The North Water (9 page)

“You must help me,” he says.

The boy doesn't respond. Small black flies agitate across his lips and eyebrows, but he makes no effort to brush them away. Sumner points down at his leg.

“Tie it for me,” he instructs. “Tight but not too tight.”

The boy stands up, looks at the wound, and says something in Hindustani.

“Tight but not too tight,” Sumner says again.

The boy kneels down, takes hold of the bandage, and begins to tie the knot. The bone ends grind together. Sumner cries out. The boy stops, but Sumner impatiently gestures for him to carry on. He finishes the knot and ties the next one and the next one. When the splinting is finished, the boy goes out to the well behind the house, refills the water jug, and brings it back. Sumner drinks the water, then falls asleep. When he wakes up the boy is lying next to him. He smells of wet sawdust and is no larger than a dog; his breaths are slow and shallow. In the nearly lightless room, his sprawled body seems like no more than a thickening of the general darkness. Without moving his damaged leg, Sumner reaches out and touches the child as gently as he can manage. He is not sure which part of his body he is touching. The shoulder blade, is it? The thigh? The boy doesn't stir or wake.

“You're a good little fellow,” Sumner whispers to him. “A good little fellow, that's what you are.”

At first light, the barrage recommences. The explosions are distant to begin with, but then, as the gunners find their range and the British troops gradually advance through the city, street by street, they become closer and louder. The room shakes and a fresh crack jags across the ceiling. They hear the fierce buzz of cannonballs passing overhead, then the dull basso crumble of collapsing walls.

“We sit tight,” Sumner tells the boy. “We sit tight here and wait.”

The boy nods and scratches himself. He has found a piece of bark to chew on and what looks like the leaves of a turnip. Sumner lights his pipe and silently prays that Tommy Atkins arrives before the house is hit by an artillery shell or overrun by fleeing Pandys. After a while they hear the rattle of musketry, then voices. Someone outside is cursing and yelling commands. There are footsteps overhead and the sound of slamming doors. Sumner feels a sudden and terrifying sense of encroachment and exposure; he feels the urge to crouch down and hide. The boy looks at him expectantly. Sumner grabs onto the stove and pulls himself upright. The pain in his leg is sickening but tolerable. He leans against the boy and together they stumble over to the doorway. There is a boom of cannon fire and then screams. The boy presses himself against Sumner's side. Sumner cracks open the door and peers out. He sees a dead Pandy propped against a wall and, from the gap at the end of the alleyway, the flash of a British uniform. The air is sharp with gun smoke, full of yellow dust, and loud with the panic and wildness of battle.

“Quick,” he says to the boy, “quick before they leave us behind.”

They hobble down the alleyway in the direction of the shouting and gunfire, but already the noises are becoming fainter. The battle is moving on. When they reach the thoroughfare, all they see are piles of smashed masonry and scattered, blood-smirched corpses. A British soldier appears from a doorway, carrying a pistol in one hand and a sack of loot in the other. Sumner calls out to him for help. The soldier turns sharply back to look at them. His eyes are wild, and his once-red uniform is befouled with sweat and dirt. Noticing the boy, the soldier stiffens momentarily, then raises his pistol and shoots. The ball hits the boy full in the chest and knocks him backwards. Sumner lowers himself and presses his hands hard against the pulsing wound. The pistol ball has shattered the sternum and passed directly through the heart. Bubbles of blood rise and break on the boy's gray lips, his dark eyes roll back into his head, and in a minute he is dead.

The soldier spits, twitches, and begins to reload his pistol. He looks over at Sumner and smiles.

“I have a fucking good eye for the shooting,” he says. “I always have.”

“You are a fucking imbecile,” Sumner answers.

The soldier laughs and shakes his head.

“I am the one who saved your precious life,” he says. “Think on that.”

A dooly arrives, and Sumner is lifted onto it. They carry him back through the broken city to the field hospital behind the racquet court. He is not recognized at first amongst the hordes of wounded, but when Corbyn sees him, he is quickly moved upstairs and placed in a side room by himself.

He is given food, water, and a dose of laudanum, and an adjunct is sent to re-splint and dress his leg. He slips in and out of slumber. He can hear the constant noise of cannon and the intermittent howls of the wounded from the floor below. It is dark before Corbyn comes up to see him. He carries an oil lamp and smokes a cheroot. They shake hands and Corbyn stares down at him for a moment with an expression of sad puzzlement, as though Sumner is a carefully planned experiment that has unexpectedly misfired.

“So the others are all dead?” he asks.

Sumner nods.

“We were caught unawares,” he says.

“You were lucky to survive then.” He lifts the blanket and glances at Sumner's leg.

“The wound is clean and the break isn't so bad. I may need to use a cane for a while, but that's all.”

Corbyn nods and smiles. Sumner watches him expectantly. Soon, he thinks, he will make me an offer, suggest an appropriate reward for my sufferings.

“You must have imagined I was dead also,” Sumner says, “when no one came back.”

“Indeed,” Corbyn says, “that was the general assumption.” Then he adds after a pause: “I am glad of course that we were wrong.”

“The treasure was real enough, but there were Pandys hiding in the house.”

“You walked into a trap then. You made a bad mistake.”

“Not a trap,” Sumner says, “an accident. No one could have guessed they were in there.”

“For a surgeon to leave his post is a serious thing.”

Corbyn's gaze hardens and he watches Sumner carefully. Sumner opens his mouth to speak, then stops himself.

“I trust you understand my meaning,” Corbyn says. “I am glad you're safe, of course, but nonetheless your present situation is not a happy one. There is likely to be a charge.”

“A charge?” Sumner wonders for a confusing moment if this could be part of some larger plan that Corbyn has cooked up in his absence. Some grander strategy for their mutual benefit.

“The circumstances make it unavoidable,” Corbyn goes on. “The assault was at a crucial stage. To lose three surgeons at such a time…” He raises his eyebrows and lazily exhales a tube of gray-brown smoke into the inky darkness.

Sumner feels a sharp tightening across his chest, and the beginnings of disorientation, as if the room has started unexpectedly, impossibly, to tilt around him.

“If there is to be any charge,” he says, “I trust I can rely on your assistance, Mr. Corbyn.”

Corbyn frowns and shakes his head dismissively.

“I don't see what assistance I could possibly offer you,” he says lightly. “The facts of the matter are clear.”

“Your account of yesterday, I mean,” Sumner says. “The details of what occurred. The boy and so on.”

Corbyn has put the oil lamp down on a side table and is pacing slowly back and forth at the foot of the bed. Before answering, he goes over to the open window and pauses there awhile, as if looking out for a dinner guest who is late.

“The general is unlikely to concern himself with the minor details,” Corbyn says. “When you were needed here, you left the hospital in search of treasure. Three men have died, and you have come back severely wounded. In your absence, your injured comrades, several officers amongst them, lay untreated and oftentimes in severe agony. That, I fear, is as much as he wants, or is required, to understand.”

“You expect me to hold my tongue then? To take my punishment? I will very likely be dismissed.”

“I'd advise you not to make a bad situation even worse, that's all. To bring my name into this will not serve you well. I can assure you of that.”

There is a pause in which the two men hold each other's gaze. Corbyn's expression is stern, but also calm and self-assured. Beneath the standard military-issue stiffness there lies a vast and heedless confidence born of wealth and leisure, a sense that the world is malleable, that it will bend to his desires.

Sumner's head has begun to ache. He feels a sour inner swell of anger and self-reproach.

“So you offer me nothing at all for my trouble?”

“I offer you my advice, which is to accept the unfortunate consequences of your own actions. You were unlucky, I agree, but then again you are alive and the others are dead, so perhaps you have something to be grateful for.”

“I still have the treasure,” Sumner tells him.

Corbyn winces and shakes his head.

“No, you are lying about that. You were carrying nothing with you when they brought you in.”

“You checked then,” Sumner says flatly, “before deciding on this course of action.”

Corbyn's jaw tightens and he looks, for the first time since the conversation began, discomfited.

“Do not provoke me. It will not help your case.”

“I have no case. You know that as well as I do. If I go before the general, my career is over.”

Corbyn shrugs.

“You will be moved up to the regimental hospital later on this evening, and you will receive the official charges in the next day or so. I will see you again at the hearing.”

“Why do you do this to me?” Sumner asks him. “What's your purpose?”

“My purpose?”

“You are destroying me, and for what?”

Corbyn shakes his head and smiles thinly.

“There is a melancholic strain in the Celtic soul which finds martyrdom appealing, I understand. But in your case, Mr. Sumner, the cap hardly fits. I do my duty merely; you would have done much better to do yours.”

With that, he nods a brief good-bye and steps towards the door. Sumner watches him depart, hears the clatter of his boot heels as he descends the wooden stairs and the assonant gabble of his Englishness as he issues another command. As the surgeon lies there, as the truth of his situation settles slowly upon him, he feels the defining elements of his character—eagerness, belief, cussedness, a kind of desperate, unspeakable pride—beginning to slip away. When William Harper died and left him nothing—since everything the man owned had by then been sold or mortgaged or squandered on drink—even then he persisted; his determination didn't flag. He could no longer afford his lectures or lodgings in Belfast, but he recognized the army as another way to rise. It would be much slower and much harder, he knew, but not impossible. He believed he could still do it,
would
still do it somehow. But now, those long-held reserves of resilience and tenacity are wiped out at a stroke. The years of effort, the years of doggedness and patience and guile. Is it possible? And if it is possible, what does it imply? He feels a hot jolt of rage at what Corbyn has done to him and then answering it, just as powerful but broader and more fierce, like a long, gray wave that has been gathering its force and finally reaches the shore, a chilling flood of shame.

 

CHAPTER EIGHT

Three weeks from Jan Mayen Island to Cape Farewell. Clear blue skies above, but the wind is intermittent and changeable, blowing strong and hard from the south on good days, but on others turning blustery and infirm or failing altogether. The crew are kept busy reeving boat falls, splicing whale lines, overhauling the lances and harpoons. After the success of the sealing, morale is high. Brownlee senses a general optimism amongst the men, a belief that luck is with them this year and the season will be a good one. The murmurings of discontent he heard in Hull have quieted: Cavendish, although still an irritating prick, is proving competent at his work, and Black, his understudy, is laudably ambitious and shrewd beyond his years. After his near-fatal dunking, the surgeon has revived remarkably. He is regaining color and energy, and his appetite has returned. Although the blooms of frostbite are raw on his cheeks and the tip of his nose, he can be seen most days pacing the deck for exercise or sketching in his journal. Campbell in the
Hastings
is waiting up the strait ahead of them, somewhere past Disko Island, but the two ships will not meet or attempt to communicate until the moment is right. The underwriters are alive these days to any sign of conspiracy, and a ship so heavily and disproportionately insured as the
Volunteer
is suspicious as it is. His final voyage then. It is not the end he would have wished for, but better this way, surely, than another five years on that coal barge chuntering like a pillock from Middlesbrough to Cleethorpes and back again. None of the others that lived went back to sea after the
Percival
—brains scrambled, limbs missing, twitching and spasming with dread—he was the only one who managed it. The only one sufficiently stubborn or stupid to want to carry on. A man should look forwards and not backwards, that is Baxter's persistent advice to him. What matters is what happens
next
. And, although Baxter is without doubt a fucker, a scoundrel, and a deep-dyed charlatan, there's some small but solid truth to that, he thinks.

The bergs around the cape are dense and dangerous as usual. To avoid collisions it is necessary for the
Volunteer
to run west another hundred miles or so under topsails before steering north-northeast into the middle portion of the Davis Strait. From the foredeck, where he sits when it is warm enough, Sumner watches out for birds—curlews, ptarmigans, auks, loons, mallies, eider ducks. Whenever he spots one he calls to the steersman for an estimate of the latitude and makes a note in his book. If the bird is close enough and a rifle is at hand, he sometimes takes a shot, but more often than not he misses. His inaccuracy is fast becoming a joke amongst the crew. Sumner has no interest in natural history; when the voyage is over, he will throw the notebook away without looking at it again. He watches for birds like this only to pass the time, to appear busy and to seem normal.