He and Reynolds had considered, without discussion, a quick sprint back to the water to wave the pinnace back, but the wind had already blown the small ship away, and neither of them wanted to look like a coward in front of the other one by yelling across the water for assistance. They were young men, still, even after all the things they’d seen. And the motivation for their volunteering for this jaunt remained; if they were the ones who got back with news of a freshwater source, they’d receive warm praise from Hawkyns and, who knew? Perhaps a slightly larger share of whatever was in the hold. Taken together that was payment enough for putting up with mysterious bodies on tropical beaches.
So they sucked in their bellies, stuck out their chests, and pretended a bravery they did not feel. They inspected the ominous ravaged body and the remains of its belongings, and then they spent a fruitless couple of hours cutting through the low-level undergrowth of the island’s interior, trying to make their way through and find freshwater and, hopefully, a source of food. The foliage wasn’t thick, but it had an annoying green persistence which at first enraged them before eventually exhausting them. They slashed at it with their ineffective swords, and occasionally they forced a way through, but the green stalks still scraped their legs with enough force to draw blood.
It was after three hours of exhausting and painful hacking and ripping that they spotted the bloodstained tree. It was in the middle of a clearing that looked ominously man-made within the recalcitrant green. The tree was on its own in the center of the clearing, its pale bark stained deep brown from head-height down, and grooves ringing the tree at waist-level and inches above the ground. In the right place to tie up a man, Billy thought to himself, and something in Reynolds’s slow face said that he too had reached something like the same kind of conclusion. And there was something about the way the vegetation lay that indicated a body had been dragged from the tree out toward the beach where they’d landed. The dead Spaniard, presumably.
They walked around the tree several times, inspecting it and becoming aware that men had indeed made this clearing, that men had killed the Spaniard, and that it was quite possible that these men were still around somewhere. There had been no time to share this thought with each other when the Indians appeared.
Billy wasn’t sure exactly how he knew they were Indians, because they looked very different from the native savages he’d seen in Venezuela and at Rio de la Hacha. But their skin color was the same, their eyes were similarly pinched and Asiatic, and their black hair shone, though less healthily than the Arawaks he’d watched from the ship in Santa Fe.
There were four of them: three young men, and one very, very old woman, whose ancient face and stooped shoulders couldn’t mask the fact that she was, apparently, far more hale and hearty than the three men who accompanied her. They were thin and shivering, and their eyes had a yellow sourness. Even from the edge of the clearing, Billy could smell death on them.
“God’s teeth!” said Reynolds, instinctively moving behind the bloody tree. He held out his sword toward the three men. Billy didn’t bother. He couldn’t see any trouble coming from these sad, emaciated men. The old woman, though, was perhaps another matter.
She stepped confidently, if a little shakily on her ancient limbs, into the clearing. She was holding a staff that looked like a stiffened snake, thick and colorful with a snarling serpent’s head, which she raised above her head, and began to speak in a strange, rasping tongue that meant nothing to Billy. A little after she started, one of the men started speaking as well, in something more recognizable to English ears.
“He’s speaking Spanish,” said Reynolds, sounding miserable and scared, still holding out his sword.
“You speak Spanish,” said Billy. “What’s he saying?”
Reynolds lowered his sword and squinted at the male Indian, as if trying to read his lips. The renewed purpose seemed to have weakened his fear.
“Wait!” This to the old woman and the Indian man, who stopped talking for a moment and allowed Reynolds to catch up. Something about their calm patience, their wish to make themselves well understood, was professional and crisp. They looked like diligent (if near dead) factors on an errand onshore to conduct a dockside transaction.
“He was speaking too fast, but I think he said something like ‘our people are dead.’ Over and over.” Reynolds indicated with his hand that the old woman should continue, and she did, the voice of the young man sounding the Spanish words behind her, slightly out of time. Reynolds tried to keep up.
“Yes, our people are dead, that’s what they’re saying, over and over, like a song. Oh, wait, now it’s changed—something about boats carrying things that kill, no, carrying death, I think she means, or killers, or people who bring death, something like that. He says, I mean she says, their time has reached a finish or an end, and now they are leaving, but it’s a strange word, more like that story from Egypt. Exodus, that’s it. But the boats brought a great evil, a great wrong, and now they will place a curse on the ones who came here, they will allow one to escape, while one must stay and carry their curse back over the sea, to the place where the boats came from and to which they must one day return.”
Reynolds blinks, as if only just realizing what he is saying.
“This sounds bad, mate, doesn’t it? What do they mean?”
The old woman held up her arms, and the young man who was translating looked down at the ground, as if to shield his eyes. She raised her eyes to the sky, and Billy thought he could hear something, something like the hum of a congregation inside a chapel. He looked around him. Were there more people in the trees? The woman started to speak again.
“I can’t hear him very well, what’s that noise? Jesus, are there more of them? He’s saying something about a power, a great power, she’s calling to the great power to come down. She’s talking about—what?—she’s talking about a ‘half-lit place,’ about living in a half-lit place where nobody enters and nobody leaves, and she’s asking the power, she’s asking it to choose, to choose between . . . Oh Christ, she’s asking it to choose between us, to take one of us and to leave one of us in that place, to send the cursed one back with the evil that came with the ships . . .”
Reynolds’s voice changed then. It stopped stuttering and stammering and for a moment the embittered, self-pitying David Reynolds, man of Lancashire and son of a farmer, stood up straight and spoke with the authority of a Lutheran priest.
“Our people are dead.”
“Our people are dead.”
“Your ships have brought death to us.”
“Death is the ending we have all been taken to.”
“Our people are coming together again in the houses of the gods.”
“For the death you have brought us you must stay in this half-lit place.”
“Our people are dead.”
“Our people are dead.”
Reynolds’s head whipped back at that last repeated dirge, a gurgle came from his throat, and he fell to the ground. The humming from the trees stopped, like a blown-out candle. The three young Indians moved back into the trees, leaving the old woman staring at Billy. She said something in her local tongue, and her cold professional eyes softened momentarily with something like sympathy. And then Billy ran.
The trees were humming again and within them Billy could see brown bodies running alongside him, running and humming. It was all around him, above, below, even within him, ringing off the bones in his chest. He ran with his hands over his ears, the vicious green growth slapping him in the face and eyes, but he didn’t care and barely noticed. The humming turned into a whoosh, and it sounded like water sluicing into the air. Like water from a great fountain.
Within the humming, he could hear the chattering and screeching of those who were running alongside him, seemingly accompanying him rather than chasing. His own breath was huge in his chest. Blind panic thrummed through him, and he had no idea, none whatsoever, of the direction he was heading in.
Something sh
ot through the air from his left, and then to his right an arrow appeared in the trunk of a tree, its shaft and feathers vibrating, the thunk of its contact seemingly unrelated to its arrival. Then another arrow thrust through the air into another trunk, and then a third arrow hit him in his left-hand side, his chest exposed by his madly reaching arms, which were up in front of him to try and claw away the undergrowth.
He felt the arrowhead grind into his chest, between his ribs and then, impossibly and impertinently, it entered his heart. Something else too: a sense of a dark cloud enveloping within him, shooting through his blood and climbing up into his brain, and he thought of the Arawak poison he’d learned about in Santa Fe. And then, as the humming seemed to stop and an Indian’s laughter rang out like a parakeet in the trees, Billy died.
When I woke up, from a dream of women and riches where the only sound was of a constant humming, the arrow was still in my side. I could still hear things in the trees: voices chattering in unknown languages, a scream, a cackle of laughter, the screech of a bird. But eventually all the noises stopped, and all that was left was the sound of the sea somewhere nearby. Even that awful sound of rushing water had stopped, as if somebody had turned off a mighty tap.
There was pain, enormous pain. My heart felt like it had been torn into pieces, and the Indian poison had done something to my sinews and muscles such that they all felt as if they’d been stretched to a breaking point. I reached down and pulled the arrow out of my side, and after an explosion of an even greater pain I felt relief. It was passing extraordinary, to feel my heart restart itself as the arrow came out.
I did not question what had happened. I was alive, it seemed, despite everything. I thought briefly of the fountain of youth, and that sound of water. I got myself to my feet, and started walking toward the sound of the sea. Before very much longer I got to the beach.
I waited an hour or two, sitting in the sand and considering my fate, and then I went back into the trees, and found the clearing again. I did not feel brave or afraid going back in there, merely a flat sense of obligation. I dragged Reynolds back to the beach, which was surprisingly close to the clearing—we must have wandered in an almost complete circle. The feet of my dead shipmate reestablished the marks which had been left by the dead Spaniard and whoever had dragged him here, however long ago. There wasn’t a mark on him.
I didn’t eat or drink that day, and I didn’t sleep that night either. I just sat, my hands moving in and out, in and out of the sand, my thoughts on Kate and England and not, definitively not, on the words of the old Indian woman and what they might or might not mean, nor on the obvious fact of my survival. There was no moon, only starlight, and at some point in the night there were more noises from the trees, and what sounded like a scream.
On the second day, in the middle of the morning, I began to notice that I did not feel thirsty or hungry anymore, though the pain in my side was as great as ever. My heart felt like there had been a hole punched into it. I fixed my eyes on the horizon and thought of Kate, but somehow her face had faded and that strong pull, which had felt like a rope around the world dragging me back to Stanton St. John and her, weakened (but still there nonetheless, an intense little tug on my sore, poisoned heart). And then it seemed to me that the dead Spaniard started speaking to me.
So here we are.
The voice was loud and clear and entirely in my head. It had a thick Spanish accent. I considered the possibility that it must be coming either from the dead Spaniard or from inside my own head. I had heard tell of this, of men at sea imagining voices were speaking to them, particularly men at the extremity of thirst and hunger, who had seen things they did not think to ever see. But was I at such an extremity, given I felt no thirst nor hunger? I decided to speak to the dead Spaniard.
“What has happened to me?”
Do not fear, your boat will return. Your destiny is not on this island.
“What has happened to me?”
You met the old woman? She seems to have presented you with a gift which was not offered to me.
“A gift? What is the gift?”
The gift of fulfilling your destiny.
“What is my destiny?”
Ah, who can answer this question? All I mean to say is that you must have confidence in your immediate future. You appear to be blessed, Billy. You have traveled far and many men have died around you, and yet here you are, a pearl in your pocket, a slaving share waiting for you, and a woman at home who cannot sleep with worry for you. Reynolds is dead, you are alive, and perhaps that humming in the forest was hungry Indians or perhaps it was the fountain of youth. It is enchanting, is it not, to think on destiny?
“Are you real? Or are you in my head?”
What is the difference?
I grew tired of listening to the Spaniard speak. I moved down the beach and put my feet into the cold water. Were mine the first English feet to be washed by these particular waves? Was my emaciated kidnapper’s arse the first to feel this wet sand? My buccaneering boots were lying on the sand behind me. I was tired and hot and afraid. I was an abandoned sailor, a marooned adventurer suspended on the edge of a peninsula which these past fifty years had been called Florida.
And yet, I was alive.
Something was happening to my vision. The edge of the horizon, which had been straight when we first arrived, was now distinctly wavy. The colors around me were beginning to wash out. My eyes were aching and sun-dotted and dried-out and locked on the liquid horizon. Out there were Hawkyns and Drake, or at the very least the pinnace which had dropped me here in the first place. They should have been here yesterday, which wouldn’t have saved me or poor Reynolds from the Indians. But I wouldn’t have had to sit here with a dried body and a fresh one for company.
My fingers pushed wet sand around in between my legs, probing and releasing, probing and releasing. My eyes kept watch on the horizon while my brain churned through all that had happened to me in the eight months since I had arrived in Plymouth. Gulls were screeching, reminding me of the first time I heard that noise. And then the voice spoke to me again.
Billeeee.
I looked around at that, my tired dried-out neck snapping slightly as my head whipped left and right and my streamed-out vision came momentarily back into focus, the greens and the yellows of the island pouring back in.
Billeeee.
“I do not understand how you can be talking to me.”
Of course not. This does not happen.
“You mean hearing the voices of dead men in my head?”
I have things I need to tell you.
“How is Kate?”
Your wife? You still have concern for her, then?
“We only married the week before I left for this trip. Of course I have concern for her. I need to return with money. She is the reason I sailed with Hawkyns.”
She being Kate? Or she being money?
“Kate, of course. But I am stranded on the other side of the world. I didn’t bring back the money I said I would and she will die alone and destitute. Because of me.”
And what of the terrible things you have done? Will you tell Kate of these?
“Terrible things? What terrible things have I done? Is it not a husband’s duty to provide for his wife, to secure her future?”
In Our Lady’s name, you are a naive fool. You will get off this island.
“Really?”
Really. I have told you already. Your destiny is not to die on this island. That has all changed now.
“Changed?”
Yes, changed. Did you not listen to what the Indian woman said?
19 DECEMBER 1811
Thomas Anderson, a constable of the parish of St. Paul’s, Shadwell, pulls on his cherished old peacoat and opens the door of his little house near the top end of New Gravel Lane, just south of its junction with the Ratcliffe Highway. The house is dirty but cozy in the way that only a house occupied by a single man can be. He steps out into the street. His street.
The evening is warmer than it has been for weeks, and the lane is relatively quiet after a long period of busy, clattering days when it seemed that every Londoner, rich or poor, had decided to pay this part of Shadwell a visit. There have been similar outbreaks of public interest in the bloody tragedies of the poorer districts of the metropolis, but never one like this. The funeral of the Marrs was the high tide of this clamoring attention, but it is now fading off. The newspapers remain watchful, the story now shifting in nature to a more political subject—the complete failure of the local magistrates to find the killers. The wealthy have returned to their apartments in the West End and the city. The poorer people left behind in Wapping and Shadwell have seemingly decided that, for the time being, they are safer in their beds than in the local alehouses. Which is odd, thinks Anderson in his slow solid way, when you think that the Marrs were massacred in their home, not in any tavern.
New Gravel Lane runs north to south, from the Ratcliffe Highway down to the wharves that line the river, parallel to and east of its sister thoroughfare, Old Gravel Lane. Both get their name from the gravel which for centuries has been taken down these streets to the river to be used as ballast for the empty colliers returning to the northeast, the same gravel which makes up the raised terrace on which the Highway sits, an ancient feature left behind by the Thames as it meandered north to south and cut down into the earth over the millennia. The land is higher and drier here than it is down by the river, and in some cases the ground-floor windows of the houses are at the same level as the top of the dock wall to the west.
Before Wapping proper was reclaimed, this is where the original community congregated. The higher ground could be more easily built upon and required no Dutch experts to facilitate its draining. The southern ends of the Gravel Lanes continue to form the beating heart of Wapping; despite the development of the dock they have kept their ramshackle, squeezed-in nature, and now have the character of a cutoff island. Houses, inns, and shops line both sides of New Gravel Lane; at the southern end, these buildings sit in front of warrens of lodging houses and other dwellings of evil reputation. This is the place where grim-faced sailors in meager shared dwellings nurse terrible hangovers and frightful dreams while their heads knock against their sea chests.
The English Monster Page 13