Blessed Isle (7 page)

“Because I don’t want you to.”
I think of all the wounds I’d had that day, that one was the worst.

I was angry with him, you see. And with myself also. His impulsiveness had cost me my ship; had cost Mortimer and Gregory and Chapman and Kent, all the surviving marines and tars, even the convicts, their lives. So I thought at the time. I hadn’t realized that Carter had been the one to start it. That makes a difference. I wish you had told me before! I should not have been so resentful over the years. It is . . . It shall not be the least of my regrets that I misjudged you so. I am always doing it. You make play of being charmingly reckless, a rake without responsibility, but I should have known you better than that. I am not worthy of you. Not now, and not then.
But I digress. I was at the time furious, and hurt, and deeply, burningly ashamed. I wished I had gone down with my ship—my first command! —and died. I blamed him for saving my useless life, and myself for letting him do so. I loathed the fact that I wanted to let him carry on petting me while I fell asleep with my head in his lap. We neither of us deserved that.
“Can you watch?” I asked at length, reluctantly. “How do you feel?”
“I feel splendid.” He grinned at me, white teeth in a face speckled with red gore. “Better than fine. I feel . . . exultant.”
I couldn’t answer that. I lay down by the mast, thoroughly repelled, and fell asleep in an instant.
When I woke, my head seemed full of oakum, and my body an iron structure, partially rusted together. Before I opened my eyes, I thought from the sound of the wind that the storm had abated a little. Though I lay in a pool of rainwater, its rate of descent had slowed. A rhythmic scrape and shush lulled me back to oblivion, and when I woke again it was distinctly drier beneath me.
I looked up. Garnet sat in the stern, his black hair blown forward over his face, the tiller under his arm and the ropes of the sail in one hand as he bailed with the other. He lacks at least ten of my years, and at that point he looked, against the breaking dawn, young and weary and beautiful.
He turned his head to look at me. It seemed an enormous effort. His face was white as paper and those brown eyes of his looked black to the rim. “Harry. I’m tired.”
My heart twisted within me and my anger fled. Even with my guilt and desolation, it seemed I had space for a fresh pain. I should have known the battle vigour would wear off and leave him watching over me, injured, alone, and rebuked, with both our lives in his hands and no word of thanks. I was an utter villain.
Creakily, my bones protesting the movement, I found water and hard tack, passed them to him. Then I got him by the shoulders, and as he had done for me earlier, I eased him away from the tiller. He yielded to me, heavy, limp, and confiding, not an ounce of strength left in him.
“I have a niece,” I said, my arms about his chest, settling him down into a sitting position beneath me. His head drooped onto my knee, his eyes closed. “Betsy. My sister and her husband let her sit up to hear my tales when I am in port, and she falls asleep just like this: draped all over me. I can lift up her little arm and let it fall, and she does not wake.”
He gave a “hmn” of amusement, tried to open his eyes and failed.
My eyes burned as I brushed my fingers against his throat. How could I have blamed him for a disaster that was my own responsibility? I had known all along that Garnet was proud and reckless, arrogant and hot-tempered, with that aristocratic certainty that everything he did must be right. I had gone against his advice in ordering the convicts to be released. I had loaded him with the responsibility of commanding them, though I knew he was weary beyond reason or restraint. If he had snapped briefly under the pressure and hit one of them, unprovoked, well, it was no worse than many a boatswain had done to a surly new recruit. As his captain, I should have seen his fraying temper and restrained it before the damage could be done. I had asked too much of him. The death of my crew, the wreckage of all my hopes? It was my fault, not his.
How deep pride goes! Even then, I cherished a small ember of self-regard, because I was nobly and selflessly able to forgive Garnet. I thought it a proof of my love. Now I see that he was blameless all along. Even my forgiveness was an offence to him, for I patronised him when I should have trusted his judgement. I treated him like a boy when he has always been the better man. This I will try to remember in future, so that I do not make the same error again.
“You’re not angry?” he asked me then, his voice slurring with tiredness.
I threaded my fingers through his hair and teased out the tangles of blood and salt. A wearying inner voice told me we should not be talking so—like lovers, stirring drowsily in the early morning, warm beneath the blankets. But why not? Who was here to see? We were ruined and dying, and together. And for the first time in my life—since, at the age of ten, I began to suspect there was something strange about me—I felt free. At peace. “No,” I murmured, watching his fingers open, and the biscuit he had taken up fall out into his lap. “I’m not angry. Or at least, only with myself. I’m sorry, Garnet. I’m so sorry.”
By midday, the storm had slackened to become a fine following wind, the swell had decreased, and the sky above had turned the most translucent of whites. A glow like a hot pearl concealed behind those filmy clouds showed me the sun, finally, enough for me to take a guess at our direction. Still mostly west with some northing. I thought perhaps, with a little luck, we might yet strike Tahiti and be saved, though luck had not been the greatest distinguishing feature of this trip so far.
Garnet slept all day, while I thought about my life. All my striving for success and it had come to this: nothing—worse than nothing. If we made it back to England by some outrageous miracle, a court martial would be waiting for me, as it was for any captain who lost a ship. I had lost four. Perhaps five, if the
Ardent
too had gone down, as seemed likely. An astonishing degree of failure that deserved to be punished with the utmost rigour,
pour encourager les autres.
The irony of it! All those years I had feared to reach out lest I bring disgrace on myself and here it was, inescapable. It seemed that should I not drown, then I must indeed be destined to hang.
Steam rose off us as we travelled onwards. Our coats dried on our backs. Garnet woke sunburned, his face flushed pink, staggered to the heads and then to the barrel of water to drink thirstily. When he settled himself to the tiller I did the same, then brought the bucket back and set it, upturned, between his legs so I could sit there, leaning back against his chest. He gave a snort of amusement, and pressed his smile to the crown of my head. “I like you better like this.”
“I find I no longer need worry about the propriety of a relationship with an officer of inferior rank. If I’m not hanged for incompetence when we get home, I’ll be turned before the mast for sure.”
“You think we’ll get home?” He placed a kiss on the tip of my ear, startling me into laughter.
“At this moment I don’t very much care.”
I felt his low, rich chuckle through the muscles of my back and it warmed me like the sun. Setting an arm around me, he idly unbuttoned my waistcoat from top to bottom, and though I eagerly wished to know whether he would move on to other buttons after, I fell asleep before I could find out.
Sometimes those first days come back to me in dreams as a glimpse of paradise. We were hot and cramped and thirsty, filthy, dishevelled, sick of hardtack, and the barrel of water grew staler by the day. Yet what I remember is the solid warmth of him in my arms, drowsing, peaceful and contented as we drifted onwards under the light of the stars. It was the first time I had ever been so purely happy.
We talked. I learned about his family; a mother and father so devoted to each other that the children had always known they came second. He detailed all their different ways of attracting attention, from the ostentatious perfection of the eldest, to Garnet’s waywardness. He too had nieces whom he adored. “I was bringing home the most beautiful packet of silk for Constance’s first ball dress. She will be coming out soon, and that shade of jonquil would have brought out the chestnut in her hair.”
His brows creased. We had unpicked his cravat and made a line, bent a pin into a hook and threaded on it the juiciest, whitest, most energetically squirming maggot we could shake out of the bread, and he was sitting dangling this impromptu fishing rod over the side. He shifted it into the other hand, rubbed his forehead, squeezing his eyes shut. “The silk is at the bottom of the ocean now. And I may never see her again.”
Something took the bait. I saw the line whip out through his fingers and lunged for it, catching it just before it hit the water, landing an ugly, widemouthed, warty creature, a toad of the fish world. “Yes!” I cried, elated at still being able to achieve something. “Yes. I got one! You nearly lost him, you sluggard!”
He had not re-opened his eyes. “My head hurts,” he said. “The light is too bright.”
I used to be a steady sort of man, but Garnet has always had this ability to tip me from overweening joy to despair and back again. I left the creature flapping in the bilges and pressed my hand to his face. He all but scorched me.
Savagely, I shoved back the wool of his coat, the loosened neck of his shirt, and saw the fierce red blush where no sunburn should be. There on the hot, smooth flesh stood out the little mottled circles of typhus.
I’m told Job in his trial never once sinned by being angry with God. I was not so restrained. I stood by the mast and screamed my voice hoarse at Him, shaking my fist at the heavens and dredging up every obscenity from my childhood I had ever carefully purged from my speech. There came no reply, and in the end Garnet had to beg me to stop, for I was making his headache worse.
I sat down again, squashed flat like an ant under a man’s foot. I was no doctor, and even if I were, I had no medicines. I had nowhere to go. The storm had thrown me off my reckoning so far I had no hope of guessing our longitude. The empty ocean stretched out from horizon to horizon, featureless, and I knew the islands on which I pinned my hope were scattered in the Southern Ocean like a handful of sixpences on a desert of white sand. Should the wind blow one degree this way, or that, we might pass by them without even seeing them, blow onwards, adrift, a funeral barge under a black sky full of the points of teeth.
Looking back on it now, it occurs to me that I too may well have been delirious from the heat. It seemed such a relief to give up, and yet I was weeping as I tied off the sail, put a hitch round the rudder and made as comfortable a pallet for us both as I could out of rope and our coats. I lay down there. There seemed a ceremony to it, as a woman of India lies on the pyre of her husband, perhaps not willing, but resigned to being consumed by fire together with her beloved. Gathering Garnet’s lithe frame into my arms, I pressed my wet cheek against his forehead to cool him. He lifted his chin, instinctively offering a kiss. His mouth was dry, his lips hot and rough. His breath against my face came in short bursts of fire. “Hate you,” he said. “All this time . . . You have to pick now. I’m too tired.”
“Ssh,” I said, “go to sleep.” It must have been the end of everything, because there was such a feeling of rightness, of coming home, simply to lie there with his skin against mine, our breath mingling, our hearts slowly coming into time with one another. I closed my eyes and waited for the end.
Let no one say death comes on demand. I woke suddenly, as if, at some instinctual level, I recognised a change. The oars dug me in the back, and my chest and thighs were damp from being pressed against Garnet’s blazing heat. An urgency had me by the heart, but it had not reached my mind.
Damn it!
I thought,
You weren’t supposed to wake up afterwards!
But I disentangled myself nevertheless and crawled back to the stern to look out.
Night had fallen and the cool refreshed me. The sea ran on with barely a swell: a long, idle, rolling motion, smooth and black. Above us shone a spill of stars, pale gold and silver and white. I thought they twinkled. But something about that flicker kept me braced against the gunwale, gazing up. Was there a sound? A peeping? A low, restless whirring noise?
Yes! Yes, there was!
I bit down on my lower lip and the cracked flesh parted. Blood oozed out, salty and thick as I peered up into fitful darkness. I caught fluttering, clapping, clicking noises, an impression of swooping. Birds! And not gulls. These were a great flock of tiny, black, plover-like birds: the kind that makes their nests ashore.
I took the tiller in my hand, the ropes of the sail in the other, and turned up into the wind to follow them.
Hours passed. I feared for Garnet, but I knew his best hope lay in finding land, where I could find him shelter and fresh water. Medicine even, God willing.
The birds, flying fast against the wind, scudded away before me until I could no longer even guess at them. My heart failed, but I held my course, and then, two or three hours later, I felt that unexplainable sensation a sailor gets when there is land nearby. For me it is a kind of jangle of the nerves and a breathlessness. The water feels shallow beneath me and the waves feel wrong. The air hangs heavy as though in an old, unopened room.
The sky had turned to slate, grey-blue in the east, and sunlight filtered upwards through the sea like a candle in too thick a green glass lantern. I muffled my breathing behind my hand, strained my ears and heard it: surf. The long, uninterrupted swells of Oceania breaking on a distant shore.
“Garnet!” I cried, nudging him with my foot. He rolled side to side limply and I, with my heartbeat held in suspense, hunkered down and shook him violently by the shoulder. “Garnet, wake up! That’s an order, Lieutenant. Help me find the land!”
His eyes were half open, a slit of white eyeball beneath the fringe of dark lashes. But he clung to life still. He gave a little mutter, and his pulse raced visibly in his scarlet throat. I caught up the bailing bucket, filled it in the sea—the sound of breakers growing stronger in the tricky pewter twilight of dawn—and dashed the water over his face.
Several doctors have since told me I might as well have stabbed him in the heart. The fever should be encouraged to grow and reach its climax, I now understand. This sudden cooling might have proved catastrophic. But he looked so hot, so sunken away where I couldn’t reach him, and I wanted him to wake.