Deluded Your Sailors (22 page)

In 1719, some years after my father's death and my departure from Cambridge in disgrace, I put to sea. My vessel:
Bonny Jane
, a brigantine, new-built and fresh out of Bristol, this time with John Cannard, second son, as supercargo and majority owner. Runciman found new co-owners and gave me a destination: Harbour Grace.

This ledger book and ink I did lately buy in Harbour Grace. To be sure I have much to do, cataloguing stores and provisions, credits and debits. My one companion in such matters has been dead these seventeen years: Robert Lacey, late and so-called fishing admiral of Port au Mal – no companion but an adversary, a tyrant of strange order. But at least, conversations scarce enough, I could speak with him.

A certain quality here, perhaps something in the rock, skews a compass. An experienced master, armed with local knowledge, good weather and God's grace, could manage the narrows; the skipper of Lacey's ketch put in safely twice each year. Should a larger vessel, as chanced with my
Bonny Jane
, lose her course and, in ignorance, desperation and dusk make for the narrows of Port au Mal, her compass will go dumb, deviate, and babble like an idiot, jerking east sou'-east on heading northwest, tip west, east again, perhaps loll from west to south, as did ours for seven consecutive minutes; I did count those seconds, dumb myself. Eventually the hapless officers will try needle and cork and thereby waste more time before venturing on deck, without the wit for words. Wind drove us through the narrows larboard first, and only as we strained in that passage did we hear the waves smashing against the fire rocks. The men screamed it. ‘Rocks! God!'

That first impact gutted
Bonny Jane
. Loosed cargo shot up to the surface. A tossed hogshead hit Captain Wren in the chest and crashed him over the starboard bow. Rats and foodstuffs tumbled about the deck with us, the rats' squeals blending with ours and just as blunted by the wind. Curtains of rain and sleet would briefly part, allowing us to glimpse the fire rocks. All my inheritance invested in
Bonny Jane
. I imagined the rewards of government service would pay it back; tokens of that government service were locked in my strongbox: papers. A courier, and expected shortly in Harbour Grace, I was to deliver these papers to a particular set of men who would engage me in matters theological, remarking, when I referred to
Matthew
chapter 26 verse 73, do you not, sir, mean
Matthew
chapter 27 verse 6? I'd tucked that heavy strongbox beneath my right arm and slung the key to it around my neck. I stumbled back on deck; fire rocks surrounded us now. Several of the men turned to me, mouths identical holes, and one of them pointed. I did not feel the lurch that threw me overboard. I knew the thrill of descent, the taste of salt water, and, detached suddenly, I asked ‘So then, Lord, shall I freeze, or shall I drown?'

My mind flitted like a moth in front of a light. My last sight, a wave, persistently returned as Behemoth cracking open his jaws and then diving to engulf my delicate brigantine. Darkness, ignorance and incomprehensible voices. Perhaps I would die and go to Wales. My mother's family had land in Wales. When I awoke from that, no dark Welsh beauty graced my sight, only a fair ordinary woman with a promise of jowls and three white hairs poking out of her chin. She helped me sit up enough to drink, uttering words in rhythms I recognized, but by God, the storm in my ears stole the meaning. ‘Not dead. Be not dead.' I finally understood. ‘You be not dead. Stay in bed now, until I gets the Admiral.' I tried sitting up, could not, and asked of admirable girls and islands. The woman said, ‘Newfoundland.' I lunged up once more, saying, ‘The
New
Found Land? John Donne's blissful kingdom:
O my America, my new-found-land
…' Here she laid her hand on my shoulder to ask if I meant John Dunn. ‘He be two houses down. Fetch him, I shall.'

I shut my eyes a moment and opened them again to dusk. Just over the screams of rats and rigging, just beyond the wall, two men spoke. Smelling salt and rot and human filth and determining I would escape it, I got out of bed and stood up, quite carelessly, forgetting I had not eaten properly since before the wreck. The cook had extinguished the fire and came on deck to fumble in hope and terror with the rest of us. I stepped towards the voices and found two men. The taller, the size of a grenadier, gawped as though I stood horned and hoofed as well as naked, while the older man studied me calmly, saying ‘Nancy, give the man back his clothes. He has need of them.'

More tedious dreams, days' worth, until I suddenly felt well: I could see, I could hear, I could think. The smell of death so thick upon the place was only superstitious nonsense that rises like fumes from the sickbed – just the odour of the sea. The house was perched on stilts to keep it rooted in the thin soil and prevent it from sliding down the face of rock. That quirk of architecture, combined with the drying fish outside and the moist remains of codfish on Nancy Truscott, indeed, upon the persons of all the inhabitants of Port au Mal, all save Lacey, had conspired to stodge my nose until I could dream of naught else but shipwrecks. I sat up. Someone had dressed me in a shirt of most excellent linen, softened by another man's wear. I did welcome it. A pair of breeches lay at the end of my improvised bed. As I stood and dressed, I recognized the props from my fever terrors. The empty hogshead, salvaged from my wreck and now used as a table, and the basin atop it: so often had a vision, like steam from hot water, risen from it and scalded my eyes. Rats, my brother putting a wager on my recovery, a whore I'd jostled once at the Bristol docks, fellow schoolboys, Wren, captain of my doomed
Bonny Jane
– all brought to life by my fever and that hogshead and basin. Captain Wren I particularly wanted to see. If I had come through that icy salt death, that truer hell than flames, then so had he. Despite our differences, I did much enjoy the company of Wren, coming eventually to respect him. Hardly a good man; I could not then call him a good man. Some five bastards had he on his ledger. A whip scar marked his neck and jaw. He told me he'd killed a man. I had not the wit to cull details, waiting instead for him to offer up the story: he did not. From the cook I did hear how the man who'd whipped Wren died in a Bristol alley, throat cut in a manner very similar to Wren's scar. The cook would give me no date for this story.

Beneath the breeches I found stockings. I wondered idly if I might find a wig and waistcoat yet, for someone, presumably the jowly woman, had shaved off my hair and beard for fever, just as I had done for my father in his illness. His razor I kept in my strongbox, reasoning I'd not need it until landed. The thought of the strongbox, rather its absence, caused me a nearly unbearable pang, exacerbated by the useless key I still wore around my neck. The weight of the strongbox alone should have drowned me; clearly I had abandoned my duty so I might live. Runciman would learn of my wrack as he learned of everything; for all I knew God Himself whispered in Runciman's ear. He would then wipe me from his mind and file my name in a dusty corner of that great Alexandria housed beneath his wig. Not even a simple courier job could I manage; damn my stupidity, my losing the chance to repair if not my compact with God then at least my reputation amongst men. I failed to hold the strongbox.

I looked to the rude floor and there discovered not buckled shoes with a good heel but good boots, high and brown, boots a squire might wear for inspecting his fields. A precious gift, one of some sacrifice. I hauled them on, the leather pliable and still retentive of another man's feet, and recalled a particularly muddy day when I'd insisted on stockings and shoes. I resolved when next I saw Nancy to pass mildly by.

Feeling much improved, I descended the muddy slope to the shore, landing on slippery beach rocks that clattered beneath my feet like so many petrified grey eggs. The settlement of Port au Mal had been built backwards from a puddle off the main harbour. Beyond the offreach: a jagged sheet of rock, dull red smudged with black. The harbour itself stretched out into the narrows, while behind me, the settlement's houses dotted the land. About halfway up the cliff, perhaps the last reachable point, lay a flat and fertile piece of ground, yellow with last summer's grass, the closest thing to greenery apart from the conifers. The woods to the west reached the horizon. The cliff, high but blunt, seemed to have suffered an axe blow to the face: a wedge-shaped cut, out from which the upper rock sheared, under which gravel crumbled but did not fall. Calm water in the narrows and harbour, chop enough beyond.

To my right I suddenly saw people – just women, but even women might speak and tell me where the rest of the men from
Bonny Jane
convalesced. The women stood at a rickety table, on which they had laid out pieces of whitish flesh. Knives glittered in the obscured sunlight. Stages, I reasoned, stages and flakes. The women were curing fish. Those long shacks there, propped up stilts upon the slope behind the stage, those are fishing rooms. Spotting the woman Nancy, I hallooed and picked my way towards them.

‘Nancy, tell me, tell me, good lady, where are they?'

Nancy there commanded me to call her Mrs Truscott, for she'd long risen above the rank of servant. I did indulge her, and she said ‘Admiral's Hall. This be his stage, behind be his rooms. Go to the Admiral's Hall.'

I nearly clasped her hands, her gut-stained and maggoty hands. I pleaded ‘Take me there. I must see them, by God, what we've suffered. How fare they?'

Nancy Truscott said naught. The other women, about a dozen of them, looked directly at me, and one toddling brat, young Aurelius, rubbed his nose. I glanced about for a building grand enough to be the Admiral's Hall, sheltering a dozen near-drowned men. As Nancy made to take me, another woman muttered, quite clear enough to hear, ‘Lacey's slut.'

Nancy led me up over the rocks and onto some thin wet soil towards a house built comfortably at the edge of the woods, prompting my sensible question of why did they not all live up here, back from the water, considerably less cold and damp? She answered, ‘Cold and damp got longer legs than that. Go on in. The Admiral likes no women here.'

Perhaps not in daylight, I said to myself, displeased with her insolence. But a larger neglect concerned me now: none had told me that my shipmates, my countrymen, were housed in this Admiral's Hall. My lucid moments had been few enough, but a word of my countrymen's presence, a whisper of their survival, and my fever might have run less bleak.

Overcome by a fit of wheezy coughing, the like of which still haunts me in winter, I pulled open the door, then leaned against the doorjamb and squinted. I eventually discovered the bearded man who had studied me in my nakedness. Now I studied him: handsome, in a heavy way, his body compact and strong, profile fetched of strong features and no doubt a strong mind, though his nose did be fleshy. Truly, a man untouched by doubt. He wrote in a ledger. I stepped towards him.

He did not turn, instead held up a hand, and said, ‘A moment.' I waited. Then he pushed himself back from his table and stood to face me, still eyeing his entries, his question nearly finished before he looked on me full. ‘The Englishman. Now then, sir, what can I do for you?'

His bearing confused me. When last I had seen him, he'd commanded. Just then he had kept me waiting, as he might a servant come bearing trivial news. Now he stood before me in courteous respect, hands clasped before him. But a habit of leadership moulded his face, for even now his muscles and nerves relaxed into a confident stare. White shot through his fair hair and beard, yet the skin, while lined by the sun off salt water, looked plump and young. I guessed him to have no more than ten years on myself, putting him at thirty-five. He looked me up and down in an insolent manner and opened his mouth to speak but stopped. His silence irritated me even more than his stare. Angered by Nancy's discourtesy, perhaps excusable given her ignorance, and now by this Lacey's blunt way, I came directly to my question. ‘Where are they?'

He looked at me, asked me to repeat my question, which I did, though he hardly answered it. ‘It seems the breeches fit,' Lacey replied, calm as fog. ‘I had to dig hard to find those old clothes of mine. Shirt's a good linen, too, better than anything you could ever find here. The razor was my father's. I've given up on it over here.'

I did repeat my question, and Lacey's answer clarified nothing.

‘Resting in the rooms, I expect, mending nets.'

‘
My
men, not yours. Where are the men from
Bonny Jane
?'

Lacey glanced up under his strong brow, curious now, contemptuous. ‘The drowned? You might just catch sight of them beneath the waves in certain moonlight. Go out and look.
Bonny Jane,
I shall write that down.' He did this, adding, ‘Were they really your men?'

I'd hired them, with Wren's good advice. I'd paid them, or would have done on return to Bristol. I'd provided food, beer and rum for them: truly then, my men. Admitting it deepened the loss. Not only had I lost my inheritance and the chance at redemption it had brought, but I had lost all outward signs of that inheritance. And I had lost lives, lives on loan to me. My loss was deeper than any of my brother's gambling debts. I'd need pay a heavy reckoning upon facing God.

I asked once more. ‘All of them, sir? Not one other man from
Bonny Jane
?'

‘Look there. Only the shadows of crates and barrels, not men. I shall show you where we buried the ones that came ashore. I expected you to die of that lung fever, but then I doubt God would spare you drowning at sea only to have you drown in bed. I am Robert Lacey. Are you a religious man? Were I a religious man, I would consider why God saw fit to grace me. What good act earned your survival?'

I do not recall what all else he said as he led me to the burying ground, that boggy meadow halfway up the mountain. A knotty wooden plank marked my men's grave, and gouged into it with a marlinspike was WRACK 19. Lacey stopped speaking and finally departed. When I rose, stiff and cold, to return to my stale sickbed, dusk had come. The water lapped the fire rocks. Not one answer rose from the grave of my men. Not one answer rose from the sea.