Lieutenant (3 page)

Once ashore, Silk led the straggle of junior officers as confidently as if he had visited English Harbour and its delights a hundred times. He strode along the quay, turned left at a house with brilliant geraniums dripping red down its white wall, and went on into the heart of the town.

Everywhere Rooke saw the black faces of the slaves that Lancelot Percival had spoken of. He saw women in a muddy yard, doubled over tubs scrubbing away at laundry, shouting to each other above the splashing. He paused to listen, hearing a language like nothing he had ever heard before: not Latin, not Greek, not French, none of the languages he had studied at the
Academy, sounds as opaque to his understanding as if he were a baby. He took a few steps into the yard to hear better, but Silk shouted to him to
come along Mr Rooke, come along now, we are not here
to wash our underlinen!

As they walked through the streets he saw slaves harnessed into carts, hauling the firewood and water of the garrison. On the edge of town black men and women swayed along with huge bundles of cane or baskets full of pineapples balanced on their heads. In the fields others crouched over the squares where they planted the cane, their skin gleaming with sweat.

Even when they passed close by on the narrow streets, Rooke noticed that the slaves never looked him in the face. It must be a thing they were taught: never to look a white man in the face. Their own features were exotic, powerful, as if carved from a stronger medium than the insipid putty of English faces.

But he was shy to look too hard.

Seeing for himself a system in which a man could be bought and owned, as one might buy a horse or a gold watch, Rooke found that Lancelot Percival’s abstractions about the collapse of the British Empire did not convince. The slaves were utterly strange, their lives unimaginable, but they walked and spoke, just as he did himself. That speech he had heard was made up of no sounds he could give meaning to, but it was language and joined one human to another, just as his own did.

He still did not know how to rebut Lancelot Percival’s logic concerning the collapse of the British Empire, but now that he
had seen the slaves he knew this: they were not the same as a horse or a gold watch.

Silk strode on, up the hill behind the port, along a narrow laneway into a hamlet of rough dwellings where hens pecked and lame dogs barked at the men in their red coats. At the end of the last stony alley, he knew which door to knock at.

The woman Rooke was given—large, handsome, brown-skinned, red-lipped—watched as he bashfully lowered his breeches. He never forgot her face, shrewd and amused, as she exclaimed, ‘Bless you, boy, you are hung like a damned horse!’

Newton’s calculus, the lunar distance method of determining longitude, and this other business: it was a private reassurance that he was a natural at least at a few things.

Life in His Majesty’s service unspooled itself day by day in a manner he saw no reason to think would ever end. The service gave a shape to his life, allowed him to play with the brass machines and the numbers, even offered him the nearest thing to comrades that he was ever likely to have. When he thought back to the boy counting his pebbles on the beach under the Round Tower, he realised that, contrary to all his expectations, he had found a life.

L
ike everyone else, he had taken the oath. It was easy to raise his right hand and swear that he would serve and obey. It was nothing but words.

But for the many hours of a certain long hot afternoon on the ramparts at English Harbour, he learned where those splendid words might lead. Some officers from
Renegade
had failed to serve and obey. They had not actually disobeyed, not got as far as mutiny. They had only talked about it. But it was brought home to Rooke that mere words could have the power of life and death. The leader of the mutineers—a lieutenant of marines like himself—was hanged. He opened his mouth as if to speak just as the bag was pulled down over his head. No one in the crowd breathed. Then a shout rang out, the floor fell away, and he hung jerking at the end of the rope. When he shat himself
the smell travelled over the crowd. Rooke smelled it, heard the rustle among the others as they smelled it too.

Rooke willed the agonised jerking to stop. He could not look away, felt that he had to be part of it. If he looked away the wretch would go on twitching forever. The man had got a hand half free of its binding and as his body twirled on the end of the rope Rooke could see it opening and closing.

When the lieutenant was nothing more than a bag of meat within his clothes, his head kinked sideways, the crowd breathed a long sigh. Rooke tried to take a breath but a shudder came up from deep within him and he heard himself moan.

The other two men, also lieutenants, had not led, only followed, and were spared the noose. They stood, already shrunken, while their commander unsheathed his sword and struck off their badges of rank, then their regimental brass buttons, one by one. He was loose with his sword and, when he had finished, the jackets were sad wounded things, the fabric sliced, the facings flapping loose.

Then they were escorted out of the gate. Their bare heads, publicly cropped by the barber, looked undersized in the merciless light as they were sent into oblivion. Of course their hair would grow back and they would continue to walk about, and breathe and eat: they were not dead. But they might as well be. They would never again have a place in the world. No one wanted to have any dealings, personal or professional, with a man who had been ejected in dishonour.

Every officer at the garrison had stood to attention, muskets at the slope, and watched. Watching had not been a choice, because the spectacle was the whole point. No one who sweated through that pitiless stretch of time would ever forget what happened to those who did not serve and obey.

Rooke knew he would not forget. In that afternoon in which feeling had been assaulted into numbness he saw that under the benign surface of life in His Majesty’s service, under its rituals and its uniforms and pleasantries, was horror.

He had thought to find a niche in which he could make a life. What was forced into his understanding that eternal burning afternoon, was that a payment would be extracted. His Majesty had no use for any of the thoughts and sensibilities and wishes that a man might contain, much less the disobedience to which he might be inspired. To bend to the king’s will required the suspension of human response. A man was obliged to become part of the mighty imperial machine. To refuse was to become inhuman in another way: either a bag of meat or a walking dead man.

He thought he had found all he needed in the marines. But now he dreamed of that man’s hand opening and closing on air, speaking to him of something he wished he had never learned.

Late in the year 1781, the French navy came to the aid of the rebels and blocked the approach to Chesapeake Bay. Rooke took
his place in the waist of
Resolution
with the others. A sea battle—his first experience of active combat—seemed nothing more than a question of distance, of trajectory, of speed relative to direction. They tacked all day, working themselves into position, Line Ahead, to engage with the French, and finally drew close enough. The marines waited behind the hammocks wadded up against the rail.

Fear took everyone a different way. For Rooke it led back to his old friends the primes. Seventy-nine, eighty-three, eighty-nine, ninety-seven, one hundred and one. Beside him, Silk checked that the flint of his musket was screwed in tight. Unscrewed it, turned it over, screwed it in again. Pulled the trigger to test it.

‘Buckley was with Arbuthnot in March, he told me that
Victoire
contrived to send a red-hot shot into the captain’s cabin on
Intrepid
, can you imagine! Which kept rolling about and burning everything until a gallant first lieutenant—Woodford, do you know him?—took it up in his speaking trumpet and threw it overboard!’

Silk took the flint out again, blew on it, turned it over, screwed it in once more. He was talking so fast that there was a fleck of foam at the corner of his mouth. Rooke nodded, pretended to listen. It was the small kindness one man could do another.

He saw the first blast of black smoke and a gout of flame from the cannons of the French ship opposite, felt
Resolution
shake and thunder as her own cannon answered.

The firing, the reloading, the ramming, the priming, the firing again: all that was familiar from having been practised so often. The theory of it was tidy: men firing and then calmly dropping to one knee to reload. What was happening on
Resolution
bore no resemblance to that.

He thought later they should have worked it out for themselves: that the deck would become a confusion of smoke and screams, because—this had never been part of any exercise—they were being fired at as well as firing.

Behind him he heard someone make a noise, half grunt and half groan, but did not turn to see, that was what they taught you,
do not break the line
. Somewhere up towards the bow, a man was screaming, short high pulses of sound.

Blindly Rooke went through the motions of loading, ramming, priming. Stepped up to the rail and fired at the smoke across the water, stepped back, fumbled for the bag of shot, kept his head down. He would not let himself hear those screams. He obeyed the imperative of his profession, and the musket in his hand obeyed the imperative of its own workings, the flint falling, the spark leaping, the ball leaving the barrel in a blast of flame and smoke.

Above the din of the muskets and the deep percussion of the cannons, Rooke heard a long splintering aloft, and saw the end of a rope twitching down towards him. He tried to duck out of the way but it caught him across the ear and as he fell he saw a
clot of sail collapse and knock down the two men on his left. He was getting to his feet again when he went sprawling sideways from a blast of violent air too loud for hearing. It was so close that it was all there was, the world sucked up into this blind vortex.
This is death
, he thought.
This is what death sounds like
.

But he was not dead, knew he was on his feet again. He looked around for Silk and the picture was fixed on his blank mind like a stain: Private Truby lying nearby, his lower part a shining inchoate mass of red, of glistening pearly surfaces, of dark gleaming stuff all seething and steaming, and Truby was trying to rise, heaving upwards with his hands on the deck, looking down to see why his arms could not get him up, pushing and pushing as if he could not understand that there was no body left, only that shambles of his own flesh and entrails gluing him to the deck.

Silk was watching Truby too, his face as expressionless as a sleeping man’s. His sleeve hung in tatters and blood was running down his arm and dripping from his fingertips. Between Rooke and Silk, Private Truby went on earnestly pushing at the deck with his hands, a terrible puzzled smile on his face.

Rooke had no memories of the spar falling on him, giving him a blow on the crown that extinguished consciousness.
Lucky to be
alive
, they told him weeks later, in the hospital at Portsmouth,
but he thought death would be better than the pain in his head so bad it blacked out vision and made his guts rise into his mouth.

Or was that the memory of the deck of
Resolution
on the fifth day of September in the year 1781?

During the many months of his convalescence, Anne sat by his bed hour by hour with his hand held between both of hers on the coverlet. The pain in his skull and the remembered din of the guns were always with him, Anne’s hand cradling his the only thing that kept him from slipping away.

When at last he recovered enough to leave his bed, the house grew tight-walled and airless and he took to walking: slowly, falteringly, through the lanes and crooked streets of the town. He never took the same route home, walked in wide loops rather than retrace his steps. It was
away
he needed.

Most walks ended where they had when he was a child, at the ramparts where the entrance to the port narrowed. He clambered down beside the Round Tower, hanging on now at every step like an old man.

The first time he found himself there he looked for his collection of pebbles. He knew they could not still be there after more than ten years, but when he stooped to look into the hole in the wall and found it empty he felt the tears prickle. It was the injury, he supposed, that made him feel he had lost everything, and that it was too late to find it again.

The beach was the same, and as always he had it to himself.
He sat on the cold stones, rounded by the sea to egg-like smoothness, and watched the sky, the water. Low waves gathered themselves up, glittering in hazy sun, a smooth tight-drawn surface that dropped and broke apart onto the pebbles, spotting them dark, then withdrew with an unhurried slap and rattle. Out towards the Motherbank and the Isle of Wight a band of brilliant white often lay between sea and cloud, luminous against the dark water.

His life had arrived at a point of suspension, like a fleck of dirt in a glass of water. He hung in a cold bleak space. He had thought to find a future, even found it for a time, beckoning like a tease. Now there was nothing, only this pain in his head and his heart, which had seen into the vile entrails of life and smelled the evil there.

Air flowed to and fro, water mounted and drew back under the pull of the moon as it had done for as long as there had been air and water, and as it would while air and water ever remained. He sat there, stiffening on the stones, but the pain in his head eased. A kindly trance wrapped itself around him in which time could pass.

He had retreated into some tight dry place within himself, like a periwinkle marooned above the tideline. It was enough to watch the waves crest and collapse, the distant brilliant band of light contract to a line along the horizon.

A ball of mist closed in from the sea and dusk crept over the town behind him. He forced himself upright and went through
the darkening streets back to that narrow parlour and attic bedroom that were his world now.