Deluded Your Sailors (19 page)

I dreamt far too much on Peter's Rue. Afterward I hardly dreamt at all. Not until we met
Kindly One
off Harbour Grace. I dream again now, vigilance and sweat, a long watch no other can relieve. You nod, Mr Kelly? Then you know I dream of monsters who look like ordinary men?

Early in September, Christina pronounced me fit enough to help unload the gigs. I'd been helping her with the house, and she told me secrets over the washing. Maybe a dozen families had left the larger island of St Mary's for Peter's Rue. The fishing seemed better, and the ground grew bigger vegetables. Her parents and others had rowed over with their children, some still in bellies. Then, one by one, they got sick and died. They blamed the first well. It gave sweet water, but they all got bloodshot eyes, stiff joints, sore guts. They dug three more wells, all reeking of brimstone. That saved the children, who shat out flux and blood and flesh but healed. Their parents languished, wore themselves out, working sick. A few of them got to see their grandchildren. The ones growing up married young, as soon as paps and blood announced themselves, and within a few years the rocks echoed with the racket of infants. Those youngsters suffered bad wind and hard bellies, screeching, drawing up their legs, beating their heads off their mothers' breasts and shoulders, Christina said. But only two of them died, and life on Peter's Rue got sweetly predictable.

A bad wreck came, bodies washing ashore for days, but also crates of beautiful fabrics, lace, candlesticks and wine, pretty things tumbling out of stories about royalty. Most of the youngsters played in the salvage. Kings and queens on the beach that day, lords and ladies, fevers by nightfall and black flux at dawn. All dead in a week. The islanders burnt the fabrics and the crates, buried the candlesticks and wine. No baby got born after that. Some got started, but they only bled out before five months. The Bad Salvage, they called it.

That September, I studied the shore all of a cause I wanted to determine the precise line where the salt water ate the sand so I might imagine a boundary for the nennorluk, should he have crossed the sea. I felt the first crooked winds. Rough weather coming. I slept badly – we all did – waking up a dozen times, dreading the thing that picked its way toward us. See, I knew that, and I knew it different and apart from how I knew mending and compass points.

Voices in the rain. Not children's voices, as we often heard, but strange men's, hoarse and cracked, calling to one another, calling to God. One voice pricked through that racket to complain of a broken ankle. Bracing their doors ajar, the islanders took lanterns and got to the shore, hoping to find and guide the wrecked. I stayed behind to renew the fire and help strip off and dry them, the Foote cottage being the first sanctuary and closest to the sea. Richard Noy eventually took master and mate, and the Carews sheltered two seamen. Hicks found the lame gentleman crawling the shoreline, groping at seaweed. He pleaded for his wig. ‘Fetch it,' he said, losing patience with his new underlings. ‘Tis blasted expensive.' I got him warm and immediately bound his ankle. This act impressed him. Lamplight flashing over his eyes showed an unusual light blue-green, like icebergs. The left eye wandered. He spoke like a king, but fear shook him nonetheless. He made some observations, and then he looked at me as though he saw the truth of me, right down to my bowels. And still that wandering eye strayed. Hicks invited the gentleman away, saying the Footes already housed one survivor, me, from an earlier wreck. Accepting Hicks's arm, the gentleman stood, sat down again, and stood once more in what I'd learn was a rare bit of indecision. Hicks finally persuaded the gentlemen to lean on him, and as they passed through the door, the gentleman asked my name. Hicks explained I could not talk. The gentleman looked back at me as Jem closed the door.

By dawn, the rain had thinned out but the winds kept kicking up. Just at the northeast point, where the rocks met sand, leaned a little sloop called
Honour
. Right sweet and complete, canvas neatly furled and quite thoroughly aground. Fallon Carew put his arm round the sad captain's shoulders and remarked he'd once got his gig caught in the very same spot, so he knew precisely how the captain felt. Someone muttered that it took only a hair's breadth of error to let in disaster, and someone else said that this is what comes of gentlemen and secret plans.
Honour
's master cuffed him, and he stopped up.

I mended torn shirts while the women cooked a feast. Wrecks usually forced corpses on the islanders; this fine occasion of not burying strange dead must be celebrated. The gentleman's ankle proving sprained and not broke made him easier to bear. High tide swamped
Honour
. Then, walking to Hicks's house, I spied something I've wished over and over that I'd missed. Tangled in seaweed, pushed and dragged, loose strands swirling out of the sodden grey mass: the gentleman's wig. It looked like a cloud trapped in water, shifting like that. I carried it with me, thinking the gentlemen very stupid to have gone looking for it in the storm.

He sat in Hicks's best chair and invited all to admire his ankle, now propped on a crate. He'd wound some linen round his stubbled head so he'd not catch cold. He noticed me immediately, though he affected otherwise. One of the women called out: ‘Look, Mr Reynolds, the dumb boy found the wig.'

‘Mercy unfettered,' the gentleman said. ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin which you have lost. And I thought he carried a drowned cat.' He studied me once more, and I didn't mind it, because his gaze made me feel worthy of something. Then he looked at the women, eyes lingering on their chests. I heard the rigging of his mind work.

The men arrived, rowdy and joyous, and we ate an extra meal, some very fine carrots and potatoes, fresh fish and small beer. Reynolds took Jem aside and asked him to thank his son for the wig, and Jem explained the Bad Salvage and how I did hardly be his boy. Reynolds asked Jem if he sheltered me because his own son had died. Jem said ‘No. We shelter him because he survived, and we know not what else to do with him.' Mr Reynolds did need be satisfied with that response, for I answered naught to his repeated questions of my origin.

Later in the evening, Reynolds beckoned to me and Jem, saying he must relieve himself, a tricky procedure when hobbling. Between the three of us, we mutely reasoned best angles. Outside, a little way's off, I could hear Christina speaking softly to someone about love and confusion, and a male voice answered. Jem begged leave of us, so Reynolds leaned all the harder on me, remarking I stood a better height for this purpose than Jem. ‘I am a coward who fears pain,' he said. ‘I put this off much too long.' He pissed mightily. Jem returned, angry and distracted, and Reynolds asked if he might borrow me. ‘Just until your Hicks can ferry me to the mainland.' Jem granted me to Reynolds as long as he needed me. He warned Reynolds that he could not guess how much I understood. Reynolds grasped my jaw then, his hand very strong, and forced me to meet his gaze. ‘Oh, he understands. Quite well.'

Reynolds' favourite pastime over the next few days was trying to make the dumb boy speak. He seemed to think of naught else but prying loose my voice, and I thought of naught else but screwing it in tight. Some days I felt sure Christina would burst out and scream the truth of me at Jem, all of a cause she needed a weapon in the battles between them. But she kept my secret, tucked it away with her other ones. So, me and Reynolds, mute boy and gentleman, went out a-walking the shore together like a pair in some song – oh dum-dilly-dum-dum – and as he leaned on my shoulder, bracing himself against the wind, his makeshift turban unwound. Linen trailing off him, he spoke as though the turban's failure was my fault. ‘What manner of creature are you? I beg you, boy, before I take it in my head to bash out your brains with a heavy rock, tell me of the knife and lanyard you finger, and tell me your name, for I'll not be indebted to the anonymous.'

I said naught to that, my firm habit by now. Then Reynolds stopped, bent over with some difficulty, and picked up a likely rock. He slipped and cried out against the pain in his ankle, going right pale, and bowing his head to hide his tears. Stubble matted his scalp, stubble with bits of silver in it, and no hair grew at all near his temples. His wig lay drying in the sun outside Hicks's house, weighted down with rocks like a chart, but it grew stiff and stank worse each day. Hicks had strenuously offered to bury it. I wondered if he'd place it in the burying ground or throw it down the poison well.

‘This,' said Reynolds, making sure I got a good look at it, ‘will do it. Do not bother to run. Where on this small island might a lost soul run?'

‘Lost soul' confused me.

Then Reynolds dropped the rock, and the noise of it rang in my teeth. ‘I did ask Mrs Foote if you've ever talked in your sleep.'

I waited.

He scowled. ‘But she said she'd not heard a sound. A pretty mystery, when I know you are no foreigner and no born mute. Come, sit with me.'

Reynolds interrogated me quickly and furiously and showed no surprise when I finally answered. I felt then as I do now, with you, Lieutenant: burdened. My voice startled me, all dusty and harsh, as I told him of
Bonaventure Walters
and how many men sailed her. Details spilt out me, cargoes, ports of call, the scent of Coltman's brass spyglass. Then Reynolds asked which man on board I'd called ‘Father.'

‘None,' I said, limply, hoping he'd not ask how I got on board.

He teased some useless facts out of me, such as what we ate noon Wednesdays, in what direction lay Harbour Grace, the colour of the first mate's eyes. That question hurt, and I described Rattlebags as if the right words would drag him back to life. Then Reynolds set me to repeat a little speech, which I mostly got on a few hearings:

A ward, and still in bonds,

one day I stole abroad;

it was high spring,

and all the way primrose and hung with shade;

yet it was frost within,

and surly wind blasted my infant buds,

and sin like clouds eclipsed my mind.

Reynolds quickly demanded where I'd heard Vaughn before, and I asked, ‘Who is Vaughn?'

He praised me then, called me intelligent. I asked if that meant the same as useful, all of a cause that I liked being so. ‘It can be,' he said, ‘with education and good handling.' Then he asked if Captain Walters has been a good man. Twice more he asked me, voice hard, and I did need apologize for not being intelligent enough with words to answer him. Finally I got out ‘We were so afraid at the end, though none said so. Except Rattlebags. And the captain mocked him for it. The captain, blind as worms, made a mistake giving the course, and so we wrecked.'

We sat another few moments, and my arse got cold on the rocks. Reynolds turned his gaze from the water back to me. ‘And what of all the details you've not told me?'

I expect he'd guessed how I ended up on board a merchantman, ships not normally known for employing boys, though tis not unheard of. The navy in wartime be different, your ships packed with midshipmen and little powder monkeys. How do ye look after all those boys?

Shame gnawed me, all of a cause of this man with the strange eyes, grand captain of the human heart despite lacking one of his own. He saw each of my darknesses writ out on my forehead. I needed a drink, small beer or even salt water, just to swallow that shame back down into my belly. Surely this Reynolds smelled the usage off me, figured me like many linkboys a tool of corruption. Ruining a man's soul, or at least giving him a rash on his prick.

So I thought on the wreck and told Reynolds of my deal with God. Coltman tried to teach me plaindealing, and the good half of that makes your lies plausible. Except I hardly lied. The night
Bon
Wally
holed and water flooded us, I made tallies and exchanges against my past bad usage and begged God to damn me as He pleased, only take Coltman and drown him. To Reynolds, I said ‘I hated a man on board, and I begged God to strike him from my life. The only man on board who'd asked me my true name died after saving the man I hated, and the hated man lived. I promised God I'd be right thankful and quiet and meek ever after if He'd take the man I hated.' I pointed to where pieces of
Bon Wally
still lay. ‘See how God did it.'

Reynolds seemed to understand. He asked my age, but we both had to guess at it. Then he praised me again for being intelligent and possessing capacities I knew naught of. ‘These qualities need guidance to make them useful,' he said. ‘Should you like to come with me?'

No dull voyage. I leapt up like a fawning dog. ‘Please sir, I'd work hard,' I told him.

He smiled back at me, not entirely happy but at least pleased. ‘So many teeth,' he said. ‘Now, we need a story.' I offered to tell him of the sailor man and the shells and the boatswain, but he held up his hand, demanding silence. He said ‘Injured in the wreck, flesh bruised and gone mortified, necessitating removal – no, I can do better than that. I need a good reason why you squat to piss.'

I ran. Ducked past his grasp and lit out. Forgetting his ankle, Reynolds made to stand, bore full weight and fell. He greeted the rocks with his hands and knees. I stood out of reach. He ordered me back to his side, and I refused. He said he should strike me, and I thought again to run, but where, Peter's Rue being sandbars crammed against a rock and some soil. I could criss-cross the land, but, though it might take all night, Reynolds would find me. Turban in hand, picking his way on a bad ankle, he would limp and fall, curse and rise, never losing sight, and he would catch me. Pick his way over the rocks, like Appolyon in that long story Pilgrim's never finished telling me.

Dread being worse than punishment, I let him catch me. He grabbed my shoulder hard, harder than Walters ever did. ‘I demand obedience,' he said. ‘I will care for you, but at the simple cost of obedience. Else I shall cut you loose to starve in the cold, and such a waste that would be.' He palmed me between the legs then, his hand very warm. ‘Disguise and memory, boy.' He gave that word only subtle weight. ‘I should strike you so hard your ears would ring for days, but I shall not. Because we each need the other. You may trust me, for I promise you no bad usage. I've got work that might only be done by a young one with tough legs, sharp eyes and an excellent memory. More than all else, I need your memory and your disguise. Consider your deal with God, and then get to your knees, for you are saved. So long as you work for me, you shall suffer no want beyond that necessary to the task, and you'll be warm and fed and a good sight safer than your sisters. Decide and say, will you come with me? Will you plaindeal and obey?'