Death on a Pale Horse - By Donald Thomas Page 0,118
just forward of the paddle-box. From there I could see every face that came up the gangways, until each arrival stepped on to the deck a few feet away from me. I could even watch them as they waited on the harbour pier for their turn to come aboard. Perhaps because this was a Friday sailing, there were far more than had come across from Dover, but the second-class travellers would be confined to the forward part of the ship.
I truly had expected that Holmes might slip aboard in disguise; but none of these, whom I saw at very close range, resembled him in the least. I do not underrate my friend’s capacity for concealing his identity. Yet there is one thing that cannot be disguised, short of bandages or dark glasses, and that is the eyes. Not for nothing had I been a physician searching the gaze of my patients for hope, fear, or resignation. I looked at close range into the faces of those hundred or so who came aboard. I would swear on my life that none of them was Holmes nor, indeed, Colonel Rawdon Moran. His telegram seemed to have told the truth. The scene of events would be in Brussels.
As the light dwindled, the rising mist became a fog that closed upon us with the chill of a hoar frost. The ritual of departure began and with it came a fond memory of my childhood. It was low tide and the steamer had come in bows-first. To go astern in shallow water, against low tide and poor visibility, is unwise. Yet there was often no room for a ship to turn herself round in a small harbour where other vessels were moored. The answer is simple. A man in a rowing boat comes out, carries the loop of a heavy mooring rope from the winch in the stern of the ship to a bollard on the far quay. The winch is then used to wind the rope in and pull the stern round until the bows of the steamer face the tide. The loop from the bollard splashes into the sea, and the length of the mooring rope is wound in at the stern. How often had I seen the ferries perform this manoeuvre in the west coast harbours of my Scottish boyhood!
The oarsman in his little shell rowed out from the mole, collected the rope, rowed back, and looped it over the bollard. There was a clanking and a gust of steam from our stern as the heavy rope rose taut and dripping from the water. Our stern swung slowly round until the bows faced the sea. The loop was cast off by the oarsman standing at the end of the harbour jetty. The bridge telegraph above me rang “Half Ahead.”
We faced the dark with several hours and sixty or seventy miles of fog-bound sea in a flat calm ahead of us. We should round the Ruytingen lightship off Dunkirk, then turn north for Dover. British travellers “going foreign,” as the saying is, would have taken the shorter crossing to Dover from Calais. Unfortunately, our royal protégé, like all other claimants to the throne of France, had been permanently exiled by the laws of the Third Republic and was not to set foot on French soil.
The weather promised to be thick, but not so dense that the sailing had to be cancelled. As we eased past the end of Ostend’s western pier, the bridge telegraph rang “Full Ahead” to the engine room and the two paddles picked up speed. Their wake frothed down either side of the ship as we slid into the seaway, past a tier of colliers and coasters. Presently we were steaming at about twelve knots, parallel with the flat winter sands. Behind a line of muddy surf, only a chain of lights from houses on the esplanade marked the shoreline that was fast receding into the gloom.
While I was leaning on the rail, watching our departure, the first mate had come to the foremast and hoisted a white oil-light almost twenty feet above the deck. He then turned, gave an order, and a second man standing behind him handed a box of lucifers to the ship’s boy. The lad struck one of these and lit the green navigation light whose lantern was fixed to the forward edge of the starboard paddle-box. The seaman took the box back and went to attend to the red light on the port side.