The Innocents

by Michael Crummey

  “Oh,” she said.

  “She would be about your age. If she’s still in the world.”

  Ada tried to keep her rising confusion from her features. Not relief exactly, not disappointment, but a mongrel creature born of both. “But you idn’t married,” she said.

  “Not in the eyes of the church,” he said. “But there’s more to a marriage than the banns.”

  She waited.

  He said, “I’d been to every continent on earth but one before I was thirty years of age. And I had always wanted to see Australia. I took a berth on the Lady Julia transporting female convicts to New South Wales. I did not by any means like her cargo but I was resolved to submit to a great deal to see the country.”

  “What was it they did wrong?” Ada said. “The women?”

  “Petty crimes mostly. Theft. Or being disorderly.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Streetwalkers,” he said. And a moment later, “Prostitutes.”

  Warren paused again as if he anticipated more questions or was hesitant to carry on with the story.

  “When we were fairly out to sea,” he said, “every man on board took a wife from among the convicts. And I was as bad in this point as the others. She was from Lincoln and like all the girls from the country she came on board in irons. They were riveted rather than locked and the country jailer paid me half a crown to strike them off on my anvil. And I’d set my fancy upon her from that moment. She was modest,” he said, “and reserved. And as kind and true a creature as ever lived. That was my impression of her you understand.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Nancy,” he said. “Nance Phair.”

  “Was she?” Ada said. “What was it? Disorderly?”

  “She was banished, she told me, for a mantle she’d borrowed from an acquaintance. And the friend prosecuted her for stealing it.”

  “That idn’t true,” Ada said.

  Warren laughed at the vehemence in the girl’s voice. “Well it was such as she told me,” he said. “And some in this world are more credulous than yourself, Miss Ada. I would have married her on the spot had there been a clergyman aboard. And I was resolved to bring her back to England my lawful wife when her seven years’ sentence was done. She bore us a daughter on the voyage out.”

  “You didn’t leave them there?”

  “We were six weeks in Port Jackson after our arrival in New South Wales. I offered the captain to lose my wages if he would permit me to stay but he was short of hands. And it was not without the aid of the military I was brought aboard all the same. I left Nance my Bible which had been the companion of all my voyages, with both our names written in it. I told her I would come for her when her time expired.”

  The door of the tilt swung wide then and Evered fell into the room. He looked up from his hands and knees, staring first at his sister and then the stranger beside her and back again. “You’re all right then,” he said.

  “The brother of the bung has arrived,” Warren said. He seemed relieved to be interrupted. “Shall we get to work, Evered?”

  But the youngster crawled past them and into his bed. Ada turned to Warren who showed no interest in carrying on with the story.

  “So,” she said. “You never went back.”

  He shook his head. “I looked two years for a berth without luck. I made it as far as the Cape and paid off there, intending to stay until I could flag a position on to New South Wales. The Venus came into port under Captain Coffin. She had taken convicts to Port Jackson and there was an escapee aboard who had stowed away and kept himself hidden till they were well out to sea. He told me he had seen me in Port Jackson with the Lady Julia and my heart fair burst in my chest. I asked if he had any news of Nance and he claimed she had left the colony for India. I didn’t know what to think of it. Every day for a week I went back to him to ask again, thinking he had confused my Nance for some other woman. I described her in detail and her parents and place of birth and anything else that might distinguish her. But he never wavered. She’d left Port Jackson within a year of arriving. With her daughter. And her infant son. And her husband.”

  “That idn’t true,” Ada said again.

  “I didn’t believe it could be,” he said. “I went to Lincoln when next I was in England and found her mother and father but they knew nothing more than myself. I tried for a while to find a berth to Bombay to track her there. Until it occurred to me I was the only one looking.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean she had never made the slightest effort to find me, not in all those years we were apart. There were no letters or messages. Even if she wasn’t married and living in India, for all her talk of faithfulness she had discarded me.”

  “Maybe,” Ada said, “it could be she died.”

  “I wished it,” Warren said. “So I did. But the heat has left me long since. If she had died in Port Jackson her parents would have heard. And I would rather think her alive now and looking after my daughter.” He turned to Ada. He looked as if he were about to bawl. “It galls my heart to think of a girl abandoned to the world without mother or father to tend to her.”

  She saw it then, the knot Warren had been trying to tie since their first encounter, and she could hardly speak around the lump in her throat. She shook her head. “I got Evered,” she said. “He been good to me.”

  Warren wiped the tears from his face with the palms of his hands. “Amen to that then,” he said.

  * * *

  —

  Ada roused Evered from his rum stupor before noon and Warren took him into the woods to clip new growth from a spruce. They boiled the branches to make a tea that was added to the mash of hops and yeast and molasses cooking over the fire on the landwash. Warren salvaged and rehooped a puncheon from the remains of two crippled tubs in the store and after the brew cooled enough they set it to work in that vessel and in the beer barrel recovered from the shipwreck.

  “That should be fit to drink in two days,” Warren said. “But those hops are old enough you might want to leave it a week or more.”

  The sailors stayed three nights longer with them. Their needling debates and catcalls and laughter like a rattling brook running through the cove, a steady racket at the centre of their days, a cold rushing current they waded into and kicked up and soaked in.

  Outside of the few hours he worked on the batch of spruce beer, Evered spent every moment with Josephus Rex. They rowed the bully boat out along the coast that first afternoon, placing him in the bow where he leaned over the ocean with his rifle like a vessel’s figurehead. He bagged a brace of loons, a goose, five turr and seven strangers, the sailors giving a roar of approval every time he took a bird they’d set to wing. “Ho, Sixpence!” they shouted. They cleaned and roasted the game for their supper and there was enough left over to make a meal of it the following evening.

  Evered got drunk with the men each night and he wore his vibrant daylong hangovers like a starry crown. He slept among them in the improvised shelter they’d built at the treeline and when he started from a dream of walking through the bowels of a drowned ship with mutilated corpses in his wake one man or other would lay a hand on his head and whisper drunkenly to him until he’d fallen back to sleep.

  The caplin struck in on the morning of the third day, rolling on the grey sand beach in a wall-eyed churning mass. The sailors had never experienced the like and all hands were in the shallows with dip nets and buckets and hand seines, hauling the suicidal harvest above the landwash. Evered and the crew hand-barrowed several hundred pounds to the farm garden where they turned the soil and spread the caplin to compost. When they were done they lit a fire on the plateau and sat with pipes and cigarettes to tamp down the blackflies swarming to life off the Downs and they dozed and gossiped lazily, waiting to be called down to their dinner.

  “Who is it you got buried up here, Sixpence?” one of the men asked.

  They’d lit the fire at the head of the garden rows
and within spitting distance of the graves.

  “The little one there,” Evered said, “is our sister Martha. She was carried off by the same sickness took Mother and Father. But they two was buried at sea.”

  “And what about the other then?” a voice asked. “Next your sister?”

  “Before my time,” Evered said. He considered telling them about the drowned French sailor but the conversation with Captain Truss had made him uncertain of the tale.

  “I was told a story while we were in Fogo last winter,” the first man said. “There was a grave in a peat bog was part of it.”

  “I heard that one too,” a second sailor said.

  The first man said, “There were two brothers came out along this coast, oh this was long and long ago it was. Two brothers came over from England as servants in the fishery and worked off their indenture and they came out to raise an enterprise of their own in a little cove like this one. And they hired an Irish girl to work the shore crew and cook and the like.”

  “She wasn’t Irish,” the second sailor said.

  “Well she was born in Newfoundland right enough but she was Irish stock. Twelve or thirteen years old she was and all her people left behind, out in the world on her own. And the brothers of course they both coveted the girl. And the brothers loved each other you see and couldn’t decide who should marry the lass. So they resolved to make themselves known to her and let the girl choose.”

  “That’s a mistake right there,” someone said. “Never let the girl decide.”

  And there was a quiet round of agreement on this point.

  “Well each of them made his declarations and pledged his offerings of love and fidelity and children if she would choose him. And for her part she was taken with them both but by one more than the other. And she gave her hand to the younger of the two. Now the older brother was in a bad skin over it. He never said as much but all along he’d thought it his right as the older to have the girl. He’d agreed to the arrangement only to spare a falling-out with his brother and it bedevilled him to be passed over.”

  “What did he do?” Evered asked.

  “He slew his brother is what he did,” the second man said, “with a blow to the head.”

  “You are Josephus Rex,” two voices called.

  “And so he did,” the first man said. “When they next went out on the grounds he struck his brother a blow across the head and tipped him into the ocean. And told the girl a tale of her intended falling overside trying to bring in a fish and sinking like a stone. And he comforted her in her grief as a good man would. When the body washed up on shore days later the two eyes were eaten out by sea lice. And the older brother carried it up off the beach and buried it at the edge of a peat bog much like this one here.”

  There was a murmur around the fire and then a voice asked, “What did the girl do?”

  “Well what choice did the young one have?” the first man said. “Likely no more than a blanket hung between their beds,” he said and then shrugged. “A parson or some such came into the cove in the fall of the year and he said a funeral service over the dead man’s grave and wedded the older brother and the girl on the same afternoon. And they two joined giblets that night in the shadow of the brother’s final resting place.” There was a round of sober scandalized laughter. A voice across the fire asked, “What became of them after?”

  “They never said. Perhaps they’re still on the coast somewhere. Surrounded by youngsters who don’t even know the poor uncle’s name.”

  Something in the details reminded Evered of a story his mother told about a murderous brother from the childhood of creation though he couldn’t recall her version well enough to say how close they tracked. “Is it true?” he asked. “The story?”

  The sailors both made a face as if they were tasting some strange new flavour they weren’t sure they liked.

  “It was told to me as if it were so,” the first man said.

  Evered felt like a fly trapped in honey. Each turn he made to haul clear of the tale sank him deeper into the sticky mess. What he knew of his father was at odds with most every detail. But the telling of it alone seemed nearly enough to make it real. He said, “Don’t you be talking any of your old mash to Ada.”

  “It’s only a story, lad.”

  “Just you don’t,” he said. Someday it would get put down in a book somewhere, he thought, and that would be the fact of it.

  “All right, Rusty Guts, no need to get up in the boughs over it.”

  “Young Sixpence must think his Ada is some delicate creature,” a third sailor said.

  “Easy now. He’s only looking out to the young maid.”

  “What does he think our Bungs is up to with the girl all this time I wonder? Other than joining giblets?”

  The circle of men came to attention without seeming to move a muscle, their eyes flicking across Evered and away.

  “Bungs has tapped that dirty puzzle and no mistake.”

  “On Saint Geoffrey’s Day he has.”

  “He’s been taking a stroll up cock alley is what.”

  “You’ll be getting a dowse on the chops you don’t watch your mouth.”

  “What, from Sixpence here? Fart-catcher to his little sister? That will be when the devil is blind and he—”

  Evered was on the man before he’d finished and all the sailors came to their feet in the youngster’s wake, forming a seething ring around Evered astraddle the man. He had a handful of hair in his fist and swung wildly with his free arm, Josephus Rex cheering him on. “Blacken his lamps,” someone yelled. He took an elbow across the bridge of his nose and the shock of it made his head buzz like a hive of bees. The sailor beneath him twisted sideways and they found themselves on the ground in a useless clench, grunting at one another. Every fibre straining to cause the other pain and irreparable damage and they managed only to rock back and forth in a vehement interminable hug until the other sailors stepped in to break up the stalemate. “All right, lads,” they kept saying, pulling at their limbs. “All right, lads.”

  “Well done yourself, Sixpence,” someone said to Evered as he was helped to his feet. Several hands clapped him on the back.

  “Sure I was only having a bit of fun,” the sailor said. His lip was split and swelling and he spat a thick clot of blood. He laughed and reached for the youngster’s hand. “But you were right to come aboard of me for it. Fair play to you,” he said.

  Evered shook the proffered hand and sat back at the fire. His eyes still watering from the smack to his face. He’d wanted someone or something killed dead for a hot instant but every ounce of that malice had drained away. There was a round of celebratory chatter among the men, he and the sailor sitting beside each other and joking. Evered felt diminished and lifted up. As if he’d passed a particularly sly and gruelling test and been admitted to a fraternity he’d aspired to all his days without knowing what he hankered after.

  They heard Warren hailing from down below for them to come eat their dinner.

  * * *

  —

  Ada spent most of those three days baking bread with the sailors’ store of flour in a vain attempt to stanch their relentless appetites and she kept company with Warren who slept in the bunk behind the blanket curtain and was hardly out of her sight when she was awake.

  He talked through his days growing up in Scotland and the shock of arriving in London as a boy, the taverns and beggars and street thieves, the playhouses where men wore costumes on a stage and pretended to be other than themselves for three hours of an evening. She walked him through his voyages again, asking after additional details and clarification on the circumstances of one episode or another. She asked him to redraw the map of each of his journeys in the sand. She had him place the cove on an outline of Newfoundland and to sketch in the continents around the island, moving chairs and table and the water barrel to make room for the expanding atlas.

  Warren asked after her parents and where their people hailed from, if they were
Newfoundlanders or had come over from somewhere in the British Isles to the cove. The question had never occurred to Ada and she had no answers for him. And that lack made her feel almost as naked and pitiable as her baby sister before the infant was bestowed with a name.

  He asked how they had managed in the cove on their own and for the first time Ada had to consider their lives as they might look from the outside, as a story she might tell a stranger. She spoke of Mary Oram and of the infant Martha who was gone but still with them, of the Beadle aboard The Hope and the whitecoat they almost died taking off the ice. There was the storm that wrecked the ship on the coast, the icebound vessel with its dead man at the stove and the trunk of clothes where she salvaged her trousers and waistcoat and tricorn. She mentioned the bear and her cub, she told Warren about the unlikely Captain Truss and Mrs. Brace who had saved her life, about trapping with Evered up the brook and along Black Bear River over the winter. Even to Ada’s mind there was detail enough she was satisfied she hadn’t left out anything significant.

  They ate with the sailors at the fire above the landwash on the second evening, the men offering to take Evered aboard as a stowaway and to leave Warren behind with the pretty lad in his place.

  “Bungs have been of a strange kidney since he set foot here,” a sailor said. “We’d be happy to be clear of him.”

  “I’d be happy enough to see the back of you lot myself,” Warren said. “But I’m afraid His Majesty might object.” He turned to Ada to ask her pardon and he walked into the darkness to relieve himself.

  “You see now, Sixpence,” a voice called, loud enough for Warren to hear, “why we want to be rid of old Screw Jaws. His Majesty this and His Majesty that. Grand talk for a dogsbody who served as duck fucker on the Proteus.”

  “I remind you we are in mixed company,” Warren shouted from the water’s edge.

  “Where?” a voice called. “Everyone present is wearing trousers.”

  “An imposter among us,” another said and he climbed to his feet. “Let’s go, lads—your credentials.” He dropped his pants to his knees and a handful of others stood to do the same.