Then I heard the baby’s cry from the cellar, and was forced to complete my transactions down there. As I entered the baby’s pathetic little chamber, I thought of Kate and the life which we could have lived, and—well, then. The memory was cleaned away.
Horton waits several minutes until he is sure Pugh and Hart have left the quayside. He looks back down at the old waterman, who has likewise stood stock-still and silent the entire time. He gestures all’s-well to the old man, who nods and sits down in his boat to wait.
At the top of the steps, Horton peeps over the lip of the quay. There is no one there. He looks back at the Zong. There is a light shining from the aft-cabin, so someone is still on the ship, though whoever it is has gone back inside. Presumably Ablass. Hopefully Ablass. With a small sigh, Horton climbs the last few steps up and makes his way to the gangplank.
It creaks when he steps onto it, but he doesn’t worry too much about making noise. An old ship like this is a cacophony of creaks and groans as it rolls on the water, even here inside Sheerness harbor. A dropped barrel, on the other hand, would draw the attention of whoever is on board, and while he is on the plank he will be plainly visible to anyone who happens to look. But he still has his sea legs and gets across the plank with little fuss, stepping down on to the deck at the other end.
He tries to remember the layout of the ship. The steps down to the lower decks are midships, toward the stern, and thus toward whoever is already on board. He looks back down along the deck and can see the flickering light at the other end of the ship. The light moves and by instinct he covers up his face with the wide-brimmed hat, his hands gloved in dark material. He sits on the barrel and presses himself back against the shadows below the ship’s rail as the ship’s captain steps back out onto the deck.
Williamson, now. He was a different case. An older man, not as pious and priggish as young Marr, perfectly willing to trade with one such as I. Only money mattered to old Williamson, the invisible hand of profit. I suppose that, in this, he was much like me, though his domestic circumstances were a long way from comfortable. But he reneged on our arrangement too, for reasons I know not. He told Benjamin that he’d promised another not to pursue the undertaking we had discussed, and that mention of another had chilled me. Like Marr, here was another mouth that needed to be stopped-up. Hart accompanied me to Williamson’s tavern, and the fool had panicked before our transactions had completed. We’d made our escape through the back of the tavern, leaving some alive inside, but Williamson himself was silenced.
The magistrates of Shadwell and Wapping pursued me over the weeks that followed. I had been careful in my transactions and had sought the opinions of many of those in the area as to the capacities of the magistrates. Those in Shadwell, it was said, were not fit for their purpose. Those on the river, however, were capable, but had no jurisdiction on the land. My former shipmate John Williams was to be the means of my own escape. It was a simple matter to steal the maul from his lodgings, but even then the Shadwell magistrates were unable to follow the trail I had laid out for them. I was forced to point out the way to them directly, and eventually they accepted the gift I gave them readily. And with Williams dead in his cell, the dead end I had pushed them down ended their investigation.
But then others became involved, magistrates with more imagination and application. I was arrested and kept for days, taken time and again before the Covent Garden magistrate, whose questions were as smooth and dangerous as his face. I began to worry then, for this man seemed in possession of knowledge which might serve to trap me, but then as soon as it started my incarceration ended, suddenly, two days ago. I came straightaway to my dead ship, and she was still here, waiting for me to return.
So the project can now start again. We will make the ship beautiful once more. Within three months I should be off the coast of Guinea once again, like I was all those years ago, with Drake and Tillert and grumbling old Cornelius. This time the Africans will know what a gun is and will not wait for us to shoot at them. They will be wiser, and cannier, but one thing is for sure: there will always be someone there willing to trade, and thanks to my investors I will have no shortage of items to offer them.
The time has come again. Everything is now in place. I walk back to the stern of the ship: my ship. There is no foolish Welshman to deface the rail with a knife and ponder his own glory. There is no Drake to smirk and sneer and then disappear when metal starts to cut into flesh. There are no pompous Royal Society Fellows, begging to be told my secret while desperately denying my very existence. There is only me, Billy Ablass, enduring in the face of time.
The trade may be banned. But the business goes on.
Peering over the brim of his hat, desperate to avoid showing any pale skin in the moonlight, Horton hides in the dark. During the day, he would be a hundred feet away from the captain, and plainly visible. Now, he is just a dark shape amid many.
The captain turns and walks up the ladder to the aft deck, above his cabin, and continues on back toward the stern. He is tall and walks with a noticeable limp. His long coat swirls round his feet, and Horton’s mind is suddenly awash with conflicting witness statements and depositions and the common themes that ran through them. A tall man . . . he had a limp . . . there was a tall man outside the shop the day before . . . a long coat . . . a young man, very tall . . .
The captain comes to a halt at the stern, his back to Horton. He puts his hands behind his back. Horton can see them, pale against the night.
His chance. He removes his shoes and leaves them on the deck, places his hat on his head, carefully takes up the barrel, and walks toward the stern, every step adding to the creaking shrieks of the ship’s wooden planks. He tries to feel the rhythm of the boat, to make each step in keeping with the language of the vessel, and he must succeed, because within seconds that feel like hours he is standing at the top of the ladder that goes down into the dark lower depths.
He steps down, one step, two steps, and as he passes into the lower deck the edge of the barrel catches the edge of the deck above and he ducks down all the way, unable to see if the captain has heard the noise or not. As lightly as he can he skips down the rest of the steps, the weight of the barrel carrying him into the darkness, before turning back behind the steps and gazing up at the square of night sky above him to see if the captain has taken any notice of the strange noise.
As he stops, he listens and listens. And there is something new, a more regular noise within the caterwauling of the ship’s structure. A step then a shuffle then a step. A limping gait, coming toward midships. His heart thumping, Horton moves backward into the darkness of the hold until something presses against the small of his back: the shelf onto which the slaves had been packed in for the Atlantic journey. As carefully as he can manage, Horton slides under the shelf and covers his face with the hat again, as the captain’s foot appears on the ladder coming down.
The long body of the captain shows as a silhouette in the moonlight from above the opening in the deck. He seems more sure on his feet on this ladder than he seemed on the deck, practiced at clambering up and down. Steadily but also blindingly quickly he steps down onto the lower deck, and then looks around, peering into the dark shadows.
His face is clearly visible to Horton now in the moonlight, and familiar. It is a face he has seen in crowds at funerals and gatherings ever since the death of the Marrs. A young, handsome, appraising kind of face, far younger than seems correct for the crimes Horton believes he has committed. The cheeks seem too soft, the lips too full to be in the face of a man who has slashed the throat of a baby. The brow is heavyset, though, and the eyes are in darkness. The hair is untidy but also looked after, apparently professionally cut. Something about the man’s bearing suggests authority and wealth. It is not the bearing of a young man.
And then the captain speaks.
“Anybody there?”
The accent is odd. Part West Country, part establishment, part something foreign which Horton recognize
s as distinctly West Indian, the cadence of several of his former shipmates who had grown up amid the islands and reefs and hurricanes.
“If there’s somebody there, best show yourself now.”
The captain waits. Five seconds. Ten. Half a minute. A minute.
“Careful, now,” he says finally. “Careful what you do next. If there’s someone there, best be careful.”
Then one hand grabs a step on the ladder, and he turns round and climbs back up again, into the starlight.
Horton waits and then waits some more. He hears that strange half-damaged step walking away along the deck, and then nothing but the waves and the creaking of the hull. Slowly, infinitely carefully, he maneuvers himself out from underneath the shelf. He stands, hoists the barrel back up to his chest, and makes his way back to the ladder.
Immediately below the ladder from the main deck is another, going down into the belly of the ship, where provisions would be stored for the voyage, lying directly against the outer hull. Horton climbs down, working essentially from memory now—memory of the plans of the Zong itself, but also a deeper memory of the essentials of an oceangoing vessel, its contours and its vectors. The ladder has a dozen steps, and somehow Horton’s old seagoing legs expect this and are not shocked with their contact with the bottom of the ship.
There are only inches between him and the water of the dock. The darkness is absolute now, although Horton does not need light for what he is about to do.
From his bag he takes out a coil of something like a longish length of narrow rope; it is a fuse, but nothing like any fuse he has seen before, seemingly constructed from a combination of rope, paper, and powder. He takes out a knife from inside his coat and works away at a stopper in the lid of the barrel. When it comes away, he works the fuse into the powder within the barrel, as Graham had explained earlier, and replaces the stopper, which has a small gap at its edge for the fuse.
He unwinds the coil, then picks the barrel up and slowly walks toward the stern of the ship, allowing its contours to show him the direction in the dark, unwinding the coil as he goes. After perhaps thirty seconds of slow walking, the barrel hits the rising inner surface of the hull, and he stops himself standing as there would be no room. He is now directly underneath the captain’s quarters. He places the barrel down on the hull, picks up the unwound coil, and uses it to guide himself back to the ladder.
Once there he takes something else from his bag. A tinderbox, dry as a bone, its charcloth carefully maintained. The one from Naar’s house, left at the bottom of the stairs. He settles down onto his haunches to set about the careful business of starting a flame. He strikes the flint on the steel abruptly, directly, acutely aware of the sharp noise he is making. It takes nine strikes before the charcloth ignites, and then he misses catching it on a wood splint and is forced to hold the charcloth directly against the fuse he has uncoiled onto the floor.
For a moment, nothing happens, and then the special fuse provided by Graham ignites in a frenzy of colorful sparks the like of which Horton has never seen, which light up the bowels of the ship, sufficient for him to see to the other end of the hold, where the little barrel awaits the arrival of the flame. “You will have between seventy and ninety seconds once the fuse is lit,” Graham had written.
For a moment, a destiny suggests itself, a deliberate self-immolation in the face of Graham and those faceless men who have dragged him down here to the hold of this hellish ship. Richard Parker throwing himself from the yardarm, all doubt and guilt vanquished in a single gesture of defiance and glory. Then he thinks of Abigail, and with that, he grabs a step on the ladder, and then strong hands have grabbed his hand and are pulling him up onto the deck above.
The captain has him by the arm, then he has him by the hair, and Horton shrieks as he is pulled up toward the captain’s face, toward a shining lethal sliver of knife-metal which catches the moonlight as it hovers before his eye, ready to take it out or slash at his throat. Horton smells the captain’s breath and feels the hairs coming away from his scalp and then the captain sees the colorful luminescence from the cavity below them and bellows something deep and ancient before hurling Horton onto that dreadful shelf which rings the lower deck.
Horton shrieks, again, as he slides onto the shelf and hits something hard, sharp, and metallic which bites into the space between his shoulder blades. He feels skin break and starts to scrabble away but cannot. He is caught by something snagged onto his clothing, and then recalls with sudden clarity the iron chains and manacles which line the interior of the Zong. One of them has him held fast.
From below he can hear the captain shouting and stamping, trying and failing to extinguish Aaron Graham’s fuse, and the inside of the Zong is humming, as if a gigantic swarm of bees had been released belowdecks. How much time has passed? Half a minute? More? His fingers scrabble down between his shoulder blades but he can feel nothing there, cannot reach around far enough to release himself, and how many more seconds have passed now?
His shoulders feel like they will pop out as he stretches manically, and fingers scatter across something hard and cold, snagged into his coat in that impossible place in the middle back where an itch can last for hours. Abigail, I am sorry he says to himself for the ten-thousandth time since his marriage, but almost alongside that thought he makes one final stretch, the sinews in his shoulders straining like the rigging of a doomed ship head-on to a murderous wind, and his fingers grasp the underside of the devilish iron thing at his back and with a desperate pull he is free.
That humming surrounds him and from the hold comes a sound like an enraged Minotaur held by unbreakable threads, and Horton is climbing, climbing into the moonlight, blood running down his face and his arms hanging almost useless by his sides, his shoulders livid with pain, his feet now on the deck and pushing him toward the ship’s rail as, from below, first a flare of light, then a ripple of wood and then a roaring, crashing percussion which helps to shove him up, out and into the night, falling into the water below as the old slave ship explodes into its essential parts and pours its guts down on the other ships, on Horton and on the old, watching waterman. The final thing Horton hears is a jolly tinkling, as dozens of silver coins rain down against the stones of the dockside before sinking into the black water, like an offering from heaven.
EPILOGUE
John Harriott watches the river, from his customary position at the window of the Police Office. He stands, as he likes to do, with his weight on his good leg, determined not to sit at the window like some old maid spying on her neighbors. Even at this late hour the stream is full of noise and movement. Lights flicker from ships at anchor and from the dozens of lighters and wherries which are still ferrying goods and people from shore to ship to shore. The river is as busy as any London street.
When he had first looked on this stream, decades before, all he’d seen was chaos. Now, he sees an emergent order, as if a new quality is rising up from these scurrying motions, like honey from a beehive. The quality is prosperity, he supposes. His own, but more importantly that of the country. A prosperity which must be protected and nurtured, like the spark of life itself.
Ah, but at what cost?
There is a discreet knock on the door and his big, ancient heart leaps in its chest. He growls: “Come in.”
One of the office servants opens the door.
“Mr. Graham is here, sir.”
It is the visit he has been anticipating, yet it feels as unwelcome as the bite of a mosquito. He does not turn from the window, leaning on his stick, his lame leg throbbing with exhaustion.
“Good. Send him in.”
His voice is its usual gruff self, calm and measured but with the old excitability bubbling beneath. He hears his old friend enter the room, and wonders if indeed they are still friends, or if the ballast of their recent history is too much for comradeship to bear. He finally turns from the window and sees Aaron Graham standing before the fire, head bowed and eyes looking deeply into the flames. The
magistrate has none of his Covent Garden poise this evening. He looks both older and more serious. It is, considers Harriott, probably an improvement, yet it feels like a diminution.
“Well?” he asks, and Graham visibly starts at the sound of his voice. He clears his throat, his face still fixed on the fire.
Is he ashamed to look at me?
“The deed is done,” says Graham quietly.
“There can be no doubt? Ablass was on the vessel?”
“My agent saw him go on and did not see him come off before Horton arrived.”
“The ship is destroyed?”
“I’m told it was the biggest explosion Kent has ever seen. They will be talking about it for years.”
“And Horton?”
Harriott’s voice catches a little, and Graham looks up at him then. He looks terribly sad.
“Constable Horton survived. He dived from the ship as it exploded.”
Graham looks back to the fire.
“Thank heaven,” says Harriott.
Graham says nothing to that. He does not look much in the mood to thank anyone or anything. Perversely, Harriott feels some sorrow for him. His political friend has been rather boxed in by events, it would seem. He cannot shout or bluster, as Harriott would. He has too much at stake. Graham has bent his personal morality to the snapping point in recent days. It is unlikely to bend back quickly.
The English Monster Page 35