around the stern.
Everyone rushed back to the rail. The horses staggered to their feet in the stables, and their nasal bleating rose above the noise of the engines. Wayne jumped down on to the deck and pushed between Ricci and Anne Summers. The sailors were shouting to each other and pointing to the water, but Wayne looked back at the Captain. As the helmsman picked himself off the deck, nursing his bruised knees, Steiner had matter-of-factly taken the wheel. The Apollo swung clockwise in the water, its sails limp in the calming air. Steiner stared at the great towers of Manhattan now less than half a mile away. It seemed to Wayne that the Captain had never looked happier. Had he made the long uncertain voyage across the Atlantic secretly determined to sink his ship these few hundred yards from their goal, so that they would all perish and he could plunder alone the treasures of this waiting land?
‘Wayne, lying down there, can you see?’ Wayne felt Anne Summers seize his arm. ‘There’s a sleeping mermaid!’
Wayne peered into the water. The Apollo’s propeller had stopped, and the mass of churning bubbles dissolved in the water that swilled against the hull. Lying on her back beside the ship, like its drowned bride, was the statue of an immense reclining woman. Almost as long as the Apollo, she rested on a bed of concrete blocks, the ruins of an underwater plinth. Her classical features were only a few feet below the surface. Washed by the waves, her grey face reminded Wayne of his dead mother’s when he gazed into her open coffin in the asylum mortuary.
‘Wayne, who is she?’ Anne Summers stared at the impassive face. A colony of lobsters had taken up residence in the woman’s nostrils. As they emerged from their domain, peering up at the dripping bulk of the Apollo, Anne held her handsome nose. ‘Wayne, she must be some kind of goddess…’
Paul Ricci squeezed between them. ‘A local marine deity,’ he suavely informed them. ‘The Americans of the eastern seaboard worshipped a pantheon of underwater creatures – you’ll remember Moby Dick, Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, even the great white shark affectionately christened “Jaws”.’
Anne Summers stared doubtfully at the statue. She moved her hand from Ricci’s. ‘Rather a fierce form of worship, Paul, not to mention a hazard to shipping.’ She added, as an afterthought: ‘I think we’re sinking.’
Sure enough, a clamour of shouts had begun.
‘Captain, we’re holed! We’re making water!’ The petty officer rounded up his sailors. ‘Get the forward pumps going, and put your backs into it or we’ll settle here!’
Wayne struck the rail with both fists. He laughed aloud as the sailors ran past him. He realised now what had been missing from the mental picture of New York harbour he had carried with him across the Atlantic.
‘Wayne, for heaven’s sake…’ Anne Summers tried to calm him. ‘You’re going to have to swim, you know.’
‘Liberty! Professor Summers, don’t you remember?’ Wayne pointed to the Jersey shore, where a rocky island stood in the main channel. Even now the remains of a classical pedestal could be seen. The Statue of Liberty!’
They stared into the water beside the Apollo. The lamp held aloft for generations of immigrants from the Old World had vanished, but the crown still remained around the figure’s head. One of its radiating spikes had left a ten-yard-long gash in the Apollo’s hull.
‘You’re right, Wayne. My God, though, we’re going down!’ Anne Summers looked round wildly, a hand to her blonde bun. ‘The equipment, Paul! What’s the matter with Steiner?’
The first rusty water foamed from the fore-mast pump-heads. Orlowski was screaming at the Captain, his plump index finger raised accusingly. But Steiner strolled in a leisurely way around the helm, a satisfied light in his eyes. He ignored the commissar and the pandemonium on the deck, his mouth relaxed as he spoke to the engine-room on the brass voice tube.
Below the stern the two-bladed propeller thwacked the water. A heavy black smoke billowed from the funnel. The Apollo made way, dipping cumbersomely through the waves. The cold pump-water raced across the deck to the scuppers, sluicing around Wayne’s ankles. Ricci and Anne Summers backed off, but Wayne stared down at the immense statue moving away from them. At the climax of the evacuation of America, under the personal control of President Brown, the Statue of Liberty had been lowered from her plinth and prepared for shipment to the new American colonies in Europe. In a sudden storm, however, the wooden lighter built to transport the statue had broken loose from its tugs, drifted free across the bay and lost its bows on the razor-sharp keel of a scuttled freighter. In the chaos that filled the final days of the evacuation the exact location of the statue had never been established, and she had been left to break up in the cold waters of the next century.
So already the expedition had made its first discovery!
From that moment, as the Apollo limped, bow decks awash, towards New York harbour, Wayne resolved to keep a diary of the extraordinary visions he would see in the following months, led by this image of his dead mother asleep below the waves. In all good time he would present his record to Dr Fleming, the once and future father whom he would find somewhere in America, waiting for him in the golden paradises of the west.
Landfall! At last the Apollo had negotiated the boom of wrecked ships in the entrance to the Hudson River and beached itself on a silt bank alongside the old Cunard pier. Lulled by the steady beat of the pumps, and the confidence that even if the Apollo foundered they could swim ashore, the crew and expedition members had fallen silent. When the Apollo buried its wounded bows in the wet silt everyone gathered at the rail, looking at the vivid quays in front of them, at the soundless city with its great towers and abandoned streets, a million empty windows lit by the afternoon sun.
Already they could see the dunes that filled the floors of these deserted canyons. The rolling sand lay ten feet deep, undisturbed by any footstep for almost a century, smoothed by the onshore winds and covered with a fine glaze of golden dust. For Wayne it seemed a magical carpet, a metallised dream from the fairy tales of his childhood. He held his breath as the ship settled into the mud under the falling tide, and prayed that the silence and calm aboard the Apollo would not give way to a sudden, greedy stampede.
There was more than enough for them all, gold beyond the dreams of Columbus, Cortez and the conquistadores. Wayne had a vision of the crew and passengers dressed in their coronation armour, he himself in gilded doublet and hose, Anne Summers in gleaming breastplates and skirt of gold leaf, Paul Ricci in a sinister black and gold armour, Steiner in a golden cape at the helm of a new gold-plated Apollo ready for its return voyage in triumph to Plymouth and the Old World…
The ship’s siren hooted, three long blasts that shattered Wayne’s ears. The sounds echoed among the silent skyscrapers, reverberated to and fro across Central Park, and were lost miles away in uptown Manhattan. Wayne clung to the faint echoes. In some way the harsh noise marked the real moment of their arrival, releasing them all from the voyage across the Atlantic, closing the past behind them as they prepared to step ashore. Like the immigrants of old, each had brought a small, precious baggage, a clutch of hopes and ambitions to be bartered against the possibilities of this new land.
McNair was thinking of gold. He stood on the forward docking bridge by the coal bunker hatchway, and wiped the black anthracite dust from his beard. He was looking up at the Cunard wharf,
