by Jeremy Page
‘The father is an ogre, that is the sum of what I know of the man. I am only in contact with Clara now because it’s behind that man’s back.’
I couldn’t decide whether Bletchley was being open or dishonest in his responses. He appeared to be both, and I was in danger of making a fool of myself. I decided to take a bolder approach, thinking it might cause the breakthrough I required.
‘It is strange, but I believe Clara has not always been her name.’
A flicker of vexation flashed across his face, but it was fleeting and may not have meant anything. He had the tendency to try out expressions, even when he was alone. Even while he slept by the stove, with his blanket wrapped around him, his face flinched with tremors and twitches.
‘An intriguing theory,’ he replied.
To stop at this point would have been maddening for me, but I could tell Bletchley had little interest in continuing. ‘Was she once known as Celeste?’ I asked.
‘Celeste, you say? A pretty name—she would be deserving of it. We have discussed her charms and attractions at an earlier occasion, have we not? But Mr Saxby, I do not quite understand you. You are suggesting she is two people?’
‘One person, but with two names.’
‘How queer. You have a curious mind. But in truth there isn’t any one among us who is one person. We are all many personalities. Now if you will excuse me, I have much thinking to do.’
I reached out and held his elbow, frustrated by his evasions. He looked surprised, staring at my hand as if it was something he could not comprehend. ‘You are holding me,’ he said.
‘Edward …’ I wondered how to continue. ‘What is the nature of your friendship with Clara?’
He turned in my grasp, a little hostile. I thought of him wrestling with French, how he had forced a stronger man up by sheer tenacity. ‘She is my cousin,’ he said, properly. ‘More than that I do not know it is any of your business.’
‘She cares greatly for you.’
‘Yes, she does. We have this—’ he tapped his head. ‘A connection.’
‘My point is that she cares for you, and I do not wish your actions to hurt her.’
‘My actions?’
Our exchange was rapidly slipping away from my control. Already, several of the men had noticed I was restraining Bletchley by the arm. I adopted a kindly tone towards him: ‘This voyage appears to have changed you considerably.’ I let go of his arm and he deflated somewhat, as if I had been bolstering him.
‘Yes, that is true,’ he conceded. I glimpsed a relief in him, that he was able to acknowledge it publicly. ‘The journey has not been as I expected. I have told you, Eliot, about the expression the seal had, when I shot it? I can see that it troubles you for me to mention it again. But I am still haunted by it. And this ship is haunted by it, also.’
‘The ship? In what way?’ I asked.
He chuckled, as if it was clear to anyone who bothered to notice.
‘You will have to explain,’ I pressed.
‘The Esquimaux are interesting people,’ he began. ‘It is their belief that all things have a soul. Not merely man, but also the animals and the world at large. In this manner, all things are connected by a continuation of life that we have little understanding of. If you wish to know what troubles me and forces me to wait by the stove night after night, it is because this journey has made a great imbalance. We have filled the hull of this ship with dead things. It is the weight of their souls that has caused us all to suffer.’
I listened with alarm at the elaboration of his thinking. Nights of vigil at that stove had enabled him to construct something quite wild.
‘Some creatures have several souls,’ he reflected, to himself.
‘You were fully aware of the nature of this trip before you started,’ I tried. ‘Why, you even had guns made for you, with engraved stocks for the purpose of your hunting …’
He scoffed. ‘Those guns!’ he said, disgusted. He looked on the verge of tears, haunted by the man he had once been, a man he now wished to deny. He stared at me with an appeal in his expression I had never seen before. His mood was very volatile. ‘Illness is a small death of the soul, and I have been ill, Eliot, as have you. I recognise things in your eyes, my friend. Deep secrets. I see it.’
‘What do you see?’ I asked, cornered.
‘Damage.’
I wanted to escape him. I felt my blood pounding in my ears.
‘My remedy has been extreme,’ he continued. ‘May I tell you?’
‘You must.’
‘I have been tying myself to my bunk,’ he said, ‘so that my soul might be freed from my body. It is a practice of lustration performed by the shamans of these communities we have visited. I can see you are horrified.’
‘I am attempting to understand you, that is all.’
‘My conclusion is that the ship and all of us upon it have committed a wrong. It is full of the dead and we have not been forgiven. This ship is carrying a migration of souls, but it is upon a route not of their wishing.’ He looked at me as a teacher might, who has outlined a theory but is disappointed that the student cannot grasp it.
‘It is why we were in that storm,’ he explained.
‘Edward, I have to stop you. It was a storm, a natural occurrence, that is all—it was nothing else.’
He continued to look at me with disappointment. ‘It is why we were in that storm,’ he repeated, as if to say it once more would validate his theory, ‘and it is why the voyage shall end in disaster.’
This time, it was Bletchley who reached out to hold my elbow. ‘But do not worry. I will correct the imbalance,’ he said confidently. With an enigmatic wink he added:
‘I shall see to it myself.’
Occasionally, the distant coast of Greenland would appear, little more than a charcoal smudge above the horizon, as if a wipe of a cloth could remove it from the world. We had left a curious litter on that land: a scattering of manufactured goods, Sheffield steel, needles, rifles, shells and primers, flints, hooks and line, forged tools and blades, cutlery and cloths. We had left the bones of the auks on the shore at Jakobshavn, for the gulls and ravens—Sykes had overlooked the fact that even their skeletons would have value to museums—and we had left the headless stump of the walrus on the shingle where it had been slain. Perhaps we had left illness, too. It is said that the Europeans are murdering the Esquimaux, simply by bringing influenza and smallpox. So that was the sum of our trade: a hull emptied of English steel, and replaced with the skins and feathers and bones of a wilderness. Bletchley was correct. It was a hold full of death.
It was the same story with all the ships that travelled north. They arrived empty, hungry to be fed, at an Arctic where they would feast and feast until they could take no more. The whales would be lashed to the ships and their blubber sliced, peeled in strips as wide as a mattress by flensing hooks and cables, before being boiled and rendered and poured into barrels. Jawbones would be opened and baleen extracted with axes, for corset stays and parasol ribs, and ambergris would be searched for in the rank miles of intestines, men reaching up to their shoulders into unimaginable filth, groping for secretions more valuable by weight than gold itself. Birds would be shot from the sky or plucked from cliff ledges, their eggs gathered or smashed and their pelts reduced to pillow down and writing quills. Seals would be clubbed with oars and hakapiks and hammers and spikes, their colonies would erupt with slicks of blood on the ice. Some of their hides would be unsheathed while the animal still thrashed with life and their pups looked on bewildered. This Arctic, so grey and white and endless, contained a welling of blood that was as bright as fire, and this frozen sea that was as vast and lonely and as wild as any place on earth, it had been set fire to. It was a burning sea.
The men who came here plundered indiscriminately: wherever they saw life there was profit or trade. Some animals were a greater challenge than others, but for every animal there existed a method, and all could eventually be killed. Knife, hammer,
wooden stick or gun. It was a larder with apparently infinite resources, yet it was clear the Arctic was not infinitely replenished. The seals are harder to find now, the whales are scarcer. The nesting ledges are falling quiet.
We had stumbled across a rarity akin to a pot of gold at the tip of a rainbow: the last family of great auks. It had been a test, where the conscience and nature of man would be questioned. He had met it with a simple, practised answer: to slaughter, and slaughter, and slaughter again.
From this fire we had extracted a single flame of hope. A bird that, with the true tenacity of nature, had become a bird and its egg. A single thread of life on which might hang the future of an entire species.
The bird was now eating voraciously, either from Clara’s hand or my own, taking the fish with a dry parted beak, much as a parrot carefully takes a nut, before throwing back its head to swallow it whole, with quite a flourish. The auk’s eyes were glistening with a new-found lustre, and it growled and wheezed so comically and loudly that we had to tie the binding around its beak to keep it calling for us when we were elsewhere.
‘She is quite a character,’ I said to Clara. ‘She fusses with that egg as if it’s a hot potato.’
‘And she mumbles considerably. Sometimes at night I think I hear her, grumbling and complaining. I lie there wishing she would be quiet—even though I know it’s not possible to hear her from the cabins.’
The Amethyst was making good progress, flying before a zephyr wind, which meant time was running out.
‘Clara,’ I whispered, alone with her after breakfast one morning, ‘it is only a few hundred miles of ocean between here and England. We might not even see land, let alone discover a sheltered cove or appropriate cliff or reef where we might release the bird.’
She stiffened in her posture. ‘I wish those men would stop winding the bilge pump and let the ship sink!’ she said, vexed. ‘What shall we do?’
‘We must bring the bird to England.’
‘Oh no! That is impossible!’
‘Speak quietly.’
‘But England is part of the disease that has killed these birds.’
‘I am aware of that.’
She looked cornered. ‘Has French told you to say such a thing?’
‘No. No—of course not. I haven’t spoken to him about this.’
‘You sound like him,’ she replied, disappointed. ‘Forgive me. What I mean to say is—there is nothing for this bird in England. Nothing but hunters and cruelty—you know that in your heart, don’t you? It would either be killed and stuffed, or it would be paraded around like a circus animal.’
‘But in England we might be able to find a safe haven for it.’
She looked steadily at me. I wasn’t even convincing myself.
‘Then we shall have to take a greater risk,’ I conceded. ‘We have no choice. We must tell the captain.’
She flinched, quite openly, as if she had been stung. I held her hand to console her.
‘We tell the captain,’ I continued, ‘and we appeal to his greater nature. He is the only person who would be able to find a suitable place for the bird and its chick. He has his haul and fortune—what difference would it make to him?’
‘But you tried to appeal to the captain’s good nature before,’ she said. ‘Sykes is an open book. He is out to make a profit.’
I agreed, but it was an impossible situation. She had to understand that. ‘Yes, dear Clara. I tried with Sykes. But it might be different if we both tried.’
The idea made her curious: ‘Are men so easily unlocked?’
I shrugged, at last feeling I had made some ground in the conversation. She was willing to grasp at straws, as I was. ‘I had a game of draughts with him once—the black pieces were flattened bullets, and the white ones were discs of seal bones. When we played, I had the feeling that all he cared about was the playing of games. He likes to joust and kid. Perhaps there is nothing more to the man.’
‘Do you really believe that?’
‘I do not know. But there is another thing. He is ill. You have seen him coughing into his handkerchief until he is red in the face. He knows he is ill. I witnessed a moment at the whaling station when he was unguarded, and I am beginning to think he might act more favourably towards us as a consequence.’
‘But why?’
It was difficult to answer, other than admit it was purely a guess. ‘Surely, if you feel your time might be running out, you might have empathy for the predicament of this animal?’
‘You think a dying man suddenly becomes interested in the last of a species?’
I laughed. ‘Something like that.’
She smiled, happily. ‘What I love in you is that you are an idealist.’
‘I wasn’t sure I was one, until this voyage.’
‘I think that you should hold me.’
‘Here?’
‘Of course. And you wish to save things,’ she whispered.
‘Yes. That is true.’
I put my arms around her. She was thin and fragile; the hard lines of her shoulder bones felt as curved and delicate as walking canes.
‘Now,’ she continued, ‘squeeze me. Until my breath has gone.’
Alarmed, I broke free of her, but she clung to my arms with an insistent grip. ‘Please,’ she urged.
‘But why?’ I tried. She brought my arms around her waist and guided them across her back, waiting for me to oblige her.
I pulled my arms tight, interlocking them and gradually pressing her within my hold. I imagined all there was to her, her bones and flesh, her densities and the spaces of her body that were filled with air. I imagined them contracting, disappearing.
Clara gasped in pain; quickly, I let her go, shocked by a pressure I hadn’t known I was exerting. She looked back at me, flushed and unembarrassed, with a triumphant smile that faded as quickly as it had formed.
‘Tell me, who won at draughts?’ she asked, unnaturally composed.
I stared back, bewildered. She raised her eyebrows.
‘Oh, he did,’ I said, ‘quite easily.’
‘Then he’s always going to win, I suspect.’
‘Did I hurt you?’
‘My cousin told me of your conversation with him,’ she said. ‘Did he tell you that he has been tying himself to his bunk, in the attempt to free his spirit?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me, Eliot—do you think him mad?’
How to answer? I wasn’t sure. The journey had certainly affected him. ‘I’m not convinced that I would recognise madness,’ I replied.
‘But you think he is an addict?’
‘An addict?’
‘Of opiates.’ She looked at me without judgement. ‘I can see you do.’
I told her what Bletchley had said, how he had insisted this voyage had become a migration of souls, but that it was a damned migration that had offended a natural balance. ‘I must admit I didn’t quite follow him. Has he said this to you? He is planning to correct the imbalance.’
‘I am looking after him,’ she said, formally.
‘By tying him to a bunk?’
‘If that is what he needs, I think I shouldn’t refuse him,’ she answered. ‘He believes a demon wants to find mischief with him.’
Bletchley performed his correction one night, as we approached Cape Farewell and our last sight of Greenland, from the stern rail. Apparently the three men on watch—curious as to why he was cloaked and dragging a large package—had attempted to stop him, but he had shrugged them off with great strength. Thinking he might be about to leap into the sea, they had been relieved when all he had done was to throw the tightly wrapped bundle away from the ship. It had caught briefly in the moonlight and they had heard the splash. It must have been weighted down, for it quickly sank.
The men had stood away from him, naturally wary of a man they had never understood.
Apparently he had spoken in a clear, calm voice: ‘One of you devils should inform the captain that I have saved the shi
p. Please tell him I have thrown his cargo of great auk skins into the ocean.’
25
WITHIN MINUTES OF BLETCHLEY being brought down from deck, I had been summoned to the saloon. Pacing with frustration, Sykes was already mid-rant, flushed pink as a lobster and burning with frustration. He was overdressed in his sea coat, which appeared to have been hurriedly buttoned on top of his night attire, and his constant agitation made the saloon feel crowded. French and Talbot stood awkwardly on opposite sides of the room, as if between them they were pushing the captain from one to the other, as in some diabolical maritime game. Sitting stoically on a wooden chair, Bletchley was more serene than he had appeared for several weeks. But he was obviously guilty of something, and although he sat with his eyes half closed, placid and untroubled, I felt there was a coiled tension hinged within his body, making him at any moment liable to spring up.
‘I should have you in irons!’ Sykes shouted, marching back and forth in front of his passenger in the manner of a bullying schoolmaster. ‘And to think that my officers—my own officers—warned me of your increasingly errant behaviour. All your peculiar night-time vigils by that stove and the like. But would I listen to them? I did not! I believed you to be an eccentric, but this is not the case is it, man? Is it? You are little more than a criminal—you have meddled with the business of the ship and as a consequence you have wilfully ruined our financial returns.’
Bletchley accepted his role without complaint, allowing the rant to fall on him with phlegmatic patience. He showed no sign that he was even listening to the captain’s words, let alone preparing to defend himself.
‘You are maddening!’ Sykes said, in disgust.
Emerging from her cabin, Clara made a swift assessment of the judicial nature of the gathering.
‘Captain Sykes!’ she said. ‘I have been hearing your accusations from within my cabin. It is intolerable. How dare you address a gentleman in this tone? What has happened to your manners? What, sir, has happened?’ She deliberately stood directly in Sykes’ path, preventing him from completing one of his crossings of the room. He looked startled by the obstacle put in his way, and I realised that, despite his parade of authority, despite this being his ship, a woman’s presence instantly quelled him.