I looked like something that had crawled halfway across England, sleeping under hedges all the way, to collapse in tears at the workhouse door. I appalled myself. Seizing my uniform and weapons, I ran to the lagoon to bathe.
“What ails you?” Harry came gently out of the blue shade of the woods as I was sharpening my sword. He too looked roughened by the wind and sun, dried and withered like a piece of old leather. Like an ape with human eyes. All my accumulated days of melancholia burst upon me at once, and the last few coins of fairy gold turned to ashes in my hand. So this, this ugly and meaningless world, this was the truth, was it?
“Nothing.” I bowed my head and did my best to shave with the edge of my sword.
He sighed, sunk onto his heels in a patch of shade and watched me. His gaze itched up my spine like a file of soldier ants. It settled on the bruise on my cheek. “Did I hurt you?”
“Oh, please!” The edge of my blade dug into my skin. “Do not treat me as though I was a woman! You could not hurt me if you tried.”
“I treat you . . .” His frown deepened. Its shadow darkened his changeable eyes from amber to oak. “Like someone for whom I care a great deal. If I have not hurt you, something has. What is it? What’s wrong?”
His concerned voice irritated me. Our ship had long gone down, and he was no longer my captain to demand to hear my thoughts. “Go away, Harry.” I sawed beneath my chin, pulled out double handfuls of beard. “Leave me be. I need peace, space. Away from you.”
He actually winced. I felt a sense of achievement, and shame, as I gathered my things and walked out along the causeway to the smallest wooded islet. Behind me, my footprints filled with water. The tide flowed in.
We called it Ardent Isle, the little one, after our smallest ship. There, I finished my toilet. I bound back my hair, shaved as best I could, and dressed carefully in my salt stiff, clammy uniform. Every piece of clothing put on chafed. The buckles pinched and the waistcoat buttons choked me, climbing up to my throat. And every one came with its own individual ache of regret.
I stood and looked out from the southern shore while breakers of burning whiteness seethed over the silver beach not five feet below me. Behind their dazzle, the ocean receded forever in lines of lapis lazuli towards a sapphire sky. Somewhere before the horizon, the two vivid blues merged as the bowl of the sky sealed us in, like a brandy glass pressed over a captured wasp.
Since there seemed no reason to do more, I was still standing, gazing out, when the tide turned. Gradually the water drew away, leaving a flat expanse of barren grey rock with reflections of the sky shattered and scattered across it. Trees sighed around me and stones slipped and settled. The seabirds squabbled as they had since we’d fetched up here, an endless backdrop of complaint. And then Harry’s arms went about me from behind. He pulled me in close and rested his chin on my shoulder. His knees were wet and cold against the backs of my legs. Evidently he had not waited for the tide to go out fully before literally wading back into the conversation.
But his embrace was comforting. I liked to feel him, solid, capable, and gentle, breathing with me.
“You want to go home,” he said, quietly.
“I am forgetting how to be human.” I feared to look him in the face. So, of course, I did so at once. He too had washed and groomed himself and dressed. No beast now, thank God, simply thin and weather-beaten and concerned.
His smile came cautiously, slightly bemused. “It isn’t a thing you forget.”
“No?” I took both his hands and held them in my own, drew them up so I could kiss the calloused knuckles. “I feel like Odysseus, come to an island where men are changed to pigs. What have we done here but eat and rut and sleep?”
“And talk.” He shrugged. “What else is there to do?”
The sun was going down, the horizon banded with livid orange light, purple above it, intense and unnatural. Harry, in his white shirt and breeches, was a watercolour man in an oil painting world. I smiled, because he was the only thing that looked right to me then. “My point exactly. What makes a man human? Is it not art, culture, the discourse of other minds? Friendly society. Even enemies. I miss . . .” I swallowed, and my need lodged in my throat like an iron ball. “I miss . . . Everything.”
The dam broke and the words came pouring out of me. “The opera. The theatre. I miss music, and balls. And women! I miss talking to women. And gaming and riding and hunting. And carriages, and . . .” I fingered brocade in my mind, my touch drinking in the slippery, soft, heavy luxury of beautiful fabric. “Visits to the tailor. New suits. Sitting in a coffeehouse in the morning, reading the news. I miss drinking in the wardroom and rolling my eyes at anecdotes that grew stale three months ago, while across the table from me my drinking partner is laughing up his sleeve at my antics.
“I miss books. Other people’s ideas bringing me to a standstill because here is something I never thought before. The smell of colliers and sewage and stockfish and hemp and cologne. I miss other people, Harry. I am . . . sorry, but much as I love you, you cannot be a sufficient replacement for all civilized society.”
He stepped back. He looked dumbstruck. Something tender and fragile changed behind his eyes. It took me longer than it should have to realize it was only the reflection of moonrise. “You love me?” he asked, bemused. As though this was unexpected.
“Did I not say so? I thought I had.”
He sat down heavily on the edge of the grass. The light grew silvery behind him as the great shield of pitted moon began to shine in earnest. “You most certainly did not. I thought myself a challenge to you. A sport. You are . . . you cannot say that your demeanour gives a man any confidence in the seriousness of your affections.”
I walked away, collected a few branches as an excuse to turn my back on him. It’s true. That too I have been told a number of times—that I seem a gadfly. A flirt and a tease without a heart. But it seemed intolerable to me that Harry, of all men, thought it too.
He had cleared the ground when I returned. I stacked the wood and set to work making a fire-drill, avoiding his eyes. If we were telling the truth now, some old resentments of my own could do with an airing. “I know you don’t care for me.”
An ember dropped into the pan of the drill. I tipped it into a double handful of dried grass and bent over it, blowing until it caught. My hands were full of fire. The flaring flame showed his face, red-gold against a sky of dark, imperial purple. I thrust the tinder into the heart of the stacked wood and the small sticks caught and crackled. “You had to have everything else taken from you before I became something worth valuing. No doubt you only tolerate me here because there is no other alternative. I help pass the time, I suppose.”
He laughed at this, a little bark of surprise and mockery. “Don’t be an arse. Will you force me to say it in so many words? Very well. I love you too. There. Does that satisfy?”
I could have kicked the fire in his mulish face had I not lost my shoes somewhere at sea. He expected me to believe that? A declaration of love phrased like a complaint? “Oh yes.” I flung a log atop the burning pile. Sparks swarmed. “I was convinced of your regard when you were willing to risk nothing at all for me. This love you feel you would feel for anyone with whom you were confined long enough. It has no reality. It will vanish like a phantasm, should we ever escape.”
The night grew colder, and a water-laden wind flowed over us. The tongues of the fire fluttered like the pennants of a ship. Harry came to sit beside me, his hand resting on my knee. I did not move it aside, but I did not clasp it either. “You think this is not real?” he asked, as if clarifying a concept strange to himself. “This place and what we do in it, you think it is an interlude while the real music plays on, out there?” He flapped a hand in the direction of the rest of the world.
“Yes.”
“To me . . .” Harry turned his head to watch as salt in one of the branches burned up with a hissing, blue, ghostly light. His voice was very calm and sure. “To me, this is the re
ality. Out there they make us pretend. They force us into lies or hiding. Here I’ve been free to be myself for the first time in my life. You and I, it’s the first honest thing I’ve ever done. And that’s because this place has given me the freedom to do it.” A little sigh of amusement mingled with melancholy. “Your prison is my refuge.”
I leaned back and watched stars bloom overhead, so clear you could see their colours, faint and pale. Harry’s words turned my understanding of our situation inside out. If this was a refuge, what must his normal life have been? Could a man be so sensitive to the criticism of others as to feel better when every last human soul but himself was gone? I did not understand it, but I grieved for him.
Yet now that a reason for my affliction had been brought home to me, I did not know how I would continue to bear it. “It is making me insane.”
He took a deep breath, like the sound of wind and sea, leaned in and kissed me beneath the ear. “Tomorrow we will try a final time to raise the boat. If that isn’t possible, we will build a raft. I’m still firmly of the opinion we are somewhere in the vicinity of Tahiti. If we carry on northwest we must eventually strike New Guinea, or even Asia. We must think of provisioning. Water will be the main difficulty there.”
I was slow to recognise this as the declaration of love for which I had wished. But as he continued to work out the details of our onward journey, it did finally occur to me that he was giving up his refuge, his true self, for my sake. He was facing again everything he feared, simply because I wished it. I gave a smile somewhere between tears and laughter and covered his hand with my own.
A full week has passed now since I began this account, and I am sitting on the terrace of the PasseioPúblico, looking out over Guanabara Bay. I am not completely easy in my mind at the thought of bringing such an incriminating document out-of-doors, but it is a habit that Garnet has acquired, and I am too weak-willed to put an end to it. It will please me when it’s finished and can be locked away to be found again only after we are both dead.
Still, it is pleasant to sit here after a day spent creeping through the bowels of fishing boats with my fellow customs men, up to our necks in shrimp and swordfish, looking for contraband. My employment, I am afraid, is a great deal less glamorous than Garnet’s, and I appreciate the evening breeze to take away the stench.
Children shriek behind me, chasing one another up and down the many pathways and through the falling water of the Fonte dos Amores.
A man selling coconuts has just accosted me—I had to buy one so that he would go away. Once more, following Garnet’s precepts has led me into more danger than I am comfortable with. But perhaps I like it that way, for if I did not, surely I would learn better?
And now it is I who interrupts the story! Forgive me. The truth is that while I wish I could claim such selflessness as Garnet has claimed for me, the thought of leaving our blessed isle had been growing on me too. I did not wish to go, but I did wish to find out, if possible, the fate of the Ardent, which had become separated from us in the storm. The great gnawing of my heart would have been eased if I had known that one at least of my charges had survived. I wanted, too, with a strange penitential desire, to stand my court martial and maybe—this was my hope on those nights when I could not sleep—to have the court rule that only storm and sickness was at fault in causing our disaster, not I.
These concerns would not have been enough to goad me into attempting an escape if Garnet had only been happy. But having him there unhappy was intolerable, and so we had to leave.
I would not like to think it of myself, but perhaps the decision was so easy to reach because I had no real belief in its success. We had tried to raise the boat, which was lodged fast between two boulders, and failed. I could not see that circumstances had changed in the meantime to make our success more likely. And from the weight of the wood we took from the island’s trees, I suspected it would not float at all.
This indeed proved to be the case, but Garnet was not deterred. “We can break the boat in half, recover the pieces as they float to the surface, and then mend her.”
With rocks for tools and sharks circling overhead, this plan seemed impracticable. But I had not reckoned on Garnet’s gift for getting his own way. Those gods he is always talking about? I believe they favour him too much. That or the sheer power of his personality bends the world to suit him, as a lens bends light. However it was, we had not been three days on the work before everything changed.
I was hauling the boat’s broken mast and a chunk of worm-riddled keel up the beach when Garnet’s excited shout pealed on my ear like a church bell. I looked up, saw him perched like an incongruous bird in the branches of the tallest tree on the isle. Framed against the pellucid sky, he was waving his white shirt like a flag.
I dropped the mast and ran, leaping up the inclined ground, excitement and sick dread warring for possession.
Garnet had set a fire going, covered it with leaves, and smoke was beginning to filter through the canopy of branches. The island’s birds hurtled into the sky in a twisting, protesting flock dense enough to set the lagoon in shadow. But neither of these signals was needed, for barely quarter of a mile from the long, north side of the main isle, a three-masted frigate was riding at anchor. They had already begun to heave out the boats.
Garnet and I looked at one another. Without a word said, we flew into a frantic state of tidying comparable with that of a new wife when her husband’s mother makes an unexpected call. Ah, no, even his metaphors are rubbing off on me. I mean we tidied like a ship’s crew whose captain has seen the admiral put off from shore for a surprise inspection. We dressed to perfection, rolled up the hammock, swept the clearing, set the lid on the water barrel, and covered over the two plucked plovers we had meant to roast for dinner. Then we stood side by side, at attention, and I think from his quick, nervous breathing that, despite his smile, he shared something of the shattering strangeness I felt on seeing other people again for the first time in so long.
They burst into our clearing, rifles in hands, their faces closed and grim. Incredibly, they wore British uniforms, and behind them on their ship the Red Ensign fluttered in the wind like a long-stemmed poppy. The marines’ red coats hurt my eyes, so bright they were. Men ringed us both, keeping the guns levelled upon our faces, and my astonishment and joy at unlooked-for rescue faltered at the look in their eyes. “Gentlemen,” I said, watching the same doubt dim Garnet’s big grin, “you are an unbelievably welcome sight. How did you know to come for us?”
“None of that.” The marines parted and a lieutenant strode through. He examined the clearing, and us, and raised disapproving eyebrows at the single hammock. I reeled. I could not believe any of this, and it was a while before I collected myself enough to notice he still wore his cocked hat.
“I am Captain Harry Thompson, of HMS Banshee,” I straightened my coat. The buttons had tarnished in the salt air, but the gold braid still shone bright. “I expect you to uncover before me, sir.”
His mouth writhed like a serpent. He turned and fixed me with a snakelike gaze from pale and piercing eyes. “What is this fucking impertinence? Uncover before you, pirate? On your knees!”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Sergeant.” The word was the only warning I had before a rifle butt to the back of my knees made me stumble and fall forward. As I struggled not to sprawl on my face, someone caught my arms and manacled them behind me. The sound of a scuffle and Garnet shouting, and then the butt of the gun was driven into my skull and the world came apart in a burst of black fire. This was proving to be an unorthodox rescue indeed.
I woke. Even as I pieced myself together with clumsy fingers, long before I opened my eyes, I knew we were at sea. The rocking might have been dizziness, but that damp wind and the creak of sails, the turn of the wheel, the ting of the bell and knock of rope on mast was unmistakable. The sun shone acid bright at the corner of one shut eye. Beneath the other ran holy-stoned deck planks and a line of caulking, t
acky in the heat. Voices spoke dispiritedly above me until a racketing, metallic din cut them off and they grumbled into silence.
For a moment I lay, lulled by the familiar sounds, and a profound relief went over me. We were home. I would see my family again, and Garnet would attend his niece’s coming out ball. I would receive my judgement from a court-martial board of my peers, and perhaps be absolved of responsibility for all those deaths . . .
“You must let us out!” Garnet’s voice put an end to these idle thoughts. He sounded close above me, weary and hoarse and patient as though he had said these things a thousand times and was prepared to go on saying them until he was heard. “I am Lieutenant Littleton of the Banshee. This is Captain Thompson of the Banshee. We were shipwrecked. We have nothing to do with this.”
“What . . .?” I struggled to my knees, my head swimming, and he was with me at once, arms about my shoulders, steadying me. I almost closed my eyes, rested my world of aches against his strength, but as I looked around, I noticed for the first time the latticework of iron bands that surrounded us. I had woken in a cage, one of a dozen men crouched uncovered, unsheltered, on the quarterdeck of this unfriendly ship. Our fellow prisoners were watching us. Outside the bars, the lieutenant and midshipman of the watch had turned, regarding us like curious beasts in their very own menagerie.
It was as though, through long disuse, I had lost all the callouses on my soul. I felt the onlookers’ judgement as an unhardened hand feels the rope burn and cut as it pulls through. Over half a year I’d had to forget I was anathema, to forget I was a pervert, to forget I was something less than scum. I stiffened in Garnet’s arms, unable to bear their scrutiny. Looking down on me, he gave a little choking laugh, and let go.
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