Swiftly: A Novel (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  He might have thought that hope was the life’s-blood of love, and that a love perfectly drained of hope such as his would be listless and weak. But the contrary was true. The hope had been replaced by quicklime and it burned in the tubules and chambers of his innards. He thought of her at all times. As he walked about the town he wondered what she was doing, with whom she was passing her time.

  It was in the nature of his love that he lacked all restraint and composure. In her presence he was too cowed to express himself; but with all other people he met he was immoderate. He confessed his love to the French soldiery in clumsy fron-say. Talking to Larroche he found himself close to tears on more than one occasion. Strangers would utter the expected and polite forms required by civilised exchange, and Bates would presume upon this as if it were an intimacy to confess - to confess.

  He lacked the ability to control himself.

  His shame was insurmountable, woven into his love. The stink of bodily waste aroused him. He settled himself upon the jakes in the morning and voided his own bowels, and the stench of his own matter excited him. He repulsed himself. Yet the stench caused his member to stiffen, and he saw remembered glimpses, projected upon his inner eye, of her softness, her perfect whiteness, the tucked-in curve of a forearm.

  Oh!

  And then he could no longer gain access to the jakes, because the space was always occupied. The Colonel was in there with the flux in the bowels, or one of this men was there with the same sickness. They had caught it upon the coach ride, presumably; and now they suffered as Bates had himself. He was forced to walk up the steepness of Scarborough town and into the woods, like a peasant or a wild animal. But this humiliation he accepted, because he deserved nothing better. He hid himself away.

  The weather was changeable, some days warm and blue, otherwise cloudy and prone to chill. Bates lay in bed, and this was his thought: that he must test himself against the chance of battle. Then, if God were as disgusted with him as he was with himself, he could hand over his life, pay his debt of death, and leave the agony behind.

  His choices were two: he could abscond, take one of his daily walks and not turn back, walk on into the countryside until he encountered the English irregulars, and offer himself as a recruit. Or he could ask the Colonel to take him under orders, and fight for the French. His patriotism debated with his understanding.

  A sky of mackerel blue. Bates woke and his dream was—

  The Dean is awake; bellowing. The ship has gone. The soldiers are dying. The sound of artillery. The sound of artillery.

  The sound—

  In the room behind him the Dean had fallen quiet. He pulled himself upright in the bed, and called for water. ‘The jug and glass are beside you,’ said Bates without looking round.

  ‘Damnable thirst.’

  ‘Can you not hear the sound of cannon?’

  ‘Perhaps it is the last trump,’ rasped the Dean. ‘Where is my snuff?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘My snuff!’ barked the Dean.

  Bates’s mind was not on the Dean. He had to reach Mrs Burton, but of course it was out of the question that he approach her. She was in her room, on the top floor of the hotel; and this is where she had stayed, and would stay. He stood in the hall in his breeches, his shirt untucked, and tried to fight the urge to hurry up the stairs to her. It was, he told himself, to make sure that she was alright; but she would not thank him for it. The—

  BOUM!

  —the Colonel, perhaps, could approach her. But now that the town was under bombardment from cannon it must be time to evacuate, to leave, partir, upon the Sophrosyne. Surely?

  He hurried down the stairs. He saw nobody else, as if the hotel were deserted. But of course it was not deserted. It was filled with soldiers, citizens; most rooms were occupied by two or three people. So where were they all? Had none of them heard the great drumbeats of gunfire?

  He tripped on the landing, and recovered his footing. Here was the place, and he fell to beating with his knuckles on the Colonel’s door. Through a small window the sky was visible, blue as innocence itself. But there was no mistaking the sound of the cannonade. It did not match the—

  He rapped his knuckles once, twice, and then, exactly consonant with the third,

  BOUM!

  -as if he were a mighty devil from Milton’s Hell hammering upon a door ten leagues high. Bates raised his fist to his face, at the ridiculousness of it. But there was no time to waste! The Colonel was not answering. Mrs Burton was in danger. He turned the handle, and discovered the door unlocked.

  Inside was a drawn-curtain dimness, and an unpleasantly yeasty smell, behind which pressed an ungainly combination of rotten fruit and tobacco. It took a moment for the reflex of the eye to adjust to the levels of light, and then Bates saw the Colonel in bed: lying on his back and smoking his pipe. His pipe stood perfectly vertical, just as Larroche’s body lay perfectly horizontal, and both were as motionless as if mortise-and-tenoned out of wood.

  ‘Colonel !’ Bates called, from the door. And then, because the sepulchral feel of the darkened room made such volume seem impertinent, he spoke again in a lower tone: ‘Colonel! Can you not hear the sound of the cannons? They are shelling the town. It is, I suppose, the English, and they are shelling the town.’

  He stood waiting for the military man’s reply. A single sheet of sunlight, thin as paper but broad and tall and slant from the edge of the curtain down upon the floor, picked out the atoms of dust in the air of the room. The Colonel lay perfectly contemplative.

  There was a squeal, almost musical, and then another BOUM!

  ‘Colonel,’ urged Bates, starting forward and rather afraid of the sangfroid of a man who could lie quietly in bed whilst gunpowder and metal poured down from the sky all around him. ‘We must ensure the safety of Mrs Burton.’

  He reached the edge of Larroche’s bed, and stood for a moment. It was apparent now - it had been apparent since he opened the door, although he had not absorbed the reality - that the Colonel was dead. He lay as if carved. Even the lines and tucks of the sheet, tucked over his chest and under his arms, possessed a sculptural solidity. Standing over him, Bates looked down blankly at the expression on his face: a taut open-eyed tension, made more alarming by the fact that the lips were pulled back and his teeth, biting so tightly on the stem of the pipe that they dented the ivory of the mouthpiece, seemed picked out, every tooth, in preternatural detail.

  Bates moved his gaze to the table beside the bed. On it rested a glass, half-empty and with a skein of dust lying on the circular surface of the water. Beside this was a Bible, in French, and a leather pouch around which many threads of tobacco, like brown lint, were scattered.

  For a time Bates simply stared at this scene. Then there was another detonation (BOUM!), louder and so closer, and he gave a little yelp and hurried from the scene.

  Outside, on the landing again, Bates looked upon a scene completely changed from what he had seen only moments before. French soldiers rushed up and down the carpeted stairs; somebody was screaming orders in French, and all the doors were open: scared or bewildered civilian faces peered out. A (BOUM!) petty officer pushed past Bates and into Larroche’s room, only to emerge moments later in a disordered state, calling something in French in a high-pitched voice.

  Bates slunk up the stairway towards his room. Inside the Dean - for the first time in more than a week - was on his feet. He had been (BOUM!) brought to the window by the sounds of cannonfire. No, he was at the window because that was where the chest of drawers was, and he was rifling energetically through the drawers, muttering: ‘It must be in here, unless ’tis stolen.’

  ‘Dean,’ said Bates. ‘The town is under attack!’

  He did not look around.

  ‘Dean, I have just come from the Colonel’s room,’ Bates added, ‘and he is dead. I am sorry to say it, he is dead.’

  ‘Thieving Frenchmen!’ cried the Dean, pulling the top-drawer out entire so that it crashed upon
the floor.

  But there was nothing to do. Bates went among the hurrying French and attempted to report the death of Larroche. Eventually he found an officer who seemed to be the senior man in the town’s established garrison, but he spoke little English, and Bates could not be certain that he had conveyed the information.

  A troop of a dozen soldiers jogged in formation up the main street. In the opposite direction came three carts, one horse-drawn, the others dragged by weary-looking men - old men, woollen-tunicked and exhausted. On these carts were piled furniture and belongings and children in apparent jumble. All the well-dressed holidaymen and holidaywomen of Scarborough were on the streets too, watching this toing and froing. The sound of cannonades continued, less frequently, and seemingly without effect.

  In the bay the Sophrosyne squirted white smoke from its square portholes, one, then another. The sound of the cannon came a moment later, and corresponded with a piglet’s squeal through the air over Bates’s head. He felt a panic, a rush in his breast, and started back towards the hotel. There was singing. He heard high-pitched singing, but the chatter in the streets and the chomp of soldier’s boots on the cobbles and the knocks and crashes of cannonades swallowed most of the words. But it was hymn singing:—that with this tincture for thy sake does not grow—

  and behind the carts was a long line of children, herded down the street by a Dame, and singing hymns. Bates thought: I must reach Eleanor. His mind was wholly taken by that thought. I must reach Eleanor.

  [8]

  The Dean’s lack of snuff drove him wild, and for a day and a night he could not be tamed. His room was wrecked.

  The cannonade did not last into the night; and the following day dawned quiet - save only that the streets outside were now busy with people, driven from the outskirts of the town to the seafront by fighting. They camped along the pavements, and tried to beg food from any passing figure. Bates was too alarmed to leave the hotel.

  But the following day the street was cleared by a battalion of French soldiery, the citizens hurried along the seafront and south. It was quiet once again. Indeed, the hotel was so quiet that Bates found it disconcerting. An unsatisfactory conversation with a French soldier revealed the fact that all the English guests had been ejected from the place - all save the Dean, Eleanor and himself. Bates assumed that this was to provide space to billet the French soldiers, but none had yet been moved into the house.

  Bates spent the day sitting downstairs in the salon and reading - idly, agitatedly, his attention not wholly on the words - through the selection of books.

  Eleanor stood in the doorway.

  Bates stood up hurriedly. ‘Mrs Burton!’ he said. ‘How glad I am to see you well!’

  She looked at him, and her look made no concealment of her repulsion. ‘Mr Bates,’ she said, tipping her head forward a fraction. She turned and left.

  Bates’s heart thundered and chugged.

  Something very shameful had happened to Bates, something so revolting that he barely admitted it to himself. He became strenuously and urgently aroused, carnally aroused, at the smell of faecal matter. To sit in the water closet and unloose his bowels brought him a cockstand so tight it was painful. To walk the streets and take in his nose the odour of filth - from the gutter, or an alley; from horses or humans, it mattered not - brought his membrum virile to attention. And at the same time there flashed upon his inner eye, which is the taunt of conscience, an image of Eleanor. Her face so pure, so beautiful, her virtue so unmistakable! How could it be connected in his revolting imagination with the stench of foulness, so? It was the devil, the devil, it was the devil; and not the grand Devil of Milton and St John, not the mighty Brobdingnagian beast wielding a trident the size of a Norway pine; but a foul devil, a petty devil, a devil of dirt and degradation.

  A short, black-bearded French officer - Bates was unsure of his rank, or name - came in upon him in the salon. He was attended by several figures; his bearing was of a man of importance.

  ‘There are battles to the west,’ he said, without preliminary, speaking even as Bates got to his feet. ‘We must remove yourself, and the others.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bates, his coward’s heart speeding.

  ‘Colonel Larroche’s orders are my responsibility now,’ said the officer. ‘But I must care also for my men. I do not know the disposition of you English - you three.’

  ‘I am Abraham Bates, said Bates. ‘I am—’

  ‘We are to put you upon the Sophrosyne, a ship,’ said the officer. ‘That is my decision. Yourself, and the lady ...’

  ‘Mrs Eleanor Burton.’

  ‘She. You, her, and also her husband.’

  ‘She is a widow.’

  ‘Her,’ said the officer, ‘fiancé.’

  ‘No, sir, you misunderstand. I call her Mrs, as you would say Madame, but her husband is dead, mort. She has no fiancé.’

  ‘He must be accommodated also,’ said the officer, with a blank expression.

  ‘You have misunderstood ...’ said Bates again, but the officer continued talking.

  ‘But there is a problem with the Sophrosyne,’ he announced.

  ‘Problem?’

  ‘Certainly. The Sophrosyne refuses to take you.’

  ‘Refuses?’

  ‘Certainly. They have orders to take you. They have the highest orders.’

  ‘Why, then,’ asked Bates, ‘do they refuse?’

  The officer made a great Gallic flourish with his right hand, as if tracing out a hieroglyph. ‘They are fearful of the pest,’ he said, in a scornful voice.

  ‘Pest? What is the pest?’

  ‘Forgive me. The contagion. The contagion.’

  ‘It claimed,’ said Bates, with a flurry of fear and thrill in his belly, ‘the life of Colonel Larroche.’

  ‘And many more,’ said the officer. ‘They maintain quarantine, aboard the Sophrosyne. But we shall move you and the lady and her husband aboard, and the Sophrosyne shall take you far from here. These are my orders.’

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Bates, feeling an unbecoming rush of gratitude. ‘But the lady has no husband.’

  ‘Husband in the future,’ said the officer, turning his back and leading his aides-de-camp out of the salon.

  The misunderstanding piqued Bates, because - and he possessed enough self-knowledge to realise this - it gave voice to his own secret yearning. He was a gentleman. Despite everything that had happened to him, and all that he had done, he remained a gentleman. Mrs Burton was a gentlewoman, respectably widowed. What stood in the way of their marriage? One unfortunate incident, in which Bates had - stupidly, foolishly, absurdly - attempted to act as nursemaid. But once Eleanor forgave him that - as she must forgive him that for she must come to see that he had been acting in the interest of her decency - then what else could prevent their union?

  He loved her.

  He dreamed of her, he loved her.

  He got onto his knees every night, like a schoolboy, and prayed to God to deliver Eleanor to him as his wife.

  And some days he began to believe that his prayer was being answered. She might exchange a few words with him in an almost friendly manner. And other days she was chilly and distant, as if he revolted her. As well he might!

  The following day was Sunday, and there was a renewal of bombardment, although it lasted only a half-hour. In the afternoon, Bates walked along the promenade. Along the sweep of the coast, to the south, he could see that many of the ordinary people, expelled from the centre of town, had set up a gypsy community further along the beach. Seagulls swooped and dived over the sheeted carts and squatting folk. French soldiers patrolled the promenade.

  Bates watched as a longboat rowed out to the Sophrosyne. A dozen Johnny d’arms sat in rank of three inside the boat, and the black-bearded officer at the helm. The boat pulled alongside, but no ladder was lowered to it. The officer conducted a long exchange with somebody on deck; distance and breeze obscured the words, but Bates could guess at them. The boat lowered its
oars again and rowed back to the shore, having embarked none of its passengers.

  Bates wandered to the quay, but guards did not permit him to come close enough to greet the bearded officer. Instead he watched as the fellow bustled up the stone flags and away across the street, surrounded by his men. His face was bright red with rage. Bates was struck by how very red the skin above his beard was. He looked, in fact, as if he were suffering from a scarlet fever.

  The Dean, having exhausted his supply of snuff, and unable to obtain a resupply, sulked in his room. He could not be talked with. Bates spent most of his time in the salon.