Collector of Lost Things (36 page)

She stiffened in her posture. ‘I wish those men would stop winding the bilge pump and let the ship sink!’ she said, vexed. ‘What shall we do?’

‘We must bring the bird to England.’

‘Oh no! That is impossible!’

‘Speak quietly.’

‘But England is part of the disease that has killed these birds.’

‘I am aware of that.’

She looked cornered. ‘Has French told you to say such a thing?’

‘No. No—of course not. I haven’t spoken to him about this.’

‘You sound like him,’ she replied, disappointed. ‘Forgive me. What I mean to say is—there is nothing for this bird in England. Nothing but hunters and cruelty—you know that in your heart, don’t you? It would either be killed and stuffed, or it would be paraded around like a circus animal.’

‘But in England we
might
be able to find a safe haven for it.’

She looked steadily at me. I wasn’t even convincing myself.

‘Then we shall have to take a greater risk,’ I conceded. ‘We have no choice. We must tell the captain.’

She flinched, quite openly, as if she had been stung. I held her hand to console her.

‘We tell the captain,’ I continued, ‘and we appeal to his greater nature. He is the only person who would be able to find a suitable place for the bird and its chick. He has his haul and fortune—what difference would it make to him?’

‘But you tried to appeal to the captain’s good nature before,’ she said. ‘Sykes is an open book. He is out to make a profit.’

I agreed, but it was an impossible situation. She had to understand that. ‘Yes, dear Clara. I tried with Sykes. But it might be different if we
both
tried.’

The idea made her curious: ‘Are men so easily unlocked?’

I shrugged, at last feeling I had made some ground in the conversation. She was willing to grasp at straws, as I was. ‘I had a game of draughts with him once—the black pieces were flattened bullets, and the white ones were discs of seal bones. When we played, I had the feeling that all he cared about was the playing of games. He likes to joust and kid. Perhaps there is nothing more to the man.’

‘Do you really believe that?’

‘I do not know. But there is another thing. He is ill. You have seen him coughing into his handkerchief until he is red in the face. He
knows
he is ill. I witnessed a moment at the whaling station when he was unguarded, and I am beginning to think he might act more favourably towards us as a consequence.’

‘But why?’

It was difficult to answer, other than admit it was purely a guess. ‘Surely, if you feel your time might be running out, you might have empathy for the predicament of this animal?’

‘You think a dying man suddenly becomes interested in the last of a species?’

I laughed. ‘Something like that.’

She smiled, happily. ‘What I love in you is that you are an idealist.’

‘I wasn’t sure I was one, until this voyage.’

‘I think that you should hold me.’

‘Here?’

‘Of course. And you wish to save things,’ she whispered.

‘Yes. That is true.’

I put my arms around her. She was thin and fragile; the hard lines of her shoulder bones felt as curved and delicate as walking canes.

‘Now,’ she continued, ‘squeeze me. Until my breath has gone.’

Alarmed, I broke free of her, but she clung to my arms with an insistent grip. ‘Please,’ she urged.

‘But why?’ I tried. She brought my arms around her waist and guided them across her back, waiting for me to oblige her.

I pulled my arms tight, interlocking them and gradually pressing her within my hold. I imagined all there was to her, her bones and flesh, her densities and the spaces of her body that were filled with air. I imagined them contracting, disappearing.

Clara gasped in pain; quickly, I let her go, shocked by a pressure I hadn’t known I was exerting. She looked back at me, flushed and unembarrassed, with a triumphant smile that faded as quickly as it had formed.

‘Tell me, who won at draughts?’ she asked, unnaturally composed.

I stared back, bewildered. She raised her eyebrows.

‘Oh, he did,’ I said, ‘quite easily.’

‘Then he’s always going to win, I suspect.’

‘Did I hurt you?’

‘My cousin told me of your conversation with him,’ she said. ‘Did he tell you that he has been tying himself to his bunk, in the attempt to free his spirit?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me, Eliot—do you think him mad?’

How to answer? I wasn’t sure. The journey had certainly affected him. ‘I’m not convinced that I would recognise madness,’ I replied.

‘But you think he is an addict?’

‘An addict?’

‘Of opiates.’ She looked at me without judgement. ‘I can see you do.’

I told her what Bletchley had said, how he had insisted this voyage had become a migration of souls, but that it was a damned migration that had offended a natural balance. ‘I must admit I didn’t quite follow him. Has he said this to you? He is planning to correct the imbalance.’

‘I am looking after him,’ she said, formally.

‘By tying him to a bunk?’

‘If that is what he needs, I think I shouldn’t refuse him,’ she answered. ‘He believes a demon wants to find mischief with him.’

Bletchley performed his correction one night, as we approached Cape Farewell and our last sight of Greenland, from the stern rail. Apparently the three men on watch—curious as to why he was cloaked and dragging a large package—had attempted to stop him, but he had shrugged them off with great strength. Thinking he might be about to leap into the sea, they had been relieved when all he had done was to throw the tightly wrapped bundle away from the ship. It had caught briefly in the moonlight and they had heard the splash. It must have been weighted down, for it quickly sank.

The men had stood away from him, naturally wary of a man they had never understood.

Apparently he had spoken in a clear, calm voice: ‘One of you devils should inform the captain that I have saved the ship. Please tell him I have thrown his cargo of great auk skins into the ocean.’

W
ITHIN MINUTES OF BLETCHLEY
being brought down from deck, I had been summoned to the saloon. Pacing with frustration, Sykes was already mid-rant, flushed pink as a lobster and burning with frustration. He was overdressed in his sea coat, which appeared to have been hurriedly buttoned on top of his night attire, and his constant agitation made the saloon feel crowded. French and Talbot stood awkwardly on opposite sides of the room, as if between them they were pushing the captain from one to the other, as in some diabolical maritime game. Sitting stoically on a wooden chair, Bletchley was more serene than he had appeared for several weeks. But he was obviously guilty of something, and although he sat with his eyes half closed, placid and untroubled, I felt there was a coiled tension hinged within his body, making him at any moment liable to spring up.

‘I should have you in irons!’ Sykes shouted, marching back and forth in front of his passenger in the manner of a bullying schoolmaster. ‘And to think that my officers—my own officers—warned me of your increasingly errant behaviour. All your peculiar night-time vigils by that stove and the like. But would I listen to them? I did not! I believed you to be an eccentric, but this is not the case is it, man? Is it? You are little more than a criminal—you have meddled with the business of the ship and as a consequence you have wilfully ruined our financial returns.’

Bletchley accepted his role without complaint, allowing the rant to fall on him with phlegmatic patience. He showed no sign that he was even listening to the captain’s words, let alone preparing to defend himself.

‘You are maddening!’ Sykes said, in disgust.

Emerging from her cabin, Clara made a swift assessment of the judicial nature of the gathering.

‘Captain Sykes!’ she said. ‘I have been hearing your accusations from within my cabin. It is intolerable. How dare you address a gentleman in this tone? What has happened to your manners? What, sir, has happened?’ She deliberately stood directly in Sykes’ path, preventing him from completing one of his crossings of the room. He looked startled by the obstacle put in his way, and I realised that, despite his parade of authority, despite this being his ship, a woman’s presence instantly quelled him.

He regarded her gravely, picking his words. ‘Perhaps your relative will explain,’ he said, dismissively.

‘Well, Edward?’ Clara asked.

But Bletchley made no motion to speak. He closed his eyes, his silence not one of guilt, but of the morally wronged. He would take no part in this.

‘He is determined not to speak,’ the captain stated.

‘What have you done to him?’ Clara said, indignantly.

Sykes deferred to his first mate: ‘Mr French, if you please.’

French looked up, a little surprised. Quickly clearing his throat, he adopted a serious demeanour sufficient to outline the crime. ‘He has thrown the skins of the great auks into the ocean.’

No one spoke. The news silenced the room, the way irreversible fact always does. I have often tried to recall the moment of this announcement, how Clara jolted with surprise, whereas Sykes stared dark-eyed at the floorboards. And French, a quickening tension in his expression, avoiding everyone’s eye. I had imagined a blank depth of water that pressed around me, and had the urge to reach within it, into its featureless and lightless fathoms, chasing something that could not be found.

I knew Bletchley’s warped logic. This was the corrective gesture he had promised. Of course it was. How could I not have seen?

Clara was the first to speak: ‘Is it true, Edward?’

Bletchley snapped open his eyes, as if waking from a pleasant daydream. ‘Oh, yes, quite true,’ he answered, in a blissfully light manner.

‘But are they
lost
?’ she asked.

Captain Sykes sighed, looking deflated. ‘He weighted the bundle, madam. It has sunk to the ocean bed.’

The finality of the act subdued the room. The last breeding colony, needlessly slaughtered, now entirely vanished. And alongside that, a further fact: history would have no record of this journey. The captain’s logbook would be proficiently filled with hourly readings and separate columns for knots, fathoms, course, wind and leeway. Navigation and speed would be calculated and plotted with the utmost accuracy. But there would be no mention of the birds that were found and lost. No one would ever know there had once been a chance to save this species, but that chance had not been taken, because of greed, because of man’s weakness. All of us, present, would be too ashamed of the story to tell it.

Whether or not Bletchley became, at that moment, aware of what he had done, he was suddenly keen to elaborate.

‘I used a length of chain,’ he explained, demonstrating with his hands how he had wrapped the package. He looked happy in the precise nature of the task: ‘In order for it to sink.’

‘But why, man?’ Talbot asked, fed up beyond bearing with a man he’d never understood.

Bletchley regarded Talbot with curiosity, his mouth half opened ready to shed light. But Talbot’s sheer presence, his broad bearded jaw and straightforward expression, the countenance of a man requiring blunt solutions to practical problems, seemed only to amuse Bletchley rather than require an answer.

‘We might consider the ocean bed a more fitting grave for these birds than the public spectacle of them being mounted within display cases, where our guilt might be looked upon for hundreds of years to come.’

‘
Avast!
I have had my fill of your prattle!’ Sykes roared, his strength regained. ‘You talk of these birds as if they have
souls
. They are
cargo
, and you have destroyed them. Perhaps Mr Saxby here will explain just how valuable each of those birds might have been.’

I crossed my arms, reluctant to take part. ‘I do not wish to comment,’ I said.

‘But you shall, Saxby, because I am your captain and I have asked you.’

I felt a restless energy in the room, keen to find a new victim. ‘All I have to say is that the collection of those birds was a doomed and cynical venture from the start.’

He dismissed me with an impatient wave of his hand. ‘The cost, Mr Saxby?’

‘The cost in pounds is probably several times the value of the rest of your cargo, if that is what you require from me.’ Before he could answer, I made it clear I had more to say. ‘But the cost to the animal kingdom was immeasurable, and it was not Edward, but you, who committed that crime.’

‘Enough!’ he spat back. ‘I will not be judged on board my own ship!’

The captain’s anger was fierce, but it bounced off me. I felt emboldened by the realisation that for once I was not afraid of him. ‘It is not being judged on board this ship that should concern you. It is the rest of the world that shall judge you, sir. You may be captain on this plank of wood, but as soon as this vessel docks in Liverpool you will be seen merely as a profiteer. A man who recklessly murdered a species for the sake of a few pounds. That is your crime and it is for that you will be judged.’

Sykes turned on me, squaring up like a street brawler, even though I was a good few inches taller than him. ‘You are young, and foolish,’ he snarled. ‘I am in the business of survival, Mr Saxby, of making a living and a profit. I am doing what every Englishman was born to do, and I am proud of it. My type is strong and it is in the majority. You, on the other hand, are in the business of trying to save the things that are already lost. For that, you are foolish. And you are mistaken, too, in considering that the world of this ship is inconsequential.’ He held out his fist and opened it, revealing a wide, fleshy palm. ‘Your life and all the lives on board this ship are in my hand, right now. We are surrounded by a cruel ocean and dangerous coasts. This ship, sir,
is
the world.’

He turned away from me, contemptuous and in command. Beyond him I noticed French regarding me curiously, as if I was a problem he could not solve. As usual, he showed no sign of standing up in my defence. Instead, it was Clara who came to my aid.

‘The birds are gone, captain,’ she said, her voice impeccably reasonable. ‘There is little point in venting your frustration now.’