Silver

by Andrew Motion

  The captain was the last we buried. By this time we had devised a little service to accompany our proceedings. Rebecca, the prisoner who could not be separated from her Good Book, and who spoke a little English, would read a passage of scripture; I would say a prayer; and the whole congregation, gathered in a ring, would give an “Amen” before those who had shovels began piling back the earth. My role in this was often difficult, since when I looked upon Smirke and Stone, and upon Jinks with his baldness and blisters, I could find very little compassion in me. They therefore went to their everlasting rest with a perfunctory hope for their life hereafter, and not much wish that it should contain the kindness they had denied to others. Monkey and old Turner, the two men I had killed myself, I did not look at.

  The captain, however, I wanted to bid farewell in a way that showed the particular affection I felt for him. Although I had the eyes of some fifty people watching, I knelt beside his body and spoke to him as if he could actually hear. I thanked him for his care of us during our voyage, and for the fatherly way he had looked over me. I said I did not doubt that he had behaved with a similar generosity in the earlier parts of his life, of which I knew nothing. I promised that when we returned to England, we would give a good account of him, and seek out his friends so that we could tell them how bravely he had died.

  All the while I spoke, a low murmur of assent came from everyone around me—although I dared not look at them, thinking that if I saw how much they sympathized, I would lose my self-control. I did not dare to look at the captain’s wound either, though I glimpsed it was very black and surprisingly precise in the center of his forehead. Instead, I kept my eyes fixed on his brown hair and his freckles, and the lines around his eyes that showed where he had narrowed them to stare into the weather ahead.

  When I had finished my eulogy, and heard Rebecca recite her passage from the Bible, and said my prayer for his soul, I leaned forward to touch him for the last time. His cold face, then his shirtfront, where the linen still seemed to hold a little warmth. As my hand pressed down, I realized it was not his skin I was feeling through the material, but something unyielding. I did not have to think, in order to understand. It was my father’s map, which the captain still kept in its little satchel around his neck. Before I was fully aware of my own actions, my fingers had fumbled at the buttons, thinking I must recover what belonged to my father, so that I could return it to him. When my mind caught up with my instincts, I stopped. I knew the map should be buried with the captain—so that the directions it contained would not be seen again. The world would have been a happier place if Treasure Island had never been found.

  No one saw what I had discovered and decided. They thought I had merely laid my hand over the captain’s heart, which in a manner of speaking I had done. As I withdrew my weight, I pulled his coat straight, then climbed to my feet and told the gravediggers to complete their work. They slid ropes beneath the captain’s body, hoisted and swung it, then lowered it slowly enough for me to watch his face sinking into the darkness. When the ropes had been pulled out again, I picked up a handful of the island’s sandy soil and threw it down—hearing it patter on the captain’s clothes with a hollow sound, like rain after a drought. With that I turned away and walked to the edge of the graveyard, where I could look on the open sea beyond the Nightingale, and contemplate the gray waves as they folded over one another.

  34

  The Conflagration

  I REMAINED IN this state of reverie for a decent interval, which ended at last with a silent promise to the captain that I would never forget him. Then I returned to my work.

  “Bo’sun Kirkby,” I said, no doubt interrupting his own private meditations at the captain’s graveside. Like the good fellow he was, he immediately stepped up to me, encouraging the rest of our shipmates to follow suit. We stood apart from the others, which I regretted since our discussion affected them directly. But they were not accustomed to determining their own fate, and I was not yet bold or considerate enough to include them.

  “Begging your pardon,” said the bo’sun, using the polite phrase that nevertheless told me he knew exactly what he wanted to say and do. “Begging your pardon, sir, we need all hands on the Nightingale before sunset, in case we’ve made the wrong judgment of those villains presently hiding from us, and they decide to have another dart at us after all.”

  “And in case they have another of them canoooes,” added Mr. Tickle, elongating the word to show he thought they were ridiculous contraptions. “We don’t want them boarding our beauty and sailing clear away. There’s only Mr. Allan and a handful more on board.”

  Although it seemed unlikely to me that a second canoe was lain up for such use, in view of the maroons’ great idleness and complacency during their sojourn on the island, I reckoned it was wise to be cautious. I repeated my opinion that the slavers were cowards, as well as villains, and would therefore not bother us—but agreed we should take sensible precautions. Natty evidently thought the same, and now joined in.

  “We must be smartish,” she said in her own voice—the one she had tried to deepen in disguise. Bo’sun Kirkby had never taken orders from a woman before, but seemed to accept that a revolution had occurred in his existence, and smiled broadly enough to show twice the number of tooth-pegs he usually revealed.

  “Thank you,” he said, and with no more to-do began instructing Mr. Stevenson and Mr. Creed to divide our friends into parties of a dozen each, which would then be ferried out to the Nightingale one after the other in our jolly-boat. Mr. Tickle and Natty and I volunteered to stay on the island until everyone had been safely taken away, so that we could stand against our enemies if they proved me wrong and decided to reappear.

  During all this discussion, no mention whatsoever was made of the silver, and when we would take that aboard. Common sense told me it could not easily be stolen away from us now, so might as well stay where it was until our other work was finished. The silence of the others on this subject seemed to prove they agreed—although Mr. Tickle, I saw, had removed his ingot from the jolly-boat and was carrying it with him wherever he went. When I asked him about this, he told me it was “for safe keeping,” and would be shown to Mr. Allan and the rest as proof of our good fortune when he returned to the Nightingale. All this was said with such childlike enthusiasm, I could not resent it.

  My second thought was more tactical. I reckoned that because it was now toward the middle of the afternoon, we might already expect rain to be blowing in from the east—as was usually the case. But a day that had begun by refusing us any sunlight in the morning was now sparing us torrents as the evening approached. This might have been a relief, except that gray clouds and sticky wind were hardly a pleasure; we needed to finish our work as quickly as possible.

  As the jolly-boat set out—with Mr. Stevenson in charge, and the remaining friends waiting as near as possible to the water, which showed how anxious they were to depart—Natty and I decided to return to the compound. This might appear strange, given how much we deplored everything that had happened there, but at the time it seemed a completely natural decision. We wanted to satisfy ourselves that recent ghosts had all been banished, and also to prove that its older specters—our fathers—had been set free.

  I had already noticed in my travels across the island how its scenery seemed to change according to my mood. As we came in through the southern gate, the same thought struck me again—but more strongly. While Smirke and his crew had been the kings of their empire, everything they owned had acquired a look of significant evil. Now they were dead, even their most terrifying instruments of oppression seemed merely gimcrack. The Fo’c’sle Court, for instance, with its peculiar fan-shaped wall, its creaking chairs and jury seats, turned out to be an utterly inept piece of carpentry. When I leaned against any part of it, such a groan rose from the joints, I almost expected it to fall to the ground. I might have leaned harder and made this happen, had the sound of its imminent collapse not planted a more ambitious
idea in my mind.

  As we continued toward the pirates’ log house, Natty told me more about the time we had spent apart, including her miraculous descent and escape along the ravine. She said she did not want to dwell on any particulars yet, but would lead me to the places where she had suffered, since they would be eloquent enough. When I saw the scrape marks her heels had made in the soil by the “staging post,” which showed where she had struggled as Smirke threw her down or dragged her to her feet, I seized her hand and held it tightly in my own. When we reached the shack containing the distillery, and peered into its dizzying smell of rot and fermentation, I felt her faintness as if it were my own.

  I had thought we might look into the log house after this, to get some idea of how the pirates had lived, and see where our fathers had made their negotiations with Squire Trelawny in the old days. But even as we stepped across the dingy little stream that ran from beneath its veranda, I felt sickened by the idea. There was such a hideous confusion of stains and gouges in the floor, and such a tide-scum of torn clothing and trinkets (including a piece of scrimshaw, that showed a naked woman sitting astride a dolphin, which I put in my pocket and still have in my possession), I could easily imagine how revolting it would be to go further.

  The open door showed I was right. In so far as the greasy light allowed me to see anything, it was all suffocating squalor—the floorboards entirely buried under rubbish, the beds rancid, the air choking with the stink of sweat and alcohol. Very bizarrely, the slender branch of a tree was propped in one corner, which I think must once have been covered in blossom, and been introduced as decoration; now it was leprous with the same mold that also flowered across the roof, like a corrupt imitation of the stars that are sometimes painted on the ceiling of a chapel.

  Everything I saw quickened the idea still hatching in my mind. It also explained why Natty, in a rage of disgust, pulled me away from the door and further up the slope toward the northern end of the compound. We did not need to see the quarters in which our friends had been kept—the captain had already shown me what to think of them. Instead we left the compound and followed a narrow path where fragments of black rock were scattered like coal; Natty explained it was the way she had been driven by Smirke and Stone.

  There was a note of excitement in her voice, and not the dread or terror I might have expected. “Come and see! Come and see!” she called like a child, running ahead of me and sometimes brushing her hand through the tops of the bushes, until she suddenly stopped and told me to be careful. When I came up beside her, I found we were at the edge of the same ravine I had discovered on my first visit to the stockade. I planted my feet as firmly as possible on solid ground and leaned forward—far enough to see the pine tree wedged between the two walls as she had previously described it, and to feel the cold breath of the deep earth rippling against my cheek.

  I also saw—and wished I had not—rags of flesh and clothing, as well as some white sticks of bone, lying on the bottom of the ravine some fifteen fathoms below. These were the remains on which Natty might have fallen—and although we both stared at them for a full minute, neither of us said a word.

  In my own case, I could not think of anything to express the shock and pity I felt. As for Natty, I assumed she did not want to think about the death she had so narrowly escaped. Later, when I remembered her tight-lipped face, and set it in my mind beside the sight of her gazing at the silver on the White Rock, I thought her silence might in fact be further proof that a seam of her father’s coldness ran through her. This did not make me feel any less fascinated by her; it only made me realize that I should be open with myself about what I liked in her personality.

  When we had gazed long enough, Natty and I turned to look at the Anchorage. Daylight had softened a little by now, and the first purple traces of evening enriched everything we saw—the straggling mound of Skeleton Island, which cast its shadow across the wreck of the Achilles; the feathery stump of the White Rock; the Nightingale at anchor; and the paws of wind making their scratches across the mirror of the sea. If I had not been so complacent about my safety, and so absorbed in my happiness with Natty, I should have paid more attention to the streaks of yellow that had crept into the clouds on the horizon, and realized our difficulties were not yet over.

  As it was, my attention was distracted by our jolly-boat, which we could see continuing its work in the distance below. It seemed that only one group of friends, including Bo’sun Kirkby, remained to be taken on board—and because the tide was now at its lowest ebb, these had walked out as far as possible toward the retreating shoreline, where they stood waiting for their deliverance. Mr. Tickle was fussing around them like a sheepdog, keeping them compact and tidy; I could not help thinking he would have moved more nimbly if he had not been so hampered by the weight of his silver bar.

  Everything about our mood and the occasion had now run down so far into quietness, it was almost a shock to hear Natty say she thought Mr. Tickle must still be anxious the slavers would suddenly appear, despite his own assurances to the contrary. I told her again I did not think this would happen, since they knew they would be hanged if they returned to old England, and would therefore prefer to take their chance on the island like Smirke and Stone and Jinks before them. Whether or not Natty agreed with me, the silence that lapped around us seemed to prove what I had said. There were no human voices in the foliage—only the metallic cries of parrots, and the chatter of small insects, and occasionally the deeper and more definite click-click of squirrels as they guarded their particular patches of ground.

  After we had listened to this unpeopled noise for several minutes, which was long enough to convince Natty even more deeply that we were not in danger from the maroons, I put to her the plan I had been devising. I told her I wanted to destroy the stockade before we left the island—to burn it until it had been obliterated, and could not be revisited or even recognized. I had expected this to surprise her but she replied quite calmly.

  “Why would you do that?”

  “Is it not obvious?” I said. “To destroy all memory of the evil here. To make the place whole again.”

  “Our fathers will be sorry,” she said.

  I looked at her in astonishment. “Surely our fathers will be glad? Your father is a reformed character. Mine had no need of being reformed. Why would they want to preserve the relics of so much suffering?”

  Natty hesitated for a moment, frowning as she stared down at the Anchorage and the miniature figures that remained on the shore.

  “I dare say you are right,” she said eventually, her voice very gentle. “And yet we cannot destroy it entirely. We can remove the evidence but that is not the same thing. What has happened has happened, and we are a part of it. It is a part of us. Forever.”

  Although Natty’s words seemed logical, and followed from what we had been saying, there was an element of mystery about them that made me turn toward her. As I did so, she pushed her hand into my hair and pulled down my face to kiss me. I felt her lips on my own, very warm and soft, and when our teeth touched there was a jolt in my brain.

  “Don’t you have a reply to that?” she whispered—although her voice sounded enormous.

  My heart was beating too fast for me to think clearly. “I do have a reply,” I said, hoping that I was answering the right question. “My reply is: you are right. Forever.”

  “Very well, then,” Natty said, and stepped away as suddenly as she had taken hold of me, looking directly into my eyes. “Provided we are agreed about that. Forever. And yes, we should destroy the evidence. We should destroy it now.”

  With that, and no more to prove what had passed between us than a smile, she led me back down the stony path toward the stockade and the shore.

  When we reached Mr. Tickle, the sight of his anxious face peering into my own for orders, and perhaps even for comfort, reminded me I should concentrate on matters at hand. There would be time to study the larger horizon, and the place Natty and I might take in
the world, when we were safely away from the island. When we were traveling home.

  I therefore became as pragmatic as possible, and explained that our plans had changed: we would now send the last of our friends and the bo’sun ahead to the Nightingale, and ask the jolly-boat to return one last time in order to collect the three of us. The oarsmen grumbled a little when they were given this news, but soon brightened when Mr. Tickle told them they would eat well as a reward for their labors, because he had in mind “a certain piece of work” he would perform in their absence.

  As soon as the boat had departed with the bo’sun and the last load of friends, Mr. Tickle led us inland through the rice fields again, and we came to the little compound that Smirke had used as a pen for animals. In the rush and confusion of the last several hours I had become so used to the sounds arising from the creatures it contained, I had stopped paying them much attention. But when these animals heard us approaching now, their voices rose to a new pitch of excitement, and made a tremendous orchestra of squeals and bleats.

  When we looked over the wall of the pen, we found the maroons had been as cruel here as everywhere else: the place was crammed with emaciated things trampling hock-deep in their own filth, which included the bodies of those who had not survived their deprivations. The stink was horrible. More touching still, because more surprising, was the sight of at least a dozen doo-dahs waddling among the pigs and goats and suchlike: the subtle blue of their breast feathers had been dulled to a plain gray by the squalor in which they lived.

  Mr. Tickle (who had continued to carry his silver ingot throughout this excursion) now slid his treasure into a pocket of his topcoat, where the weight of it almost pulled this garment off his shoulder; he then pressed both his hands over his nose and mouth. Although he would not remove them when he spoke, and therefore muffled everything he said, I understood him well enough. He had brought us here in the expectation of selecting some specimens to take on board as a reward for our labors, but had taken pity on everything he had seen.