drove the iron through the air and into the whale’s flank. It buried itself deep and an instant later the second iron followed it home.
Pain bent the creature almost double as he flung himself away from them. He thrashed his mighty flukes and sent a column of water high into the air before he sounded. The line ran out so fast as he dived that smoke rose from it and the headsman hollered at William to douse it with water from his canvas bucket. The line had half run out before the whale rose once again and in agony beat the water with his flukes and tail, so that it churned and rocked the little boat like an eggshell. William could not make himself look to see, but he heard the whale’s jaws snapping like cannon fire seemingly inches from his own head.
‘Oh, my boys, my lovely boys, we have him now,’ Matthias was crooning. The lines held fast and blood welled up and clouded the water between boat and prey. The other craft closed in to assist the bow boat with the kill.
The poor whale proved no match for all of them. Soon his thrashing ceased altogether and he rolled belly up. Immediately they had the huge carcass secured Matthias set the signal to the ship. As luck would have it, it was riding to windward of them, so it beat down towards the boats while they rested next to their prize. A leeward wind or a flat calm would have meant a gruelling row back to the ship with the great dead weight of the whale dragging in the water behind them.
William was full of the exhilaration of chase and kill as they made the whale fast against the ship’s side, but he soon found that his day’s labours had hardly begun. Once the whale was properly tethered with hawsers and an iron chain passed around the narrow part of the tail before the spreading flukes, the work of cutting-in commenced. This was the stripping off of blubber, to be completed in the shortest possible time before sharks could begin to feed on the carcass and because the ship could make no further headway towards fresh whales with the unwieldy bulk of the dead cousin dragging alongside.
The Captain and mates began digging with their long-handled cutting spades. After an hour’s work of hoisting oily and bloody strips of blubber over the ship’s side, William knew that any notions of exhaustion he had entertained before this moment were no more than a sweet afternoon’s dream compared with the reality of stink and pain and retching disgust he was experiencing now.
At last the whale’s mangled body, headless and stripped bare of every other valuable shred, was cut adrift and left to the mercy of sharks and circling sea-birds. Matthias patted the crumpled boy on the shoulder as he came aboard from the cutting platform with the last of the animal’s blubber. ‘Well done, lad,’ he said simply. ‘Now you’re one of us good and proper.’
‘I think not,’ William retorted and turned away, with a display of energy and feeling that surprised them both.
Already the fires were blazing in the brick furnaces of the try-works. The seamen had fed the hungry iron mouths of the furnaces with wood carried for the purpose and now began the business of feeding blubber into the two huge pots mounted above. It was boiled to release its barrels of oil and when each load had yielded its all the tired-out scraps themselves were used to feed the red heat.
William sank down, mesmerised with exhaustion, on to the hatch-cover that up until now had protected the try-works. The boat steerers were the ship’s stokers, and they stirred up the roaring flames and used long poles to pitch reeking piles of blubber into the boiling pots.
The smell was all of terrible singeing, a sick oiliness that filled every throat with a taste of decay and death. Dense clouds of black smoke billowed up from the pots to darken the sails overhead with broad brush-strokes of filth. The ship surged forward in the night, freed from the encumbrance of the whale, with the inferno of fire and smoke blazing on its deck.
It was a twelve-barrel whale, William had learned. A good enough start to the Dolphin’s voyage
As he huddled on the hatch he watched the hissing pots and the belching flames of the furnace, and the figures of his shipmates bending and gyrating in the lurid light. Their naked upper bodies gleamed with sweat, their faces were black masks of smoky grime and their exertions drew their lips back from their teeth in a stark grimace so that white teeth shone cruelly out of the tangles of black beard. They looked like the devil’s own imps tending the subterranean fires.
‘I am in hell,’ William whispered aloud. ‘Truly I have descended into hell and this is the payment for my sins.’
He locked his hands together and tried to pray, but no form of prayer would come to him.
May lifted her head. She could see the dead whale and the oily fires glimmering on the deck of the ship. A shiver crawled over her skin. The sea was greedy and she felt how close it was to her, gnawing and worrying at the shore.
She thought that if only she listened a little harder she would be able to understand its language; maybe interpret the warning it was whispering to her. It was like breeding an extra sense that was not yet quite ready to use, a painful knob under her skin to which her fingers kept returning, pressing to test the growth.
The book was more than just a book, but she couldn’t put a finger on why or what it might mean. Hannah Fennymore had lent it to her because she had asked for it, because she was curious about Doone. And beyond Doone’s bedroom window there was nothing to be seen except the beach, and Kevin and the others fooling about on or in the water.
And Lucas, slant-eyed, who made her feel things she did not understand or welcome.
May didn’t want to be shut up alone any longer. She left her chair and ran to the door and for a second it seemed again that there was a weight pressing against it, trapping her in the room. But it yielded and banged open, and May ran down the steep stairs.
John was sitting by the window overlooking the sea. There was a book on his lap but he was staring out at Moon Island, his chin resting on one hand, as if waiting for something. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘What’s happening?’
May hovered in front of him. She was pricklingly conscious of her father’s outstretched legs and the sinews on the backs of his hands. Her own legs felt thick and over-elongated, and her hips wide and heavy. Her arms hung clumsily at her side.
He made the little beckoning movement she was waiting for, putting his book aside. May could see that he was afraid she might reject his gesture. She bundled forward and piled herself on to his lap, an awkward mass of jutting elbows and knees.
John held her, resting his chin on the top of her bent head and stroking her hair. Her weight and size surprised him. It was a long time since she had come asking for a cuddle like a little girl. ‘What’s wrong?’
May picked dully at a three-cornered tear in the pocket of his chinos. Where to begin? I wish I were like Ivy. I’m afraid I’m turning into someone else. There’s a ghost on the island and now I’m scared of the sea… ‘I don’t like it here,’ she said. It came out as a whine instead of an explanation.
John sighed. ‘I know that. What do you want to do, May? Go home early?’
He had unintentionally wrong-footed her, turning her into the saboteur of other people’s pleasure when she had only wanted reassurance. It seemed always to happen this way between them. When he offered his concern it made her feel awkward. She retreated in guilty embarrassment. And when she asked for it he couldn’t interpret the question.
May shook her head violently, bumping his jaw. ‘No. It’s okay. I don’t mind staying.’
‘Is there something going on between you and Ivy?’
‘Nuh-uh.’
