I ran forward. The thin black-haired man did not jump into the dory, but turned to face me instead. He brushed at his tweed jacket, and somehow the commonplace gesture slowed my attack. Then he looked up at me. He had very confident eyes. He was a handsome man, perhaps in his late thirties, with a sardonic, knowing look about his narrow features. It was a face which suggested a long acquaintanceship with human fallibilities, but it was also a face with an intrinsic air of command. “There’s really no need to get excited,” he said to me in a very condescending voice.
“What the hell are you doing on my boat?” I still advanced on him, but slowly now and with the boathook held out like a pike.
“I want to talk to you, of course.” He had a very crisp voice; an unashamedly upper-class voice honed by public school and effortless confidence. “Shall we go below?”
“Only after you’ve paid for the damage you’ve done.”
He smiled wearily. “We’re going to be tedious, are we? And for God’s sake stop pointing that hook at me.”
The dory’s helmsman, a much coarser creature than the thin man, still held on to Sunflower’s guardrails. He was bald, big, and was staring with concern at the threatening boathook, but the other had already dismissed the weapon’s menace. He reached out with his right hand to fend off the hook. I resisted his gesture and, in sudden anger, he gripped the boathook’s head to wrest it out of my hand.
He was surprisingly strong for such a thin man, but, a second after he had seized the hook, and while he was still pulling, his brain registered a stinging pain where he had expected none. I added to the pain by twisting the haft. Blood was spilling out of his hand now, dripping on to Sunflower’s deck. I saw the sudden agony on his face. He snatched his right hand away, dripping blood, then groped his left hand beneath his jacket to find a slim, long-bladed knife that had been sheathed at his belt. His larger companion was evidently uncertain whether to come to the thin man’s aid or keep the dory alongside, so did nothing. I lunged, skewering the boathook’s sharpened point into the thin man’s upper arm. He swore, tried to fend the hook away with his knife, but I had swung it away and now hefted it hard back.
He had taken enough and scrambled desperately over the guardrails. He was too slow to escape my swing and the weighted boathook caught him on the back of his head as he jumped. Blood was bright in his black sleek hair. He fell against the big man who let go of Sunflower. The dory rocked alarmingly. I ran forward, raised the hook, and slammed it down, hoping to ram it clean through the aluminium hull. Instead I punctured a spare petrol can which began adding its fuel to the blood in the dory’s scuppers.
The thin man, whom I’d wounded, was much more alert than his big companion. He threw himself at the dory’s controls and rammed the throttle into reverse. The engine roared, the boat scuttled backwards like a frightened crab, and the big man nearly fell overboard.
“Bastards!” I shouted. The thin man just stared at me. Blood glistened on his waxed coat. I had hurt him, and his eyes told me that he was not a man to forget or forgive a defeat. But let him hate, I thought, because in a week’s time I’d be sailing south and he could whistle his enmity at the waning moon. I watched as he pushed the dory’s motor into forward gear. He was a better helmsman than his companion, and I suspected that the thin man was capable at most things he turned his hands to. He had that kind of confidence about him, but he had failed with me. I raised two fingers at him as the small boat accelerated away between the moored yachts, then the two men vanished among the moorings, leaving behind only a haze of blue exhaust smoke and a smear of bright blood on a boathook’s head.
And a woman. They had left the woman behind.
So now I went to find her.
“Bloody hell.” For a second I was too shocked to move, then I swung myself down the companionway.
The girl lay on my starboard bunk where the thin man had evidently gone to work on her. There was blood on her face, chest, and hands. She was wearing a woollen skirt, a blouse, and a sweater. The sweater was in remnants and the blouse bloodstained and torn. On the companionway were the tattered fragments of her raincoat which looked as if it had been torn apart by dogs. She stared at me with whimpering, scared eyes.
The bastard had also gone to work on Sunflower. He’d ripped her cabin to shreds, but that could wait.
“Who are you?” I was pumping water from the freshwater tank into an unbroken cup.
The girl did not answer. Her hands tried to pull the scraps of her torn sweater together.
I knelt beside her and she flinched away.
“For God’s sake,” I said, “I’m trying to help you. Now stay still.”
I don’t think I reassured her, instead I think the abruptness of my tone merely scared her into compliance. Whatever, she did not move as I used a cleanish scrap of rag to wipe the blood from her face. She shuddered when the rag first touched her skin, then seemed to accept that I was helping her.
“Nothing’s broken,” I said, which meant that her nose was still in one piece. The blood had come from a nosebleed, but that had stopped. One of her cheekbones was badly grazed, but the damage was really very slight, except to her nerves. I did not know about her ribs, nor was I about to investigate. The thin man had half stripped her to the waist, but I was not going to inflict a similar indignity on her. “What did he do to you?” I asked.
“He threatened me with a knife,” she managed to say, “then hit me.” Her voice was wavering and scared, and no wonder for she was still rigid with shock.
“Only hit you?” I asked. “Nothing else?”
She nodded firmly. “Nothing else.” Meaning she hadn’t been sexually assaulted. “He said I’d come to make an arrangement with you, and when I wouldn’t tell him more, he tore my clothes.” She had barely been able to articulate the last words, which came out as sobs. “There was nothing to tell!” she protested to me, to the whole boat, then began to shiver violently. I pulled a sleeping bag from the mess on the cabin floor and draped it round her shoulders. She shrank away from my touch. I was almost as shocked as the girl. The violence of the thin man was so gratuitous and unexpected, but any explanations would have to wait till the girl had recovered some of her composure.
“Go into the forward cabin,” I said firmly, “and clean yourself up. You’ll find some sweaters in the drawers. They’re not very clean, they’re a bit damp, but they’re better than nothing.”
She nodded again, but did not move. She was clutching the sleeping bag round her body with her bloodstained left hand. She was still sobbing, each exhalation a tiny whimper of pain.
“It’s all right,” I said, “I’m not going to hurt you.” I deliberately backed away and sat on what was left of my portside bunk.
Still she did not move. She was struggling to subdue the sobs which slowly died away. She took some deep breaths and finally, when she felt she was once again in control of her voice, she asked if I was the Earl of Stowey.
The question was so unexpected, and so out of place, that I just gaped at her. She frowned at me. “Are you the Earl?” she asked me again, but this time with a tone of desperation as if her recovery from the ordeal depended on my answer.