Silver (16 page)

In such a state of torpor, it was very easy for one or two of his shipmates to lay hold of him, which the captain now ordered them to do. Easy as well for them to lead him below decks and imprison him there, while others collected the body of their friend and laid it on a long sack, after tugging the knife from his chest.

When this was all done, I found some of my energy had returned
– enough, in any event, for me to take Natty by the arm and lead her to the starboard side of the
Nightingale
, where we could contemplate the clean water lapping beneath us. Our silence was not so much a matter of our having nothing to say, but of having too much – although, for my own part, I was not certain what
too much
might actually be. I had seen Death for the first time. I had felt the warm surface of my life split open, and glimpsed something cold beneath. These things were self-evident, but a question remained. Had I been the witness to a kind of aberration, or a reliable truth?

Natty’s face, with the greenish light of the swell reflected across it, gave no indication of whether she was debating the same question. Exactly as she had done when rowing me upriver, and again when we had sat with her father in his cockpit, she kept her thoughts to herself. I could permit myself to feel we were in broad sympathy with one another, but understood that if I wanted her to feel for me more deeply, I would have to make a more active demand on her interest.

It might seem unnatural for such thoughts to have occupied me so soon after the murder. But if I am to give a true account of my adventure, I must admit that in this particular circumstance I felt more curiosity than tenderness. And my curiosity grew to fascination when the captain, having spoken to Bo’sun Kirkby, came aft to interrupt the peace that I was enjoying with Natty, and informed us that he required our attendance.

I bridled somewhat at the phrase, since it had the ring of an order about it, and I was used to speaking with the captain in the language of friendship. But I understood this was an emergency, and went willingly with the bo’sun until we were in the waist of the ship, where the body of Sinker had been laid out. This had been done with as much reverence as possible, but the effect was still very humdrum: the man was wearing the clothes in which he had been
killed, with the blood still wet on his shirt, and his lank hair blowing about his face. His right eye had not been perfectly closed, so that he seemed to be taking a final sly look at the world, and therefore to be noticing that the sack on which he lay was very dirty, and sprinkled with pieces of the grain it had lately contained.

The captain stood on the further side of the body, while the rest of us formed a semicircle opposite. He informed us in a very straightforward way that he had two offices to perform – the first being a burial. He produced from a pocket of his topcoat a small prayer book, which I noticed was much thumbed and had several loose pages. Having found the service he wanted, he lifted the book close to his face and began to read. His voice moved quickly over the words, which showed he was not enjoying the task in hand, and when he reached the passage that mentioned committing the body of our shipmate to the deep, he positively glared at Bo’sun Kirkby and Mr Tickle. At this signal, they picked up poor Sinker, and made him as good as his name. They lifted him on his sack and swung him over the side and let him go. The rest of us knew he had begun a better life when we heard the splash.

Before silence could settle again, the captain quickly put away his prayer book, straightened his hat, cleared his throat, and called for Jordan Hands to be brought on deck. As he did so I realised that his haste was not the result of a lack of feeling for the office he had just performed, but a sign of nervousness about what came next – since it involved a more complete sort of test and confrontation.

A moment later, Hands was standing face to face with the captain; his wrists were bound, and Bo’sun Kirkby and Mr Tickle were close on either side of him. In spite of this, Hands tipped his head backwards and stuck out the tip of his tongue. I noticed that since he had last been on deck, he had wound a bandage round his thumb, where he had cut himself in his fight.

The captain continued to look flushed and serious, as I saw when he removed his hat and tucked it underneath his arm, in a way that suggested he was not merely in command of the
Nightingale
but of the entire world. In that instant a frail breath of wind – the first we had felt for many days – bloomed into the sails and made them tighten. The ship immediately began to yaw about, and the line of the horizon behind the captain disappeared then heaved into view again. Although I felt engrossed by the scene before me, I could not help noticing one of the crew (a very dainty man named Mr Lawson) peel off from the crowd and trot aft – to take a hold of the wheel, I supposed, since it was obvious that our becalming had ended, and we would soon be under way again.

The change sent a ripple of talk through the men, and several turned to look behind them, where the sun was already curtained by clouds. The captain ran the fingers of one hand through his hair, and demanded we listen to him and finish the business we had started. He then began speaking in the same rapid voice as before, which at least now had the excuse that his ship needed him to hurry.

‘Gentlemen,’ he began, which made one or two of the crew raise their eyebrows, since none of them assumed themselves to be any such thing. ‘Gentlemen, I shall be brief but I hope not careless. With the power invested in me as captain of this ship, I ask you to witness that Jordan Hands stands accused of the murder of Robert Sinker, and to notice that I intend to keep him a prisoner in chains until we return to England, when he will be delivered to face the sentence of the law.’

Another darker ripple of comment now ran through the men, which I could not so easily interpret. My first thought was: they did not appreciate the captain’s judgement, although it seemed quite reasonable to me. My second, which was re-enforced by the fact that Bo’sun Kirkby and Mr Tickle pressed against Hands more
urgently, was that they wished to see an immediate punishment. I must confess, although it does me no credit, that I myself felt uneasy at continuing our voyage with a murderer lurking in our midst – ready to escape at any moment, or likely to do us further harm.

As for the prisoner himself: he seemed to have inflated since committing his crime, and to be standing his ground, and looking about him with greater confidence. It made me reflect that in becoming wicked he had become himself, which I took to be a dreadful possibility.

‘Remove him below,’ said the captain, which conveniently ended this line of reasoning. He had interpreted the restlessness of his men as a sign of agreement, and had not noticed or chosen to care about the change in Hands himself. Without waiting to see his orders carried out, he crammed his hat back upon his head, checked the buttons of his coat, and made his way towards the stern, where he took charge of the wheel from Mr Lawson.

As he went, the majority of shipmates also scattered to their duties, since by now the
Nightingale
was rolling scuppers under in the swell. The booms were tearing in their blocks, the rudder was banging, and the whole hull was creaking and groaning and jumping like a manufactory. Some men set about tightening ropes, some slammed the bolts on doors and flaps, some vanished to their quarters to make everything secure below decks. Natty and I took up our place in the roundhouse, where Spot greeted us by saying, ‘Have a care, have a care’ – to which I should have paid more attention than I did.

Although it was only a moment since the court scene had ended, the sky was now entirely overcast. The ocean, which had been as still as the surface of an eye, and possessed the same sort of density, had begun contorting into waves, some of which were already fringed with white. A steady wind, flecked with rain, had taken
every sail that was set – and the sound of their stretching and straining seemed delightful. Only our resident rook was put out by these changes, since he had been dislodged from his place in the rigging, and now circled us making a series of very offended remarks. Spot, who must have heard them as clearly as we did, closed his red eyes and pretended to feel indifferent.

This sudden business gave Hands the opportunity he needed. To have seen him during what I must call his recent
arraignment
, any observer would have thought as I did that the ropes binding his wrists were held by those standing either side of him. In fact they were not – which allowed him to retain a great degree of freedom, even as he began his journey towards the companionway. So much freedom, in fact, that instead of following meekly where he had been directed, he astonished us all by giving a sudden leap sideways, and landing on top of the gunwales that ran round the
Nightingale
. There, and in spite of the quickening movement of the ship beneath him, he kept his balance and squared his shoulders like an orator. Each of us stopped whatever we were doing, and gazed at him.

For a moment I thought he might be about to unmask Natty, and reveal her to be the young woman she was, or else to expose me as my father’s son. But his tirade was more general. ‘Why?’ he demanded of us all. ‘Why should I suffer in the dark, only to die in England?’ His voice was loose like his body, and slid from word to word with a strange languor, as though he might be drunk. ‘My life is my own,’ he continued. ‘I choose to keep it or lose it, not to give it over for any one of you to manage.’ As he paused he glared at the captain, and in particular at his throat, as if he wanted to slit it open. After this moment of loathing, he then scoured the deck with his eyes until he found my face inside a window of the roundhouse. The effect was to make me cringe like a child before his master.

‘Jim Hawkins,’ he called to me, in the same watery drawl. ‘I
had hoped our lives might run along side by side for a while, so our enmity could have been resolved – as I decided.’ His eye fixed on me as he said this, which in the confusion of the moment I barely understood.

‘Be that as it may,’ the voice went on, with a sincerity that made it terrifying, ‘I still have enough breath to curse you. Which I do, Jim Hawkins. I curse you. May everything you desire be a torment to you, and everything you get be poison.’

With that, when he seemed to be warming to his subject and likely to continue for several more sentences, his mouth closed, the red tip of his tongue disappeared, and he lifted into the air as though the wind had caught him. He hovered for a moment with his shirt-tail flapping behind him, then dropped silently out of view.

Every one of us that could rush forward now did so; because I was one of the last to arrive at the place where he disappeared, I had to push a way through the men to see the last act of the drama. Hands was upright in the water like a wooden statue, bobbing among the steep grey waves. His eyes were wide, and looked quickly from face to face as the current carried him along the broadside of the ship. After this moment of interrogation, he began speaking again, or rather shouting: ‘I curse you. I curse you. I curse you. I curse you.’

Not one of us made any attempt to throw him a line, which in any case he would not have been able to take, but stared in silence as the wind carried us quickly away from him. I had half a mind to run aft and watch him vanish entirely, but as I began to move Natty put her hand on my arm. ‘Leave it be,’ she whispered to me. ‘Leave it be.’

A moment later he had been swept from our view, and we had nothing to see but the wide wilderness of empty water.

The earth remembers us. We are generally survived by the homes we have lived in – and our improvements, like our desecrations, leave marks on the landscape that curious historians may study. When we no longer live and breathe, headstones show where our journey has ended. In all such ways, the solid ground resembles a book, in which our stories are recorded.

The sea is the opposite. Rolling waves eradicate everything written on them, whether it is the wake of a ship, or the passage of the wind, or a log, or a bottle – or a man. After every kind of interruption, water wants nothing more than to be its simple self again.

Such thoughts preoccupied me after the death of Jordan Hands. When I had finally pulled away from Natty, and gone to the stern of the ship despite her protest, I kept my eyes fixed on what I
thought must have been the exact spot where he had jumped – but within a second or two I could no longer be sure whether it lay in this hollow or that. Then I concentrated on the idea of his body sinking through various levels of darkness. This also proved a failure, since my imagination could not reach as far as the seabed, but became distracted by the question of what creatures, such as jellyfish and sea horses, might survive at such depths. Eventually – which was only a matter of minutes afterwards – I resolved not to stare downwards or back, brooding on the violence I had seen, but instead to look up and forward, and so anticipate whatever new trials would soon come. The decision gave me a distinct sense of relief.

A relief, I admit, that was accompanied by a paradoxical feeling of anxiety. Before I had stolen my father’s map, I felt superior to those who first set sail for Treasure Island. Brooding on my crime persuaded me I had been overconfident. And because I knew I was no better than them, I also knew I would be no safer than they had been.

In my heart, and without a word to Natty or the captain, I began an apology to my father, and a prayer for his forgiveness. I did this in solitude, continuing to stand for a while in private in the stern of the
Nightingale
, and as I watched the waves wrap round one another, I could not help recalling the story of Noah. My prayers circled like the rook, which flew to and fro while the waters covered the earth, and could not find a place to settle.

Superstitious readers will already have speculated that our better progress had been allowed by the demise of Hands. Like Jonah (I am now remembering a different part of scripture), he appeared to have been responsible for our becalming. Yet as I finished these orisons to my father, good sense persuaded me that no man, however malevolent, could claim such a great control over nature. When I turned to face the midships again, and looked at the crew, I noticed
a similar stubbornness in them as well. They might have become more sensible of our situation, but they were also more galvanised. There was a new eagerness in the work of setting sails, and a new determination in Captain Beamish.