‘Why, pray?’
‘Because I love him.’
‘More than you love yourself?’
‘Yes, Captain, more than I love myself.’
‘I’m to be convinced of that.’
Baxter held his arms wide. ‘He’s innocent of all of this. He’s done nothing to offend the dead.’
‘But you’ve offended the dead?’
‘Of course I have. It’s why you’re here now. I’ve offended the living too. I’ve deaths on my conscience as a consequence.’
‘Innocent blood on your hands?’
‘Yes.’
Ballantyne was silent in response. The fugitive thought occurred to Baxter that he was merely hallucinating all of this. He was close to exhaustion and his nerves were shot and this was a stubbornly barren place in the night’s empty seclusion. But he could smell palm oil and hemp rope and salt pork. He could smell canvas sheets drying in some spectral breeze and the tang of brass polish and barrelled rum and knew that this was all of it the odour of the sea as it had been aboard a ship in an era now long vanished from the world.
As these smells grew familiar to him, there was the warm hint under them of exotic spices he knew was the scent of the captain’s cruel and sunlit voyages to the coast of Africa. And under that there was a base note of sweet decay he thought might be the whiff of disease rising from a slave hold.
And there was the figure in front of him; the grim, solid presence darkly toying with an hourglass on the desk at which he sat, flipping it impatiently as if harrying time itself.
And there was the voice. There was that gravel-charged bark of command that made Baxter flinch when it emanated from the captain’s throat and chest, summoned impossibly from lungs long bloodless and cold. He wasn’t at all imagining that, he knew.
Finally, Ballantyne said to him, ‘The sorcerer has forgiven me my sins against him. Perhaps everything now is a consequence of that, because I’ve since forgiven him. My own beloved daughter is at long last at rest. This latter cause for joy inflicts on me a great debt of gratitude. I owe that to the scholar of the sea and his companion with the decorated skin. I owe it to your architect and the scholar’s stepdaughter. Most grievously I owe it to an officer of the law, a man of prodigious courage and surpassing kindness.’
Baxter thought he could identify in his mind the people to whom the captain referred. That Helena Davenport was among them didn’t even rouse his curiosity. All he cared about was that they had apparently succeeded in what they’d attempted together to do. It might even mean his haunting was now at an end. He hadn’t been haunted for all that long but present company accepted he’d already had quite enough, in his life, of ghosts.
‘I’m pleased for you,’ he said. ‘I’m pleased for Rachel too.’
‘In saying which, you sound sincere, Sir. So in return for your good wishes, I shall tell you something eternally true. You reap only what you sow, Mr Baxter. In this place, on this stony ground, yours is a harvest of scorn.’
‘Is there nothing I can do?’
Ballantyne chuckled again. It was an awful sound. He raised a finger and pointed, which was worse. A blood-coloured ruby embellished the ring worn below the first knuckle of the pointing finger and the movement of lifting his arm released ancient odours from the corrupt flesh rank under his clothes.
‘The sorcerer has seen fit to leave in peace the poor spirit who took his bracelet of teeth from my sea chest. In consequence, she has departed your life. She will never now afflict the life of your son. You need no longer be fearful on his behalf. So I’d say you too owe a mighty debt of gratitude.’
‘How do I repay it?’
‘You leave this artful folly of a building and you never return to it. You gather those of your crew that survive where they presently cower in your camp at the southerly point of my island. You equip your sturdiest boat and you cast off and sail directly for the mainland. Do not tarry. Do not risk a single backward glance. Go now.’
My island.
‘And you?’
‘The party to whom I’m indebted will shortly arrive here. They plan the modest celebration to which their act of mercy entitles them. I would not subject them to the sight and sound and stink of what I became. Instead I will seek an end to myself, believing I will find it now.’
‘There’s no light.’
‘On the contrary, this evening’s events have proven there is always light, Mr Baxter.’
‘I meant here, in this building. For their celebration.’
‘A circumstance your architect can alter, albeit only temporarily.’
‘I see.’
‘It’s my sincere wish you’ve seen everything you need to. There’s no hope for you, Sir, if you have not.’
No hope on New Hope.
Baxter didn’t consider that he needed any time to think matters through. It wasn’t the moment for debate or even hesitation. He looked swiftly about him and then drew in a deep breath. He said a silent farewell to Seamus Ballantyne with something between a nod and a bow, more reverential this, than merely courteous. He felt profound relief and a tinge of regret but none of the loss he’d expected. He turned and walked out of the suite and away from the complex and into the rain without once looking back, a man reprieved and blessed, born again and headed he hoped and believed for some welcome kind of betterment, already in him vastly overdue.
Phil Fortescue and Ruthie Gillespie visited Liverpool a full fortnight after departing New Hope for what she suspected both of them hoped would be the final time. They’d again spent a few days in Southport, playing the antique amusement machines at the end of the pier and window-shopping along Lord Street, having arrived in Phil’s babe-magnet Fiat coupe with him this time instead of her at the wheel. They’d strolled through the Wayfarer’s Arcade and eaten an unseasonal ice cream on Nevill Street and toured the galleries of the Atkinson. Ruthie was impressed by the paintings purchased in the past by the town’s discerning public servants. Phil told her he was too.
Ruthie revisited the Guest House at lunchtime on their first full day. And she bought the same meal she’d ordered on her last attempt to eat there. And she ate it unmolested, calmly sipping between mouthfuls at a modestly sized glass of Chablis. The surface of the drink only shivered slightly from the tremor in the hand gripping the stem of her wine glass when she lifted it from the table to her lips. She ate and drank almost sure that she would do so unhindered by the rude presence suddenly of someone undead, disconcerting in their decades-long distress at what they’d become. And that’s what duly happened.
It wasn’t enough, though, she didn’t think. She thought that as a couple, certainty eluded them. She thought they appeared relaxed to one another rather than fraught or careworn but were neither of them really tranquil or serene or truly happy. The doubts lingered. She knew the island loomed at the back of their minds, brooding as blackly as the clouds of a gathering storm. So they travelled to Liverpool, where Phil said they would find out for sure whether a fate they equally detested now had at last finished with either or with both of them.
‘Why did we come to Southport?’ Ruthie asked, getting into the Fiat’s passenger seat.
‘So we could go to Liverpool,’ Fortescue said.
‘Because we have to put the bracelet back,’ Ruthie said, closing her door on herself with a clunk of finality.
‘That’s only the half of it,’ he said.
She didn’t know what he meant in saying that. She didn’t ask. She’d find out, she was sure but felt in no particular hurry to do so. She felt raw and almost wounded. She’d experienced too much. They both had. Their recent ordeal had wearied them, to Ruthie’s tired mind and it wasn’t over yet she knew, as the car ate the miles on the short journey to Liverpool and she watched the flat, verdant fields slip by on their route without another word passing between them.
It was raining when they got to Liverpool. They parked the car and walked the distance through drizzle to the Maritime Museum. The cloth b
ag containing the bracelet of teeth was in Fortescue’s right hand. She walked on his left side. She did not take his left hand in hers, as it was her habit to do when carefree, to swing their arms together as they walked. Doing so in her present mood would have felt to her counterfeit.
‘It’s like the end of something,’ she said.
‘That’s because it is the end of something, love.’
They passed a derelict cinema building, white paint peeling off plaster like some scrofulous disease; smashed lozenges of glass around a once grand, now padlocked main entrance door, Deco accents pointless in their geometric precision, a poster in a tarnished frame catching Ruthie’s eye as they walked by.
The poster showed a little girl. She was very pretty in a period dress and buckled shoes and a bonnet tied with a red ribbon in a bow under her chin. She held a small bunch of flowers, white petals blossoming between both hands. She was frowning slightly, which struck a discordant note with Ruthie as she thought there’d better have been a bright smile to light up that lovely face. But it was only a glimpse, no more than a fleeting impression and then behind them.
They were there.
Ruthie shivered. She looked at the ornate, pillared façade of the building before them knowing that for the man standing beside her this was where it had all begun seven years earlier.
‘I need a cigarette,’ she said. ‘I’ll have one while you go in and get us through the formalities.’
‘The formalities were done over the phone. You know that. You’re just going to stand here on the cobbles, smoking in the rain?’
She blinked up at the grey sky. She said, ‘The last time I did that they were the cobbles of Seamus Ballantyne’s dock on the island. It was a fortnight ago and you told me you loved me.’
‘Well, it was only the truth.’
‘Is it still the truth?’
‘I think so.’
‘I’m scared, Phil,’ she said, taking her cigarettes and Bic lighter from the pocket of her coat.
‘We both are,’ he said. He winked at her and smiled and then walked into the museum’s vestibule. Ruthie smoked listening to the seagulls clamouring above, aware of the cobbles rain slicked and slippery under her feet, wondering why the little girl on the film poster had looked familiar and then as she flicked away her butt and turned to enter the museum, knowing why it was.
The room, when they’d descended the three flights of stairs that led down to it, seemed very cramped to Ruthie with two of them occupying it. She was quite used to nautical props. The Spyglass Inn back in Ventnor was full of the brass lustre of old ocean-going artefacts and that was her local pub, she’d spent a lot of time there.
The difference was that the fog bells and brass ship’s clocks and bronze propellers and such in the Spyglass were only there for decoration and to lend the pub’s interior an atmosphere fitting to its name. Here by contrast the objects were important of themselves. There were furled battle colours and vicious looking pikes she thought probably for fending off boarding parties. There was a pyramid of piled iron canon balls. There was a side-drum that looked as though it might have been used by a boy in a scarlet uniform to beat the marines aboard to quarters on a man of war in the time of Nelson and Trafalgar.
Phil would have been able to tell her about the true history and significance of the drum, about its provenance. He’d have been able to tell her about the specifics of everything there if she but asked. She didn’t ask, though. She just stared at Seamus Ballantyne’s sea chest, his initials picked out on the oak curvature of its lid, less than innocently reposed against the wall in the spot furthest from the door.
Was it less than innocent?
Ballantyne had been the master of a cruel trade. But it became barbaric only really in retrospect, in what Phil would term a revisionist perspective. At the time it was considered normal and even respectable and it was the abolitionists who’d been regarded as out of the ordinary. Judged on the values of their own harsh period, Wilberforce and his crew had been no more than a minority of vocal cranks rebelling against established convention.
He’d become truly cruel later though, had Ballantyne. When his New Hope Kingdom of Belief began to be consumed, he’d turned to the human sacrifice he’d witnessed on his voyages to Africa in a desperate bid to appease their destroyer, or to strike some kind of occult bargain. That was the story, anyway. No one living knew the specifics, but that had been the bleak and bloody purpose of the windowless church.
‘It’s different,’ Phil said to her.
‘What is?’
‘Everything is.’
‘You’re talking in riddles,’ she said.
‘No, I’m not. The atmosphere’s changed.’
‘I wouldn’t know, Phil,’ she said, ‘I’ve never been here before.’
He turned and looked at her. He glanced down at the cloth bag he was carrying, but that hung motionless and mercifully silent and still from the fingers of his right hand. He looked at her again. He said, ‘Even the air in here, before, always sort of impended, Ruthie. It’s hard to put into words, but it was like some unspoken threat hung over you. It was oppressive. It was horribly oppressive. Unless I’m wrong and you can feel it, that’s gone.’
‘It’s just sort of musty and claustrophobic, down here,’ Ruthie said. ‘I think you should open the chest.’
‘Showtime?’ he said.
‘I bloody well hope not.’
His free hand groped in his pocket and came out with the key. He squatted before the chest gesturing for her to squat beside him. She did so. She was aware that her breath had become shallower. She thought that her pulse had become more rapid than was usual. Her mouth was dry. It was completely quiet down there and entirely still and quite gloomy under the one dim yellow overhead light. Heating pipes gurgling suddenly somewhere startled her and she almost grabbed Phil’s arm as her mind rationalised the unexpected sound. But she didn’t.
Phil turned the key in the lock and raised the chest lid. She was aware that this had been an ordeal for him when he’d had to do it in the past, working here as Keeper of Maritime Artefacts, completing a routine inventory of the contents of Ballantyne’s sea chest, enduring the uncomfortable sense of being watched until almost overcome by a feeling of terror he’d described as closer to instinct than any more subtle sort of foreboding.
Was he feeling something similar now? It didn’t appear from his expression as though he was. His features were set, but all she could see in his eyes was a calm determination to get this done. It was different, now. He’d just said that himself. Everything was different.
The chest lid yawed open with a long, languorous creek of its elderly hinges. Phil dropped the bag containing the bracelet of teeth into it. It seemed to slither down with a sibilant hiss to rest at the bottom of the chest’s heaped contents. Just teeth, she thought, tinkling innocently on their silver chain.
Evening sunlight flashed then through Ruthie’s mind. She clenched her fists and closed her eyes and memories of a summer day at dusk embraced her warmly in the luminescent light at the edge of the sea. She was outside the Spice Island pub on Portsmouth Harbour 18 months earlier and was seeing Phil in the flesh for the first time. Water lapped gently in her ears. Around her there was laughter and the careless chink of drinking glasses. She could smell sun cream and a splash of spilled beer drying on a wooden tabletop.
He sat staring out at the Solent Forts, at their bulk, ominous and indistinct in heat shimmer, his features hewn into handsomeness by imponderable loss, she remembered thinking then, Seamus Ballantyne’s pocket watch ticking in his bag to remind him of the fortitude needed to live on enduring the cruel loss of his wife. Ruthie hadn’t known that about him then. She hadn’t known until later when he took it out and explained that to her as the watch ticked determinedly on the table between them.
It wasn’t ticking now.
The chest lid had opened on silence. The watch was there, Ballantyne’s Breguet half concealed in a fold of boat c
loak, its blued fingers still against the flawless white enamel of its face, its maker’s name etched between the 10 and the 2 of its circle of Roman numerals.
‘It stopped at a quarter to twelve,’ Ruthie said aloud. ‘Could have been just before midday, but wasn’t. It stopped at night, just as we finished singing to Rachel, at the precise moment she went to sleep, just as we put his daughter finally to rest.’ It was impossible to say this for certain, Ruthie knew. But she was equally certain it was true. Her personal history over recent years had left her with no belief any longer at all really in coincidence.
She looked at Phil, who stared unblinking at the watch. He’d made no move to pick it up and examine it further. He’d just pushed the concealing fold of boat cloak back to reveal its face fully. He stared. And Ruthie thought she knew what he was thinking and it hurt her terribly but she couldn’t find it in herself to end his reverie with a touch or with further words. So she said nothing. Instead she stood and took a retreating step and waited for him to return to the present. And eventually he did, closing its lid, locking the chest, his eyes still fixed on nothing any longer there.
Or living, Ruthie thought.
You were thinking that if only you could turn back time then you would. You were thinking about your dead wife and how much you loved her. How much you still love her. Oh, Phil. You were thinking about how short and precious were those lost days and it’s nothing to do with me because it all ended before we began but it haunts you still and I saw that when I saw Ballantyne’s stopped watch and watched you remembering. And wishing too, which is the worst part. It’s no one’s fault, but it’s no good, Phil, because if you live in the past, then of course we have no future.
When they got back outside again, Ruthie thought the strengthening rain only appropriate. She made no move to take Phil’s hand in hers. They walked silently, side-by-side. When they passed the derelict cinema, the poster in the tarnished frame was blank. Between the pavement they walked on and the road, a small bouquet of white blossoms lay trailing its lost petals in the gutter.
The Colony Trilogy Page 75