Silver (46 page)

I was so often flung back by the weight of water, or forced to stop and cling to whatever was handy, an effort that should have taken less than a minute took ten, each of which felt like an hour. When I had crawled as far as the mainmast, broken rigging snapped at me so I thought I might be blinded. By the long nine, a wave cracked my head against the old ammunition box and I lay dazed for a moment, while waves foamed over me in a continuous fury.

At last I came close enough to the bows for Mr Tickle to rescue me, which he did by flinging a length of rope that caught me in a kind of lasso, before tugging me forward so I landed beside him like a flounder. His grey beard and face streamed as if they were
about to dissolve. Even the bowl of his pipe had filled with water, and trembled as he spoke.

‘Did you see?’ he shouted.

I was confused, and did not understand what he meant. Because the last words we had exchanged had been about Treasure Island, I assumed he was asking whether I had seen its silhouette, when we had ripped past it ten or so miles back.

‘I did!’ I shouted back to him. ‘Very tiny and drowned!’

Mr Tickle removed the pipe from between his teeth, turned it upside down to empty the water from the bowl, then clamped it back between his teeth while raising both his eyebrows. I knew from this that I had missed my mark, and gave him a foolish smile.

This made him pat me on the arm in the forgiving way he had, then point with his thumb over the prow that sheltered us. I widened my eyes, to show I was wondering whether he wanted me to look – and when he nodded, I found a way to crouch half-upright while clinging to the bulwark. I immediately had all the breath knocked out of me, with the wind slamming into me and seeming to grab my head as if it meant to crush the brains out of me. Everything sensible begged to duck down and be safe again – but with Mr Tickle’s large hand pressing into my back, I knew I must stick at my post for a moment and tell him what he needed me to confirm.

I shielded my face and tried to find the horizon, but it kept flying away from me – a bar of darkness that one moment plunged underwater, and the next launched into the heavens. Not just a single bar of darkness, but bar upon bar, all heaped in higgledy-piggledy confusion. On the island, storms at evening had allowed the sun to set in glory, with explosions of orange and gold. But this was a different end to daylight. It seemed the sun had been entirely extinguished, and would never rise again.

Mr Tickle was impatient for his answer, and bellowed up to me.
‘Well, lad, what can you see?’ Once more I tried to protect my eyes, peering and squinting until I could fix a fragment of the distance. But suddenly it was not distance. The horizon was a mile away – or less than a mile. And it was not simple darkness. It was a deep-green featureless wall. No, I was mistaken again. Not featureless. As I narrowed my eyes even more tightly, I saw the shape had a spine, made of peaks and valleys. And where I saw these valleys I also found a shore, with cliffs carved out of sheer rock, all lit by plumes of white spray cascading across them.

Natty’s voice came back to me, no longer resigned as it had been, but hissing like her father. Spanish America, it said. Spanish America.

For the first time in my life I felt entirely at the mercy of the world – the idea of it made my legs crumple beneath me, so that I slumped down beside Mr Tickle. I felt I had been asked to carry an intolerable weight. Mr Tickle could not support it either. When I told him what I had seen, I might as well have heaped stones onto him: his face sagged and emptied. When I lolled my head against his chest, I was surprised to hear his heart still beating – loud as a kitchen clock.

I had no idea whether he understood what I said to him next – although it was nothing except a description of the coast, and an estimate that we would strike it very soon. He did not reply, and his expression did not change. I stared at him closely, willing him to speak. But again there was nothing, just the water streaming off his nose and beard. He never wiped it away. He had lost the power to feel, and even the will to care.

I took this as the final proof we could not survive. But rather than making me panic, and struggle to save myself against all odds, I accepted the idea quite calmly, as if I were a child that had been told it was bedtime. Without any exceptional sense of hurry, I looked about me with a marvelling curiosity at everything I was about to
leave, until even the rage of the storm seemed beautiful: the spray breaking over the prow in flowery branches; the miniature white bubbles in the water as it drained beneath my hands; the dozens of different shades of grey cloud that swirled overhead – dove grey, and pewter grey, and charcoal.

When I had done this, and with an equally steady composure, I decided I should make my peace with my Maker, and commend my soul to Him; although I had not lived an especially virtuous life, I had at least made efforts to improve my condition, and did not want to slip back at the last. I therefore said the ‘Nunc Dimittis’ under my breath, and when I had finished, and felt the comfort of that phrase in which we hear about the servant departing in peace, I shook Mr Tickle by the hand and called him a good brave fellow.

It will sound from this as though I had determined to stay and die where I sat, beside my friend. But in fact all my looking and praying was a kind of preparation for what I always knew must come next (and therefore last): namely, a creeping struggle back along the deck of the
Nightingale
with the wind raging in my face. That was where I meant to die – lying beside Natty in the roundhouse.

My journey to reach Mr Tickle had almost exhausted me. My journey away from him was impossible – but I would not accept that. The gale screamed in my ears. Rain drove nails into my head and hands. The sky wrapped darker and darker scarves round my eyes. Waves tore at me, wrestled with one another, boiled in pools and streams. I defied them all. I defied them because I could imagine Natty waiting for me – and knew I must reach her. A few moments before, I had been concerned with my own survival above all else. Now Natty was the whole purpose of my existence.

Nothing I could do was enough. In my lookout from the prow, I had not been able to see whether any reefs lay offshore. After only two or three minutes of clambering and sliding, which
brought me no closer to Natty than the mainmast, where I clung for a moment to recover my breath, I heard the sound I had dreaded. A sound like none I had heard before, but which I understood immediately. A tremendous
dunch
that was partly a sigh, partly a roar, and partly a scream. A hideous combination of solid and yielding. A pathetic wounding.

We had run aground. My first thought was not a thought but a question: why is there so much light on our ruin? This at least was easily answered. When I twisted my face upwards, I saw the wind had entered into a conspiracy with the sea, and suddenly blown the clouds from the sky, and the rain with them, so the spectacle of the wreck lay open to the moon and stars. They glared with a fierce brilliance – clear beams shattering across the water; lying solid over the black rock on which we had foundered, which coiled out from the cliffs ahead like a gigantic eel; and shimmering on the cliffs themselves, a hundred yards off our bow. In the space of a few leaping seconds I saw the cliffs stood higher than our mainmast, with a ribbon of gulls fraying into the sky above. The narrow shore was deserted, without any sign of a path or track that might lead us to safety, or anyone to our rescue.

While I was still gazing at these cliffs, recoiling from their desolation, I heard the timbers of our hull give another pitiful groan. This time there was no delay, no suspense, only a sudden welter of disasters. The waves took their chance like wolves, and leaped furiously over the bulwarks. The prow lurched underwater, creating a great juddery bubble of air that burst with a shine that seemed luminous. And all the while, in a chorus of misery and surrender, the rigging overhead, or such strands as remained, kept up their keening as the gale tore through.

Even now, and in a way that astonished me almost as much as the storm itself, I found my brain kept to its steady course. I can
only explain this by saying that I reckoned I might have no more than a few moments to live – and so was ravening for order. I was even able to notice the end of the
Nightingale
came in separate scenes, like the acts of a play. First she slewed round on her rocky perch, until our hull lay sideways to the main blast of the gale and parallel to the shore. Then, with a laborious slowness that felt heavy even to watch, she listed towards the land. Next I heard the last small sail at our jib ripped free of its rigging, and floundering into the waves. Next I heard the hatches burst open, which allowed the water to plunge into our hold in a hundred cataracts.

Finally, in the fifth act, our terrified passengers began to appear on deck, all carved with deep and shivering shadows. Some were dumbstruck as they crawled forward, and found a boom or a rope where they might cling, and hang, and await their fate. Some railed at the top of their voices, protesting they could not believe a just God would persist in treating them so harshly. All were immediately soused, and with the moonlight twisting across them resembled maggots on a corpse.

And here I have a confession to make, as well as a scene to paint. I knew I should help my fellow sufferers, but I did not. Not even to show the least respect and kindness. I ignored them. I pushed past them, in fact, and pretended not to feel the fingers that grasped at me, or to hear the voices that clamoured. When I came to Rebecca, who was pointing towards the whizzing sky with one hand, while the other pressed her Bible to her breast, I saw a puzzlement that cut me very deep – yet made no impression. My whole heart and mind was fixed elsewhere. Fixed on Natty.

But I had lost sight of her – and when I peered ahead to the roundhouse I thought she must already have been taken from me. The door swung wildly, and wave after wave gushed through the empty window frame. As these torrents shrank away through the bilges,
making a hideous sucking noise like a huge breath drawn endlessly inwards, the ship rose a little from the reef. Rose, and hesitated, and sent a curious shudder along her whole length. This was the moment of decision, though not controlled by any human power. When it passed, the
Nightingale
settled back onto the reef with an immense sigh, before very suddenly collapsing onto her side; the angle was so steep, every thing and every one on deck was immediately tipped into the water.

It is an easy sentence to write, but a dreadful thing to record. I heard voices shrieking as they fell, saw arms and legs scrabbling for purchase and finding none, felt the thud of bones against wood, skulls against skulls, and in a blurred glance found our entire little world had been flung aside. Bo’sun Kirkby I saw, torn from the wheel, with his mouth wide open in a scream that showed all the pegs of his teeth. And Mr Tickle I saw, with his brave red cap finally dashed from his white head. And Mr Allan, who seemed to be clutching a spoon. And Mr Stevenson, who had somehow found a way into the captain’s cabin and taken a bar of silver; he held this with straight arms as he skidded into the waves, so the weight would accelerate his journey to the bottom of the sea. ‘I cannot swim, I cannot swim,’ he called in his gentle brogue, and then disappeared.

As for me, I should consider myself lucky to be the witness of these things, because I am their survivor. For the plain fact of the matter is this: our upending began when I had dragged myself close to the mainmast, and as it continued I was caught in a spider’s web of rigging. Whether I wished it or not, I was snagged and held. I struggled at first, thinking I would be dragged underwater and drowned, but in fact the ropes supported me. This meant I was able to lie in a sort of cradle as my companions slithered into the sea – able to lie; able to turn; and able to search for Natty with a last
desperate scouring – and miraculously to find her. As suddenly as if I had actually
invented
her, I saw her hurtle through a window of the roundhouse with her arms crossed over her face. She bounced on the deck like a toy made of Indian rubber. She ricocheted into the waves. She sank, then immediately shot back to the surface, where I saw her face clenched in what seemed to be fury. She sank again and I saw her no more.

I writhed in my trap of ropes, kicking with my legs until I was free enough to wriggle around and follow. But follow where, exactly? Even with the moonlight falling in a steady wash, the surface of the sea was now so churned with arms and legs and heads and whole bodies and ropes and barrels and pieces of clothing and spars of wreckage, it was impossible to be sure exactly where she had vanished. But this did not deter me – how could it, when the thing I most valued in the world was on the point of leaving it? I marked a spot which I thought might be her place – a few of our apples had collected there, looking as red as starfish in the white spume. I took as large a breath as I could, and dived down.

The quiet that followed was uncanny. After the screams, and the curses of some men, and the prayers of others, and the continuous boom of the wind, and the crash of the waves, there was only the drum of my pulse, and the gurgle of bubbles as they trickled up from my lips and across my face. Could I see anything? Darkness. Could I feel anything? Only the soft nudging of flesh that I burrowed past into deeper water.

Nothing. When I burst to the surface again I struggled wildly, attempting to gauge by my distance from this piece of jagged timber, or that rag of sail-cloth, how far I had drifted from the spot I had tried to hit. But the sea does not allow precise calculations of this sort. Everything drifts – as I remembered Natty and I had said to one another, after the death of Jordan Hands. Nowhere remains
steady. All I could do was dive again, and then again, and then again, with each plunge more desperate than the last.

Whenever I swam beneath the waves, I might as well have been blundering through a dream. When my head was above water, and I was gasping to fill my lungs again, my dream became a vision of hell itself. There was never a trace of Natty – only devastation, revealed by flashes of moonlight. At one point I saw Spot, still in his cage, dragged in a cartwheel as the current bowled him through the foam; his small wings raggedly opened and closed, but there was no life in them. At another I found Mr Tickle and Bo’sun Kirkby, their limp bodies snared in the ropes of a cross-mast. Mr Allan I noticed, still alive. ‘Stay there, old girl,’ he was calling, speaking to the
Nightingale
as his arms flailed to keep himself afloat. ‘Stay there and we’ll come and empty you.’ His voice was full of foam, and his words bubbled.