The Outrageous Fortune of Abel Morgan

by Cynthia Jefferies

  I said none of this to my father, not wishing to distress him. However, as soon as Jane, William and I were the only ones not abed I tasked them to tell me everything.

  ‘The master came upon him while abroad, searching for you,’ said Jane.

  I think she was trying to make things sound better for me, but I was not minded to be soothed. ‘So, are there a host of other “sons” that he collected while I was parted from him through no fault of my own?’

  ‘No, sir! He can better tell you the circumstances but, in any case, he returned him at once to his people.’

  ‘It was a full two years later when the child turned up again,’ said William.

  ‘Three,’ said Jane. ‘He was about nine years old by the time he ran away from the people in Ireland. He had been used most cruelly, sir, and his parents were dead.’ She shuddered. ‘Killed most horribly they were, by pirates, who took the little child to be a slave in the East. Having returned him to Ireland and restoring him to who appeared to be his aunt, your father thought that all would be well but, by all accounts, he was almost as much a slave in Ireland as he would have been in Constantinople. Naturally, he made his way back to the one person who had shown him any kindness.’

  ‘He was hardly my father’s responsibility!’

  Jane looked at me reproachfully. ‘Your father has a soft heart, sir.’

  ‘Just so! It is easy to take advantage of a man with a heart that is over-soft.’

  ‘He had not wanted to be a parent to any other than you,’ said William. ‘But in time we all came to love the child for himself.’

  ‘He was never a replacement for you, sir, nor never could be. Don’t ever think that.’

  I made no response, though I am sure Jane meant what she said.

  ‘Your father was away on business when Turlough arrived,’ she added after a moment. ‘We didn’t know what to do, but when the master came home he said we must care for him, so we did.’

  ‘I assume he is a papist, with that name of his and his nation,’ I said in disgust. ‘How sensible do you think it was to give him shelter?’

  Jane sighed. ‘Perhaps he was born that way, but we took him to church with us and that is how he has worshipped ever since.’

  William coughed. ‘Your father apprenticed him to a stonemason in Chineborough when he was of an age. He works hard, sir, and has repaid your father’s kindness manyfold. He has been dutiful and does not forget his benefactor, although he is successful in his work and has had no need of help for a long while. He asks for nothing.’

  ‘What’s more,’ said Jane, ‘his liveliness and good humour cheered your father and helped him to bear your loss.’

  ‘I can see,’ said I, ‘that you are determined to excuse him, whatever my doubts. As you say, Jane, my father does have a soft heart. It sounds as if you and William have allowed him to be taken advantage of.’

  William looked at the floor, but his wife gave me a searching look and the memory of her role in my childhood made me feel somewhat uncomfortable. ‘I am sorry you think that,’ was all she said.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I will say no more. Ours is not the only nest in the land to have admitted a cuckoo, but I take it he resides in Chineborough? I do not expect him to treat this place any more as his home, coming and going as he pleases.’

  ‘I will ensure his coming and going will be at the master’s desire and no other person,’ she said, rather pertly, it seemed to me.

  I went to bed somewhat downhearted. It was a miracle to have found my father alive after he had been dead to me for so many years. I should be brimful of joy, but my joy had not lasted above a few hours. I had come here in part hoping to find our old servants still living and to be their benefactor. Of course, it was wonderful to find that all lived, but no one needed me. Was that what ailed me? A desire to be needed? That and Turlough the interloper, stealing my father’s love. And for how long had I been missing before my father had shaken off his poverty and shifted for himself? Then, he replaced me with another, who he supported, when he had not paid a penny for my education.

  I was, I could see, inclined to feel sorry for myself. Even Jane, who I had loved almost as the mother I had never known, didn’t support me over Turlough. What was more, my marriage had not been a success, my wife was mute and most likely dying, if not already dead. I berated myself for counting my misfortunes instead of my blessings, but I could not prevent these miserable feelings from stealing my rest.

  I felt tears pricking my eyes and a sob fighting to burst free of my throat. What was the matter with me? It all felt too much. I no longer needed to feel guilty for being the agent of his death, but discovering my father alive had not brought the feelings I might have expected. Some part of me, the remnant of the child I had been, wanted him to pick me up, hold me to him and take away all the hurts and fears of the years we had been apart. It was not reasonable to want that, but it was how I felt. Part of me also wanted him to admire the successful adult I had become, but he, too, had become successful and needed nothing material from me. It seemed that no part of me could find a place here. Perhaps it would be better if I went back to London, where I was respected and had many friends. My father had been dead to me for too long for him to be alive now.

  I hated this room. Christophe had begged leave to sleep in my old bed, so I lay here, in part of the new building. The bed was comfortable, but the walls were too straight and pale-plastered, the window glass too clear and the stonework too recently carved. It made me feel a guest instead of a returning son. I did not want to go back to London feeling this way. I wanted to love him and be loved by him as in the distant past, but how do you restore past feelings? Our special love, decades away, was long gone.

  I turned over in bed and buried my face in the pillow to stifle my sobs. I was deeply ashamed of the tears that dripped from my eyes, but I was overfull of emotion. I felt like a wild animal that howls its distress, but I must muzzle my misery and be quiet. At length, when my eyes had enough of tears and my sore heart was somewhat calmer, I wondered if I might sleep at last, but I could not. I wished the day was here so I could pick up my life again, but it was the middle of the night. I thought of my father and decided to go to him, to make sure he was comfortable and not in need of anything.

  His door stood ajar and a little light spilt through. I pushed the door wider and stood there, looking at his shadowy form in the bed. A small fire illuminated the room, but no one was with him. I went quietly to his bed. He was lying on his side, with his hand by his cheek. I listened and could hear his breathing, a little rasping, but otherwise calm and steady. All was well with him, but I was chilled in my nightshirt, so went to the fire. When I set more coals upon it, he awoke and turned in the bed.

  ‘Abel?’

  I went to him. ‘Yes. It is I.’

  ‘My son. I thought I had dreamt it, but there you are! So tall and handsome. But you must be cold. Take my gown there and put it on.’

  It was a fine wool gown and very warm. I put it on, remembering the silk gown he had owned when I was young. The long fraying threads had fascinated me when a child. I had so loved the bright colours, but it would be long gone and forgotten now.

  I sat in the chair beside his bed. For some minutes he was quiet, and I wondered if he had gone back to sleep, but then he spoke again.

  ‘I am often awake in the night,’ he said, ‘and doze in the day. If you are not too tired, Abel, would you like to stay with me for a while? There were too many people today. Now it is just us two, like in the old days.’

  ‘I would like that.’

  ‘Then can you help me with my pillows? And pour wine for us both? There is some on the table.’

  ‘Would you like me to light the candle?’

  He shook his head. ‘I like the firelight … unless you need it …?’

  ‘No. I can see to pour the wine. Here you are.’

  I handed him the glass and he took a sip. I felt shy of him somehow. I did not know what t
o say, but I wanted to say something.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  I had not known I was going to say that. He looked at me with surprise in his face. ‘What are you sorry for?’

  I turned the glass in my hands. ‘I wish I had come sooner.’

  ‘You thought me dead. I realise that.’

  For a few minutes we stayed silent. So much of his room was as I remembered it. The bed, where I had always felt safe after bad dreams, his night table and large wooden chest. But I was grown and he was old. I thought about taking my leave, so he could sleep, but his eyes were wide open and eventually he spoke again.

  ‘I am sorry too, Abel. So sorry that I lost you.’

  What could I say? That it didn’t matter? That I didn’t blame him? I took a long drink, but the wine didn’t make me feel any less awkward.

  ‘What happened to your boots?’

  I stared at him. ‘My boots?’

  ‘Yes. The ones you found under the seat of the old settle.’

  ‘Oh! Those boots.’ I hadn’t thought about them for many years, but I remembered them now. ‘I lost them along the way …’ I took another mouthful of wine. He was watching me, waiting for more. ‘I was sorry to lose them because the knife would have been useful. I might even have managed to—’ But he interrupted me.

  ‘Knife! You had a knife in your boot?’

  ‘Yes. I found it with the boots. There was a loop inside one boot that I thought had been made for it.’

  ‘I never knew!’

  I smiled. ‘Perhaps I thought if I told you, you would have taken it from me.’

  He laughed. ‘At the least I would have been concerned about the safety of your foot!’

  He reached out his empty glass with his slightly trembling hand. ‘More wine, Abel. To soothe my fear about your boyish foot! I feared so many things for you, but a knife in your boot never occurred to me!’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, thinking of the great disaster in Jamaica, ‘it’s the things we don’t know that we should fear the most.’

  ‘Life has made you a philosopher! But certainly, I sometimes feared things I didn’t need to, while some I had not anticipated were so frightening I would have run from them if I had known about them in time.’

  I passed him his glass, but he gripped my hand instead and I was forced to return the wine to the table.

  ‘Abel, we have both had to face fears not of our making nor imaginable until they happened. And yet, here we are at last. I thank God you thought to visit your old home before I died. It means the world to me that you are here.’

  I felt tears pricking my eyes again, but my heart was in less pain.

  ‘Come,’ he said, letting go of my hand for a moment. ‘Come and sit up here next to me, like we used to after you had dreamt a bad dream. It was always better after we talked, to chase the dream away.’

  So I did, bringing the wine with me. We sat up in bed together, my father and I, drinking our wine and talking of the past.

  We spoke of so much that night. I tried to tell only the more cheerful parts of my lost years and I daresay he did the same for me. I told him a lot about Ptolemy, which made him recall his own experiences after the war and how so many who had fought were set adrift, not being able for one reason or another to return to their earlier lives.

  ‘I owe that man so much,’ he said, on hearing that my profession and wealth had come from the surgeon. ‘I wish I could have met him and thanked him for his care of you.’

  ‘He wrote an account of his life for me, but I could not understand much. His hand was not easy to read.’

  My father looked at me sternly. ‘You must persevere! If he wrote it for you, then you have a duty to read it.’

  ‘Maybe in London I will find someone to help me,’ I said, trying to remember if the papers were with my London lawyer and if they had even survived the disaster in Jamaica. ‘You are right. I will see to it. Then I will be able to tell you more about him.’

  I had been concerned about admitting my time with the pirates, but I did not need to be. My father simply assumed that after Ptolemy died I had immediately come into my inheritance and had ceased to roam the sea. He was very ready to believe that a life in the Caribbean was not quite as lawless as the broadsheets liked to make out. There was a part of me that regretted not confessing that dreadful day when Rowan and Black Tom died. Perhaps the telling would have purged my guilt at planning to kill them, but it would have been unkind to burden my father with that. If I had, I would have been hard put to avoid talk of my piracy. At the time, I had been pleased at the expediency of my decision, but I knew he would be sorely distressed at me having walked freely into the profession.

  The thing he took hardest was my estrangement from Marie and her subsequent illness. He seemed determined to see her only as a sweet English girl and was inclined to blame me for our falling-out, although he did not say it in so many words. I was glad when he finally accepted the end of our relations. I would have been hard put to describe truly some of her behaviours, not to mention her life on board as a boy and her birth into slavery. It was all better unmentioned.

  As for my father, he did not have so very much to tell. Apart from his brief journey to the East and subsequent adoption of Turlough, his life had been uneventful. It had been fortunate for him that he had met his business partner, otherwise his life would undoubtably have been much harder. I wondered if he had not ever wished to marry again, but when I mentioned it he laughed, and said, ‘Who would have had me?’ I truly think that my mother was the only love of his life and he wanted no other. It is a very moving thought.

  We talked on until the birds began to sing, but eventually sleep overtook us both. When Jane came in the morning to wake him, she found the wine all gone, the fire out and me, still wrapped in his gown, asleep upon the bed beside him.

  That day we were both tired, but when awake he was lively and quick to laugh. We sat in the garden for a while and he took much pleasure in watching his grandson play. The only time I tried to speak of Turlough he dismissed any discussion of him, other than to commend him to me.

  ‘Turlough will not mind me spending so many hours with you. Don’t fret about him. It is of no consequence, but I am gladder than I can say that you have regard for him. He has been such a comfort.’

  I do not think he misunderstood me purposely, but it was difficult to tell.

  The sun had gone behind a cloud, and I was about to suggest we went indoors when he suddenly became deathly pale and slumped against me. I caught him in my arms. His eyes rolled up into his head and I feared his heart had stopped. I carried him indoors and laid him on a couch. We closed the curtains, kept him quiet and hoped. I put my ear to his chest and listened to the intermittent pulsing of his heart. His breath was very light, and it almost seemed as if he might float away, he was so slight of body.

  I thought of all the remedies I had in my box back in London and sent urgently to Chineborough for what I needed, though doubting that there was much that could be done. I had satisfied myself that Jane’s drink that he liked so much was full of good things. Eggs, sugar and some of the finest French brandy were in it. It would do him as well as any physic I could suggest. I could have bled him, but in truth I felt he was better left in peace. Care and rest was best, as Jane had always given him. He was not such a very old man, being no more than sixty, and he had all of our loves, but his heart was the engine of his body and I feared it was quite worn out.

  That night I slept in the chair beside his bed and in the morning I was rewarded by a little colour returning to his cheeks. In a while his eyes opened. He knew me and managed a spoonful of broth, but he was quite unable to sit up. Jane brought more pillows and we propped him, so he would not gather liquid in his lungs and drown, as so often happens. We took our turns to sit with him, but his eyes were mostly closed and he said little, other than to ask a few times for Turlough. I said nothing to Jane, but that afternoon she brought him to the room. I did not intend to leave hi
m with my father but stood to one side while he knelt at the bed and took his hand.

  ‘Turlough?’

  ‘I am here.’

  ‘Abel?’

  ‘Here I am, Father.’

  ‘Ah.’ There was a long pause before he could continue. ‘I am pleased … you have met.’ He smiled, closing his eyes again he slept.

  It was night when he woke again. It distressed Jane that he would not take any nourishment, but I could see that he was beyond such things. When I bent over him it was clear that his sight had gone. He held my hand for a while and then something seemed to rouse him. He became restless and called out in distress. ‘Margarita! Margarita!’ Immediately afterwards he smiled. He tried to raise his other hand and Jane took it in hers. ‘That lace at your breast,’ he said. Jane had none and to my knowledge she never did.

  I thought he had drifted into sleep, but then he spoke again. ‘Abraham.’

  At first it was no more than a mumble, but then he said the name very clearly, twice more, as if speaking directly with delight to a very dear friend. ‘Abraham. Abraham!’

  It was then he slipped into a deep sleep, with the smile still on his lips.

  His breathing became heavier and laboured, with the loud rattle that presages death. Then, by the afternoon of the following day, his breaths changed again. They were now hardly discernible and I felt sure the end was near. For an instant a look of gentle surprise crossed his face. There were only a few silent breaths after that and then none. And so he died, peacefully, with the window to the garden open, the scent of his roses in the breeze and with the sound of birds singing.

  Margarita had been my mother’s name.

  We all felt it miraculous that in addition to mentioning her, he had been called to God by Abraham.

  Jane wiped her eyes and said, ‘He often said he was not on good terms with God but see how the good Lord sent Abraham to fetch him to Him.’

  William said, ‘He was a good man.’

  Turlough said little other than that he would miss him greatly. However, his distress was obvious and so I was content to include him with the household in prayers for my departed father.