Mr Darwin's Shooter (27 page)

He had the cut-throats around him again in the dawn
light. They said they loved him as a brother, but really they wanted his boots. They were made by a cobbler in Monte Video to a pattern copied from a famous Spaniard's pair. He splayed his fingers inside them from pure pride, fitting them to his arm, giving them a buff of leather-soap, twirling them in the air and admiring the stitching, that was neat and regular, with a flourish of fleur-de-lis on the toecaps (that was supreme in the originals). Usually he kept the boots in a sack. But today he wore them, and his best shirt besides.

 

Covington and Mrs FitzGerald splashed over the edge of the green world. He had his killing to do, making deft work of stopping the hearts of small life. But he tried not to get his clothes too dirty. Mrs FitzGerald noticed the change in him. She teased him, and said he was
un grande galopeador
away from his ship. She didn't mind if he got himself dirty—wasn't that what men did? She went on in a vein of flirting and he boasted to her some more of what he did— grubbing up old bones and captivating new animals, smiling at the idea of himself so far removed from the lanes and fields of Bedfordshire. She made admissions of herself in return, being from a town in County Cork, Marlow by name, which she had left as a youngster riding pillion on a bay gelding with the son of an Irish lord, Mr Barry, who wished to marry her most devoutly but was forced home. So she was stranded, for a time, in Jamaica, until rescued, abandoned, then rescued again by Mr FitzGerald (who died), and found herself in Monte Video. When she spoke of her girlhood she removed her hat and loosened her hair, and in the heat of the day placed her jacket across the saddle and joined Covington in his shooting and preparation of specimens, taking an interest quite emphatic and useful.

‘What is he like, your Mr Darwin?'

‘He has more energy than me, and I have plenty for ten,' said Covington. ‘If there is something he wants he will go
to the ends of the earth to find it. He is clever, but you would not think so.'

‘Then he is not like you,' she flattered.

‘I am not clever, but I am better than him in ways.'

‘I am sure of that. You keep telling me,' she smiled.

‘You have heard me boasting. But see us together and you would have another impression. I seem quick beside him on some days. I have seen him stand while his shadow moves around him. He is all the time thinking, and he declares by a great authority that genius is patience.'

‘Are you patient?'

‘I cannot wait too long for what I want.'

‘Does he rate himself so high?'

‘No. You could say he tries to make himself invisible at times. But his effect is always strong.'

And then Covington let out an annoyed word, and said that he always ended feeling confused around Darwin when he expounded his science, as if his brain was stuffed like the insides of a specimen, with nothing but bark, leaves or cotton waste. Even FitzRoy their captain did not always keep up with him, either, though he tried, especially when the finds were special and exciting, and then he baited and mocked his ship's naturalist in the way these gentlemen used, that was foreign to the ordinary ship's company: ‘I do not rejoice at your extraordinary and outrageous peregrinations, Darwin rarissimus, because I am envious— jealous—and extremely full of all uncharitableness. What will they think at home of Master Charles—“I do think he be gone mad”,' etcetera, and words to that effect.

‘One day I was jumping to understand what was behind what he did,' said Covington, ‘because there is always that feeling, that he knows what it is and won't say. And I said to him, “Is it like those things that are seen are
temporal
, as the books say; but there is something even more
invisible
, and we might see that too, if we find
enough
,” and Darwin was pleased with me, and said, “That is exactly
right, Covington, full marks. The things that are not seen are eternal.”'

‘You make him sound like one of your English parsons with an answer to everything, and going about the countryside exposing the blessed mysteries.'

‘He plans on getting a parish right enough, I've heard him say,' said Covington, ‘you know, with a “good living” and “a thousand a year”, it would suit him very well. And he longs to get his oats that way too.'

‘His “oats”?' she smiled.

‘Aye, cockeyed, ain't it?'

Mrs FitzGerald leaned across and placed her hand on Covington's wrist, and looked him in the eye. It was a way of reacting that made Covington feel important whatever he said, and he knew he could be boastful with her, or complaining, or saucy, and it was all the same. ‘He wants a pretty wife on a couch in a vicarage, as he puts it, and I think that is where he beams his lusty thoughts,' he added.

‘He has lusty thoughts?' she asked.

‘Well, wouldn't he, being a man?'

‘If he had been to the same school of advancement as you, Mr Sleepy-Eyes, I would say so.'

He thought it a pity she wasn't free, otherwise he would make his confession to her right off, that they might make a go of it, ride away, and be adventurers together. They went to their horses and started getting them ready.

‘What is it like, going on pillion?' he asked.

‘I was never so free,' she said, and without too much ceremony got up behind him, letting her saddle-horse follow, and he felt the grip of her arms around his waist and the pressure of her cheek against his back.

Then they were closer than speaking.

 

It was noontide and the next day. Covington was skilled at finding advantage in declivities and hollows, where he
waited prone with his gun and lay back with clouds drifting over, watching larks climb almost from sight and then float down pouring out their song until they settled in grass near his head. Mrs FitzGerald lay beside him. He spread his nets and waited. The next lark that came he caught, and handed over, telling her not to put the least pressure on her fingers, or its heart would stop. She admired its gleaming eye and noted its palpitating breast, and then she set it free. Covington thought: If Colonel de las Carreras came upon them he would want to know what they were doing, so close and so smiling. Then he would take Covington as she took the lark, with ease, but whether he would set him free was a question. He would possibly shoot him or at the very best pluck his feathers. Contrariwise he might arrange for him to be feted a hero and be given a sash for his protection of a virtuous bride. You could never tell in this country what it would be—unless you were an Indian: If you were an Indian you would be chased, ridden down, betrayed, clubbed, knifed, slaughtered. If you were an Indian girl above fourteen years you might be kept and used, but other wise Rosas's men went out in troops two hundred horses strong and crossed the plains to the snowcapped Andes. They went on chases five hundred miles long, night and day forsaking food and drink except for mares' blood. It was not wise to even begin thinking about it.

Mrs FitzGerald reached out a hand again, and tweaked Covington's ear. ‘Did you hear what I said?' she asked. He hadn't, he was going deaf, and so she said louder, ‘You have two cock birds in your bag and shouldn't you get you a hen?' Well, he told her, he tried to get one each of whatever he bagged, the cock and the hen, but was never sure what he scored. Sometimes he killed the same kinds over again without realising, skinning and preparing like mad, binding the trays to his packhorse frame and sending them off. Variety was what mattered—the differences showing in beak and tailfeathers, speckled backs, breast markings,
often easily observed, sometimes harder to tell. Mrs FitzGerald seemed to follow what he said, but he thought she was not listening to the words as such.

They lay parallel, propped on their elbows. She moved from tweaking his ear to stroking it a little absent-mindedly. It was all about
phylogeny
, he said—what belonged with what, which bone fitted where, which gaps in knowledge an animal explained. If you had a fancy, continued Covington, you might think of birding, bugging, and bone-study as an argument running back and forth, in which the samples from the
Beagle
's voyage played their part. When they got back to England there would be their great congregation on the matter, and Darwin would be in the driving seat.

‘I am tired of your colleague,' she said.

‘Colleague is flattering. He is a Cambridge University man and I am a boy from a boneyard. He is one of those who is always “joshing” all the time. But he never joshes me.'

‘Is he rich?'

‘Very.'

‘Is he a looker, Syms Covington my lad?'

‘Better than a pig and worse than a peacock.'

‘Oh, he must be then,' she smiled. ‘I never trust a man to tell me anything worth knowing about another man. It's in their blood.'

He liked it she called him a man after calling him a boy.

‘
I
might tell you anything I wanted,' he said.

‘What is stopping you? I heard you admired my gloves, but that is all. Do you have nothing left to say?'

‘Nay, but you are betrothed.'

‘Pledged but not bounden,' she said, a little tartly.

He took a breath and considered the danger of her. Eyes watched in these empty plains and made their reports. Who knew if any watched now? Troops were stationed not far ahead. There was a chance she would turn the tables and
want him to flee with her if he made a grab for her bezooms, which he was close as his next breath to doing. Did he really want to run away with her? It was the whim he'd had. But not now. Not on his life.

Yet he drew close, and his blood was stirred.

 

Covington told it to Mrs FitzGerald as they rode along— that his master lacked warmth. Didn't he realise that if he wanted a dog, Covington would even learn to bark, and fetch a bone?

‘You do all you can and more, and you have a great heart,' said Mrs FitzGerald, tilting her head to one side and looking meltingly at him. By unspoken agreement and mutual plotting they nudged their horses towards a grove of poplars that marked a slight rise on the plain. The ground would be dry in there and the place sheltered. A burnt-out chimney showed where a house had been. There were no other buildings around. As they came closer they could smell the sweetness of poplars.

The air was clover-fresh, pungent, tangy with new growth. Covington drank it as wine. Ribbons of smoke wafted through the stillness and hung in bronze bands across the lower sky. Covington believed he could sniff mischief-making gauchos a league distant and sense their savage guile. There were none too close, no smell of burning meats ribboning the flatlands. But if he was wrong he carried his pistol in his coat to make things equal. Likewise for ostriches, hawks, ducks, anything else that clawed the blue sky or pecked green grasses. He sensed where they were; went after them; and because he wanted them, he found them. A small dose of lead so as not to damage them, only kill them, understand, and then they were ripe for skinning.

In such a way Mrs FitzGerald was delivered to him in the grove of poplars in the warmth of the day. She stood down
from the saddle before him peeling her gloves, and then impatient with the pearl buttons she tore them off.

For the rest it was soon done, a matter of a carnal greed and exchange of pleasure most satisfying and exhausting: an education in lasciviousness. It happened over two days yet seemed without limit and was rich with animal instinct. Their chiefest glades were swathes of old thistles, dark woody trunks from the previous season that only ever hid treacherous Indians (but they were gone) or wandering cattle (but they had no fear of them) and so they had only prickles to remind them of sanity, which state of mind was last in their thoughts. Their marks of civilisation were a coarse blanket, an embroidered pillow, and Covington's bird-hide with a length of cane holding it from the ground and making a shelter for two. With their game declared he was in a rage of wanting her any way he could. She held him off with a small hand, laughing and asking had he been with a woman before. His eyes hooked into her, ‘Not a white 'un,' he breathed, and she cooled (he thought) considering his worth.
Not with a woman the way I want you, madam
, his mind rumbled,
either, with your legs in the air and your back in the dirty
. Would he ever get into her business-end this way? While she plucked at buttons and tugged pretty bows he tensed and waited. The bullock of Elstow had nothing on him, his blood so full that his eyes stretched tight in his skull. ‘You are no help to a woman at all,' she taunted, but when he lunged, getting a hold of her bubs, she was exasperated and pushed him off. ‘Not so fast,' and she asked him to kiss her but only to kiss her, nothing else. Was the horn in his trousers never to have its toss? She guided his touch, a quick hand for squeezing, a slow hand for stroking, and a chuckle around his getting to her under-silks—‘
push
it back'—and a purr—‘
roll
it back'. Her breath was sweeter than plums, all softness was in it, and when she fell back, crying, ‘Take me,
buen mozo
, I love
you,' in a most dramatic way, his need led him into her— quick, there, done.

And there she was with her skirts under her chin and her eyes like a cat's, and ready for scratching and hissing again. It was a good pattern they had.

Except that while they still had a day or two left of their ride Mrs FitzGerald began tidying herself too much, frowning with irritation at her jacket all stuck with burrs, and dismissive of Covington when with all his boy's humour he tickled her at the waist and grabbed her ankle to bring her down, and she turned on him hostile.

On their last night they were among friendly troops and she was queen. He was like a whipped spaniel over the quickness of her passion. Through the days before he'd downed everything on the wing in the neighbourhood, a figure of eighty birds and also twenty small quadrupeds, rats, mice, pests, night visitors. Uncountable more than that was the number shot and rejected as being spoiled. He was in bad spirits and totally gone on a rampage over his situation with her.

A ringing in his ears came on while he squatted on his haunches in a small mud hut, peeling birdskins by the light of an oil lamp, his forearms bloody and his fingers running with the warm, yellowish crop of seed-eaters. The business put him in mind of a useless meal. The sound came like a screech of wineglasses being hummed by a wet finger, and he looked through to the next dim room where Madam was dining with officers, to see if a game was being played, as he had seen the gentry doing at captain's dinners, but their cups were forged from clay as you might expect in that country, and they were eating meat from their knives. So he went to the outer door and stood watching the stars, wiping his hands on his apron. Maybe it was them—the heavens. They sang, did they not, as they rotated in their spheres? He was tired and his head was not right. Maybe it was time for three shining ones to come to him and salute
him with Peace Be To Thee, to set a mark on his forehead and set a seal upon it, or something of the kind, because he felt like death after enjoying her favours so mightily, and death brought to mind sin and disappointment after such ripe whirligigs. The sound came from within material matter and from around it at the same time, which is what he understood an emanation to be, and there was only an eternal explanation for that. He was betrayed, confused, stung, and reduced to a desperate nonentity and he wanted to be gone from this life.

‘Do you hear that noise, a small bell, a cricket?' he asked her when she came through for air, sweeping somewhat grandly in her new importance. He was conscious of over-politeness to her, arch and offended.

‘Dear oh me,' she hissed, ‘whatever is wrong with you? You are not in love with me, are you? Don't spoil it.'

Smiting his head with the flat of his palm he said, ‘The ringing, don't you hear?' Mrs FitzGerald looked alarmed because he yelled. What sort of passionate fool had she lumbered herself with, when she had only wanted his desire? The soldiers that came through calling her back to the table wondered at Covington crawling around on his knees, bothering his head like a dog with a sore, looking under casks and following into the corners of the room for the source of the ringing. They blocked a hatch and closed him in, and he yelled that he would have them shot, for which they kept him longer, cackling as long as their adored one allowed it, which was not for long, and then spewing their apologies. A post-rider had been sent to fetch Colonel de las Carreras and now shots were fired, shouts were heard, horses whinnied being spurred most cruelly and reined in at the same time to keep them frenzied. A great jangling of silver was made and elaborate orders shouted, responses given, and there went Mrs FitzGerald open-armed to a portly, suspicious Carreras illumined by a flaring torch of thistles carried by a peon.

The next day they rode into sight of Buenos Ayres and Covington had his last look at Mrs FitzGerald. A night's sleepless thinking had diminished her in his mind. She rode at the side of the Colonel resembling a pouter pigeon, and nothing would make you think there was anything in her policy except reflecting his importance. Carreras belonged to the Rosas party that was blockading the city and not letting food in or people out. He was a great Indian-killer no doubt, for Mrs FitzGerald said his cattle were all safe from them. The polished walnut stock of Covington's bird gun attracted the eye of Carreras and he wanted it, offering safe passage through his lines as his price. But Covington was astounded and refused, on the honour of his master, whose bird gun it was, and said his passage was already promised by Mrs FitzGerald, and that the Colonel was obliged on her honour to provide it. Carreras took this to be immense effrontery, which it was, being a correction of the morals of a man of pride, and also courageous in the extreme from an English weed, and so to be admired. He muttered to an assistant for a few dark moments, and then the assistant came over, bowed, and said he was Covington's guide.

They waited until nightfall. Mrs FitzGerald came and took his hand, and then kissed him, quite formally, on the cheeks. Carreras bade him good fortune. They went around the fires of one group of soldiers and skirted the fires of the next. Neither side was in a mood to fight. There was just a little skirmishing, a few killed by day, and by night a kind of peace in their war. Halfway to the town they went through a plain of mud and the horses went up to their bellies. It was where the gun slipped from Covington's hold. He turned around in the blackness and saw his escort leaning away from him in the floundering, as if adjusting something on the port side of his mount. They were skilled scoundrels all of them. Whether the guide relieved him of the gun or it fell in the mud he had his suspicions. When
they reached the stones of the city he found himself alone. He learned that Darwin had waited at the Estancia of the Merchants and then given up on him, having caught the packet to Monte Video a few days previously.

So Covington was able to arrange for his private birds to be sent to Leadbeater's without other eyes around. He required payment to be made to Mrs Hewtson of Bedford on his behalf. It was a good feeling and went partway to restore his wrecked pride. At Merchant Lumb's everything was in chaos and there was constant fear of the town being ransacked. Covington waited on a balcony and saw the rebels enter, five thousand strong, and when he saw Carreras he ran down intending to face him over the gun: really there was a wish in his heart as hot and sharp as a dagger; but who should come along in a flurry but Mrs FitzGerald, almost stopping his breath, and she crimsoned and bustled him into an alcove and whispered, hot-worded, that he was the silliest, most callow fool, but she wanted him to remember her better, after all, and if he ever became rich from all his bird-plundering he was to write to her in care of Merchant Lumb's. Then she gave him a folded handkerchief, saying it was hers in Ireland as a girl, and he must treasure it close.

Her kiss was full passionate, dizzying warm, renewing every promise her touch had made, and she was gone.