Nick of Time Read online

  You are in possession of an object of extreme value to me. I will do anything to get it. Anything. You know what it is, and you cannot hide it from me. I will have it.

  I am also in possession of an object, one of extreme value to yourself.

  That would be your flea-ridden dog, who will not eat or drink until we meet and you give me what I want.

  Would it be possible for us to discuss this matter? I suggest we meet at the deserted shanty down by Old North Wharf at six o’clock this evening.

  Until then, I bid you

  Fond Adieu,

  WILLIAM BLOOD, ESQ.

  P.S. DO NOT WORRY ABOUT YOUR DOG. I LIKE DOGS. ESPECIALLY THE HEARTS AND GIZZARDS. DELICIOUS!

  Blood

  Nick took the stairs up to his room three at a time. When he looked under his bed, Jip was gone, just as Nick knew he would be. From the instant he’d locked eyes with Blood he’d known the man to be a fiend. Capable of anything. Anything.

  Nick collapsed on his bed, sobbing.

  His dog was gone and there was no use looking for him, not in the cellar or chasing seagulls out on the headlands or anywhere, for that matter. Jip was gone and Billy Blood had him. What was it Gunner had said last night? Was the man a wizard or even a ghost? Did he possess some kind of magical powers? Nick didn’t much credit such stuff and nonsense, but seeing, or rather not seeing was believing. What had Gunner said?

  They come from out of thin air, is where they come from!

  Six o’clock at Old North Wharf.

  He had just nine hours to find a way to get his dog back from Billy Blood. He sat up and wiped his eyes, done with tears for good.

  It was no time for good men to be lying about, after all. Not with black retrievers to retrieve and black-hearted Nazis and evil pirates lurking about!

  CHAPTER VIII

  A Council of War

  · 6 June 1939 ·

  AT GREYBEARD INN

  War council!” Nick had said, and after seeing their parents off for the mainland on the midday packet boat, the children had gathered upstairs at the Greybeard Inn. Katie, her brother, and Gunner all sat round a heavy oaken table in a small room at the top of the inn. It was called the “Armoury,” because it was chockablock with antique weaponry of every description. Colorful battle flags of many nations hung from the ceiling in a great circle of tattered glory, and among them were suspended many swords, lances, and battle pikes of great antiquity.

  It was Kate’s view that her brother would use any excuse to have a “War Council.” He’d even called one when Gunner’s cat had gone missing for less than twenty minutes! But now that pirates had stolen Jip, she supposed that war was actually called for.

  Seated below this somewhat frightening display, the little band had an old map of Greybeard Island spread before them, and Gunner and Nick were poring over it inch by inch. Kate tried to pay attention, but it was hardly her idea of fun, sitting there looking at some old maps with a lot of swords hanging over her head. War, like spying, wasn’t nearly so much fun as it sounded.

  She was whiling away the drowsy morning watching the cat Horatio, her favorite animal on earth. Gunner’s cat was a wily predator with an uncommonly insatiable appetite for any creature smaller than himself that flew or swam. Sitting in the small open window just opposite her, the cat was eyeing a fat red robin perched amid the gently swaying clouds of white blossoms on a crabapple tree.

  It was a long jump, from window to treetop to robin, but Kate had no doubt that Horatio would steel himself and make the leap. It was only a matter of time.

  It had already been a busy morning. Her mother in tears after reading and rereading a mean letter her father had gotten. Then her parents packing for a trip to London to stay with her uncle, and then Nicky telling her that Billy Blood had stolen Jip because he wanted that old sea chest they’d found, maybe.

  And now, she and Nicky were staying with Gunner right here at the inn! She had her own tiny little room, the Blue Room, and it would be most thrilling to sleep somewhere besides your own bed, she thought. She was already missing her mum, but now, with all this talk about “escape routes” and “flanking actions” and “declarations of war,” she was simply feeling bored. She took a ball and jacks from her apron pocket and practiced her “threesies” on the Armoury floor.

  Nick was describing the sea chest and its location to Gunner.

  “It’s the chest Billy Blood’s after,” Nick was saying. “See that strange look that came over him when Katie mentioned it by the fire last night? He knew about it, but how, Gunner? And how could he steal my dog from under my own bed with only one stairway up to my room and my mum standing at the sink not ten feet away, snipping roses? And where’s he got poor Jip now, Gunner? Why, everyone on this island knows Jip’s my dog—” Nick broke off, his eyes threatening to go all leaky on him for the second or third time that morning. No more tears, he told himself. Never again, no matter what!

  “Which he is indeed a strange one, Blood is, Master Nick. Strange bloke indeed,” said Gunner, drawing his fingers through his full white beard and squinting at the map through his little gold spectacles.

  When Gunner found himself in comfortable, homey surroundings, like sitting here beneath all this sharpened steel, he tended to talk in complete sentences rather than the sharp bits and pieces he used when his nerves were a little scratchy.

  “Methinks that cursed pirate’ll find himself at the wrong end a’this afore we’re done,” Gunner said, polishing the walnut stock of a prize blunderbuss he called “Old Thunder.” Nick nodded silently in agreement. Sooner or later they’d go to war with Billy Blood and he was mighty grateful Gunner would be on his side.

  “The chest is located inside a cave here at Sandy Cove,” Nick said, marking the location on the map with a heavy black cross, the kind he’d seen on pirate maps in his books. Odd to be using the pirate’s cross, Nick thought, to indicate what might really be a chest laden with pirate’s treasure, just like something out of a real adventure story.

  “The first thing we have to do is move the chest where the enemy won’t be looking. A place where we can get that lock open and find out why that old box has Mr. Blood’s blood in such an uproar.”

  “Blood’s blood?” said Gunner, cupping his good ear. “Uproar?”

  “Right,” said Nick. “And then we’ve got to find a way to get Jip back unharmed without giving up that chest. Something fairly valuable inside, I’d guess. Gold, I reckon—doubloons or napoleons, maybe, or pieces of eight. It’s heavy enough.”

  “Bring the chest here, Master Nick?” asked Gunner, pointing to the inn on the map. “She’d be safe enough up here in the Armoury—ha!”

  “We could,” Nick said, rubbing his chin, “but she’d be awfully heavy coming up the side of that cliff, wouldn’t she? And I wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time lugging it across open ground while that nasty bird of his is flying around out there spying on us.”

  “Why don’t you just go get the chest with your sailboat, Nicky?” Katie asked quietly over her shoulder.

  She’d been half listening to them and it was pretty obvious to her what they should do.

  “Do what?” Nick asked, frowning. “Sailboat?” But he knew instantly that his sister had hit upon it. “You know, that’s not a completely terrible idea, Katie!” he said excitedly. “We could use Petrel to go get the chest! Gunner, do you have a pair of dividers handy?”

  Nick took the navigator’s dividers and put one point on the black cross marking the treasure, spreading the instrument to describe an arc around the center.

  “Based on what Blood heard last night, when Kate said we’d found it by the sea near Gravestone Rock, this is most likely the area where Blood and Snake Eye will be looking for the chest. Searching the coast from about here to here. We need to find a way to get the chest out of this circle in a hurry, without bumping into that old pirate, and hide it somewhere where he can’t get at it. See this! Kate’s right! You could run a boat up o
n the sand fifteen yards from the mouth of the cave and then—”

  A big smile spread across Gunner’s face. “You be thinkin’ of a naval operation, Master Nick? Come in and snatch yer treasure chest from the sea? But consider, lad. You’ll never get yer boat safely in this cove, never in your life.”

  “Why not?”

  “Use your orbs, boy!” Gunner exclaimed, pointing his finger at the map. “You know what these little squiggidy lines round the cove mean well as I do. Those are the Devil’s. Teeth, and they’ll rip yer bottom out, of that I’m sure!”

  Nick looked at Gunner with his own broadening smile. “Your ordinary seaman might not be up to it, Mr. Gunner, but Nick McIver can get you safely inside that cove! And don’t worry about the Petrel’s bottom on the way in, sir. I know every square inch of those reefs!”

  “It ain’t yer boat’s bottom I’m worried about, boy. Still, a snatch from the sea is not without its particular merits and feasibilities.”

  “Exactly my thinking, Mr. Gunner, sir. Exactly!” Nick cried, and he leaned over to give Kate a big kiss on the cheek which she wiped away with a grimace as soon as he wasn’t looking.

  Excited, Nick ran his finger over the map. “We slip out in the Petrel, tack in carefully through the Seven Devils, ghost up into the cove here and I’ll lay her up easy by the shore. Then we’ll just hop over the side, go ashore, and we can quickly haul that old sea chest out of the cave and into the hold of the good ship Petrel! Right out from under that old pirate’s nose!”

  “And where we be makin’ for then, Master Nick? To stow it, I mean.”

  “Let me take a look at that tide table, Gunner.”

  Nick checked the high and the ebb against the naval chronometer weighing down a corner of the map. “If we shove off in the next half hour, and make good time sailing south to the cove, we might just snatch the chest and beat the ebb before it makes getting through the Devils impossible.”

  Nick picked up the dividers again and swung the silver point along the coast.

  “From there, with a good sou’westerly on our beam, the closest safe harborage would be right … here!”

  The silver point moved south and east and pricked the map at the southernmost tip of Greybeard Island. There, a cavernous lagoon nestled at the foot of a craggy, mountainous headland that jutted boldly into the sea. It was off this very headland, Nick knew, that a good deal of recent U-boat activity had taken place.

  And upon that headland there happened to stand one of the most famous and formidable pieces of stonework on Greybeard or any other island in this part of the world. A dark, gothic masterpiece of soaring stone towers, turrets, and battlements where no flag had flown for many a year.

  Castle Hawke.

  Gunner bent down and peered at where the point of the divider had stuck, his gold-rimmed glasses sliding down on his nose. He took a sharp breath.

  “Why, we can’t drop anchor there, never in your life, sir.”

  “There’s a good eighty feet of water in that lagoon, Gunner,” said Nick. “Petrel only draws four.”

  “Likely so, likely so. But this be Hawke Castle, Master Nick. That lagoon belongs to Hawke Castle! To Lord Hawke himself! You ain’t scared?”

  “Why on earth should I be scared, Gunner?” Nick asked, smiling. “Don’t tell me you believe your own tales about the castle being haunted?”

  “No one’s sailed into that lagoon nor set foot on that point o’land since Lord Hawke’s two children, little Alexander and Annabel, was mysteriously kidnapped there, nigh on five years now. Lord Hawke has said he’d kill any man that’d dare trespass his castle, said he’d kill ’em himself, he did, and legend has it there’s not a man in England more handy with pistol or sword than Lord Hawke himself, him or his ghost!”

  “Gunner, you know as well as I do that all this talk about Hawke Castle is nothing but stupid pub gossip, fueled by pints of popskull and rum.”

  “Some of it, maybe,” Gunner allowed.

  Gunner looked at Nick and smiled sheepishly. He knew he was the person chiefly responsible for all the gossip surrounding the castle. When it came to weaving tales and embroidering the rich Hawke legend, Gunner had no equal on the island. And, to be honest, he couldn’t really remember anymore what was true and what he’d made up after a pint or two.

  For years, Nick had heard stories circulated around Greybeard Island about mysterious kidnappings at Hawke Castle and evil goings-on there. Most of them had originated, Nick thought, with Gunner entertaining his patrons around the blazing hearth of the Greybeard Inn. On a small island, he’d learned, gossip spread like a case of poison oak and was usually just as unpleasant.

  The strange legend of Lord Hawke and Hawke Castle were well known on this tiny island. Although no one talked much about the great castle or its eccentric owner anymore, stories abounded about why Hawke had gone into voluntary seclusion. The tragic disappearance of his two small children was by far the island’s most accepted theory. But no one had any proof, nor had there ever been a police investigation, nor a single word in The Island Gazette.

  Hawke had been a brilliant scientist and world-class detective. Before dropping out of sight, he had single-handedly solved two or three of Scotland Yard’s most difficult murder cases after the famous Yard inspectors had come up empty.

  One theory held that a famous criminal mastermind had murdered Hawke out of revenge. He was hiding out from his old gang and the coppers in the heavily fortified castle. Stuff and nonsense, Nick thought—he wasn’t buying any of it.

  Hawke was simply a modern-day Sherlock Holmes, who’d grown weary of the criminal world, come home to his castle, and pulled up his drawbridge. A drawbridge young Nick had never dared cross, and about which he’d always been intensely curious.

  “Gunner, look at it this way. You’re Lord Hawke, a brilliant scientist and even more brilliant detective. You’ve locked yourself up in that moldy old castle all these years. One fine day there’s a lad on your doorstep with a mysterious sea chest. A lad who’s being chased all over creation by evil pirates. Would you shoot that boy? No, sir, you wouldn’t! You’d be glad of a chance to dust off your scientific detective skills and get back in business! Why, you’d be tickled pink to help solve the mystery of that chest!”

  “Pink or no, I might be just as tickled to shoot, too,” Gunner said, rolling it over in his mind. “Of course, poor ailin’ Davies says his lordship flung himself from the top o’ that tower and broke his bones on them rocks down below. Like his heart was broken after his wife died of consumption and them two wee children was snatched off the face of this earth that terrible night nigh on five long years ago. Only his ghost livin’ there now, is what Davies says.”

  Gunner sat back and regarded his friend carefully. Nick refused to reply.

  “Course, all of it could be, as you say, nothin’ but idle pub talk, Nick.”

  “Of course it is, Gunner! Of course it is! Pirates, maybe. But ghosts? Never.”

  Gunner looked at the two children with a smile at this new potential for adventure. “Well, ghosts or no, I likes the idea of a naval maneuver! And, we’ll have Old Thunder here, won’t we? In case those pirates get in our way!”

  Nick stood up, a look of rapturous excitement on his face.

  “That’s it, then! We’re bound for Hawke Lagoon, Gunner,” he said, rolling up the large map. “It’s the only way we can keep that chest out of Billy’s hands long enough to find out what’s inside it! With or without the help of Lord Hawke or his ghost! All in favor signify saying ‘Aye!’ ”

  “Aye,” Gunner said, his eyes alight.

  “Aye,” Kate said simply out of habit, since she’d been paying scant attention all morning. Her focus now was the cat Horatio.

  Nick looked at Gunner with fierce determination in his eyes. “We’re off, lads! First the chest, and then the little matter of rescuing my poor dog from that cursed buccaneer by six o’clock!”

  “Look, Nicky!” Kate shouted excitedly, pointi
ng out the open window. “Horatio’s jumped all the way to the top of that tree and is having robin for his breakfast!”

  Nick looked out the window. There was only a big white cat among the crabapple blossoms where the fat little robin had been singing.

  “Who dares, wins, Kate,” Nick said.

  “True enough, Nick,” Gunner said, slinging his big shiny blunderbuss over his broad shoulder. “With a bit o’ luck, true enough.”

  CHAPTER IX

  The Leviathan

  · 6 June 1939 ·

  AT SANDY COVE

  Prepare to shove off, Mr. Gunner, sir!” Nick said, smiling broadly as Gunner emerged from the cave into the misty sunlight.

  He was, Nick was delighted to see, carrying the gleaming sea chest. “And we’ll set her hard for Hawke Lagoon, south by southwest, sir!” It had taken Gunner only a few moments to fetch the chest from the cave, while Nick stood guard with the blunderbuss at the cave’s mouth, on the lookout for pirates or parrots or both. Luckily, he’d seen neither while Gunner was inside the cave, though he would have happily blown the red parrot from the sky had he seen it.

  The mysterious chest now loaded safely aboard, the Stormy Petrel set sail once more, having picked her way through the Devils, and leaving the Gravestone Rock growing ever smaller in the wake behind her. They sailed southwest and then in a more easterly direction along the rocky coast, along the southern shore of Greybeard Island, bound for Hawke Lagoon. It was just after two o’clock and the little sloop was well heeled over, slicing through the blue water like a long white knife.

  Kate sat happily in the cockpit, chatting with her redheaded doll Rosie, the cat Horatio cradled in her lap, keeping her brother company by the helm. “And what might you be up to now, silly cat?” Kate wondered, as Horatio suddenly leapt from her lap and up onto the roof of Petrel’s cabin house, and from there, up onto the boom.

  Petrel’s snowy white mainsail was sheeted all the way out to the starboard side of the boat to take advantage of the wind coming aft over the stern. The sail, which was stretched at its foot all along the beautifully varnished boom, formed a comfortable pocket when they were running before the wind, and it was not uncommon for Horatio to tred gingerly out along the boom and curl up in the soft pocket formed by the billowing sail, and sleep.