Deluded Your Sailors (14 page)

Thus from Salem, where I sent my letters enquiring after
Kittiwayke
and her history, and where arrived the navy ship
Dauntless
to seek a prodigal and a thief. I drag my finger to the spot on my table where Newfoundland should be, were this chart large enough. A missing Newfoundland. Would I'd missed it, and all these bitter collisions.

Come to inheritance after the death of my older brother James in 1719 and suddenly no more angry at being cast the second son, I did permit myself be tasked to voyage on King's business to this mess of fish guts and rocks settled in tiny snatches, as though God–

Does it not suffice that I keep him in food and gear? Good God, he'd waken Lucifer with that denting fist, bring us barren waters, the sea as much a desert of cold salt as any plain of hot sand when the fish hide. Aurelius Jackman at my door, so named for his silly mother's paternity, though how a Devon tenant came to the burden of ‘Aurelius' remains a dull mystery. At least I know this Aurelius Jackman at my door be no flesh of mine. Nancy Truscott, later my wife in the manner of this place, witnessed Aurelius' birth in 1717. She cheered his obscured face: born with the caul, he was, a most fortunate sign. Once Jackman became a man and took to wife a Simms girl and fathered three sons, he fancied himself my equal, coming uninvited and unannounced to the Hall (a dwelling Admiral Lacey, fever of determined settlement on him, had built separate from his fishing rooms) to, of all things, talk.
Converse,
he meant;
discourse
, he desired: he accomplished only talk. He does so still, all manner of subjects, and I catch myself unlocking such treasures as I had packed in my young brain before taking departure (though to look back remains the worst mistake, for it feeds my bad dreams). Aurelius Jackman in turn speaks to me of what he did witness or heard upon his visits to Harbour Grace, visits increasingly made on my behalf. Harbour Grace, once my most fervent desire, is now a spot I visit but annually of necessity, for I find no appeal or truth in Jackman's description of its worldliness.
Tis a major port, Mr Cannard
. No; my Bristol is that.

Jackman might be pleasant enough company when he deigns to show courtesy and sense. Other times he stumbles past my door when I am writing the tallies or elsewise far from a fit and proper state of mind. One evening, he mocked me, gently at first, gently, so I knew not the fire'd been lit until I smelled the smoke come up between my toes, this unlettered fisherman casting me as a heretic whom he might pluck from the flames everlasting of my own pride. I'd erred before, confessing to Aurelius Jackman I felt forgotten by God. He'd laughed.

The fishermen here be much occupied with fog and the patterns wind marks on the surface of the sea. On foggy days I wheeze, for I never got my lungs' strength back after the wrack. I did marvel, before my first whole winter in Newfoundland, at the bravery of fishing in fog. So I remarked on it to Tom Truscott, my wife Nancy's first husband. ‘Course we go out in the fog,' he told me, brazen and dark. ‘We like to eat.'

Cast away. A castaway for fourteen years in this settlement of thin-stilted draughty shacks perched (and praying not to slip) upon this stone leviathan, this lonely rock sheared and broken out of the sea, up out of the sea: Lucifer's fist, shaken at God. Thrown off, unwanted seed. Fourteen damned years, God far away, past fog and strange sky.

I did be trapped in this Port au Mal fourteen years when
Dauntless
pursued
Kittiwayke
through the narrows. ‘Sunkers out there,' Tom Truscott liked to observe, with annoying frequency, nodding at dozens of rocks that broke the water at low tide. I knew those sunkers. They can bugger a compass senseless. Some devious mineral sparkles in threads through the rocks, Lucifer's embroidery, and near these rocks not even simplest cork and needle could point out the truth. Tis a strictly local phenomenon, for none suffers such trouble navigating near Harbour Grace. My little brig,
Bonny Jane
: her tortured compass needle jerked east, west, east southeast, and west again until wrenched north to circle widdershins as we squinted at charts in maddened lamplight. So we met the sunkers.

Relics of
Kittiwayke
fouled the nets and washed ashore for years after she sank. Aurelius Jackman, gifted with a preternatural attraction to flotsam, often discovered pieces between rocks. Newman Head's several letters, perhaps most helpful, now lie safe and bound together in Admiral Lacey's old trunk. I witnessed but a flash of the story myself, a scene illuminated as if by lightning over a bog; my memories do not suffice.

I owe debt as well to the first lieutenant on board
Dauntless
, John Kelly, who died in my bed of pneumonia. Kelly possessed knowledge which must, he begged me, reach England.

So, trapped, aged an ancient sixty-seven, I sit with a scrap of sail, a splinter of mast, letters from Salem and a dead man's notes. I need the winter nights already promised me to plot this particular course, which I shall mark on the old time, for I dislike the new calendar and its fuss over twelve days. The players be: myself; a spymaster named Runciman; Captain Finn out of Salem; Captain Cleasby and Lieutenant Kelly of the Royal Navy; some agents; a female; a bag of gold; old charts and a useless compass. The story began, as does much in this life, by accident.

The accident occurred at the Bristol docks in late 1718, March month. I expect I did be there.

11) DRINK THAT LIGHT
M
ARCH
1718 (
OLD STYLE CALENDAR
), B
RISTOL
, E
NGLAND
.

Ignition: the silly and sacred
fwhoom
as Robbie Pike lit the torch and the torch took the flame. Ann, dressed in shirt and breeches, long hair tied back in a plait, breathed deeply and got the scents of pitch and rot layered over the dank stink of the Avon. Pike and Ann worked the riverside, this major shipping route giving plenty of business. Pike, her guardian since, well, always, kissed the top of her head and playfully cursed the moon. Such a team, Pike and Ann, she so quick and smart in her disguise, he waiting to carry out the rougher work. Under Pike, Ann got nearly enough to eat and usually a place behind a wall to sleep. Robbie Pike had known Ann's mother, and he'd made her a promise: —I'll look after your Ann. I swear, by all the stars in the sky and all the tears in the sea, that girl shan't work the trade whilst I live.

A story to cling to, like a blanket. Ann liked the story and often asked to hear it.

—What did she die of, Pike?

—Fevers and regrets, but even then, all she cared after was you.

Torchlight and shadows made Pike's skin and eyes yellower, his hair and beard darker. He'd trained Ann to pass as a boy on the streets because boys seemed to have a marginally easier time of it. How he and Ann would manage when paps and hips erupted, he'd got no idea. For now, Ann worked as a glymjack, or a linkboy, one of those youngsters who bears a torch and guides a man's way though a city at night. The darker the night, the better the business. Glymjacks sometimes partnered with larger thieves, making a walk at night a calculated risk. Alone and unlit, you risked getting robbed. Following a glymjack, you also risked getting robbed. Not all linkboys led a man to trouble, but many did. With light, you might escape. With luck, the linkboy led you to your destination. Linkboys could also make extra money with their hands and mouths. Pike did not expect this of Ann.

Prettier linkboys sometimes disappeared.

Target in sight, Ann blew life onto the torch's flame and darted out of shadow.

—Glymjack, sir? Light the way and guide the walk, just one farthing.

The customer paid readily. He stood straight and easy, broad in the shoulders but thin in the legs, arm muscles forcing his sleeves taut. A sailor, almost certainly. He fingered his left ear, covering it then with most of his hand, and leaned down to look the glymjack in the eye.

—Ever heard the story of why a sailor drives rings through his ears? Sharpens the eyesight.

The sailor yanked his hand away from his ear. The scar had been cauterized, healing clean. The bottom third of the ear was gone.

—No truth to it. Got that sliced off in a fight, and I see fine. Should like to know who sliced it off? Man who tried to cheat me.

Failing to back away before he could clamp a hand on her shoulder, Ann tried to bring the relationship to some shade of normal.

—Where to, sir?

—Let me look on you a minute longer and mark those green eyes. Be feverish? No, forehead's cool. Such a sweet face. So sweet and complete. Better fall and burn in hell for your pretty face than drown in the shitten gutter in the dark, hey? Can you sing as we walk? A second farthing in it.

Ann accepted the extra cash, swallowing little pricks of fear.
Two farthings, don't run from two farthings …
Pike should be quite pleased.

—What song then, sir?

—Can you sing ‘Lizie Wan'? My ship's docked near the Cannard and Son warehouse. Do you feel no cold?

Even close to the flame and certain of her path, she felt the cold. First glymjack lesson Pike taught her: how to poach warmth and light the way. He'd told her a story about Lucifer falling from heaven and stealing fire on the way and then giving it to mankind. Jesus hunted Lucifer down and saw him nailed to a rock so birds could eat out his liver every day, except clever Lucifer substituted a lesser devil and carried on to rule over hell. Ann always imagined seagulls tormenting the demon, first with their racket and then with their beaks, but she'd yet to see a good rock to set the scene. Another of Lucifer's tricks: to draw heat from the fire without setting oneself alight. Slippery one, that.

Ann's torch only brief defiance, a little standard of need against fertile shadows and noise, she led her customer along a shortcut. Five times the night before, as she had many nights, Ann had led her customers to Robbie Pike, who hit them, aye, but just a love-tap to the head – no stove-in skulls here, no ambitions to murder. Clotted blood over the ear and a headache be all. A matter of a deathbed promise to a clapped-out whore, aged eighteen. A matter of study, of pace-counting by daylight. A matter of getting something to eat.

—Tis so? Fuckin little liar.

Expectation in the customer's voice: he'd spotted the trap. Ann swooped the torchlight at him and darted off some more, trying to confuse him, tempt him away from Pike.

Does ragged-ear see in the dark?

—Follow me and my hot green eyes, hey? Hey? My pretty face be over here. Over here.

She'd never heard Pike say
Jesus
that way before, hoarse and deep in the throat.

Someone fell.

Ann waved her torch again, desperate for sight. Robbie Pike twitched in a puddle.

Run
–

The sailor's hands missed her neck and shoulders but just caught her plait. He jerked her back, and she dropped the torch. It rolled against a wall, burning low.

—Flick those pretty eyes and lead me to ruin? I'll teach you hard lessons against that. And I'll hear that song, too.

He taught. She knew.

She weighed maybe fifty pounds, mere feathers for him. Skull smacked off the wall twice, three times, hard fingers prying and blunt – split, rent – by all the stars in the sky and by all the tears in the sea.

Footsteps and torchlight. Still behind Ann, the sailor reached round and snapped back one of her fingers, breaking it. His words seeped as he crammed her into his ditty bag. —Pretty little boy-gift, thrown across my path by maybe God Himself. Who be I to argue with God? Screw your eyes tight shut and let not one whisper get past those lips. Keep stiller than death or get more of it, hear me? Little thief. Little gift. Keep still.

12) DEAD RECKONING
M
ARCH
1718-20,
AS TOLD
J
UNE
1734
TO
L
IEUTENANT
J
OHN
K
ELLY
, RN,
BY
C
APTAIN
C
HRISTOPHER
M
ATTHEW
F
INN
.