The North Water

by Ian McGuire

  “The word of a lone sodomite will carry no great weight, you can be sure of that. You must stand your ground, that’s all.”

  Drax nods.

  “I’m an honest man,” he says. “I tell only what I saw.”

  “Then you have nothing to fear.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The news of McKendrick’s guilt spreads instantly through the ship. Those few who considered themselves friends of the carpenter find it hard to believe he is a murderer, but their doubts are quickly overpowered by the breadth and weight of the more generally held certainty that he must be one. After his second interview with Brownlee, he is kept chained in the forehold, eats alone, and shits and pisses into a bucket, which is emptied daily by a cabin boy. After a week or so of this, his identity as a criminal and a pervert is so secure in the minds of the crew, it is hard to believe he was ever truly one of them. They remember him as separate and strange, and assume that whatever seemed usual about him was only a clever way of covering up those deeper deviancies. Occasionally, one or two men venture into the hold to taunt him or ask him questions about his crime. When they do so, they find him oddly unrepentant, sour, baffled, belligerent, as if he doesn’t yet (not even now) realize the truth of what it is he has done.

  Brownlee wants nothing more than to get back to the appointed business of slaughtering whales, but for the next several days they are beset by foul weather—drenching rain and thick fog—which conceals their prey and makes the fishing impossible. Domed and circled by the clamminess and murk, they grind mutely southwards through a loose patchwork of pancake ice and slurry. When the weather finally opens up they have passed Jones Sound and Cape Horsburgh to the west, and are in sight of the entrance to Pond’s Bay. Brownlee is all eagerness to proceed, but the sea ice is abnormally dense for the season and they are forced to delay awhile longer. The Hastings moors alongside them, and so do the Polynia, the Intrepid, and the Northerner. Since there is no work to be done while they are waiting for the wind to change, the captains move freely amongst the five ships, dining in one another’s cabins and passing time in conversation, argument, and reminiscence. Brownlee tells his old stories often and easily: the coal barge, the Percival, everything before. He is not ashamed of what he has been or done: a man makes his mistakes, he tells them, a man suffers as he must suffer, but the readiness is all.

  “So are you ready?” Campbell asks him lightly. They are sitting alone in Brownlee’s cabin. The plates and dishes have been cleared away, and the others have already returned to their ships. Campbell is a shrewd and knowing fellow, friendly to a degree but also secretive and superior at times. There is a hint of mockery in his question, Brownlee thinks, a definite suggestion that his part in Baxter’s machinations is the finer one.

  “I hear that if all goes well, you will be next,” Brownlee says. “Baxter told me that himself.”

  “Baxter thinks the whaling trade is finished,” Campbell says. “He wants to settle up now, buy himself a modest manufactory.”

  “Aye, but he’s wrong about that. These seas are still crammed full of fishes.”

  Campbell shrugs. He has an upturned nose, broad cheeks, and long side-whiskers; his narrow lips are poised in a semipermanent pout, giving Brownlee the uncomfortable impression that, even when he appears silent and absorbed in his own thoughts, he is always just about to talk.

  “If I was a gambling man, Baxter is one horse I’d like to put a little of my money on. He doesn’t fall at many fences; he jumps ’em pretty clean, I’d say.”

  “He’s a shrewd fucker, I’ll give you that.”

  “So are you ready?”

  “We’ve got time enough to kill a few more whales. No need to rush on, is there?”

  “The whales is small change in this game,” Campbell reminds him. “And you may not get too many good chances to sink her nicely and make it look just as it should. It’s the way it looks that matters most, remember. We can’t make it any too obvious or the underwriters will start up with their querying, and that’s what none of us wants. You least of all.”

  “There’s a deal of ice about this year. It won’t be so hard to manage.”

  “Sooner is better than after. If we leave it too long, I risk getting trapped myself. Then where the fuck would we be?”

  “Give me a week in Pond’s Bay,” Brownlee says. “A week more only, and then we can look about for the right spot to get well nipped.”

  “A week will do it, and then I say we head back northwards,” Campbell says, “up to Lancaster Sound or thereabouts. No one will follow us up there. You find yourself a snug little lead near some hefty land ice and wait for the wind to blow the floes back in on you. And from what I’ve seen of your crew, those fuckers won’t be doing too much to help.”

  “I’m minded to leave that carpenter where he is.”

  “Accidents do happen,” Campbell agrees. “And a man like him ain’t so likely to be missed.”

  “It’s a fucking outrage,” Brownlee remembers. “Did you ever even hear of such a thing? A little girl is one thing. A little girl I halfway understand. But not a fucking cabin boy, Good God, no. It’s evil times we live in, I tell you, Campbell, evil and unnatural.”

  Campbell nods.

  “I’d venture the Good Lord don’t spend much time up here in the North Water,” he says with a smile. “It’s most probable he don’t like the chill.”

  When the ice opens up, they enter the bay, but the whaling is poor. There are scarcely any sightings, and on the few occasions the boats are lowered, the whales quickly disappear below the ice and there are no strikes. Brownlee begins to wonder whether Baxter might be right after all—perhaps they have killed too many whales. He finds it hard to believe that the vast and teeming oceans could be emptied out so quick, that such enormous beasts could prove so fucking fragile, but if the whales are still about, they are certainly learning to hide themselves well. After a week of these dispiriting failures, he accepts the inevitable, signals as agreed to Campbell, and announces to the men that they are leaving Pond’s Bay and turning north to seek for better luck elsewhere.

  * * *

  Even with the aid of laudanum, Sumner cannot sleep for more than an hour or two consecutively. Joseph Hannah’s death has aggravated and incited him in ways he doesn’t understand. He would like to forget it now. He would like to rest, as the others appear to rest, in the certainty of McKendrick’s guilt, and eventual and inevitable punishment, but he finds himself signally unable to do so. He is troubled by memories of the boy’s dead body laid out on the varnished tabletop, where every night they eat their dinner still, and of McKendrick standing naked—ashamed, passive, gazed upon—in the captain’s cabin. The two bodies should match, he thinks, should fit together like twin pieces of a puzzle, but whichever way he twists and turns them in his mind, he can’t make a whole.

  Late one night about a fortnight after the carpenter’s arrest, as the ship moves north past looneries and icebergs, Sumner descends into the forehold. McKendrick in his slop suit is lying in the small space that has been cleared for him amidst the various boxes and bundles and casks. His legs have been chained together, one either side of the mast, but his hands are both free. There are some fragments of biscuit on a tin plate, and a cup of water and a lighted candle by his side. Sumner can smell the high tang of the slop bucket. The surgeon hesitates for a moment, then leans down and shakes him by the shoulder. McKendrick unfurls himself slowly, sits up with his back against a packing case, and gazes indifferently at his latest guest.

  “How’s your health?” Sumner asks him. “Do you require anything from me?”

  McKendrick shakes his head.

  “I’m hale and hearty enough, considering,” he says. “I ’spect I will live until they choose to hang me.”

  “If it comes to a trial, you know you will have a better chance to make your case. Nothing is decided yet.”

  “A man like myself finds few friends in an English court of law, Mr. Sumner. I’m
an honest fellow, but my life will not stand for too much peering into.”

  “You’re not the only one who feels that way, I’d say.”

  “We’re all sinners, right enough, but some sins are punished harder than others. I int a murderer and never was one, but I’m many other things, and it’s the other things they would wish to hang me for.”

  “If you’re not the murderer, then someone else on this ship is. If Drax is lying, as you claim he is, it’s possible he either killed the boy himself or knows the man who did and is seeking to protect him. Have you thought of that?”

  McKendrick shrugs. After two weeks in the hold, his skin has taken on a grayish tinge, and his blue eyes have turned murky and recessed. He scratches at his ear, and a piece of skin flakes off and flutters to the floor.

  “I thought of it all right, but what good will it do me to accuse another man if I have no proof and no witnesses of my own?”

  Sumner takes a pewter flask from his pocket, passes it over to McKendrick, then takes it back and has a sip himself.

  “I am running short on baccy,” McKendrick says after a moment. “If you could spare a pinch, I’d be much obliged to you.”

  Sumner passes him his tobacco pouch. McKendrick takes the pouch with his right hand after jamming the pipe between the middle two fingers of the left. With the pipe secured in this peculiar fashion, he fills the bowl and tamps it down with his right thumb.

  “What’s the trouble with your hand?” Sumner asks him.

  “It’s only the thumb,” he says. “Got crushed by a cock-eyed fellow with a lump hammer a year or two back and haven’t been able to move it even a quarter inch one way or the other since then. Makes some difficulties for a man in my trade, but I’ve learned to make the adjustment.”

  “Show me.”

  McKendrick leans forwards and holds out his left hand. The fingers are normal, but the joint of the thumb is badly misshapen and the thumb itself appears stiff and lifeless.

  “So you cannot grip with this hand at all?”

  “Only with the four fingers. ’Tis lucky it was my left one, I suppose.”

  “Try to grip my wrist,” Sumner tells him, “like this.”

  He rolls up his sleeve and holds out his bare arm. McKendrick grips it.

  “Squeeze as hard as you can.”

  “I’m squeezing now.”

  Sumner feels the pressure of the four fingers digging into his arm flesh, but from the thumb, nothing at all.

  “Is that the best you can do?” he says. “Don’t hold back.”

  “I ain’t holding anything back,” he insists. “Man hit my thumb bone with a fucking great lump hammer two years ago aboard the Whitby, I tell you, when we were in dock repairing a hatch cover. Smashed it near to pieces. And I have plenty of witnesses to that occurrence—including the captain himself—who will happily swear on the Bible to his foolishness.”

  Sumner tells him to let go, then tugs his shirtsleeve back down.

  “Why didn’t you tell me about your injured hand when I examined you before?”

  “You weren’t asking after my hand, if I recall.”

  “If you can’t grip any better than that, how could you have strangled the boy? You saw the bruises on his neck.”

  McKendrick pauses and then looks suddenly wary, as if the surgeon’s implications are too large and too hopeful to be easily or quickly absorbed.

  “I saw them right enough,” he says. “He had a string of bruises all around his neck just so.”

  “And there were two large bruises at the front. Do you remember those? One almost on top of the other. I thought at the time they must have been caused by the two thumbs pressing hard down on the gorge.”

  “You remember them?”

  “I remember them clearly,” Sumner says. “Two large bruises, one on top of the other one, like two smudges of ink.”

  “But I don’t have two good thumbs no more,” McKendrick says slowly. “So how did I make them bruises?”

  “That’s right,” Sumner says. “I need to talk to the captain now. It looks like the fellow with the lump hammer may have saved your neck.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Brownlee listens to the surgeon’s arguments, hoping keenly as he does so that they are wrong. He has no desire to release McKendrick. The carpenter is a convincing culprit, and if he is released (which is the end Sumner seems, for some mystifying reason of his own, to seek), there is no one else aboard the ship who can take his place without a deal of trouble and complication.

  “A scrawny cunt like Hannah can be strangled with one hand easy enough, I’d say,” Brownlee argues, “thumb or no thumb. McKendrick isn’t tall, but he’s plenty strong enough for that.”

  “Not with the bruises patterned as they were on Hannah’s neck, though. The twin thumb marks were as clear as day.”

  “I don’t remember thumb marks. I remember a good many bruises, but there is no way on earth of knowing which particular fingers caused which particular marks.”

  “Before the burial, I made sketches of Hannah’s injuries,” Sumner says. “I thought a court might want to see them if it comes to a trial. Look here.” He puts a leather-bound sketchbook on the table in front of the captain and opens it to the relevant pages. “Do you see what I mean now? Two large oval bruises, one above the other one, there and there.”

  He points. Brownlee looks, then rubs his nose and scowls. He is irritated by the surgeon’s conscientiousness. What business does he have making ink sketches of a boy’s dead body?

  “The boy was sewn up in his shroud already. How could you have sketched him?”

  “I asked the sailmaker to loosen the stitches, then had them tightened again while the making off was going on. It was easy enough to do.”

  Brownlee turns the pages of the sketchbook and winces. There is a detailed rendering of the boy’s damaged and ulcerated rectum and a labeled diagram of his broken ribs.

  “These pretty pictures of yours prove bugger all,” he says. “McKendrick was seen making advances to the boy, and he is a known and notorious sodomite. Those are the solid facts of the matter. Anything else is guesswork and fancy.”

  “The thumb of McKendrick’s left hand is damaged beyond repair,” Sumner says. “It is physically impossible for him to have committed this crime.”

  “And you are free to express that opinion to the magistrate as soon as we return to England. Perhaps he’ll be more convinced by it than I am, but in the meantime, while we are at sea and I’m the captain, McKendrick stays where he is.”

  “As soon as we land back in England the real killer will leave the ship and disappear from sight, you do realize that? He will never be caught.”

  “Should I arrest the entire fucking crew on suspicion of murder? Is that what you recommend?”

  “If it’s not McKendrick who killed the boy, it’s most likely Henry Drax. He’s lying about the carpenter to save himself.”

  “You have been reading too many penny dreadfuls, Mr. Sumner, I swear to it.”

  “Let me at least examine Drax as I did McKendrick. If he’s a murderer, then it’s still not too late for the signs to be apparent.”

  Brownlee shifts sideways in his chair, tugs down on his stubbled earlobe, and sighs. Although the surgeon is certainly annoying, there is something admirable in his persistence. He is a dogged little fucker all in all.

  “Very well,” he says. “If you must. Although if Drax objects to being poked and prodded, I’m not so inclined to press the issue.”

  When Drax is called for, he makes no objection. He drops his britches in front of them and stands there grinning. The captain’s cabin fills with a stink of stale urine and potted meat.

  “At your pleasure, Mr. Sumner,” Drax says, giving the surgeon a coquettish wink.

  Sumner, breathing only through his mouth now, bends and examines, with the aid of a magnifying glass, the dangling parabola of Drax’s glans.

  “Pull back the foreskin please,” Sumner says
.

  Drax does as he is asked. Sumner nods.

  “You have the crabs,” he tells him.

  “Aye, I usually do have them. But that int a hanging offense now, is it, Mr. Sumner?”

  Brownlee chuckles. Sumner shakes his head and then stands up.

  “No visible chancres,” he says. “Show me both your hands now.”

  Drax holds them out. Sumner looks at the palms, then turns them over. They are as black and rough as lumps of pig iron.

  “The cut on your hand has healed, I see.”

  “That wont anything,” he says. “Just a scratch.”

  “And you have full use of all your digits, I suppose.”

  “Of my what?”

  “Fingers and thumbs.”

  “I do indeed, thanks God.”

  “Take off your peacoat and roll up your sleeves.”

  “Do you doubt me, Mr. Sumner?” Drax asks as he tugs his arms out of the jacket and starts to unbutton his shirtfront. “Do you doubt me when I tell what I saw by the deckhouse?”

  “McKendrick denies it. You know he does.”

  “But McKendrick is a sodomite, and what is the word of a sodomite worth in a court of law? Not too much, I’d say.”

  “I have good reason to believe him.”

  Drax nods at this and continues to undress. He takes his shirt off and his flannels. His chest is dark-pelted, broad, and stoutly muscled; his belly is proudly bulbous, and both his arms are coated in a checker-worked swirl of blue tattoos.

  “If you believe the word of that cunt McKendrick, then you must fancy I’m a liar.”

  “I don’t know what you are.”

  “I’m an honorable man, Mr. Sumner,” Drax says, pressing down gradually on the word honorable as if honor itself is a complex and esoteric notion, but one he is proud to have mastered. “That’s what I am. I do my duty, and I have no cause to feel any shame because of it.”

  “What do you intend by that, Drax?” Brownlee asks him. “We’re all honorable men here, I think, or honorable enough at least for the requirements of our calling, which is a dirty enough kind of business, as you know.”