The Harbour Master's Rule Book

He kept pointing.

Lowe steered at his arm. Bjorn could feel her doing it without looking round, the cutter’s bow coming off the wind a point whenever his arm moved and settling when it held, and he held it at the empty place in the sea with the rain running down his sleeve and into his armpit and did not blink.

The orange came up six yards to the left of where he was pointing.

He moved his arm. “There!”

“Good lad,” said Lowe. “Keep on him.”

She brought the cutter round to windward of the place, and cut the engine back, and let the wind push them down towards it broadside, so that the cutter’s own dark hull was between Frayne and the worst of the seas. Bjorn saw the water flatten in their lee. He saw Frayne in it, his head back, his arms working slowly, the orange oilskin ballooned up round his ears.

On the Kittiwake, Pike threw again. This time the line fell right across Frayne’s shoulders, and Frayne got an arm over it and then round it, and clung.

“Take him!” Pike roared across the water. “I’ll pay out! Take him, Beatrix!”

“Boathook,” Lowe said. “Apprentice, listen to me. You don’t hook the lad. You hook the oilskin, at the back of the collar, and you hold him to the side, and you don’t let go of that pole if it pulls your arms out.”

Bjorn went to the low stern quarter with the boathook. The cutter rolled towards the water and he went with her, too far, over the rail from the waist up, and a hand closed on the back of his coat and stopped him there.

He didn’t look round. He knew the grip. It did not shake.

Frayne came down the side of the hull on the end of Pike’s line, choking. Bjorn put the hook down at the back of his collar and it skidded off the wet oilskin. He tried again. It caught in the fold of the collar, and held, and he leaned his weight back against Rolf’s hand and pulled Frayne in against the planking and kept him there while the sea tried to take him back.

“Line,” Lowe said.

Rolf let go of Bjorn’s coat, took Pike’s line where it came in over the rail beside Frayne, and made it fast to the stern cleat with one turn and a hitch, so neatly that Bjorn only saw it when it was done.

Lowe left the wheel and came aft. “On the roll,” she said, beside him. “When she dips. One, two.”

The stern went down into the trough. Three of them took hold of oilskin and arm and belt, and hauled, and Ollie Frayne came in over the transom in a rush of sea and landed on his face on the boards, and coughed up what seemed a great deal of the approaches. Lowe was back at the wheel before he had finished.

* * *

Frayne was alive. He was blue at the lips, his teeth clicked with shaking, and he had lost a boot, and every time he tried to sit up and speak he coughed instead. Lowe threw her own coat down to Bjorn and Bjorn wrapped him in it and held him propped against the thwart, and after a while the coughing turned into breathing.

Across the water, Pike had seen his deckhand come aboard. Bjorn watched him turn from the rail and say something to his second hand, and the two of them bent over the warps together, and a moment later the Kittiwake’s nets, and everything in them, were gone. Freed of them, she swung her bow into the sea and rode it, and Pike got his hand back on her wheel.

The storm had not changed at all. It stood over them, black and flat-topped, and behind the wheel the Tattler rang itself hoarse.

Rolf stood in the lee of the wheelhouse with the rain running off him, and looked up at it.

“Senior Pilot,” he said. “If I ask Pilotage to close the approach against it, can you?”

“I can shut my approach.” Lowe didn’t take her eyes from the sea. “Douse the marks, fly the closed signal, put the hazard notice out to every master in the Harbour. Refused, on the record. Whether it takes any notice is another question.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Then it sits on the grounds for a week and nobody fishes. Or it goes. Or it comes in over the Point on its own, unpiloted, and sits on the fish quay.” She shrugged, which on a pitching deck was a whole-body business. “Your Rule, Harbour Master.”

Rolf touched his chain of office, and left his hand there.

Bjorn knelt in the water with Frayne leaning on him and looked down at his hands. He did not know. That was the trouble. He had a handful of things he’d seen and a feeling about them, and nothing in the Rule Book or anywhere else that said the feeling was worth anything. Everything in him that liked to be sure before it spoke told him to keep quiet until he was.

A man had nearly drowned. He had been pointing at him.

“It isn’t coming at us,” Bjorn said.

Rolf looked down at him. “Go on.”

“It moved off when the flags said. It stood off where it was told.” It came out flat and careful, one piece laid after another as Rolf laid things out, and Bjorn caught himself at it, and went on anyway. “It went out to the grounds because we asked it to go away. Then we followed it out and told it again, louder, in front of all the boats.” He did not look at Lowe. “Before it went dark, it turned. I saw it. It didn’t turn on us, it turned away. And on the quay, the rain.” He stopped. “The rain was warm.”

“Warm,” Rolf said.

“Warmer than the morning.” Bjorn swallowed. “I don’t think it’s a threat. I think it’s hurt. And if we shut the approach on her, that’s the third time we’ve told her the same thing.”

“Her,” said Rolf.

Bjorn looked at his hands again. “Somebody filled in the form,” he said.

Rolf’s fingers stayed on the chain a moment longer. Then he took them away and turned to the wheelhouse.

“Senior Pilot,” he said. “I’m asking Pilotage to bring the arrival in, under Rule 9,318.”

Back through the rain, from somewhere beyond the Point, the Lighthouse sounded one low note, and Rolf’s shoulders came down a fraction, as if he had picked something up.

Lowe was silent so long that Bjorn thought she would refuse again. She looked up through the wheelhouse window at the black tower, and then aft, at Frayne huddled in her coat, and then at Bjorn.

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“I’ll lead her,” she said. “I’ll not board her, because there’s nothing to board, and I can’t watch my marks through this and talk to her both. If she’s to follow me in, somebody stands aft, on the open deck, and keeps her steady the whole way.” Her eyes stayed on Bjorn. “Somebody she’ll listen to.”

Rolf said, “Bjorn,” and it was not quite an order, and not quite a question either.

Bjorn eased Frayne down against the thwart, and tucked the coat round him, and stood up, and went aft.

Lowe took down the speaking-trumpet. She held it a moment before she lifted it, turning it in her scarred hand.

“Arrival off Skerry Point,” she said into it, and her voice went out through the rain much quieter than before. “This is the Skerry Point pilot. I spoke out of turn. Pilot’s aboard. Follow me in.”

* * *

The cutter turned for home, with the Kittiwake limping after her, and Bjorn stood at the stern rail in the rain and could not think what to say.

“It’s Bjorn,” he said. “From the quay.” It went on raining.

“He’s all right,” he said. “Frayne. Ollie. He’s on the boards in the Senior Pilot’s coat. He’s lost a boot. He’s breathing.” He looked back at the black tower. It was following. He could see it following, keeping its distance astern like a vessel on a pilot’s lights, and he had to clear the rain out of his eyes before he could go on. “We’re going in now. Past the grounds and up to the markers. That’s the outer green, there, you’ll have seen it this morning. We leave it to starboard. That’s on our right. I had to copy the chart of this approach out four times, and I still get the colours backwards.”

The rain on the stern did not stop. It did, perhaps, thin a little.

He kept talking. The Senior Pilot was sorry, he said, and was not the sort to say it twice, so he was saying it for her; Lowe called from the wheelhouse that she would say her own sorries, thank you, apprentice, and he said that she had, and that it was true. Then he owned up to the lunch, and to being sick in the lunch pail, twice, which he would not have admitted to most people. Then the Overseer, who had gone off to find somewhere with no hulls in it, and would complain about it, and would have found it anyway, because that was what he was like.

Somewhere between the green can and the red, he stopped to drag a sleeve across his face, and the rain came on harder at once, and the Tattler, which had fallen quiet, began to ring.

“Keep talking, apprentice,” Lowe said.

He kept talking, and the wind went first. Then the rods of rain softened to ordinary rain, and the ordinary rain thinned to a steady grey falling, and when he looked back again the black tower was not a tower any more. Its flat top had slumped. It had come down lower, greyer, a long soft bank again, lit faintly from inside. The Tattler rang once, and after a long pause, once more, and gave it up.

They passed inside the markers. The water flattened. And the cloud came down around the cutter’s stern.

It came down so close and so gently that the wheelhouse was gone behind him, and the Kittiwake, and the Point, and there was only grey on every side and the cutter’s white wake running back into it. The air went perfectly still. The rain stopped. He could hear his own breathing.

Something cool closed over his hand where it held the rail.

It was hardly wet. It had a weight to it, the faint weight of mist settling, and it lay along the back of his fingers the way another hand might lie on a rail beside yours, in the dark, not quite by accident. Bjorn did not move his hand. He stopped talking, and for the first time since the grounds the rain did not come on harder when he stopped. Everything held.

Then it lifted away, and the grey drew back up off the deck, and the wheelhouse was there again, and Lowe at her wheel looking very hard at the inner marks, and Rolf in the wheelhouse doorway studying the harbour wall with close professional interest.

A light drizzle began to come down on the stern, on Bjorn and the rail and the white wake, as fine as flour through a sieve.

He put a wet cuff to his face, which did no good at all, and cleared his throat.

“There’s a basin,” he said to the drizzle. “Inside. I haven’t seen it yet. It’s got walls all round, so the tide doesn’t get in and it’s always flat. I think you’ll like it.”

* * *

Hask Corrin had found a basin under the Point, behind a pair of old gates at the end of the Point wall. He had the gates open by the time the cutter came round, and was standing on them looking as though he had personally dug it.

“Enclosed water,” he said, as the cutter came alongside. “Nobody’s berthed in it since they built the new basin across the way. Silted to a fathom, no moorings, and weed you could lose a dog in. I’ve not had my breakfast.”

“Thank you, Overseer,” Rolf said.

“Of course,” said Corrin, and then, looking up past Rolf at what was coming round the end of the wall behind the cutter, “oh, good grief,” and forgot to look put upon.

She came in slowly. She came in over the gates as a long pale bank, low down, the last of the rain hanging from her in threads, and she moved out across the basin and settled over the middle of it. The water under her went flat as a plate. The air over the basin went still. On the quay, out of habit, Lowe licked her finger and put it up, and held it there, and then put her hand in her pocket.

“Station book, this evening,” Lowe said to Rolf, with her eyes on the basin. “Arrival, Squall. Piloted in. You’d better come up and countersign it, Harbour Master, since you’re so fond of that book.”

“I’ll come,” said Rolf.

“And she’s berthed as what?” Corrin said. He had his allocation sheet out again. “Board wants a class, Harbour Master. Vessel. Cargo. Passenger. I can’t put varies in a class box.”

“You’re not being asked to put anything in it,” Rolf said. “Rule 9,318 asks for a pilot. It doesn’t ask what she is. She asked to be piloted in, and she was. That is the whole of what the Harbour was asked for today. I’m not going to classify her as a favour to a form.”

Corrin looked at his sheet. He looked at the cloud over his weed. “That’s not a class.”

“No,” said Rolf.

Corrin wrote something in the berth column, small, and folded the sheet away before anybody could read it.

* * *

The Kittiwake came in astern of the cutter and tied up on the outside of the Point wall, and Pike came along the wall towards them bareheaded, with his second hand behind him and a face like a slammed door. He stopped at the top of the basin steps and looked down at the cutter, where Frayne was sitting up now in Lowe’s coat with a tin mug in his hands and his one bare foot wrapped in a sack. Bjorn stood up.

“Nets,” Pike said, to nobody. “A full day’s catch. Two new warps. My good cap.”

“The Harbour will make that good,” Bjorn called up to him.

Rolf did not say so. Watching him not say it, Bjorn could tell that the Harbour would not.

Pike looked out at the pale bank over the basin, and his jaw worked.

“I went out first,” he said at last. “Went too close. She told me.” He jerked his head at Lowe. “Doesn’t mean I have to like the thing.” He came down two steps and held out a hand to his deckhand. “Up. Home.”

Frayne got up, in the coat, and hopped. At the top of the steps he turned and touched two fingers to where the brim of his cap would have been.

“It wasn’t aiming at us, Skip,” he said.

“Get your boot.”

“I haven’t got my boot.”

“Then hop,” said Pike, and took most of his weight, and they went off along the Point wall together, the second hand bringing up the rear.

Lowe sat down on the cutter’s thwart and got her notebook out of her shirt, a small fat thing gone soft with salt, and licked her pencil, and wrote for some time. When she had finished she held it out to Bjorn without looking at him, as she had handed him the pail.

R. 9,318. Weather, named, by request. Lead. Don’t board. Hail once and be civil about it. Put somebody aft who will talk to her the whole way and keep talking. Do not say anything in still air you would not say through the trumpet.

He gave it back. She put it away. Then she took the Tattler out of its bag, looked at it, and pushed the little brass slide on its side that said MUTE. It stayed quiet.

“First time that’s ever worked,” Lowe said, and did not seem sure whether she was pleased.

* * *

Rolf went up to the Pilot Station towards evening to countersign the book, and Corrin and Lowe went with him, Lowe with the Tattler under her arm, and Bjorn said he’d stay and see the gates shut.

The man on the left gate shut his side and went for his supper. The man on the right shut his and went for his. The lamps came on along the Point wall one at a time, and a heron lifted itself out of the weed at the far end and went away over the roofs.

The air over the basin was quite still. She lay low on the water in the dusk, pale and calm, with the faintest light still moving somewhere inside her. The basin under her held the lamps without a ripple. The gates were only for the tide; she had come in over the top of them, and could go out the same way whenever she chose.

Bjorn stood on the quay a while with his arms folded. He was cold, and his coat was still dripping on the stones, and he had eaten nothing all day, and he could not remember when he had last been so reluctant to leave anywhere.

He unfolded one arm and lifted his hand, a little, to say goodnight.

A small, fine drizzle fell on the quay. It fell on the stones around his boots, and on his lifted hand, and on him, and nowhere else in the whole of the basin.

He stayed where he was, and let it.

End of Part 3