Mr Darwin's Shooter (16 page)

Covington whistled at his work, meriting more praise than he earned in dreams. He copied Darwin's way of prising open shells with a knife, cleaning them of flesh, washing them out, and tying them together with a piece of thread while keeping the hinge intact. The smaller shells the naturalist told him to pack inside the larger, to save room, and to ensure their safety. The cleaning they completed on deck until rain drove them inside. Covington was told that a scientific collector in England would give more for a shell covered by its rough coating than when it had been taken off by unskilful hands.

‘I shall keep that in my mind,' he said, with a forwardness that prepared his way.

With Darwin that long day Covington experienced what he knew, but hardly dared hope, would free him from punishment this time round: namely, that any sailor who assisted the ship's gent was given goodwill by certain officers for the reason that the gent was close with Capt, their avenging Moses, whose law was writ in officers' commissions.

As the work went along Covington heard these words: ‘Good man, well done, you have been a brick,' and other such let-outs of breath as occurred to the one he chose and would serve unto eternity if he was wanted. They settled snug in the poop
cabaña
where Darwin let go the
preposterous strain gents had about them, even between themselves. He culminated in examining Covington's thoughts as he expressed them, rather than by fossicking around the root-hairs of his nut and making suppositions. The boy liked this better, and his vanity swelled. It came about that Covington knocked shells to the floor that were arranged for sketching, and was able to set them from memory back just as they were, making piles of uninjured, cracked, small, large and curious, all ready for the gent's pencil.

Darwin turned from the table.

‘This is good, Covington.'

‘Yea?'

‘The captain praises your wits.
I
praise your eye.'

‘I look
and
listen,' Covington replied. Then rubbed his fishy hands through his hair and gave out a grin. ‘That is not all the captain says about me.'

‘I would not know,' said Darwin, his jaw tightening a little. There would never be any gossip from him, and that was that.

‘He is a good Christian, our Capt,' said Covington.

‘Indeed he is.'

‘I am a believer too, as the Lord is my witness.'

‘I can see that about you.'

‘Can you indeed?' Covington was interested.

Darwin looked uncomfortable. ‘It is a manner of speaking.'

‘You have seen me at my texts?' insisted the boy. He was deaf to any sarcasm that Darwin allowed himself.

At that moment, seeing a barrel of dirty salt that needed moving, Covington enfolded his arms around it, and raised it to a higher shelf.

‘Not there,' Darwin said. ‘In the hold if you please. With my other stores.'

Covington staggered below, where the air was fetid and always smelled of mildew and dead rats, and of a fishes'
graveyard. He stowed the salt between the parlour furniture of the Fuegians and a few labelled jars, and returned wiping his hands in quick-time down the side of his breeches.

‘You have good strength,' said Darwin.

‘I have, if I am given good work,' Covington boasted. ‘Lifting, carrying, hauling. It is all the same to me.'

‘You have concentrativeness, too.'

Covington laughed, gladly remembering that great word and a few others besides.

‘Where are you from?' Darwin asked.

‘The topgallant forecastle,' Covington quipped, ‘above the coalhole. That's where I swing my hammock. I sometimes believe I was born there, 'cause whenever I want better for myself, I get sent back there.'

‘Your accent is Bedfordshire,' said Darwin.

‘Just so. There is no room for me there any more,' Covington nodded, ‘except in the open fields. But then our John Phipps gave me a taste of the sea. Us Covingtons go back before Oliver Cromwell's time, God bless 'im.'

‘Your people are dissenters, still?'

‘They are butchers and horse cappers,' Covington nodded, ‘that is what they are. They love their meeting house and their ale.'

‘Bone men too?'

‘Aye. By the drayload.'

‘I am always chasing bones.'

‘It is a long road round, to go back to Bedford for them.'

‘Agreed, we are better off in America.'

‘We?' said Covington with dim hunger in his voice.

‘Tell me more about you,' said Darwin.

‘They say I was born in a stable and wrapped in a horse-blanket. I do remember this—on cold nights we put our feet in warm horse-cack. That is barely all I remember till I was taken to chapel, and then I saw a young man leaping a stile. He was in a stained-glass window. I kept reaching out to it.'

‘You wanted to break the glass?'

‘Nay, but I am telling you something curious. That young man had a round face and light-coloured hair, which puts me in mind of you, sir.'

‘Indeed,' said Darwin a little remotely.

Covington leaned his hands on the table. The day had worn him down. He'd had nary a wink of sleep and his fever tackled him. Darwin peered at him close. ‘Use a chair, if you please,' and sat Covington down. He felt pinched at the knees from the tight fit. He had legs like callipers and bumpety wrists that slung from his sleeves like bollards. And so did his brother Darwin have long legs, bumpety wrists, and so on.

‘It must be no great joy,' said Covington, ‘to be wedged in here writin' out your thoughts, while the sea bucks you around, and Lieutenant Stokes draws his charts at the same time, aye Mr Darwin?'

‘It has its compensations,' said the gent, and Covington believed from the light in his steady eyes that he meant entertaining Covington himself in that steamy tinderbox might be one of them. ‘Covington,' he stared at the boy roundly, ‘you are very ill. Don't deceive me with it.'

In his guts, Covington feared, he was working up to a run for the Spice Islands. But he shook his head. He didn't want to leave where he was. ‘I am fit as a pudding in a dog's mouth,' he boasted as he looked around him. He had been in and out the poop cabin carrying cocoa, tea, beef on a platter and pease porridge by the bucketful; and looking in those books, that one time with Mr Stebbings; but had never looked around him as he did then, with such ease and freedom.

‘It is a real snug little home you have in here. You must be warm as a mouse in a churn.'

‘When it is calm I like it better than anywhere else in the world,' acknowledged Darwin.

‘Is that where you place your pillow?' Covington gestured at a plank.

‘Yea, and I can never get my legs fully stretched.'

‘It is easy to see why not—if you never make space behind your head.'

‘But then I would have no place for my pistol box.'

‘Your pistol box might stand on its end.'

‘True but where?'

‘In that corner of the bookshelf that is empty.'

‘Ah,' said the gent, ‘but that bookshelf is the preserve of Mr Stebbings' library. There are books that fit in that place.'

‘Where are those books now?' asked Covington.

‘All around the ship.'

‘And will they be always around the ship?'

‘No. They come back each day. And so the space is filled.'

‘But some others will always be a-going out?'

‘Aye.'

‘Then there will always be a hole ready,' said Covington, ‘and another just the right size for you to fit your head in. It would not do for me, but your head is not such a great enlargement as mine.'

‘The better for thinking, say I,' said the gent.

‘And whatever else bumpology wants of it, eh?'

‘Bumpology—indeed.'

‘It is not thinking that I do with my knob,' replied Covington. ‘What is the point? Us Covingtons are not made for thinking. Ask me and I shall do a job for you, though. Like this board that gets in your way. It can be done quick smart with just a hammer and awl.'

‘Perhaps, perhaps.'

The gent was getting too much of Covington altogether. Sometimes there was never enough air in a ship even for one.

Covington did not wish to go.

His hand strayed to a stone ink-jar on the table and he closed his fist around it, feeling the coolness inside. ‘I want to show you my hand,' he said.

‘Let me see your copperplate another time. I have seen a lot today.'

Covington felt a darkening inside him, prelude to a faint, and told himself to force the day to its very end, for he had that power, to unfold his advantages and take his chances to the peak of his blood.

So he dipped a quill, and pulling over a sheet of paper he duplicated a piece of writing he saw in front of him. What it was, and whether Darwin continued his praise thereafter, Covington never knew, because at this pass he fainted clean away.

His head hit the table. He made a sticky mess for all to see. Mr Wickham came in, and Capt came in, and they called for Ash, the gunroom steward, and Fuller, Capt's steward; and those two oxen carried Covington by the arms and legs to the opposite end of the bark, where he was draped in his hammock above the coalhole and left to sweat. Darwin did not visit him, but sent a steward with eucalyptus drops to freshen Covington's air, and dose him with more opiate, which peopled his dreams.

When Covington came to his senses it was morning and Phipps was there to visit him, peering into his face so closely that the first thing Covington saw was a small mite creeping through the tangles of the catechist's curly black beard.

‘Cobby old cuff,' he felt his shoulder being shaken.

‘Where have you sprung from, John Crow?'

‘Right from where I sit, here on this chest. I have recited half the gospels to you and you gave me your responses all over the place. You had the Temple Mount at Sinai and the Israelites were never in the Red Sea at all, 'cause you had them in the Dead Sea getting baptised.'

Covington told him his surprise that it was already the next day. ‘It must have been my ghost doing all that talk.'

‘You are a great knock, Rosin-the-bow. It is the third day since they put you here, and you have been raging like a hurricane and sweatin' like a river.'

‘I am as cool as you like,' Covington asserted, and swung to the deck. But when he touched the damp timbers he collapsed in the legs. Phipps hoisted him back up and told him, in answer to a question Covington posed him, that there had been no punishments listed; that as far he knew Covington was Gent's missy now, because Gent had speculated to Lieutenant Rowlett that he might send for an
order of trowsers for him, to be cut from cotton duck, to replace the ones that had been torn by Covington in the forest.

‘You are hurt by this, John?'

‘Hurt? Nay. You take me for a fool. I have fallen to the deck in a foul wind from a height of fifty feet and broken several bones. That is what I call hurt.'

‘Good, then.'

‘This other is not hurt, young sinner.'

‘Do you have a fear of what I want, then?'

‘No, for if I had I would have expressed it before now— because you have been going around this bark like a lovesick seagull with your eyes on that gent for the best part of our whole voyage, and what have I said about it before? Nothing, as I recall.'

‘Nay, but your eyes have condemned me sometimes.'

‘Eyes are but mirrors betimes.'

‘Very well. But will you say what makes you so sour?'

‘Well, I can hardly say. Maybe it is that I have come here to watch over you, and that gent, who you brought so close to your desires, has neither sent nor asked nor given you a half farthing of his thoughts.'

‘Then I thank you. But he has sent medicines.'

Covington showed a physick. It was a thick glutinous mulch reeking of sulphur, and Phipps was humbled.

‘I must take care to be charitable with him,' he said sincerely.

‘I love you, John Phipps, you are the same as my own kin to me, even in our storms.'

‘Now it is my watch,' said Phipps, bunching his beard in his fist on hearing the bells.

‘John?'

‘Yea?'

Covington reached out and took his friend's hand. ‘Did you pray for me, John?'

‘I did that, and I believe you were pulled through by a power so great that we are plain sinners to have bad words.'

 

The next to call was Volunteer Musters bringing his news. He said there was a great argument between Capt and Darwin while Covington thrashed in his hammock. It happened two nights before. At the end of it, Darwin declared, he would no longer dine in Capt's cabin, but would join the gunroom for his gut-pudding. The gunroom was made gloomy by the division, for their voyage drew its mood from the wedding of Capt with Darwin, and the gentry were like children when their parents scrapped, uncertain of their place. By the evening of the next day the two had patched it up again. So what was the fight about?

‘You don't like to hear,' said the child Musters, looking at Covington with sly contempt.

‘Why “don't I like to hear”?'

‘Shan't ever tell you.'

Covington leaned over and twisted Musters's ear.

‘Quick, or I'll make you cry.'

‘And I'll have you flogged.'

‘I am strong for that.'

‘It was slavery.'

‘Whose slavery?'

‘Why, slaves' slavery. Whose do you think?'

‘And you were on our captain's side,' said Covington, letting go of Musters's ear. ‘You are all for slaves.'

‘Positively so,' he said, rubbing it, ‘otherwise I am a mutineer.' As a parting shot Musters said: ‘And if I was a captain I would have you hanged, Nob Head.'

‘And I would have you served for supper, King Dick.'