On reaching shore, Odysseus pressed on, while I stop to write.
A short time ago I was in France, at the port of Calais, where the Strait of Dover is at its narrowest. I stood on the top of Cape Gris Nez outside the city and stared across the strait. The fog lay too thickly to be pierced. Still, I fancied that, in the distance, Dover’s sheer white cliffs could be seen, a denser white looming just beyond the white of the fog.
In Calais, the weather prevented all ships from sailing, and I was too impatient to wait for it to clear.
“Could the strait be swum?” I asked.
“Absolutely not,” said the garrulous seaman whom I questioned.
He explained that what is but a quarter inch on a map has killed some and humiliated more. The waves slap back and forth between the cliffs of the two countries. Sandbanks throughout make more waves. Worse, there are shallows and headlands and breakwaters, and the waves crisscross each other at canted angles. A swimmer could be battered to death from all sides. Even if he survived the waves, he could not fight the tide.
“The tide is much too strong here,” the man concluded. “With fog and with the wind up, like today, not even the ships sail.” He must have seen resolve in my posture and said, “Don’t attempt it today! The water is too cold; the fog, too thick; the tide, all wrong!” Without answering, I tossed him my last coin for his information.
Late that afternoon I stood on the quiet beach. On a chain round my neck, I wore a compass I had stolen in the market. I had already tossed my cloak to the side, refusing to worry how to replace it once I was in England. But my boots! They were something of a prize, and I wanted to keep them. Several years ago, I had happened upon two tremendously tall brothers with matching boots, but of different sizes. Only then was I able to adequately cover my own differently sized feet. I felt, at least from the dry vantage point of the shore, that the boots were worth carrying.
So I took them off and made a slit in each one up near the top. Then I removed my shirt, threaded it through the slits, and tied the shirt around my waist by the sleeves. Thus fastened, the boots sat like holsters on a belt. I tucked the oilcloth with my journal into the toe of one. I had at first thought to remove Mirabella’s necklace and pack it with my journal, then decided against doing so. If I lost the boots, I would lose everything at once. Letting the necklace remain on my wrist gave it its own chance of survival.
At last ready, I looked out for a moment toward England, still invisible in the fog. Then I jumped in and began to swim. What I was attempting was sheer folly. Had revenge driven me past reason?
Letting the water numb body and mind, I concentrated on the act of swimming. Stroke and stroke and stroke—my legs kicking, my arms reaching ever forward. The elements became more destructive than my thoughts: the wind, the tide, the waves, the deathlike cold of the water. The fog was an impenetrable wall mere feet away. Its white was the white of the Arctic: a perfect, deadly white. Muffling sight and sound, it annihilated the rest of the world. As the hours passed, I felt that I was the only creature left on earth. If I survived to land on the shores of England, I would find it deserted.
Gradually at first, then, in the end, all at once, the white became soot gray as the sun set. I stopped swimming and looked at the compass. Darkness and condensation obscured which way the needle pointed. I could just make out its direction and realized I had been swimming southwest, for how long I did not know. Left unaltered, my path would have taken me out into the ocean. I needed a more northerly course.
As if to emphasize that I could spare no thoughts, gigantic waves walled me in. The fog hid their presence till the very end: without warning, great blankets of froth crashed down on me one after another. I dived underwater to escape their fierce weight. When I burst to the surface, gasping for breath, another wave would crash down, as if it had been waiting for me with sentient purpose. Time after time, I found myself turned round; time after time, while I stared at the compass, a pounding wave forced me back under.
My precious boots became boulders strapped to my back, but their heaviness only tightened the wet knot of the sleeves tied round my waist, and I couldn’t free myself. Do not dwell on these things, I told myself. Not the weight, not the wind, not the waves. Each moment brought me closer to shore; I could think only of that.
Bursting upward yet another time, I surfaced in an area where the fog had lifted enough to allow a ring of visibility a hundred yards across, eerily lit by a gibbous moon. What I saw was so amazing I cried out: the menacing humps of a school of whales. Then I realized I was seeing only hills of water, huge waves that had not broken to foam. I checked the compass, adjusted my direction, and swam.
Something snaked across my face and chest, leaving traces of fire on my skin. Batting it away, I slapped against a spongy mass and found myself entangled in the long stinging tendrils of a jellyfish, and then of another, and another, until a huge swarm, bobbing on the waves, ringed me in with torment. I would have thought myself too numb to feel such pain, but a thousand needles pierced my body—and still the swarm extended before me. The salt water burned my wounds and made me suffer afresh.
From a distance came a weird whistling sound, high pitched and keening. Water whipped away from the tops of the humps. I feared I was swimming into breakwater again. The whistling grew louder, and both water and air slapped me in the face. It was the wind funneling through the cliffs on either side of the strait. The thick dark gray of the fog was soon swept away, replaced by the purer black of night.
Hour after hour I swam until monotony became my new danger. I saw only unending dark, felt only iciness, heard only the ceaseless howl of the wind. Somehow, without knowing it, I had drowned, I thought; I had died and gone to Hell. Sisyphus had his rock; I had the strait. But stroke and stroke and—dawn would come eventually, and I would reach England, as long as I kept swimming north. At last I saw the horizon, a dark sky above the darker sea. On my right were the changing colors of sunrise; before me, white cliffs, like a tremendous ice shelf. I no longer needed the compass.
I pulled myself onto shore. People would soon be about, though I did not care. At the base of the cliffs I found a rotting boat and crept underneath its overturned shell. I fell asleep without bothering to untie the boots from my waist. It was not until I woke that I realized I had lost my journal. Amazingly, the clasp on the necklace had held; the little charms tinkle as I write this.
The loss of my journal so stunned me that my first action was to break into the nearest firm, a solicitor’s office. A thin twig or the shaft of a small loose feather—these are always at hand, even if they are annoying substitutes for proper quills, which I am able to obtain only when a bird is large enough, and unlucky enough, to be my dinner. For ink, I have used everything from crushed berries to the water of simmered walnuts, from boiled-away coffee to lampblack. Even a small stoppered phial for the ink can be foregone awhile.
But paper!
A fresh diary is as rare as a friendly face, so I settle for stolen ledgers and account books, hoping not too many pages are already filled with numbers. An extra good in such thievery is this: where there are ledgers, there are quills; and where there are quills, there are phials, providing the convenience of not needing to make ink so frequently.
Despite my good fortune in replacing all these, my old journal has been lost. I have no past except what I create by writing it down. What I created before is now gone. A new journal, a new past. A new man?
I shall think only of murder.
October 8
I carry with me a map of England. I feel kinship with the picture. The divisions of rivers, roads, and boundaries are like the scars on my face: each tells a story of something once separate and divided, now brought together and made one. But where is Tarkenville?
Before I could ask directions, I had to find suitable clothing. I stopped first at a farm and from its stable stole a horse blanket to use as a cloak. Later on my journey I shall fashion a hood for it; now I draw the blank
et down to shadow my features.
Nearly shredded by the waves, my shirt proved more difficult to replace. Cloaked but bare chested, I traveled from village to village till at last I saw a man so stout as to serve my needs. I waited by his window till the candle was long put out, crept inside, and found his bedroom. Snoring loudly, he lay oblivious as I searched his chest of drawers and found two spare nightshirts. The fine white cloth—so full and wide to accommodate his girth—fit perfectly across my broad shoulders and chest. Its length, below his knees, was just to my hips. I looked into his armoire greedily and saw a black jacket and blue trousers, both of soft wool. His jacket on me would be a waistcoat, his trousers on me would be breeches. I rolled my treasures under my arm and left.
Now at least, when I ask directions, though my face might be hidden, I can show a clean shirt.
October 9
“Go north till you’re in the middle of nowhere,” said a man in Dover. “If you hit Scotland, you’ve gone too far.”
Those were my first directions to Tarkenville, which seems to be no closer than Hell and no more desirable. It is not on the map. If a man has even heard of Tarkenville, his advice begins, “Go north,” but then provides no other help.
Finally, one man said he thought that Tarkenville is up near Berwick-upon-Tweed, which is indeed north, nearly at the Scottish border. He did not know to what side of Berwick Tarkenville lay, but it could not be east as then it would be in the sea.
So, for now, until I am closer, I travel north, led by the Pole Star to Margaret Winterbourne and through her to Walton.
Newton Mulgrave
October 10
From my crossing of the strait through today, my experiences provide, not the memoirs of a murderer stalking prey, but the sedate observations of a vacationer. I walked up the North Downs of Kent, remarkable for the tent cities that spring up overnight, temporary housing for crowds from London come to harvest the hops. I crossed the Thames just east of London and made my way into Essex. There, the neatly thatched cottages and fertile farmland made me yearn for quiet domesticity. Then rain turned the red-clay fields to blood, and my thoughts to darker images.
In Cambridge, the colleges reminded me of the heady intellectual swirl I once sought outside the Vatican. There, as in Rome, I found myself so “clumsy” as to bump into one of the students and knock his armful of books to the ground. He would later discover himself missing Spinoza’s Ethics.
Tired of slipping from shadow to shadow along city streets, I found the steaming bogs in Lincolnshire more suited to my mood: they are said to be haunted. Because of their devils and ghosts and malarial air, I was alone when I witnessed thousands of wildfowl breaking cover from the marshes and rising up as one, their wings beating thunderously. Like a fool pointing out the most obvious event, I wanted to turn to a companion and say in wonder, “Did you see that?”
No one was there.
Farther north the fens have been newly drained to create drier, passable land. I keep to those portions not yet tamed. And still farther, stone manor houses sit high upon the wolds; these I eyed only from a distance. The highest of the wolds rise hundreds of feet up. From the top looking eastward I could see bands of color like an earthbound rainbow: the green of the marshes, a yellow rim of sand, the blue of the sea.
I am currently in Yorkshire, where at every turn there is a river, stream, or brook. After fording or swimming across the Don and the Aire, the Wharfe and the Ouse, and dozens of rivers whose names I do not know, I have come to a sea of a different sort, an ocean of heather. The bluish purple of its rolling waves is broken only by flocks of red grouse. A huge stone cross stands to mark the way—to where I do not know. No doubt its builders thought to dwarf men with its size. I can easily trace the full front of its face, its carved lessons worn smooth by centuries of wind and rain. The sun shines now though, and I have stopped in the cross’s shadow to write this.
My thoughts twist ever inward. My father was not a believer. Nevertheless, if he had accepted me as his son, would he have made me learn, even if by rote, the Christian creed? Left alone, abandoned, I made my own creed. In mine, the son does not die as atonement; the father dies. This is as blasphemous as my father’s seizing the power of creation—and as unsatisfying. Neither offers me hope, nor does the Church itself, that hoarder of redemption. If there is a Hell, I am probably damned to stand outside that as well.
Berwick-upon-Tweed
October 19
The words skitter on the page with excitement: I have just spoken to someone who at last knows where Tarkenville is. I must retrace my steps, as it is a little south of here. If I had traveled along the coast instead of inland, I would have passed it on the way.
More important, my informant has also heard of the Winterbournes; indeed, he is cousin to a man who works their flocks.
Walton’s sister, Margaret, came here years before he began his mad pursuit of me. Although she had had no previous acquaintance with Gregory Winterbourne, she married him only six weeks after her first husband’s death had made her a very young widow. Winterbourne carried her and her small daughter up here to wild Northumbria, away from the more civilized south.
Over the years, the pleasant new bride became a morose and suspicious woman. She now believes the whole world is determined to do her ill and imagines a thief or murderer hidden in every shadow. She has grown miserly, too: there had better not be a sock’s worth of wool nor a chop’s worth of meat missing when the accounts are tallied up.
Never mind the chop, I thought as the man spoke; the murderer that Margaret believes to be everywhere has come to her at last.
Walton’s sister has no issue from her second marriage. That there are only three Winterbournes to kill disappoints me. I want to leave so wide a trail of blood that Walton can see it from Venice.
Tarkenville
October 24
I know now why the name Tarkenville is not on the map; it is barely a smudge on the coast, as small as a town may be and still be called a town. The Winterbourne estate is its chief feature: an ugly square on top of the sandstone cliffs by the sea, although set back from the edge. At the bottom of those cliffs is the cave that now shelters me.
As close as I am to the estate, I feel safe. The cliffs are treacherous; there is no easy path down, not even for one as goat-footed as I. The shoreline before the cave is empty of signs of fishing lines, traps, or other human occupation. In addition, a veil of fresh water spills over the cave’s entrance, hiding its existence from all but the most curious.
When I made a fire in the cave, I found myself in a chamber that was an uncanny shade of red, too deep to be merely sandstone. The red color comes from a type of moss that paints the cave’s walls and ceiling. With the firelight flickering against these crimson walls, I can imagine myself Satan in Hell, plotting against all mankind.
Driftwood for fire is plentiful, and there is an abundance of food as well. Shellfish collect around the rocks of tidal pools, and there are many seabirds, such as oystercatchers, turnstones, and redshanks. I leave the curlews alone; their eerie piping affects me strangely.
Fresh water, food, fuel, a dry shelter: not long ago it was all I asked of life—that, and to be left alone.
Now? In a few hours I will go up to the estate.
October 26
It was near one o’clock in the morning when I began the steep, nearly vertical climb. Knowing it would impede me, I left my cloak in the cave. At once the cold shot through the thin cloth of my shirt. I kicked toeholds for myself, sometimes clinging to no more than an exposed root. The rocks I disturbed tumbled down, rattling against the cliff face till the sound disappeared into the endless rush of waves, the tide eating up the sand, yet remaining hungry. I clawed at the unyielding stone; the wind clawed at my back. Below me, behind me, above me: the gale wind tried to knock me loose.
At last I scrambled over the top and set my feet upon craggy ground. Before me lay a distance of rough terrain, at length becoming a garden
that had been imposed unsuccessfully on the land. Immaculately tended, white gravel paths led to stone benches and fountains and statues, but every tree within the garden was gnarled and twisted, beaten into a crouch by the fierce ocean wind. Only scrub survived; it had learned how to bow.
The Winterbourne house was a massive stone block, unadorned by columns or balconies or other decoration to ease the eye. Smaller outbuildings stood a distance away: what looked like a stable and then, set closer, perhaps a summer kitchen, banished to the outside so that, I imagined, the cook’s mighty labors did not cause Walton’s sister a single sweaty drop of discomfort. Other structures were attached to the house like afterthoughts. One was a greenhouse, perhaps meant to provide what could not be coaxed from the land. Another looked like an observatory, but its foolish placement, low and adjoining the house, would blind the observer to half the sky. Nearest to the cliff, and farthest from the central part of the house, was a chapel, marked by a cross large enough to proclaim the owner’s piety.
A slight figure—Margaret Winterbourne?—emerged from round back of the house, wearing a dark cape and carrying a lantern. Behind her were mastiffs and pit dogs, unleashed but rigid with obedience.
Moving behind a statue, as if that could possibly hide me, I stepped on a branch. The dogs lifted their heads, quivering as they waited for a single word. The woman looked up as well. The statue offered little cover, the wind-blasted grounds even less, and I could be seen as easily as I saw.
“Have we a rabbit, boys?”
Her voice was low and throaty, full of quiet laughter at her own joke.
“Go.”
The dogs sprang. Brown, black, and mottled fur, yellow teeth, pink tongues in gaping mouths—all blurred into the blood red of the chase. Rabbit, indeed. I would run before them until it no longer suited me.
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