Inferno

Chapter 12

Maid bobbed to her anchor off the cave, and Kydd strained to see what he could of the wreck. It was on a small pebble beach within a terrifying twist of rock and had the sombre dignity of centuries about it.

He surveyed the area carefully, squinting as the pain behind his eyes became intrusive – generosity in the matter of libation at his offer of counsel had not been stinted. The incline was certainly enough over time to account for the wreck washed clean, but had the contents been scattered on the seabed below?

The first thing was to make soundings.

They had brought a coracle with them and Stirk set out in it. Under Kydd’s direction he paddled it on a straight course and lowered a lead-line at regular intervals.

Kydd soon had a picture: the beach incline led into the sea and quickly levelled to a flattish firm silt undersea plain, at this state of tide, of the order of three fathoms deep over a respectable area. There must have been high-water springs when the ship struck for it would never have cleared it otherwise. There was every possibility that whatever had been brought down had settled and gone no further.

On its own, however, this was not enough. The area was within two buttresses of rock, which would have protected it from the worst of the seas, but the most insidious foe would have been tide scour, currents regularly swirling back and forth about the craggy points as the water ebbed and flowed. It would not have been long before loose objects had tumbled into deeper water.

Kydd took in the situation carefully. Tides were always local and could take any number of courses, even down to individual outcrops of rock. Here, with the tide on the make, he could see from the pattern of ripples that, while it passed offshore, the little bay itself was not disturbed.

Almost certainly the relics were strewn within twenty or thirty yards of the end of the wreck – in but three fathoms of water.