A Man to Hang

Chapter One: The Bar at Fort Harrow

The sea came over the bar at Fort Harrow in long grey ridges that afternoon, and Nicholas Curnow stood in the mud at the foot of the slipway and watched a good ship die.

She was the Loyal Increase, four hundred tons, eleven weeks out of Bombay with cotton goods and a bishop's ransom in silver, and she had lost her main topmast in the first squall and her mainmast in the second. Now she lay a mile and a half off, embayed, rolling her gunports under and drifting sideways toward a bar that would open her like a walnut.

"She'll strike inside the hour," said Titus Grimes. He was a wide, sun-blackened man with a gunner's burnt eyebrows and the calm of somebody who had already survived more than his share. "Two, if the tide's kind."

"The tide is never kind." Curnow squinted through the spray. He was thirty-four, lean as a spar, with sawdust permanently in the creases of his knuckles and a Cornishman's flat way of speaking that people in Fort Harrow mistook for insolence. Often they were right. "They've cut the wreck away. Fools. They should have kept the wreckage for a drag."

"They've a boy for a first mate and a drunkard for a master."

"Then we'd best go and be their master for them." Curnow turned and began to walk very fast up the slipway toward the timber sheds. "Titus. The spare topsail yard — the pitch pine one, ninety feet, in the rack by the pitch house. Six iron knees, the heavy pattern. Four coils of three-inch. The big maul, wedges, and every man in the yard who can pull an oar."

"In this?"

"In this."

They took the yard down to the water on rollers with twenty men shouting at it, and they got it into the water alongside the big pinnace with lines under it, and they went out over the bar with the yard towing astern like a dead whale. Twice the pinnace stood on her nose and Curnow thought they would go over. The rain came flat and hard enough to sting through a shirt. Somewhere behind them, on the flat roof of the Company factory, a man with a telescope was watching, and Curnow was too busy to care.

They came under the Loyal Increase's lee with the boat leaping like a hooked fish. The mainmast was gone six feet above the deck, a ragged white stump wound with iron bands that had burst. Men crowded the rail, wet and useless.

"Who commands?" Curnow bellowed.

A young officer with a broken nose leaned over. "Mr. Trebilcock, sir, second mate. Captain's below with his head laid open."

"Then you'll do. I am Curnow, master shipwright of the yard, and I am going to fish your mainmast. Do you know what that means?"

"Splint it, sir."

"Splint it. Good lad. You have a stump eight foot high and you have a yard ninety foot long, and I am going to lash the one to the other with iron knees and thirty fathom of rope until it is a mast again, and then you are going to set a scrap of sail on it and claw off this bar. Now get me your best forty men and every stitch of old canvas you have for padding, and someone find me tar."

They hoisted the pitch pine yard up the ship's side with the fore stay tackle, three men crushed against the bulwark, one hand's finger taken off clean, the boat below smashing and grinding. Curnow went up the ropes with a maul in his belt and did not look down. On the deck he worked in a world four feet square: the stump, the yard butted against it, the iron knees hammered home to bind timber to timber, the canvas padding, the woolding — turn upon turn of three-inch rope hove down with handspikes until the two spars were one and the rope sang when you struck it.

"She'll never hold," said somebody.

"She will hold for one hour," said Curnow, without turning, "and one hour is what you have, so stop talking and heave."

The shrouds were set up to the fished mast with tackles instead of deadeyes, because there was no time. A storm staysail went up, then a scrap of the main course cut down to a rag. The Loyal Increase came off the wind, hung, shuddered — and then, sweetly, ridiculously, began to move.

They crossed the bar with four feet under the keel and the mud smoking astern of them, and the fished mast bent like a bow and groaned and held. Curnow lay against the pinrail with his arms shaking and watched the fort come up on the bow: the red laterite walls, the flagstaff, the crooked line of godowns along the creek. A man on the roof waving his hat.

"You saved her," said Trebilcock, half laughing, half weeping.

"The yard saved her," said Curnow. "I only put it where it would do good."

The country boats came out to meet them: long, low, high-prowed pattamars with lateen sails, the fleet that carried every grain of pepper and every stick of teak between Kalapur and the sea. The leading one ran up alongside and a woman stood in her bows with one hand on the forestay, sari kilted up out of the water, entirely unbothered by the swell.

"You are all mad," called Kamala Nair. "Do you know what that hull is worth?"

"Nine thousand pounds and the silver."

"And your neck?"

"Considerably less, mistress. That is why I risked it."

She did not smile, but something moved at the corner of her mouth and was put away again. Kamala Nair was perhaps twenty-eight, with a scar on her thumb from a parting hawser and a voice that carried the length of a river. She ran her family's boats, forty of them, and the family owned the teak forests behind Kalapur, and she had been saying no to Nicholas Curnow for two years.

"You will want towing," she said.

"I will want towing."

"Then it is four rupees a boat and I will not argue about it in this rain."

They warped the Loyal Increase into the roads at dusk. The rain stopped as suddenly as it had begun and the sky turned the colour of a bruised peach, and Curnow stood on the wharf with his hands opening and closing because they had forgotten how to be still.

Governor Wilfred Layton came down from the factory in a clean coat.

He was a big, handsome, grey-eyed man of fifty, with the sort of easy authority that made merchants feel they were being let into a secret. He shook the hand of Mr. Trebilcock. He shook the hand of the surgeon. He walked to the rail, looked up at the fished mast with the air of a man appraising a horse, and said, loudly enough for the clerks, "Well. I said we should not lose her, and we have not lost her. The Company's yard here is the best on the coast and I have written to the Court of Directors to say so."

His eye found Curnow at last.

"Ah. Curnow. You did that? Neatly done. Come up to the house, there's a bottle of claret with your name on it."

"Thank you, sir."

"Not at all. Not at all." Layton was already turning away. "Petherick, make a note — the yard is to have an extra half ration of arrack tonight. Nothing keeps men sweet like arrack."

Grimes spat into the creek. "A bottle of claret," he said.

"It is a good bottle," said Curnow. "He gave me one last year when I got the Elizabeth off the sand. I've still got it. I'm saving it."

"For what?"

"For the day I don't work for him."

He walked home along the creek in the dark, past the timber ponds where the teak logs lay soaking, past the sawpits, past the frame of the new grab, forty feet of her, standing on the big slipway with her ribs open to the stars like the skeleton of something washed up. He stopped and put his hand on her keel, as he always did, and felt the grain under his palm.

Eleven years he had been on this coast. Nine of them for the Honourable Company, at a carpenter's wage plus twelve pounds a year for the word master, and a house with a leaking roof. His contract ended with the monsoon.

And four miles up the river, where the salt water met the sweet, there was a creek at Kalapur with a hard bottom and a natural fall to it and a stand of jack and teak behind, and he had surveyed it three times on his own time and dreamed it more often than that. A slipway. Two building slips. A saw shed. His own mark on his own keels.

All it needed was money he did not have, and the goodwill of the Nair family, who thought him competent, presumptuous, and cheap.

He had a plan for the first. He had no plan at all for the second.