Silver (27 page)

Natty has told me that as the water cut into her brain, it also carried her back to certain things she had heard from her father. She saw him clambering over the stockade to sue for peace with Captain Smollett of the
Hispaniola –
throwing his crutch across the wall first, then scrambling after it. She followed him across the yard, where – what with the angle of the slope, and the soft soil – he and his crutch were as hopeless as a ship in stays. She watched him sitting among the tree stumps – all cleared now – and refusing the offer of help to rise again. She tracked him through a dozen scenes of begging, then asserting, then begging again, with a full sense of how put-upon he felt, and how insulted.

I have explained to her that this was a delirium, brought on by her lack of sleep, her hunger and her thirst. She understands this. Yet she always insists her father was beside her as plain as daylight. She says it was the lowest point of unhappiness in the whole story of her adventure. When a small lizard crept towards her from beneath the log-house – a pretty one, with red spots across its green back – she thought even this cold-eyed creature stopped for a moment to look at her with sympathy.

It might have been an hour before the camp came back to life; it might have been a few moments. She was not in a condition to know. Jinks, who had evidently slumped into his chair after Scotland had been returned to captivity, at last decided that he had rested for long enough – so stretched, yawned, took off his hat to rearrange his handkerchief, peered into the empty tankard that lay at his side, put his hat back on again, and finally stood to spit in Natty’s direction, before rapping on the prisoners’ door and shouting, ‘Five minutes.’

This produced a multitude of soft scrabblings and scratchings, like mice under a bed. At the same time, more definite bangs and scrapes began in the pirates’ house close behind Natty. From this, she realised that Stone had not immediately woken his captain when he vanished inside, but had waited for Jinks to give his reveille. It surprised her, and not for the first time, that so evidently heartless a man should be so respectful towards another – until she thought how this proved there must be even less humanity in Smirke himself than in his henchman.

How much less she soon saw, for Smirke was the first to appear from the pirates’ cabin, dragging behind him an undressed woman, whom he hurled towards Jinks as if she were made of rags; Jinks opened the door and tossed her into the prisoners’ hut without a word. Smirke then knelt on the veranda and washed his face in the
spring, lapping at the water like a dog, before shaking his head so the water-drops flew off in all directions.

Once this ritual was finished, Stone also came outdoors, helped Smirke to his feet, and began whispering very urgently. For as long as this lasted, with Stone’s right hand laid across his captain’s back while he completed his story, Smirke often threw glances in Natty’s direction – first in surprise, then in curiosity, then in anger, and finally in a sort of amusement that was more alarming than any of the rest.

Frightening as this was, it gave Natty an opportunity to look closely at her tormentor. When she had crouched beside me in our hiding-place, overlooking the trial, we had both noticed Smirke’s cloudy grey hair tumbling about his shoulders. At this new proximity, she could also see how his life on the island had aged him, as it had the others. His skin was very crumpled and blotched with sores, and although he had evidently long since abandoned any attempt to shave with a razor, he had not grown a beard but only odd tufts, which sprouted from his chin and cheeks like eruptions of smoke. His mouth, likewise, gave him a very neglected look – the lips were cracked with sunburn, and his teeth showed very brown and haphazard. Taken all in all, he resembled a large and battered scarecrow – half human, half soulless.

This made it all the more astonishing that his first gesture towards Natty was one of kindness. He patted Stone on the arm to show he had heard enough, then slipped off the veranda of the log-house (
staggered
would be better, since he was still very unsteady on his feet) and with a great deal of groaning knelt down beside Natty to undo the rope that tied her.

‘Well, well,’ were his first words, spoken close to her face. Like everything he said, they sounded
wet
, as though there were always too much saliva in his mouth. ‘Mr Stone told me he’d caught a
pretty one, and a pretty one you are, no mistake.’ His breath was so rancid, it was as much as Natty could do not to flinch away; but she was determined to keep her eyes fixed on his, to show she was not afraid. ‘An exceedingly pretty one,’ he went on admiringly, lingering over Natty with the same greed that Stone and Jinks had shown. ‘Exceedingly pretty. Not quite a girl and not quite a boy by the look of you: a very strange bird. Or is this the way of the world, nowadays? I have precious little knowledge of the world, you know. Precious little. And precious little regard for it either.’ He narrowed his eyes as he said this, breathing deeply and apparently inhaling the scent of her skin. ‘And what’s this?’ he continued after a pause, which he filled with soft grunts and sighs. ‘A smudge of brown as well as a smudge of white? Very choice. You’ll be at home here, my lad; you’ll be at home here all right. None of us cares who we are or what we do.’

Natty felt so disgusted by Smirke’s closeness, and by the insult and insinuation of his words, it was almost impossible for her to stay silent – as she knew she must. But just when it seemed he would become intolerable, he suddenly lurched away, hauling himself to his feet and looking down at her with his hands thrust into the tops of his trousers. ‘But we can come to all that in our own good time,’ he said. ‘Time is the one thing we’ve got plenty of, isn’t that so, shipmates?’ He leered at Stone as he said this, showing more of his ruined teeth, then continued – apparently speaking to all and sundry, but with the dreaminess of a man talking to himself.

‘First things first is what I always say. First things first. So let’s begin with the first of all. What shall we call you? I wonder. Shall we just call you
English
? Mr Stone tells me you come from the old country, and I would like to revenge myself on her. Or do you have a name of your own?’

Threatened like this, Natty felt there would be no harm in telling the truth, though her throat was so dry, her voice squeezed out sounding very pinched.

‘Nat.’

‘Nat,’ Smirke repeated with a mocking fondness. ‘Nat with a thirst, by the sound of it. Mr Stone! Fetch the lad a drink, if you would be so kind, and we can hear how he pipes.’

Stone did as he was told, which again seemed remarkable, by filling a tankard at the spring, carrying it carefully, and pressing it into Natty’s hands and staring as though he had never seen a person drink before.

Natty almost choked as she swallowed, and swallowed again, thinking she was like a calf being fattened for the slaughter that must follow – and perhaps would have come very soon, if a distraction had not interrupted them. This was Jinks flinging open the prisoners’ door, and ordering his charges to appear – which they did immediately, and formed into a column two abreast.

After the first few pairs had emerged, Stone backed away from Natty, ripping the tankard from her and throwing it onto the ground as Smirke bellowed, ‘Look lively, men! Look lively!’ A great commotion then began in the pirates’ own cabin. This was the sound of bodies falling out of bed, cursing as they searched for clothes they had mislaid, complaining about their headaches, snatching a mouthful of food and water – then stumbling into the bright yard. The majority stood still and gaped – first at Natty, then at one another – but this rigmarole was soon ended by Smirke barking orders. At this, two or three of the men broke away and lolloped towards the prisoners like wolves discovering a flock of sheep.

The prisoners seemed to shiver as these guards approached, but not one of them faltered or looked up, their dejection was so great.
There were some fifty of them, men first, women following, and every one stooped and ashamed, with dull eyes fixed on the shoulders of the one before. All were naked to the waist, all were barefoot, and some of the last to emerge carried young children, or led them by the hands. The paler skin of these children showed their parentage; several, in fact, had hair as yellow as the sun, and one a tangle of red ringlets which reached halfway down his back. Everyone – child and adult – held either a shovel, or a mattock, or a fork, or some other implement in their unbound hands; only their ankles were tied together – with lengths of rope that made it easy enough to walk, but impossible to run.

Natty soon found Scotland among them, shuffling with the same cowed meekness as the rest so as not to invite attention. He refused to look towards Natty – although it comforted her a little to notice how the blows inflicted on him by Jinks, and the dozens of stabs and cuts delivered by Stone, had been cleaned since he had been thrown back to join his friends, and the blood on him wiped away.

Natty understood that she was watching a daily ritual, which Smirke and the others were also now closely scrutinising, eager to reprimand anyone who strayed from routine. Still in line, the prisoners approached the stream that ran towards the edge of the stockade. In pairs they knelt to drink and, when they had swallowed a few mouthfuls, rose and stepped across, allowing those behind them to do the same. When the last had taken their refreshment – which was never enough, and to the children was especially miserable (many of them began weeping) – those at the head of the column had reached the southern gate. From here they passed into the fields they had made, which were already shimmering in the heat.

As each pair of prisoners left the stockade they began to sing – a slow-paced song Natty did not recognise:

Eventually the troop was in full voice, swaying gently from side to side as they went, with the children now drying their eyes, and beginning to clap their hands. It was a most affecting sound, very beautiful in its sorrow, but at the same time full of dignity and defiance. Until they began to drop out of sight towards the shore, their music really seemed to fill the sky and cancel its emptiness.

When the song ended, which happened as the prisoners set to work, this emptiness returned, but now seemed larger, just as the misery of the prisoners’ plight also seemed more engulfing. Plans that Natty had spoken about with Scotland – plans that had seemed so easily achieved when they were nothing but words – now felt impossible as she saw them translated into facts. Fifty friends, all of whom had shovels and suchlike to use as weapons, and thirteen enemies. Their uprising must surely succeed! Yet so broken were the prisoners, and so completely demoralising was the thought of sticks against swords, the battle seemed lost before it had begun. Natty had imagined a second storming of the Bastille. On Treasure Island, such a thing was impossible. Here was the old world still, stupid and brutal as ever.

Smirke saw nothing of this as it passed through Natty’s mind – nor much of anything except his latest chance for cruelty: the prisoners were so familiar to him, they had no individual selves. In fact all the pirates seemed so completely used to their own barbarity,
Natty asked herself whether they might in fact prefer not to be rescued from the island, no matter how much they might say they missed England and her weather.

From this, Natty deduced that Smirke’s
comfort
, if that is quite the word for such a diminished state of being, was so enormous, he could not be bothered to cut off her head. In this respect, she understood that he was filled with the same vanity as Stone. And once again, while being astonished by the lethargy it produced, she also felt a profound gratitude for it. Smirke was so convinced of his authority, so blinded by his habits of domination, he was not merely reluctant to search for the ship that had brought her to the island – he could barely stir himself even to consider the likelihood that it would have a crew opposed to his way of managing his affairs.

At the same time, it was quite natural for him to be very suspicious of Natty, and once he had finished his perusal of the slaves, he therefore began a bullying and laborious sort of interrogation. How many others had come with her to the island? Where was their ship if it had survived the coast? Were they here by accident or design? In the beginning, these questions were delivered with the same false kindness that Stone had shown in passing her the tankard of water. But the longer they continued, and the less helpful Natty became, the better she understood that he was not in fact expecting answers at all. He was performing a brutal charade that, thanks to his sense of invincibility, had nothing to do with a real curiosity about Natty’s friends or the
Nightingale
. Instead, he was looking for ways to terrify her. It was for this reason and no other that he eventually grabbed her by the shoulder and hauled her across the yard until they stood in front of the Fo’c’sle Court.

‘You know what this is, do you?’ As Smirke hissed this into Natty’s ear, he gave it a painful tweak.

She shook her head, which made Smirke continue even more fiercely. ‘Very well,’ he said, widening his eyes. ‘I shall tell you what this is. It is our court, here on the island. Our court, where we see justice done. We are a reasonable society. We arrest, and we try, and we punish. And we’ve arrested you, haven’t we, Master Nat? We’ve arrested you, and now we’ll try you and punish you.’

He paused again – but when Natty stayed silent, decided he might as well lose control of himself. ‘Still tongue-tied?’ he spat, looking round at Stone for encouragement then lunging wildly towards Natty again, with the tufts of grey beard wagging on his face. ‘By God, I’ll shake you up, you miserable dog. We’ll shake him, won’t we, Mr Stone, we’ll shake him until his bones melt. I don’t care if he is no more than a boy – a boy’s as insolent as a man, more insolent in fact. Much worse. Much more insolent. Where’s your respect, boy, where’s your respect? Ha! What are boys and men to me, they’re all the same. A babe in arms or a doddering fool, they’re all the same. I’ll chop them up and fry them if I want – they’re all nothing.’