The Devil's Mask

by Christopher Wakling

  ‘You here in search of your tongue, lad? Or can I help?’

  I shifted my weight to my front foot and drew myself to my full height. ‘How was the voyage?’

  The man scratched at the hair bristling from his open collar, which ran uninterrupted into a mess of beard at his throat. ‘What’s your purpose in asking?’ he said.

  ‘My purpose? That’s my master’s business, owed to the Dock Company. But I’m also curious for my own part as to whether or not your voyage was a successful one. Perhaps you can begin by answering that?’

  ‘No, I can’t.’

  I took a step forward and the man held up a hand.

  ‘Which isn’t to say that I wouldn’t if I could. But I didn’t sail with the ship, Sir, so I’d be taking a liberty in guessing how those that did found the voyage.’

  The man explained this as if to a half-wit, but at least he’d dropped the ‘lad’ in addressing me as ‘Sir’.

  ‘No, all that sailed with her has vanished ashore. Bar the stragglers. If you’re quick you may still find one or two sloping around.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Which is understandable, considering. No matter how much they enjoyed the scenery afloat, there’s things they’ll have missed.’ The man scratched at his throat again, becoming expansive. ‘But if you and the Dock Company are really asking whether she turned a profitable trip, I’m looking around me here and I’m thinking she might have done. They stuffed her full. I know that in every bone.’ The man’s hand moved from his throat to the back of his neck. He glanced up. ‘Still, it’s a marvellous help, the loading gear. That should make sure we get the job done on time.’

  I looked up too as the crane, trailing its chain and an empty hook, swung back across the deck. Somebody barked an order and the man flinched, then continued more gruffly, ‘Provided nobody gets in our way, that is.’

  Eleven

  Although the hook passed well above my head, I took a couple of steps backwards and followed its progress with my eye. The Captain was standing at the rail of the upper deck. He appeared to waver there, silhouetted against the rushing sky. It seemed he’d been watching the conversation, for he now forced out a smile – the silver shards in his beard twitched – and called down, ‘Good morning to you. Maybe I can help.’

  I shaded my eyes and nodded and skirted a deflated mountain of tarpaulin to make my way up to him, pocketing my notebook again in order to hold on as I climbed the steps. The Captain met me at the top with his hand extended. As I shook it, the sun broke through again and the two of us were enmeshed in a net of shadow cast by the empty rigging and masts.

  ‘I’m here on behalf of the Dock Company,’ I explained. ‘My client wants particulars of your latest voyage.’

  ‘Captain Charles Addison,’ he said smilingly. ‘A pleasure to meet you …’

  ‘Inigo Bright, of Carthy and Co.’

  ‘And I’d be pleased to furnish you with whatever “particulars” I can,’ the Captain went on. ‘What are you after? Details of the goods we’ve traded are all set out in the ship’s ledgers. As is an account of the delay we suffered. The storm damage. It’s all in the log. Our limp back to Speightstown. That’s Barbados. The refit costs.’

  The Captain still hadn’t let go of my hand. He pumped it one last time and the white daggers either side of his mouth twitched upwards again. There was something odd about Addison’s eyes. They were red-rimmed, sunken deep beneath his weathered brow. He held my gaze and I blinked. The pupils, that was it. Given the brightness, they were too black, too large, too round.

  ‘The log you say. And ledgers. Well, I’m sure my client will want to inspect both.’

  ‘You’re welcome to them. All of it.’ Addison waved at the mass of goods stacked on the deck and, smiling at the joke, said, ‘Everything’s … quite literally … above board.’

  The Captain’s garrulousness did not suit him. It was as unnatural as the light now flashing in his eyes, which appeared less reflected than released, as though it were burning from within. I let him go on.

  ‘Yes, we were away longer than expected, or longer than the owners would have liked, because in a sense they should expect it, don’t you see? The Windward Isles. Wind! Christ, did it blow. In all my years. See the mizzenmast, this one here?’ Addison advanced across the deck and kicked the foot of the mast in question. ‘Sheared straight off, below deck! What with that and the damage to the forecastle. But what did us was the rudder. It sprang clean apart. That mast killed a man coming down. Took his legs off and punched a hole in the foredeck for good measure. Waring couldn’t save him. We couldn’t go on. It was God’s will that I got us back round the north of the island and into port.’

  It seemed Addison wanted me to doubt what he was saying, or at least to question it so that he could restate its truth. He scratched the palm of one square hand with the fingers of the other now, itching to go on.

  ‘Killed a man,’ I prompted. ‘By breaking his legs.’

  ‘Yes! Not just broke, though. It took them clean off. Look, come below. I’ll show you the new joinery, whole sections, green timbers, the repairs amidships.’

  I let myself be led forward at the Captain’s insistence. Had Carthy spoken with him already, prepared the way for a visit? I could think of no other likely reason as to why Addison had required no persuading, no warrant, or other evidence of authority, no proof even of who I was.

  I followed the Captain down the steps and across the weathered timbers of the main deck. His rolling gait first appeared to me as right for one accustomed to life on board a ship, but then he stumbled against a low spar and missed the rail he clutched for and ended up down on one knee, his hat awry. He pulled it off and slapped it against his stocky thigh and shouted ‘Gulls’ Eyes!’ as he stood and punched the hat roughly and set it back in its rightful place, and I suddenly suspected that the man must have been drinking; at the very least, frayed nerves had put him in this discomfited state.

  ‘No harm done I hope,’ I said quietly as I waited for him to go forward again towards the hatch.

  We made our way below. I had not set foot on a ship such as this since my passage to England as a small child but immediately, before my eyes had a chance to grow accustomed to the dark, the smell of the thing gripped me as something primal and familiar and horrific. There had been a strong, purifying breeze on deck, but even with the hatches open and the hold all but emptied, the dark interior of the ship filled me with claustrophobic dread. It smelt of rotten meat, gaseousness, death. I stifled an urge to wretch. One hand was still wrapped tight around a ladder rung: it was all I could do not to bolt straight back up it towards the light. As well as the horrible gloom and smell, the awareness that I was not on land but afloat intensified in me: I felt it as a ghastly weakening in my legs. The ship, tethered tight, was barely moving, but its gentle nuzzling at the dock, the imperceptible bumping and chafing of wood against stone, was magnified in the confinement of the hold, so that to me it seemed the ship was menacingly unstable. I locked my knees, fearful I might otherwise sink to the floor.

  ‘Come along. Mind your head. Wood against timber, timber on wood. That’s it, Mr Bright, through here. The mast sheared straight through the bulwark, took a wall of shiplap with it. Infernally heavy. And these timbers here, and those ones, they were splintered by the blow. Something the matter?’

  Having staggered after the Captain through a series of low doors with raised sills, past cramped storerooms disgorged of their contents, I now drew up short on entering the wider space between decks. It being impossible not to, I pressed my palm to my mouth and nose. The smell here was … raw. The air that bore it had a thick, unholy quality, cloying as earth dug from a grave. A wad of revulsion rolled through me, from my stomach to my chest to my throat, and this time it broke over the back of my tongue, flooding my mouth with sick. I fought to swallow it back down and contain the next wave: the sensation was so overpowering, the effort of resisting it so obliterating, that for long moment
s I had no idea what the Captain was saying, much less why I had followed the man down here, what I was looking for. My very awareness of where I was faltered; every sense, every shred of reason, all of it dimmed.

  ‘… and Waring. That’s the surgeon as was. Well he … impossible to staunch. No point wasting … he said, if I hadn’t … we lashed the man down, against himself you understand, but there was no need … my God … quickly faded. It was an almighty squall, you see … a proper blow.’

  I took in the new joinery the Captain appeared so keen to highlight, blond wood whose rough-cut grain was still beaded with sap in places. Against it the old timbers looked like something burned and buried and dug up. But they had held firm. Addison stroked a length of black plank and explained how nearly the ship had come to wrenching entirely apart. Perhaps the memory of this recent scare was to blame for having unhinged the Captain? I tried not to breathe in through my nose and nodded with him.

  ‘But she’s a marvellous tough tug. The squall would have stowed many a newer vessel in the locker, I’m sure of that.’

  My legs still swaying beneath me, I steadied myself with a hand on one of the ship’s ancient spars. Instantly I recoiled: the woodwork had the greasy feel of cold meat.

  Addison stumped off further into the hold, pointing this way and that at the refitted interior as if by doing so he could conjure the nightmare the ship had endured. There was something frightening in his enthusiasm. It was manic, sharp-edged. I could think of no reason to hang back, however, and followed the Captain deeper into the hold’s recesses.

  ‘We were broadsided by the swell! The sea shipped itself through that hole, dropping us three feet nearer the waterline. I tell you, by the time we made port, the waves were lapping at the waist!’

  Pawing at my coat-tail to rid my hand of the ship’s clammy touch, I managed a further sympathetic nod. I did not feel I was beneath the waterline so much as interred; the planks of the ship’s hull and deck seemed the walls and lid of a buried coffin. My breathing was shallow, confined to sips of the rotten air. How on earth did sailors manage to survive the long months of a transatlantic voyage? The tour of the empty hold continued aft, past a storeroom strewn with filthy straw. Perhaps disturbed by the sound of our approach, a rat sped out of the open door, around the Captain, and straight over the toe of my right boot. I kicked out instinctively, but missed; the rat fled.

  ‘You have to be quicker than that to catch them,’ Addison grunted. ‘The log’s still in my cabin. As are the ledgers.’ He pointed past the stairs to the upper deck and continued, ‘Back this way.’

  I faltered. The light pouring through the hatch into the ship intensified at that moment, the sun having emerged from behind clouds above no doubt, so that the block of brightness in the hold appeared suddenly celestial. I walked towards it. ‘No need,’ I said. ‘No need.’

  ‘Why ever not? The delay is all accounted for, written down in black and white. You’ll need to see it, won’t you? Ink! It runs in lawyers’ veins, does it not?’

  ‘It does,’ I muttered, my foot upon the first step.

  ‘Well the log’s taut rigged, Sir.’

  I climbed towards the light. ‘I’m sure it is. You’ve no objection to my taking it back to the office, have you? My master will want to review it …’

  ‘As you wish,’ Addison muttered, disappointed. ‘As you wish.’

  Twelve

  Regaining the deck, I found myself blinking and sucking down deep draughts of air. The stink of the port had never tasted so good. I lifted my face to the sun and felt the weight of another shadow pass across it: the crane boom swung from ship to shore where the crate it carried was swiftly unhooked.

  ‘They’re making short work of it,’ Addison said with satisfaction. ‘Mind you, they need to. The Venturers took five years to erect proper lifting gear when it was needed two decades ago. As with the lock, too little, too late. Still, they’re not entirely stupid. With just the one crane they can command an exorbitant price for its use.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  The Captain’s face seemed too mobile again in the bright sunshine. ‘Yes, well,’ he said. ‘If you’ll wait here I’ll fetch the necessary.’ He turned on his heel and made for his cabin.

  The chain drifted back high above the deck trailing its empty hook. That Addison had volunteered to give me a guided tour of his ship was clearly an aberration; his hotfooted errand to retrieve the ship’s log seemed so out of character as to be faintly absurd. Now that I was on deck again and feeling better, I suspected I’d made a mistake in not accepting the invitation to enter the Captain’s cabin; I might have spotted something in it, something useful. I watched a stevedore catch the hook as it swung to the deck and stab it nonchalantly into the tangle of ropes above a pallet stacked with casks. Still, if there had been anything untoward in his cabin, Addison would hardly have offered to take me there. The chain rattled itself straight and took the strain and jerked the casks up off the deck to swing immediately sideways in an arc that again cut the air above my head. I stepped back instinctively, before the hook tore through the webbing and one half of the pallet dropped and the casks slid sideways and fell the thirty feet to the deck. One of the barrels smashed a section of the ship’s rail; another – filled with rum – exploded as it punched a dent in the ship’s deck. And a third cask hit the man who had attached the hook in the first place. He was bent double over a block and tackle when the barrel struck him. In snapping the man’s back as it fell, the cask’s route to the deck was softened: it did not break open but rolled away lazily across the planks, and as the sound of its rolling died, I realised that the deck-hand had been whistling before he was struck.

  One minute a tune, the next nothing.

  Instantly, the hot smell of rum swam up from the deck.

  I ran forward to the man’s side. I had never seen a dead body before, much less a man killed, but I had seen both now, I knew that for sure. There was no blood, and the colour beneath the man’s skin had not faded, but the ugly awkwardness of the accident was reflected in the utter stillness of his face. It hadn’t even had time to register surprise, much less pain. The blow had been fatal: there was nothing anyone could do. Why then was I working with another of the deck hands to straighten the corpse into a more natural position? Who was I trying to comfort?

  Addison was swiftly back up on deck. He broke in upon the circle and his barked questions sounded like accusations. He swore at the stevedores and summoned the crane driver and cursed the ship’s surgeon, Waring, for not being there, though the Captain, too, appeared to understand at once that the man was beyond medical help. I retreated a few paces. The crisis, either in itself or because it had eclipsed me, seemed to have given Addison back some of his authority. Within minutes the body had been removed from the deck and the work of unloading the ship began again. A boy – of no more than twelve – set to work clearing the broken casks away.

  When Addison turned to me again, his voice was gruffer than it had been before.

  ‘It’s all in here,’ he said, thrusting a leather satchel into my chest.

  I took the bag.

  ‘The log, the ship’s documentation. Etcetera.’

  ‘It was the man’s own haste that did it,’ I said.

  ‘Hmm?’

  ‘The accident. The hurt man (somehow ‘dead’ would not come out of my mouth) hitched the load to the crane. Hastily. In case you were wondering if anyone else was to blame. Not the crane driver, or another hand, just the man himself. Though perhaps if he’d been allowed to work at a more measured pace …’

  Addison regarded me a while, a yellow incisor working to still his lower lip. ‘Perhaps,’ he said eventually, but could not stop himself from going on. ‘Perhaps pondering, ruminating and whatnot are of use in lawyering. But I can’t see that dallying would have helped here. No, Sir. On board a ship, sloth does everything but sharpen a man’s instincts.’

  Thirteen

  Amidst the rush of the quay, I sa
t on a bollard to eat a minced beef pasty I had bought from Cousins, the baker. Today more than usual, the warm and wholesome smell of the place, in contrasting so vividly with the docks, had been irresistible. I flicked my foot at a gull. It cocked its head and swaggered just out of reach.

  It wasn’t the Captain’s apparent callousness in the aftermath of the accident which troubled me, but the truth in what Addison had said. Sloth, or drudgery, or thoroughness – call it what you will – did indeed blunt a man’s instincts. Poring over documents in search of accounting discrepancies had dulled my own eye. If the Captain had not pricked me with his jibe about lawyering, I might not have noticed. But now, on the quay, I could see every detail, the boy’s bare feet, the depression in the deck (like the flattened skin of a bruised apple) where the barrel had hit it, the shard of wood the boy was about to sweep up, branded with a letter: W. And there, beyond the broom, the rest of the barrel’s lid, with the remainder of the stamp. I took a bite of pasty and blinked back the initials: TC.

  There was nothing untoward about the Belsize, owned by the Western Trading Company, unloading a cargo of barrels stamped with the Company’s logo. Nothing untoward at all, not when considered rationally. But to have seen a man killed by such a barrel cut through rational thought. It was an omen. My instinct told me that although the documents in the satchel across my knees were no doubt all present and correct, Captain Addison was covering something up.

  The seagull had tacked up to within kicking distance again. You’ve got to admire these birds: nothing short of a blow will warn them off. I stood up and tore the remains of my pasty in two – I was less hungry than I had thought, anyway – and tossed it at the gull’s webbed feet.

  Fourteen

  Kitty didn’t want to go in the first place but her brother Edmund said it would be worth their while if she did. He needed somebody to help carry the buckets. Full, they’d be heavy. The track from Leigh Woods to the river’s edge was steep. Going down wasn’t a problem; you could hop, skip and slide down empty-handed, but the gorge was a trial coming back up, never mind lugging a load.