Mr Darwin's Shooter (3 page)

The sailor stood on the footbridge overlooking the canal and stared at Covington in the water. Whether he looked with interest or just gazed in that direction like a blackbird with quick, sharp, alert-headed movements was of little account to Covington, who didn't like it at all. The sailor scratched his ribs under his red waist-jacket. He wore flared canvas trousers, and on his feet were wooden clogs. His hairy shins showed bare. The sun glittered on the water and blinded him. He put a hand to his round beard and bunched it in his fist, giving it a twirl. Though it was the dress of a sailor he wore, the canal was far inland from the sea.

Who the man was Covington would learn when he saw him again in autumn, and remember him as if he had been planted in his brain and stored there to ripen. It would be cold by then and John Phipps would wear an overcoat and a cocked hat and call to a crowd under a lime tree with words to twist a rope around Covington's heart and haul him up from being down:

That summer day, however, the man stared into the canal a long time; too long; and Covington made a blurting sound like a wet trumpet to accuse him of foul curiosity. When the man still stared, Covington grabbed himself between the legs and gave a tug and yelled, ‘I caught a fish, it's a big 'un, look, see?' Then Covington saw the man tiredly grin and heft his sack of belongings across his shoulder and screwing his eyes against the glare of the sun disappear from sight.

The day emptied except for hens from the lock-keeper's cottage giving themselves dust baths on the towpath. Covington climbed from the water unpeeling strings of green weed from himself, giving a shake like a dog, then mopping his chest with his clean shirt taken from his bundle that smelled faintly of beeswax from Mrs Hewtson's understairs cupboard. He dressed and was cool, and was clean enough, too, but still carried the over-sweet fatty odour of the slaughteryard about with him. It would never go away for as long as he lived in his father's house.

 

Sunday meant chapel, where Covington sat next to Mrs Hewtson. She was his plump excitable stepmother, a fresh-faced widow and the best friend Covington ever had in the world. His real mother had died leaving him with a memory of sweetness and a green ribbon his father had placed in their Bible. Mrs Hewtson wore her best Sunday bonnet, which Covington told her was pretty, and she said he had better not say that to just any maid, or she would be jealous. She had rosy cheeks, humorous eyes, a teasing kindness and a great devotion in her heart. He played the fool and ground his knuckles into his forehead and dribbled spit from his hanging-open mouth onto the bare dusty boards between his boots. Mrs Hewtson nudged his knee and giggled, offering her bunched handkerchief to wipe his lips, and whispered, ‘Be serious about you, now.' From a
low, sinister angle Covington flashed his pale blue eyes at her, smiled and grunted, going at her with a small jerk of his head just like that bullock. She was very young.

‘Stop it,' she squeaked, and the preacher, Mr William Squiggley, paused in his delivery, sending Covington a look of accusation: ‘What was the last thing I said, Simon Covington?'

‘You said that Abraham heard the voice of God and he took his son into the desert.'

‘Why?'

‘To cut his throat, that's why.'

‘To make of him a
sacrifice
. And what happened next?'

‘You did not say what happened next.'

‘That is true,' said the honest Squiggley, who was their printer and bookbinder in his weekday trade, and easy with bad debtors because they were all good Christians and true.

Squiggley continued the story of Abraham and how there was a ram caught in a thicket, and how the life of the animal was taken for that of the boy about to be sacrificed in obedience to God. Covington lifted his eyes to the window-glass where he lived in his thoughts. His Pa dozed, dreaming of Mrs Hewtson's bezooms that were like jellies in his palms when he woke in the mornings. The brothers, matched each to their future wives in adjoining pews, had the look of dozing horses. Their ears twitched when the preacher's voice rose, and steadied when he prayed.

Covington raised his hand to answer a question about the boy, Isaac, and how he must feel being released from having his throat cut. He did after all go forth and father the people of Israel, and nobody else seemed to know that. But the preacher wanted no more of him.

Come weekdays Covington sat at a high desk in a leather-merchant's loft where he copied letters and entered transactions in ledger books. He had none of the scuttling resentment and affronted secrecy of the older clerks, but gave all to his work. He thrust his tongue between his teeth and twisted his body in keen concentration, half-slipping from his stool and balancing himself on his elbows as he wrote, one foot toeing him from the floor.

Cattle hides came to Quentin House from South America packed in bales and tied with hemp. They arrived in barges up the River Ouse and were unloaded at Great Barford. Broken open in the warehouse they were dry as parchment and so hard that being slid out by warehousemen they made the sound of a shovel being scraped on stone. They stank with an odour of dried blood and arrested decay. It was a stink known to Covington before he was ever taken on as a clerk, for it hung about the slaughteryard of his Pa. Thistle-heads squashed flat were often found in the packages, and once a greasy-handled Spanish knife that was passed about and then wired to the wall in the front office as an exhibit denoting the romance of cattle on the estates of La Plata.

It was a great illusion of power, sitting high above the busy town with the economy of leather radiating out from under Covington's fingertips. Written words, with their
dangling tails and spiny longitudinal bones, engrossed him as they flowed from the tip of his nib. He could go all day on a folio of long f's and deep y's. Bootmakers, jacket-makers, upholsterers, saddlers—all, down to the man who made leather stops for musical instruments and up again to the one who packed cushions for the royal coach, placed their bids at the auction rooms and came begging Covington's master for terms to pay, which Covington conveyed back to them in his fine copperplate that he had learned in dame school from the age of seven.

But when he heard his Pa say that his boy would one day rise and stand equal to the Quentin House in money and fame, then Covington felt his stomach shrink. Those Quentins were mean procurers of shoddy advantage. They were Established Church and looked down on Baptists and Congregationalists as less than thistle-weeds. ‘No mind, they have found you good work, and a lifetime's employment to keep you away from sticking a knife into gore,' insisted his Pa. But there were nights when Mrs Hewtson's sprogs pulled the bedclothes from Covington in their sleep, and he rolled to the floor lying groaning and looking up at the stars through a small breath-fogged window, believing he was always to stay down.

Covington would spit his shame out at his work by grunting like a bullock, extending his leg into the aisle of the office and tripping the messenger boys who came running past. While they were sprawled gathering their wits he took his aim and dipped a chewed-up ball of paper into a dish of ink and sent it flying from the tip of a wooden ruler. He could give a boy a wet black eye and send him howling in confusion and be poised over his next page of invoices before the ruckus began from on high, and a culprit was sought by the overseer. Covington beamed his innocence back in the face of any accusation. Though later there would be a challenge to a fight with bare knuckles along the canal-side, and Covington would find that the
boy he chose to bully had great spirit, and wouldn't give up, and so Covington wouldn't give up either, and they would fight down to the end, slugging, mauling, damaging, until their skin rubbed raw and they powder-puffed to the finish.

One day late in the year Mr Timothy Quentin, brother of Covington's master and a man with the manner of an undertaker and with a foul breath besides, asked Covington and six other boys to come with him to his rooms and be given something worthy of their services. The boys jostled to be first in line and the one with his hand out most promptly was Covington. He was given two dull florins and told of an excess of hides on the market. There were just too many cattle on the plains of South America and other houses were stealing the trade. What this had to do with Covington being rewarded he was slow to perceive, and only understood when he walked out of Mr Quentin's rooms, and found warehousemen stacking the clerks' stools and desks away. It made no difference that Covington was the one highest-praised. The busy room of boys and penmanship was to be made a storehouse until prices rose, and then the Quentins would have their hides as cheap as anyone. At the prospect they could barely hide their glee.

Carrying a half-eaten apple and a beef bone that was to be his dinner, Covington walked through chilly damp cobbled streets where houses leaned over his head and almost touched. He sat under the bare-limbed lime tree in Bedford town square, blinking around him at the unaccustomed hour of noon and seeing how worry and care seemed to line every face. He wasn't hungry. A gangling youth walked around calling salted pilchards and an old woman dragged a bucket of slops between her knees and when Covington tried to help she scolded him. What was he to tell his Pa? That his sire's pride was just a nag to the slaughterhouse, unwanted, without value, scorned? That same morning Covington had whistled and thrown conkers at stray dogs and everyone had seemed to be laughing in the brisk smoky chill. Now faces looked pinched. The same youth returned and called his salt-fish with his head thrown back, shaking his tray, and they were slow to be gone at a ha'penny a clutch. Covington dropped his head between his knees and closed his eyes. He did not know how much time went past. He was in the Vale of Despond.

But there came a sad moaning in the air like a swarm of bees beginning its flight. He listened without raising his head or opening his eyes—only his mind came to attention. Then curiosity overcame him, and he blinked and tipped
his cap behind his ears and looked around. It was not bees but the sound of a song coming from a huddle of men in the square. One was the salt-fish boy. On looking closer he saw they were
all
boys and not much older than Covington himself. They had weatherbeaten long faces and a look of the earth about them, as if they had climbed from sleeping in the ground. He had seen them beforehand, separated from each other, smoking their little clay pipes and scuffing their poor boot-heels in the shiny, overtrodden ground. They had seemed like anyone else he might see that day, resigned to a change in their lives that would never come. Now they formed a line. They had peculiar life in them. Covington's spirits gave a lift. A man joined them, older than the rest by far, and Covington recognised him with a kind of longing excitement in his heart: he was thin-faced, curly black bearded, and wearing a cocked hat and a seacaptain's overcoat that swished the tops of his boots when he made his determined stride. He had famished red lips and an excitable smile. One minute he had not been there; the next he sprang from the pavement just a few feet from Covington's face. ‘That is my sailor,' thought Covington, ‘who always goes round staring at a body.' The sailor took out a jew's harp and sounded a key of C. His companions broke into a shanty:

Covington jumped to his feet with a look of bright amazement. ‘I'll be in this,' he muttered, and ran with others to where the quintet performed outside the baker's shop, their arms around each other's shoulders and their boots kicking right and left. Covington clapped his hands and shouted ‘Oi!' at the end of every verse:

‘Oi!'

The baker came out and handed around sweet buns. Covington took one and sank his teeth into it. Then they went around the town venting their chorus on whoever cared to listen, stopping on corners, being handed more food, gathering coins. Covington went with them for a good few hours with all the fascination of a stray dog yelping at the moon. One of his brothers found him, and said they all knew what had happened at the Quentin House. They were sorry. What would he do now? He had not considered that, except that he was doing it, and his brother clapped him on the back, said it would do to warm the day, and let him alone.

In his uncracked soprano, Covington sang as joyfully as anyone, learning the words as he went along, adopting the rolling gait of a sailor and obeying the signals of the leader, John Phipps, the sharp-eyed seaman who at each turn when the boys formed a square raised his arm and fluttered his hand like a flag in the wind, laughing, smiling and encouraging the dance.

More than once Phipps caught Covington's eye. More than once Covington laughed back at him. John Phipps was a gamecock challenging and strutting.

Then Phipps stopped still and said to Covington directly:

‘Do I know you, boy? I think I do. I think I know your heart what's more.'

Covington dropped his eyes from being known. He felt a nakedness to be covered, and nothing to shield him.

Then the seaman slipped his jew's harp to his mouth and cupped his hands around it, making a tune that slowed everybody down, and brought them breathing slow and feeling warm and happy into a circle around him. They were back in the town square again. There came a last twang that faded into the silence.

‘Be still,' was the meaning of that signal. ‘Furl your topsails and drop your anchor.' The sailor called for his squadron to kneel and be given a blessing. The crowd that had gathered wrapped its rags around itself and shuffled in a little tighter. They were the poorest of the parish, hungry for dreams, and if they could not have their dreams then toss them a sugar-crusted bun, and if the baker was not inclined to redouble his whim, then give them a pilchard from the fishboy's basket. Give them something. Even words to chew upon.

John Phipps gave them his sermon. He said he knew a great admiral, and the admiral was Lord of the Fleet. The admiral was one in a thousand and could do many things at once: he could build ships, launch them, serve in them, sharing travail with their sailors, and he could fight with them when dying, leaping from ship to ship and always being there with them. Yes, John Phipps had met him and knew him. Yes, he had fought alongside him as his Lord's Obedient Servant and had seen him die. And behold in the morning of the third day after the battle-smoke cleared, had seen him with his very own eyes, a man brocaded in gold and wearing a hat like a crown and carrying a book in his hand that was the King's regulations of truth writ on his lips.

‘How can he live when you saw him die?' asked a beggar, with hope.

John Phipps bent down to him.

‘Landlubber,' he said, ‘for the love that he has in his King's service, he is sure in the world that comes next to have glory for his reward.'

He took a testament from his pocket in the last grey dusk. Resting a foot on the worn roots of the lime tree he struck an easy pose, throwing his coat-tails back. His intensity had a hunger to it, Covington saw. It demanded everything to itself. And when his audience listened, as he bade them to, and only sparrow-chirp and the grind of a passing cartwheel disturbed the silence, the hunger disappeared. Phipps's feverish eyes and his pained smile gave over to a changed appearance.

He caught Covington's steady eye watching, and asked, ‘Ain't that right, boy? Ain't that how we can die and live?'

‘But isn't
he
the King,' Covington asked, ‘if he can do all them things, jump across water, live again, come back on the third day, and all? Isn't he the one who rules everything,' and added stoutly, ‘isn't
he
the King of the Jews?'

‘A clever boy who exceeds my parable,' said the sailor, putting his arm around Covington's shoulder, ‘says my Admiral is Jesus of Nazareth and indeed he is. What an emissary he makes. Yet though he is called King and Master,' (here twisting Covington's ear with sharp humour) ‘
I
call him Admiral. He is the only man whom the Great King on High has authorised to lead the fleet in which any of you may serve. Wherefore take my meaning. Bear in mind my parable lest in your journey you meet with some that pretend to lead you right, but their way goes down to death.'