Silver (32 page)

I would have been willing to moulder there for a while, dreaming and drifting; I was used to my own company, and had learned to enjoy it. But the captain had other plans for me – plans that might have been provoked by pity, or by his own restlessness. He called to me on my perch, saying he needed my help with a task he had
to perform. He added that in the process we would see different parts of the island, and discover what God had given us to enjoy.

This seemed a privilege, in view of my youth, and another proof of his kindness – by which I mean that I understood the captain must have a good independent reason for proposing our expedition, but was also determined to distract me from the crisis that lay ahead. I did not hesitate. I crawled back from my retreat and walked straight up to him. He was holding two small wicker baskets, each of which had a narrow cap or lid, and two long wooden thumb-sticks. One of the sticks, and one of the baskets, he gave to me.

‘Come on, my boy,’ he said with a gleam in his eye. ‘We have important work to do.’

After we had announced our departure and left Bo’sun Kirkby in command of the
Nightingale
, the captain and I were rowed ashore and disappeared into the vegetation. For a while it was impossible to see more than a few inches in front of our faces, and difficult not to feel the baskets and the sticks might be torn from our grasp – but I kept my sense of direction. We had set our course north-west, which was the way the captain had taken yesterday, towards the site of the silver.

We soon reached a part of the same pine forest that grew across the central part of the island, except the trees were smaller here, and in many cases bent into writhing shapes because of the wind. This would have made the area seem desolate, had it not been for the fact that a thin canopy allowed more sunlight, which had bred
an extraordinary richness of flowers. Some of them I recognised; there were large drifts of convolvulus, for instance, and clumps of honeysuckle and bougainvillea. Many varieties, however, were entirely unknown to me.

Now and then I stopped to collect a specimen, thinking the captain had given me my basket for this purpose. When he told me not to fill it completely, I realised he had some other kind of storage in mind, and was surprised not to hear immediately what it was. Surprised, but still so absorbed in the pleasure of finding new species, and so happily neglectful of the dangers that awaited me, I said nothing and continued my botanising. I was especially pleased to discover a new variety of lily (lilies have always been a favourite of mine). It had a delicate flower-head shaped like an infant’s pouting mouth, but the petals were striped in bands of black and yellow as regular as the body of a wasp. In a fantasy of ownership, I named it the ‘Hawkins Lily’.

Because there was no definite path through this garden, we found ourselves trampling beauty at every turn. It was very agitating, but not a torment we were allowed to suffer for long: Nature is never so careless with her gifts. Within a few hundred yards the earth was almost bare again, and strewn with heavy boulders in which the wind had carved a number of large holes. Here, however, were other sights that made us stop and wonder. The most remarkable was a plump bird about twice the size of our fulmar in England, which had decided these holes were very convenient places in which to rear young.

The birds had been silent while we were out of view; now they began accusing us of coming to murder them. Several launched from their rocks and attacked us as boldly as soldiers, waddling on short legs (with bright
green
feet), and pecking our knees and hands. While we were busy defending ourselves, it was impossible to notice
much detail in their appearance – only the colour of the feet, and that the adults were covered in shiny feathers the colour of tortoiseshell – and to reflect that these birds were unusual among the inhabitants of the island in seeming aggressive. I silently told myself that although their rage was disagreeable, it showed they possessed greater powers of self-preservation than any of their more trusting fellow creatures.

On our right-hand side, where the colony continued up a slope that ended in the northern cliffs of the island, I saw several birds stumbling towards the precipice and preparing to launch themselves off it. I realised this must be how they became airborne – and understood we would therefore soon be attacked from above as well as on the ground. After I had mentioned this to the captain we made a rapid retreat, tacking south-south-west, and so leaving the birds to resume their bad-tempered existence.

Our retreat brought us back among the flowers, from which we now set out a second time, following a more westerly route that led round the edge of the birds’ territory, and so to a region of the island the captain had already seen. The soil here was sandy, with some yellowish clay mixed into it; because it was protected from the sea-wind, the pine trees grew straight and to a proper height. It was the site of the silver.

‘They set less store on this treasure,’ the captain said as we drew near. ‘Less than they did on the rest, at any rate.’

I asked how he could be sure.

‘Did your father not tell you?’ he replied, and let the question dangle for a moment. Although he had previously spoken no more than a few sentences to me about my father, he knew my lineage very well, and understood how I had come by the map. In this respect he had treated me with the same tact that he had shown to Natty throughout our journey – in order to spare us being
continually compared to our parents. Hearing this silence suddenly broken, and my father’s name spoken aloud, was very affecting. I could not immediately answer.

‘When they found the other treasure …’ the captain went on. ‘That is to say, when
your father
found the other treasure, which Ben Gunn had discovered before any of them, and had moved to his cave, they also found Captain Flint’s – …’ his voice faltered, then hurried on – ‘Captain Flint’s
direction
.’

By now I had regained my composure. ‘My father did tell me,’ I said. ‘You mean the
direction
that was a dead man lying on the ground and pointing like an arrow.’

‘That is exactly what I mean,’ said the captain with a smile. ‘Old Flint left no such instructions near the silver – which shows what he thought of it.’

‘Or perhaps because he valued it so much.’

‘Explain?’

‘Perhaps he wanted to leave no visible evidence of its existence,’ I said. ‘We shall only know how much we think of it, when we see it with our own eyes.’

The captain clapped me on my back. ‘Right enough,’ he said cheerfully. ‘We shall know when we see it and not before.’ Then he paused again, and a distinct look of mischief came into his face. ‘Just for now,’ he said, ‘I ask you to think of this and nothing else: what kind of hole do you think it would make in the earth, this silver, if it were to be buried? What kind of
capacity
would be required?’

I did not immediately understand the captain – until I turned away from him. We had reached the lee of the highest part of the hillside, where the yellowy ground was covered with a black dust more like ash than earth. This dust had collected in a wide and shallow crater that was crossed by a chain of stagnant pools, each of which was covered by a rainbow-scum; I thought it must be
produced by minerals in the earth beneath. The colours might have made the place look joyous, since they were as bright as peacock feathers, but their effect was entirely the opposite. The shimmer was revoltingly bright, and a sickly counterpart to the bare earth round about.

‘Tread carefully,’ said the captain, tightening the grip on his thumb-stick, and poking it into the earth before he took a step forward. ‘We are close now.’

‘Here?’ I asked uncertainly.

‘Not here precisely,’ he said, very watchful. ‘Follow me and you will see. We avoided this part when I came here recently; now we must enter it. Be careful!’

I did as I was told, treading in the captain’s footsteps as he set off across the crater. Every time my foot touched the earth, it produced a puff of black dust that coated my shoes and ankles, and floated so easily on the air it even crept into my nose. My eyes watered, and I began breathing in shallow sips to keep the stuff from entering my lungs.

When the captain stopped a moment later, and crouched to put his basket on the ground beside him, my first thought was: we had reached the treasure site. Then I saw, by the way he hoisted his stick like a spear and pointed the V of the thumb-rest towards the ground, that whatever was happening now had nothing to do with silver. We were standing where Scotland had told us we would find the snakes – the kind that made this miserable ash their only home on the island, and had killed his friend with a single bite. The captain was endeavouring to catch one. That is why we had brought the baskets. We were going to catch the snakes and bring them back with us to the
Nightingale
.

These thoughts slithered into my head very suddenly, confusing me and unnerving me. I took a breath and swallowed; I remembered
the marshes at home, where I had crawled up to spy on unsuspecting creatures without a fear for my life. Why should I not be as fearless now? The question steadied me so much, I was able to peep over the captain’s shoulder and watch how he managed his work.

The snake in front of him was a foot long, and grey as the dust that now almost enveloped it, with its neck pinned in the V of his stick; its slender body lashed viciously from side to side, and it made a fierce hissing noise like a kettle on a hob. Moving very gingerly, the captain bent forward and took hold of it close behind the head, using his thumb and forefinger to lift it into the air – whereupon the hissing stopped and the creature hung limp as string, before he dropped it into his basket and swiftly replaced the lid.

‘One!’ he said to me, or rather shouted. His wide face was shining with sweat. ‘Now you.’

If there had been a minute to think, I might have asked him to continue as my teacher. But when I opened my mouth to say this, I noticed a second and smaller snake coiled an arm’s length away from me, its shiny tongue already darting between its lips as though the prospect of my leg were delicious. Without any delay, I plunged at it with my stick – which produced another explosion of dust – and found that I had trapped the creature as I wanted, and was able to lift it as the captain had done. The skin felt absolutely cold and lifeless, like the tallow of a candle that has long since been blown out.

Because we had caught these first two snakes very quickly, the captain and I then decided our work was easy – and set about finding ten or a dozen more, which we stored in our wicker baskets, where they lay coiled around one another’s bodies without any fuss. ‘Our security,’ said the captain as we finished our work. ‘Our “arms”, you might say.’ I nodded at this, to show I knew what he meant without him needing to explain. We would use the snakes as weapons, since
our firepower on the
Nightingale
was so limited; it pleased me very much to think the native spirits of the island were turning against the men who had defiled it.

We set off north-west again, and within a few minutes found ourselves on the slope of a crisp little ridge that seemed insignificant in itself. It turned out to mark the beginning of a long sweep that ran towards the north-western shore of the island; the ground here was lush as an English park, being lightly covered with pine and live oak. Two especially tall pine trees stood directly in front of us, making an obvious landmark – so in this respect, at least, it was no surprise to see the earth between them had been torn up and thrown about.

‘Here is where we discovered our loss,’ said the captain, very heavily. I felt so determined not to say anything my father might have done, such as what a desecration it was, that I did not immediately reply. All the same, and using the strange sort of measurement the captain had suggested a moment before, when he had spoken about the earth’s
capacity
, I calculated the emptiness before me must be a very valuable one. It was not, perhaps, a vault to hold as large a fortune as the £700,000 my father and the others had removed from the island. But it could have contained at least half as much, which would have been a pretty amount for all of us.

We stood in silence – our heads bowed with the weight of failure, but also I suspect with
guilt
, since the sensation of being thwarted had exposed us to the consciousness of our own greed. In a short while, however, I found that my concentration was not directed where I meant it to be, but fixed on a succession of irritable
click-click
s, quickly repeated, that came from one of the two pines that grew nearby. I recognised these as the sound a squirrel makes when defending its territory, and when I looked up I found that two pairs
of eyes were regarding us from a large ball of twigs and moss. I supposed this must be a nest, and contained young the parents were anxious to protect – which was why they had raised their voices in our direction, and were determined to leave us in no doubt we were not welcome in this part of their parish.

This sight alone was enough to make us want to move our ground. Another reason was a second noise – much fainter – which I had never heard before, and which quickened my curiosity. It was a mixture of sighing and whistling, but sometimes broke into a sort of bark. Not a dog’s bark but something more drawn-out, and more amused than affronted. It appeared to originate on the coast below.

The captain heard it too, which he showed by cocking an eyebrow and indicating we should walk on, and discover the origin of this strange music. It seemed a simple decision, but it marked a profound change in our mood. In fact, I might even say that while I could not entirely forget my fears for Natty, the next several minutes were the happiest of any that I spent on the island. The wind pressed gently against my back and drove me forward. The sun was warm as an English summer. The downward slope was easy. The talk … I cannot remember the talk, only that the captain and I were together, and did not say anything to break our mood of exaltation.