Slaves of Obsession - Anne Perry [151]
He recalled Trace’s having mentioned diving in the Confederate navy, and he needed to speak to him about it now, urgently.
“Diving!” Trace said in disbelief. “Where? What for?”
Explaining his reasons, and briefly what he had seen, Monk told him why.
“You can’t go alone,” Trace agreed the moment Monk was finished. “It’s dangerous. I’ll come with you. We’ll have to get suits. Have you ever dived before?”
“No, but I’ll have to learn as I do it,” Monk answered, realizing how brash it sounded even as he spoke. But he had no alternative. He could not send anyone else, and the look in Trace’s eyes betrayed that he knew that. He did not argue.
“Then I’d better explain some of the dangers and sensations you may feel, for your own safety,” he warned. “There must be divers somewhere along the river, for salvage at least, and to mend wharfs and so on.”
“There are,” Monk agreed. “The waterman told me. I’ve already made enquiries. We can hire equipment and men to assist us from Messrs. Heinke. They are submarine engineers in Great Portland Street.”
“Good.” Trace nodded. “Then I’m ready when you wish.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Certainly.”
Monk had told Hester of the idea that had come to him on the river, and of his plan to take Philo Trace and dive beneath the Thames at Blackwall Point. Of course she had asked him about it in minute detail, and he answered only with assurances of his safety, and generalities as to how that was going to be assured, and what he expected to find.
The next afternoon just before two o’clock he left, saying he would meet with Philo Trace and the men from Messrs. Heinke at the river, and would return either when he had discovered something or when the rising tide made further work impossible. She was obliged to be content with that. There was no possibility whatever of her accompanying him. She knew from the look on his face that pressing the issue would gain her nothing at all.
Monk found the entire experience of diving extraordinary—and terrifying. He met Trace at the wharf where they were to be fitted out with all they would need for the proposed venture. Until this point Monk had been concentrating on what he expected to find on the bottom of the river, and what he would learn from it, if they were successful. Now, suddenly, the reality of what he was going to do overwhelmed him.
“Are you all right?” Trace asked, his face shadowed with anxiety.
They were side by side on the vast wooden timbers of the wharf, the gray-brown water opaque, twenty feet below them, sucking and sliding gently, smelling of salt, mud and that peculiar sour odor of receding tide which left behind it the refuse of the teeming life on either side of it. It was so turgid with scraped-up silt it could have been a foot deep, or a mile. Anything more than a foot beneath the surface was already invisible. It was just before ebb tide turned to flood, the best time for diving, when the currents are least powerful and the visibility of the incoming salt water offered almost a foot of sight.
Monk found himself shivering.
“Right, sir!” a thin man with grizzled hair said cheerfully. “Let’s be ’avin’ yer.” He eyed Monk up and down with moderate approval. “Not too fat, anyway. Like ’em leaner, but you’ll do.”
Monk stared at him uncomprehendingly.
“Fat divers in’t no good,” the man said, whistling between his teeth. “Can’t take the pressure down deep. Their ’ealth goes an’ they’re finished. Off with yer clothes, then. No time ter stand abaht!”
“What?”
“Off with yer clothes,” the man repeated patiently. “Yer don’t think yer was goin’ down dressed up like that, did yer? ’Oo’d yer think yer’ll see down there, then? The flippin’ Queen?”
Another man had arrived ready to assist, and Monk looked across and saw that Trace was also being undressed and redressed by a cheerful man who was wearing a thick sweater in spite of the warm August morning.
Obediently he stripped off his outer clothes, leaving only