Late in the afternoon Richmond and the green man, Michael Sharpe, came upon the Susan abandoned on shoals near Charles Brook and in trouble on the rising tide. The sails and some of the rigging had been cut away and there was damage to the hull from the beating that was underway. They could see there was a chance she might be taken into the rocks and lost altogether, but there was no way to get safely aboard of her in the meantime.
Richmond managed to throw ropes with grapples across the gunnels while Michael Sharpe handled the oars, slewing around in the ocean roil, coming as handy to the sloop as he dared. They fastened one of the ropes to a killick to anchor the boat oceanward and secured the other line ashore in hopes of keeping the boat from slamming helplessly against the cliffs or the lowlying skerries. By this time it was near six o’clock in the evening. Richmond left Michael Sharpe with a rifle to keep watch over the sloop and then headed back to Burnt Island in the falling darkness.
When Taylor and Peyton arrived, Richmond came down to the water to meet them.
“Found her out at Charles Brook,” he said. “No surprise there, hey, Tom Taylor,” he said as the two men clambered up onto the wharf. “On the doorstep of our very own half-breed and his brood of Jackietars.” He laughed then, although there was no humour in his voice. The little civility that Richmond once showed the Irishman was long gone. Reilly had been Peyton’s choice for head man when his father gave up the day-to-day concerns of the family enterprise. It was a decision John Senior hadn’t disagreed with although the set of his head when Peyton told him, the slow thoughtful way he tamped his pipe full of tobacco, suggested there might be some trouble to accompany it. Taylor felt slighted, clear enough. But Richmond felt betrayed, as if his own flesh and blood had turned on him, and he seemed determined to wage a petty war of revenge. If Peyton could think of a way to sack him without John Senior taking his part, he would have done so long ago.
“The sails are gone,” Richmond reported, “but from the way she’s riding she still has a load of salmon aboard of her.”
Peyton said, “We’ll have to try to get on her at low tide tomorrow if she doesn’t go down tonight.”
John Senior and Reilly came in from their search an hour later and the men ate together in the kitchen, drinking cups of tea liberally laced with rum before wandering off to sleeping berths, leaving Peyton alone with Cassie as she cleared the table.
He said, “A year’s work we could lose there. And the boat besides.” He was doing the calculation in his head to try and figure the enormity of the loss.
“You should have woke me when you came in last night,” she said without looking in his direction. “I would have gone down while you slept.”
“I only intended to close my eyes a second,” he said.
“Well you needn’t get cross with me, John Peyton.”
She said this so softly he could just make out her words and he was immediately ashamed of himself. Since the news of her father’s death reached them in the spring there was a change in her that no one but Peyton took note of. Something beneath the hard surface she showed to the world had given way. She seemed hollow to him, brickly, fragile as the first layer of ice caught over a pond in the fall. He sighed and placed his face in his hands a minute and then looked to the rafters. He said, “But day doth daily draw my sorrows longer, and night doth nightly make grief’s strength seem stronger.”
She stopped fussing about the table to look at him. “I thought you lost interest in all that,” she said.
He shook his head and turned his face away from the light of the candle. “I never had the head for it is all,” he said. He looked across at Cassie where she stood beside the table. She was smiling, surprised by the scrap of verse he had managed to carry with him from those sessions years ago. He felt an immense, infuriating rush of pleasure to have given her a moment of satisfaction.
“You should get some sleep,” she said softly.
They found the vessel at first light next morning in much the same condition Richmond had left her. When Peyton got aboard he found the ship’s cargo intact and largely undamaged although anything movable in the cabin and below had been stolen, along with the canvas sails and a good part of the rigging. The mast had been hacked at with rough blades, though it seemed solid enough when he leaned his weight into it. Michael Sharpe discovered the two rifles that had been aboard in the shallows of Charles Brook the previous evening. The barrels had been bent, the trigger works and flints were smashed and beyond repair.
On their way to the shoals that morning John Senior had stopped into Little Burnt Bay to request the help of several small boats and they arrived shortly after Peyton got aboard. He set about running lines across to them. The cord that was secured ashore the previous day was shifted to the top of the mast and half a dozen men stood holding the other end to try and rock her off the shoals on the rising tide.
By noon she was clear and in tow, on her way back to Burnt Island. There was at least a week of work to be done on the damage to the hull and mast, repairs to the rigging and fitting up new sails, before she would be ready for the trip to St. John’s. But most of the year’s work was salvaged.
FOUR