Silver

by Andrew Motion

  I agreed with him, and did not need to look at Natty to know she would feel the same. We therefore continued to walk around the wall of the pen until we reached its gate, which I took great delight in opening, before I stood to one side and prepared to watch the creatures returning to their kingdom.

  I had expected this exodus to begin with the kind of glee that makes animals dear to us. But these creatures had become so used to living in fear of their lives, they did not immediately know what to do. There was some inquisitive grunting, some doubtful bleating, and a few flouncing leaps from doo-dahs who seemed determined to remind themselves they could not fly.

  By slow degrees, this randomness and uncertainty acquired a sort of purpose, whereby all the creatures fanned into a crescent inside the open gate, in order to gaze at the wide world that lay before them. None of them knew whether they were allowed to live in it. The emptiness of space seemed to hold them back. Or did, until one little pig, which must have known nothing but captivity all his life, came forward with the appearance of extreme caution, since he seemed to be walking on tiptoes, and passed before us into the wilderness.

  This example persuaded the rest to follow—pigs, goats, doo-dahs, one or two geese I had not noticed in the melee, and also a curious furry creature the size of a badger, but walking upright with large baleful yellow eyes, which bounded past making a high-pitched whimpering noise. Apart from this fellow, who seemed really desperate to vanish, none of them went quickly, but rather sauntered, glancing around as if reacquainting themselves with what they had forgotten, or had only dreamed, and making occasional comments to one another.

  Because the ground here had been cleared to the distance of about twenty yards, it was possible for us to watch this progress in a leisurely way, and to marvel at how nearly human it seemed. At the same time, the ties that originally bound the creatures into a kind of community gradually began to loosen, so that before they had reached the edge of the trees surrounding the compound, each one had made a particular association with its own kind—the pigs forming herds, the goats flocks, the doo-dahs a gaggle, and so on. When this had been accomplished, there was a final burst of what sounded like conversation—which it was difficult not to think must be a farewell. Then they strolled purposefully into the shadows and vanished from us.

  Mr. Tickle, who had recently seemed very tenderhearted about the animals, now became less sentimental—as I discovered when I turned around to make sure the pen was entirely empty. It was not. Slumped along one wall was a middle-sized sow, apparently unable to move. On closer inspection it transpired that both her back legs had been broken, though in what way and how long ago I did not like to think. In any event, Mr. Tickle was determined she should not suffer any longer—and the knife he pulled from his belt proved we could be sure of our dinner, before Natty and I turned to the last part of our work and left him to complete his own.

  This work of ours began with a hunt through the stockade to collect every scrap of loose and combustible material—logs, dried grass, sticks—which Natty and I then took turns to lean against the Fo’c’sle Court and along the sides of the two log houses. The longer we toiled in this way, the more fiercely my heart beat within me. At first I thought this must be a sign of excitement—I might almost have been a liberator about to burn the Bastille! But as I continued gathering and stacking, I realized it was anger I felt, and nothing else. Anger at what had been done in these places, anger with myself for thinking a journey to Treasure Island might have been a simple thing to undertake, and anger with my father for raising me in the shadow of stories I had not been able to resist. These were the things I wanted to destroy. These were the memories and grief I had to abolish.

  We did this work so carefully, it took us almost a whole hour—and by the time we were finished, the sun was melting its first long bars of crimson along the horizon, as if encouraging us in what we were about to do. After I had stared into this cauldron for a moment, I asked Mr. Tickle to lend me the tinderbox he usually kept with him to light his pipe—and laid it against the base of the Fo’c’sle Court. I had half a mind to move at once to the log houses and repeat the action there, but Natty prevented me.

  “One at a time,” she said with a slow delight, and together we stepped backward until we were leaning against the timbers of the stockade, where it abutted the graveyard. In this sense, I felt we were allowing the captain to stand alongside us, and admire our handiwork.

  For a minute I saw nothing more than a plume of oily smoke twisting from the rubbish we had assembled. But just when I thought we might need to encourage it somehow, a breath of wind came from the sea and buffeted the smoke into flames. These snarled very rapidly across the bench where Jinks had made his travesty of justice, and the chair in which Smirke had sprawled with such contempt, and the dock where Stone had laid hold of the accused. It seemed the fire had a particular appetite to destroy these things—seizing the timbers and scarring them with deep black corrugations before they raged into scarlet.

  By the time these flames had spread across the entire construction, the heat was tremendous—as if I were looking into an oven. The word “Mercy!” squeezed out of me, not because I wanted the fire to die down, but because it was much more furious than anything I had imagined—showering sparks and flashes and ribbons I thought might soon fly into the trees, and afterward incinerate every leaf and twig and branch and trunk on the island.

  I looked out to sea, gulping a lungful of cooler air, and saw the reflection of what I had done was shaking over the Anchorage. Every wave was tipped with gold, every hollow a seething mirror. There seemed no end to the extravagance. It rippled around the boulders of the White Rock and Skeleton Island, then quivered as far as the Nightingale—so that she seemed to be tethered in fire, but unharmed—and on toward the horizon itself, where the flames were renewed in the sunset.

  When I looked inland again, I found the thing I had thought was mine now had a life of its own. Several long flames had jumped from the court onto the roof of the two log houses, where they were feasting on the dirt between the pine trunks. The material we had laid against the sides was unnecessary—because the buildings themselves were so hungry for their own destruction. They seemed to will themselves to be ablaze, then wrecks, then nothing. As the roofs began to show holes, and the air rushed inside, a loud woofing roar broke out—which was the fire admitting that everything it had done so far was child’s play, and now it would show its true appetite and authority.

  I thought of the tousled beds I had seen, and the blankets, and the packs of cards, and the empty tankards—all the flotsam and jetsam of the pirates, all the humdrum apparatus of their lives, that had been made sinister and frightening. I thought of how my father had stood inside those walls as a child, and Mr. Silver, while they wriggled around the truth of things, lying and making up and lying again. I thought of their clothes, long since turned to dust, and their living flesh, and saw everything vivid, and crisp, and pure for a moment, then disappearing completely.

  This would have been enough for me, this ferocity of destruction. But I had not bargained on how the distillery might affect the flames. As they began to caress its walls, and jerked the latch of the door, Mr. Tickle laid a hand on my arm, and on Natty, and pulled us further down the slope until we were outside the stockade.

  From here I watched the fire pause for a moment, with all its scintillating scarves, its cloaks and ruffles and laces hanging suspended, as if the body inside them were gathering its strength. Then it lunged. Then it exploded. Splinters of blazing wood, whole logs, fragments of barrel, glass and metal, a piece of wall the size of a bed: all these leaped into the air as if they weighed nothing, while a blast of scorching air rushed across our faces and burned into our lungs.

  “Ah! Ah!” cried Mr. Tickle, whose face in the glow seemed almost like fire itself.

  I was not sure whether this was a laugh or a cry, but I echoed it nonetheless—“Ah! Ah!”—while the debris that had been flung upward
continued to hail down, some pieces sizzling on the grass of the compound, and others thudding onto the fresh earth of the graves we had dug.

  I will not say that was the end of things; the fires were still burning when we turned toward the shore at last, where our jolly-boat awaited us, and stepped aboard—Natty and I with empty hands, Mr. Tickle carrying his silver. I would say, however, that it was the end of something. As we set out across the red water, the scene we watched shrinking into the distance had a strange peacefulness. The embers of the court and the log horses still glowed very fiercely, and showed the shape of how things had been. But now the shadows of trees seemed to lean forward until they were almost touching the stockade. The island was already beginning to take back the darkness that had been stolen from it.

  Part VI

  THE WRECK

  35

  We Leave the Island

  THERE WAS LESS than a sea mile between the shore and the Nightingale; with our shipmates hauling strongly on the oars, the jolly-boat took us across in a matter of minutes. Brief as it was, this journey transported us from one world to another. Behind us everything was wreckage and death. When I stood foursquare on the ship again, all I could see was stoicism and life. Bo’sun Kirkby and Mr. Stevenson had arranged for several of our passengers to find quarters in the cabins below, where they were already asleep or resting. The majority, being reluctant to enter any confined space, preferred to remain on deck—where they sat, or stood, or leaned together, with their faces touched into red and gold by the fires still burning on the island.

  Mr. Allan and the rest had hung lanterns in the windows of the roundhouse, and also along the yardarm, which allowed me to see that care had been taken of everyone as they came aboard. A large tin bath stood in the prow, and to judge by the amount of water slopped round about, and the number of wet footprints leading to and fro, it had already been used and refilled several times. In addition, our crew had given some articles of their own clothing to our guests, which I knew because several of those I went to greet were dressed in a strange assortment of nautical shirts and trews, as though they had been sailors all their lives. Despite the fact that the Nightingale was now very crowded, and that as I walked from prow to stern I frequently had to step across curled-up bodies, or bodies flat on their backs admiring the stars beyond our rigging, this evidence of kindness brought a sense of order to what must otherwise have been chaotic. Despite the misery still evident on so many faces, I felt the beginnings of contentment spreading among us.

  As I shall soon explain, this mood turned out to be a deception—but we did our best to enjoy it, and told ourselves that our luck had changed at last, because our course was set reliably for home. This was confirmed when Mr. Tickle vanished into the galley with the carcass of the sow we had brought from the animal pen. His arrival provoked a great deal of busyness there, and the assorted cooking smells that were already drifting around the deck soon became delicious. In truth, this fragrance must have been a kind of torture for our friends, who had been kept in near starvation by Smirke, but they accepted their pain with good humor, because they knew it would soon end. One fellow I noticed, who grinned broadly as I passed him, had found our apple barrel: he held a stripped core in one hand, and a second apple already half-eaten in the other. I was surprised that others had not followed his example, and entirely finished our supply.

  When Mr. Tickle reappeared, he carried his silver ingot on a tour of the whole company. His fellow shipmates showed an exceptional interest, calling it names like “my beauty,” as if it had been a pet, but the Negroes were not so fascinated. One or two gathered around to admire, but the majority remained where they were on the deck, showing that peace and quiet were more valuable to them than all the riches in the world. After a while, this judgment seemed to affect Mr. Tickle, for he gently placed his treasure on the table in the roundhouse, and left it alone there.

  If anyone doubted the safety of our remaining store on the White Rock (which I admit Natty and I both did, now and again), we were easily reassured. As we waited for our meal, we wandered to the port side of the Nightingale and gazed in the direction of the little island. Its dark mass seemed to shine even when the sunset disappeared, as though the silver nestled inside its crater had suffused color and warmth throughout the surrounding stone.

  When our feast arrived—with the carcass of the sow already dismembered by Mr. Allan in his galley, and the glistening pieces carried above deck on several large plates with great ceremony—a satisfied silence fell over the Nightingale. This was the sort of hush I had never expected to hear on Treasure Island, or in its vicinity, and I felt my heart swell in my chest when Bo’sun Kirkby banged his shoe on the deck and demanded our attention so that he could say grace before we began eating. As he spoke, I looked around the circle of faces, all now smoothed and softened by the light of the lanterns, and felt certain for the first time that our adventure had not been in vain.

  The mood I am describing here could be called happiness, but it was mixed with sorrow about everything we had lost. Even as we found places to lean against the bulwarks of the ship, or looked across the dark water with pieces of pork shining between our fingers, it was impossible for our guests suddenly to forget their suffering, and for the rest of us to feel we had saved ourselves completely. Conversations were hushed around the lanterns, out of respect for the ghosts that hovered close to us. Songs, when they began as our meal ended, lifted into the sky above the Anchorage with more frequent reminders of sadness than joy—including one that I sang myself, which my father had taught me:

  I met a maid from a far country

  And she was passing fair—

  The prettiest maid I ever saw

  But fleeting as the air.

  I walked her through the land nearby,

  And showed her streams and trees

  I’d known since I was just a boy—

  All close and dear to me.

  I saw their peace and beauty set

  As clearly in her mind

  As sunlight in a river’s ice

  Or rain along the wind.

  And still she said, “I cannot stay,”

  And still she told me, “Love,

  Your country is the earth below;

  My own remains above.”

  To judge by the height of the moon in the clouds, it could not have been much later than ten o’clock when Natty and I realized we were almost the last awake—and went toward the place we had habitually taken during our voyage, which is to say the roundhouse. Here we found Spot waiting for us in his cage; he glared at Natty with such intense interest, his pleasure at seeing her might have been mistaken for anger. Then he tipped his head on one side and seemed to murmur, “Always too late, always too late”—which to me was entirely meaningless. If Natty understood, she did not explain, but blew gently across the bars of his cage so they made a noise that was at once dull and musical, like a muted harp. Spot seemed to enjoy this, and soon began preening his feathers very contentedly.

  Natty and I then took our places side by side at the little table. Most of the candles previously set there by our crew were drowned in their wax by now, though enough remained for us to see one another’s faces, and also the silver that shone between us. Natty ran her hand along its length as if she were stroking a cat.

  “It’s warm,” she said, and for a moment I saw again the gleam in her face that I had noticed when we stood on the White Rock.

  “Warm as blood,” I replied, which was a little theatrical of me, but showed we should not forget the price of our good fortune.

  Natty then leaned backward until her head was resting against one of the curved windows of the roundhouse, and turned toward the island. Beyond the creamy waves breaking along the shore, cinders of the log houses glowed with a strange pulse as the wind rose and sank across them.

  “Scotland saved my life,” she said; her voice was expressionless, as though she might be asleep.

  “He did.” My reply wa
s also soft, since I could tell that she was still wandering in the trance she had entered a few hours before; I thought in this condition she might speak more easily about things she usually kept hidden.

  “Do you think he meant to sacrifice himself?” she said.

  “His foot slipped,” I told her. “I saw that. He slipped as he jumped. But there’s no doubt what he meant to do—which was to save you.”

  “His wife died,” Natty said, in the same empty voice.

  “You mean he had nothing more to lose?”

  “I do mean that,” Natty said, and swung around to face me so suddenly that the glass creaked as her head pressed it. Her eyes were wide and full of tears.

  “Imagine,” she went on. “Loving a person so much, your own life is worth nothing to you.”

  I did not reply to this, but placed my hand on hers, where it lay on her knee, and kept it there. The fact that she did not move away, but tightened her fingers around my own, gave me confidence to ask for the complete story of her adventures after leaving the Nightingale. Her answer was the longest speech I had ever heard her give, and by the end we were seated in complete darkness, because our candles had entirely burned down, and the moon was obscured by clouds. I could not even see the bodies sleeping on the deck all around us.

  Everything Natty told me was very candid, and very affecting, and very reassuring—except that in conclusion she said Scotland had reminded her of her father. I asked in what way. “Age,” she replied. “Their age. If you cannot understand, you understand nothing.” I took this to be a reproach, although it was spoken gently—and so said nothing more, but unwound my fingers from her own and sat still for a moment, looking into the night.