The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [133]
‘He knows we’re going to win,’ cried Burrard, cock-a-hoop.
Was it so? Those who had bet against the mariner began to look uncomfortable. Some of them, standing near Totton, turned to him nervously. What was going on, they demanded? ‘We were following you,’ they reminded him.
Henry Totton had already endured some chaff when it had been noticed that his son was in Seagull’s boat. ‘Your son’s sailing with the opposition?’ his friends had cried. He had treated the question with perfect equanimity. ‘He’s still friends with the little Seagull boy,’ he had replied calmly. ‘He wanted to go with him.’
‘I would have stopped him,’ one merchant remarked grumpily.
‘Why?’ Totton had given a quiet smile. ‘My son’s extra weight and will undoubtedly get in the way. I think he’ll cost Seagull a furlong at least.’ This shrewdness had drawn some appreciative laughs.
So now, as they looked at him accusingly, he only shrugged. ‘Seagull has made a bet, like the rest of us.’
‘Yes. But he never bets.’
‘And he is probably wise.’ He looked round their faces. ‘Has it not occurred to any of you that he may have made a mistake? He may lose.’ And faced with this further piece of common sense, there wasn’t much anyone could say. There was a feeling, all the same, that there was something fishy about the business.
Nor was this suspicion confined to the spectators. Down in the boat, Willie Seagull was looking at his father curiously, while the mariner, his leather hat squashed at a jaunty angle on his head, leaned very comfortably against a cask of wine. ‘What are you up to, Dad?’ he whispered.
But all Seagull did was murmur a short sea-shanty:
Hot or cold, by land or sea
Things are not always what they seem to be.
And that was all Willie could get out of him until the mayor’s voice cried: ‘Cast off.’
Jonathan Totton was happy. To be with his friend Willie, and the mariner on their boat – and for such an event – it did not seem to him that heaven itself could be much better.
It was a bracing scene. The little river between the high green slopes on its banks had a silvery tinge. The sky was grey but luminous, the ribs of the clouds spreading southwards. Pale seagulls wheeled round the masts and dipped over the reeds, the waterside echoing with their cries. The two boats were out in midstream now, the Southampton boat nearer the eastern bank. At the quay it had looked larger, but to Jonathan, now, down on the water, the hoy with its built-up platforms fore and aft seemed to tower over the fishing boat.
The crew were all ready. There were four men on the oars, but only to keep the boat steady in the stream. The rest were in position to raise the sail. Seagull was on the tiller, the two boys, for the time being, crouched down in front of him. As Jonathan looked up at the mariner’s face, with its dark wisps of beard against the gleaming grey sky, it looked, for a moment, strangely sinister. But he put that thought from him as being foolish. And just then, on the shore, the mayor must have waved his flag, for Seagull nodded and said: ‘Now.’ The boys looked forward as the square sail went up with a flap and the four men on the oars gave a few good pulls, and in a few moments they were moving down the stream with the north wind pressing behind them.
Looking across to the quay, Jonathan could see his father’s face watching them. He wanted to get up and wave to him, but he did not because he was not sure his father would like it. Soon the borough on its sloping crest was falling behind. A shaft of light through a break in the cloud lit up the town’s roofs for a few brief, rather eerie moments; then the clouds closed and greyness descended. They were slipping downstream fast. The trees on the river bank intervened and the borough was lost to sight.
The smaller craft was able to pick up speed more