Silver (29 page)

Because Natty had only just left her prison, she felt it reasonable to say nothing for a moment, but merely rub her arms and wrists until the blood flowed through them more easily. This silence, which in Smirke’s mind was merely a continuation of her stubbornness, very quickly enraged him.

‘Don’t you keep playing the fool with me,’ he bellowed. There was a flustered look on his face, which told her he had probably intended to lead up to this anger by a more circuitous route. However, having lost his temper immediately he took no steps to gather himself again, but instead ploughed on, drawing a gully from his belt. ‘I’ve had enough of your silences, my boy. Give us the news of how you came here. And who came with you. And where you reckon they might be now – or maybe you think they’ve left you to your fate? Can’t say I’d have done any different, if I’d been them. In any case: it’s your words I want, or I’ll take your tongue if I can’t have them.’

Stone stood impassive as he heard this, but Noser lunged forward and slapped Smirke on the back, as if to say, ‘Now we’ll see some fun.’ Smirke seemed not to feel it, but kept his rheumy eyes fixed on Natty’s face and slowly rolled up one sleeve of his jacket. ‘Here’s luck’ and ‘Ted Smirke his fancy’ were very neatly and clearly tattooed above the wrist, and on his forearm, which was leathery with age and completely hairless, there was a sketch of a gallows with a man hanging from it.

‘I cannot tell what you want,’ Natty said, looking away in revulsion. She thought her voice sounded light and frail – very like her own true voice, in fact, which she then struggled to disguise in what followed. This was not something she had practised, but a thought that came to her by instinct.

‘Mr Smirke,’ she said, using his name for the first time. ‘You must put yourself in my position. You must ask yourself: would I save myself to betray my friends?’

Natty had expected this to be the start of a much longer speech, in which she would appeal to the spirit of common humanity. But the effect of even these few words was so dramatic, she had no chance to continue.

‘Spare me your speeches!’ Smirke said, slashing the air in front of her face. ‘It’s
news
I want from you, lad, not speeches.
News. And facts
. Now I’ll ask you again. Will you give them to us, or must we frighten them out of you?’

If any fumes from the distillery still lingered in Natty’s brain, this dispelled them. She knew that she had come to the end of excuses, and could not delay any longer. It was time to speak about the
Nightingale
, or else suffer and die.

She opened her mouth – and then suddenly closed it again, as the sound of singing rose from the land between the stockade and the sea. At first it was very faint, but quickly came closer and gained strength:

There could be no doubt what the song meant; it was the prisoners, returning from their work. And although this was a daily event, and might therefore have been tedious to Smirke and the
rest, in fact it seized their attention. Natty thought this must be because it proved their authority, while reminding them of evening pleasures that would soon begin. When she looked again at Smirke, he seemed to have quite forgotten her; like Stone and Noser, he was agog to see the southern gate open, and the procession begin.

Although Natty was glad of the respite, what now appeared to her was very shocking. The prisoners were quite worn down with fatigue, so every head drooped and every foot dragged through the dust – which made their continuing to sing seem all the more remarkable. When she saw Scotland, she quickly closed her eyes. The skin of his shoulders was shiny with blood, and a long wound was open across the top of his head, as if the skin had been cut and deliberately pulled apart.

Jinks strutted at the head of the column, like a general who had marched his men up to the top of a hill and then down again; the other tyrants who had escaped the wreck of the
Achilles
patrolled on either side, waiting to snap at anyone who strayed. No one had the energy. As their singing stopped, which it did as soon as they came into the compound, the prisoners trudged in sullen weariness and obedience. This, to judge by the smile that now creased Smirke’s wide face, was everything he wanted.

Onwards they shuffled, towards the porch outside their log-house, where a barrel had been placed, and a wooden trough such as might be used to feed pigs. It was filled with water, which each prisoner knelt to drink before delving into the barrel and retrieving a wedge of black bread. With this in their hand, they then sank into the same darkness that had disgorged them a few hours before. It was not the end of their day’s hardship, however – merely a pause before the beginning of its second and more terrible part.

Natty did not expect to see any of these later cruelties, because she did not expect to be alive – as Smirke soon reminded her.
Watching the last few prisoners disappear, he lost interest in them as abruptly as he had found it, and remembered what they had interrupted.

‘One final time,’ he barked, turning towards Natty and tapping the blade of his dagger against the open palm of his hand. ‘Tell us where your mates have got to. Have they left you, or are they coming for you?’

‘I have told you as much as I can,’ Natty replied, tearing her gaze away from the prisoners. To give an impression of indifference, she did not look at Smirke directly, but into the sky behind him. Smirke did not seem in the least impressed by this, but Natty could not have expected such a simple gesture would lead to the strangest exchange of their encounter. For as she continued watching the clouds travelling across the sky above the Anchorage, trying to distract her mind with their shifting greys and whites, she heard Smirke say, ‘God’s teeth but you’re a stubborn piece of work, Nat. Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you know how I’ve lived? I’ve sailed with Captain Flint! I’ve been the friend of old Barbecue Silver!’

To hear her father mentioned like this, as if he were the devil himself, struck Natty a painful blow.

‘And what of Mr Silver?’ she whispered.

‘What of Silver?’ he ranted on. ‘The coldest heart I ever knew. Silver’s a dog, and he taught me my own dog’s ways. Woof! Woof!’

Smirke threw himself against Natty as he made these noises, so that she felt his buckles and buttons pressing through her clothes. But he was not quite finished with her father yet.

‘The last I saw of that rogue was his miserable face leering over the side of the
Hispaniola
and my musket ball parting the hair on his head. Another inch to the south and I’d have blown him to the flames he deserved! Not a day passes …’

Here Smirke seemed ready to continue swimming for some
while in the current of his hatred, and might well have done so if Stone had not stepped forward and tapped him on the arm.

‘Yes?’ he snapped, whirling round.

‘The prisoner, Captain sir,’ said Stone, speaking very properly like a good sailor but at the same time grinning. ‘You are forgetting the prisoner.’

The effect of this interruption was startling. Smirke stood still, frowning at the ground as though he had forgotten where on earth he was, grinding his teeth and cursing. It was a terrifying glimpse of hatred, but Natty told herself she must take advantage of it. To hear her father condemned with such violence should have been outrageous – the man she knew bore no resemblance to anything Smirke had described. Yet in fact it invigorated her; by conjuring up her father, Smirke had given her an example of ingenuity, when she felt her own resources were about to run dry.

Her new resolve was tested immediately, for no sooner had Smirke composed himself than he became purposeful again, as Stone had encouraged him to be.

‘You there,’ he called across the yard, to a brace of guards who had recently returned the prisoners to their quarters. ‘Robinson. Rawson.’

‘Yes, Captain,’ grunted one man, and the other, ‘Aye-aye, Captain,’ as they trotted towards him.

‘You know your duties,’ Smirke told them, thrusting his gully back into his belt, and suddenly smiling at Natty to show how much he was enjoying this new display of his power. ‘Light the fire and make everything ready for my return. Noser!’

The goggle-eyed man lurched forward obediently. ‘Aye-aye, Captain.’

‘Kill us a doo-dah, and that will be our dinner. I expect to be hungry when I’m done with Master Nat here.’

‘Gladly Captain,’ said Noser, rubbing his proboscis and stamping off towards the farm pen. As he leaned over its low wall, the creatures
beyond it began a most pathetic gabble, appearing to understand that he bestrode their world like Death himself.

‘An excellent executioner,’ Smirke told Natty, still smiling. ‘We all say that about Noser. A very excellent and delicate butcher.’ Then he turned to face Stone and continued in the same complacent voice. ‘As you are yourself, of course, my friend; as you are yourself. So favour me with your company if you will, and walk with me so that we can attend to our prisoner here.’

By way of giving an answer, Stone ran one hand across his throat. As he did so, the sun disappeared behind clouds and the wind strengthened off the sea, flapping his trousers around his legs until he leaned backwards a little to resist the pressure. This tilt of his body, slight as it was, gave Natty the fanciful idea that even wild Nature had finally turned against her, since it supported her enemy, and now she would be taken to the Fo’c’sle Court, where –

But she did not have to complete the thought. For instead of heading in that direction, Smirke began goading her towards the northern gate of the stockade. She noticed that Stone seemed to understand what must follow; he gave a high-pitched chuckle as he fell in step with them.

The ground at this end of the yard was lumpy with old tree roots, so Natty sometimes stumbled as she went, and once even staggered to keep her footing, as a person might do if they were weak with fear. She regretted giving this impression, since her spirits were now suddenly higher – she insists – than at any time since her captivity began. I have often questioned her about this, finding such optimism hard to credit. Her answer is always the same: that what she felt was not optimism, but rather the impossibility of her own death. She did not think the foliage would suddenly part and reveal her rescuers – the captain and myself. She did not imagine Smirke would change his mind and show mercy, or decide to keep her as a hostage
after all; he was too foolish and too vain. She very simply could not believe that she had reached her limit in the world. It was the mention of her father that made this possible; he seemed to have survived everything – why should not she?

Natty remained steadfast, or perhaps I should say
innocent
, even when the climb uphill from the camp began in earnest, along a track that wound between many large rhododendron bushes. Here, rather than contemplating Last Things, she says she began thinking that courage might not be an exalted state, but a natural and primitive thing that derives from our desire to die as we want to live – with dignity. Her life had not been a long one, but she had assembled it carefully. She felt that to vandalise it now with some sort of collapse would have been worse than giving Smirke a victory; it would have licensed her to become a little like him.

Before Natty could finish these thoughts, the fellow suddenly called her name, then followed it with a barrage of groans and curses. Evidently every practical thing was always done for him in the degeneracy of the camp, and although once a very strong man, he had become almost entirely slack during the passage of the years. Even marching this short distance had puffed him out. ‘Damn me for a landlubber,’ he gasped, between futile hoofs at the ground. ‘Damn this earth. Give me a good ship and a following wind; I’ll have none of this weight and clay.’

This outburst made Smirke so thoroughly exhausted, Natty thought for a moment she might be able to save herself – by plunging into the bushes and running away. When she felt Stone’s sword in her back, however, and heard the steadiness of his silence, she realised he would easily overtake her, then overpower her, and then in all likelihood deprive her of the very dignity she had just been celebrating to herself. She therefore kept to the path and continued walking, trying to occupy her mind by noticing how suddenly some of the blossoms
around her had begun to close, now there was no direct sunlight to encourage them, and how the raindrops that had started to fall made a light tapping sound on the leaves, like fingernails.

After another few minutes of hard climbing, they left the belt of shrubs and came to a little wood of Scots pine. Here they felt the wind blowing more strongly, bending the crowns of the trees so that some of them began to scrape together – except where they seemed to step back aghast, and left a patch of open ground. As soon as Natty saw this, she realised it was Smirke’s destination – the great crack in the earth that ran down from near the summit of Spyglass Hill, the ravine we had found together with Bo’sun Kirkby on our reconnaissance of the stockade. Then we had been near the shore, where the depth of the thing was not more than forty feet, but still terrifying. Here it was more than twice as much.

‘Stop here, lad,’ said Smirke, pausing for breath between every phrase. ‘This is as far as we go. And as far as you’ll ever go.’

Natty turned round and saw Smirke crouched with his hands on his knees. Stone, on the contrary, stood cool and upright, swinging his sword like a pendulum; the blade was shiny with raindrops.

‘We often bring our friends here,’ Stone said, in his thin and piping voice.

Because this sounded reasonable, Natty thought for a moment they must come to see the view behind him, which was indeed beautiful. The stockade was entirely hidden by the bushes they had passed through, and the island seemed a paradise again. A stormy paradise, with loose purple clouds billowing up from the horizon, but gorgeous in the polished green of its vegetation and the prolific scattering of its flowers. If this was to be her final sight of the earth, she could think of nothing to match it.