Signals of Distress (16 page)

What would the sea make of the snow? They watched the tide swell up, curl its lip and skim the beach of snow like children skim the cream off cakes. Soon some crewmen from the
Belle
, too
bored and restless to stay in bed, joined the Wherrytowners on the beach. Snowballs began to fly. The snow was mixed with sand, and was dangerous. Walter Howells decided it was time for
pilcharding.

M
IGGY
B
OWE
had had her fill of fresh beef the night before. Her dreams were bilious. Her stomach wasn’t used to large
amounts of meat. She’d had to get up in the dark to pass an aching stool into the flattened heather behind their cottage. The night was cold and white. She squatted, shivering, and watched
the lanterns of the fishing boats beyond the broken
Belle
. Her gut ached. It took its time. She didn’t like the snow at night. It put her on display. She could be watched. She’d
heard the movement in the undergrowth when she’d first hurried out of doors. She’d taken it to be the cattle or a fox. The dogs were barking and pulling on their ropes. They always
barked when there were foxes near. But now that she was bent up double with her nightshift bunched onto her knees, scarcely balancing, and constipated too, the night sounds seemed more sinister.
The undergrowth was not asleep. It fidgeted. It stirred. She heard the snap of wood, and then a chilling silence as if someone twenty yards behind her back were standing on one leg, mid-step, and
watching her. She couldn’t think that anyone would be about at such a time, on such a night, excepting fishermen, of course. Or Devils.

Miggy did her best to look around, to decipher all the darker shapes. But if she turned too much she’d topple. Was that somebody up against the rock, somebody large and shadowy? The shadow
stayed as still and silent as a bush. But other shadows seemed to move and deepen. Again, the snap of wood, and silence.

Miggy was as quick as she could be. She didn’t bury her waste. She had no light. The snowy earth was far too hard. She left it for the foxes and the crows. She shuffled back home. She
didn’t wait to rearrange her clothes. She untied the two mongrels and let them go to chase the Devils away. The dogs went off, twisting like hunting eels into the snowy breakers of the hill,
their barks abusive, their ears turned back like gills. She heard them growling in the dark, but soon they became quiet. There weren’t any cries of pain. There were no Devils, then. Or else
there was a silent Devil there. He had no tongue. He was half dog.

It was too cold inside the cottage to wash. But Miggy washed herself nevertheless in water from the pot next to the grate. It was a little shy of warm, but warm enough to take the gloss off one
of the bars of Aymer’s soap. She ran her fingers across the hard escutcheon of Hector Smith & Sons. She held the wet soap to her nose. Would she smell kelp from her own pits? She
didn’t recognize the smell. She’d not encountered almonds, oleander or eau de Sète before. But she was drugged on them at once. She would smell sweet for her sweet Ralph. She
dressed in breeches and a wrap. She tied her hair back with a ribbon. She knotted the
Belle
’s red-patterned ensign at her throat – ‘I need help’ – and, as soon
as there was any light, woke her mother. ‘Come on, girl. Up. This in’t the Sabbath. Let’s not be idle, eh?’ These were words her mother usually used.

It took the Bowes less than two hours to walk from Dry Manston to the pilchard beach. There was a quicker, more direct route than the coastal path. It was a wagon way which, though rutted, was
flat, partly hedged from wind and shielded from the deeper, drifting snow. Miggy – far from mithering at every step – set the pace. ‘Come on now, Ma. There’s gonna be no
work for us unless we stretch ourselves a bit.’

‘What’s biting at you, Miggy?’

‘Nothin’s biting at me, Ma. The quicker out’s the quicker in.’

‘Is that the truth of it?’ said Rosie Bowe. She was no fool. She knew the signs. Her Miggy hadn’t washed herself that thoroughly to please the pilchards. She had her hair tied
back for some young man. It wasn’t hard to guess which man that was, from amongst their new acquaintances. The windswept blond American? Or Mr Aymer Spindle-shanks, too nervous of a floating
cow to get his ankles wet? To some extent she wished it was the spindleshanks. At least the man was educated, and wealthy. And
soft
, was that the word? She’d shouted at him at her
cottage door (‘A shillin’ is a fine price to be paupered by!’) and he had blushed and stuttered and hoped that they’d be friends, when all the other men she’d shouted
at (and there’d been a few) had wagged their fingers in her face or turned away or laughed at her or knocked her to the ground. Rosie Bowe thought she could cope with Aymer Smith. He
wasn’t dangerous. But sailor Ralph? She saw the danger in that boy. At best he’d break her Miggy’s heart, and leave her beached. That’s what to expect from sailors. At
worst, he’d win her heart and sail away with her on board the
Belle
. And that would be the last of Miggy Bowe.

So only Miggy ran along the path to Wherrytown. How long before she’d hold his hands again? How long before he’d run his finger down her spine, a bone, a bone, a bone, the hollow of
her waist, his breath upon her neck? Her mother was less speedy in the snow, and for once in lower spirits than her daughter. She wasn’t sorry for herself. She was too toughly made for that.
But as she walked and watched her daughter hurrying ahead she had to face the truth of who she was: no one would hold her hand in Wherrytown, or try to count her vertebrae, no one would try to
break her heart, or take her to America. She wasn’t young or beautiful, she thought, or plump, and men and ships were not for her. She would be thirty-five at Christmas time. A modest age.
Too young to feel so old and weathered. She watched her daughter on the path ahead. Miggy swung her arms as if there were no troubles in the world. Well, perhaps there weren’t if you were
seventeen, and there were lips to kiss.

‘Go on, then,’ Rosie said, to Miggy’s back. ‘Be happy if you can. It don’t last for ever.’ Nothing does, she thought. You can’t rely on anything for
long. Not even kelp. She smiled at that, and shook her head. But it wasn’t kelp that bothered Rosie Bowe as she walked on her own along the wagon way. She could learn to do without the kelp.
She hated it. How would she manage, though, without her cussed daughter to adore? Would it be long before she lived alone?

The shore at Wherrytown when they arrived was like a winter carnival, a hundred people at the very least with Walter Howells on his big horse as showmaster, and a leaping fire close to the
water’s edge to hold bad weather off. The townsmen and the fishermen and some Americans were already in the water, basketing the pilchards from the keepnets nearest shore with as much concern
for their living catch as they would show for vegetables.

There were too many fish for sentiment. As each net was emptied and dragged up on the shore for gulls and boys to glean, so the outer nets were edged in by their boats until these pilchards were
a gasping, thrashing multitude as well, maddened by the dipping baskets of the men and by the turmoil of air and sea and sand and snow. The tide was on the turn and so the water wasn’t deep.
But still the work was wet and cold. Men hurried to the fire, between each basketful of fish, to steam their knees and coax some blood back to their faces, hands and feet. Each filled basket was
tallied by the agent Howells against the family who owned the net. He had a simple principle – he made no mark for every thirteenth load of fish. It wasn’t superstition, but a sort of
tithe, a fee for sitting on his horse. Less than eight per cent for him against their ninety-two. A fair division of the spoils, he thought. Walter Howells would make a lot of tithes that day, from
pilchards and from ships. Who needed kelp? Who needed Hector Smith & Sons?

No one there resented Walter Howells. They cursed him, maybe. Wished he’d topple from his horse and break a leg. Wished – just for once – he’d get his trousers wet and
find out how heavy a basketful of pilchards could be. But no one wished him dead. How could they manage without their agent with his peppery face and temper, and his good contacts to the east, his
wagons and his warehouse home? He was worth his eight per cent. They didn’t have to like the man. They didn’t have to speak to him. They only had to concentrate on the strenuous joy of
dipping baskets into, fish and swinging them onto the shore until the sea drained out, and know that Walter Howells would turn their efforts into cash.

The Americans would not get any cash from Walter Howells. He regarded them as volunteers, free labour, and not worth a fourpenny fig between the lot of them, despite their noise and swaggering.
They were too clumsy with the fish and were a hindrance rather than a help. They teased each other and flirted with the working women. They splashed their skirts, or dropped a pilchard down their
apron fronts, or touched the younger and prettier women unnecessarily while they helped to put the baskets on their backs. The women, happy to be flirted with, on such a high and zesty day, carried
the pilchards through the snow and sand up to the salting hall, next to Walter Howells’s house. Their baskets filled the lane, the yard, the courtway to the hall. Any living fish that jumped
free of the baskets didn’t stand a chance. They suffocated in the icy air. Or they were scavenged by cats and gulls and by the little girls whose job it was to grill them for breakfast on the
beach fire. There wasn’t any idleness. This was a working hive.

Up at the salting hall some of the older women were as panicky and breathless as the fish. They tipped each basket-load of pilchards onto the sloping flagstones and sorted them with brooms and
wooden spades. Most were sent slithering down lead-lined chutes onto the cellar floor for balking with layers of rough salt. There’d be no waste. Farmers boasted, when pigs were slaughtered,
that they had a use for everything except the squeal. The pilchards though were better than pigs: even the smell of fish was put to use – it kept the Devil out of town. Their fins, the flesh,
the scales, the eyes, they all had purposes. Their blood and oil would drain into the cellar tanks for sale as cheap lamp fuel. Their flesh would end up, thanks to Walter Howells’s hogsheads
and his wagons, on tables in London, Bristol, Liverpool and even in the sugar plantations of America, on nigger bread. The badly damaged pilchards – torn scales, ripped fins, their bellies
gaping – were flipped aside. They were fit only for manure on a farmer’s field. The second best were packed on woodweave trays. They would be hawked and jousted inland while they were
fresh. The remainder would be potted with vinegar, bay leaves, spices or pickled in jars with brine, for the spring. But the largest and the very best of the fish were put in panniers and covered
by damp cloths. These were the ones that would be cooked to celebrate the catch. No table in Wherrytown would be without star-gazy pie that night, with pilchard heads protruding from the brown sea
of a pastry crust, and pilchard eyes recriminating in the candlelight. A comic meal, and one that recognized how farcical it was to have a town so occupied by fish.

The Bowes were given jobs as basket carriers. Walter Howells was glad to see them there. They were strong and used to lifting heavy loads of seaweed and so could be expected to shift a decent
share of fish. He noted down their names. He’d pay them later on – in pilchards and with a promissory note. There’d be no pennies till the fish were sold, and he could calculate
his own cut of the profits.

Rosie Bowe was frozen from her walk. She warmed herself at the fire. She greeted her neighbours from Dry Manston and tasted her first roast pilchard of the season – not a touch on beef.
But still she savoured it. It would be a long and arduous day, an aching day. She meant to pace herself. But Miggy didn’t wait to warm herself or taste the fish. She was already hot. She had
seen Ralph Parkiss, thigh deep in the sea, basketing the pilchards with Palmer Dolly and his brothers. He would hand his next full load to her, and no one else. She’d see to it. Palmer Dolly
– that idiot! – tried to put his basket on her back. ‘Come on, Miggy Bowe. Let’s see you give the pilchards legs.’ And then, ‘I got myself a dollar here
…’ But she was deaf and blind to him. When Ralph stepped across the net, a wriggling basket on his shoulders, she paddled in to meet him. ‘That’s one for me,’ she
said.

‘It’s heavy, though.’

‘So what of that?’ She took the weight of it. Her hand held his. Her lower lip turned in to check her smile. ‘Ma says I’m stronger than a horse …’

‘Giddup,’ Ralph said.

They worked in concert then. He kept the baskets light for her, and every time they met at the water’s edge, they touched each other’s hands. Their fingertips were lips.

Where did Aymer Smith fit in? He was, of course, the Smith & Son whom Walter Howells no longer needed. Whom Rosie Bowe would learn to do without. Whom Shipmaster Comstock took to be a
kidnapper. Who was a coward and a weeper. Who was (his own assessment now) an apostate not only to God but to himself. Who had abandoned Otto to the snow.

He hadn’t slept too well, and little wonder, given how his ear and self-esteem had taken such a bruising. His nose was blocked. His throat was sore. The muscles in his legs were torn. He
should have stayed in bed. But he didn’t want to wake the Norrises with his offensive cough, or with his sniffing. Sea air, he thought, might clear his passages and lift his spirits, a little
exercise might be his remedy. So he’d followed everybody else down to the shore and stood, his back against the fire, observing ‘all the colour of the scene’, the spectacle of one
small, single-minded, unremitting town at its busiest. This, certainly, must be the point of travel, he was sure, to see the different tribes of humankind, at ease with themselves. Perhaps he ought
to travel more, to Edinburgh, say, or Paris or Florence, to see the greater works of man, the castles and the statues and the churches. Though what greater work of art than this live pageant might
he see abroad? He rehearsed (not quite aloud) his ‘philosophic certitude’ that a traveller should leave himself exposed to humankind, not art or landscape. Just for the moment, though,
he preferred not to expose himself too deeply. He wasn’t tempted to wade in amongst the pilchards. He wasn’t well enough. He must stay warm.