But the wind veered and hauled about us, and the wheel bucked beneath the helmsman’s hands like an unbroken stallion. Lightning hit the water next to us in a bang and a plume of steam, lanced down again, and we heard a shriek like the gates of hell opening, saw one intense, vivid image of the supply ship, Ardent, lit up, dazzling white against the black abyss of sky and sea as the bolt hit her main mast. Everything blazed, etched in burning bright lines and fathomless dark. And then she was behind us too, a suggestion of flame in the gloom.
Michael Franklin at the wheel gave a high-pitched, gurgling scream. He must briefly have let go. The wheel had spun and the spokes caught him in the stomach, beneath the ribs. I don’t know whether he still lived at that point. It was grab him or grab the helm, and to let the wheel spin was to risk every soul aboard. His body tumbled past me as I crawled, bent double against the wind, to reach the helm. The wheel almost lifted me from the deck. I clung on, every muscle in my back and belly tearing with the effort of holding it still, fighting the pull of the sea, the insolent, easy strength of the wind.
It blew for nine days.
I remember very little of the end of it. Hands, on mine, eased my claw-like grip off the spokes. I recall my puzzlement as to what this warmth could be about my fingers. Looking up, I saw a face where I had been used to seeing the sky. “Sir,” this face said, “it’s safe for you to sleep now. Come on.”
It was Garnet, of course.
I had been somewhere far away from humanity, from speech and thought and regret. As he got a shoulder under my arm and peeled me from the helm, I felt my senses were being darkened—I had become the ship. I had forgotten what it was to be a man.
“Come now.” He taught me to walk again, guiding my uncertain steps into the cabin. “It’s over and we’re through it. Go to sleep, sir.”
Between the two of us—I daresay I was very little help—I was tumbled into my cot and covered with blankets. As I spiralled into unconsciousness he leaned over and kissed my brow, his lips like sandpaper and his hollow cheeks furred with ten days’ growth of beard.
When I woke, a day later, I had stiffened in every limb. I shuffled, bleary-eyed, out of the cabin, wondering what a captain had to do to get a cup of coffee and a hot breakfast after he had steered his ship single-handedly through the storm.
A pearl-grey sky floated above us, wisps of cloud hurrying from the east. The foremast lay over the bow in a cat’s cradle of fallen rigging, dragging at us like a sea anchor. Why was no one attending to it?
Zachary Walsh stood asleep at the wheel, and on all the rigging and the rails of the ship drowsed hundreds of sea birds exhausted by the storm. We were covered over with bundles of white feathers, but there was no other human being on deck.
“Zachary! Zach!” I whispered, my voice as stiff and overstrained as my muscles. As I reached out to shake him awake, his head tilted gently with the roll of the ship and I saw the hectic flush, the red rash of typhus that spread beneath his chin. Casting a hitch about the wheel to keep us on course, I caught him before he fell and hauled him laboriously to the companionway stair.
“Lieutenant Kent! Dr Mortimer!” I called, trying not to let the panic enter my voice. “Where the hell is everyone?”
The answer met me on the gun deck: long rows of swathed shapes, and a shorter row of invalids hanging in their hammocks. Someone had opened three of the gunports and a wet, cold breeze blew in, making the stench endurable. I like to think my first thought was not Not Garnet—please say he is still alive! But that thought was very present, adding a newly personal twist to my feeling of helplessly falling.
A sound of knocking came up from the orlop deck beneath my feet—metal on wood, the clatter and glissade of chains. I will admit my skin crawled. I thought myself dead, the captain of a ghost ship condemned to sail these bitter waters for all time as a warning against . . .
But there my imagination faltered, and the door to the wardroom opened, proving me not quite abandoned yet. Garnet came out, with a kind of calmness in his demeanour that spoke of having endured madness and won through it, sailing shattered out the other side. He had even shaved.
He had even shaved! I could have kissed him for that act of defiance, of humanity in the face of this utter ruin. But Mortimer came out after him and so I did not.
“Captain,” Garnet said gently, and took hold of Zach’s trailing legs by the knees. Together we manoeuvred the man into a waiting hammock. Garnet turned aside to find a blanket, tucked it in around the unconscious sailor with a fatherly tenderness I had not anticipated in him. He was so reassuringly in control of himself that I found it easy to imitate him—to click back into place like the rudder sliding back onto its pintles, ready for use. Affection for him swelled up and almost filled the hollow place the state of my ship had opened in my chest.
“This happened during the storm?” I asked, nodding at the line of casualties without taking my eyes from the edge of his lips. He had a little scar there. Perhaps he’d split it, fighting as a child. It glimmered silver. I thought the skin must be thinner than in other places, the pulse beneath hotter, and at the thought life came thundering back into my veins, scalding sweet. I regretted the dead—their names are in the beginning of this book and I read them over every night—but the same life that breaks the shell, that sends the sap of trees hammering into the sky, demanded its recognition from me. We were not dead, either of us. We were alive, and I ached to prove it.
Garnet responded to my gaze. His nostrils flared and his mouth opened a little. He inched forward. If we had been alone I believe we would have rutted there amidst the corpses, and it would have been . . . It would have been holy, in some way: life’s victory, an affirmation that love was greater than death.
But we were not alone. Garnet wrenched himself away, cleared his throat. I sat down shakily on the nearest cannon. And Dr Mortimer, who looked like the skin of a sausage after the meat has been squeezed out, said, “I’ve no doubt the disease has been aboard some time, manifesting itself only as a general malaise and lowness of spirits. But the storm taxed our resistance too greatly. We could no longer keep it in check, and it has spread—” his smile, even now, was not without an element of scientific interest “—with extraordinary rapidity and completeness.”
“So I see.” I stood, lifting up along with my bones the weight of responsibility for all of this. “There is no one on deck. How many men do we have fit for duty?”
“Six.” Mortimer did not attempt to soften the blow. “The three of us. Lieutenant Gregory, the commander of the Quicksilver. Taff Walsh, foretopman out of the Cornwall. And Ben Hough, one of the jailers, also out of the Cornwall. They are asleep, but I can rouse them if you wish.”
“No, let them rest. I’ve no doubt they need it.”
“If, under Providence,” Mortimer went on with a careful note of hope, “we are permitted another week of calm, then I believe I should be able to provide you with a further nineteen convalescents, capable of light duties.”
“Very well,” I said, quailing inside. Six exhausted men to handle a three-masted ship as she negotiated her way into an unknown harbour in potentially foul winds? Yet we could not stay at sea. Not here in this perilous southern ocean, where storms came as regular as the tick of a clock.
As I thought this, there came again that deep, indistinct groaning from the hollow of the hold beneath us—the rattle of chains and something that sounded almost like speech. My wits had settled and this time, though the hair still stood up on my arms, I took a lantern from its nail in the bulkhead and edged slowly down the ladder. The noise stilled. The light ran away from me, illuminating the ribs of the hull like the belly of a whale and revealing blackened, shabby, hunched things that moved, shuffling forward until their chains twanged taut. Their eyes glistened with the flame of my lamp.
“Get us out of here!” He was a flash of teeth in a tangled beard. A distinguished-looking man once, perhaps, but goblin-like in that half-light. I’ve never seen eyes
before or since that had such a red light in them, but his words were reasoned enough. “Please, Captain! You are the captain, ain’t you? Please, we can help! Just let us out.”
“You’ve been fed?” I asked, while inside, my heart seemed to turn to brass, its beat jerky and far more terrified than it had ever been facing the French.
“Oh aye,” said he. “And watered like cattle when they could spare the time. But we’ve all had the fever, ain’t we, and come out the other side, fit and healthy, and you need us.”
I didn’t like his smile. The records of his offence had gone down with his ship, but if he had not done murder in the past, I believed he was contemplating it now.
“I will think on it,” I said, and went out into the open air with the sense that I was running away.
“There are three-and-twenty of them, sir.” Garnet had followed me, and now he leaned into the wheel for support. “Twenty-three men, with nothing to look forward to at our destination but dust and chains. And six of us. If there’s a single man among them with knowledge of navigation, we’d be signing our death warrant to let them free.”
I took a glass and climbed to the mainmast topmast yard, scouring the three hundred and sixty degrees of horizon for land. Given nine days running before a wind of twelve knots or more, we must have rounded the Horn in the storm. America should lie to the east—the long hospitable coast of Chile, where we could land and nurse our invalids back to life, rest and eat and regain our strength, and draft in any adventurous Chilean lad who cared to sail with us. If there was but a blue, cloudlike shape on the edge of sight, a change in sea and clouds, we might yet be saved.
A smudge darkened the edge of the world to starboard. My heart leapt into my dry throat as I peered and peered through the little circular window at that low . . . ridge of hills in the distance? Or might it be a reef? Was there a line of white beneath it where the surf broke on the shore? The log had gone over the side in the storm along with the midshipman who had been trying to read it. All I knew was that we had been tossed like a thrown stone steadily west northwest. How far we had travelled I had no idea, and would not until the skies cleared enough to show us the moon. But it could be America, over there. It was not beyond the bounds of possibility. God almighty, have mercy on this sinner now. Let it be land. Please, let it be land.
The wind blew still nor’ nor’west, away from what I thought must be the coast. If it was land, that smudge of black should be growing fainter, dipping slowly beneath the horizon.
It flickered white. I took the glass from my eye and rubbed the strain from my face, and when I looked again the shape was larger, darker, more defined. I felt then as a man must who is alone and wounded in the woods and hears the first howl of the wolves, a kind of paralysis of terror and disbelief. The thing was flying towards us out of the east. Ten minutes more and I could see it as boiling black thunderheads, piling up one on top of another. Their undersides drew down into strange, demonic dugs, stained crimson and weeping rain as red as blood.
Courage drained from me. I closed my eyes and clung to the rigging, resting my cheek against the worn fibres of the shrouds, and I might have stayed there until the storm overtook us and blew me into the air like a child’s kite, had not Garnet beneath me suddenly begun to laugh.
I climbed down, startled. The thrum of the sea through the hull had already strengthened and the lines popped and hissed as they tightened. Garnet looked up at me, the distant lightning reflected in his eyes. “Dear God, sir,” he laughed, his smile wide and bright, “it isn’t often you get to watch your own death flying towards you across the water. It’s just as the poets say. It’s sublime!”
His joy leapt the gap between us like a flame travelling down a fuse. It touched something within me and exploded, filling me with light and heat. I thought him a magnificent madman, and he filled me with awe and delight. In that moment I knew for the first time that I loved him.
His lunacy infected me. I wanted nothing so much as to drive him into the cabin, lock the door, and couple as the ship was ripped apart around us, dying as I’d never dared live.
But I was the captain and below my feet there slumbered still a score of my crew and twenty-three other human souls whose well-being was my responsibility. Half in love with death as I was, I would not let them perish without doing my utmost to save them.
“All hands on deck, Mr Littleton, if you please.” I brought the keys of the manacles out of the stern locker in which they had been stowed and passed them to him solemnly. He grasped my fingers with them and pressed, clasping my hands for a long moment, knowing what I was going to say. The wind picked up and shrieked in the rigging and the first spatterings of that bloody rain smacked aboard, hailstones rattling down with it.
“All hands please, Mr Littleton,” I said. “Including the prisoners.”
“Aye, aye sir. At once.”
You felt that too? I wish I’d known! I still think there could be no better way to die than that—the glory and the ecstasy of it. Maybe when we grow old? When the aches and pains begin, you lose your teeth and I my hair, we can buy a sloop and fit it out like an emperor’s tomb and run it into the maw of a black squall. Let the sea tear apart that which it brought together. Better than dying in bed, incapable, incontinent, and wrinkled, buried in separate graves by mourners to whom the survivor would never be able to tell his grief.
But yes, yes. I dare not risk your rebuke. I have remembered I am supposed to be telling the story and not embarrassing you with my thoughts.
They came up the companionway steps like black dogs, hunkered over, stiff, scarce able to walk from their long confinement in chains. They paused at the top, straightening with exquisite care, squinting at the light and snuffing the racing, water-laden air. I can’t find it in me to blame them for what they did. I’d have done the same had I been caught scrumping apples, confined in chains for months, tossed and forgotten as human ballast in the utter dark and freezing cold of the underwater hull. If I’d gone into that a man, I’d have come out a monster. I can’t blame them.
Harry a little I can blame. He should have known. But I think he did. I think he knew they would turn on us, but he wanted to give us all a chance at life anyway. The heart of a hero beats in the breast of that man, even though he does look so much like a bailiff’s enforcer.
It did not begin immediately. It took three days. The first day, our prisoners were still too cramped in themselves, unaware of their opportunities and blasted out of their mortal concerns by the rising, enfolding seas. Landsmen all, they’d never seen anything like this. They thought nature something to subdue: a field to plant, a steady place under their feet. No one but those who have gone down to the sea can know man’s sheer insignificance in the world. When Neptune rages, one cannot reason with him, one can only hold on and hope to endure. For some, it is a strangely intoxicating freedom. For others, it loosens their wits and makes them grovel on the deck, blind and helpless as maggots. There are no unbelievers on the sea—the gods are there, visible in all their power, and a man must live with them, or die.
Harry lived up to his name and harried them at every turn, sword in hand—for the powder of a pistol would have been drenched beyond use in seconds—giving them the will to move. He pitted himself against their terror and won, driving them to work the sails, to set loose the wreckage of the foremast, to hold down the wheel. We taught them—we had to teach them—to read the compass and the flags, to keep the ship running, running fast in front of the wind.
By the end of the second day, you could see it in their faces, behind the smear of weariness, the thought, This is not so hard. We can do this.
That was when I put the barrel of water and the wax-paper-wrapped parcel of hardtack in the pinnace and loosened all the ropes that held her tight to the deck. I’m not certain even now whether this was forethought or cowardice. I know I dared not tell Mortimer or Lieutenant Gregory what I had done, lest they should take it for defeatism or even mutiny. What can I sa
y? I like to have an escape route prepared.
On the third day, the wind fell briefly, and a gleam of yellow sunshine pierced the cloud. From yards and rigging our convicts looked up and cheered, light tender over battered faces. Steam rose in frail curls from the decks as the hot sunlight dried them.
Gregory put a hand on the scuttlebutt, dipped me out fresh storm water. He was a lovely creature, not above nineteen years of age, smooth skinned and rosy as a girl. You’d have thought he rouged his lips, they were so pink, and he was as leggy and eager and charming as a new colt. God knows what he must have suffered, growing up in the Navy, but it had made him wary. He glanced down at his reflection, up again at me. “This . . . this is it, isn’t it, sir? The moment they turn on us.”
The clouds thinned and streamed away to the west, a sky of cerulean blue dreaming hot above our heads. The scuttlebutt blazed silver, a perfect mirrored circle, and the air filled with the scent of wet hemp. One by one, like fruit too heavy to stay on the bough, men came down from the rigging. The soft thud of their bare feet sounded on the deck all around us.
“They’d be fools,” I said. Then loudly, “Can’t you see the second front following on behind?” I pointed out east, and indeed there hung a second black line, thin as a pencil stroke. “Can’t you taste the lightning in the air? This is only a temporary respite. It’ll be on us again in minutes.”
We’d had to give them axes with which to clear away the fallen foremast and its tangles of snagged rigging. We hadn’t dared to ask for them back. Now the leader of the convicts, a man named Nathan Carter, walked over to us, took the cup from my hand, and dropped it on the deck.
I had been working beside them for the past three days. My hands were swollen, bleeding, and black from rope burns. I had slept perhaps twenty-four hours in the past fortnight. I had begun to see the phantoms of our fleet keeping pace with us, their crewmen all in grey, rags of black flesh about gleaming bone. I saw one now, behind him, and it was Joseph Barnes, who had gone down with the Drake rather than leave his wife and child.
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