Home From The Sea (4 page)

“She likes her men round and plump?” Toby chuckled.

“I haven’t asked. She’s old enough to be my grandmother – and yours.” Jim settled the tricorn on his head and gave the brim a tug as the breeze got under it. “Does Bess like a bone? I’ll see what I can find.”

“She’d be grateful,” Toby guessed, and leaned the haft of the axe over his left shoulder to watch as Jim made his way up onto the path which took passing seamen from port to port.

Salterton and Budleigh nestled together, just west of the east end of the long, shallow bay. On a fine day it was a pleasant walk, and if Jim told the truth, he needed the exercise. People often watched how he
favored
the lame leg and assumed he needed to rest it. The opposite was true. The damned limb needed all the gentle exercise he could find for it; the more it got, the better it was, but the term ‘better’ was relative.

He limped. He had limped since he was a lad of fifteen, still four months shy of his sixteenth birthday. He would always limp, and that was the fact of the matter. Jim had accepted it and only noticed the gammy leg when other people, people whose opinion mattered to him, saw it. Today he noticed it keenly and one part of him wanted to try to stride out, hide the limp, while the more sensible part told him to walk the way he always did, be himself, and if Toby Trelane did not like it, then be damned to him.

Instead, he turned his face to the sun, took a lungful of the salt sea air and steeled himself against turning back to see if Toby was still watching him, and what look might be on his face. Some people wore expressions of pity or sympathy; others were scornful. Jim did not need the former, and the latter aroused his anger faster than a mug of ale tossed in his face.

What he wanted from Toby Trelane was just the simple acceptance of what he was, and who, and he was surprised to find
a tightness
in his chest, a certain flutter in his belly, as he wondered if he would get it.

The coastal path was overgrown on both sides, rank with sea grasses and wild barley which had escaped from fields belonging to farmers like Joe Flynn. It followed the line of the bay, with the rush of the sea on his right hand as he walked east, and the sound of birds, the distant bleating of sheep,
the
creak of a
plow
and the clop of heavy horses, at his left hand.

It seemed to Jim that he had lived his whole life in this one small place. Had it only be six years and eight months? He was nineteen when his father fled the city with lungs gone to ruin and a wife and two daughters in the ground. Two more daughters, both older than Jim, were still living in London, one married to a merchant, the other to a tanner. The last he had heard from them, he had half a dozen little nieces and nephews, and a standing invitation to come back to town and make his home with Janet or Kate, with their husbands’ blessing –

Not, he thought, that they or their husbands had any inkling of where Jim’s heart lay. He wondered how shocked they would be, if they knew he was a very long way indeed from being the eunuch they supposed; that the leg might be gammy but it was rarely painful, and he could give better than he got in one of those wrestling bouts that took place on a mattress by the light of a brass lamp … and the
last
thing he desired was a wife.

He could imagine the shock on Janet’s and Kate’s faces – and the horror, perhaps even anger, on their husbands’. Once they knew the truth, he would no longer be welcome in their homes even as a guest, and in London it was infinitely harder for a man to be discreet in his affairs, even if he could make the acquaintance of seamen who knew about these things, which was doubtful.

Here in the west, never out of sight and sound of the ocean, situated between Plymouth and Portsmouth with the sailor’s path right at his door, life was a good deal easier.
Safer.
Jim was not about to move, even if there were times when he felt as if he was almost becoming part of the stone and thatch of The Raven.

With a chuckle, he mocked himself and quickened his pace. The sooner he shared the time of day with Joe Flynn – discussed the weather, inquired about the health of his wife, asked circuitously about the luck of Chris and Wills in the activities for which the Government would gladly have hanged them both – the sooner he could get back to watching Toby Trelane, and trying to fathom if the man would accept the offer of a bit of slap and tickle, or if he would flush crimson to the roots of his straw-
colored
hair and make a beeline for the nearest magistrate.

Not knowing was a nuisance. Trying to read Toby’s signs was a sweet kind of torture, and Jim was going to enjoy it.

Chapter Three

The drinkers came in by twos and threes, after six o’clock when the day’s work was done and the farms and forges closed down and shops ran up their shutters. The local men were an odd lot, Jim thought. Many were miserable, too poor, rightly, to be drinking here on a Wednesday night, but too morose not to. Times were hard, work was
meager
, and if a strong-looking male between fourteen and forty years of age did not keep his weather-eye open, the pressmen would be on him before he knew it.

Two of Jim’s regular drinkers had been pressed, one for a whaler, one for a warship. Both had been away from home for seven years before their ships put back into Portsmouth and they were free to go. Israel Cooper and Billy Mulligan were smart enough not to get
too
drunk, the first night ashore. They could have been picked up again by the same pressmen, sent right back to the same ships. No few innkeepers in the ports had a standing arrangement with pressmen, to get the newly-released crews comprehensively drunk and then send a message regarding fresh meat ready for collection. Mulligan and Cooper made their way back to Exmouth and the villages strung out along the coast, and if one could get enough rum into them, they would tell the kind of stories that made a man’s hackles stand on end.

Jim had heard them all, and had no desire to shiver through them again. Tonight, he was intent on the balladsinger. The windows shone; the firewood was stacked four feet high beside the hearth and the kindling basket was full. The brass fixings around the fireplace were so bright, Jim could have seen his face in them, and Mrs. Clitheroe swore the man was an angel because he had taken out the kitchen rubbish, cleaned down her table, filled up her water pitchers, brought in the wood to fire the kitchen hearth tomorrow, fed the cat and the terrier, and made her a cup of tea while she put her feet up, waiting for the pies to be done.

He was, Jim thought, the biggest bundle of contradictions wrapped up in a single
package, that
one could imagine. He knew seamen and ships, but he was not a sailor. He knew tools, but was not a
laborer
. He never spoke about women, and the wide blue eyes followed Jim from taproom to windows to kitchen and back, but the sparkle of recognition and invitation Jim was waiting for was still not quite there, as if Toby were waiting for
something
.
Or hiding something.

Confounded, enchanted, captivated, Jim poured rum and ale and counted coins while he watched the locals come drifting in for grog or food or both. At seven, when more than a dozen punters were enjoying the fire, throwing darts at a painted wooden board or playing backgammon on the big oak table – made of timbers from the merchantman
Lady Grey
, which had gone down in this bay in the big storms a dozen years ago – Toby picked up his mandolin.

Eyes turned toward him. The locals might be rummies, but they knew a balladsinger when they saw one, and it was a long time since any of Toby’s species had passed by. Most people were always in the market for a new song, a new story, or an old one told with relish. Toby gestured with the black
enameled
instrument and dropped a flourishing bow before them.

“Will you gentlemen hear a song?” he wondered.
“A tale of love and anguish, perhaps?
Or a grand story of blood and guts and a man’s raw courage?”

It was Billy Mulligan who grunted, “Aye, so long as ye don’t ask for
more’n
a ha’penny for
yer
time and trouble, cuz
I’s
got three ha’pennies left in me pocket, and two of them’s for rum, afore I has to git off home to a wife that wishes me six foot under and tells me so, three times every bloody day afore breakfast.”

A laugh ran around the tavern, though Mulligan was not joking, and they all knew it. His wife was a shrew. Jim had met her several times. Edna Mulligan was one of those who curled her lip at Jim, fully believing him a eunuch; and if a man was no use between a woman’s sheets, he was no use, period. He could only imagine Billy’s troubles, if middle age and girth had begun to conspire against him.

“A ha’penny would be grand,” Toby said affably, “especially if it were a ha’penny from each and every one of you in this house tonight.”

And little Israel Cooper, with the broken nose and the bright brass hoop in his left ear, piped up from the backgammon board, “Not afore we’ve ’
eard
thy songs and tales!
Tell us the same old rubbish, and
thee’ll
get
nuthin
’ from me, ’
sept
mebbe
a swift kick up thy skinny arse.”

“And rightly so.”
Toby dropped the lean buttocks onto the three-legged stool in the corner by the hearth, where it was warm and bright and they could all see him. “But I know a hundred stories you’ve never heard, and I know what songs they’re singing this year in Spain and France … and the ditties from Cork and Liverpool, too.”

Again, the laugh, as he strummed a chord and began to pick a fine tune out of the strings.
His speaking voice had a lilting quality which made Jim’s skin prickle, and he knew even before Toby began to sing, he would be very good. The melody sounded Spanish but the words were English, and he wondered who had translated them.

It was a love song with an edge of tragedy, about a young man who ran away to sea before he could make a fool of himself over a local beauty. Three verses into it Jim began to notice, the lover left behind had not been named … and no gender was ever mentioned in the lyric. The prickling sensation redoubled and he stood behind the bar, hands frozen in the chore of drying mugs as he listened to the tale, and felt curiously moved as it ended:

“The sea is my bastion, and I’m going home

“After too many years throughout which I did roam

“’Cross oceans and islands too strange to relate,

“Which have brought me at last to the seaman’s bleak fate
–

“For the storm is upon us; there’s ice all around,

“And
all the
world shakes with the furious sound

“Of winds and white water; but I am at peace

“For I’m bound for the place where the silence has
lease
…

“Just one thing I ask for, before I go down:

“To send this last message; then, pleased, shall I drown.

“I left my old homeland, compelled by the need

“To leave you before I could sow ruin’s seed.

“I ran from the town, leaving no faintest clue

“That I ran for the sake of a love I felt.
You
.

“For the love that I felt
was
my sin and my shame –

“There’s no place for sinners, and you’re not to blame.

“So the sea was my refuge, the ships and the mates…

“And now we’ll go down, for our destiny waits,

“And the sea is my haven; my voice is the wind –

“The deeps are my homeland; and though I have sinned

“I bid you, remember the boy with red hair

“Who fled from the village, at harvest time
there.
”

The song was bittersweet and lilting, and while he sang the tavern was so quiet, nobody even burped much less said a word to break the spell. A few clapped when he finished, and Toby dropped another bow but did not even pause to ask for a farthing before he struck up another song, this time ribald, cheeky.

“Come, cheer up, my lads, there’s a hogshead of rum,

“Which we’ll open tonight when the young ladies come –

“When the frills and the fancies are dropped on the floor,

“And we’ll get so blind drunk, we’ll forget what they’re for!

“So cheer up, my hearties – we’ll wait for them girls,

“Mine’s the plump lass with the long golden curls …

“Or was she a redhead? I just can’t recall –

“So I’ll have one more rum, ’fore I skip, trip and fall,

“And I’ll
try
to remember, tomorrow, with grace,

“Who I rolled in the sheets with … the name and the face.

“Now, I
think
’twas a doxie. Fact is
,
I ain’t sure!

“It’s all the rum’s fault, and there is but one cure –

“Put the cork to the hogshead and hammer it in!

“Don’t drink till you’re legless, nor indulge in no sin

“With no girl from no brothel who’s ripe as no plum…

“So, how
much’ll
you take for yon bottle of rum?”