The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘I’ll take her!’ Richard said with the spontaneity that had gained him the affection of any troops with whom he served in close quarters.

  ‘That’s what I had in mind, the moment you spoke. But there are grave dangers …’

  ‘Our laddies have the savages whipped into shape. A skirmish now and then, nothing to fear.’

  ‘It wasn’t that I was thinking of. Richard, will you go fetch Vera? Right now?’

  They sat under the oak trees in the picnic chairs John Constable had used for his paints two years earlier when doing the large canvas showing Salisbury Cathedral in sunlight; as an appreciation for his constant use of this lawn, he had dashed off a wonderful watercolor sketch of the towers, which he had given Emily on his departure; it hung in the main room in a fine oak frame which she had cut and nailed herself.

  The Saltwoods of Salisbury had not survived for nearly two centuries, during which people of influence had tried to wrest Captain Nicholas Saltwood’s fortune from them, without acquiring certain skills, one of which was to marry young women of the vicinity who showed ability. Emily Saltwood had been one of the most resilient, mother of four good boys and counselor to all. She had never been afraid to pinpoint inherent dangers, nor was she now.

  ‘How old are you, Richard? Thirty-one?’ He nodded. ‘And you, Vera? Twenty-nine?’ She nodded.

  ‘Then you’re old enough to realize that a four-month sail to Cape Town aboard a small ship, in close confinement …’

  The couple found it embarrassing to look at her, so she spoke with extra vigor, demanding their attention: ‘Inherently dangerous, wouldn’t it be?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Richard said.

  ‘Old romances are full of this sort of thing. Tristan and Iseult over in Cornwall. One of the Spanish kings, if I recall, and his brother escorting the bride. Are you listening to what I’m saying?’

  Richard placed his hand on his mother’s and said, ‘I’m taking a little girl I knew at playtime … out to marry my brother. When I seek a wife, I’ll find one for myself.’

  ‘Those are insulting words,’ Vera snapped, and for the first time the two Saltwoods looked at her as an individual and not as a prospective answer to a Saltwood family problem. She was, as Emily said, twenty-nine, tallish, thinnish, not especially beautiful of face, but lovely of voice and smile. Like many young women her age she knew how to play the piano and had taken watercolor instruction from Mr. Constable when he stayed in the village. For the moment she was reticent, but as she grew older she would become much like the woman now counseling her: a strong English wife with a mind of her own.

  She had never yet been kissed by any man other than her father, and by him only rarely, but she had no fear of men and had always supposed that when the time came, her parents would find her a husband. She was a girl of spirit and rather looked forward to an interval on the frontier, always supposing that her husband would return to a position of some importance at the cathedral, in whose shadow she had been raised and intended to die.

  ‘I’m fully aware of the dangers,’ she told her putative mother-in-law, using a low, calm voice even though she realized that Mrs. Saltwood’s questioning reflected on her as much as on her son.

  ‘That’s good,’ Emily said with an inflection that signified: ‘This meeting’s over. We understand one another.’ But Richard had one thing more to say: ‘You must tell Vera where the idea came from that sent you to her house … seeking a wife … for Hilary, that is.’

  Emily laughed vigorously and took the young people’s hands in hers. ‘Vera, when Richard passed through Cape Town various army friends advised him that Hilary needed a wife. It was Richard who set this all in motion. And now he proposes to complete the transaction.’

  ‘I don’t think of myself as a transaction,’ Vera said.

  ‘We’re all transactions. My husband married me years ago because the Saltwood holdings needed close attention, much more than he needed a wife.’

  They rose from their chairs under the oak trees and looked across at the stunning beauty of the cathedral—which some of them might never see again.

  The Alice Grace was a small commercial barque accustomed to freighting cargo to India but now commissioned to carry some three hundred emigrants to Cape Town, in conditions which would have terrified owners of cattle being shipped across the Channel to France. Her burthen was two hundred and eighty tons, which was significant in that by law she was entitled to carry three passengers for every four tons; this meant that she should have sold passage to no more than two hundred and ten emigrants. Thus, when she left port she was ninety over complement, but since most of the passengers were charity cases, government inspectors smiled and wished her ‘Good voyage!’

  She departed Southampton on 9 February 1820 on a gray, wintry day when the Channel looked more immense than the ocean, its waves far more menacing. For seven painful days the little craft tossed and pitched in waves that seemed determined to pull her to shreds, and all aboard who had not sailed before were convinced that they must perish. Major Richard Saltwood, retired, who had sailed to and from India, reassured the cabin passengers that once the Bay of Biscay was reached, the passage would settle into a pleasant monotony in which the limited movement of the ship ‘would be like a gentle lullaby, no worse.’

  Especially pleased to hear this was the woman whose welfare lay in his hands. She did not accept the violent motion of the ship easily, and this irritated her, for she was grimly determined to ‘make a brave show of it,’ as she had promised her mother she would, and when her stomach was wrenched into convulsions by her sickness, she was ashamed of herself. She was the sole occupant of the cabin next to her brother’s, as she called him, but he shared his with a captain going out to join the Gallant Fifty-ninth on the Afghan frontier, so that during the bad days she had two gentlemen to assist her.

  Sure enough when the Alice Grace entered the great Bay of Biscay the storms subsided and the gentle, reassuring motion which Saltwood had predicted replaced the tossing. Vera came to like the motion of the ship, as he was certain she would, and for the third and fourth week the three travelers had a congenial time together, with Richard discovering what a sterling person this Vera Lambton was. Her determination was obvious, her sense of humor reassuring. When children were ill, she acted as general nurse, and whenever any of the women passengers in steerage needed attention, she was eager to help. My brother’s getting a strong woman, Richard told himself, but because of a reticence which he could not have explained, he did not inform his cabin mate of Vera’s destination. ‘She’s a family friend’ was all he’d say. ‘Heading out to South Africa.’

  ‘She’d make some chap quite a decent wife,’ the captain observed several times, but since he was much younger than Vera, and since his regiment would not allow him to marry till he was thirty, his interest in her could only be that of an observer.

  Once Cape Finisterre was passed, that bleak and ominous last outpost of European civilization, the long reach to the bulge of Africa began, and now the three travelers began to be aware of a remarkable young man, a wagon builder by trade, who had more or less assumed command belowdecks. He was an attractive fellow, careful of his appearance even though the ship provided him no water for washing. His curly head and broad grin appeared wherever there was trouble. It was he who organized the teams that handled the slops; he supervised the distribution of food; and he sat as judge’s clerk when the rump court belowdecks handed out penalties for such infractions as theft or pummeling another passenger.

  ‘Name’s Thomas Carleton,’ he told Saltwood and the captain when they asked if he could fix their door, which had come off its hinges during a blow. ‘I can fix it, sirs. With wood I can fix anything, it seems.’ And as he worked, devising ingenious tools for getting around corners, he told them of his apprenticeship in a small Essex village and his removal to the more important town of Saffron Walden, not far from Cambridge University, which he had once visited.

  He was a c
hatterbox, intensely excited about his prospects for starting a new life in the colonies: ‘I can work eighteen hours a day and sleep four. Saffron Walden had prospects for everyone except me, so I kicked up me heels and was off to sea. The town’s a fascinating place, you understand. Named by the father of Henry VIII, him with the wives. One of the two places in England entitled to trade in saffron, precious stuff. It makes meat taste better, but in all me days I never took a pinch of it into me mouth. Reserved for rich people.’

  Vera, returning to her cabin after a stroll on the minute deck—fifteen steps forward, fifteen back—heard this last observation and interrupted: ‘Saffron’s a yellow powder, I think, and it’s not used for meat. It’s used for rice.’ She blushed and added, ‘Here I am explaining India, and both you men have been associated with it.’

  ‘Not I, not yet,’ the captain said gallantly.

  ‘But she’s right,’ Richard said. ‘Saffron is yellow—orange, really—and they do use it a great deal in India. You’ll grow to like it.’

  ‘While you’re here,’ Vera said to the wagon builder, ‘could you fix the lock on my box? The workmen threw it aboard, I’m afraid.’

  Thomas Carleton left the men’s cabin and moved a few paces to Vera’s, where, after one quick glance at the portmanteau in which she kept her dresses, he told her that a small piece of wood must be replaced so that the screws holding the hasp could catch. ‘It’s no problem,’ he assured her, ‘always providing we can find the wood.’ Together they made a quick tour of the deck, finding nothing, but when they went to the ’tween deck, where the ship’s carpenter kept his cupboard, they found the piece they needed, and it was so small that the carpenter refused any payment from Vera: ‘Take it and be blessed.’ He was giving it not to this amiable girl but to the wagon builder, whose good work among the passengers he had noted.

  When the box was fixed, Vera thanked the young man, four years her junior, and then talked with him about conditions belowdecks. She was by no means a philanthropist, as those seeking always to do good for others were called in England—those busybodies who were agitating against slavery in Jamaica and child labor in Binningham—because families like hers in Salisbury were too sensible for that. But she was interested in whatever was occurring on this tedious voyage, and on subsequent days she visited various parts of the ship with Carleton, and one night about half after ten the captain who occupied the bunk closest to the dividing wall in Richard’s cabin whispered, ‘I say, Saltwood! I think something interesting’s going on next door.’

  ‘Mind your business,’ Richard said, but any chance of sleep was destroyed, so toward three in the morning, after assuring himself that the captain was asleep, he peered into the night and saw young Thomas Carleton, he of the glib tongue, slipping out of the next-door cabin and down the ladder to his proper place below.

  The next weeks, half of March and half of April, were a dismal time for Richard Saltwood; it was apparent that Vera Lambton was entertaining the young man from belowdecks three and four times a week. During the day their behavior was circumspect. They spoke casually if they chanced to meet each other as he pursued his duties, but they betrayed no sign of intimacy. On one very hot day after the Cape Verdes had been passed and the ship was heading sharply southeastward, the ship’s captain summoned both Saltwood and the young officer to assist him in a court-martial; the accusing official was young Carleton, who, as an officer in charge of maintaining discipline belowdecks, had brought charges against a pitiful specimen who on four different occasions had been caught stealing.

  When the court learned that he had been shipped aboard after a chain of similar offenses in London, there could be only one logical verdict: ‘Twelve lashes.’ And Thomas Carleton was charged with bringing on deck all the passengers so that they could see for themselves how crime was punished. When all were in place, ship’s officers led the convicted on deck, where he was stripped to the waist, tied with his arms about the mast, and lashed with a club from whose end dangled nine cattails of knotted leather. He made no sound till the fifth stroke, then cried pitifully and fainted. The last seven lashes were delivered to an inert body, after which he was sloshed with salt water. There was no more stealing.

  The flogging had a sobering effect upon theft belowdecks; some of the passengers were a sorry lot, but most were from the sturdy and moral lower classes, women and men who would engage in no misconduct, and they rebuked those who did. One man, nearing fifty and with two sons, grabbed Carleton’s arm as the young man hurried past one afternoon and pulled him into a corner.

  ‘Laddie,’ he said bluntly, ‘you’re treadin’ on very dangerous ground.’

  ‘What do you mean, old man?’

  ‘Meddlin’ with a lady of quality, that’s what I mean.’

  ‘I’m a man of quality,’ Thomas said quickly. ‘I am as strong—’

  ‘Those men in the cabin next hers, they’re officers. They’ll shoot you in a minute, laddie.’

  ‘Those men are not involved with the lady, and take your hand down.’

  This the older man refused to do. Instead he tightened it, saying, ‘Laddie, this is a small ship. If I know, don’t you suppose they know?’

  For six days the warning deterred young Carleton from visiting Vera, and Richard sighed with relief at having avoided the necessity of intervening where his brother’s honor was involved. At night he listened for sounds that would betray an assignation, and was pleased when none came echoing through the thin wall. But on the seventh day he spotted Vera talking intently with the young wagon builder, and that night, about eleven, her door creaked open and someone slipped in.

  It was, in many ways, the worst night of Richard Saltwood’s life, for the lovers, having been separated for a week, clutched at each other with such passion and noisy delight that the young captain was awakened.

  ‘I say, Saltwood, listen to this! I say, like a pair of goats!’

  The noise of love-making could not be masked. There were rumblings of the bulkhead, the squeals of a woman who had waited till her twenty-ninth year for love, and harsh pantings. Without even moving to the captain’s bed, Richard could hear the lascivious echoes, and after a long, wild ecstasy in the other room, when the captain said, ‘I say, that’s prolonged!’ confused Richard blurted out, ‘And she’s going out to marry my brother!’

  In Saltwood’s room there was silence, broken by the sounds bouncing off the bulkhead, and after a long time the captain asked in barrack-room accents, ‘Well, whad’ja goin’ to do?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Saltwood asked in the darkness.

  ‘Damnit all, man. Aren’t you goin’ to shoot him?’ And Richard heard the hard clang of a revolver being slammed onto their table.

  It was there when daylight came into the cabin, accusing him. He did not shave that morning, nor take any food. The young captain left him severely alone, but at midafternoon he returned, picked up the revolver, and banged it down again: ‘Good God, man! It’s your duty. Shoot the filthy blighter.’ When Richard was unable to respond, the young man said, ‘I’ll testify. I’ve heard everything, God knows. If you want to shoot ’em both, I’ll testify for that, too.’

  But the Saltwoods of Salisbury were not a family that solved problems by shooting. In Parliament, Peter had been challenged to a duel by a foolish city member and had ridiculed the man into retreating. In the wilds of Illinois, young David had refused to gun down an Indian caught trespassing, although his neighbors shot them for much less. And in the South Atlantic, with storms rising as the coast of Africa hove into sight, Richard could not bring himself to shoot a young wagon builder and perhaps the man’s mistress as well. Instead he waited till dusk, then told his cabin mate to put away the revolver while he went next door to talk with his sister-in-law, as she had sometimes phrased herself.

  ‘Vera, your behavior’s been shameless.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ she said, bristling.

  ‘The bulkhead. It’s very thin.’ She looked at the wall i
n amazement, tapped upon it and heard nothing. ‘We don’t make noises, the captain and I,’ Richard said. ‘We’re gentlemen.’

  She tapped again, whereupon the captain, lounging in bed, tapped back. It sounded like the explosion of a gun. ‘My God!’ she said, covering her face.

  ‘Yes. The captain offered me his gun, wanted me to shoot you both.’

  This had quite the opposite effect from what he had intended. Vera stiffened, lost any sense of contrition, and faced him boldly. ‘I’m in love, Richard. For the first time in my life I know something that you’ve never known, will probably never know. What it’s like to be in love.’

  ‘You’re a foolish woman on a lonely ship …’

  Instead of attempting to defend herself, she laughed. ‘Don’t you think I know that your poor little Hilary is sadly damaged? That you’re desperate to find him a wife … to get him back on course? I know that. Everyone knows it.’

  ‘Who told you?’

  ‘Simon Keer. The Reverend Simon Keer. Oh, at the public meetings he extolled your brother. So did your mother. But when I spoke with Keer alone, what do you think he said? That Hilary’s a bit of an ass. Those were his words. He said I might be able to do something with him, the LMS certainly wasn’t able to.’

  ‘He told you that?’

  ‘What else could he tell me, if I asked him in all honesty?’

  ‘But Keer’s the reason … He sent Hilary to Africa.’

  ‘What he said was “Some young men, especially from Oxford …” ’

  ‘Natural envy from a man without an education.’

  ‘ “… some young men from Oxford take religion too seriously. It addles them.” ’

  ‘But Keer marches up and down England, lecturing about the missions.’

  ‘He does so for a purpose, Richard. He wants to end slavery. Doesn’t give a damn about religion … in the old sense.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘And neither do I.’

  The blasphemy staggered Saltwood, and he sat down abruptly, whereupon Vera confided in a rush of words that it had been she, not her mother, who was desperate to find a husband. She loathed being a spinster, the afternoon teas, the sober dresses. Hilary, off in Africa, had been a last chance and she had grabbed at him. ‘Your mother was so afraid I’d be put off by the long sea voyage.’ She laughed nervously. ‘I’d have fought my way aboard this ship. It was my last chance.’