Signals of Distress (24 page)

Walter Howells couldn’t ride his horse down companion ladders nor canter between decks. He had to swagger on his feet, directing what repairs should be completed, often as not with
unseasoned, shrinking wood and cordage that was badly chafed. He pointed out what minor leaks or springing planks or damage from marine worm should be disguised with gobs of tar, or battened down
with strips of wood. The Dolly boy, he had discovered, would do what he was told, no questions asked. Howells worked him all the time. That … Palmer? Was that his name? … might prove
to be a useful man in future. Palmer had asked Walter Howells to recommend him to the captain. The boy wanted, it would seem, to be a sailor and go off to America. But Howells considered him too
handy and too willing to lose so soon. He needed him in Wherrytown. He’d warn the captain that Palmer Dolly could not be trusted. Light-fingered, maybe? Clumsy? Daft? The captain
wouldn’t want the risk. Who’d ever know? Who’d ever learn the truth?

That afternoon, when dusk had put a stop to work, Palmer Dolly did ask the captain for Nathaniel Rankin’s place. He was, he said, a willing hand, and strong, and young, and used to boats.
He’d been the one, he reminded the captain, to bring the dead sailor ashore. No one had worked harder on the
Belle
. Surely Captain Comstock had seen him work? But it was too late.
Walter Howells had already said the boy had fits. They couldn’t take a boy with fits on board. The captain shook his head, ‘No, sir. Your place is here, amongst your own,’ and
went to spend his last night at the inn in Alice Yapp’s good care.

That Sunday night, they all sat down again to pie. Not squab. Not star-gazy. But good beef pie. One of the cattle in the dunes had ‘died’, and Walter Howells had given the flank to
Alice Yapp. She’d pay him back somehow, when her captain had departed. Again, the young Americans were sitting at the softwood trestle in the Commercial, raucously excited by the prospects of
their voyage home, the wives and lovers they might see in the New Year. They envied Ralph. He would be the first to have a woman in his arms.

The large oak table in the parlour was a squeeze. There were two extra places set. Mrs Yapp and Walter Howells wouldn’t miss out on beef. They sat with Captain Comstock by the parlour
fire. Only George didn’t have a knife and plate. He had to serve. And only Otto wasn’t there.

‘Not pie again!’ said Aymer Smith, down at the cold end of the table with the Norrises.

‘It’s always pie,’ said George. ‘Be glad of it. That’s why the Devil never comes to Wherrytown. For fear we’ll put him in a pie.’

At this, John Peacock took up his fiddle and played the Devil’s Jig at George’s shoulder, serenading every steaming plateful in the parlour. When George placed the servings for the
Norrises on the table, John Peacock put down his fiddle and sang in Robert’s ear:

Katie hoped that Canadians would prove to be a little more self-conscious than these Americans. The fiddler had almost put her off her meal. She didn’t like the way the beef had whistled
when George had spooned it on her plate. She didn’t like the way that Aymer Smith was watching her, as if she had the Devil’s gravy on her chin.

Elsewhere in Wherrytown, the more observant families had already finished their pies and had climbed the lanes to chapel. The Norrises wouldn’t go. They couldn’t condone the
preacher’s fierceness at the funeral.

‘Master Sacrilege and his bloody uncles, Mr Cant, Mr Sin and Mr Cynicism,’ Preacher Phipps told his smallest congregation for more than a week in his toughest – and most
alliterative – sermon of the year, ‘are not amongst us with the Lord this evensong. They do not hear the Sabbath’s holy horn. They do not lay their cups aside, they do not hand
their hammers down, they do not pause in their profanities. These gentlemen and their dark friend are not content with building Pandaemonium for six days of the week, and doing Devil’s work
amid our harbours and our homes, amongst our barley and our beans. Now Master Sacrilege is roaming free in Wherrytown and he is intent on breaking up the one day in the week when we can give our
thanks unto the Lord, Amen. These freethinkers, the Devil at their side, are lodged in Wherrytown and they are labouring against the Lord our God and His Observances.’

His congregation couldn’t think where the beans and barley were. The best they had was thistle-rye. But they enjoyed this sermon more than most. It cracked with piety and spleen. And it
was thinly coded. They could tell whom Preacher Phipps was lamming from the pulpit – anyone who hadn’t come to chapel. He thrashed the sailors and the Sabbath-breakers. Master Sacrilege
was ‘surely’ Agent Howells (the preacher’s most long-standing foe). And that dark stranger doing Devil’s work was, no doubt of it, the African. The congregation was, for
once, excluded from his disapproval. It was a happy sermon then. They couldn’t wait to sing.

So when Mr Phipps called the first note of the hymn, the congregation did its best. They sang more loudly, more zealously, more fearfully than they’d sung for weeks. They sent the African
away with verses beating at his ears. They drove him back to Hell with choruses. This was their battle hymn. They’d save their daughters and their chickens from the Devil’s work with
euphony. They’d scarify the night with noise. Their voices could be heard at sea. But Mr Phipps was not entirely pleased. The hymn seemed thin. So did his flock on that chilling Sunday night.
He should have been elated. He was not. He missed the finest voice. He missed the finest head of hair.

When Mr Phipps’s flock departed for their beds, his eyes were fiery at the chapel door. His goodnight handshakes were hard and purposeful. And unforgiving. But the preacher’s fires
were dull. He was cold inside. He put the chapel candles out and went back to the chapel house. Usually he was proud of the simplicity of his two rooms, the hardness of his bolster, the bareness of
his unplanched floor, the plain wooden cross, the water in the jug. He wasn’t lonely with the Lord as his companion. How could he be? That was the choice he had made when he was only
seventeen, that he should embalm himself in God. But today he hoped the Lord had not been his witness, had not heard him preach so icily, and did not see him now retrieve the brandy bottle from its
hiding place. He warmed his teeth and chest on it. He said his prayers. He could not sleep. His sermon haunted him. Had it been too venomous? It had, it had. It had no warmth, no Christian charity.
It was not kind. He was a snake, he thought, a hornet. No wonder people flinched when he shook hands with them. No wonder Katie Norris had not come to chapel. He warmed his teeth again. He was used
to dealing with self-pity. He lay, fully clothed, on his bed. He dreamed up better times in Wherrytown; he made amends. He and the Norrises – and even Mr Smith – were spending pleasant
evenings in the chapel house. They made a decent four at whist. He called them by their Christian names. They called him John. They put the world to rights over cups of tea. They lodged with him,
and somehow he refrained from feeding them on Buttered Tracts or Bible Soup or Hebrewed Ale, or dishing up the Word Made Flesh for supper. And Katie, Robert, Aymer, John were fond companions for
the night.

T
HE
A
MERICANS
had slept their last night at the inn. That was the end of mattresses for them. They’d spend the Monday
night in hammocks on the
Belle
, roped to the quay at Wherrytown but ready for the Tuesday’s swelling tide and for the eight hard, pieless weeks at sea which separated them from
home.

Their ship had been refitted in a breathless seven days. It would have taken seventeen – or seventy? – if Walter Howells hadn’t been there, with his quick eye and his belief in
shaving costs rather than shaving badly fitting wood. Was he their captain on the land? Their own Captain Comstock hardly bothered to speak. He still seemed beached. Dry-docked. An Admiral
Driftwood who had turned green and queasy as soon as he’d come ashore. But Walter Howells was a Napoleon: shorter, fatter and more demanding by the day. He’d told ten of the younger,
fitter sailors that they had to get out of their beds at dawn that Monday morning to fetch the cattle and the stores from Dry Manston beach. He should have sent ten older, calmer men. They would
have done less harm. He woke the Americans himself; he never seemed to sleep. The sailors only had to pull their boots and surtouts on. They slept in shirts and breeches. They didn’t wash
themselves. Tobacco took the smell away.

Walter Howells provided two narrow, open wagons and a pair of nags. He told them not to touch the smaller herd of cattle, but to drive the larger group back to Wherrytown for re-loading on the
Belle
. He gave them two black bottles. ‘Keeps you warm,’ he said. ‘And quiet, I hope.’ He winked. He put his fingers to his lips. The sailors didn’t give a damn
what Walter Howells was up to. Fewer cattle, less work, was all that bothered them. What mattered most, once they were up and out, was that they were freed from the dullness of the town and not yet
prisoned by the sea. Two nags, two wagons, two bottles, and the whole day to themselves. They would have a high time on the coast. Still farting Sunday’s beef and beer and creased with sleep,
they left the courtyard and made a noisy exit west.

Ralph Parkiss was their guide. He knew the coastal path. He led them out of Wherrytown along a half-flagged lane. Some of the sailors sat on the wagon ends and smoked. Some walked ahead with
Ralph. They only had to give the horses gentle tugs at first, but once the lane and flagstones ended and they had to climb on softer ground into the wind the horses became obstinate. They dropped
their heads, and tried to back the wagons home.

How should the sailors navigate a horse? They tugged the ropes as best they could, but made no better progress than an ostler would if he were put behind a ship’s wheel and told to sail it
to America. It would have taken them all day to reach Dry Manston beach, if Palmer Dolly hadn’t come by on his way to the quay. They pressed him into helping them. He showed them how a wagon
horse was like a fishing boat, steered by the rudder, from the back. He found two sticks, and beat the horses on the flanks. They soon put up their heads and rattled off along the paths. Once
they’d reached the granite levels above the town, the walkers had to run to keep up with the wagons, and the riders had to put their pipes away and hold on with both hands.

‘In’t there no horses in America?’ Palmer Dolly wanted to know. And, ‘What will a dollar buy?’ And, ‘Has Captain Comstock got a man to take Nathaniel
Rankin’s place?’ The sailors amused themselves with lies. No, they hadn’t any horses in America, not yet. The farmers there rode goats. One dollar bought one dozen goats, and
there was money left for saddles. No one with any sense would want Nathaniel Rankin’s place. His place was up the topmast with a stick, night and day, knocking seagulls off the rigging,
‘for no one travels free on board the
Belle
, not even birds’. Palmer knew they were teasing him. He didn’t care. He was happy to belong, and to prove how useful he could
be, even if there weren’t any horses in America, even if the captain had already said he couldn’t crew with them. He had a better plan. He’d stow away. He’d take his dollar
on the
Belle
.

The riders were numb to the bone with cold when they arrived on the bluffs above Dry Manston, late in the morning. The walkers were as warm as toast, except their faces and their hands. Ralph
Parkiss went across to the bench where he’d carved his initials, nine days before. Had they survived the snow? Someone had ringed his carving with a heart and inexpertly added more initials:
M.B. Miggy Bowe! Ralph blushed with pleasure. She must have come and seen his name carved in the wood. She’d found a stone and scratched her love for him. A heart, containing both of them. He
ran his fingers around the heart. He kissed his fingers and he pressed them to the wood. He would have put his lips on to the wood if he had been alone, and tongued the letters of her name. If only
he could slip away, and hold his Miggy in his arms.

He rejoined the wagons and the sailors as they began their descent to the beach. The tide was high up on the shore. The strongest waves fell just short of the dunes. The horses were not happy
going down. The rocks were steep and slippery, and all the sailors had to hold the wagons from behind or let them tumble with the horses onto the beach. It took them more than an hour to negotiate
the rocks and reach a wider and less steep path. First came grassy heathland, then salty flats littered with the flotsam of the winter tides, and then the shifting dunes, so flimsy at the edges of
the sea that even the roar of breakers, eighty yards away, and the rattle of the tide throwing pebble dice, were all it took to make the dune sand blink, and separate, and slip.

The wagons sank into the sand. They’d have to leave them at the edges of the dunes and lug the ship’s stores over by hand. Unless the horses could be forced, of course. Palmer shook
his head. ‘They in’t gonna shift,’ he said. ‘They’ve had enough for now. Leave ’em to their bit o’ grass.’ Ralph Parkiss thought he knew better. He
tried to pull one of the nags by its head. He held it by the headstall. And tugged. Perhaps there really weren’t any horses in America, thought Palmer. Ralph didn’t seem to know that
horses could nip. And hard. He watched the old horse nuzzle Ralph’s shirt. He saw it bite. Ralph could hardly breathe for pain. When he opened up his shirt, there was a bleeding four-inch
bruise in the soft flesh of his stomach.

His shipmates made the most of it. ‘Don’t let your Miggy see that, Ralph, not on your wedding night.’

‘A horse had its mouth inside your shirt? Oh, yes! She’ll think you’ve found another girl.’