After Greenwich and Woolwich, the river begins to move back to its natural state as it shakes off the invasions of commerce and war. The landscape is indistinct and brown-green, with muddy banks, islets, and the occasional small hill rising back and up, either into Kent in the south or Essex in the north. The horizon is like the smudge of a child’s pencil on the damp air, painted in with occasional masts. Horton keeps close to the south bank, remembering the channels here but not looking forward to what is coming: the estuary, with its treacherous sandbanks and muddy non-edges, where even the newest charts can be out of date within a year or two.
It is approaching lunchtime, so he pulls his little boat in at Greenhithe, where a small cluster of well-to-do houses are squeezed between a hill and the river. He buys some ale and bread at the inn, watching small boats load up with chalk and lime from the pits inland.
After a half-hour of sitting, eating, watching and thinking, he climbs back into his dinghy, and sets off again. Gravesend passes by, and a small child out for a Christmas walk waves at him from the steps leading down to the river. Horton waves back, the small pinch of sadness at the sight of a child like a draft on his neck. He thinks of Abigail, back in their sitting room, probably reading one of her endless books on science or history while the fire crackles and families all around toast the Savior’s birth again, and again, and again.
And now, finally, he is out in the estuary, and his innate sailing skills begin to fail him. His instinct for the water is as strong as any man’s, but the currents are wild here, their shapes new and unrecognized. He is torn between the safety of the land, with its treacherous mudbanks, and the safety of the deep river stream, with its equally lethal currents and inquiring eyes.
He puts down a line to keep an eye on the depth, but the wind has picked up and he is doing more than eight knots now, a crazy speed for this little craft, and he has little capacity for doing anything other than keeping the boat upright and himself out of the water. The far Essex shore has dropped away as the estuary opens, and he clings as close as he dares to the Kent shore, aware that he is being pushed from the edge of the deep water of the central estuary onto the sandbanks which reach out from the blurred landscape to his right.
He sails in a state of panic for the best part of two hours, creeping eastward along the shore. The land is almost empty, farmland and marshes mostly, with the occasional squat Norman church, encased in an ancient graveyard, to tend to the souls of the local farmers. On the little beaches he sees a few grounded boats, usually heavy gnarled things dragged up from the sea by experienced hands. Smuggler territory, no doubt. The writ of the River Police ended miles before upriver, and since the advent of policing on the river these wild, desolate lands on the edges of London have seen a surge in illicit activity. In some of the houses up there Horton knows that ex-shipmates are involved in this gray trade, sheltering inside little houses and looking up at night from the raised land to see lights signaling from ships out in the estuary, meeting rowing boats from those ships down on the beaches and taking up the smuggled goods, shaking hands and exchanging coins in the nighttime sea wind.
Up ahead is the Nore, the ancient sandbank which stretches out from Sheerness and the second estuary, that of the Medway. The Nore where navy ships would group together like a gang of well-dressed dandies out for a night on the town, gold-glittered and boastful with their bright new sails. If the sun was shining, they were a marvelous sight, a panoply of marine construction, power, and wealth, prepared to set out for battles off Spain, off Egypt, in the Indies East or West, or to push home advantages in Gibraltar or Malta or Newfoundland. This would be their final sight of England, a view back up the Medway into the guts of Kent or over the flat, sightless fields of the Isles of Grain and Sheppey.
His thoughts have become distracted by his return to the scene of the mutiny, and he misses the odd mess of ancient groynes and ship-wood lodged into a sandbank off Hoo All Hallows. The rope he’s been using to check for depth suddenly snags, impossibly, and then the wind catches the sails and veers the boat suddenly starboard and southward. With a shearing wrench, an old piece of the ship-beam which formed the groyne tears into the side of his dinghy and immediately, to Horton’s horror, the seawater starts pouring in.
The boat is doomed, it is clear, and barely two miles from his destination at that. He is only twenty yards from the sloping shore, an unpromising combination of mud and sand, but the old sailor’s panic of swimming has surged through him. He’s been in the water only twice before, once off Portsmouth and once on the Nore. But now the dinghy is already half into the water. He keeps enough wits about him to pull down the sail, which is now as one with the wind and is churning the boat round wildly. He grasps his old leather bag, and holding it above his head he commends his traitor’s soul to God and jumps into the water.
Cold rushes into his skin and bones like remorseless fire and for a quarter of a second, as his feet descend through seawater, he imagines a bottomless depth below him, an impossible tunnel of dark water rushing straight down into Hell, but then his feet touch bottom, or at least a kind of loose, ill-defined boundary which will serve as a bottom, and he comes to rest with the water up to his chest. Then, another panic as he tries to lift his feet and finds them sucked down into the mud. He sets his eyes on the church of All Hallows, up there on the hill above the shoreline. Once again he mentally begs a favor of his creator and then yanks both feet out of the mud and starts an uncomfortable, freezing walk to shore.
He reaches it in minutes, but it feels like hours. Hours of a crushing cold which deadens his muscles and causes his brain to slip and slide in between memory and present. He even considers surrendering to these waters, within sight of the mutinous transactions of 1797, the events which have defined him. But then he sees the church again, and the edge of something massive around the promontory, toward the point where the clear waters of the Medway empty into the gray-brown muck of the estuary, and he pulls himself ashore. The images of Abigail reading a book and the child on the riverside are the memories which finally get him out of the water.
“Ashore” is only a comparative term here, of course. The edges of the land and sea are overlapping things, a sequence of gradations between liquid and solid. His feet continue to be sucked down into the mud, but the water is now below his knees and the panic is subsiding. The lizard self is pushed back down; the public Horton, calm and secret, starts to reemerge. After a few minutes of yomping across damp ground he finally reaches dry land, properly dry even though still surrounded by swampy marsh, and only then does he remember to bring his arms down. The leather bag is dry. He feels inside gingerly, and the rough metal edges of the coins meet his grasping fingers inside one of the many customized compartments.
It is perhaps half a mile to All Hallows Church, up the hill, and from there he can get his bearings, as the land is higher. The church is squat, flat, around five hundred years old, surrounded by a bleak little churchyard containing a few new graves in among the old. There seems to be no one around, but he can hear the turning of wheels from somewhere, and a distant sound of metal on stone.
As he passes the church, the rudimentary track he is on forks, running westward one way down a fairly substantial track, while the track he is on bends away toward the south. Where the track splits, there is a tiny wooden sign with lettering burned into it, naming the westward route which has presumably taken people back toward London, 25 miles away.
The sign says Ratcliffe Highway.
The cold that has been sitting in his bones since the boat sank deepens a notch. He looks back up this other Ratcliffe Highway, which skims the high ground on top of the Hoo peninsula, across to the gray infinity behind which is the Thames and London. For a moment, this ancient church seems to stand at one end of a primitive line of power which connects this grim shore with the smart little house at 29 Ratcliffe Highway, that other Highway where the impoverished hordes gather for work on the docks and spend their wages in a desperate dance
with death and deprivation. For a moment, the bodies of Timothy Marr and his family could be lying here, in this cold churchyard, whispering their secrets to him.
He turns his back on this new discovery, and sets off down the other track, south and eastward toward the Grain Marshes.
It is a walk of perhaps three or four miles, less direct than the sea route, the road taking him around Yantlet Creek and across the Grain Marshes, toward a small hamlet around the Church of St. James. There he hopes to find someone who can take him across to Sheerness.
Beyond this second church is the point at which the Medway pours into the Thames estuary, its clear blue waters giving their name to Sheerness, the harbor, fort, and town on the far, eastern side of the Medway from where he is now walking. The huge southern bend in the Medway hides the great towns of Chatham and Rochester, back upstream, where another great naval dockyard churns away in the face of an opposing world. Sheerness was intended to be the staunch guardian of the Medway’s mouth, its Garrison Point Fort fortified in a panic under Charles II soon after a Dutch fleet sailed, without obstruction, down the Medway and deep into Kent, to the despair of a cavalier court.
For a century and a half since then Sheerness has been a bastard port, a hacking-together of wood and mud and old men-o’-war deliberately beached to form a breakwater. A town of sorts has formed onshore, but many families still live in old hulks out on the water, their masts hewn away like the blasted limbs of sailors, their decks roofed over with cheap timber. Half a dozen of these massive floating workhouses line the edge of Sheerness, which like the Hoo peninsula is on the boundary between sea and land, its mudbanks extending out a hundred yards into the estuary before they suddenly drop away into deep water, the deep water which allows enormous men-o’-war to sail out of Chatham and muster out on the Nore, just offshore.
The sound of metal on stone is louder up here, and Horton knows where it is coming from. Back behind the fort the great dock builder himself, John Rennie, is once again working his bricked-in alchemy, carving out a massive stone dock within Sheerness, just as he gouged out the guts of Wapping to create the London Dock. Sheerness is being turned from a bastard hybrid, a make-do naval base, into something more in keeping with Britain’s ambition. Work on the new base had started less than ten years after the Nore mutiny.
He walks down into the little hamlet. The walk has warmed him a bit, even in this cold Christmas air, but he is still freezing, possibly dangerously, and the memory of that other Ratcliffe Highway has supplied its own kind of chill. There is an alehouse here, and inside he finds an old waterman who is prepared to take him across to the other side, and a fire he can warm himself by while the old man prepares his boat. The flames breathe life back into Horton’s bones. He recalls tracking a whale off Newfoundland, seeing it rise and sink into the freezing waves and marveling at the heat in its blood. He needs that heat now.
Eventually, the old man’s boat is ready. It’s a sad thing, its sail full of holes and its hull covered over in repairs both professional and amateur. It creaks out into the deep water of the estuary, and in a matter of only minutes it ties up to the side of one of the great hulks, which Horton has pointed out to the old waterman. It is the Sandwich. One of the Nore mutineers, now emasculated and home to a few dozen families down within its depths.
It is Horton’s old ship. It is like rediscovering a beautiful young girl, now in her dotage, her hair gone and her eyes dull and her hands rough as they churn through another woman’s washing.
A ladder is let down for him. Someone has been charged with watching out for the visitor from London. The old waterman from the alehouse heads back across the estuary to his beer and the fire. Once up on the now covered deck Horton looks around him with a nostalgia so intense that it actually feels like a presence in his stomach, but it is only for a moment. The roof that has been built over the deck is low and it no longer feels much like a ship. More like something from which the life has departed.
He is taken belowdecks. The man he wants is living, with his family, on the spar deck.
This man, probably the same age as Horton but looking much older, greets him warmly, and his wife reaches up to kiss Horton on the cheek before showing off her children. Horton musses the hair on their heads and feels a familiar pang in their presence. He is generous with his time for them, kneeling down to be at their height and talking and laughing with them. After a while their father shoos them away, and the two men turn brusque and businesslike. Horton shows the other man the coins in his bag, and then the man opens a purse and shows him another, identical coin.
They talk for a while, the man’s wife and children looking on. They are hunched over the coins, comparing them minutely, and they talk of boats and sails and preparations for voyages. Eventually, the two men leave the woman and children, and climb down into another little boat which takes them into Sheerness proper, to the old harbor, little of which is left as Rennie’s new masonry encroaches.
Several ships are moored up in the old harbor. Some are unloading, but most are being subjected to some kind of activity: repairs, cleaning, even (for one of them) apparent demolition and decommissioning. The man leads Horton to one of these ships, a vessel which begs not to be looked at, which seems to hide behind its own lack of distinctiveness. They call up to the ship from the quayside and, when no answer comes, they cross a gangway onto the deck, and disappear down below.
JUNE 1741
Old Dr. Sloane woke to the familiar panicky symptoms dancing in his chest: shortness of breath; a heart galloping away like a terrified three-legged horse; a catastrophic tiredness which served to convince him, once again, that he would never again rise from his bed, that this morning had indeed brought The End.
The doctor has long been a student, a correspondent and, he trusted, a friend of the great Italian anatomist Morgagni. Now, as his dry and anxious mind considered the parts of his old body which seemed to be turning themselves off, one by one, he calmed himself by recalling those inner realms which were already coming to be known by the name of his friend: the sinus Morgagni in his heart; the columns of Morgagni in his anal canal; the foramina of Morgagni in his throat; the hydatid of Morgagni in his testes.
Hmm, thought the doctor. A theme I need to weave into my talk. Morgagni has to a great extent annexed my body by naming it!
These considerations gradually eased his breathing. His heart settled down into something resembling the steady but perceptibly weaker rhythm which would be the norm for the rest of his day. After perhaps ten minutes he was able to sit up. After twenty minutes he could call for his manservant and get ready to face the extraordinary day ahead of him, combining as it did an intensely pleasurable task with a painful, even terrifying chore.
A breakfast first, laid out for a hearty sailor but in fact barely picked at. Each day his servants repeated this performance, setting the table for a man in his forties rather than his seventies, for a robust man with robust appetites, not this wizened echo of the man who once shouted down a Jamaican pirate captain and called him an overindulgent idiot. Jamaica had been much on his mind these past few weeks, and today more so than ever. He had brought a lot more than memories back from that beautiful island, and now he faced having to deal with the most terrible of its exports.
After breakfast, he went back up to his chamber with his quiet manservant. The Negro’s father, Sloane’s original manservant, had caused outrage in polite London society when the doctor had brought him back from Jamaica. His use of a Negro manservant had not been unprecedented, but it was certainly rare and had thus been moderately scandalous. Nevertheless it had been very much the right kind of scandal, a coup de théêtre which had done the doctor a great deal of good in the long run. “Get the doctor with the nigger,” went the polite society refrain. “He’s good, and he tells the most wonderful stories while he’s draining your blood.”
The original servant had died a decade before, and the man’s son had taken over in the same role. The mother had b
een left in Jamaica. Neither of the Negroes ever mentioned her to the doctor, although both wept separately and secretly at their particular memories of her. The son was almost silent, dutiful, hardworking, and beautiful. He and Sloane had never exchanged more than half a dozen sentences at a time with each other. The Negro knew what the old man wanted, when he wanted it, and was always there to supply it. No one, least of all Sloane, had ever asked why it seemed so important to him that the job be done so well.
The manservant laid out the doctor’s clothes while the old man made his toilet, then helped the doctor into those clothes, a particularly fine set for this particularly important day.
After another hour the doctor was ready. The manservant followed him slowly down to the front door of the smart mansion, carrying the thick leather bag which contained the doctor’s self-prescribed battery of curatives and palliatives. Outside in the driveway stood an elegant coach-and-four. The small but immaculate mansion house was surrounded by fields and orchards, its proximity to the new developments of the West End making it convenient for visits to expensive clients while meeting the doctor’s desire for more bucolic surroundings. Indeed, on this warm spring day, the landscape reminded him more than a little of Jamaica, that luscious place where he’d first made his name and which still, every day, was in his thoughts.
The air was sweetly scented and clear, the sky was sharply crystal-blue, and the sun had that newly minted quality of an English spring. The manservant quietly raised his face up to the limpid light, while the doctor fussed around getting into the carriage, assisted by the driver.
The English Monster Page 25