The Star of the Sea (55 page)

The strangeness of the stars was his other thought now: the way ordinary things become mysterious late at night. Some people discerned in them proof of a Creator; an impetus which piloted the Earth through the illuminated nullity, and which always would, until it annihilated even that nothingness. While others saw no
evidence for anything in their arrangement: a celestial clutter which was beautiful, certainly, but on to which no pattern or purpose should be projected, and for which the word ‘arrangement’ would therefore not suffice. The stars had not been arranged by any force but hazard, and by those who stared up at them like gaping monkeys from the lonely star they called the Earth. This is what Grantley Dixon had come to believe: that the monkeys’ descendants had looked at God’s droppings and decided to call them stars. It was mankind and not the Almighty that had ordered the universe; only a man could look at an accident and call it a creation with Himself at the centre.

And he wondered if one day the monkeys might learn to fly, if they might construct ships which would sail around the planets as the one he was standing on at the present moment had sailed around the seas. He supposed that would happen. It was probably unavoidable. They would gawk out their portholes and scratch themselves in wonderment and give each other chimpish grunts of congratulation. And all of it would be seen as something to celebrate.

Grace Toussaint, the elderly Yoruba who had helped to raise him on his grandfather’s plantation, had often told him what she felt to be the most consequential secret of life: that all of our trials are caused by restlessness, the refusal to accept the fact that limitations exist. She was the most tender person Dixon had known in Louisiana, a place where people could be ardent as the merciless sun, but on this contention she was ardent herself. Dixon’s grandfather, a Jew, a hater of slavery, had argued with her frequently about the point. A man that knew the whispered malignity of neighbours, he had crossed the borders many times: to Mississippi, east Texas, into southern Arkansas. There he would purchase the most broken of slaves and take them back to Louisiana. He would walk his tended meadows as the sun raised the crops and calculate how many could be saved this year. A good field was ten slaves, a bad one maybe two. Every precious harvest of his fifty thousand acres was sold for the purpose of redeeming the stolen.

Mississippi was a Hell for the black man, he told his grandchild; and if Louisiana was far from Paradise, at least it was not quite Hell. The
Code Napoléon
had seen to that. He had purchased Grace Toussaint and her blinded tortured brother in order to restore a
version of their liberty; had argued with her frequently about something called free will. He would say that to be human was to accept nothing of proscription, to live only by the boundaries of what your conscience dictated. But Grace Toussaint had not agreed. It was easy to make grand statements from the vantage ground of wealth. Had she remained all her life in the country of her birth she might even be making them herself, she told her purchaser; for her people had once been royalty there.

The arguments were strange. Dixon did not understand them. One night as a boy, he had paused in the hallway, by the half-opened door of his grandfather’s study, and eavesdropped on the quarrel that was raging inside: ‘You think God has any colour? You really think that, Grace? Jesus Christ was probably a Negro, Grace! His skin was the colour of tobacco, Grace!’ And she had answered bitterly that if the old man truly thought as much, he was the sorriest fool that ever saw Louisiana: for Christ was as lily-white as all the powerful.

She used to take Dixon walking on summer mornings, along the drive of yuccas and beeches that led down to the pasturage; past the whitewashed shanties of the upperside meadow and then through the misty heat of the tobacco fields. Sweet the warm air with the aroma of watered leaves; thick with the clatter of crickets. Her brother, whose name was Jean Toussaint, though he was known among the farm boys as ‘Handsome John’, would sometimes walk behind them with the aid of a stick. He didn’t care for company most of the time. In the mornings he didn’t care for it, ever.

Despite his great age he was a powerfully strong man, with enormous hands, bulging veins in his temples, his skin the colour of antique gold. He would often pluck a tune from the battered two-dollar guitar he carried on his long, straight back, like a dusty knight in a storybook hefting a shield; but Dixon had never heard him sing or even speak. One day he asked his grandfather why this was so. Dixon was twelve years old at that time, and was told that when Jean Toussaint had been half that age his tongue was cut out as a punishment by his master, a Mississippi son of an Irish bitch who deserved to burn for eternity. That Jean Toussaint was not Handsome John’s real name; that Grace Toussaint was not Grace Toussaint’s name; that even their names had been stolen away from them when they themselves had been stolen from Africa. It was the instant in Dixon’s
childhood when everything had changed. More than the realisation that his parents had died. More than the moment when the police came to tell him that there had been an accident at his home, a terrible accident; that his house was burnt and his parents were dead and that now he would have to leave New Haven and live with his grandfather down in Evangeline. It had lodged in him like a bullet that could never be dug out.

‘Things are what they are,’ Grace Toussaint had often told Dixon. ‘Never join anything. Don’t ask no questions. The world will still be here when you have left it behind. Those trees, these fields, will still be trees and fields.’ And later, as a student, he had seen a version of that thought expressed by savant Pascal in his revered
Pensées
. ‘All of man’s difficulties are caused by one single thing. His inability to be at ease in a room.’ And it wasn’t necessarily that Dixon disagreed, but what could be
done
with a thought like that? Could you look at a world where tongues were torn out, where human beings were branded like longhorns, stamped with the names of the savages who had bought them, and say it had nothing to do with you? The clothes on his back, the fine boots on his feet, the very volumes of philosophy in which equality was anatomised – all these had been bought with the proceeds of subjugation, the trust fund established by his slave-trading ancestors. ‘Clean money now,’ his grandfather would assert. But there was no clean money in a dirty world.

Even now he was in hock to dirty money. Journalism paid little, almost always late. His life in London had been expensive and profitless, and had been possible only because of his grandfather’s subsidising it. He had hoped for the ‘scoop’ that might give him his freedom, the story nobody else could tell; but in six long years it had never materialised. All that had come was further dependence. The plump registered envelopes with the Louisiana postmark. The wads of greasy dollars he had done nothing to earn. The letters from his grandfather so brimming with sympathy for the difficult life of the young man of letters.
You have a talent, Grantley. You cannot hide your gift. Whatever else you do, you must keep writing. Never be discouraged. Do what you have to do. It is not a matter of the ends justifying the means: but of the creation of new means and new ends
. The loathsome defensiveness haunting their lines. The furious guilt of duplicitous compromise. Now there was a way to escape it all.

Other thoughts were boiling like a poison in his mind and he wondered if this might be a good time to mention them. It would be more convenient in some ways to say nothing at all; to stand here in companionable stillness with another of your species and ask yourself what the other might be thinking, if anything, and into which category of stargazing he might be placed. But already Grantley Dixon knew the answer to that. All murderers must be unbelievers, no matter their denomination.

‘Do you know – your face seems very familiar, Mr Mulvey.’

Mulvey cocked his head in wonder, like a dog hearing an intruder, then gave a few small nods and brushed the ash from his lapel. ‘No doubt you’re afterseen me walkin about the ship, sir. I do dander around the ship the odd time at night. Thinkin me thoughts, like.’

‘No doubt. But you know, it’s the damnedest thing – the first time I noticed you, the night we left Liverpool, I thought I recognised you even then. I actually noted you down in my diary.’

‘I can’t comprehend how you’d reckon to that, sir. I don’t believe we’ve met before.’

‘It does seem a little odd, doesn’t it?’

‘They do-say every man has a double, sir. Maybe he does.’ He chuckled, as though the thought amused him. ‘Maybe me own is beyond in America, sir. Your own home place, sir. I might even meet him myself over there, God witling. And shake his hand. Do you think so, sir?’

‘Oh he isn’t in America. I think he’s in London.’

‘London, sir? Do you tell me? Isn’t that the livin wonder?’ He took a long drag on the dampened smoke, like a man who was about to be marched to the gallows and wanted to finish it before having to go. ‘But then again when you think –’ a longer drag and a deeper exhalation – ‘there’s queerer conundrums do go on in the world than are dreamed of in philosophy. As Shakespeare has it.’

‘Ever been there?’

‘Where’s that agin, sir?’

‘London. Whitechapel. Around the East End.’

A flake of tobacco had stuck to his tongue. It took him a while to pluck it loose. ‘No, sir, I wasn’t, I’m sorry to say. Woulden suppose I ever will be now. Belfast’s as far as I ever rambled from home.’

‘You’re sure?’

He laughed with unexpected lightness and gazed dreamily out at the darkness. ‘I’d say London’s one town a man’d remember been in, sir. I believe it’s a grand place entirely, so I’ve been told.’ He turned and looked directly into Dixon’s eyes. ‘They do-say it’s full of opportunity, sir. Isn’t that right? They do-say a feller might have himself all manner of sport in London.’

‘It’s just that for a man who’s never been to London, I can’t help but notice that you talk as if you had been.’

‘Beggin your indulgence, sir, but I don’t get your meanin.’

‘You see, for example – the way you just said the word “feller”. Most curious pronunciation for an Irishman, don’t you think? “Fellow” or “fella” is what you might expect.’

‘I coulden rightly say what Your Honour would expect, sir.’

‘And at dinner tonight you used a certain word which I couldn’t help noticing. “Costermonger”, I think it was. A London word for a street trader, isn’t that right?’

‘I don’t recollect myself ever spakin that word in the whole of me life, sir. Perhaps Your Honour heard me wrong, like. Or misunderstood me accent.’

‘Ah, but you did, Mr Mulvey. Let me help your memory. You don’t mind?’

‘If I minded, I’d not insult Your Honour by sayin I minded.’

Dixon took out his notebook and quietly read a few lines. ‘
Tonight we dined with Mulvey from Connemara; whose speech patterns in particular I found most interesting, being peppered with colloquialisms clearly picked up in London. Among them: “Coster”. “Costermonger”. “Chum” for a friend
.’

‘It must be a fierce burden for you, sir, writin everthin down.’

‘Habit of my profession, I suppose you could call it. I find I forget things if I don’t write them down.’

‘An honourable profession it is, too, sir: the writin profession. They do-say the pen is mightier than the sword.’

‘They do say that. I’m not certain it’s true.’

‘Tis a great blessin you’re afterbeen given, sir, all the same, sir. I wisht I had it meself. There’s many as wanted it but it’s given to few.’

‘What blessing is that?’

‘The gift you have for puttin a thing in English, sir. The tongue of the poets and Our Lord himself in the scriptures.’

‘I think you’ll find the Lord in question actually spoke Aramaic.’

‘To Your Honour, sir, maybe. To myself, he spoke English.’

‘Or perhaps he spoke cockney. Like the costermongers do.’

The Ghost laughed abruptly and shook his head. ‘I must of heard one of the sailorboys usin the word, sir. I could no more tell Your Honour what it means to save me life.’

‘Oh, your life hardly needs saving, Mr Mulvey. Not yet, at any rate.’

He blew very wearily and gave a brief frown of bafflement. ‘I’d be reline on yourself to explain that one to me, sir. You’ve a riddlish way of talkin betimes.’

‘When I first came to London, there was a case in the newspapers. It interested me a lot, I don’t know why. Case of a petty thief in Newgate Prison who murdered a guard and then escaped. You probably remember it. “Hall” was his name. Known as the Monster of Newgate.’

‘I don’t think I ever heard tell of the case you mention.’

‘No. You wouldn’t have. You were in Belfast at the time.’

‘That’s right, sir, I was. The sweet town on the Lagan.’

‘You don’t remember hearing about the case but you remember where you were when you didn’t hear about it.’

Mulvey looked at him coldly. ‘I spent a lot of time in Belfast.’

‘And I spent a lot of time in London.’

‘More luck to you, sir. Now I’ll bid you good-night.’

‘I was contributing to a newspaper in London at the time. The
Morning Chronicle
. Liberal paper. Well I set myself the task of learning more about the famous Mr Hall. Went to the prison and studied the records. Talked to a few of the old lags in the dens up that end of town. Then down to the East End and rummaged around for a few weeks. Ran into a conversational gentleman by the name of McKnight. Scots gentleman. Something of a drunkard. Well, he says he used to work a dodge around Lambeth with an Irishman named either Murphy or Malvey. From Connemara, apparently. Place near Ardnagreevagh. Strangely enough, he went by the name of Hall.’

‘That must of been the right fascination to you, sir.’

‘Yes. He got seven years in Newgate – this Murphy or Malvey. Did I mention that already?’

‘There’s a good many Irish in that place, I’d say, sir. Poor Pat has it hard enough over in England.’

‘Not many were admitted on the same day as the Monster. The nineteenth of August, 1837. On the very same charges. Maybe even the same face.’