The Star of the Sea (28 page)

He said if it were sacrilege to believe in life after death, the
existence of the devil and the power of dark things, then all the Christian world were sacrilegious and near enough to every last soul on the ship. Each man must believe what he liked, he said; but he did not know what kind of God it was who could send his own boy to be murdered on a tree. And as for cannibalism, the Roman Catholics would happily tell you they gobbled flesh and quaffed gore so maybe Pope Pius himself was a voodoo-man zombie. I said it was not meet to speak so disrespectfully when so many of the passengers are of that great and majestic (if doctrinally errant) faith. He apologised and said it was only a jape, adding that his own wife was a Catholic (of Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas) and his youngest daughter a postulant nun. He was quite beyond persuasion of any variety; saying he would contentedly surrender all rations and go to the lock-up in chains rather than work out his watch this day. I allowed him the day but said I would have to dock it from his wages. He quite understood and seemed content.

As I left, he was uttering some words I did not understand.

Tonight I had necessity to punish one of the men, Joseph Cartigan of Liverpool
¹
, who had been importuning some of the women in steerage and making shameful suggestions by which he meant to gain advantage from their present unhappy state. Apparently he had been offering food in return. I do not like at all to punish the men, but they know I will not have decent girls ruined on my ship. Summoning him to my quarters, I asked if he had wife or daughter and he said neither. Then I asked if he had a mother; and how would he care for her to be translated to a whore? He said she was one already, the busiest in Liverpool. (I swear his ears quite wriggle with insolence.)

Chaucer asserts, in his Prologue of the Reeve: ‘Til we be roten kan we not be rype.’ If that be the case, then this Mersey-mud placket-hound is so ripe as to be practically intoxicating.

His appeal was that he had attempted nothing save what was
natural, given the length of the voyage & cetera. At that I ordered the wretch’s rations halved for three days, the moiety to be given to some poor girl in steerage. I have oftentimes observed the veracity of the late Admrl. Wm. Bligh’s remark (first captain under whom I myself served as boy, on the charting and fathoming of Dublin Bay) that when a man claims in mitigation that his actions be ‘natural’ he is invariably behaving much worse than a beast, without exception to one much weaker than himself.

The stench now become very evil indeed. As though the ship itself were beginning to rot, or traversing a very real sewer.

If you were to see old Denis Danihy, he never was in as good health and looks better than ever he did at home. And you may be sure he can have plenty of tobacco and told me to mention it to Tim Murphy. If you were to see Denis Reen when Daniel Danihy dressed him with clothes suitable for this country, you would think him to be a boss or a steward, so that we have scarcely words to state to you how happy we felt at present. And as to the girls that used to be trotting on the bogs at home, to hear them talk English would be of great astonishment to you.

Letter from Daniel Guiney in Buffalo, New York

¹
Unusually, Captain Lockwood here makes a mistake. About a dozen of the
Star
’s crew were Liverpudlians but none was called ‘Cartigan’. A ‘Joseph Carrigan’ is included in the Register of Crew, also a ‘Joseph Hartigan’. From enquiries made much later among the surviving crew, it seems Hartigan was the sailor whose punishment the Captain records here. – GGD

I
N WHICH A
T
RUE AND UNADORNED
H
ISTORY OF CERTAIN
DIFFICULT EVENTS
IN THE EARLIER LIFE OF
D
AVID
M
ERRIDITH IS GIVEN
.

At home for Christmas furlough, 1836, a respite from which he was never to return to the navy, David Merridith had been pushed into an engagement with the only daughter of Henry Blake, the neighbouring landlord of Tully and Tully Cross. He was now twenty-three, his father pointed out; a good age for a chap to put his head in the sack. You didn’t want to leave it very much later or you might end up having to take whatever donkey you could get. This wasn’t London. Supplies were limited. The Blake lands bordered Kingscourt in several places. Blake was in funds; Kingscourt needed heavy investment. A happy coincidence, Merridith’s father had said, and of course not the main thing or anything like it. But the two estates combined would be a force to be reckoned with. Even the Martins of Ballynahinch would be put in their place; not to mention those posing puff adders, the D’Arcys of Clifden. And Miss Amelia, after all, was the beauty of the county.

It simply hadn’t occurred to David Merridith to marry; but in a way, he supposed, his father was right. Amelia Blake wasn’t the worst prospect. Granted, they were cousins, but extremely distant cousins, not the sort who produced web-toed, cross-eyed children. He had known her for years and danced with her sometimes at weddings. She was pleasant to look at. They had a shared interest in horses. If you couldn’t exactly call her intelligent, neither could she be fairly described as an idiot.

David Merridith and Amelia Blake. Their names had an inevitable, satisfactory rhythm. She was a soft-featured, coltish, fidgety
girl with a remarkably derisory sense of humour, which came flickering occasionally through her habitual insouciance like a fire-cracker through a foggy night. Often he found her humour unsettling. Her way of forging an alliance was to find out who you didn’t like and then to demean them as often and as vigorously as possible. This was difficult for David Merridith; there were very few people he truly disliked. She was also quite fond of hitting you as a sign of affection. Her response to a joke was a raffish slap across the shoulder. If she’d had a glass of sherry she could start flailing at you. Soon, Merridith realised, he was avoiding making jokes in her presence (not to mention giving her sherry) because he found being cuffed by his fiancée confusing.

Two weeks after their engagement was announced, he went alone to Viscount Powerscourt’s annual shooting weekend in County Wicklow. He didn’t care for shooting, not being much of a shot; but he liked to try to understand exactly how the guns worked; the reek of gunpowder in the apple-crisp air. At dinner he had been seated across from a boyishly beautiful English girl whose carefree laughter made him want to keep looking at her. It was the first time she had been to Ireland and she found it bewitching. Her best friend, a girl with whom she had schooled in Switzerland, was the second eldest daughter of the house: one of the celebrated Wingfields of Powerscourt. He and the English girl had danced a little. She had teased him for his gaucherie at dancing the Lancers, for making a botch of the convoluted figures. They had strolled for a while on the torchlit terrace, admired the rococo fountain which decorated the ornamental lake. It had been purchased by her friend’s father in Italy, she told him, and was a copy of a piece by the great Bernini. Everyone thought it was an original but she knew it was a copy. She had a talent for spotting fakes, she said. She would like to go to Italy one day. She was sure she would get around to it.

An attractive efficiency underlined her conversation, an assuredness he wasn’t accustomed to in the women he knew. She wasn’t like his sisters, certainly not like his aunt, and she wasn’t a giggler like Amelia Blake. There was a confidence about her that was almost brazen; it reminded him of someone he rarely thought about now. The night he met Laura Markham he had not had much sleep. Somehow he sensed that he would always know her, though in precisely which way he could not be sure.

The next day he had found himself watching her through his field binoculars when he should have been shooting, or watching other people shoot. She and the other young women spent the morning on the terrace, wrapped in blankets, sipping coffee. Some played chess and others plucked at guitars but Laura Markham spent the morning reading
The Times
. Merridith found that completely intriguing. He didn’t think he had ever seen a woman reading a newspaper. He kept hoping she would find some reason to come down to the meadow, but she never did; she just sat there reading.

Luncheon was noisy and slightly drunken. The parlour games that followed were noisy, too: a cacophony of flirtations and excuses for touching. That evening, everyone had gone holly hunting before early supper. He and Laura Markham had formed one of the teams. Daringly she had linked his arm as they crunched the gravelled pathways, as they crossed the carpet-like upper lawn, as they inspected the ranks of stately foreign trees that needed battalions of gardeners to keep them alive in Wicklow. Little interest was shown in finding holly, or in finding anything except a place to be quiet. In the lengthening shadows the plucked shrubs and primped hedges (pruned into hippogriffs and otherworldly birds) appeared slightly macabre to Viscount Kingscourt. But he felt easy in her presence; quietly companionable. Glancing back at one point, he had seen their footprints traversing the frosted lawn in untidy parallel. The sight had seemed to Merridith a signal of something peaceful. Soon they had found themselves in the Lower Pet Cemetery, where the Wingfields gave their animals the touchingly respectful burial they did not give to many of their tenants.

She was looking at the elegant gardens in a way he found unreadable. The lights of the house in the misting distance were like those of a ship in a magnificent dream.

‘Is it like this in Galway?’

‘No, it’s wilder in Galway.’

‘I think I should rather like that. I like wildness.’

She sat back onto one of the ornate porphyry slabs, the tombstone of a colt that had twice been placed in the Derby, and folded her arms with an amused sigh. A screech-owl rose from the rhododendrons with a startled clatter.

‘Yorkshire and Brittany and places like that. These prettified
gardens make me feel slightly sad, I’m afraid. A bit like seeing a pixie forced into a corset. Don’t you agree?’

Merridith was a little taken aback. The restrained women of his acquaintance didn’t say words like ‘corset’ in public. He suspected Amelia Blake wouldn’t even say it in private.

‘Perhaps you’ll come and visit us one day. In Galway.’

‘Yes. Perhaps you shall invite me to your wedding,’ she smiled. ‘I should like to come and observe you in your natural habitat.’

He hadn’t realised she knew he was engaged and he wondered silently how she might have found out. It thrilled him that she might have been interested enough to ask someone. ‘Would you dance with me if I did?’ was the best response he could manage.

‘I might do,’ she said, gazing out at the lake. A gondola with flaming torches was gliding across it. ‘But I think you’d need more lessons first. Don’t you?’

He remembered the first time his hand had touched her waist. She’d been wearing a white dress that Sunday night, with a sky-blue sash that emphasised the small curve of her hips. A crucifix glittered near the hollow of her neck. The dance was a waltz and his arms had ached with stiffness as he held her. ‘I suppose they don’t waltz much in Galway,’ she said. ‘Will you get me a small brandy? We’ll drink it together.’