The next morning we woke to discover that the weather had indeed relented. Dawn brought sunlight and a delicate, clearing sky. The force of the wind had gentled, and all about us was the sudden sparkle of light on water, a million seabirds, and a scenery so majestic that both David and I felt a catch in our throats. There are few such moments given to us on this earth, moments when we are granted a glimpse of the world as it must have looked at the crowning moment of creation. “‘And God saw every thing that he had made,’” David, who, like me, was half bearded now, quoted from Genesis, “‘and behold, it was very good.’”
We cast off our moorings, retrieved our anchors from their clinging kelp, and started Stormchild’s motor. The sound of the engine seemed an affront to the pure loveliness of the channels. For once we could see clearly and I collapsed the spray hood so that our forward view was unobstructed. The cliffs reared up from the green, shining water and were topped by long wooded slopes. Between the cliffs, where the turmoil of the restless earth had made steep valleys that dropped like chutes toward the tide-hurried water, beech trees grew. In the long, long distance, glimpsed between the scattered islands, the snow-touched peaks showed the spine of a continent. When the channel widened I was able to stop the engine and, for the first time in days, hoist Stormchild’s sails so that she glided like some stately pleasure barge across a wide sea-lake that stretched between a group of wooded islands.
The wind was fitful, but the tide was friendly and pushed us silently along the waterway. We rounded a corner of glassy water to find another stretch of wide seaway, along which we ghosted between small natural meadows, wooded slopes and sun-touched cliffs. We were like men drunk on beauty, dazzled by a place as wild, as desolate, and, for me, as close to God as any place on earth. Birds of prey with massive ragged wings spiraled above the scree-edged peaks and beneath the scatter of high white clouds, while black-necked swans swam from a tree-edged creek to paddle in Stormchild’s placid wake. White mountain streams cascaded through the trees. It was, so long as the weather held, Arcadia discovered. The only jarring note was that one of our two rifles now lay beside the binnacle, for David, knowing we had entered the outer islands of the Archipiélago Sangre de Cristo, had insisted on removing the companionway paneling and retrieving the gun we had hidden there. “Though I doubt very much we shall need it,” David had said as he brought the rifle topsides.
“You think Genesis will let us come and go in peace?” I asked.
“I think that naval fellow in Puerto Montt was right,” David said, “and that the Genesis community won’t foul their own nest. Why on earth should they provoke the enmity of the Chilean authorities by a gratuitous display of violence?”
“So Jackie was right after all?” I asked with as little malice as possible, “and we don’t need guns?”
“I pray we don’t need guns,” David said fervently. He was staring forward and, looking at him, I suddenly thought how much this voyage had aged him. There was white in his beard and deep lines about his eyes, so that, for the first time, I saw in my middle-aged brother the signs of old age, and I wondered if I looked the same, and whether Jackie had been offended by my tactless remark on Antigua, and the memory of that remark burned shamefully inside me as I thought what fools old men made of themselves because of young women.
David opened the rifle’s butt and took out a pull-through and a bottle of cleaning oil. “I do pray we don’t need guns,” he repeated, “but that rather depends on how we respond if we meet hostility.”
I shrugged as though I did not think it an important question, though increasingly, as the sea miles had slipped beneath Stormchild’s keel, that question had dogged me. I had sailed from England with only one clear purpose: to find and rescue Nicole. But as David had just suggested, the completion of that simple purpose depended on what kind of welcome the Genesis community offered Stormchild. I suspected that there would be no welcome at all, which was why I was glad David was now cleaning the Lee-Enfield, though whether he would actually fire the gun was plainly another matter. “Are you suggesting I should turn the other cheek?” I asked him.
David tugged a square patch of flannel cleaning cloth through the rifle’s barrel. “I think,” he said slowly, “that if we are offered violence, then we have to withdraw. We may have to fire in self-defense, but otherwise we must behave with the utmost circumspection.” He offered me a wry smile. “I know it’s not the most adventurous approach, Tim, but we can’t risk causing injury or death.”
I knew David was right, but I did not want to admit it. “Back in England,” I observed caustically, “you couldn’t wait for me to put a bullet between von Rellsteb’s eyes. Now suddenly we have to be circumspect?”
“Back in England,” he said very simply, “I was wrong.”
“You’re scared of losing your chance of becoming a bishop, are you?” I accused him nastily. He smarted at that, looking guiltily offended. “Oh, come on, David,” I said, “you’re a Blackburn! Of course you’re ambitious, and murdering environmentalists would really mess up your chances of sitting in the House of Lords and having first pick of the choirboys.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said huffily, “and even if I did want a bishopric, that has nothing to do with the present circumstances.”
“Then what does?” I asked him.
He sighed. “The truth, Tim, is that I’m scared of dying. I’m scared of getting into a fight and leaving Betty a widow. I’m not as brave as I was thirty years ago, and I promised Betty I’d do nothing stupid. I intend to keep the promise. I also promised Betty I’d look after you. It’s bad enough that we’ve lost Dickie and Joanna, without losing you.”
For a moment I said nothing. It was unlike David to so openly reveal an affection, even toward me, and I was touched. I was also boxed in, for I had not sailed clean across the Atlantic and down to the southern hemisphere just to surrender at the first sign of von Rellsteb’s pugnacity. “If I prove that von Rellsteb killed Joanna,” I finally told David, “then I’m going to kill him. With or without your help.”
“No, you won’t,” David said very patiently, “because if we discover any wrongdoing, then we will summon the authorities, and if the authorities won’t help us, then we will travel to Santiago and enlist the support of the British Embassy. You’re famous, and I’m not exactly disreputable, so I assure you the ambassador will listen very closely to us, and if the embassy insists to the Chilean authorities that the Genesis community is sheltering lawbreakers, then it won’t take long for the Armada to get a patrol boat into these waters.”