Longbourn

by Jo Baker

  There was a first stiff attempt to get up, and see where he was, and who was there, and what was going on; and then there was his collapse, shaking, back onto the canvas, and the shock at his weakness. When he did, finally, make it to his feet, a sheet wrapped around his naked body, he crossed the bare boards to the window, and pushed back the shutters on a dim evening, and a small village that straggled down a slope towards the sea. He could hear the women jabbering anxiously below, alerted by his heavy tread across their ceiling. One of them climbed up to him, peering up through the hatch in the floor. Her face was parched, her lips fallen in on a toothless mouth. He let himself be put back to bed. She muttered over him.

  “Señora,” he tried, patching together his bits of Spanish. “Dónde—los ingleses?”

  The old woman shushed him with her old woman’s breath. She shook her head.

  “No sé. Los ingleses se han ido.”

  They were gone. He slumped back onto his bed, lay with his cheek on the canvas.

  When he was able to move a little better, he cast around for his clothes. His coat and kit were nowhere to be seen—he remembered peeling them off, swimming out from the beach—but a black canvas pack hung over the back of a chair, along with unfamiliar clothes that seemed to have been left out for him. He lifted up a fisherman’s blue smock and wide-legged trousers. As he moved, his skin felt tight across his back: he could see the edge of the scabbing when he turned his head, and when he touched it, it felt dry, and he had the notion that he was healing. Dressed, he sat to recover his breath.

  He eased his way down a broad-runged ladder. Below, there was daylight, and the red glow of a fire, and a smell of cooking that made his head reel. And a child. One of those bone-thin big-eyed children who seemed to be haunting him all over Spain. She spoke in rapid Spanish, turning towards the open doorway, and he knew it wasn’t her, not the girl from San Tirso or—afterwards. They would be bones now, those children; along with so many others: tattered cloth and greenstick bones in a pit in Sahagún.

  And Pye. Rotting in a pit. Half-rotten when he died. Wide yellow eyes and open mouth.

  Outside, a dark-clothed woman was sheafing through fishing-nets; the girl joined her, talking, tugging at her arm. The woman turned her head to regard him with the calm gaze of a painted saint. Her hair was covered with a red headscarf; she was starkly beautiful.

  Then from beyond her, the old woman creaked up from her seat, and passed by him and went indoors to the fire. She came back with a cup of broth and motioned for him to sit. He eased himself down on a stone bench, and took the cup, warm in his hand. The younger woman got on with sorting through the nets, and the girl leaned in the doorway and watched him.

  It was so still, just the shushing of the waves up onto the sand. Not even a gull’s cry. He tried to follow what the old woman was saying. There had been a man, her son, the young woman’s husband; she was telling James about him. Though giving no other sign that they were listening, the young woman seemed to go still, the girl to straighten up. James understood that the man was gone—had died? It would be the French, or famine, or the sea.

  He said, “Es triste—”

  She brushed her hand through the air, as if wafting sadness, and thoughts of her lost son, aside—though her old pinched eyes suggested that the grief had not faded. She gestured down to the village below, and kept on talking.

  He made out bits of what she said. He saw where a shutter had slumped on its hinges and hung like a broken wing, where mortar had crumbled away, where gardens grew scrubby and tangled with weeds. The boats pulled up onto the sand. The stillness. Not a movement. Not even a gull to wheel and scream. No sound but the hush of the waves. Not a soul beyond the women and him, the four of them gathered there.

  They were a secret, he thought. God had forgotten them entirely.

  “Y usted,” she said, drawing his attention back to himself, with a tap of her knuckly finger on the wood of her chair, and then pointing at his chest. “Y usted, también.”

  “Qué? Yo?”

  “You are departed. You are of the dead.”

  At this, the younger woman looked up at him. He caught her eye but she just dropped her gaze back to her nets, and continued working without a word.

  I am departed, he thought.

  He had come through death and out the other side. The soldier that he had been—all that he had done and seen since he’d enlisted, since he’d sailed to Portugal and tramped through Spain, the filth, the bloody mayhem he had delivered there, the man that he had murdered—had been stripped away.

  “Puedo,” he tried, making the women all look at him, making even the young woman smile. “Puedo trabajar?”

  The old woman laughed. The girl looked from her mother to her grandmother and back to him again, eyes wide and teeth white against her olive skin.

  “Trabajar! But what can he do? He is as weak as a little baby!” the girl said.

  “Si trabajo,” he said. “I will get stronger.”

  The light little skiff was laid up like a turtle on the shore. James heaved it over, rolling it onto its keel. His back was tight, and fired off with sudden shocks of pain.

  The old woman watched. She talked all the time, and from what he could make out, it seemed to be to do with her son, who would sail with the fleet in the evening, and come back at dawn with a boat loaded with fish. He could see it as she spoke, the images unfurling: the boats creeping back in the silvery morning, the gluttonous drag of their laden keels. The women and girls crowding on the foreshore to welcome them home. Life must have been good enough here, once.

  He rolled his trousers to the knee, and between them they pushed the skiff down the beach; the old woman stood back at the water’s edge, keeping her skirts dry. The boat bobbed on the first waves, and he felt the wash and pull of the tide around his calves, and then suddenly there were gulls, a flock of them wheeling excitedly overhead with some bird-memory of the promise of a catch, and he glanced back and saw, on the breakwater, the young woman and the girl, side by side, watching. The young woman’s head was uncovered, and her hair caught the light, and was dark as ink.

  He thought, Perhaps I am doing this for her. Perhaps I am back from the dead to make things better here for her.

  Then the water began to bubble and lick up between the boards, and the old woman exclaimed and flapped her hands, and he felt the tug and drift of the boat change, threatening to sink, and he heaved it back up onto the sand, the water sloshing inside and pouring out of it, his back an agony of flame. The old woman helped him haul it back up out of the reach of the waves.

  “It wants caulking,” he said, in English.

  When he looked back up the strand, the young woman and the girl had both turned and were walking away, their baskets on their hips, going to gather whatever it was they still found to gather in this starvling land.

  After just the brief effort of shifting the boat, he was fit for nothing. He crept his way back up to the cottage, the scabs cracked and weeping across his back, feeling as weak as a baby, just as the little girl had said. He sank down on the bench and closed his eyes in the sun.

  The young woman sat beside him.

  “Me llamo María,” she said.

  “Me llamo James,” he said.

  Later, the girl upended a bag of marbles on the ground, and he watched her arrange them—beads, lost lead-shot, an old stone fishing weight—but she did not actually play. He asked if he might have a knife, and the old woman hunted him out a bone-hafted blade worn thin with sharpening. He worked on a fragment of silver driftwood, hard as limestone; he sawed off an inch of wood, then chopped away the edges, shaping it into a ball. All the time he sat sharp upright on the stone bench outside the front door; it was an agony to lean or slump. Later, they drank a broth of sea-kale and shellfish, and then he crept up to his cot above, and laid himself face down, and as he drifted in the shallows of sleep he thought of the three of them downstairs, bundled up together like puppies on the floor before the
fire, since there was nowhere else for them to lie.

  He had thought that the pain would keep him from rest, but his sleep was deep and dark as the sea, and as all-consuming.

  He passed the chapel on his way down to the beach, tools and dry pitch-pot packed into a knapsack. The chapel doors stood open on the dim interior, and he saw the three figures of the women and the child, a few candles, but there was no sign of any priest.

  On the foreshore, he built a little fire out of driftwood, to soften the pitch; its flames were almost invisible in the spring sun. He stirred as it softened, the heat and the tarry smell in his face. Each tool he handled—knife, and awl, and hammer—was worn smooth as pewter by use, by the sweat of those other hands. It felt uneasy. James slapped and scrubbed the tar into the thirsty wood, a shiver gathering in the back of his neck. But the breeze was warm, and brought with it the stirring, unsettling promise of the summer.

  From time to time he had to stop, and close his eyes, and just breathe until the pain had eased a little, and he could go on.

  Once, he felt himself watched, but when he looked up and round, there was no sign of the women or the girl.

  He scuffed sand over the fire to put it out, and left the pitch to harden.

  In the evening, the old woman patched red canvas sails. The young woman sometimes sang with her daughter. They had sweet, dusty voices. Princesses and knights and donkeys and stepmothers and houses made out of sugar and magic spells.

  The skiff, pushed out onto the water, bobbed cockily there like a yearling colt. He dived down deep, and came up breathless; his skin was becoming sound, his body strong. He hauled himself back up over the side. The war was fading off into the distance; in his mouth Spanish had become as familiar as his broken tooth. The days lengthened and it was midsummer. When he climbed up to bed, the two women murmured on, talking long into the night.

  One evening, the younger woman touched his arm when she handed him his broth.

  That night, he lay awake, aware of the women’s voices below him, speaking in their quiet Spanish, and it sounded like a prayer. He eased out of his cot, and went to the window, and opened the shutters. The night was brilliant with stars.

  The old woman carried the sails and coils of rope down towards the shore; the girl dragged after them, lugging the folded nets. He set the slim mast, then watched and helped as she rigged the sail. The young woman stowed the nets, then between the two of them they shoved the boat out onto the breaking waves. Knee-deep in water, she stepped into the little skiff, skirts dripping; he hauled himself in beside her, making it rock. She unfurled the sail, and it caught the wind and billowed, and they were scudding off into the setting sun.

  She showed him how to fling the nets out across the water. One net split, and came back slack and empty. The other heaved with fish, was so heavy that it took both their strength to haul it up, the skiff leaning dangerously; they spilt its flapping silvery contents into the keel. Untroubled for so long, the fish had flourished, their shoals grown fat with war.

  There was a little fire burning on the beach that morning, when they returned. The old woman and the girl, who had watched them out, were watching them back in again.

  They gutted the fish and dried them in the summer sun, hanging them out like washing on a line.

  Then it was autumn, and the days grew shorter. The old woman said that they would go and pray to Saint Michael, to thank God for their continued safety, their deliverance, for the gift that He had sent.

  James nodded his understanding. He watched the dark progress of them down to the tiny chapel. When he was certain they were settled in their devotions, he slipped away to the shore, and walked across the low headland; it fell away into a spit of sand, the grasses thin and fine as old men’s hair, the sand drifting and scattering and settling; and white shells and then bleached bones, and then a sheep’s skull, picked white, which made him catch his step a moment, not at what it was but at what he’d thought that it might have been. Then skipping sand-fleas, and trails of dried seaweed, and he was out to the edge of the world.

  He walked into the shallows. The water crept up quietly and brushed his feet and ankles. He shaded his eyes with a hand, and peered out across the sea. He waded out further; the waves crashed in, soaking the rolled legs of his trousers. He blinked in the low sun, his eyes scalded. He thought, I don’t even know what I am looking for. I don’t even know what sea this is; if this is the sea that I sailed across to get here, or another one. I don’t even know what I would find back in England, if I did ever return.

  When he came back to the cottage, the place had changed. There was an end-of-summer cool, a stretch in the shadows; a chill seemed to gather about the house, rising in puddles, and then pools, and then slinking together, and suddenly everywhere. Perhaps it was just the turn of the season; perhaps it was the holiness of the day, but something made the air seem dim, and liquid, and far too full.

  They collected inside the downstairs room. The girl slipped in, and a cat that had taken to hanging around the place, crept in with her. The child sat down cross-legged on the floor and proceeded to arrange her marbles, sorting them by size and material. The cat stretched itself out and watched the girl’s movements, and the marbles as they wobbled into stillness. The creature was in whelp. It had made prey, no doubt, of gulls and rats once all the better pickings were gone. Its skin and bones, its shoulders and hips seemed just a sling for its barrel belly.

  The women were so conspicuously not watching him that it was impossible not to feel he was being very closely observed. Had they seen him walk out onto the headland, and wade into the water? Was that somehow not allowed? He’d known that it would not be approved of; after all, he’d waited until he was sure he was alone.

  When the day’s meal was served, the cat got to her feet and padded between them, and mewed. He gave her one of the gristly bits, which might have been winkles, or something similar from the sea, or might have been snails. She settled happily with it, chewing at it with needle teeth.

  The girl watched this a while, then glanced up at him. He set his cup aside, and reached out two closed hands to her, knuckles upward. She tapped the left hand. He opened it, and on his rough palm rested a new marble, carved out of bone-pale driftwood, as smooth as he could make it, and with a ripple around its middle, meant to look like the rim of foam on a wave, or like the twist of colour there’d sometimes been in glass marbles, back at home, back when he was a boy. Where now, at Michaelmas, there’d be hips and haws red as blood, and blackberries hanging like lanterns, and the birds making a feast of them, as he had too, when he was young; he had chewed the flesh off haws with the fluffy sweetness of year-old apples, he had scraped the seeds out of hips to eat the peel, he had stained his fingernails purple with blackberry juice.

  The cat curled and bumped around his legs, then gathered herself and leapt into his lap, and lay there. He felt the uneasy shift of the young inside her belly, their squirming immanence, and sat perfectly still.

  The women said nothing.

  What did they suspect? And what did they want? Had they sensed that he was dreaming now of home?

  He was woken by her body. The bones of her hip and shoulder, the cool silk of her skin. Thin as a whippet, and sweetly warm. He had not known that he wanted, had not really known what it was to want, until she coiled herself, bone and sinew and softnesses, around him, and for a while he lost himself entirely in the comfort of her body. Maria. The first woman he had ever known.

  He did not know why it had not occurred to him before, that he was necessary to them. That he could make the difference between a good haul and the slip towards starvation. He had worked because work was what you did. He had worked because they had been kind to him. He had worked because if he helped someone then he was perhaps a better man for it.

  The old woman eyed him as he came down from his bed. Maria had gone in the night, like a mosquito. The child arranged her marbles on the floor, but did not look at him at all, as if she
knew perfectly well what had taken place, and considered it a betrayal.

  He went down to the beach, and worked on the boat, and in the middle of the day, María brought him a cup of broth and sat beside him as he drank it. She was stiff, her face turned aside, as if seeing him just in the corner of her eye she could believe him to be someone he was not. He dug into the sand beside him, shoving his fingers down in the grit, rubbing his knuckles against it.

  “Espero,” he said, “I hope …”

  But the words would not come in either language. He hoped. What did he hope? That she lived to be old, that she had an easy death, and did not suffer too badly along the way. He hoped that someone might wash up here one day who could make her happy. He hoped that her daughter’s life would be better than her own. That they would forgive him.

  And when she was gone, back to the cottage and her scrubby patch of vegetables and sand, he tugged his hat down low over his eyes, and turned up the collar of his smock to keep the sun off the back of his neck, and walked along the beach and crossed the far headland, dry drifting sand in his rope-soled shoes, and the sun overhead and then descending in front of him, and he walked in the dead man’s clothes, leaving behind him the dead man’s mother, widow, daughter, the dead man’s life.

  He gathered sea-shells. Pale pink fans, bluish mule-ears, twirls of chalky white. He dropped them into his backpack, one by one.

  1810

  In Lisbon, the captain of the Snapdragon took him for a Spaniard: James was burnt brown with the Spanish sun, and found English words now hard as pebbles in his mouth. The captain signed him, and was glad to get him—crew being crew, and hard to come by, what with the Navy pressing every man that they could get their hands on, and the Army organizing the wholesale slaughter of the rest. This fellow seemed sane and sharp and biddable, and, though silent, could follow English when it was spoken to him, and he seemed ready enough to work.