The North Water (2 page)

“They can find him tomorrow,” he says. “I'll be long gone by then.”

She stands up, still unsteady from the drink, and tries impossibly to wipe the mud from her skirts. The man turns to leave.

“Give us a shilling or two, will you, darling?” Hester calls out to him. “For all me trouble.”

*   *   *

It takes him an hour to hunt down the boy. His name is Albert Stubbs and he sleeps in a brick culvert below the north bridge and lives off bones and peelings and the occasional copper earned by running errands for the drunkards who gather in the shithole taverns by the waterfront waiting for a ship.

The man offers him food. He shows him the money he stole from the Shetlander.

“Tell me what you want,” he says, “and I'll buy it for you.”

The boy looks back at him speechlessly, like an animal surprised in its lair. The man notices he has no smell to him at all—amidst all this filth he has remained somehow clean, unsullied, as if the natural darkness of his pigment is a protection against sin and not, as some men believe, an expression of it.

“You're a sight to see,” the man tells him.

The boy asks for rum, and the man takes a greasy half bottle from his pocket and gives it to him. As the boy drinks the rum, his eyes glaze slightly and the fierceness of his reticence declines.

“My name's Henry Drax,” the man explains, as softly as he is able to. “I'm a harpooner. I ship at dawn on the
Volunteer
.”

The boy nods without interest, as if this is all information he had heard long before. His hair is musty and dull, but his skin is preternaturally clean. It shines in the tarnished moonlight like a piece of polished teak. The boy is shoeless, and the soles of his feet have become blackened and horny from contact with the pavement. Drax feels the urge to touch him now—on the side of the face perhaps or the peak of the shoulder. It would be a signal, he thinks, a way to begin.

“I saw you before in the tavern,” the boy says. “You had no money then.”

“My situation is altered,” Drax explains.

The boy nods again and drinks more rum. Perhaps he is nearer twelve, Drax thinks, but stunted as they often are. He reaches out and takes the bottle from the boy's lips.

“You should eat something,” he says. “Come with me.”

They walk together without speaking, up Wincomlee and Sculcoates, past the Whalebone Inn, past the timber yards. They stop in at Fletcher's bakery and Drax waits while the boy wolfs down a meat pie.

When the boy has finished, he wipes his mouth, scours the phlegm from the back of his throat, and spits it out into the gutter. He looks suddenly older than before.

“I know a place we can go to,” he says, pointing across the road. “Just down there, see, on past the boatyard.”

Drax realizes immediately that this must be a trap. If he goes into the boatyard with the nigger boy he will be beaten bloody and stripped down like a cunt. It is a surprise that the boy has misprized him so thoroughly. He feels, first, contempt for the boy's ill judgment, and then, more pleasantly, like the swell and shudder of a fresh idea, the beginnings of fury.

“I'm the fucker, me,” he tells him softly. “I'm never the one that's fucked.”

“I know that,” the boy says. “I understand.”

The other side of the road is in deep shadow. There is a ten-foot wooden gate with peeling green paint, a brick wall, and then an alley floored with rubble. There is no light inside the alley, and the only sound is the crunch of Drax's boot heels and the boy's intermittent, tubercular wheezing. The yellow moon is lodged like a bolus in the narrowed throat of the sky. After a minute, they are released into a courtyard half-filled with broken casks and rusted hooping.

“It's through there,” the boy says. “Not far.”

His face betrays a telling eagerness. If Drax had any doubts before, he has none left now.

“Come to me,” he tells the boy.

The boy frowns and indicates again the way he wants them both to go. Drax wonders how many of the boy's companions are waiting for them in the boatyard and what weapons they are planning to use against him. Does he really look, he wonders, like the kind of useless prick who can be robbed by children? Is that the impression he presently gives out to the waiting world?

“Come here,” he says again.

The boy shrugs and walks forwards.

“We'll do it now,” Drax says. “Here and now. I won't wait.”

The boy stops and shakes his head.

“No,” he says. “The boatyard is better.”

The courtyard's gloom perfects him, Drax thinks, smooths out his prettiness into a sullen kind of beauty. He looks like a pagan idol standing there, a totem carved from ebony, not like a boy but more like the far-fetched ideal of a boy.

“Just what kind of a cunt do you think I am?” Drax asks.

The boy frowns for a moment, then offers him a beguiling and implausible grin. None of this is new, Drax thinks, it has all been done before, and it will all be done over again in other places and at other times. The body has its tedious patterns, its regularities: the feeding, the cleaning, the emptying of the bowels.

The boy touches him quickly on the elbow and indicates again the way he wants them both to go. The boatyard. The trap. Drax hears a seagull squawking above his head, notices the solid smell of bitumen and oil paint, the sidereal sprawl of the Great Bear. He grabs the nigger boy by the hair and punches him, then punches him again and again—two, three, four times, fast, without hesitation or compunction—until Drax's knuckles are warm and dark with blood, and the boy is slumped, limp and unconscious. He is thin and bony and weighs no more than a terrier. Drax turns him over and pulls down his britches. There is no pleasure in the act and no relief, a fact which only increases its ferocity. He has been cheated of something living, something nameless but also real.

Lead and pewter clouds obscure the fullish moon; there is the clatter of iron-rimmed cartwheels, the infantile whine of a cat in heat. Drax goes swiftly through the motions: one action following the next, passionless and precise, machinelike, but not mechanical. He grasps on to the world like a dog biting into bone—nothing is obscure to him, nothing is separate from his fierce and sullen appetites. What the nigger boy used to be has now disappeared. He is gone completely, and something else, something wholly different, has appeared instead. This courtyard has become a place of vile magic, of blood-soaked transmutations, and Henry Drax is its wild, unholy engineer.

 

CHAPTER TWO

Brownlee considers himself, after thirty years pacing the quarterdeck, to be a fair judge of the human character, but this new fellow Sumner, this Paddy surgeon fresh from the riotous Punjab, is a complex case indeed. He is short and narrow-featured, his expression is displeasingly quizzical, he has an unfortunate limp and speaks some barbarously twisted bogland version of the English language; yet, despite these obvious and manifold disadvantages, Brownlee senses that he will do. There is something in the young man's very awkwardness and indifference, his capacity and willingness
not
to please, that Brownlee, perhaps because it reminds him of himself at a younger and more carefree stage of life, finds oddly appealing.

“So what's the story with the leg?” Brownlee asks, waggling his own ankle by way of encouragement. They are sitting in the captain's cabin on the
Volunteer
drinking brandy and reviewing the voyage to come.

“Sepoy musket ball,” Sumner explains. “My shinbone bore the brunt.”

“In Delhi this is? After the siege?”

Sumner nods.

“First day of the assault, near the Cashmere Gate.”

Brownlee rolls his eyes and whistles low in appreciation.

“Did you see Nicholson killed?”

“No, but I saw his body afterwards when he was dead. Up on the ridge.”

“An extraordinary man, Nicholson. A great hero. They do say the niggers worshipped him like a god.”

Sumner shrugs.

“He had a Pashtun bodyguard. Enormous sod named Khan. Slept outside his tent to protect him. The rumor was the two of them were sweethearts.”

Brownlee shakes his head and smiles. He has read all about John Nicholson in the
Times
of London: the way he marched his men through the most savage heat without ever once breaking sweat or asking for water, about the time he sliced a mutinous sepoy clean in two with one blow of his mighty sword. Without men like Nicholson—unyielding, severe, vicious when necessary—Brownlee believes the empire would have been lost entirely long ago. And without the empire who would buy the oil, who would buy the whalebone?

“Jealousy,” he says. “Bitterness only. Nicholson's a great hero, a little bit savage sometimes from what I heard, but what do you expect?”

“I saw him hang a man just for smiling at him, and the poor bugger wasn't even smiling.”

“Lines must be drawn, Sumner,” he says. “Civilized standards must be maintained. We must meet fire with fire sometimes. The niggers killed women and children after all, raped them, slashed their tiny throats. A thing like that requires righteous vengeance.”

Sumner nods and glances briefly downwards at his black trousers grown gray at the kneepiece, and his unpolished ankle boots. Brownlee wonders whether his new surgeon is a cynic or a sentimentalist, or (is it even possible?) a little bit of both.

“Oh, there was a good deal of that going on,” Sumner says, turning back to him with a grin, “a good deal of the righteous vengeance. Yes indeed.”

“So why did you leave India?” Brownlee asks, shifting about a little on the upholstered bench. “Why quit the Sixty-First? It wasn't the leg?”

“Not the leg, God no. They loved the leg.”

“Then what?”

“I had a windfall. Six months ago my uncle Donal died suddenly and left me his dairy farm over in Mayo—fifty acres, cows, a creamery. It's worth a thousand guineas at least, more probably, enough, for sure, to buy myself a pretty little house in the shires and a nice respectable practice somewhere quiet but wealthy: Bognor, Hastings, Scarborough possibly. The salt air pleases me, you see, and I do like a promenade.”

Brownlee seriously doubts whether the good widows of Scarborough, Bognor, or Hastings would really wish to have their ailments attended to by a short-arse hopalong from beyond the Pale, but he leaves that particular opinion unexpressed.

“So what are you doing sitting here with me,” he asks instead, “on a Greenland whaling ship? A famous Irish landowner like yourself, I mean?”

Sumner smiles at the sarcasm, scratches his nose, lets it go.

“There are legal complications with the estate. Mysterious cousins have appeared out of the woodwork, counterclaimants.”

Brownlee sighs sympathetically.

“Ain't it always the way,” he says.

“I've been told that the case could take a year to be resolved, and until then I have nothing much to do with myself and no money to do it with. I was passing through Liverpool on my way back from the lawyers in Dublin when I ran into your Mr. Baxter in the bar of the Adelphi Hotel. We got to talking and when he learned I was an ex–army surgeon in need of gainful employment he put two and two together and made a four.”

“He's a fierce sharp operator, that Baxter,” Brownlee says, with a twinkle in his eye. “I don't trust the bastard myself. I do believe he has some portion of Hebrew blood running in his withered veins.”

“I was happy enough with the terms he offered. I'm not expecting the whaling will make me rich, Captain, but it will keep me occupied at least while the cogs of justice turn.”

Brownlee sniffs.

“Oh, we'll make use of you one way or another,” he says. “There is always work for those that are willing.”

Sumner nods, finishes off his brandy, and places the glass back down on the table with a small clack. The oil lamp depending from the dark wood ceiling remains unlit, but the shadows in the corners of the cabin are deepening and spreading as the light outside begins to fail and the sun slides out of sight behind an iron and redbrick commotion of chimneys and roofs.

“I'm at your service, sir,” Sumner says.

Brownlee wonders for a moment exactly what this means but then decides it means nothing at all. Baxter is not a man to give secrets away. If he has chosen Sumner for a reason (besides the obvious ones: cheapness and availability), it is probably only that the Irishman is easygoing and pliable and clearly has his mind on other things.

“As a rule there is not much doctoring to be done on a whaler, I find. When the men get sick they either get well again on their own or else they turn in on themselves and die—that is my experience at least. The potions don't make a great deal of difference.”

Sumner raises his eyebrows but appears unconcerned by this casual disparagement of his profession.

“I should examine the medicine chest,” he says, without much enthusiasm. “There may be some items I need to add or replace before we sail.”

“The chest is stowed in your cabin. There is a chemist's shop on Clifford Street besides the Freemason's Hall. Get whatever you need and tell them to send the bill to Mr. Baxter.”

Both men rise from the table. Sumner extends his hand and Brownlee briefly shakes it. Each man for a moment peers at the other one as if hoping for an answer to some secret question they are too alarmed or wary to ask out loud.

“Baxter won't like that much, I imagine,” Sumner says at last.

“Bugger Baxter,” Brownlee says.

*   *   *

Half an hour later, Sumner sits hunched over on his bunk and tongues his pencil stub. His cabin has the dimensions of an infant's mausoleum, and smells, already, before the voyage has even begun, sour and faintly fecal. He peers skeptically into the medicine chest and begins to make his shopping list:
hartshorn
, he writes,
Glauber's salt
,
Spirit of Squills
. Every now and then he unstoppers one of the bottles and sniffs the dried-up innards. Half the things in there he has never heard of: Tragacanth? Guaiacum? London Spirit? It's no wonder Brownlee thinks the “potions” don't work: most of this stuff is fucking Shakespearean. Was the previous surgeon some kind of Druid?
Laudanum
, he writes by the eggish light of a blubber lamp,
absinthe
,
opium pills
,
mercury
. Will there be much gonorrhea amongst a whaling crew? he wonders. Possibly not, since whores in the Arctic Circle are likely to be thin on the ground. Judging by the amount of Epsom salts and castor oil already in the chest, however, constipation will be a sizable problem. The lancets, he notices, are uniformly ancient, rusty, and blunt. He will have to have them sharpened before he begins any bleeding. It is probably a good thing he has brought his own scalpels and a newish bone saw.