Turning the Stones (16 page)

He says, his tone rough, ‘Were it not for the law of hospitality that respects the stranger, you too would be overboard, madam. Next time, close the hatch after you. Or must you baulk at that request, as is your style?’

*

The captain says, ‘If I had a glass now I would drink it,’ and the cook limps over with a bottle of wine and pours a measure without spilling a drop in spite of the pitching boat. The captain is dining at his table, while I watch from my designated spot – the little fold-down table next to the coal bunker. He looks up suddenly as the dripping Dubois slithers down the companionway and grovels at his master. The
Seal
has been circling this last quarter of an hour and I have been listening to the muffled shouts of the crew’s efforts to bring the hapless deckhand from the water. Someone, I gathered, had thrown him an empty cask as a flotation device. The captain has been indifferent to the rescue. The lamp in his quarters throws his face into relief. It is as hard and steep as a cliff, with a steep drop from the cheekbones to the wide ledge of his mouth.

He says, ‘Your watch is not finished, Dubois. Go above and see it out or you will not live to enjoy another, by God.’

I am heartily sorry for my own error of failing to shut the hatch, but I think that the captain has treated the deckhand too hard and when Dubois has hauled himself back on deck I cannot help but say, ‘No wonder Terry Madden ran off, since you are such a severe master.’

The captain makes a sharp, expulsive sound that might be an attempt at a laugh. ‘A dunking is nothing. I’ve seen a cannonball go through young lads like a hawk through a flock of sparrows and their bodies torn open from luff to leech. The wars of politicians, that’s a hard master for you, Miss Smith.’ He raises his glass to his lips and finishes it in one draught. His hair is prematurely streaked with grey, I notice. Seeing that my gaze is still on him, he adds with a wry twist of the lip, which seems to be a characteristic of his, ‘Please do
convince yourself of the quality of my claret, madam. Jim, pour her a glass.’ Perhaps he very slightly regrets his sharpness, because he says after a pause, ‘The winemaker is known to me. He is a good man, who does not rush his harvest.’

He withdraws to his supper and the contemplation of a chart spread out before him. I think I can discern a compass rose in the top right-hand corner. He wolfs down his stew without noticing it, and when the cook, Jim, has taken our plates away, the captain shifts in his chair, puts one long leg over another and brings out a pair of callipers and other instruments that I do not know. He seems to be calculating the bearings of the
Seal
.

I drain my glass. The claret is indeed excellent. There is a long French summer in the bouquet of it.

The captain’s chin lifts in that abrupt way he has and at first I think he has sensed my scrutiny. I am only observing him so closely because, even with the English shore so far behind us, escape from my tormentors depends on him. There is no one else to bring me forward so I must seize the captain’s strings like a child and get where I can by my proximity to him.

In fact he is looking past me at the first mate, Mr Guttery. He raises an arm and beckons the man to approach. There is something in the captain’s lifting of his arm in that nearly negligent way in order to disguise the urgency of a situation, the hand cupping at the air …

The gesture strikes me with such force that I nearly utter a cry out loud. From the time I first laid eyes on the
Seal
’s captain I have had a niggling sense of an acquaintance with him. Now I understand why. I had seen that same unhurried beckoning on the strand at Parkgate when I was a girl.

Can I trust my eyes? Is the captain of the
Seal
the stranger who caught my attention so forcibly that day the master’s cargo went under? Eight years have passed since then. But I am certain that it is he! I see him standing on the sands, I see the revenue men approach …

And yet, where is the rising tide of delight that so engulfed me then?

The man before me bears an identical physical stamp to that fascinating stranger, but he does not captivate me at all. If anything, he antagonises me with his grudging manners and high-handed attitude.

He has returned his attention to the chart. Won’t he be amazed to discover that we have encountered one another before? To come so fortuitously into one another’s orbit must signify a meaning – although I cannot tell what. But the novelty of it! It is a connection that might make the captain more disposed to help me.

But as I stare at his lowered head, I find myself becoming reluctant to say anything to him after all. Because I cannot predict his reaction. To disclose that I once watched him escape the customs officer – if this is, indeed, the same man – is nearly the same as declaring that I know him to be a smuggler. There is no advantage to me in that. He is a smuggler still, I realise. Why else does this vessel carry eight swivel guns and a magazine and muskets and such fine claret?

Mr Guttery edges by, light on his thin shoes, and by the time he has settled himself at the captain’s table and loosened the buttons of his striped waistcoat, I have quashed the impulse to announce our previous encounter. Instead I stay fast on my bunker.

You see how I am learning to look out for myself. Well, isn’t that the way of the world? Nothing must occur but I must ask how it will benefit me.

The captain and Mr Guttery are speaking in low voices with the air of conspirators. I cannot place the captain’s accent – and I recall that was true of the stranger at Parkgate, too. At first I took the captain for Irish, but that does not seem absolutely accurate – in any case, did not Terry Madden say his master came from France? I must say that I am curious to know more of this smuggler. I can hardly know less that I do at this moment. He has kept even his name from me.

As I come to bid him and Mr Guttery a good night, I find the boldness to ask, ‘Will you do me the courtesy of telling me what you are called, sir?’

Without lifting his gaze from his chart the captain says, ‘I am called McDonagh. Now good night to you.’

The
Seal
, Open Sea
April, 1766

In spite of my fatigue, I lie awake in the shifting darkness. My rank, salt-encrusted clothes rub uncomfortably against my bruised skin, and thoughts and images will not leave me alone. Not even the very relative luxury of the captain’s berth helps me to sleep. He insisted on donating its use to me, although the courtesy was offered in a most harsh tone.

I find myself rather satisfied to know his name. Captain McDonagh.

I keep going over my first sighting of him at Parkgate: his face takes my attention and holds it. He is in conference with a fisherman on the tide-line. In the distance boatmen shift the master’s cargo from a barge to a lopsided punt. Captain McDonagh rows strongly in the surf. Captain McDonagh sets his sail.

He strikes me still as a self-sufficing man and one that is determined to come out of the way of harm. That is a reassuring quality, don’t you think?

I continue to marvel at the happenstance that has brought us into proximity. The event cries out for interpretation, but all I can say is that it reinforces my strong sense of being bound by a chain of circumstances whose links I am unable to break. There seems to have been no swerving from anything that has
taken place in my life. Is it too far-fetched to believe that my arriving at this spot here on the
Seal
has been decreed? Has Captain McDonagh been sent through time and tide to save me? And by whom or by what force?

Oh, stop, Em. What flagrant nonsense. Did Miss Broadbent teach you nothing in regard to imagination’s overbrimming of good sense?

I try to heed her advice, but my nature loves the metaphysical. I am always straining after the immaterial, or listening out for a call, and yet at the same time I know that my hearkening is futile and that the voice I seek to hear lies beyond the frequency of human audition.

*

I must have slept a little, because I dreamed I was hanging on to the roof of a house in a flood. It has taken me some minutes of puzzling to recall the origin of that image, but I have nailed it down. It belongs to one of those rather admonitory Dutch paintings that hang in the master’s library at Sedge Court. I must have seen the picture countless times without paying it any special attention. It shows a town half under water and a scattering of hefty burghers clinging to steeply pitched roofs. In the background a fork of lightning is striking an inundated church.

Why did I dream of that scene?

Because I have been thinking of Sedge Court, and of its library. Johnny and Barfield playing billiards there. Johnny scorning Barfield’s shots in that deliberately listless tone he liked to use: ‘How pitiful this fellow’s game is. He must needs cannon, but instead he fizzed.’ And Barfield mock-sulky, bottom lip outthrust, ‘Perhaps I meant to fizz.’ There was
something ritual about their repartee. Johnny pretending to know it all and Barfield pretending to be hopeless. They were always figuratively leaning back on their heels as though to get the full measure of the ironic distance that gaped between them.

There was a brass stand in the library mounted on four clawed feet, half lion, half wading bird, oddly. It was a repository for walking sticks. I can see Mr Waterland bent over the stand examining first one cane and then the other, as if the world depended on his making the correct choice, while Mrs Waterland implored Johnny to treat his guest with greater courtesy. Johnny only made the retort that Barfield was quite stupid and minded nothing but fox hunting. He wiggled his fingers at me, pretending to be a bogeyman, and drawled, ‘Watch out, wench, or he will uncouple his beagles and come after you,’ and he called me to come to the table and make a shot to demonstrate how facile the game was.

I shrank from the invitation, but Eliza cried, ‘I will do it, Johnny.’

Johnny ignored her tremendously.

He began talking to his mother instead about a moneymaking scheme. He and Mrs Waterland liked to discuss money. I paid attention to those conversations. I knew that many people were frightened of money, of the possibility of its loss, and I wondered if Johnny had discovered how to make money flow. If he had that power, Sedge Court would never be in trouble again. Johnny began telling his mother that he had been to see the dean of the cathedral in Chester. The dean hoped to raise funds for the church by selling a portion of its property at Abbey Square in the town. Mr
Waterland’s eyebrow lowered and he muttered something about alienating the ladies with masculine talk, but the mistress impaled him on a pointed look and asked Johnny what he had up his sleeve.

Johnny wanted his father to secure a loan from the bank to buy the land. His idea was that they would build townhouses in the square or in some of the old lanes and sell them on.

Mr Waterland interrupted Johnny’s flow again, dismissing the proposal as mere speculation.

‘There is nothing mere about it, sir,’ Mrs Waterland retorted. ‘The improvement of property has made many fortunes.’

‘Speculation is all that Chester is good for,’ Johnny said. I remember he and his mother smiling at one another out of matching almond eyes.

Mr Waterland remarked that if the difficulty of the Dee could be overcome, Chester might give Liverpool a run for its money once more.

‘Oh, the Dee!’ Johnny turned to Barfield. ‘My esteemed father is infatuated by the river, don’t you know, but it is the merchants of Chester who are the difficulty. This is an age of commerce and they are behind the times. The guilds are too much concerned with maintaining their privileges to be capable of mounting a challenge to Liverpool. But Chester’s bricks and mortar can be relied on to swell in value. Uncle Felling has shown that.’

I remember Mr Waterland swivelling then towards that painting of the doomed burghers and Barfield remarking with that poorly tuned voice of his that the picture reminded him of wily old Rotterdam.

Mr Waterland said, ‘It is not Rotterdam, Mr Barfield. The subject is the drowned land of Reimerswaal in Zeeland.’

‘Never heard of it,’ Barfield said.

‘Most of it vanished in a storm a long time ago. Its loss is blamed on the lord and landowner for his neglect of a creek that scoured at every tide. The town was left marooned on an island for several years until one day it disappeared beneath the waves entirely.’

*

I am plagued by nightmares. Someone stuffed me into a compartment and filled my head with stones. They kept grinding against one another and banging at my temples. My throat was blocked by debris and it hurt to swallow. I had the feeling that a storm had passed through me, leaving all kinds of wreckage in its wake: broken branches, smashed grasses, a meadow scoured. And then, too, I was sinking in a swamp and no matter how long and hard I screamed for help, nobody came to my assistance. I am afraid to close my eyes again. Has morning arrived? Down here in the hold I cannot tell. My stomach turns and I feel the gripe of nausea. An unpleasant smell of suet hangs in the air. It might have stolen down here from the pot they keep on deck for coating the lanyards. Or perhaps a tallow candle is still burning in one of the lanterns. I pull the berth’s curtain aside cautiously.

It is still night, damp and everlasting. The captain is asleep in his chair, his hat pulled down upon his face. I creep from the berth, cesspail in hand, and climb awkwardly above. I mind to close the hatch. A blast of ocean air buffs my face. I can make out a figure at the helm and another forward on his watch, hauling out a line on a sail until it stands flat on the
wind. How embarrassing it is to have to do my business in the open like this, but I manage it, grateful for the covering of darkness, with the bucket concealed beneath my petticoat. Then I let down the pail on its rope and rinse it in the spray. There is a terrifying beauty to the scene – a limitless sea of heaving black satin and flashes of spindrift under the moonlight.