Stormchild Read Online Free PDF Page B

Caspar had to be better than a life of shoeless desiccation in a French nunnery, or of witless drunkenness in the town’s pubs.
    Nicole, her kit bag hastily packed, did not want us to go to the boatyard to see her off, but she could hardly stop us, so we drove her to the river where Caspar’s boat proved to be a great brute of a wooden catamaran called Erebus. Erebus was a graceless craft, nearly fifty feet in length, with a boxy, clumsy appearance that suggested she had been constructed by an amateur builder who had compensated for his lack of experience by making every part of his craft hugely heavy. That precautionary strength must have paid off, for Erebus carried the unmistakable marks of long and hard usage. Her gear was chafed, her hulls were streaked, and her decks had been blanched by long days of hard tropic sunlight. There was no indication of where the boat had come from, for no hailing port was painted on either of her transoms and her ensign was an anonymous pale green rag that hung listless in the day’s sullen heat.
    The big catamaran was moored at our visitor’s pontoon. Clothes and dishrags were hanging to dry from her guardrails, but there was no other sign of life on board until, quite suddenly, a tribe of very small, very fair-haired and very naked children erupted from the cabin to scream and chase one another across the coach roof and down onto the trampoline netting that formed the catamaran’s foredeck. “Are they Caspar’s children?” Joanna asked, with what I thought was a remarkable forbearance.
    “Yes,” Nicole said, as though it was the most normal thing in the world for a girl to wander off and join a ready-made family she had met only two or three hours before.
    “So he’s married?” I asked.
    “Don’t be a toad, Daddy.” Nicole swung her kit bag onto her shoulder and walked down to the pontoon.
    The four naked children on the catamaran’s foredeck netting were shrieking with loud excitement, but then a very tall and excruciatingly thin man, who had a pale green scarf knotted around his neck, suddenly appeared in Erebus’ s cockpit. “Shut up!” He spoke in German, which I had learned years before and still half understood.
    The four children were immediately quiet and utterly immobile.
    “Oh dear, sweet Lord,” Joanna murmured, for the man, apart from the wispy pale green scarf, was bare-assed naked. His skin was tanned the color of old mahogany against which his long white hair and straggly white beard showed bright. He glowered at the cowering children for a few seconds, then turned as he heard Nicole’s footsteps on the wooden pontoon. He smiled at her, then held out a hand to assist her on board.
    “Time to become the heavy father,” I said grimly, then climbed out of the car into the summer afternoon’s sunshine. Billy grinned at me from the inner pontoon where he was rerigging a Beneteau, but I did not grin back. Instead I strode down the pontoon, past the fuel pumps, and jumped down into Erebus ’s cockpit. “Nicole!”
    Nicole and the naked man had disappeared into the catamaran’s spacious main cabin. I ducked down the companionway into the familiar cruising-yacht reek of unwashed bedding and smelly oilskins. Once in the big saloon my immediate impression was of a tangle of sun-browned skin and greasy hair, then I unraveled the impressions to see that, besides Nicole and the bearded man, there were two other girls in the big cabin. Both girls were about Nicole’s age, and both girls were naked. One was completely nude, while the other, a startling redhead, wore nothing but a pale green sarong that was loosely knotted round her waist. That girl seemed to be helping Nicole undress. “What the hell is going on?” I demanded fiercely.
    “This is my father,” Nicole offered in laconic explanation. The two girls, both as blond as Nicole, snatched up clothes to cover their nakedness, while the man, whom I assumed was the beguiling Caspar, turned slowly to