A month-long fury boiled the blood within me. I slammed the heels of both hands up beneath Carter’s breastbone. The blow lifted him off his feet, sent him sprawling on the deck, winded, struggling for breath and shocked at the swift response. As he lay there, glaring at me, I made to kick him in the balls.
“Mr Littleton!” A tearing noise behind me, and the seams of my coat parted as Harry grabbed onto the material and hauled me away. I still think he was wrong to do so. Perhaps he had not seen the blatant, deliberate challenge to my authority, and therefore he supposed I had started it. I had not. But I thought, even in my rage, that reacting at once and with maximum force might yet have cowed them. Harry, Geoffrey, and I had swords; we were military men, we’d fought all our lives. I think we could have taken them. Four or five down, dead, and the rest would have thought better of it.
But Harry . . . Harry was a little too gentle for the rank he inhabited. He saw, perhaps, something of himself in the prisoners. Understood their station in life better than I, and wished to talk. He hoped we could all come through this somehow together. An admirable sentiment, but naïve.
“How could you instigate this now?” He spun me around, put himself between me and the slowly closing ring of prisoners. The fury on his face matched mine—he was terrified. “The second half is coming!”
It sped upon us almost at his call. The first outlying wave of the next storm built under Banshee’s abused hull until it groaned and the lines thrummed. Carter rolled to his stomach, pushed himself up onto his knees and spat on the good clean oak of His Majesty’s deck. “We don’t need these buggers anymore,” he yelled. “It’s our ship now. Our rules. Give ’em what they deserve, lads. Twelve fucking months in chains, they owe us! Now get them!”
He came for me, teeth bared. My sword was already in my hand. I cut his throat without a second’s thought. A lukewarm mixture of rain and blood spattered my face as the temperature plummeted and the sea bucked beneath us.
Wind screamed in the rigging so loud I could not hear the convicts gasp as Carter thudded to his knees and thence to the deck. But their faces changed. It recurs to me in dreams, the way heady hope, gleefulness, became grim at the sight of that fountain of blood pumping out of his throat.
My own heart choked me as if it were trying to follow suit. I took a breath and they were on us. They piled on Harry first, because he seemed weaker than I. Ten of them at least set about him, like a village football match, all gouging hands and kicks and elbows. Three of the bravest edged towards me, fanning out so that I should not be able to defend against all of them at once. Behind me, I could hear above the wind the tiny, tinny noise of steel-on-steel as Gregory fought for his life. Above us the unmanned yards creaked round and the sails blew out, thundering and snapping uselessly.
We tipped over the crest of a wave. A wall of water slammed across the deck. I grabbed a flailing line, watched with triumph as one of my attackers was swept away, flapping in the grip of the water like a minnow poured out of a jar. Wrapping the rope around my wrist, I swung out, caught the second man in the chest with my heels. He spiralled away like a sycamore seed in the gale.
Banshee slid sideways down the wave, the relentless gale heeling her over, her port rail below the water. I darted a glance to starboard and saw a wall of water some fifty feet high, deep emerald green, flecked with racing dots of foam. We slid down its side, broadside on, and above us the crest of the wave built and bent over. Tons and tons of water mere seconds away from falling like boulders atop us, crushing us, filling us up and foundering us.
A tang of copper in the air. Gregory’s yellow-haired head flew like a cannonball overboard. I felt almost glad. I knew now that it was over. We were lost.
And then the wind fell, cut off by the enormous wave. The dead, damp air filled with Harry’s voice, calling out to me. I felt that time slowed, or perhaps I was freed of it, to partake a little in the nature of eternity. Possessed by a berserk strength, I ran up the inclined deck of the ship, stabbed two of his assailants in the back, and grabbed a handful of uniform coat. It was like stepping into a shower of knives—edges everywhere. I slashed a red-haired man in the stomach while I hauled Harry with all my strength towards the ship’s boat.
Something tapped me on the leg. I saw a brief, blazing glimpse of Harry’s face, eyes wide and dark as the sea, a molten star of white rage within them. He leaned past me. A whisper of movement as his sword passed within inches of my face, and then a man behind me was stumbling to his knees, clutching at his eye, blood seeping through his fingers. As he fell, something tugged again where I had felt the tap, and looking down I saw a marlinspike driven all the way through my thigh from one side to the other.
I recall thinking I had never seen anything so comical in all my life. When I pushed Harry against the boat, drew up the tarp that covered it to indicate to him that he should get in, I was laughing too hard to speak.
Shadow fell black on the ship. Columns of solid water pelted the deck like ammunition, and then one of the convicts screamed, a high-pitched, pig-like noise that echoed strangely in the trough. Solid water curled above us. Spray whipped away horizontally as the glassy roof paused before it fell.
Instinctively, the convicts turned their faces towards this greater threat, and in that split-second pause, Harry dived into the boat. I scrambled after him. For a moment I was stuck, the marlinspike caught on the tarp. Then I wrenched it out and used it to tear through the pre-weakened rope that held the boat to the deck. The rope parted. We ground slowly to port across the deck. Harry lashed the tarp closed. The sound of tons of seawater spewing through Banshee’s port side gunports rumbled like thunder beneath us. She rolled further over and our speed picked up. We felt the slatey grind and shudder of our keel against the deck. The boat’s oars bounced about our shins.
And then a smoothness beneath us and a roar above. The tarpaulin bowed inward. Water spurted from between the knots. We held it closed and felt the deep cold against our fingers. Everything not strapped down within the boat rose and tumbled against us, oars and barrel and biscuit and ropes, bailing bucket and the discarded, blood-stained spike. It slowed as we drove deeper. Cold and silence encompassed us, but for the creaking of the boat’s timbers. Water seeped in through the lapped planks.
We were underwater, pushed down by the breaker towards the seabed, maybe to smash there like a dropped egg on a flagstone. We held our breaths and looked at one another for a long, motionless, suspended moment.
And then with a rush and bubbling we burst back onto the surface. With a final clatter, everything settled into its place. Like men possessed, we peeled back the tarp, set up the mast and the single small sail, double reefed, working with speed and strength I don’t think I could consciously equal again.
The scrap of canvas caught the wind and, collapsing to sit by the stern, I felt life go through the rudder. She had steerage way. I turned her to run before the wind and she sped like a kite up the mountainous sea.
Harry looked back until we were over the streamers of spray and scudding down the next trough. I did not. I could see the reflection in his eyes, his pupils two dark mirrors. There was nothing behind us. The Banshee was lost, capsized and gone under, taking all her invalids with her.
He is a well-set-up man, Harry. Broad shouldered. The kind of man you’d put money on at boxing. But at that moment a careless touch might have shattered him. He sat down as though his bones were made of glass. Looking at me, he opened his mouth, then shut it again, dumb in his desolation.
“Go to sleep,” I said. “I’ll take the first watch.”
With a great struggle, some words surfaced. He crouched forward, laid his hand on my knee. “Your leg . . .”
I looked down in surprise. Truth be told, I’d forgotten about it. No one could have been more surprised than I to see that my white breeches were now crimson and my stocking was gummed to my leg with dried blood. That was, of course, the point at which it began to hurt. “Oh,” I said—I’m awar
e it was not the wittiest of ripostes—“oh damn!”
He tore the arm from his shirt to make up a pad of linen and bound it on firmly with his cravat, his hands shaking. His bent head was furred with a stubble of hair that shadowed the shape of his skull and picked out the vulnerable nape in tiny chestnut glints. Everything seemed miraculous to me then, limned in the kind of vivid high relief they say is a characteristic of the sight of eagles. I brushed my palm over his head from forehead to nape and back again, feeling how the bristles fought me one way, accommodated the next.
Harry sat back on his heels with a thud. “Don’t do that!”
They say I’m not a tactful man, and perhaps I did think, You can hardly be worried about greater disgrace than this! But give me credit. Even with the searing, scouring pain that was working its way up through the marrow of my leg and into my stomach and spine, I did not say it. I said, “Why not?”
“Because I don’t want you to.”
I think of all the wounds I’d had that day, that one was the worst.
I was angry with him, you see. And with myself also. His impulsiveness had cost me my ship; had cost Mortimer and Gregory and Chapman and Kent, all the surviving marines and tars, even the convicts, their lives. So I thought at the time. I hadn’t realized that Carter had been the one to start it. That makes a difference. I wish you had told me before! I should not have been so resentful over the years. It is . . . It shall not be the least of my regrets that I misjudged you so. I am always doing it. You make play of being charmingly reckless, a rake without responsibility, but I should have known you better than that. I am not worthy of you. Not now, and not then.
But I digress. I was at the time furious, and hurt, and deeply, burningly ashamed. I wished I had gone down with my ship—my first command!—and died. I blamed him for saving my useless life, and myself for letting him do so. I loathed the fact that I wanted to let him carry on petting me while I fell asleep with my head in his lap. We neither of us deserved that.
“Can you watch?” I asked at length, reluctantly. “How do you feel?”
“I feel splendid.” He grinned at me, white teeth in a face speckled with red gore. “Better than fine. I feel . . . exultant.”
I couldn’t answer that. I lay down by the mast, thoroughly repelled, and fell asleep in an instant.
When I woke, my head seemed full of oakum, and my body an iron structure, partially rusted together. Before I opened my eyes, I thought from the sound of the wind that the storm had abated a little. Though I lay in a pool of rainwater, its rate of descent had slowed. A rhythmic scrape and shush lulled me back to oblivion, and when I woke again it was distinctly drier beneath me.
I looked up. Garnet sat in the stern, his black hair blown forward over his face, the tiller under his arm and the ropes of the sail in one hand as he bailed with the other. He lacks at least ten of my years, and at that point he looked, against the breaking dawn, young and weary and beautiful.
He turned his head to look at me. It seemed an enormous effort. His face was white as paper and those brown eyes of his looked black to the rim. “Harry. I’m tired.”
My heart twisted within me and my anger fled. Even with my guilt and desolation, it seemed I had space for a fresh pain. I should have known the battle vigour would wear off and leave him watching over me, injured, alone, and rebuked, with both our lives in his hands and no word of thanks. I was an utter villain.
Creakily, my bones protesting the movement, I found water and hard tack, passed them to him. Then I got him by the shoulders, and as he had done for me earlier, I eased him away from the tiller. He yielded to me, heavy, limp, and confiding, not an ounce of strength left in him.
“I have a niece,” I said, my arms about his chest, settling him down into a sitting position beneath me. His head drooped onto my knee, his eyes closed. “Betsy. My sister and her husband let her sit up to hear my tales when I am in port, and she falls asleep just like this: draped all over me. I can lift up her little arm and let it fall, and she does not wake.”
He gave a “hmn” of amusement, tried to open his eyes and failed.
My eyes burned as I brushed my fingers against his throat. How could I have blamed him for a disaster that was my own responsibility? I had known all along that Garnet was proud and reckless, arrogant and hot-tempered, with that aristocratic certainty that everything he did must be right. I had gone against his advice in ordering the convicts to be released. I had loaded him with the responsibility of commanding them, though I knew he was weary beyond reason or restraint. If he had snapped briefly under the pressure and hit one of them, unprovoked, well, it was no worse than many a boatswain had done to a surly new recruit. As his captain, I should have seen his fraying temper and restrained it before the damage could be done. I had asked too much of him. The death of my crew, the wreckage of all my hopes? It was my fault, not his.
How deep pride goes! Even then, I cherished a small ember of self-regard, because I was nobly and selflessly able to forgive Garnet. I thought it a proof of my love. Now I see that he was blameless all along. Even my forgiveness was an offence to him, for I patronised him when I should have trusted his judgement. I treated him like a boy when he has always been the better man. This I will try to remember in future, so that I do not make the same error again.
“You’re not angry?” he asked me then, his voice slurring with tiredness.
I threaded my fingers through his hair and teased out the tangles of blood and salt. A wearying inner voice told me we should not be talking so—like lovers, stirring drowsily in the early morning, warm beneath the blankets. But why not? Who was here to see? We were ruined and dying, and together. And for the first time in my life—since, at the age of ten, I began to suspect there was something strange about me—I felt free. At peace. “No,” I murmured, watching his fingers open, and the biscuit he had taken up fall out into his lap. “I’m not angry. Or at least, only with myself. I’m sorry, Garnet. I’m so sorry.”
By midday, the storm had slackened to become a fine following wind, the swell had decreased, and the sky above had turned the most translucent of whites. A glow like a hot pearl concealed behind those filmy clouds showed me the sun, finally, enough for me to take a guess at our direction. Still mostly west with some northing. I thought perhaps, with a little luck, we might yet strike Tahiti and be saved, though luck had not been the greatest distinguishing feature of this trip so far.
Garnet slept all day, while I thought about my life. All my striving for success and it had come to this: nothing—worse than nothing. If we made it back to England by some outrageous miracle, a court martial would be waiting for me, as it was for any captain who lost a ship. I had lost four. Perhaps five, if the Ardent too had gone down, as seemed likely. An astonishing degree of failure that deserved to be punished with the utmost rigour, pour encourager les autres. The irony of it! All those years I had feared to reach out lest I bring disgrace on myself and here it was, inescapable. It seemed that should I not drown, then I must indeed be destined to hang.
Steam rose off us as we travelled onwards. Our coats dried on our backs. Garnet woke sunburned, his face flushed pink, staggered to the heads and then to the barrel of water to drink thirstily. When he settled himself to the tiller I did the same, then brought the bucket back and set it, upturned, between his legs so I could sit there, leaning back against his chest. He gave a snort of amusement, and pressed his smile to the crown of my head. “I like you better like this.”
“I find I no longer need worry about the propriety of a relationship with an officer of inferior rank. If I’m not hanged for incompetence when we get home, I’ll be turned before the mast for sure.”
“You think we’ll get home?” He placed a kiss on the tip of my ear, startling me into laughter.
“At this moment I don’t very much care.”
I felt his low, rich chuckle through the muscles of my back and it warmed me like the sun. Setting an arm around me, he idly unbuttoned my waist
coat from top to bottom, and though I eagerly wished to know whether he would move on to other buttons after, I fell asleep before I could find out.
Sometimes those first days come back to me in dreams as a glimpse of paradise. We were hot and cramped and thirsty, filthy, dishevelled, sick of hardtack, and the barrel of water grew staler by the day. Yet what I remember is the solid warmth of him in my arms, drowsing, peaceful and contented as we drifted onwards under the light of the stars. It was the first time I had ever been so purely happy.
We talked. I learned about his family; a mother and father so devoted to each other that the children had always known they came second. He detailed all their different ways of attracting attention, from the ostentatious perfection of the eldest, to Garnet’s waywardness. He too had nieces whom he adored. “I was bringing home the most beautiful packet of silk for Constance’s first ball dress. She will be coming out soon, and that shade of jonquil would have brought out the chestnut in her hair.”
His brows creased. We had unpicked his cravat and made a line, bent a pin into a hook and threaded on it the juiciest, whitest, most energetically squirming maggot we could shake out of the bread, and he was sitting dangling this impromptu fishing rod over the side. He shifted it into the other hand, rubbed his forehead, squeezing his eyes shut. “The silk is at the bottom of the ocean now. And I may never see her again.”
Something took the bait. I saw the line whip out through his fingers and lunged for it, catching it just before it hit the water, landing an ugly, wide-mouthed, warty creature, a toad of the fish world. “Yes!” I cried, elated at still being able to achieve something. “Yes. I got one! You nearly lost him, you sluggard!”
Blessed Isle Page 5