Chapter 131: Down Among the Drowned
Coombes kept hold of the wheel a mite longer than he needed, the way a man will when he is not quite ready to give up a perfectly respectable excuse for standing around and hearing one more word. At last he let it go without ceremony.
"Yours now."
Bucket took the wheel and said nothing. That was enough to tell everybody the morning’s talk had run its course.
The dive party sorted itself out with little fuss. James, Anne, Mary, and Coombes would go down together, with two of the Herring’s hands added for their backs more than their swords, seeing as hauling would likely matter more than fighting beneath the sea.
Bucket stayed with the helm. Grey remained over his charts, muttering at them like they had cheated him somehow and ought to apologize before the day was done.
James stripped down to his breeches, and there was not a scrap of him that looked earned any way except the hard one. Years of hauling rope and scrambling through rigging had made him lean instead of bulky, with strength that sat close to the bone, built by work instead of vanity, every muscle looking as though it knew its business without needing to show off.
Anne crossed the deck while he was still peeling off a shirt damp with the night’s ale. Without so much as a greeting, she planted a hand flat against his stomach and gave his muscles an appraising squeeze.
"One... two... three... four... five..."
She frowned theatrically. "Where’s the sixth? I’d near convinced myself ye had a set in the dark."
"Ye’d know better than most, lass."
"Aye, that I would."
Anne had stripped down for the dive herself, breeches fitting close and a broad band of heavy cloth wrapped firmly across her chest before knotting across her back, leaving her middle bare like any sailor aboard. It concealed everything it meant to, yet did precious little to hide the gentle curves beneath.
She caught James looking and did not pretend to mind.
"Eyes cost nothin’ but hands’ll cost ye. We’ll settle that later."
Mary climbed up from below afterward wearing what looked like two garments that had quarreled so hard neither one wished to admit the other existed. A sailor’s shirt stopped short above her waist, while a length of oiled canvas wrapped low around her hips, and together they looked only half convinced they belonged on one person.
"Don’t."
She warned before either of them spoke. "Coombes’s dive clothes weren’t stitched with me in mind, and I’ll not swim about wrapped in a spare sail like some wean fresh out o’ the bath."
Anne snorted, and whatever words she might have found died there as Bucket’s voice went clean across the deck.
"Enough admirin’ each other. Get over here, the lot o’ ye. There’s one thing ye’ll want hearin’ before that bell so much as kisses the water."
He waited until James, Anne, Mary, Coombes, and the two sailors had walked close enough that no man needed to shout. Then he nodded toward multiple broad sheets of gray canvas lying by the rail, each corner weighted with old cannonballs lashed tight.
Bucket started to explain, "We sink these round the site first. They hang like a curtain and keep most o’ what’s swimmin’ out there from wanderin’ in while ye’re workin’."
His gaze passed from face to face without the least hurry. "But some sharks got poor manners and less respect for a fence it can’t see, so odds are there’ll be one or two already inside by the time ye reach bottom. If ye spot one, don’t thrash and don’t bolt. Let it lose interest, same as ye would with a dog wonderin’ whether ye’re worth bitin’."
He tapped the knife at his belt.
"Each of ye’s carryin’ a blade. That’s worth about as much comfort as it’ll buy."
Grey spoke from beside his charts without anybody inviting him, following Bucket’s warning as neat as a second verse after the first.
"And don’t expect her to be lyin’ there plain as mass meetin’ once ye’re down."
He kept one arm around the folded chart. "My reckonin’s she’s beneath this patch of water, and I’d wager me own name on that much. Where she’s resting inside it, I can’t tell ye from up here, so y’all’ll have to spread out and hunt her.
Coombes clapped his hands once, loud enough to chase off any more speeches. "Well then. No use frightenin’ ourselves with talk o’ teeth when there’s a man o’ war waitin’ below. In with ye now, and mind yer elbows. She’s roomier outside than in."
Before climbing aboard, he pulled off his cap and set it carefully on the deck instead of trusting the sea with it.
Without the garment, the truth came out.
His head was bald and pink across the crown, with a stubborn ring of gray hair hanging on around the sides like it had not yet accepted defeat.
"What?"
Coombes demanded after catching James staring. "A man’s allowed to be bald and still outlast most folk holdin’ their breath. One’s got nothin’ to do with t’other."
"Never said it did."
"Bah, ye were thinkin’ it."
One by one they folded themselves into the bell until every spare inch was taken by shoulders, knees, and elbows pressed against curved iron ribs.
The boom swung the great thing out over the rail with a groan and lowered it toward the sea on a rope thick as a man’s wrist. It struck the water, rocked once as though making up its mind, and then began sinking. The oxygen stayed trapped beneath its crown just as Coombes had promised, while the daylight overhead grew thinner with every fathom.
"Christ." James grinned despite himself. "Feels like bein’ swallowed."
"Give it another minute."
Coombes grinned. "Soon as ye forget which way’s up, ye’ll feel right at home."
Anne pressed her face close to one of the little glass ports and watched the world above shrink until it looked no bigger than a pale coin.
"I never imagined an Irish girl’d end up divin’ in the Caribbean after a sunken wreck."
Mary sounded as easy as though she spoke of tomorrow’s weather. "There’s a first drownin’ waitin’ for everybody."
"Ye’re a comfort, lad."
"I do my best."
The bell kept sinking. The water outside the glass faded from green to blue and then into something darker altogether.
James found himself laughing before he quite knew why. There was that wild pleasure in it that had pushed him through worse scrapes than this, and he could not seem to shake it loose.
Then, as silently as a man sitting down in his own chair, the bell stopped.
Its iron rim met the seabed with a gentle jolt. The bell rocked once, no more than a breath, then stood still. After all those fathoms of empty water, the descent had simply come to an end.
With Anne peering through one of the little glass ports, James had to squeeze in beside her, his cheek brushing hers as he stole what room he could.
The reef spread to every direction, and neither of them could have named all the colors even if somebody had offered money. The coral climbed upward in towers of pink, gold, and bruised purple, twisting into what no sensible shipwright would ever think to build.
The fish drifted through it by the hundreds, flashing silver and blue before scattering and gathering again like gulls over fresh scraps.
Far overhead, shafts of sunlight reached down through the sea and broke across the sand into slow bars that never quite stayed where they first fell.
Coombes tapped one of the weighted casks lashed beside the bell, and James understood at once that the easy part had finished. The real work began the moment they ducked beneath the trapped air and stepped into the sea itself.
Before he did, though, his eye caught the first proof that Grey’s figures had earned their keep. A splintered plank lay half buried in the sand, the wood gone pale and furry beneath days of growth. Beyond it rested a coil of rope rotted nearly through, one loose end swaying with the current as though it had not yet decided whether it belonged to the living world or the dead.
Small things, maybe, but enough to tell a smart man he stood in the right place and that something much larger waited close at hand.
James slipped beneath the bell’s rim first to meet cool water closing around him all at once. The others followed until the whole party floated together beyond the bell in the open sea.
The sailors from the Herring peeled away toward the far edge of the reef, trusting to some course only them seemed able to see. That left James, Anne, and Mary to search another stretch for themselves.
The three moved together through coral heads taller than any man, while bright schools of fish burst away before them in frightened clouds, only to drift back once they had passed. The current pulled gently instead of hard, the sort they scarcely noticed until they tried swimming against it.
James let it carry part of the work, with Anne on one side and Mary on the other, none of them seeing any reason to waste breath they did not have.
Ahead rose a wall of drifting weed, thick, dark, and tangled with broken coral that had plainly given up trying to grow. It hid everything beyond.
James reached it first. He shoved through, weeds dragging across his chest and arms while Anne and Mary stayed close behind.
Then the water opened.
There she lay.
The HMS Falmouth rested upon the sand in ruin and grandeur, the sort of sight he could carry a hundred years and never forget. Her hull had split in many places where iron and fire had done their work, yet the ship still stood proud beneath the sea. Long rows of guns lined her sides, some sitting square in their ports as though still waiting for an order that would never come.
Her foremast had been cut down to a shattered stump, while the remains of her rigging and torn canvas drifted lazily in the current around her like something that had not quite finished dying.
James floated there without moving and looked his fill. For the first time since the bell left the surface, he found himself with nothing at all to say.