Landfalls (48 page)

Sword Guard & Grip

Dillon moved toward a sword guard and handle displayed on a red velvet cloth. “This was the first thing we found,” he said, picking up the sword guard. He raised the other piece. “The handle we found later but it obviously belonged to the same sword.” He brought the pieces together to show how they fit. Lesseps nodded his appreciation.

“This was what began it all,” Dillon continued, separating the pieces and holding up the guard again. He explained how he'd found it on Tikopia, a tiny outlier of the Solomon Islands, where it was discovered hanging around the neck of a lascar who called himself Joe. Joe told Dillon he'd procured the item in Vanikoro, an island two days' sail west, a place filled with such objects, the detritus of two European ships that had been wrecked there many years before. Joe claimed an old white man, a survivor of the wreck, had sold it to him.

Dillon paused. It was clear from the perfunctory way Lesseps was nodding that he had heard the story already. The minister and the king had both nodded in the same way in his meetings with them. Dillon set the pieces down and stifled a groan. When he'd so readily shared his story with every newspaper that approached him, he hadn't anticipated the way the story would get ahead of him. His discoveries had been widely reported in France before he ever set foot in the country, picked up from Australian and Indian and English accounts. The advance fame had opened every door in Paris for him, of course. But now that he was
here
, in France, where he'd most looked forward to telling his story, he discovered that everyone already knew it.

Not that he'd revealed
everything
, of course. No one knew, for instance, that it was impossible for him to see the sword guard without resenting Joe all over again for refusing to accompany his expedition. The lascar spoke both English and Tikopian quite well; he would have been an able interpreter. Instead, Dillon had had to make do with Martin Buschart, a flabby, tattooed alcoholic Prussian who spoke neither language properly, despite having lived on Tikopia for a decade after deserting an American whaler. And then there was Rathea, the Tikopian who claimed he'd just returned from a two-year stay on Vanikoro. But when they finally got to Vanikoro, no one recognized him or could make any sense of his speech, which sounded to Dillon suspiciously like Fijian. The ineffective chain of translation from Dillon to Buschart to Rathea to the Vanikorans and back would have been comical had it not been so entirely exasperating.

It meant he was unsure of the account he was giving of the wrecks, especially regarding any survivors. He reported that a storm had driven the frigates onto the reef, that a group of Frenchmen had made it ashore, that from the ships' wreckage they'd crafted a small boat, and that most of them had sailed away in it, promising to return. This was largely Joe's account, however, and although Joe had seemed a credible enough fellow, he wasn't an eyewitness. It had proved impossible to confirm the story in Vanikoro. The only thing Dillon knew for sure was that no Frenchman—or European of any kind—remained on the island.

“Mr. Dillon,” the baron said. “Monsieur de Lesseps was just saying that all the officers on the voyage carried swords like this.”

“Indeed?” Dillon looked at Lesseps. The older man was looking intently at the sword guard and grip. Dillon suddenly understood: Lesseps wasn't here to discredit Dillon; he
wanted
to believe the mystery solved. And why shouldn't he? No doubt it had gnawed at him these forty years.

*   *   *

Lesseps lifted the guard and grip and held them against each other as Dillon had. With no side rings or loops or much in the way of a pommel, the guard itself fashioned with a pattern of woven silver, it had been the elegant and simple hilt of an elegant and simple sword. He'd had one just like it but had left it behind on the
Astrolabe
when he disembarked, taking only essentials for the long trip across Russia. He remembered missing it one night when he and Igor Golikoff, the Russian officer who'd accompanied him as far as Irkutsk, had been stuck in a filthy yurt waiting for a blizzard to pass. They had nothing but frozen reindeer to eat and only Golikoff's dull saber with which to slice it. They tried to thaw and cook the shredded slices, but the fire just filled the yurt with smoke, and in the end they'd simply eaten the slices raw, then dispensed with slicing and chewed directly on the slabs. Afterward, cold and nauseated, they'd clung together for warmth among a pile of smelly furs in the middle of the yurt.

“This could have been
my
sword,” Lesseps said in English, as much to end the memory as to return to the task at hand. “I left a sword behind when I disembarked.”

“What an extraordinary thing that would be,” Dillon said, his eyes wide.

Lesseps felt the first inkling of something like sympathy with the Irishman. “Yes,” he said. “Quite extraordinary.” To think he might be reunited with an object he'd left behind forty-two years ago on a ship off the coast of Kamchatka—after it was recovered from a South Pacific island where he'd never set foot! He examined the pieces again, admiring the handiwork, still evident despite the wear. One rarely saw craftsmanship like this anymore, he thought, but he didn't say so aloud. He never expressed any yearning for the past. It was the primary lesson of his eventful life, seeing him safely through the upheavals of the Revolution and the Terror, the ascendancy and fall of Napoleon, the restoration of the monarchy.

He was equally careful about expressing enthusiasm for the status quo. The current ultraroyalist regime, for instance, could not last. This year or next, Charles X would fall. The self-satisfied baron standing next to him would lose his position and return to exile, perhaps back in America, where he'd spent the years of Napoleon's rule—a fitting end for the obdurate monarchist. But Lesseps didn't share these predictions with anyone. A change in government wouldn't affect him. In a few days, he'd leave once more for Lisbon, where he'd continue as consul general, probably until he died. This was the other lesson of survival as a modern Frenchman: make oneself useful outside the country.

Not that he'd expected to end up in Portugal. Almost from infancy he'd been groomed to become the French ambassador to Russia. When he told Golikoff that they would meet again, he'd been
certain
—not that he would see Golikoff again but that he would return to Russia. Yet other men, less well acquainted with Russia and Russian and Russians but better connected at home, kept winning the post over him. By way of consolation he'd been appointed secretary of the embassy in Constantinople, only to end up imprisoned there for three years—he and his growing family—thanks to Napoleon's invasion of Egypt. When they were finally released, a rumor that their ship had lepers on board forced them to remain in quarantine for a month off the coast of Marseilles, biding their time in a moldering, leaky ship filled with refugees.

So when Napoleon invited him to join his suite with the Grand Arm
é
e in 1812, he was thrilled—thrilled to be back in service, thrilled to be close to the center of power, thrilled most of all to be going back to Russia. It couldn't turn out worse than Constantinople, he reasoned. Oh, how that misapprehension would return to him in all its bitter irony through the calamities that followed—the bloodbaths at Smolensk and Borodino, the terrifying Moscow fire, the horrors of the retreat! He'd kept thinking he saw Golikoff—in the light cavalry that harassed them as they fled, in the ruined faces of the peasants whose food they stole, in the hunched postures of their own soldiers, plodding slowly forward or stopped on the roadside, sleeping or dying or already dead. Everyone had something—a cut of military jacket, a mustache still neatly trimmed, a stolidity of expression, a whiff of tobacco smoke—that reminded him of his old companion.

After the peace, he'd petitioned Emperor Alexander and, after Alexander's death, his brother, Emperor Nicholas, for clemency and permission to return to Russia, but to no avail.

“Monsieur de Lesseps?”

Lesseps looked around at Dillon and the minister and laughed. “I was just recalling the days when fashionable young Frenchmen carried swords instead of canes,” he said airily.

Millstone

The last item was a small millstone, broken in two, lying on a heavy floorcloth. Dillon explained, trying not to sound too shamefaced, that it had split in half when they rolled it over in Vanikoro. “We found it in the same village as the post with the fleur-de-lis,” he added. He didn't add that they'd faced such rough seas returning to the ship that night that he'd nearly heaved it over the side of the boat. Or that it should have broken into more pieces when they hauled it aboard; his men, tired and storm-tossed, had dropped it, crushing Rathea's right foot. The Tikopian had hollered so loud and so long that Dillon finally threatened to tie him to the stone and throw him overboard.

Poor Rathea. Dillon couldn't remember the wiry old islander without a simultaneous upwelling of rage and grief and guilt. Rathea hadn't belonged on the expedition. He was just an old man talking big before the white man who paid so generously for the Vanikoran trinkets. Once the initial excitement abated, he'd tried to back out of the expedition. Dillon, desperate for an interpreter, had compelled him to remain, first by promising that Rathea would return to Tikopia laden with riches, and when that didn't work, by pretending he'd had dreams filled with portents should Rathea fail to cooperate. But he underestimated—by over a year, as it turned out—how long the voyage would take. It wasn't his fault. A leaky ship, uncooperative weather, unexpected detours, legal and bureaucratic difficulties, incompetent officers, troublesome passengers, outbreaks of illness—all conspired to create delay after delay after delay. It was too much for Rathea. Dillon had seen men die of many things—tropical fevers, accidents, drowning, scurvy, suicide. Rathea died of homesickness—only four days before the brig assigned to take him and Buschart back to Tikopia set sail.

And now here was Lesseps, crouched in judgmental silence before the millstone that had cost Dillon so much trouble. His mood darkened by memories of Rathea, Dillon now wondered wretchedly if he'd brought back a native tool. Had he taken some island woman's grinding stone for no reason? But then Lesseps put one hand over his mouth and said in a hoarse whisper, “This is the best thing you have.”

Dillon stepped forward and helped Lesseps back to his feet. He was surprised by how bony the Frenchman felt through his coat sleeve.

“We had two millstones on the
Astrolabe
,” Lesseps said. He explained that the stone had been connected to an ingenious windmill Captain de Langle had set up on the decks of both frigates to provide fresh flour. Dillon had read the published accounts of the voyage and knew this but remained silent, holding in check his mounting elation over Lesseps's recognition of the stone. “We always had fresh bread on board,” Lesseps added. “It astonished every European we met.” He paused. “We gave a spare stone to the priests in Monterey for the native women to grind corn,” he went on. “It looked exactly like this. Only—not broken, of course.”

Silence fell over the three men. Dillon could hear the asynchronous ticking of two clocks—a longcase clock in the corner, its wooden housing topped with a gold finial, and a second clock on the mantel, its plain white face peeking out from an absurdly embellished gold setting. If he only listened hard enough, he thought, he might compel the clocks to tick together, and all would be well with the world.

“Mr. Dillon,” the minister finally said, coming forward to shake his hand. “I congratulate you. We were already quite sure of your achievement, of course, as evidenced by the honors our government has bestowed on you. But Monsieur de Lesseps's testimony has confirmed it. You will be remembered forever as the man who discovered the wrecks of the Lap
é
rouse expedition.”

Dillon wanted to shout, to embrace the minister, to pick up Lesseps and twirl him around. He'd done it! He would collect the reward money. He would finish his book, which would be published to great acclaim. Learned societies throughout Europe would seek him out. He could retire from trading and sailing, perhaps pick up a diplomatic post somewhere. His children, the sons and daughter of the
Chevalier
Dillon, would marry well and assume their proper places in society.
They
would not be cowed by golden rooms and overdressed barons.

But then he saw the way Lesseps's face had collapsed at the word “wrecks,” and he restrained himself. He grasped the older man's hand. “Monsieur,” he said, “my great regret is that I could not bring back any survivors.”

*   *   *

Lesseps nodded and returned Dillon's grasp. He could see the elation in the Irishman's eyes and the effort it took to contain it, and he felt something almost like regard for the man. For Dillon seemed to understand the way his success had, finally and definitively, consigned to their deaths nearly two hundred men, the companions of Lesseps's youth. And if his fate was to bear the doomed expedition's documents safely back to France and then, years later, to identify remnants from the wrecks—what remained for him to do in this world? He felt depleted and old, and he must have shown it, for here was the minister helping him into a chair.

He sat before the broken millstone. Grooves remained visible on its weathered surface. He'd probably eaten bread made from flour ground on this very stone. He suddenly remembered a fig tart served on a beach in Chile: the crust, delectable in its buttery, crumbly perfection, might have originated from this stone as well. Funny to recall that after so long. Over the years his memories of the expedition hadn't just dimmed, as memories do; they'd lost the pressure of authenticity. More and more they seemed like someone else's memories. Or like something he'd read in a book. Occasionally he would find himself stopping short and wondering if any of it had actually happened.