Deluded Your Sailors (38 page)

Kittiwayke
slipped. I fell onto my arse on her deck, and then her deck vanished. The cold water, thick salt death, took me from behind. I broke the surface enough to suck in air, but I can't swim.

Deaf and gone under a third time, I tried to twist out of my coat.

Someone got my plait and nearly tore it out of my head, hauling me up. Then hands everywhere, hands and air. Someone held my nose and forced me to swallow rum. Pollard and Penney rapidly stripped me in the sickbay, and then I spewed, rum and salt and gall, Pollard the while wrapping me in blankets and bidding me remain in the chair and not dare lie down while Penney fetched my spare uniform.

I sent for you a few hours later. My last chance? I suppose you were, but my last chance at what? What I needed from you was some sense of what had just happened, some confirmation that all

I had witnessed was real. Then I recalled Runciman speaking of you and your
Bonny Jane
, ordering me in an aside to keep an ear for word of you, and there you stood. I had much to ask you, for there was a good chance you were whom you said. And now I am dying in your bed, and I've still asked you naught. Captain Cleasby interrupted. I will be facing final judgement, and that ass will bellow that my orders and soul be damned, he will face judgement first. Do you know I dream of him first and last? The moment I drift to the moment I wake, his face, his voice, Cannard, interrupting my dreams. Interrupting my dreams!

Captain Cleasby ordered you ashore, and me below, to discuss, what was it he said? A strange matter. Oh aye, very strange. Strange as a captain in His Majesty's navy ordering a prisoner to be beaten for questioning. Strange as Finn the murderer, Finn the pirate, Finn the thief, and Cleasby the captain, Cleasby the judge, Cleasby the hero, taking the musket butt himself to Finn in grossest perversion of office. Naught had dug up the gold to now, no threats, no death, naught, for no gold existed here. Finn spoke true. The only prize was Finn herself. And Cleasby must not know.

Finn lay insensible, bloodied from injuries to the head and face.

Yet these injuries did not fret Pollard as much as the blows to Finn's back and the odd swelling on the right side of Finn's chest.

I asked how these injuries had come.

‘The prisoner angered me,' said Cleasby. ‘Pollard, tell the lieutenant what else we have uncovered.'

Pollard took a quick breath; he might speak more boldly to Cleasby than I, and he did, looking like a stiff actor. ‘I am most concerned with injury to the kidneys. These blows are unnecessary.

And I know not if I can treat them. What in hell possessed you to strike this prisoner so?'

Cleasby grinned like a snotty midshipman after his first whore.

‘Handsomely, Dr Pollard handsomely.'

Finn grunted.

‘Dr Pollard,' said Cleasby, ‘tell the lieutenant just what you discovered when you looked to the injuries.'

I did not need to be told.

Finn looked at us now, pain hardening that already hard face, the same face I'd studied for three days.

Captain Cleasby laughed.

Even smaller out of the greatcoat, Finn moved with slow care.

Dr Pollard had removed Finn's shirt to treat the blows to her back, and of course he had unbound that tiny bosom. One small breast suppurated. Many scars marked her chest, as though someone had taken a knife to her. The blanket clung to a form almost without curve, waist and hips near on a straight line. Rough and ropey flesh.

Accidents and a boyish body. The cunning and tutelage of a spymaster. Stolen gold. Bitter knowledge late tempered by the friendship of Con Pilgrim. A person at once used and refusing: a murderer, a thief, a captain, a spy, a
rara avis
, a female.

Dr Pollard asked, ‘How hide you the bleed?'

I asked, ‘What is your name?'

Cleasby asked, ‘Where is the prize?'

She spat at us. It landed on her arm.

Captain Cleasby ordered Pollard and me from the sickbay.

Pollard said, ‘The captain's wrath, long a prisoner, is now released.

Kelly, a jar is shattered at our feet.'

I coughed. My plait, still wet and heavy, soaked my back.

Hearing noise from the sickbay, I recalled the Portsmouth dock and the half-dead tar who picked me up as though I weighed no more than a doll. I had but five years that day, out walking with my mother, though now, looking back on it, I cannot say what she was doing with me in hand on the fogbound docks. The tar, missing an eye and most of his teeth, leaned against a barrel and seemed asleep, mouth slack. I peered at his gums while my mother peered somewhere else, and then she tugged my hand to move me along, but the tar picked me up, his hands immense and tough as rope under my arms, and he seemed set to fling me above his head, very happy. My mother screamed. And he put me down, almost dropped me, mumbling something about the colour of my hair, and he ran off, slipping easily into the fog. Years later, at the house of my uncle, for we lived with my mother's brother, I sneaked into her bedroom and found the box she tried to keep secret. She'd shown it to me once when I suffered a fever. She'd tried to tell me something. Within the box lay a letter and a lock of red hair, darker than mine. I tried to find that box again, view that lock of hair. My father, she'd said, had died at sea, and his name had been John Kelly, too. I promised her I'd never go to sea.

Cleasby opened the door and ordered the surgeon to tend to his patient. To me, he said he'd get us on course for England, but I must submit to the surgeon's care.

I followed Pollard into the sickbay, where he said he'd find me something for the cough, when my knees gave way once more, a most annoying weakness. Pollard got me to a hammock, prying loose from my fingers what I'd found on the floor when I fell: a fly-button, thread ripped. Another sound, of hard breathing, and Pollard hastily took covers and placed them around Finn, who leaned heavily against the wall, and who, under this one gesture from Pollard, suffered herself to be helped back to a hammock.

It mattered little, Pollard said to me as he tucked covers round me and a paper in my breeches in preparation for my journey in the jollyboat back to Port au Mal. It mattered little that Cleasby ordered Pollard to sew Finn's corpse into canvas and dump it overboard with neither recognition nor ceremony, for Finn could not have lived much longer. Injury to the kidneys meant blood in the pisspot, then no piss at all. Pollard added ‘She may not have known what happened.' Murderers will be hanged. And ships will sail home. I felt confused as Pollard helped me up to deck. England already? Fever so long as that? Then I took in the meaning of the jollyboat, of Cleasby's refusing to meet my eyes as he spoke of my duty done by
Kittiwayke,
of new orders to wait in Newfoundland for a rendezvous with another agent. Fever, I told myself, it must be the fever, for what tale would Cleasby tell the Admiralty? Yet here I lie in your bed, you bitterly watching. Pollard so gentle, tucked covers about me, muttering of the danger of chill, and I asked him where
Dauntless
was bound. He said, ‘I wish for Harbour Grace, so I might see my sister.'

Yet even then, with his telling me so much, Kelly hid other truths – within his breeches, inside a false pocket: begrimed papers.

Kelly being protective of his clothing and Lacey declaring he would know the reason why, I stole the papers. At Lacey's next absence from the Hall, I hauled off Kelly's breeches and much disturbed his lungs, but I must get the papers before Lacey did. In Kelly's secret pocket rested notes towards a report addressed only to ‘My dear and honoured SIR' and topped with
‘
Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin which you have lost.' I peeled the sheets apart, deciphering with difficulty the secretive hand. Folded with these notes lay a short letter in yet another man's marks, some medical gibberish. Thankful for my foresight and large pockets, I kept the papers, for Kelly, despite his ravings about duty and his need to confess, would never freely give the papers to me. What man would?

I place the papers here.

Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin which you have lost.

My dear and honoured SIR:

Your task and my voyage being most difficult, and I fearing I may not return for reasons both beyond and within control of mortal men, I hereby collect my records of conversations with F—, who did come to trust me as a tired traveller might trust a sudden innkeeper and so did speak with some freedom.

Oedema at ankles, wrists, and face. Stoppage of urine. Gross injury to kidneys?

Body shows recent bruising and swelling.

Body shows many knife scars on the chest, the tops of the thighs, and within the hairs on the
pudendum muliebre
. One breast swollen, recently knifed in an attempt to drain a large sac of pus.

Body shows some emaciation about the ribs and the deconditioned leg musculature somewhat typical of the seaman. Buttocks flat and firm like a boy's. Shoulders broad. Arms strong, well-developed.

Hair brown with some grey at the temples and over the ears. Eyes green. Age difficult to ascertain as many teeth remain. Cause of death: exhaustion. H Pollard, MD.

28) DUST ON WET INK
C
ANNARD
'
S LEDGER
.

As John Kelly lay babbling in his fever, I suddenly called to Lacey, startling us both with my tone. ‘Admiral Lacey. Do you believe in the sacred trust of the deathbed?'

‘What of it?'

‘I must get to Harbour Grace.'

‘You've not made that demand a while, Cannard.'

‘Not for me this time, but for Lieutenant Kelly.'

‘And how do you intend to get there?'

‘Why is it, sir? Why? Why have you, year after year, prevented me leaving this settlement?'

Lacey said, ‘At each moment, I needed you.'

‘Yet you had no understanding of what I needed. You deliberately interfered with my tasked work. All those years, spring and fall, I tried to get on board
Boyne
, because, sir, I needed to get to Harbour Grace and get my news, if not myself, back to England.

Why did you prevent it?'

Lacey smiled, almost fondly, though his eyes stayed cold. ‘See the splinter in my eye? Be a good man now, and remove it.'

Passion left me. ‘Was it simply because I wished it?'

‘You give up too easily, man.'

After a few moments, I walked where he'd walked and stood in the open doorway. I watched Aurelius Jackman wade ashore, late returning. Beyond him, the offreach and the harbour, the narrows and the fog, vast water. Behind me, blunt cliffs and conifers; above me the old spike used to hold Michael Riordan.

The fog rolled in quickly; I would see no stars that night.
You give
up too easily
,
man
. Kelly mumbled behind me, and I stood before and within all this presence, understanding naught.

ACTS OF FAITH

So bitter, so courageous,
at times I think you may just
need to cry.

Wake up...

Madison Violet, ‘Wake Up,'
Worry the Jury
, 2004.

29) ‘FRET THY SHORE'
A
UGUST
29, 2009, O
RANGE
L
ODGE
, P
ORT AU
M
AL
, N
EWFOUNDLAND
.

—Jesus, Nichole! Couldn't you make it any more tourist-friendly than
that
?

—Evan!

Evan Rideout pointed in mad dismay to his copy of Nichole's play manuscript. —How the hell is anyone gonna show the Royal Navy diggin up a settlement on stage? ‘Infancy's soft bones'? And don't get even me started on your Captain Cleasby character. No way,
no way
would a naval officer behave like that. You are
never
gonna get TCR fundin if you don't make this more realistic.

—No, I am never going to get TCR funding if I tell the truth!

Seth Seabright knocked on the open door.—Sounds like I got the right place.