The Crimson Banner

Here is the sixth of 25 stained glass window designs on the Palace Pier which AI and I are using as inspiration for some of these BrightonBeach365 daily posts - see Stained glass window 1 for background. This image shows a ship, a galleon perhaps, with large white sails, a bright yellow sail at the stern, and a deep red hull. The sea is rendered in shades of turquoise, teal, and white, representing waves. The sky features soft pastel clouds in pink, purple, and blue, with a crimson pennant flying at the top of the tallest mast. The overall style is vibrant and stylised, with bold black outlines separating the coloured glass segments.

A limerick starter

A vessel once sailed through the pane,

Though how it got in, none explain.

It’s stuck there in hues,

Of purples and blues,

Forever becalmed in a frame.

The Crimson Banner (in the style of Robert Louis Stevenson)

The wind had a salt tang to it that morning, and the gulls wheeled in lazy circles over Brighton Beach. I had gone down early, before the town was fully awake, drawn by a dream that had clung to my waking mind like seaweed on a boot. In the dream, I had seen a ship - not of this age, but one from tales of treasure and peril - its sails full-bellied and a crimson banner flying high.

To my astonishment, that very vision met me on the seafront, not in the sea but in glass. Set into the round window of a crumbling bathhouse on the Esplanade was a stained-glass panel of a proud galleon with billowed sails, riding a crest of jade-green waves, the red pennant aloft as in my dream. The window caught the morning sun like a gem, and I stood spellbound.

‘You’ve seen her too,’ came a voice, old as rope and salt.

I turned. A man sat hunched on a nearby bench, his beard tangled like kelp and his eyes sharp beneath bushy brows.

‘I - I don’t know what you mean,’ I said, though my heart beat strangely.

‘She was called The Mirabel,’ he said, nodding toward the window. ‘Built when pirates still thumbed their noses at the navy. She set sail from this very coast with treasure enough to buy all Brighton. Never returned.’

‘What happened?’ I asked, stepping closer.

‘Some say storm, some say mutiny. I say she still sails - beneath the waves, mind you. Waiting for the one who remembers.’

The man rose, reaching into his coat. He drew out something wrapped in oilskin - a compass, brassy and old, its needle spinning wild until it settled true north.

‘I’ve watched that window forty years. Every spring tide, I look for the sign. And now you dream of her, lad. The sea remembers.’

I took the compass. It felt alive in my hand, pulsing with the mystery of tides and stars. I didn’t protest when he pressed it into my palm. The man tipped his cap and walked away, limping up the stony beach and vanishing into the mist that had begun to gather.

I turned back to the glass ship. The sun had risen fully now, and in its blaze, the red banner in the window glowed like fire.

That evening, drawn by the whisper of gulls and something deeper, I followed the compass along the beach. At the edge of the water, as the tide pulled back with a sigh, something gleamed beneath the surf - a coil of rope, the curve of a mast, the barest suggestion of a deck.

And the banner. Red, like a blood memory, fluttered once - and vanished.

Some say Brighton’s just a place of deckchairs and chips, but I say look deeper. The sea holds its secrets. And sometimes, just sometimes, it offers them back.