Mrs Heron looked at Jack, and then beyond him, and pointed. Heron’s top hat lay discarded in the sand. Jack had unhappiness rolling off him and pooling about his feet, but he took the hat, and brushed the sand from the silk, and tried to give it to Mrs Heron. She would not take it and instead indicated her husband, but Heron did not notice Jack at all, and so he was left holding it, and his unhappiness meanwhile rolled and rolled on. ‘I need the broadaxe,’ he said.
Pendle gave a start.
‘What? Come, man!’ Heron said. ‘Come.’
‘I never give back him his awl,’ said Pendle.
‘What?’ Heron demanded.
‘Cook’s awl,’ said Pendle. ‘I borrowed it and never give it back. He told me he wanted to mend his belt, and I put him off, for I had not finished with it.’
‘Well, there is nothing to be done for that now.’
Jack came to stand with my Cannibal and me. ‘I wish to build a coffin,’ he whispered.
‘I know; be quiet, now,’ said William O’Riordan.
Jack still had Heron’s hat; he turned it over in his hands. Tam was roaming the edges of the group, mouth fixed in a silent grimace of pain. I supposed one of the men gathered must be Mochrie, the boy’s father, but it was Jack who extended a hand to him. Tam came to be comforted.
Farther along the sand, the fire had come to life. Sparks spun into the lowering sky.
‘Stockworth, take who you will,’ said Heron. ‘That is, do not take any who went into the sea; who you will besides. The whale is not lost,’ he added as an aside to me, of all people—and I remembered he had wished me to buy his station. Did he still hold out that hope? ‘We have marked it.’
‘With the Waif?’
‘With the Waif, Mr Fox, yes.’
‘Finnegan, leading oarsman,’ said Stockworth. ‘Evans, O’Neill, Costello, Landry, Featherstonehaugh, Gilbert.’
‘What are they doing?’ I asked William quietly.
‘Going to bring the whale in.’
‘Retrieve both irons,’ said Heron. ‘They are the property of Mr Fox.’
William whispered something in a wet rush in my ear. I did not follow his meaning at all, but pretended that I had.
Heron made a sidling movement and seemed to prevent himself from saying something. Then, with a glance at Mrs Heron, he said it regardless, but with such painful awkwardness nobody could quite look him in the eye: ‘Well, I will say that Mr O’Riordan the younger demonstrated proper courage in leaping into the waves to come to the aid of those wrecked.’
There was a moment of sombre nodding at my Cannibal William, who said, ‘Thank you for saying it, Mr Heron, but I must remark—it was only natural I should have left the boat as I did and go to the aid of my father, who cannot swim, but also, I must say that Mr Fox here made a truly valiant attempt to assist Cook to stay afloat. Instead of seeking immediate safety after the wreck, he placed himself in yet greater personal peril in order to preserve Cook’s life. Indeed, it was witnessing this struggle that caused me to leave my boat a second time, after my father was secure, in order to go to their aid. And I wish to observe most emphatically that it is through no fault or negligence upon Mr Fox’s part that Cook is dead, for he did all a man might be expected to do.’
The ignoble wrestling-match below the water flashed before me, and I felt Cook’s fingernails in my skin.
‘Well, I acknowledge you, Mr Fox. And I thank you. This Accident is most unusual, and we generally keep very well here. Montserrat Station has never before seen a man die. Except for—well, a man who deserved death, long ago. Mary, will you feed the men early to-day?’ Heron said, directing this last question at the old woman in the doorway. ‘We will have much labour on the morrow. Do not become too drunk,’ he added to the group at large.
‘Sir?’ said Woolley. ‘What about Cook?’
‘I have not yet decided,’ said Heron. ‘We have never lost a man before to-day,’ he said to me, apparently unaware he was repeating himself. ‘As I have previously indicated, Montserrat Station has always been exceedingly Safe, as well as Profitable. My thinking now is that we bury him here—’
‘But we have no priest, nor graveyard.’
‘We might send to the village … someone of us might go to-morrow. They have a priest to say the proper words.’
‘Cook was a Catholic,’ said William. ‘There is no Catholic priest there. We should have to send someone farther afield.’
I was quite consumed and felt I had speak. ‘Why did you say that, man?’ I whispered to William.
‘What?’
‘That remark of yours, about how I tried to assist Cook. There is nothing to what I did. He was beside me in the water.’
‘They ought to know you tried,’ he said. ‘They are all of a kind, and you and I are of another kind—Jack Montserrat perhaps with us—and they do not quite trust us to be amongst them.’
‘What kind are we?’
‘Why, gentlemen.’
I looked at him in great astonishment, and yet there was some truth in what he said—with his hair trimmed and beard shaven, and his modulated voice—Irish in the way of Mrs Prendergast, cultivated with that same Refinement and Learning—he could, perhaps, be a gentleman—except that he was a whaler in the far end of the Empire!
‘I am not claiming we are Princes, but, never minding our present circumstances, we do both come from better things than this, I think,’ he said.
This seemed a reasonable remark. I supposed that, even as he was presently a whaler, I was an Harpoon Salesman, and if he were good enough to not deem this ungentlemanly, then I should not mind the whaling.
‘That old man—is he your father?’ I asked. ‘Forgive me, but …’ I could not think how to phrase my question without offending my Cannibal William forever, but the moment was gone. The old man was a rough sort, and the lumps I had seen through the back of his shirt spoke to a brutality of floggings.
‘Cook was a God-fearing man,’ Pendle was saying.
‘And there’s Mrs Cook and the wee Cooks,’ said Woolley. ‘How should you have them told? Shall they be so far from his grave?’
‘This man had a family of his own?’ I asked.
‘Aye, sir, three children,’ Heron said.
‘Where are they?’
‘In the town, sir, with their dam.’
‘That is, the village?’
‘No, that is Hobart-town.’
‘Well, they will certainly wish to inter their father’s body in the proper manner.’
‘There is no ship due until the end of the season, Mr Fox,’ said Heron. ‘We had a ship once, you know, the Tristessa. A splendid craft. She operates out of Hobart-town harbour, now, and might be bought back, by the enterprising gent. And to take a corpse by horseback—what, we should have to lash him like game over the horse’s rump.’
‘And we do not have any horses,’ said my Cannibal.
‘Yes, that is a more pertinent point,’ said Heron.
‘We ought to row him south to Hobart-town,’ said my Cannibal. ‘That, to me, is undeniably the most practicable—and correct—solution.’
‘I do not know that I can spare the men,’ said Heron. ‘The whale will be brought in this evening. It is not that—it is not that I do not wish to do well by Cook …’ he said, and let his words fail there. For, of course, it did rather seem that he wished to do better by the whale than by Cook.
‘How many men would such an undertaking require?’ I asked. ‘Really, Mr Heron—and I do hope you will forgive me—I beg you to understand that I am driven to appeal to you thus only by the strength of my natural and sympathetic emotions, and speak therefore plainly and humbly as one man to another, and trust that my entreaty will be accepted in this same simple spirit—I urge you to do things in the proper way, sir, despite the inconvenience it will evidently cause you.’
‘One man could do it,’ said William. ‘I will do it.’
‘I certainly cannot spare you for as long as it would ta
ke you to go alone,’ said Mr Heron. ‘Why, that would be a fortnight or more! And you only just returned from your visit to the Police Magistrate in Hobart-town.’
‘Six men could make it quicker,’ said Pendle.
‘Yes, Pendle is correct,’ said William. ‘Six men could do it in three days. One day for rowing, one day for rowing back, and perhaps one day there, to see Mrs Cook and to deliver the body where she directs us.’
‘There is naught we might do on the matter to-night,’ said Mr Heron. ‘Mr Fox, I take what you have said in the same spirit you gave it, and, further, I thank you for it. Mr Stockworth, go for the whale now. Before it grows dark.’
‘We will take a lamp,’ said Stockworth, the American, looking at the sky. I thought of bearded and haloed Mr Green back in the Royal Hotel, looking to the sky for guidance.
‘It is fortunate the fog has cleared,’ said my Cannibal, as the group dispersed.
‘Yes,’ said Jack. ‘I can see the beast from here.’
Heron made as if to depart, but his wife stayed him, and murmured something into his ear.
‘Mrs Heron,’ said the man. ‘Allow me to present Mr—Gabriel?—Fox, of …’
‘Norfolk, madam,’ I said, and made a humble bow.
‘Do come inside for a drop of whisky, Mr Fox,’ said Mrs Heron, speaking to me across a distance of a hundred thousand miles, and at that same distance I followed them into the stone house.
‘We do not stand on ceremony here,’ said the lady, as Mary met us at the door and showed us directly into a kitchen-cum-dining-cum-drawing-room.
Three glasses and a decanter upon a small table sparkled in the firelight, set out at the ready for us, a great greasy fingerprint besmearing the rim of each glass. I supposed this hospitable setting was in anticipation of my presence. There were two chairs, but Mary obliged us by bringing a wooden stool from the hearth, and Mr Heron further obliged by insisting his wife and I be seated while he perched.
‘Jack Montserrat made this stool,’ he said, as if to explain his wobbling.
The room was simple but not Spartan, with some small concessions to comfort. Chief amongst these was a large painting hung upon the far wall, the work of an Enthusiastic Artist who had perhaps once seen a horse in a dream. The walls were whitewashed, and the hearth scrubbed, and the fire banked. My hosts nicely made me welcome, with much gracious gesturing, and Mary poured us some whisky, and then took down a fourth glass and poured some for herself, and withdrew to drag a wooden box from an obscure corner and into the warmth of the hearth. She sat upon this box and swilled her whisky. Though she was an old woman indeed, parchment-skinned and claw-handed, her eyes had the brightness and sharpness of youth, and she moved with fluid ease.
‘Fancy a bite o’ mutton?’ she asked me, with an air more conversational than deferential.
‘Thank you, but if it is not your usual dining hour, I shall not impose.’
‘You must be truly famished, Mr Fox,’ said Mrs Heron. ‘We shall all take a bite of mutton, thank you, Mary.’
God Bless Mrs Heron! Mary arose from her seat and set about bringing down an outrageous quantity of Items.
Mrs Heron was a woman perhaps in her middle forties, and thus about the age Maryanne Maginn would be, if I were to find her living. Her hair was neatly put away under her cap, and her golden-brown eyes seemed to take up half her face. To my homesick self it seemed those eyes cast a soft light over her features, making gentle shadows in the creases and folds in the skin of her face and at her throat. I missed my mother. Mrs Heron did seem ill; she was thin and drawn, her hands like trembling Autumn leaves. Not leaves: the skeletons of leaves, after the fabric of the plant has decayed, and nothing remains but a tracery of veins, fine and frail. I learnt long ago from my father that it is unmanly to express sentimental feeling, and so I did not, but all I could see was my mother alone in the world.
‘I am afraid you are hurt, Mr Fox,’ said Mrs Heron, gesturing to my face with her unsteady hand.
I thanked her and told her it was not bad.
‘It must have been a distressing thing,’ she said. ‘Dear Mr Cook was a good, simple, salt-of-the-Earth Christian soul. You did very well to try and help him.’
I responded that I had done little enough.
There were some more such niceties, which I am afraid I did not pay terribly much attention to; I had already partaken of a great quantity of rum, in the whaleboat and ashore, and now the powerful twin forces of whisky and nostalgia were having a deleterious effect upon my ability to discourse. I had made careful study of Dainty Conversation for the Drawing-Room: a Guide for Young Ladies and Gentlemen when my mother had given it to me, but there was no passage within dealing with how one would approach my particular situation, drunk and post-catastrophe, conversationally speaking.
The Herons were Northerners. Mr Heron told me he was from York, and Mrs Heron named a village I did not know as her native place. They had first been introduced at a public meeting for the New Christian Society of Earthly Fellowship. The lady had an air of social smoothness about her, and I could picture her in some comfortable salon, engaging in polite discourse. Her father had been a vicar, she said. She and Mr Heron had come to the colonies as missionaries, where, due to one or two misfortunes, they had rapidly exhausted their funds. He had got into whaling as a temporary reprieve from impecuniousness, which had become a permanent reprieve, and thus, twenty years on, she found herself in a place very unlike Home. The long and the short of it all was that she was desperately ill and unhappy, and was leaving Mr Heron, and would return to England. I did not know at all what to do with this information, but the Herons were quite calm.
‘That is another reason why my husband must decide to do the correct thing and send six men to take Mr Cook to Hobart-town,’ she said. ‘That I might go with them.’
‘You need not go so soon,’ said Mr Heron.
‘What would be the good of delay?’ she said. ‘We have spoken of this already, Edgar. We have agreed.’
‘Think of Tam, if you will not think of me,’ he said, with an earnest passion. ‘Will you leave him, the motherless one, with no comfort? No maternal bosom for his head?’
‘I am not his mother,’ said Mrs Heron stiffly. ‘Do not say such things to me. You cannot know how I shall miss him.’
‘You need send only five of your own men, if I join the party,’ I said, encroaching upon this delicate matter like a man stamping about in a forest made of eggshells. I regretted already that I had spoken. ‘I have perceived you are anxious not to lose so many hands,’ I continued. ‘And you have seen I am able enough to row.’
Mr Heron looked deeply sad. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That is helpful.’
‘Mr Heron will follow me, as soon as he has sold the station,’ said Mrs Heron.
‘Have you many prospective buyers?’ I asked them.
‘You were the first,’ Mr Heron said.
‘I was not a prospective buyer.’
‘Still,’ he said. ‘You were the first one.’
It was at this moment that there was a tap at the door.
Mary reared her head up and around from the pot she was tending over the fire. ‘No, missus,’ she said. ‘You have not even had your mutton.’
Indeed! Mutton was the chief concern. Mary was a woman who could see into my heart.
‘Let him in, Mary,’ said the lady.
With a wordless shrug that communicated very precisely, On your head be it, missus, Mary opened the door to admit Tam, the native child.
‘There is no need for this, Leah,’ said Mr Heron. ‘The boy should be outside.’
‘There is every need,’ said Mrs Heron, rising, and so we all rose.
Tam sidled up to the hearth, where he delicately began to draw the wooden box from where Mary had put it.
‘Won’t you accompany us, Mr Fox?’ Mrs Heron asked me. ‘We are going to launch our Balloon once more, for the aid of the men going to fetch the whale.’
‘One can
launch too many Balloons,’ said Mr Heron.
‘I do not know what you are trying to say,’ said the lady. ‘I do not know if you are speaking literally, or if you are insinuating something Other, something Greater, but I am not terribly interested at this moment in metaphors and abstractions. Mr Fox. Tam. Let us go.’
OUR LAST BALLOON SADLY CAUGHT FIRE AND THEN SANK
A tiny whaleboat scurried across the water to the whale. It crested a wave, and seemed to grow hazy, and double. Were there two boats? And two whales? No. I was drunk. I mustered my powers to focus upon the task of seeing straight.
The red flag they had pinned upon the beast flickered brightly against the exhausted day.
‘It will soon be dark,’ said Mrs Heron.
Some distance from us, men sat around the fire upon the sand and passed bottles amongst themselves. Someone’s solemn voice reached us, singing a song about a woman with diamond eyes.
‘We send a Balloon up every night,’ Tam told me. ‘Or day. Nearly every night or day. To-day it is twice.’
‘What a charming practice,’ I said, with the precision of the careful inebriate.
‘I suppose it is,’ said Mrs Heron. ‘It has become our Habit. It is an effective beacon if the men are at sea, but of course, they so rarely are.’
Tam hushed her fiercely, and she gave him a smile.
‘It does not matter if we are frank about the state of things,’ said the lady. ‘Mr Fox is not a buyer. Anyway,’ she added distractedly, ‘you ought always to be honest.’
‘Oh yes,’ Tam said, and settled the wooden box upon the sand to draw out a quantity of folded paper—letters, it seemed.
‘And you sent it up to-day, when we went to sea,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ said the lady.
‘Indeed, I believe you sent it up somewhat before we went to sea.’
‘Perhaps—I cannot quite recall the precise order of happenings. But I sent it up so that you—you all—might see it. We make do, here,’ she went on, showing me the folded letters from the box. ‘Once I had silk! That was long ago. We use paper now. Our last Balloon sadly caught fire and then sank. Tam and I have constructed this one out of some letters I have received over the years.’
A Treacherous Country Page 11