Silver (13 page)

‘You are from Bristol, sir,’ I told him.

‘Close by. Do you know it?’

‘My father’s family is from there,’ I said. ‘He speaks as you do.’

‘Your father,’ the captain said slowly, relishing the word as he had done a moment before. ‘Well there’s a man who must have the sea in his veins. What do you have in yours?’

In a different voice, this might have sounded like a challenge. In fact it was gently spoken – though still with enough snap to make me look at Natty for reassurance. She had been watching my exchange with the captain as if she were my sponsor, and now the feel of her eyes sweeping over my face, reading my thoughts, made me take care not to claim more than my right; she would only have reproached me later.

‘Not so much salt,’ I said. ‘Fresh water, perhaps.’

The captain laughed and clapped me on the shoulder – which I took to mean he expected I would soon encounter all manner of things that were strange to me, and had better prepare myself.

Natty, feeling this had been a sufficient introduction, now broke in. ‘When do we sail?’ she wanted to know.

The captain narrowed his eyes, as if not used to such forthrightness, then bit back whatever he might have first thought to reply; he was remembering she was Mr Silver’s daughter, and his representative on the ship. This made me conclude the captain was his own man, but nevertheless had respect for higher authority. And good humour, too, since he now made a play of looking at the sun, then along the length of the deck, at the height of the masts and across the rigging, and finally into the direction of the wind, before turning back to Natty again and telling her, ‘Within the hour’ – as though he had only this moment made his decision.

‘So soon?’ I said, which did not sound as enthusiastic as I meant it to be.

‘We have everything we need,’ the captain said. ‘Now that we have you, Mr Hawkins, we have everything we need.’

With this, he took a step closer, as if he could no longer contain his curiosity, then checked and looked round about. I followed suit, and saw the crew was still occupied with the task of loading. Only one pair of eyes watched us, which belonged to the same scarred fellow who was lurking beside the hatch that covered the stairs. I would have preferred him not to be there.

‘The coast is clear,’ the captain murmured, despite this scrutiny. ‘Perhaps we could share our secret safely. After all, if we are to set sail, I need to know my direction.’

Natty laughed at this, which was a kind of tease, but I pretended not to notice and went about my business very seriously. I opened the front of my shirt, removed from around my neck the little
satchel containing the map, and handed it to the captain without a word. I could not help noticing it felt warm from contact with my skin.

The effect on the captain was extraordinary. His smiling manner evaporated and his whole face seemed to tighten and concentrate. He laid the satchel on the palm of his left hand, opened the flap, and very carefully withdrew the map. First he held it away from his face, narrowing his eyes; then he lifted it close to his eyes with such trembling caution the paper seemed to vibrate.

This was enough to excite our silent spectator so much, he gave a gasp – at which the captain and I whisked round to see a smear of white as he disappeared down the companionway, like a rabbit vanishing into a burrow.

If this troubled the captain he did not show it. Taking up where he had been interrupted, he began to pass one hand gently over the map, tracing the shape of the island. The contrast with Mr Silver was very striking; there was nothing but wonder in this touch, and nothing but delight when he scanned the paper first on one side and then the other, and mouthed some of the names he read: Captain Kidd’s Anchorage, and Spyglass Hill, et cetera. The bar silver, I noticed, he left unmentioned. Also the arms.

When he had done enough admiring, he closed his eyes. Here, I thought, he was imagining his approach to the island, and the currents that might sweep us from the fairway, and the sandbanks and other obstacles he must avoid. Then he opened his eyes again and gazed with a particular intensity at the measurements of longitude and latitude, written across the top of the chart. Without these, as I knew very well, the map was a mere curiosity, though admittedly one of a very tempting kind. With them, it was a key to open the world.

‘Good lad, good fellow,’ said the captain in a reverential voice,
turning back towards me. ‘You’ll have no objection if I keep it in my possession – for safety’s sake?’

This jarred somewhat, since I had already begun to think of the map as my own property, but I soon saw that the captain’s proposal was quite sensible. He had the authority and the experience, which meant he was much better able to protect it than I had been.

‘Of course,’ I told him – and then, as an afterthought that really should have been my first thought: ‘Perhaps you will give it back to me when we leave the island? Then I can return it to my father in the fullness of time. You might say it is on loan from him; I am sure he will be pleased to have it again.’

The captain adopted a very serious expression, as if he did not know how guiltily I had obtained the thing. ‘Very well,’ he said, ‘we have an agreement’ – and folded the map as carefully as he had opened it, before returning it to the satchel again, looping the strap around his neck, tucking it beneath his topcoat, and finally inside his shirt, where it lay against his heart as it had formerly done against mine.

‘Now that we have concluded that piece of business,’ he went on, with a brisker note in his voice, ‘we have to begin the next. I must ask you to inspect your lodgings below decks, and get yourselves acquainted with everything. All hands! Mr Allan!’

The last two commands brought forward the thin fellow I had supposed was the cook – though he had now taken off his apron. Behind him, in a boisterous rush that showed they knew what was required of them and did not need orders, several other crew also appeared. These very quickly finished what little loading remained to be done, then formed into two gangs: one went forward and another aft, where they stood ready to untie the ropes that held us to the quayside.

Mr Allan, meanwhile, stood with his head tipped to one side like
a dog waiting to be told ‘Fetch’. ‘Ah! Cookie!’ said the captain. ‘Now, make these lads at home.’

Natty did not move immediately, as the captain wished her to do, but made the same guess as I had done and said to Mr Allan, ‘My father was a ship’s cook. He also had a nickname. It was Barbecue.’

The poor fellow rumpled his hair with an embarrassed expression; he evidently felt that to be mentioned in the same breath as Mr Silver was more than he deserved. ‘So the captain has told me, sir,’ he said. ‘And very expert too, I am sure. I don’t have his skills, I dare say, in barbecuing or anything else. But how could I, being the age I am? Never mind, though, never mind. You’ll not go hungry so long as I’m on the
Nightingale
, I promise you that. We’ve plenty of vittles, don’t we, Captain? Plenty of vittles. Your father himself has taken care of that, and very generous of him too, most generous in fact. We’ve got biscuit, and pickled fruit, and salted pork, and salted beef, and the largest bunch of grapes you ever saw, and some grand old pieces of cheese, and a whole cage of chickens, and …’ he rushed on, without giving anyone a chance to interrupt or reply. ‘You go ahead, sir, and you, sir’ – looking at me – ‘straight ahead, mind you don’t crack your heads, and I’ll follow. Take an apple as you pass. We’ll none of us be hungry on this cruise, that’s for certain, not so long as I’m in the galley.’

This patter continued, without Natty or me paying it much attention, until all three of us were across the deck and down the stairs into the stomach of the ship. Here we wound along a dark and narrow galley that led towards the stern and a plain wooden cabin. Two bunks had been built against the curving outer wall, one above the other, and were linked by a short ladder; these bunks, we understood, would be our beds for the journey. After glancing at one another in silence, Natty decided she would sleep on the lower level while I had the top. The crew, Mr Allan explained, had their quarters
towards the prow, beyond the galley, which acted as a kind of barrier between us.

Once this had all been settled, we were left to inspect our home. I would have done this more thoroughly if I had not been so keen to return to the light and bid farewell to London – but I did stay long enough to notice that my bed was extremely small and dark, like a coffin with one side removed. Also that I would have to reach it every night by climbing past Natty’s face, in order to lie directly above her. This idea brought a flush to my face, which I did my best to ignore while saying the arrangement suited me very well. With that, I went back on deck and found a place behind the wheel in the stern of the
Nightingale
, where Natty soon came to join me.

As though he had been waiting for us to admire his skill, Captain Beamish now ordered the crew to set us on our way. They did this immediately, with some men untying the
Nightingale
fore and aft, then pushing us away from the quay with long poles, and others working the capstan to raise our anchor – chanting as they did so:

They sang this three or four times, and when the work was done we were already a yard from the dockside. The crew fore and aft now laid their poles on deck and began setting the jib, which took the breeze with a delightful clean smacking sound, so I felt the
Nightingale
quicken like a living creature. ‘Have a care! Have a care!’ shouted the captain, as the booms of both masts swung across deck – but the hands knew how to dodge, and in a trice everything was under control again, and we were making our way towards the
river. As we found our place among the traffic heading downstream, I noticed the water made a beautiful low humming sound. This was our prow ‘talking’, as sailors say – treading the innumerable ripples with an incessant weltering splash.

The waterfront of London quickly vanished – docks and warehouses turning into open country, then a panorama of fields and cattle, until we reached the fancy houses of Greenwich and the little mole of the Observatory. I had seen these things only recently, rowing to and fro with Natty, but from the greater height of the
Nightingale
, and with the stronger feeling of purpose that now possessed me, they had an extra freshness and significance. Everything told me that I was leaving, that my boyhood was slipping behind me, and that I was choosing the terms of my own existence.

These feelings, I dare say, were all the more intense because Natty stood beside me. At any rate, I gave this as the reason why tears swelled into my eyes as we entered a bend of the river that I recognised as the beginning of my home stretch. It was a remarkable moment, even though it came so early in our voyage, with the blackened old timbers of the Hispaniola, and the low red sweep of its tiled roof, appearing on the horizon – as if I were returning to it as a ghost. It put me in mind of a sentence I remembered my father using in his stories, which he heard used of the pirate O’Brien, whom he called ‘a rank Irelander’: ‘Do you take it as a dead man is dead for good, or do he come alive again?’ I saw in minute detail the dozens of winding tracks I had walked since childhood, and remembered in a single instant the hundreds of lives I had seen there – the moorhens and geese, the summer visitors, and the foxes that preyed on them. It was an immense variety, but all squeezed into something like a keyhole, and set my heart racing because I knew it was passing away from me even while it came closer.

Exactly when we reached the inn – as if it had been ordained by
fate – the front door opened and my father appeared. He was wearing the old blue sailor’s cap he had kept as a memento of earlier days, and carried in his right hand a pail of water. My first instinct was to duck down below the bulwarks out of sight, but I thought this might draw his attention, so I stood still, without making a sound, and watched him. He walked towards the bed of roses that formed the border of our property where it met the towpath, and poured his pail of water over the flowers very studiously, making sure not to miss one. I saw the earth darken. Then he straightened, his free hand smoothing the small of his back, and glanced around him. Although he looked directly at the
Nightingale
and seemed to admire her, he did not change his expression, which to my eyes had a sad severity. Then he turned away with a shrug, and after that I saw him no more.

The Thames had been a close companion all my life – its marshes were my nursery and its tides my education. Yet once the
Nightingale
had passed my home, I soon found myself sailing through a country I had seldom visited before. The horizons felt almost infinitely far off, and on this particular evening, as daylight faded, and clouds thickened, they made the world appear very empty and dreary. Houses dwindled from few to occasional to none at all. The banks on either side slumped into mud-heaps. The water roughened as it met the open sea. From my lookout in the stern, I imagined the waves rising to meet us were an imaginary armada, made of all the enemies England had ever known – Vikings, Romans, Danes, Normans, French, Spanish, Dutch – advancing upriver in a single force towards London, where they would spread misery and grief.