Blessed Isle by Alex Beecroft Read Free Book Online Page A

nor’west, away from what I thought must be the coast. If it was land, that smudge of black should be growing fainter, dipping slowly beneath the horizon.
    It flickered white. I took the glass from my eye and rubbed the strain from my face, and when I looked again the shape was larger, darker, more defined. I felt then as a man must who is alone and wounded in the woods and hears the first howl of the wolves, a kind of paralysis of terror and disbelief. The thing was flying towards us out of the east. Ten minutes more and I could see it as boiling black thunderheads, piling up one on top of another. Their undersides drew down into strange, demonic dugs, stained crimson and weeping rain as red as blood.
    Courage drained from me. I closed my eyes and clung to the rigging, resting my cheek against the worn fibres of the shrouds, and I might have stayed there until the storm overtook us and blew me into the air like a child’s kite, had not Garnet beneath me suddenly begun to laugh.
    I climbed down, startled. The thrum of the sea through the hull had already strengthened and the lines popped and hissed as they tightened. Garnet looked up at me, the distant lightning reflected in his eyes. “Dear God, sir,” he laughed, his smile wide and bright, “it isn’t often you get to watch your own death flying towards you across the water. It’s just as the poets say. It’s sublime!”
    His joy leapt the gap between us like a flame travelling down a fuse. It touched something within me and exploded, filling me with light and heat. I thought him a magnificent madman, and he filled me with awe and delight. In that moment I knew for the first time that I loved him.
    His lunacy infected me. I wanted nothing so much as to drive him into the cabin, lock the door, and couple as the ship was ripped apart around us, dying as I’d never dared live.
    But I was the captain and below my feet there slumbered still a score of my crew and twentythree other human souls whose well-being was my responsibility. Half in love with death as I was, I would not let them perish without doing my utmost to save them.
    “All hands on deck, Mr Littleton, if you please.” I brought the keys of the manacles out of the stern locker in which they had been stowed and passed them to him solemnly. He grasped my fingers with them and pressed, clasping my hands for a long moment, knowing what I was going to say. The wind picked up and shrieked in the rigging and the first spatterings of that bloody rain smacked aboard, hailstones rattling down with it.
    “All hands please, Mr Littleton,” I said. “Including the prisoners.”
“Aye, aye sir. At once.”
    You felt that too? I wish I’d known! I still think there could be no better way to die than that —the glory and the ecstasy of it. Maybe when we grow old? When the aches and pains begin, you lose your teeth and I my hair, we can buy a sloop and fit it out like an emperor’s tomb and run it into the maw of a black squall. Let the sea tear apart that which it brought together. Better than dying in bed, incapable, incontinent, and wrinkled, buried in separate graves by mourners to whom the survivor would never be able to tell his grief.
But yes, yes. I dare not risk your rebuke. I have remembered I am supposed to be telling the story and not embarrassing you with my thoughts.
They came up the companionway steps like black dogs, hunkered over, stiff, scarce able to walk from their long confinement in chains. They paused at the top, straightening with exquisite care, squinting at the light and snuffing the racing, waterladen air. I can’t find it in me to blame them for what they did. I’d have done the same had I been caught scrumping apples, confined in chains for months, tossed and forgotten as human ballast in the utter dark and freezing cold of the underwater hull. If I’d gone into that a man, I’d have come out a monster. I can’t blame them.
Harry a little I can blame. He should have known. But I