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nightmare in which he was pushed on a public stage with an unknown play going on, and had had to learn his part while he played it. Lying awake, he reflected that this was indeed a pretty fair picture of how he had spent those lost four months between St. Malo and here: for he’d never intended becoming a desperado and hadn’t a clue as to how to conduct himself....
    Pacing the late-night quays at St. Malo, a lawful and lovesick traveler.... Then he remembered nothing until the sound of that rhythmical watery gurgle-and-plop, gurgle-and-plop in the pitch dark and feeling of rearing and reeling each time he came-to (and went under and came-to again). A genuine dizzy swaying and reeling of everywhere, fused and confused in the dark with the swaying and reeling and pain inside his own stomach and head. Noise, and the cold; and the smell of tar, and of bilge water slopping up at him reeking of dead rat and well-oiled machine guns and burst pots of paint and the vomit all over his clothes. Overhead, fearful impacts of metal on wood. Pain—and the perishing cold; and an absolute blank in his mind about whether he’d ever left Paris, and where he was now. And nobody with him down there in the darkness and noise, apart from a cat having kittens....
    In short, the English Milord had been slugged for his bulging wallet and flung down any old hatchway alongside the quay—down one just about to be closed as it happened, the ship being ready to sail; and there had lain sprawled, without money or passport, in the battened-down hold of a schooner bound for Rum Row. By the time Augustine came-to they’d been out in the pobble surrounding the Île de Cézembre—and already off Ushant before he was found.
    Alice May ’s thirsty cargo was stowed in the main-hold, amidships: this was the forehold, which only housed the spare gear (including the guns they would need when they got there as well as the fenders and ropes which had broken his fall when that dockside thug slung him down). If they’d not had to look for the cat they adored they might never have found him—not even off Ushant.
    *
    The Master was Cockney, the Mate was from Hull: a fond pair of old friends who played the giddy-goat all day with each other, and kept the crew in a roar with their practical jokes and music-hall backchat but handled their ship as a maestro handles a fiddle, and blew on their men as a flautist blows on a flute.
    Faced with a wholly unwanted concussed Augustine and nowhere to land him they’d had to make use of him, turning him into a rum-running Able Seaman as best they could. They mightn’t have had to cope with Augustines before, but their touch with this one was faultless. Once back on his feet and fit for light duty (with sail-thread still in his scalp and still inclined to see double), they started to tease and play tricks on him just like each other. From moment to moment he never knew if those two were fooling or serious: this made his sea-apprenticeship none too easy—but left him with no time to think (which was really the point, as he realized now).
    They had made no bones at all about being rum-runners, looking on Prohibition as just a low-comedy villain whom every right-minded person must want to help foil; and you weren’t even breaking the law (so they told him) provided you stopped outside territorial waters and sold your stuff for the contact-boats to run in. On the Row, moreover, the prices were golden....
    Liners can chug more-or-less straight across; but west-bound sail finds it pays to make a big detour, adding a thousand miles to the distance but dodging those northern waters where headwinds prevail and working down south to pick up the Trades. So the schooner’s course for the Long Island coast she was bound for had taken Augustine to seas that were streaked with more greens and blues, and more bluey-greens and greeny-blues, than even Pissarro in Paris had painted with: