Uncharted Seas Read Free Page B

his wildest dreams with the gold just discovered on his brother’s farm in South Africa; rich, too, in hopes of getting his way with Synolda whose beauty had inflamed his desires to fever pitch. He leant towards her:
    ‘Be of good cheer, little one. The storm by morning will be finish. Soon your Vicente will make for you a paradise in Venezuela.’
    She screwed up her wide mouth and shrugged slightly. ‘I’ve told you twenty times I’m leaving the ship at Rio.’
    ‘Oh, no,’ he said with sudden fierceness. ‘You come on with me to Caracas, otherwise it may be that you will meet bad trouble.’
    Her eyes hardened. ‘You’ve hinted at that sort of thing before, but laughed it off each time I’ve questioned you. Just what do you mean?’
    ‘You know, my beautiful Synolda. I am not one to threaten. I ’oped you would appreciate my delicacy—my patience—in the week of days since we left Cape Town. A week is a long time for us Venezuelans who are ’ot-blooded people; particularly when the sun shines as it did until—until, yes, the day that preceded yesterday. You are the loveliest woman I’ave ever seen. You will be kind to Vicente or there will be questions. The people at Rio will want to know things about your ’usband.’
    ‘He’s dead,’ she declared sullenly.
    Vicente nodded. ‘But it might be that some curious people would make the inquiry to know why you left South Africa without any luggage and all that—eh?’
    Synolda’s eyelids quivered. For the thousandth time in a hundred and fifty hours she wondered anxiously how much the dark-faced man opposite her really knew. Certain that he knew something had kept her civil to him—but what? Her home was actually in Caracas; not Rio as she had given out, although she meant to leave the ship there. He might perhaps have known her by sight when she was living in the Venezuelan capital, but she could not swear she had not set eyes on him during her recent visit to South Africa so how could he know anything of her recentpast? She had made a bad slip though in giving it out that she was a widow.
    He nodded again. ‘You be a good girl and nice to Vicente when the storm is gone—yes—it is better so.’
    Suddenly, above the muffled howling of the wind something hit the ship with a boom like thunder; the reverberation of the shock echoed for at least a minute. The timbers groaned, the bolts grated in the girders as though about to be torn out of their sockets; the deck reared up aft to so sharp an angle that the passengers would have been thrown from the settees unless they had clung to the screwed-down tables.
    De Brissac knew the ship had taken another giant wave on her for’ard well-deck; that sunken space between the fo’c’sle and the bridge would now be four feet deep in water and she must lift again before it could pour off through the storm ports.
    The
Gafelborg
rose once more, yet the deck of the lounge continued to slant steeply up towards the companionway at its after end. De Brissac waited, imagining that the volume of water was too great for the scuppers to carry it off so soon, but the lounge remained tilted permanently. He knew then that she had been seriously damaged.
    That knowledge was reflected in the faces of the other passengers; all but a few showed varying degrees of fear from a furtive, hunted look to one of stark terror.
    ‘Dear God! Dear God we’re going to drown,’ wailed a middle-aged woman, in Spanish; flinging herself on her knees beside the two nuns.
    The elderly Greek wrung his hands in an agony of misery. He was not frightened for himself, but he knew that if he was drowned his rascally half-brother would contrive some means to cheat his wife and son out of their share of the family business.
    The screws were vibrating like electric drills; at shorter intervals now as the stern was tossed for longer periods from the water. The old cargo carrier began to wallow horribly and it seemed that at any moment she might turn