Cupids (5 page)

“With no money, few provisions, and poor soil I didn't think we ever had much of a chance,” he says.

I don't answer. I know that if I try to put my own exasperated fury into words they will be stolen again. The deck tips violently and I am almost wrenched from the rail, but my wet fingers just manage to hold. Then I am tipped in the opposite direction and the force of it buckles my legs. My ribs are flung hard against the rail. I scuttle like a dancer to get my footing.

“It's very simple, Mr. Guy,” says Bartholomew, still perfectly relaxed. “The whole project was bound to fail. You brought females for the goats, females for the cock, females for the sheep, but no females for the men.” He points over the side, to the mountains of heaving, bulging foam whose peaks now reach almost to the deck. “And this is what happens to the imagination of men who are cooped up together too long.”

Another tail appears, its ribbed flesh glistening and wet, and wriggles above the foam before disappearing. The voices grow louder and sweeter too, like a merging of hitherto incompatible sounds — a high pealing bell the softest of whispers. The creature appears again, this time headfirst, golden hair, like Eliza's, crowning her head then separating into thick strands running down her long white neck and shoulders, her smooth back and — as the mermaid arcs farther from the water — along her middle region where skin turns green and puckers into scales.

I catch her gaze just as her head disappears into the foam, the perfect curve of her body following. Her smiling eyes, I noted, are aqua-blue like Eliza's; her red slightly open lips formed a smile. Together with her nakedness and with her joyful abandonment to the clinging foam, she has reversed the perpetual question mark that hangs teasingly over Eliza. The creaking floodgates are swinging open at last to a
yes
.

Though the swaying deck conspires with my own weight against me, I climb, swinging one leg over the rail, hauling myself over, feet touching down on the outer deck rim. I watch the bubbles bulge, catching rainbow swirls of colour, before they pop and disappear. I steady myself briefly, and then jump.

Immediately honeycomb sweetness rises to my embrace and my whole body tingles with gushing warmth. The mermaid Eliza whispers and wraps her wet hair around my skin and I feel as though I am lost in an eternity of pleasure. Bartholomew yells at me over the deck rail something about a dream.

I try to ignore him, but his voice persists. Though still gliding within the substance of pure pleasure there is something flat and motionless beneath me. I find that balance — or lack of balance — has gained in importance suddenly, and that the soles of my shoes are struggling to find a firm surface upon which to stand.

“Mr. Guy,” he calls again. I peer from just beneath the surface of the foam and see him indistinct, a candle in his hand. How could a candle burn so steadily in a tempest? I wonder. “Mr. Guy, are you ill?” He is closer now, walking on the foam perhaps?

The room is dark, only the faint bronze hue of candlelight warming the walls. The ship is gone, as is the foam, and the sea, and Eliza the mermaid. Bartholomew is standing halfway between the doorway and me. I am in bed. Raising my arm to my mouth, I wipe my lips dry with the cuff of my nightshirt.

“How long have you been there?” I ask.

“Ever since I heard you calling out. You must have been having a nightmare.”

“I was merely dreaming. I am quite well.” I haul myself up against the pillow. It has been some time since he has joined me under the sheets. A faint desire mingles with my loneliness, but I know it would unman me to yield to that surrogate passion to which all seamen cling. There is no excuse now. Eliza herself is within reach. “Where have you been for the last two days?”

He pauses, one of those distrustful silences, enough time for such a mind to weave any tale it pleases.

“Come now, answer quickly!”

“I had to meet someone after our dinner at the Egret house.”

“Who?”

“A young lady.”

“Who, I say?”

“Helen, the Egrets' maid.”

“Her again,” I say with a touch of relief I daren't examine.

He shrugs and a smile ghosts across his face.

“Just remember our bargain, Bartholomew. You are working for me. I won't save you from the gallows a second time.”

The smile intensifies. I have invoked a past that his mocking air likes to deny. But I won't let him deny it. He would be dead now if not for my mercy.

“I
am
working for you, Mr. Guy. That is why I had to meet her and why I had to follow up on certain paths she unwittingly opened to me.”

“Then why didn't you apprise me of your plans?”

The candle wavers and shadows duck over his young face.

“You would have slowed me down with your questions.”

“Well, here's a question, you young rogue: what use is the information of a maid when it is her master we are trying to influence?”

He turns and gestures at the stool at the foot of my bed. I nod. He draws it into a clear space in the middle of the room and sits, laying the candle and holder on the floor.

“With respect, Mr. Guy, only a man who has never been a servant would ask that question. A servant is key-holder of the household. A servant knows where the family's riches are hidden. And like the creaking floorboard, a servant knows all their secrets too.”

“How would this help us? We need support from Mr. Egret. We are neither robbers nor blackmailers.” My voice fills the room like a whiplash, as though Bartholomew and his secret — and there must
be
a secret for him to talk as he does — were twin lions I am at pains to keep at bay. But why should I be afraid of any secret? skips the question across my mind. Is it because I am afraid of the uses to which my ambition might put it?

Since Bartholomew disappeared, I have been roaming the streets of Bristol by day and the darker streets of imagination by night. Every twisting thought, every weaving plan was studded by noose, scaffold, and stocks. Nothing within the law, nothing within the narrow confines of morality, shed any sunlight upon my desires. Why, I wonder, would any man ally himself with someone as fearless and immoral as Bartholomew unless he intended to heed the advice of the damned?

Bartholomew pauses before answering. With the light below him, Bartholomew's face seems almost angelic, like the visage looming from a fresco inside an Italian cathedral. “I am searching for weaknesses and for alliances, that is all. Helen is already ours. I am certain she will act in any way I instruct her.”

Curiosity burning my ears, I fling off my bedclothes and stand. “I am seeking an honourable approach,” I tell him, pulling my breeches on under my nightshirt, “an honest and straightforward argument which may persuade Mr. Egret to venture more capital and to persuade his friends to do the same.”

I catch Bartholomew's eye and don't like what I see; it's an expression close to pity. “How is that tactic working so far?” he asks softly.

I snap up the belt from the trunk in the corner and fasten it around my waist, my face heating with indignation. What
does
he know? How can I get him to tell me without asking?

“Mr. Egret will risk no more than he has to,” he ventures. “He has told us as much already.”

“It is in the nature of business to keep a closed purse until proof is provided of a lucrative return. He must be persuaded.”

“Or compelled.”

I take a step nearer. Anger rather than curiosity might bore the information out of him. I want to learn his devious alternative, all right, but I mustn't lower myself so far as to seem interested.

We are almost exactly the same height, and the way he meets my eye has always that mild yet fearless quality. He never flinches, nor backs away, and I feel his confidence draining mine before he even begins to speak.

“You are quite right,” he says in clear, virtuous tones. “An advantage obtained through underhanded means must be disregarded and forgotten, even if it is the difference between certain failure and certain success.”

He bows, takes a step backward and turns to leave the room.

Only as he reaches the doorway does my tongue come unstuck. “Just one second,” comes the order in a strange high-pitched voice. He turns again, a look of amusement playing under the surface of his expression. “Just out of interest only, just so I may know more of your tactics, my boy, what is this secret that you believe yourself to have uncovered?”

“Oh, nothing really.” He shrugs, making to go once more.

“Come, lad, tell me.”

He returns to me like a cat, furtive and coiled.

“It is only this: you are making your pleas to the wrong man and your loves to the wrong woman.”

“Explain yourself!”

“Mrs. Egret,” he says softly, “the creature in the corner with the knitting; it's she who holds the purse strings you wish to loosen. The poor brother for whom you heard the old man mourning — it's his interests which have brought old Egret his gold. But he is merely the heir to his brother's widow.” He smiles at me now. “Opens possibilities, wouldn't you say?”

“How so?” I snap back, and I can feel that moral shell that neither Bartholomew nor I believe in becoming harder but more brittle. The beast of ambition within me growls, sensing prey in Mrs. Egret. “Assuming your information is correct, there's a fortress around the old woman. Who can get to her but through her brother-in-law?”

“Mr. Guy,” he says. “Are we not adventurers and explorers? Is it not our vocation to go into regions with hazards and dangers and re-emerge with our prize?”

“We are in Bristol now, boy,” I tell him. “Bristol requires neither astrolabe nor charts, but honest and straightforward business.”

“Humbly, Mr. Guy, I might mention I have observed that even here in Bristol, as in every other place on earth, business is seldom either straightforward or honest.”

For a moment I am lost for words. This time, it seems, it is really quite obvious he has a point.

“What would you have us do then, Bartholomew?”

“For two nights and a day I have been working on this.”

“Working?”

“Searching among the forgotten corners of the shire for a key that might open Mrs. Egret's memory and stir her to generosity.”

He's trying to wait me out, his face calm and impassive.

Impatience gets the better of me: “. . . And?”

“I have found him. He is waiting downstairs.”

CHAPTER SEVEN
Bartholomew

L
IKE THE MOST AWKWARD
of six-legged creatures, the three of us make our huddled way in silence through the lightly falling snow. Mr. Whip stops frequently to gather his breath. His meagre elbows need supporting by Guy on one side, and I on the other. By the time we reach the Egrets' door, I am afraid the powdery snow gathering around our feet will make the old man slip before a meeting is achieved.

Keeping one hand under Mr. Whip's elbow, I go to knock, but Guy motions me away, raises the iron knocker with a flourish and lets it fall once, twice, three times. He sends a white funnel of breath through the air and I can tell he is uneasy.

The door opens, quickly revealing Helen's face oddly flushed beneath her white bonnet. Her eyes briefly take in the group but rest on me. They darken in the centre in a way that is rather pleasing.

Guy gives a cough.

“Tell your mistress,
Mrs.
Egret, we have a visitor for her.”

The order is sharply delivered and Helen's lips pucker a little, her eyes narrowing. But she turns back to me and I nod. She retreats and motions us inside. With some jostling and a brief lifting motion, we ease Mr. Whip over the threshold.

“The master is in church with Miss Eliza, but his sister-in-law is here.”

It seems like more information than is needed. We can clearly see that Mrs. Egret is in the corner of the spacious room, in the very same seat which she occupied two nights before, knitting as she did then. But Helen's words are for me. We have Mrs. Egret to ourselves. It is the opportunity for which I was hoping.

The old man is the first to shuffle forward, his feet moving far more quickly than before. The four sovereigns of Guy's that I handed over to him jangle in his purse as he closes on her. Guy and I follow him, one on each side. Dimly, the old lady's head rises from her work. The needles tap against each other twice and then stop.

“Matilda!” exclaims Mr. Whip, the three syllables collapsing upon themselves like the constituent parts of a cartwheel rim breaking under a heavy load. His angular frame stoops toward her like a storm-ravaged bird spying its half-forgotten nest.

The old lady's filmy eyes try to focus. Her mouth opens slowly, and the knitting drops first from her lap to the chair, then from the chair to the floor.

“Philip?” she whispers.

Mr. Whip nods slowly. A tear now runs down his hollow cheek.

Mrs. Egret leans forward, her swollen fingers gripping the arms of the chair. “Philip?” she asks again.

“At your service, madam.”

His hands descend shakily into her lap. Hers rise from the chair rim to meet them.

“The years,” she merely says, “the years.”

“Yes, indeed.”

Helen slips a stool beneath the place where she imagines the old gentleman will sit, facing Mrs. Egret, though he shows no signs of wanting to rest now.

Backing away slowly, I reach across and tug at Guy's sleeve. He wrenches his arm away and glares at me, but still follows me grudgingly to the exit. As I take Helen to the side, Guy rather awkwardly addresses Mr. Whip. “We shall return in twenty minutes to convey you to the carriage that will take you home, sir.” Neither Mr. Whip nor Mrs. Egret paying him the slightest attention, he turns stiffly on his heel and leaves through the main door, motioning me to follow.