The low slack tide at the mouth of the Black Shingle was dead, flat, and gray as molten pewter.
Tomas stood in the center of the salvage scow The Mud-Lark, his cart driver boots braced against the rough pine deck planking. Around him, the estuary lay wrapped in a cold, motionless silence. It was broken only by the rhythmic, clockwork wheeze-chug-wheeze of the twin-metal tube diving pump mounted on the forward deck. Two stout river wagon drivers worked the four-foot iron crank handles with steady, disciplined revolutions, their breath puffing in timed together white plumes into the freezing air.
Beside the pump, Nessa Vale knelt with her sounding transit. That kept her eyes fixed on the three underwater posture buoys she had anchored over the wreck of The Kingfisher.
“The stern sits in ten feet of water,” Nessa reported. Her voice carried the crisp, unemotional care of an engineer reading a balance scale. “The bow is buried four feet into the silt spit. The cabin roof is eighteen inches beneath the surface. But the companionway hatch is choked with river silt and dead eelgrass.”
In the waist of the scow, diver Brant was being dressed for the descent.
He stood six feet tall and broad as an ox, wearing a heavy suit of double-layered vulcanized canvas and oiled leather, lead-weighted boots that weighed sixteen pounds apiece. A heavy brass breastplate strapped over his shoulders with thick cowhide harness. Around his waist was buckled a twenty-pound belt of cast-lead weights.
Sile Rook and Captain Miller were hoisting the thirty-pound copper diving helmet over Brant’s head. The helmet was an antique ball-shaped pot of spun copper, fitted with three circular glass viewports protected by heavy brass grilles. From the back of the helmet projected the brass air-inlet elbow, connected to thirty deep-water lengths of canvas-wrapped rubber hose that trailed back to the deck pump.
“Check the non-return valve,” Brant’s voice echoed hollowly from inside the copper dome.
The canvas diving dress smelled strongly of sulfur, fish oil, and hardened rubber.
It was a royal salvage rig, made thirty years ago by the naval yards at Port-Reach. The canvas was three layers thick, heavy at the crotch and armpits with oiled leather gussets to prevent high-pressure pinch under ten feet of water-pressure head. Every seam was double-stitched with waxed linen thread and sealed with three coats of boiled gutta-percha resin.
Tomas helped Brant buckle the heavy lead collar weights over his canvas shoulders. Each weight was a curved metal bar of cast lead weighing ten pounds, shaped to fit the contour of the collarbone, secured with thick brass studs and leather lanyards.
“A diver doesn’t swim down there, Tomas,” Brant explained, his breath already sounding thick and metal through his open collar. “You don’t float. You’re a walking anchor. You walk across the riverbed with twenty pounds of lead under each sole. The mud is like cold grease. If you take your foot off the timber and step into the soft silt, you go down to your knees before you know you’ve missed the beam.”
He held up his right hand, wrapped in a heavy glove of stiff, greased cowhide. “You see nothing. The water is yellow-brown for the first three feet, then black as a coal cellar. You work by the feel of the iron under your nails. If an eel touches your sleeve or an oak splinter rips the rubber, you stay calm and signal the line. If you panic and thrash, you foul your air hose around a deck bolt and drown thirty seconds later.”
Tomas leaned forward, his right hand testing the spring-loaded bronze flap inside the air fitting. The valve clicked cleanly under his thumb, sealing with an airtight hiss against its leather seat. “Valve is tight, Brant. Air pressure is three sea-weights at twenty strokes a minute.”
“Keep the pump turning, boys,” Brant rumbled through the front port. “If the crank stops, I have forty seconds before the foul air knocks me out. If I give three sharp tugs on the lifeline, haul me up by the harness, and don’t worry about the ladder.”
Tomas nodded, his left arm tight in its calfskin brace. “We’ll be on the line, Brant. Find the purser’s chest in the master cabin. It’s bolted to the bottom spine-beam on the port side, behind the companionway inner wall.”
“I know where the silver sits, porter,” Brant grunted.
Miller screwed the circular brass faceplate into the front of the helmet with a heavy iron wrench. He tightened the threads until the leather seal ring squeezed out at the margin. Brant was cut off from the world of air. His breath hissed through the exhaust valve with a rhythmic, bubbling rattle.
Sile Rook and Tomas took their positions at the diving ladder hung over the starboard gunwale.
Brant swung his lead-shod boots over the rail with slow, heavy, slow movements. He stepped down into the freezing gray water of the delta reach. His canvas suit ballooned slightly as the air pressure filled the shoulders, and then, with a heavy, boiling surge of bubbles, the copper helmet vanished beneath the surface.
Tomas held the braided manila lifeline in his hands, feeling the shakes through the rope.
Every movement of the diver was sent up the line: the slow, dragging scrape of lead boots across the sunken oak deck planking. The sudden jerk when Brant ducked beneath an underwater deck beam. The rhythmic thump-thump of his iron crowbar probing into the silt-choked cabin door.
Tomas checked the air hose once more. He watched the rhythmic pulsations of the canvas sheath as the twin cylinders forced twenty-five pounds of clean air down into the dark water.
A diver’s lifeline was more than hemp. It was a sense channel between the living world of the deck and the dead, weightless world of the riverbed. He kept his fingers resting lightly on the braided fibers, interpreting every shudder. Brant reached the companionway. Then, the line shook with a sharp, rapid rattle as the diver’s brass helmet scraped against the underwater oak top door beam. Brant stepped onto the cabin floor. Then, the line settled into a long, slow sway as his lead boots displaced the piled up silt.
“He’s in the cabin,” Tomas told Nessa. “The shakes are dampened. He’s working through soft mud.”
Nessa nodded, her sound horn pressed to the gunwale timber. She felt the sound signal through the hull. “I hear his crowbar. He’s striking iron. Three feet above the floorboards.”
Five minutes passed. The only sound on the scow was the relentless wheeze-chug-wheeze of the air pump and the steady lap of tidal water against the clinker planking.
On the deck of The Mud-Lark, Nessa Vale stood over the air pump, her stopwatch in her hand. She watched the stroke rate of the two wagon drivers on the crank handles.
“Maintain twenty-two turns a minute,” Nessa instructed crisply. “The gauge on the storage tank metal tube must show twenty-five pounds of pressure. If the pressure drops below twenty pounds, the water will force its way past Brant’s exhaust valve and fill the helmet.”
Apprentice Olla was kneeling beside the air hose. He held the canvas-wrapped line in her lap. That let it run through a clean rag soaked in fresh animal fat to keep the rubber supple and detect any tiny air leaks by the bubbling of the fat.
“No bubbles on line one, Carrier Reed,” Olla reported, her face set in fierce concentration. “Line tension is steady.”
Apprentice Olla stood by the pump. He held a sand-glass, her young face pale as she watched the sand trickle through the glass neck. “Six minutes down, Carrier Reed.”
Suddenly, the lifeline went wildly slack.
Tomas stepped back, his boots gripping the deck. Before he could call out, the line snapped taut with a violent, shaking shudder that nearly tore the hemp from his grip.
One tug. Two tugs.
Then three sharp, desperate jerks on the rope.
“Haul!” Tomas roared. “Sile, take the winch! Miller, take the line!”
Sile Rook threw his massive shoulders onto the iron winch crank, the bronze ratchet pawls clicking rapidly—clack-clack. Tomas and Miller hauled hand-over-hand on the manila line, their muscles straining against the huge dead weight of two hundred and fifty pounds of diver and water pushback.
Through the boiling foam twenty feet out, the copper helmet broke the surface.
Brant surfaced face-down, his heavy suit thrashing awkwardly in the chop. Sile reached down with his hooked pruning blade. It caught the diver’s harness ring with the blunt iron beak. It hauled Brant’s broad shoulders up against the wooden ladder.
Miller hastily unthreaded the front faceplate with his wrench. That let out a burst of hot, foul, tightly packed air that smelled of rubber, sweat, and stale swamp gas.
Brant gasped in the raw sea air, coughing wildly, spitting black silt onto the deck.
“The chest... Is there,” Brant wheezed, his eyes bloodshot through the copper port. “I cleared... The silt off the lid with the crowbar. Heavy heart-oak... Banded in cold-rolled iron. It has the sovereign transit seal on the lock.”
“Did you hook the crane cable?” Tomas demanded, holding the diver upright against the ladder.
“Hook is set,” Brant gasped, pointing a heavy lead-gloved finger down into the dark water. “Driven through... The central iron carrying ring. But the chest... The chest is half-buried in fifteen inches of packed delta clay. It will take... Six hundred pounds of upright lift to break the mud suction.”
Tomas looked at the salvage crane. A simple pine derrick mounted over the scow’s stern, rigged with a double-purchase tackle of three-inch hemp rope.
“Six hundred pounds,” Tomas said, rolling up his sleeves and tightening the calfskin brace on his left forearm. “Then we don’t use the winch. We use the class.”