“There’s he’s light,” Ada said.
They lit the wick and went side by side into the gloom beyond the door, holding the deck lamp ahead of them. They could make out a second door on the port side of the vessel and another set of stairs leading further down into the hold, a long passageway into blackness toward the bow. But the little light they carried made the dark echoing space beyond it seem animate and ominous and without exchanging a word they decided to leave it all to morning. They went back into the cabin and were hauling the heavy trunk across the doorframe when Evered said, “This thing is full.”
They cleared the scatter of materials off the cover and opened it. The interior stuffed to the brim with clothing that they began hauling out an item at a time, a woollen mantle, two skirts, a quilted dickey, a pair of muslin shifts. A waistcoat and three pairs of trousers, a pair of long boots. A loose nightgown made of cotton. All of different sizes and condition.
“Where did it come from?” Ada asked. The array so overwhelming she’d forgotten how terrified she’d been moments before.
Evered had already taken off his father’s boots and was hauling on a pair of stockings and the boots he’d found in the trunk. “From heaven above you asks me,” he said.
Ada pulled the quilted petticoat on over her leggings and tried two or three skirts for length but stripped it all in the end, opting for a pair of trousers instead. She held up the waistcoat and looked across at Evered.
“I got me eye on your man’s outfit,” he said, nodding toward the chair in the corner. “You go ahead.”
The jacket was too large by half, the skirt falling below her knees, her hands lost in the sleeves, but she shortened the cuffs two turns and was satisfied with the fit. She put her sealskin leggings and mismatched shoes in the trunk and pulled on the red jacks her brother had just abandoned. Evered found a black tricorn among the spoils and threw it to her, as a joke, but she put it on without a second thought.
“You looks the proper Molly in that rig,” Evered said to her.
She clapped at her chest and hips, delighted, and she struck something solid in one of the pockets. She hauled out a book with a cloth cover and deckle-edged papers. She knelt beside it on the floor next the deck lamp and flipped through the pages, most of which had been soaked and dried in ridges and some stuck together.
“It looks like the Beadle’s ledgers,” Evered said.
She thought of the book Clinch had read from at the graves. “Might be it’s a Bible.”
Evered shook his head. He pointed to the inked handwriting, the blank pages at the back. “I made me mark in one the like of this on The Hope,” he said. “With a feather pen.”
She stared at him. “Whatever is your mark?”
“Like so,” he said and he took her index finger and traced a phantom X on a page.
She spent minutes more flipping through the book, the enigmatic lines of writing aslant and blotted and variable. Fighting a tug of jealousy to think Evered had a mark and a place in such a thing. She might have passed the night poring over those pages but Evered made a comment about the length of the candle stub and she tucked it back into the pocket of her waistcoat and douted the wick.
* * *
—
They stood the stove door open for the shifting light of the flames. Even with the glass out of the porthole windows the fire’s heat in the low-ceilinged room forced them to strip off their outer layers. They seated themselves on the floor and ate a little of the food they’d brought, taking into consideration how much they needed to save for the return. They were struck by a stony fatigue, the weight of it coming over them as they settled down and they both nodded off as they spoke. But the strangeness of their surroundings and the dead man they had for company kept them from surrendering completely. They couldn’t shake their disquiet to be aboard a vessel marked by calamity and soon to sink below the ocean’s surface.
Out of nowhere Evered asked, “Do she talk to you this far out? Or is it only in the cove?”
Ada lay still awhile as if she was just now listening for the infant girl’s voice. “I don’t think she’s here,” she said. “I don’t think she wants anywhere near it.”
“More do I,” Evered whispered.
But it was the first time in their lives they’d slept with a fire burning and the heat was a delicious thing. The chill that leached into the room when the fire embered low woke them every couple of hours and Evered stirred himself to feed a handful of decking junks to the coals and blow up a flame.
At the first sign of light he left Ada by the stove and went to the dead body in its chair, wanting to deal with that job before she woke. He tried to wrestle off the boots but the feet and lower legs were swollen twice their normal size and the boots wouldn’t come free until he slit the tops all the way to the ankles. The same applied to the trousers and he decided to let them be. He hefted the corpse onto the floor and flipped it side to side to shimmy the coat sleeves free of the arms. He kept his focus on the work, avoiding the dead man’s stare to hold his nerve. A feeling like grit under his own lids that he couldn’t blink away, as if he’d slept all night with his eyes half-open the same.
He stripped off the layers of smocks and sweaters in one thick pelt, then covered the half-naked body and the dead face with the rug that had been used as a blanket. He took up the coat and slipped it on, doing up the knitted buttons all the way to his throat. He turned back to the room still inspecting the fit and it took him a moment to take note of Ada sitting with her arms around her knees, watching him.
“How is it we plans to get all this back home?” she asked.
“I got a notion.”
He took his hatchet and the axe from behind the stove and he shoved the trunk away from the door. He gestured for her to follow and they went up the stairs to a clear sky, the sun just climbing above the horizon. The day already bright and Evered squinted against the sudden needling, his eyes watering so much in the sunlight that tears rolled down his cheeks.
He wiped his face dry with the sleeve of the worsted jacket and they walked up the port side to where the last of the rail curved toward the bowsprit. He handed Ada the hatchet and wielded the axe himself and they set to chopping it free. Once it was down Evered started hacking the eight-foot length in two. The rail was made of some hardwood they’d never encountered and it was flinty as stone. Every few minutes he stopped to catch his breath, to shake some feeling back into his arms while Ada took a turn with the hatchet. Between the two of them they chipped through and they took an end each under their arms.
On their way back they passed the hatchway amidships, the cover torn free and gone, and the light was just high enough to make a gloom in that sunken space. Evered handed his piece of rail to Ada and walked down the hatch stairs, crouching in the dark below decks, waiting for his watering eyes to adjust. He could sense a second set of stairs at his feet, a smell of wet and rot rising from the bilge down there. He knelt and stuck head and shoulders into the lower deck, peering to try to pick detail from the murk. Sea water had surged in through the ruptured hull and there were bits of flotsam on the surface. Rows of bunkbeds stood out of the water’s black like crops planted neatly in a peat bog.
“She had passengers aboard,” he called. “They got berths down below.”
Ada shook her head. She said, “I got a dark brown feeling about this, Brother.”
* * *
—
Most of the coals in the stove had guttered to black and Evered used the sculping knife to pick through them, hooking out the dozens of decking nails that littered the bottom of the stove. They were still too hot to touch and he scooped the few he’d need on the knife’s blade, dropping them in the last dregs of water in the half-puncheon to cool. He took to hacking a rough curve at the front edge of both pieces of rail and when he was satisfied they emptied all the materials out of the trunk and flipped it onto its face. They laid the improvised runners lengthwise across the bottom and Evered hammered them i
nto the frame with the still-warm nails.
They set the axe and hammer and knives in the bottom of the trunk, along with the deck light and tinderbox and three curious instruments made of metal and glass that Evered guessed were used in wayfinding. He took one of the dead man’s boots and collected the rest of the decking nails into the toe, wrapping the leather around the sole to hold them, and they stowed it with the clothes and the bottles of water and their last bit of food and fastened the trunk lid shut.
They lifted it for weight.
“She’s too heavy by half for the likes of we,” Ada said. “It took us near to dark to come this far with our own bit of gear.”
“She’ve got the runners on her,” Evered said. “We’ll both be on the hauling line. And one night on the ice won’t kill us if it comes to that.” He could see she wasn’t convinced. “We’ll drop some ballast on the way if she slows us down too much.”
They shoved the trunk through the doorway to the base of the stairs and attached the hauling rope’s hook to the leather handle at one end. Ada went above deck to pull and Evered pushed from below and they managed to shimmy it up into the light of day. They were both winded by the effort, Evered still on the stairs and leaning over the hatchway to catch his breath. Ada held her tongue about their chances of dragging it miles over the ice field’s anarchic snarl, wanting only to move, to put some distance between themselves and the vessel.
“I’ll get the rest of our kit,” he said and he went back into the cabin to gather up the hatchet and sculping knife, the gaff and Ada’s walking stick. He had his foot on the bottom stair when it occurred to him they hadn’t even opened the door to portside. He heard Ada call out to him.
“Be along directly,” he shouted.
He still felt an irritation like sand or ash in his eyes and he wiped away the seeping liquid before he tried the door. It brought up on something as he opened it and he pushed to get inside though the smell should have been enough to warn him off. The sight coming into focus through his watering eyes and his mind reeling to stay clear of what he was seeing.
The bodies were naked and lying one on another and they seemed to number in the dozens with the jumble of limbs though the room was too small to hold more than five or six. He was backing away and still taking in the details, the raw amputations, bone exposed where strips of flesh had been flayed away. And he saw it then, the source of that ragtag collection of clothes in the trunk, the layers of shirts and sweaters the dead man by the fire had been wearing. He heard Ada’s voice calling his name and turned for it, battering up the stairs and breaking wild into daylight. He came to his feet on deck and gazed around at the world with the terrified, unknowing look of a newborn.
“What is it, Brother?”
“God’s nails,” he whispered without looking at her. He set a shoulder to the trunk and pushed it to the rail line. He threw the gaff and walking stick to the ice below and then knelt and braced the hauling rope across his shoulders. “Go,” he said to his sister, “Jesus save us, go, go.” She took a grip and let herself overside, crabbing down the hull of the ship as far as the rope extended and dropping the last few feet to the ice. Evered reeled the rope back up, wanting to lower the trunk down by the hook, but he lost his hold on the container in the rush to tip it past the lip and it plunged to the ice and smashed to pieces down there. He threw the rope after it and was about to jump in his turn before Ada started waving her tricorn below. “You’ll crack your neck,” she shouted.
He looked behind himself and then along the length of the vessel and he ran up amidships where the deck lay a fathom closer to the surface. He shimmied himself overside, hanging by his fingers a moment before letting go his grip.
Ada saw he was limping as he came up to her but he wouldn’t answer any questions about what was wrong or what had drained the colour from his face. He dug around to locate the hauling rope among the mess of clothes and smashed glass and splintered wood and he set to tying it about his waist. Stopped short when he realized what he was wearing and he stripped the dead man’s jacket off as if it was on fire, kicked it away on the ice.
He picked out his old coat and wound the rope about his waist and set the hatchet and sculping knife in place. He was already hobbling away from the ship with the gaff in hand as Ada salvaged the one unbroken water bottle and the package of food from the pile of materials. All of it about to be lost to them. She picked up one of the long knives from the wreckage and turned to Evered, calling after him. He looked back to her and she waved it in his direction.
“Leave it,” he said.
“We should take the axe,” she said.
Evered turned and limped three more steps away from her before he dropped to his knees and vomited on the ice and he carried on urging helplessly long after his stomach was empty.
* * *
—
Hours of walking then, putting the horror ship behind them as quickly as they could move. Ada three steps in Evered’s wake, the sun warm enough to make them strip to a single layer and carry the excess clothing. A cloudless sky and she was grateful for the tricorn shading her face from the worst of the brutal glare. They finished their only bottle of water before noon and suffered with thirst the rest of the way.
Evered was leaning on the gaff like a crutch and tripping with a regularity that made him look drunk. But he seemed determined to soldier on until he struck the cove. Ada couldn’t prevail on him to stop even long enough to eat the little packet of salt pork they had left and she spread the waistcoat on a wind-carved chaise of ice and took a seat, watching him stumble across the rough surface ahead.
She’d spent the time in Evered’s wake trying to guess at what he’d encountered in those last minutes below deck and nothing she conjured was the least plausible. And the fact she couldn’t imagine a likely scenario made her terrified to know the truth. She hadn’t so much as glanced over her shoulder as they walked, gripped by a childish anxiety the vessel was following behind them. She felt it looming at her back even now but wouldn’t look for fear she might turn to salt like Lot’s nameless wife.
Evered was half a mile beyond her when she gathered up her things to follow after him. He had veered dead east, as if he planned to walk past the cove all the way to Mockbeggar. She called to him but he was beyond hearing or ignoring her, moving at a shuffle. He’d almost come to a full stop before she reached him and she touched his shoulder. He turned his head to her, his eyes squinted shut, his cheeks and neck soaking wet. Icicles hung in the fuzz on his chin.
He said, “Perhaps you should lead on for a bit.”
She wiped at his face with her bare hands. “All right,” she said.
She kept an eye on him to be sure he wasn’t drifting out of her track or falling too far behind. He seemed not able to see her even ten feet ahead and she called to him when he went astray. He stopped again as the sun dropped behind the western shore, leaning on the gaff and shaking his head. She put the waistcoat on and came back to him, stepping in under his shoulder to take some of the weight off his lame foot.
It was dark by the time they walked over the harbour skerries into the cove but the moon was nearly full and reflected white off the ice and off the snow on the rise and they had no trouble finding their way to the tilt. They both drank their greedy fill of water from the puncheon near the hearth and then Ada crutched Evered to the bunk. She lit the slutlamp and helped him out of his winter kit. He lay back and she tried to remove his new boots but the swelling and shooting pain in the injured foot made it impossible.
“I’ll have to cut it off,” she said.
Evered sat up on his elbows, his weeping eyes shut tight against the dull lamplight. “Those boots is all I got to wear,” he said.
“I’ll give you back Father’s old ones.”
“And what will you wear then? You left your shoes out on the ice.” He fell back into the bed. “I’ll keep the boots on,” he said.
“What if you got something broke, Brother?”
She was too tired to argue and stripped out of her own outfit. She douted the lamp and crawled under the covers beside him.
“She’s still here is she?” Evered asked then. “You still hears her?”
She turned into him, her face touching his in the dark. “She’ll always be here,” Ada said. “She won’t ever leave us.”
And holding fast to that notion they were both asleep.
* * *
—
Hours before daylight Evered woke to a stabbing sensation in his eyes. He tried but couldn’t open them, sitting up in bed and forcing the lids apart with his fingers which made the needling worse again. His eyes clenched in their sockets and he howled through the spasms. Ada was out of bed by then, at the hearth to spark up a fire, feeding it kindling for quick heat. She didn’t know what was wrong and had no sense of what might help but the sound of Evered’s blind torment made her want to peel off her skin and she busied herself to keep from howling along with him. She tried wiping at his eyes with a wet cloth but he pulled his face away from the sear of it. She boiled a pot of water and sat him in front of the rising steam with a blanket over his head.
“Is that helping either bit?” she asked him.
The Innocents Page 11