We take in supplies and collect mail from Anna Head. That should be late afternoon or early dusk. Then we push across to home.”

  “Anna is your nearest mainland?”

  “As far as Humpback is concerned the only mainland. Sydney, for us, doesn’t exist, except on an occasional shopping spree, or when the need arises for a particular employee that Anna can’t supply.”

  “A redhead, for instance?”

  “Exactly,” the man said.

  While they had been talking, the sea had been rising. Laurel, hearing the deepening rush of water along the planks, wheeled round and saw now that the waves had angry crests.

  Luke, at the wheel, called out that it was going to be dirty, and almost at once the boat began lifting steeply and dropping afterwards into foaming troughs.

  The younger man took over at once.

  Luke came to stand beside Laurel.

  “All right, miss?” he asked kindly.

  “Of course.” She was, too, except for the beginnings of a carping little headache. It had been a hectic week getting ready for this departure. She had not liked to leave Mr. Chester in the lurch, so she had stopped on till Friday and that had given her very little time to shop, pack, change her address, write to David, say her goodbyes.

  The girls, too, had insisted on a farewell theatre night, and since she was to be their guest she could scarcely refuse. She had not wanted to, anyway, she liked them too much; all the same it had made a short time even shorter, and her necessarily curtailed sleeping hours were telling on her now.

  Then again, she thought ruefully, a trifle uneasily, Esther’s and Marion’s and Lynn’s reaction to her announcement that she was going to an island had been discouraging. They had looked dubiously at each other, obviously wondering whether they had done a wise thing in recommending her to Mr. Kittey. She had laughed at their doubts, but once away from them her laughter had died. Looking around now at the grey sea and feeling the headache growing stronger and stronger, she knew the laughter was dead indeed.

  Luke had gone into the galley. Presently he came out with mugs of steaming tea.

  Laurel took hers eagerly, cupping her hands around the hot thick china, for the wind was blowing cold, the spray was so sharp that it pierced like needles of ice.

  After a few gulps she felt a little better.

  “Do you work on the whaling station, Mr. Lucas?”

  “Call me Luke, miss, everyone does. No, I don’t, I work on the boats. Two, there are, a whaler, the Clyde, and the Leeward here. There’s a third on the slips about the Leeward's size, the Windward it’s to be. Building it himself, he is. Nothing Nor can’t do.” He nodded his head to the man he previously only had referred to as Cap and who was now drinking his tea in long quaffs, one large, lean, dark hand on the wheel.

  Nor ... that was what it sounded like. Norman, probably, or Nor as in Norton, Norville, something of the sort. It surprised Laurel a little. Something about the man seemed not entirely Australian, not Australian as she had encountered Australians, and she had expected a different variety of name, a name with a foreign origin perhaps. The headache was coining back, and more viciously than before. She put the tea down, too tired even to drink.

  The man at the wheel put his cup down at the same time, but unlike hers drained to the last drop. As he did so, he gave Laurel a quick glance. At once he signaled Luke to his side.

  “All right?” he asked Laurel when Luke had taken over from him.

  “Of course I’m all right.”

  “You’d better take that tablet after all.”

  “I don’t need any tablets, I’ve only a headache.”

  “Call it what you like, even the French mal-de-mer if it pleases you, it still comes to the same thing—and the same result. Take this tablet and go and he down.”

  “I tell you I’m not sick, I—I—”

  Suddenly the headache seemed all the pain in the world housed in Laurel’s own inadequate brow. She put her hand up to her blinded eyes, swaying a little at the sharp agony, and in that moment he swept her into his arms, carried her into the small, cabin, placed her on the bunk without any more argument or ado.

  “I—” she protested.

  “Lie still.”

  “I’m not sick”.

  “Will you shut up,” he said.

  He left her then, and she lay still with pain, frightened to move her head—until something drove the pain away, or at least shoved it aside, so that a new sensation could take possession itself.

  It was fear; plain, unadulterated fear. She was simply, completely, thoroughly and quite horribly scared.

  For the wind was not the comradely wind of her wind and spray any longer, it was a gale.

  It was a gale that was screeching its hate of her, of them, of the Leeward, of the entire world, that was sending the sleet down like javelins, that was whipping the dark clouds until they spread into one cloud and it was as obscure as night.

  We’re going to go down, Laurel thought. She shut her eyes in terror. She could hear the waves slobbering greedily over the deck. Down, she thought again, down, down, down ... oh, David, David my dear.

  Then abruptly she wasn’t thinking of watery graves or of David any longer, in fact as her nausea increased she would have welcomed a watery end, she was just being unromantically and very thoroughly sick.

  She was sick for hours.

  Some time through those hours someone attended her, quietly, efficiently, gently, kindly. It would be the little dried up man Lucas, of course, he had that sympathetic sort of face.

  He wiped her brow. He supplied fresh towels. He held something for her to sip. He said in a faraway but infinitely encouraging voice: “It happens to everyone ... it can happen any time ... lie still.”

  At last, depleted, exhausted, she slept.

  There must have been something in wha
tever she had sipped, for she knew as soon as she opened her eyes that she had slept a very long time. It was the pearliness of the light that told her, it was not just the clear of after-storm, it was not the first veiling of dusk, it was morning, she thought. That meant it was “tomorrow” morning ... that meant she had been sleeping since yesterday ... sleeping all night.

  The boat was travelling slowly and gently now over quieter waters. She propped herself on one elbow and peered out of the cabin window. Ahead was land. This must be Anna Head where they stopped to take supplies. The storm had slowed them considerably, they must be hours and hours behind.

  Luke pulled the curtain that formed the doorway aside and smiled in at her.

  She smiled warmly back. She would never forget those kindly administrations last night.

  “Want to see landfall?” he invited.

  “I glimpsed it through the window. I couldn’t see any shops, though.”

  “Aren’t any.”

  “But your captain said you stocked up at Anna.”

  Luke laughed at that, his dried-up skin going into a million creases.

  “That stuff Nor gave you sure did the trick.”

  “Nor?” she echoed blankly.

  She knew whom he meant; her echo had not been interrogation, it had been disbelief ... disbelief and incredulity at his words. The Rock, not Luke, administering to her last night!

  “You were leading us a fine dance, miss,” Luke was smiling, “until Cap knocked you out.”

  “Knocked me out!”

  “With a—sleeping draught.” Luke grinned slyly this time. “It was getting dirtier and dirtier, it needed both of us at the wheel, it was the only thing to do. Besides “— another pleating of his brown nut of a face—“reckon Nor had given you your money’s worth already in attention, reckon it was only fair you flaked out and gave us a chance to get through.”