The North Water (21 page)

“With Brownlee gone, I'm captain still, and I'll cheerfully murder any mutinous bastard who dares think otherwise.”

There is a pause, then Bannon, a loose-eyed Shetlander with silver hoops in his ears, picks up a barrel stave and rushes wildly forwards. Cavendish, without raising the rifle from his hip, tilts the barrel upwards and shoots him through the throat. The top portion of the Shetlander's skull detaches and flies backwards against the steeply pitched canvas roof, leaving a broad red bull's-eye and, around it, a fainter aureole of purplish brain matter. There is a guttural roar of dismay from the other men, and then a sudden, leaden silence. Cavendish drops the empty rifle at his feet and takes the loaded one from Otto.

“You other cunts take heed now,” he tells them. “This pox-arsed foolishness has just cost a man his life.”

He licks his lips, then looks curiously about as though selecting who to shoot next. Blood seeps off his eyebrow and beard, and spatters down onto the ice. The tent is smeared with shadows and smells fiercely of liquor and piss.

“I'm a loose fucking cannon, I am,” Cavendish tells them quietly. “I do whatever takes my fancy at the time. You best remember that if you ever think of crossing me again.”

He nods twice in silent, bullish confirmation of this candid self-accounting, sniffs, and draws his hand across his blood-soaked beard.

“Tomorrow we make a run for Pond's Bay,” he says. “If we don't find the
Hastings
on the way there, we'll surely find another ship to take us when we arrive.”

“It's a hundred mile to Pond's Bay if it's an inch,” someone says.

“Then you bastards best sober up and get some sleep aforetimes.”

Cavendish looks down at the dead Shetlander and shakes his head.

“It's a fucking foolish way to go,” he says to Otto. “Man's carrying a loaded rifle, you don't take him on with a barrel stave. That's simple common sense.”

Otto nods and then steps forwards and, with a solemn and pontifical air, makes the sign of the cross above the corpse. Two of the men, unbidden, take the Shetlander by the boot heels and drag him out onto the floe. Off in a corner, unnoticed amidst this uproar, Drax in chains sits like an idol—cross-legged, smiling, watching from afar.

 

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The next day, Sumner is too feverish to steer or row. As they pull east through layers of thick fog and showers of freezing rain and sleet, he huddles in the stem covered by a blanket, shivering and stomach sick. Every now and then, Cavendish shouts out an order or Otto commences whistling a Germanic air, but there are no other sounds except the death-rattle creak of the oarlocks and the asynchronous plash of the blades in the water. Each man, it seems, is wrapped up in his own silent forebodings. The day is gloomy, the sky dun-colored and raw. Twice, before noon, Sumner has to pull down his britches and hang his arse over the gunwale to sputter out a pint or so of liquid shit into the sea. When Otto offers him brandy, he swallows it down gratefully, then retches it straight back up. The men watch all this without comment or mockery. Bannon's murder has flattened their resolve, left them stranded warily between equal but opposing fears.

At night, they camp on the floe edge, raise the bloodstained tent, attempt to dry and feed themselves. Near midnight, the bluish twilight thickens briefly to a gaudy and stelliferous darkness, then an hour later reasserts itself. Sumner sweats and shivers, dips in and out of an uneasy and dream-afflicted sleep. Around him bundled bodies grumble and gasp like snoozing cattle; the air inside the tent feels iron cold against his cheeks and nose, and has a stewed and crotch-like reek to it. As his flesh yearns, aches, and itches for the absent drug, his mind drifts and circles. He remembers the solitary journey from Delhi, the humiliations of Bombay and then London in April. Peter Lloyd's Hotel in Charing Cross: the smell of semen and old cigar smoke; the squeals and shrieks of whores and their customers at night; the narrow iron bed, the oil lamp, the threadbare fauteuil spitting horse hair and grimed with bear fat and Makassar oil. He eats pork chops and peas and lives on questionable credit. Every morning for two weeks he goes out to the hospitals with his diplomas and his outdated letters of introduction; he sits in corridors and waits. In the evening, he seeks out acquaintances from Belfast and Galway—not good friends but men who will at least remember him: Callaghan, Fitzgerald, O'Leary, McCall. They reminisce over whiskey and ale. When the time is right, he asks for their help, and they tell him to try America, Mexico, or possibly Brazil, somewhere where the past does not matter so much as it does here, where the people are more free and easy and more likely to forgive a man's mistakes since they have made a few themselves. England is not the place for him, they tell him, not anymore; it is too rigid and severe; he must give it up. Although they believe his story, they assure him, others never will. Their tone is friendly enough, comradely even, but he can tell that they wish him away. They greet news of his great failure as a reassuring reminder of their own more modest success, but also, more deeply, as a warning of what calamities might overtake them if they ever lose their vigilance, if they ever forget who they are or what they are about. In their worst imaginings they see in his disgrace a garish prophecy of their own.

At night, he takes opium and walks about the city until he is tired enough to sleep. One evening as he scuffs lopsidedly along Fleet Street, then past Temple Bar and the Courts of Justice, his ferule tapping the pavement as he goes along, he is astonished to see Corbyn coming straight towards him. He is wearing his campaign medals and red dress uniform; his tar-black boots are polished to a mirrored sheen, and he is in conversation with another, younger officer, mustachioed and similarly attired. They are both smoking cheroots and laughing. Sumner stands where he is in the shadow of a castellated doorway and waits for them to reach him. As he waits, he remembers Corbyn's manner at the court-martial—casual, unconcerned,
natural
, as if, even as he lied, the truth was in his gift, as if he could make or unmake it exactly as he chose. As Sumner remembers the scene, he feels an avalanche of rage beginning to gather inside his chest; the muscles tighten in his throat and legs; he begins to shudder. The two officers draw closer, and he feels for a ghoulish moment excarnated, transcendent even, as if his body is much too small and slight to contain his furious thoughts. As they pass him, smoking and laughing, Sumner steps out from the doorway. He taps Corbyn on the brass-buttoned epaulette and, when he turns around to see who it is, strikes him across the face. Corbyn topples sideways. The younger officer drops his cheroot and stares.

“What the fuck?” he says. “
What
?”

Sumner doesn't respond. He looks at the man he has just hit and realizes with a jolt that it is not Corbyn at all. They are roughly similar in age and height certainly, but apart from that, there is little true resemblance—the hair, the whiskers, the shape and features of the face, even the uniform is wrong. Sumner's rage dissolves, he returns to himself, to his own body, to the deep humiliations of the real.

“I thought you were someone else,” he tells the man. “Corbyn.”

“Who the fuck is Corbyn?”

“A regimental surgeon.”

“Which regiment?”

“The Lancers.”

The man shakes his head.

“I should find a constable and have you jailed,” he says. “I swear to God I should.”

Sumner tries to help him, but the man pushes him away. He touches his cheek again, winces, then looks carefully at Sumner. The cheek is reddening, but there is no blood.

“Who are you?” he says. “I recognize that face.”

“I'm no one,” Sumner tells him.

“Who are you?” he says again. “Don't fucking lie to me.”

“I'm no one,” he says. “No one at all.”

The man nods.

“Come here then,” he says.

Sumner steps closer. The man places his hand on Sumner's shoulder. Sumner smells the port wine on his breath, the bandoline in his hair.

“If you're really no one,” he says, “I don't suppose you'll object too much to this.”

He leans in six inches and drives his knee high up into Sumner's balls. The pain ricochets through Sumner's stomach and out into his chest and face. He drops to his knees on the wet pavement, groaning and wordless.

The man, who he thought was Corbyn but isn't, leans down and whispers gently into his ear.

“The
Hastings
is gone,” he says. “Sunk. Smashed to little pieces by a berg, and every fucker in her bar none is drowned, for sure.”

*   *   *

The next afternoon, they find a capsized whaleboat and then, a little while later, an intermittent half-mile-long slew of empty blubber casks and shattered timbers. They row about in slow circles, picking up pieces of the debris, examining them, conferring, then dropping them helplessly back into the water. Cavendish for once is pale and silent, his normal piss and windiness crushed by the weight of unlooked-for catastrophe. He scans the nearby ice floes with the telescope but sees nothing and no one. He spits, curses, turns aside. Sumner, through the green and melancholic haze of his sickness, realizes that their best hope of rescue is now gone. Some of the men begin to weep and others start clumsily praying. Otto checks the charts and takes a reading with the sextant.

“We're past Cape Hay,” he calls across to Cavendish. “We can reach Pond's Bay before night. When we get there we'll find another ship, God willing.”

“If we don't, we'll have to winter o'er,” Cavendish says. “That's been done afore.”

Drax, who is chained to the rearmost rowing bench and is thus the closest man to Cavendish, who is at the steering oar, snorts at this.

“It hant been done afore,” he says, “and it hant been done afore because it can't
be
done. Not without a ship to shelter in and ten times the provisions we have left.”

“We'll find a ship,” Cavendish says again. “And if we don't find one, we'll winter o'er. Whichever way it goes, we'll all live long enough to see you hanged in England, you can be sure of that.”

“I'd be happier hanged than fucking starved to death or frozen.”

“We should drown you now, you cavilling bastard. That'd be one less fucking mouth to feed.”

“You wouldn't like my dying words too well if you tried that trick,” Drax answers. “Although there's others here might find 'em interesting enough.”

Cavendish looks at him for a time, then leans forwards, takes a firm handful of his waistcoat, and replies in a fierce whisper.

“You hant got nothing on me, Henry,” he says. “So don't ever think you do.”

“I int squeezing, Michael,” Drax says calmly. “I'm just reminding. The time may never come, but if it comes, it'd suit you to be ready, that's all.”

Drax picks up his oar, Cavendish calls out the order, and they begin to row again. To the west, a long line of coal-dark mountains, ashen-tipped, rise up out of the hammered grayness of the sea. The two whaleboats move gradually onward. After several hours, they reach the craggy tip of Bylot Island and enter the mouth of Pond's Bay. Rain clouds gather and disperse; the light is slowly failing. Cavendish peers eagerly through his telescope, sees first nothing, then, wobbling on the horizon, the black outline of another vessel. He waves and points. He shouts to Otto.

“A ship,” he calls. “A fucking ship. Over yonder. See there.”

They all see it, but it is far away and seems to be steaming south already. The smoke from its stack makes a faint angled smudge against the sky, like a thumbed-out pencil line. They give urgent chase, but the effort is futile. In another half hour, the ship has disappeared into the haze, and they are alone again on the dark, brimful sea, with only the brown snow-clad hills about them and the scuffed and mournful evening sky above.

“What kind of fucking watch are they keeping that they don't see a whaleboat in distress?” Cavendish says bitterly.

“'Appen the ship is full,” someone answers him. “'Appen they're heading home with all the rest.”

“No fucker's full this year,” Cavendish says. “If they had anything about them, any fucking thing at all, they'd still be out here fishing.”

No one answers him. They look out into the pallid misty drabness seeking for a sign but see nothing.

As darkness falls, they pull over to a nearby headland and raise the tent on a thin strip of gravel beach backed by low brown cliffs. After eating, Cavendish orders the men to break up one of the whaleboats with hand axes and build a beacon fire with its salvaged timbers. If there is another ship out there in the bay, he argues, they will see the blaze and come to rescue them. Although the men appear to doubt this reasoning, they do as they are told. They turn the boat over and begin to smash apart its hull, keel, and stern piece. Sumner, wrapped in a blanket, shivering and queasy still, stands beside the tent and watches them at their work. Otto approaches and stands next to him.

“This is how I dreamed it,” he says. “The fire. The broken whaleboat. Everything the same.”

“Don't tell me that,” Sumner says. “Not now.”

“I don't fear death,” Otto says. “I never have. We none of us have any idea of the riches that await.”

Sumner coughs violently twice, then retches onto the icy ground. The men gather the broken wood into a pyre and light it. The wind catches the flames and blows them sparkling upwards into darkness.

“You're the one who survives,” Otto tells him. “Out of all of us. Remember that.”

“I said before, I don't believe in prophecies.”

“Faith is not important. God doesn't care whether we believe in Him or not. Why should He care?”