The Sot-Weed Factor

by John Barth

  “I see,” said the officer, smiling uncordially. “And hath His Laureateship anyone to vouch for his identity? Surely the gentlemen and ladies among the passengers must know their Laureate!”

  “Of course I can bring proof,” said Ebenezer, “though it seems to me ’tis you should bear the burden! I have a friend ashore who—” He stopped, recalling Burlingame’s disguise.

  “Who will swear to’t through his teeth, for all you’ve bribed him,” declared the officer.

  “He lies,” said the young man Joseph from the shallop, who had climbed aboard behind Ebenezer. “He told me he was a servant of the Laureate’s, and now I doubt e’en that. What servant would pretend to be his master, when his master’s near at hand?”

  “Nay, you mistake me!” Ebenezer protested. “The man who calls himself Ebenezer Cooke is an impostor, I swear’t! Fetch the knave out, that I may look him in the eye and curse him for a fraud!”

  “He is in his cabin writing verse,” the officer replied, “and shan’t be bothered.” To the sailors he said, “Throw him o’er the side and be damned to him.”

  “Stay! Stay!” Ebenezer shreiked. He wished with all his heart he were at the King o’ the Seas with Burlingame. “I can prove the man’s deceiving you! I have a commission from Lord Baltimore himself!”

  “Then prithee show it,” the officer invited with a smile, “and I shall throw the other wight o’er the side instead.”

  “Dear God!” the poet groaned, the facts dawning on him. “I have mislaid it! Belike ’tis in my chest somewhere, below.”

  “Belike it is, since the chest is Mr. Cooke’s. In any case ’tis not mislaid, for I have seen it—the Laureate produced it on request by way of voucher. Toss the lout over!”

  But Ebenezer, realizing his predicament, fell to his knees on the deck and embraced the officer’s legs. “Nay, I pray you, do not drown me! I own I sought to fool you, good masters, but ’twas only a simple prank, a mere April Foolery. I am the Laureate’s servant, e’en as this gentleman affirmed, and have the Laureate’s notebook here to prove it. Take me to my master, I pray you, and I shall beg his pardon. ’Twas but a simple prank, I swear!”

  “What say ye, sir?” asked one of the sailors.

  “He may speak truly,” the officer allowed, consulting a paper in his hand. “Mr. Cooke hired passage for a servant, but brought none with him from the harbor.”

  “Methinks he’s but a rascally adventurer,” said Joseph.

  “Nay, I swear’t!” cried the poet, remembering that Burlingame had hired berths that morning for Ebenezer and himself in the guise of the servant Bertrand. “I am Bertrand Burton of St. Giles in the Fields, masters—Mr. Cooke’s man, and his father’s!”

  The officer considered the matter for a moment. “Very well, send him below instead, till his master acknowledges him.”

  For all his misery Ebenezer was relieved: it was his plan to stay aboard at any cost, for once under way, he reasoned, he could press his case until they were persuaded of his true identity and the mysterious stranger’s imposture.

  “Ah God, I thank thee, sir!”

  The sailors led him toward the fo’c’sle.

  “Not at all,” the officer said with a bow. “In an hour we shall be at sea, and if your master doth not own you, ’twill be a long swim home.”

  11

  Departure from Albion: the Laureate at Sea

  THUS IT HAPPENED that not long afterwards, when anchors were weighed and catted, buntlines cast off, sails unfurled, and sheets, halyards, and braces belayed, and the Poseidon was sea-borne on a broad reach past The Lizard, Ebenezer was not on hand to witness the spectacle with the gentlemen of the quarter-deck, but lay disconsolate in a fo’c’sle hammock—alone, for the crew was busy above. The officer’s last words were frightening enough, to be sure, but he no longer really wished he were back in the King o’ the Seas. There was a chance, of course, that the impostor could not be intimidated, but surely as a last resort he’d let the genuine Laureate pose as his servant rather than condemn him to drown; and Ebenezer saw nothing but certain death in Burlingame’s scheme. All things considered, then, he believed his course of action was really rather prudent, perhaps the best expedient imaginable under the circumstances; had he acquiesced to it at Burlingame’s advice, and were his friend at hand to lend him moral support in the forthcoming interview, he might still have been fearful but he’d not have been disconsolate. The thing that dizzied him, brought sweat to his palms, and shortened his breath was that he alone had elected to board the Poseidon, to pose as Bertrand Burton, to declare to the officer his real identity, and finally to repudiate the declaration and risk his life to reach Malden. He heard the rattling of the anchor chain, the scamper of feet on the deck above his head, the shouted commands of the mate, the chanteys of the crew on the lines; he felt the ship heel slightly to larboard and gain steerage-way, and he was disconsolate—very nearly ill again, as in his room that final night in London.

  Presently an aged sailor climbed halfway down the compan-ionway into the fo’c’sle—a toothless, hairless, flinty-eyed salt with sunken cheeks, colorless lips, yellow-leather skin, and a great sore along the side of his nose.

  “Look alive, laddie!” he chirped from the ladder. “The Captain wants ye on the poop.”

  Ebenezer sprang readily from the hammock, his notebook still clutched in his hand, and failing to allow for the incline of the deck, crashed heavily against a nearby bulkhead.

  “Whoa! ’Sheart!” he muttered.

  “Hee hee! Step lively, son!”

  “What doth the Captain wish of me?” the poet asked, steadying himself at the foot of the ladder. “Can it be he realizes who I am, and what indignities I suffer?”

  “Belike he’ll have ye keelhauled,” the old man cackled, and fetched Ebenezer a wicked pinch upon his cheek, so sharp it made the tears come. “We’ve barnacles enough to take the hide off a dog shark. Come along with ye!”

  There was nothing for it but to climb the ladder to the main deck and follow his comfortless guide aft to the poop. There stood the Captain, a florid, beardless, portly fellow, jowled and stern as any Calvinist, but with a pink of debauchery in both his eyes, and wet red lips that would have made Arminius frown.

  Ebenezer, rubbing his injured cheek, observed a general whispering among the gentlemen on the quarter-deck as he passed, and hung his head. When he stepped up on the ladderway to the poop, the old sailor caught him by the coat and pulled him back.

  “Hold, there! The poop deck’s not for the likes of you!”

  “Good enough, Ned,” said the Captain, waving him off.

  “What is’t you wish, sir?” Ebenezer asked.

  “Nothing.” The Captain looked down at him with interest. “ ’Tis Mr. Cooke, thy master, wants to see ye, not I. D’ye still say thou’rt his man?”

  “Aye.”

  “Ye know what sometimes happens to stowaways?”

  Ebenezer glanced at the sky darkening with evening to the east and storm clouds to the west, the whitecapped water, and the fast-receding rocks of England. His heart chilled.

  “Aye.”

  “Take him to my cabin,” the Captain ordered Ned. “But mind ye knock ere ye enter: Mr. Cooke is busy rhyming verses.”

  Ebenezer was impressed: he would not himself have dared to request such a privilege. Whoever this impostor was, he had the manner of the rank he claimed!

  The sailor led him by the sleeve to a companionway at the after end of the quarter-deck which opened to the captain’s quarters under the poop. They descended a short ladder into what appeared to be a chartroom, and old Ned rapped on a door leading aft.

  “What is it?” someone inside demanded. The voice was sharp, self-confident, and faintly annoyed: certainly not the voice of a man fearful of exposure. Ebenezer thought again of the dark sea outside and shivered: there was not a chance of reaching shore.

  “Begging your pardon, Mr. Cooke,” Ned pleaded, clearly intimidated himself. “
I have the wretch here that says he is your servant, sir: the one that tried to tell us he was you, sir.”

  “Aha! Send him in and leave us alone,” said the voice, as if relishing the prospect. All thought of victory fled the poet’s mind: he resolved to ask no more than mercy from the man—and possibly a promise to return, when they reached Maryland, that commission from Lord Baltimore, which somehow or other the impostor had acquired. And maybe an apology, for it was, after all, a deuced humiliation he was suffering!

  Ned opened the door and assisted Ebenezer through with another cruel pinch, this time on the buttock, and an evil laugh. The poet jumped involuntarily; again his eyes watered, and his knees went weak when Ned closed the door behind him. He found himself in a small but handsomely furnished cabin in the extreme rear of the vessel. The floor was carpeted; the Captain’s bed, built into one wall, was comfortably clothed in clean linen. A large brass oil lamp, already lit, swung gently from the ceiling and illuminated a great oak table beneath. There was even a glass-fronted bookcase, and oil portraits in the style of Titian, Rubens, and Correggio were fastened with decorative brass bolts around the walls. The impostor, dressed in Burlingame’s port-purple coat and sporting a campaigner wig, stood with his back to the poet-at the far wall—actually the stern of the ship—staring through small leaded windowpanes at the Poseidon’s wake. Satisfied that Ned was gone, Ebenezer rushed around the table and fell to his knees at the other man’s feet.

  “Dear, dear sir!” he cried, not daring to look up. “Believe me, I’ve no mind at all to expose your disguise! No mind at all, sir! I know full well how you came by your clothing in the stable of the King o’ the Seas and fooled the ferryman Joseph and his father at the wharf—though how in Heav’n you got my Lord Baltimore’s commission, that he wrote for me in his own hand not a week past, I cannot fathom.”

  The impostor, above him, made a small sound and backed away.

  “But no matter! Think not I’m wroth, or mean to take revenge! I ask no more than that you let me pose as your servant on this ship, nor shall I breathe a word of’t to a soul, you may depend on’t! What would it profit you to see me drown? And when we land in Maryland, why, I’ll bring no charge against you, but call it quits and think no more of’t. Nay, I’ll get thee a place at Malden, my estate, or pay your fare to a neighboring province—”

  Glancing up at this last to see what effect his plea was having, he stopped and said no more. The blood drained from his face.

  “Nay!” He sprang to his feet and leaped at the impostor, who barely escaped to the other side of the round oak table. His campaigner, however, fell to the floor, and the light from the lamp fell full on Bertrand Burton—the real Bertrand, whom Ebenezer had last seen in his room in Pudding Lane when he left it to seek a notebook at the Sign of the Raven.

  “I’God! I’God!” He could scarcely speak for rage.

  “Prithee, Master Ebenezer, sir—” The voice was Bertrand’s voice, formidable no more. Ebenezer lunged again, but the servant kept the table between them.

  “You’d watch me drown! Let me crawl to you for mercy!”

  “Prithee—”

  “Wretch! Only let me lay hands on that craven neck, to wring it like a capon’s! Well see who drinks salt water!”

  “Nay, prithee, master! I meant thee no ill, I swear’t! I can explain all of it, every part! Dear God, I never dreamed ’twas you they’d caught, sir! Think ye I’d see ye suffer, that e’er was such a gentle master? I, that was your blessed father’s trusty friend and adviser for years? Why, I’d take a flogging ere I’d let ’em lay a hand on ye, sir!”

  “Flogging you shall have right soon, i’faith!” the poet said grimly, reversing his field in vain from clockwise to counterclockwise. “Nor shall that be the worst of’t, when I catch you!”

  “Do but let me say, sir—”

  “Hi! I near had thee then!”

  “—’twas through no fault of mine—”

  “Ah! You knave, hold still!”

  “—but bad rum and a treacherous woman—”

  “ ’Sheart! But when I have thee—”

  “—and who’s really to blame, sir—”

  “—I shall flog that purple coat from off thy back—”

  “—is your sister Anna’s beau!”

  The chase ended. Ebenezer leaned across the table into the lamplight, brighter now for the gathering dark outside.

  “What is’t I heard you say?” he asked carefully.

  “I only said, sir, what commenced this whole affair was the pound sterling your sister and her gentleman friend presented me with in the posthouse, when I had fetched your baggage there.”

  “I shall cut thy lying tongue from out thy head!”

  “ ’Tis true as Scripture, sir, I swear’t!” Bertrand said, still moving warily as Ebenezer moved.

  “You saw them there together? Impossible!”

  “God smite me dead if I did not, sir: Miss Anna and some gentleman with a beard, that she called Henry.”

  “Dear Heav’n!” the poet muttered as if to himself. “But you called him her beau, Bertrand?”

  “Well, now, no slur intended, sir; oh, no slur intended at all! I meant no more by’t than that—ah, sir, you know full well how folks make hasty judgments, and far be’t from me—”

  “Cease thy prating! What did you see, that made you call him her beau? No more than cordial conversation?”

  “ ’Sheart, rather more than that, sir! But think not I’m the sort—”

  “I know well thou’rt a thief, a liar, and a cheat,” Ebenezer snapped. “What is’t you saw that set thy filthy mind to work? Eh?”

  “I hardly dare tell, sir; thou’rt in such a rage! Who’s to say ye’ll not strike me dead, though from first to last I am innocent as a babe?”

  “Enough,” the poet sighed, “I know the signs of old. You’ll drive me mad with your digressions and delays until I guarantee your safety. Very well, I shan’t besmirch my hands on you, I promise. Speak plainly, now!”

  “They were in each other’s arms,” the servant said, “and billing and cooing at a mad rate when I came up with your baggage. When Miss Anna had sight of me she blushed and tried to compose herself, yet all the while she and the gentleman spoke to me, they could not for the life of ’em stand still, but must be ever at sweetmeat and honeybee, and fondle and squeeze—Are you ill, sir?”

  Ebenezer had gone pale; he slumped into the Captain’s chair and clutched his head in his hands. “ ’Tis nothing.”

  “Well, as I said, sir, they could not keep their hands—”

  “Finish thy story if you must,” Ebenezer broke in, “but speak no more of those two, as you prize your wretched life! They paid you, did they?”

  “They did in truth, sir, for fetching down your baggage.”

  “But a pound? ’Tis rather a princely reward for the task.”

  “Ah, now, sir, I am after all an old and trusted—” He stopped halfway through the sentence, so fierce was the look on Ebenezer’s face. “Besides which,” he concluded, “now I see how’t strikes ye, ’tis likely they wished me to say naught of what I’d seen. I tell ye, sir, ’tis not for much I’d have missed your setting out! Had not Miss Anna and her gentleman insisted that I leave at once—”

  “Spare me thy devotion,” Ebenezer said. “What did you then, and why did you pose as me? Speak fast, ere I fetch the Captain.”

  “ ’Tis a tragic tale, sir, that shames me in the telling. I beg ye keep in mind I’d never have presumed, sir, save that I was distracted and possessed by grief at your arrest and in direst peril of my life.”

  “My arrest!”

  “Aye, sir, in the posthouse. ’Tis a mystery to me yet how thou’rt free, and how you came so rapidly from London.”

  Ebenezer smacked his hand upon the table. “Speak English, man! Straight English sentences a man can follow!”

  “Very well, sir,” Bertrand said. “I shall begin at the beginning, if ye’ll bear with me.” So sayi
ng, he took the liberty of sitting at the Captain’s table, facing Ebenezer, and with a full complement of moralizing asides and other commentary, delivered himself during the next half hour of the following story:

  “ ’Twas a double grief I carried from the posthouse in my heart, sir, inasmuch as I had lost the gentlest, kindliest master that ever poor servingman served, and could not even claim the privilege of seeing him off to Plymouth in his coach, and wishing him a last Godspeed. Therefore I sought a double physic for’t. With the pound Miss Anna and her—What I mean to say, sir, I hied me to a winehouse near at hand and drank a deal of rackpunch, that the rogue of a barman had laced with such poisonous molasses rum I near went blind on the spot. Three glasses served to rob me of all judgment, yet such was my pain at losing you I drank off seven, and bought a quart of ratafia besides, for Betsy Birdsall. That is to say, not all the bottled spirits in London could restore my own, and so at length I fled for comfort back to Pudding Lane, to your rooms, sir. Yet well I knew they’d seem so vacant with ye gone, ’twould but increase tenfold my pain to sit alone, and for that cause I stopped belowstairs to summon Betsy Birdsall—ye recall the chambermaid, sir, that had the unnatural husband and the fetching laugh? We climbed the stairs together, and ’sheart! so far from vacant, your rooms were fit to burst with men, sir! A wight named Bragg there was, that looked nor manlier than my Betsy’s husband, and a half-a-dozen sheriff’s bullies with him; ’twas you they sought, sir, with some false tale of a ledger-book—I ne’er made rhyme nor sense of’t!

  “Directly they spied me a shout went up, and they were that bent on justice, I feared for Betsy’s honor at their hands. At length I told them, in answer to their queries, my master was at the posthouse, and off they ran to catch ye—Nay, look not thus, sir! Tis not as ye think, I swear’t! Not for a moment would I have breathed the truth, had I not known your coach was some time gone—rather would I have suffered death itself, or prison, at their hands! But well I knew ’twas a wild-goose chase they chased, and good riddance!

  “We turned to’t then, the wench and I, and with her her ratafia and me my rum we lacked no fire to warm the sheets withal, and were that tired when we had done, that though ’twas brightest day we slept some hours in sweat, sack a sack. Anon I knew, by certain signs, my mount was fresh and restless for the jumps; yet for a time I feigned to slumber on. (The truth of’t is, though the girl and I are twins in will and skill, I’ve twice her years and half her strength, and more than once have cantered willy-nilly when I yearned to walk.) There were these signs, I say, that I’d have naught of, till Betsy made a moan and dived head foremost ’neath the covers. The cause wherefore I saw at once in opening my eyes, for ’twas not her hands were on me after all, but the hands of Mister ‘Prentice-Clerk himself, the winehouse fiddler! Aye, I swear’t, ’twas that same Ralph Birdsall, Betsy’s husband, that erst was wont to leave his field unplowed, but since I seeded it had grown such a jealous farmer he looked to’s plot five times a day. He had come home to run another furrow, like as not, and on advice from one below—the cook’s boy Tim, that long himself had leched for Betsy—he stole upstairs to find us.