by Paul Butler
George had until this moment retained an odd pride in being able to follow Whitbourne unseen. It was as though he had the admiral at a disadvantage. But now, as he hid in the shadows, shivering in the damp and cold, he saw his own actions the way others would see them. He was a vagrant, scavenging for scraps, nurturing risible fantasies of revenge. He was less than a cur at Whitbourne’s feet because he acted utterly in secret, following, plotting, stealing letters. Suddenly the only “sin” was to be on the wrong side of the silk purse and the well-armed frigate.
This is not at all how he had imagined things would be in the summer when he arrived in London, his own purse still half full. Then he had been infused with the spirit of determination and steel. In his heady confidence he had even imagined himself explaining Easton’s treacheries to the King himself, with the latter listening patiently, hushing his courtiers. He was prepared to fight openly with anyone from the Killigrew family once inside the court, to chance the accusations of treason or slander.
It took perhaps a month before he realized how misplaced such fantasies really were. He could get nowhere near the seat of power. Although he had taken pains to camouflage his slightly bedraggled appearance, it gave him away nevertheless. His urgent missive to the king, anonymous but written in a well-ordered hand, using quality ink and high-priced paper, was taken only grudgingly and passed inside the heavy oak doors of St. James’ Palace. It was one of many letters to enter through the guards that morning, he discovered. He remained in the vicinity, lurking, expecting any moment a military party to stride out through the gates in search of the letter’s sender and more intelligence regarding Easton’s treacheries.
Of course, nothing happened. The guards shuffled. The great oak doors opened and closed and occasionally a person of rank would pass through. But it was just like any other morning. Did it ever reach the eyes of the Sovereign? He had given an address for reply. But no reply came.
He turned up day after day with new messages, each a variation of the first. They pledged that he would reveal his true identity, a captain of His Majesty’s navy, if ever there was a reply. Three messages were all that made their way into the doorway of the Palace, the third only after protracted begging of some Italian merchant on unknown business. The merchant finally took the paper and looked at it in bewilderment as he sleepwalked through the entrance.
George’s demeanour changed, gradually and against his will. He could not prevent the mad desperation from coming into his eyes. The guards began to stare openly at his reappearance every morning. They would not let him near with any more letters and would bar his way if he tried to approach someone who was on their way inside. Soon they began to laugh, sensing in him the chance of sport.
Finally one day, on the smiling invitation of a guard, George approached and was immediately thrown down by two of them. He landed hard enough to break a tooth and taste the grit of the wet cobbles. All his remaining confidence oozed away and the options dwindled. One thing he could never do was reveal himself to any acquaintance of the Granthams. This meant he could not approach anyone who might have heard of him. So finally he was reduced to a shadow—following his enemies silently in the darkness.
“I was wrong to bring you here,” he tells Jemma at last. His voice is no more than a whisper, a soft echo in the silence. How on earth am I ever to get us out? he wonders secretly.
Jemma lays her head again on his shoulder. George hears her breath as she begins to form words. But she stops in a slight gasp. She remains unnaturally still and says nothing for a few moments.
“Are we going to leave?” she says, breaking the silence at last.
“Yes, I think so, if we can get a passage somehow.”
There is another pause. For the second time George gets the impression that she is forming words but not speaking.
“You must be angry with me for bringing you here,” he says. Her head does not move from his shoulder.
“No,” she whispers. “You felt you had to.”
The words are as soft as falling petals. Now George knows it is not his imagination. There is an earthquake trembling beneath, something immense she is not telling him.
He turns slowly and she lifts her head.
“We might have to go soon,” she says, a deep furrow in her brow. “Soon, I’ll be no good for travel.” She takes his hand in both of hers and her fingertips hover over his cold-chaffed knuckles. “I think I’m going to have a child.”
George gazes at her for some moments. Her cheek has become more hollow since coming to London, especially in the past few weeks. Her frame is more frail than before.
“I don’t think so,” he says gently, squeezing her hand.
Jemma laughs a little, showing the newly formed lines around her eyes.
“Poor George,” she replies, “you’re not really an expert, are you?”
“But how do you know? You look thinner to me.”
Jemma sighs, smiling sadly again.
“I just know. You’ll have to believe me.”
George thinks of Jemma’s poor sister, and how his own crashing lack of knowledge was revealed to him that time in the lower cabin. He squeezes Jemma’s hand again and falls silent.
As feet clatter on the staircases outside and tradesmen and women begin yelping about their goods, George absorbs the near certainty that Jemma must be with child.
Then a knock on the door interrupts his thoughts. George and Jemma look at each other and begin to shift. So secret has their life in London been that people seldom come to their door. When they do, it is occasion for frantic dissembling. Jemma hides while George opens the door a crack. If the visitor claims rightful entry, as in the case of the landlord or landlord’s agent, George tries to take on the aspect of a gentleman who, for some obscure reason, has installed his slave in a hovel while he resides in some unspecified dwelling nearby.
This knock disturbs him more than usual. He knows hunger and the oncoming winter has taken its toll on his appearance, and more tellingly, he now has no money. A man in a hovel with no money and a broken tooth is unlikely to persuade a visitor that he is really a gentleman of means.
Now they are both on their feet, George looks at the mound of clothes, at the dead fire and the scattering of rats’ droppings. Jemma starts arranging the clothes and blankets to make them look less slept in. The baby rests quietly.
The knock comes a second time and George’s heart beats harder.
Jemma looks terrified.
“It can’t be the rent,” George whispers, “it isn’t due until next week.”
He turns to go to the door and Jemma touches his arm, her face imploring.
“It might be safer to get it,” he says. “We mustn’t raise suspicions.”
He crosses the bare floor, pauses, then opens the door an inch or two.
On the other side flutters a distant memory—a woman, white faced, flushed cheeks with a bonnet in the plain Puritan style. Her pale blue eyes latch onto his with a sense of excitement and hope. It is Rosalind.
“George!” she cries. “It is you!”
“Rosalind...” the name tumbles from his lips in a cracked whisper. His face freezes, unable to create any expression beyond shock; his ears burn to numbness and a dull, tingly sensation travels over his cheeks and neck and forehead.
She comes nearer to the narrow gap he has allowed, her fingers running up and down the rough door frame in happy agitation.
“I knew you were alive! I knew it!”
George takes a half step backward. Rosalind’s eyes are full of joyful tears. She hasn’t yet noticed how furtive he is, nor how unhappily he has been surprised. If she has any hurt or worry it is clearly drowned in the euphoria of seeing him alive. Her ungloved hand continues to move up and down the door frame like a delicate starfish. She laughs and moves forward a little, pushing the door.
George takes another half step backward and lets the door open. It is fate, his leaden body tells him. There is only one way to let her know
, he thinks. His mind has quite seized up and any kind of explanation, even a true one, would be quite beyond him.
She enters and stands just over the threshold, apparently not noticing the room at first, nor its two other occupants who are dead silent.
“Let me look at you, my George.”
She reaches her hands up toward his face and feels his stubble with her palms, her eyes filling with an awful pity. “Admiral Whitbourne alerted me to your terrible condition. I had to come.”
“So Whitbourne told you,” he merely says. “I did not know he even knew I was in London.”
Only now does she seem discouraged by the fact he has made no move at all, neither cringing from her touch nor meeting it. She seems to wince as one might from an animal, once dear, which has become diseased and unreliable of temperament.
She turns from him and looks around at the room. Her eyes narrow at the sight of the withered floorboards, the few scraps of stale bread and the brown pellets of rats’ waste. “Still, I had no idea things would be this bad,” she says in a hushed voice.
She seems to take in Jemma and the baby with no special added horror. George wonders if Whitbourne has told her about them already. Jemma, for her part, remains large-eyed and motionless at the farthest end of the room beneath the window. She holds the baby, who makes a slight coughing noise.
Rosalind stares at him, a little impatient perhaps, as well as bewildered. She delves into her purse and withdraws a letter. She lets it fall into George’s hand as she continues turning, looking around the room.
George unfolds Whitbourne’s letter and lets his eyes fall on disparate phrases, “my dear young lady,” “extreme case of brain fever,” “evil lodging,” “company of a savage and wicked slave.”
Now she turns to him, her expression a combination of compassion and a kind of common sense zeal. “My dear George. The admiral is trying to save you from the bedlam. He thought any influence but mine might be too great a shock.” She softens again, tiptoeing toward him and reaching out her hand once more. “Be guided by me now,” she whispers, and her voice slips into an ancient chamber of his heart, making him think for a moment that he might have been happy with her once. He feels his face quiver with an emotion that is at once present yet long gone. Then he looks over to Jemma. She is beginning to cower with an almost pulsating fear, her hands wrapping the infant tighter.
George tries to let his face fall into the agonizing apology he thinks most appropriate for what he must tell Rosalind. But Rosalind smiles warmly and wipes away a tear. She has seen my vulnerability, he thinks, and believes it is her anchor into the old me.
“Food scraps!” she exclaims. “Why have you been starving yourself?”
Rosalind goes to the broom in the corner and begins to delicately sweep the worst offending articles into a corner.
George sighs and looks around at the floor. “I have no money,” he says.
“You see,” she says brightly, laying the broom aside and coming to him again. “You are too ill to even think of the right priorities! Before allowing yourself to go hungry why didn’t you at least sell your slave?”
George ducks as though receiving a blow. When he looks up he finds himself turned to the side, looking at Jemma; there is grief as well as fear in her expression now; her lip is quivering.
“She isn’t my slave,” he says simply, knowing this road is bound to lead to total disclosure.
“Then what is she?” Rosalind replies, playful and challenging.
He turns back toward Rosalind.
“My wife.”
Rosalind gives a curious laugh. She stares at George for some moments, hardly blinking, then laughs again. But this time the sound is edged with panic and a sinew on her neck comes into sharp relief. She turns to look at Jemma and the infant wrapped in her arms. George can see Rosalind’s expression struggling with the impossible. Her gaze remains on Jemma, who returns her stare, mouth slightly open, eyes wide.
“What have you done?” Rosalind asks quietly as though to herself. Then she turns and repeats to George, “What have you done?” Her hand reaches one more time toward his face, her eyes alive with a mix of pity and horror. This time her fingers do not make contact with his face, but withdraw, quivering. She gasps and begins shaking her head. “I won’t believe it.”
George looks down at her intently. “You must believe it. It’s true.”
Rosalind turns once more toward Jemma and the infant gurgling in her arms. She points.
“The child?”
“No.”
She gasps as though partially relieved.
“But the next one will be mine.”
She shakes her head again, then stares at him with dazed eyes. “You’ll be hanged. Before this day is through, you’ll be caught and hanged.”
Slowly—too slowly for George—she begins backing toward the door. A strange mixture of pleading and contempt remains in her expression. George watches her all the way. Soon she is standing in the entranceway holding the door. She is staring openly at both of them and gazing all around at the hovel as though the scene before her is so perfect and so spectacular a degradation that it is somehow exquisite; something that must be viewed over and over until it is burned forever in the mind, with every detail, every particle of dust preserved. At last she disappears from view, her footsteps descending.
George waits until he is quite certain she is gone. He turns to Jemma.
“We must leave straightaway. We have to be gone from England tonight.”
“But we have nothing!” Jemma approaches.
George fingers Whitbourne’s letter.
“I have a plan,” he says.
Chapter Sixteen
Richard has never seen the King at such close quarters. He is more familiar with the portrait that hangs in the Palace banquet hall. In the painting the King is attired in robes of state; he holds the orb and scepter, his head tilted slightly toward the viewer in an attitude that seems to convey both wisdom and nobility. The man in front of him now is a different kind of creature altogether. He moves backward and forward in his chair in an agitated manner. His face is a constant twitch of anxiety and perhaps annoyance. And his skin, far from showing the pink pure sheen of the Highlands as his portrait suggested, seems to be rather ingrained with dirt, oil or some other long-unwashed bodily sediment. There is an odour, too, wafting from him that would scarcely bear investigation.
“I had the impression, Admiral Whitbourne,” he says, pulling at his ear, “that I had sent m’a own fleet a year ago to seize and capture the pirate Easton. Now i’ seems you an’ Sir Killigrew here want me to shower him wi’ honours.”
Whitbourne bows his head slightly before answering.
“Your Majesty sees the matter most astutely,” he begins. “It is one of the great paradoxes of power that he who seemed a villain yesterday can be revealed as a true and loyal friend today.”
“In wha’ ways is Easton a true and loyal friend?”
Whitbourne glances across at Killigrew, who stands in a deferential pose. “All the time I was with Captain Easton,” Richard answers, “in every venture against our hated foe, the Spanish, he was motivated solely by his utmost devotion and respect for the greater glory of Your Majesty.”
The King swings his legs on the chair and appears to scratch his crotch. Killigrew coughs slightly.
“He canni be interested in ma’ glory if he mak’s me enemies I donni want.”
“Your Majesty, I am not defending his judgment. I am merely enlightening you as to his motivations.”
“But I hear it’s not just the Spanish he attacks. He tak’s ma own navy officers prisoner. I heard about Captain Pym and his young man...” He stops, clicking his fingers, trying to remember. “...Baxter. Pym said he kulled the young man for no reason.”
Richard bows again.
“I hate to contradict so fine an officer as Captain Pym, but the young lieutenant was entirely to blame. Easton gave me his word it was self-defence, an
d after weeks of serving with Easton for your own greater glory, Your Majesty, I have come to see Captain Easton’s word as the most sacred of bonds.”
The King stares at him for some moments. It’s a gaze of surprising penetration for so distracted a character. Richard finds himself wondering for the first time if the King will be as easy to persuade as Killigrew thinks him.
“Did you not have such a man of your own, Admiral—a captain?”
Richard bows and sighs. This is the most painful part, he thinks. “Indeed,” he replies in a reverential tone. “But the villains there, your Majesty, are the tropics themselves, the vicious sun and the tempestuous, wild emotions they can awake in a man too young and inexperienced to resist.”
The King leans forward. His tongue appears for an instant through his lips and he is motionless, waiting, apparently, for further explanation.
“Wild emotions?” he says at last.
Richard sighs.
“He fell into depravities too unspeakable to name.”
“Oh aye?” says the King, his eyes glistening.
“It is a shocking story to relate.”
“Shocking?” the King says, lips moist, clearly wishing to hear more.
Richard shuffles his feet. “And so I dare not offend the ears of my own dear Sovereign by repeating any part of his depravities.”
The King sighs and slowly leans back, apparently disappointed.
“All I can tell you is there is a chance, a slight chance, that his soul may be restored to him and that he may escape the bedlam. There is work being done in this direction at this very moment. I pray it may be successful.”
The King frowns and goes back to his twitching, distracted manner.