The North Water

by Ian McGuire

  “I think the surgeon gets my drift,” Drax says. (He is standing fully naked now—thick-limbed, fistic, unashamed. His face is burned brown and his hands are black from toil, but the rest of his skin—where it is visible beneath the mats of dark hair and the panoply of crude tattooing—is a pure pinkish white like the skin of a babe.) “Him and me are old pals, after all. I helped him search his way back to his cabin after that famous night in Lerwick. You likely won’t remember, Mr. Sumner, since you were fast asleep at the time, but me and Cavendish had a good look around before we left to make sure your necessaries was safe and sound just as they should be. Nothing disturbed or out of place.”

  Sumner, staring at Drax, instantly understands. They have rooted through his sea chest, read the discharge papers, seen the looted ring.

  Brownlee is looking at him curiously.

  “Do you know what the fuck he’s talking about?” he says.

  Sumner shakes his head. He casts his eye unthinkingly over Drax’s arms and torso, breathing carefully as he does so, pushing back against the inner uproar.

  “Do you doubt my knowledge or competency as a surgeon?” he says (sounding preposterous even to himself). “I have served an apprenticeship and have certificates from the Queen’s College of Belfast.”

  Drax smiles at this, then laughs. His yellowy cock thickens and twitches noticeably upwards.

  “You have your little scrap of paper, Mr. Sumner, and I have mine. Now, which one of those two little scraps of paper weighs the most, I wonder, in an English court of law? I never did learn my letters, so I’m not the one to say, but a good lawyer would likely have an opinion, I suppose.”

  “I have my evidence,” Sumner says. “It is not a matter of my opinion or my reputation. Who I am, or who I have been, is not the question.”

  “And what evidence do you hold against me?” Drax asks more fiercely. “Tell me that.”

  “We are not accusing you of any crime,” Brownlee says. “That’s not why we are here. McKendrick is still down in the hold in chains, remember. Sumner is merely curious about some details of the outrage, that is all.”

  Drax ignores Brownlee and continues staring at Sumner.

  “What evidence do you hold against me?” he says again. “Because if you have none, then it’s thee against me, I’d say. My solemn word, sworn on the Bible, against yours.”

  Sumner steps backwards and digs his hands into his pockets.

  “You are lying about McKendrick,” he says. “I know very well you are.”

  Drax turns to Brownlee and taps his finger to his ear.

  “Is the ship’s surgeon a little hard of hearing, Captain?” he says. “I keep asking him the same fucking question and he don’t seem to notice it at all.”

  Brownlee scowls, then licks his lips. He is beginning to regret agreeing to Sumner’s request. Drax may be something of a savage, but that is no good reason to accuse him of child murder. It is hardly surprising he has taken the hump.

  “What evidence do we hold against Drax in this matter, Sumner? Tell us now, please.”

  Sumner looks down at the floor between his feet for a moment and then up at the cabin’s pitched glass skylight.

  “I have no evidence against Henry Drax,” he confesses flatly. “None at all.”

  “Then let’s call an end to this nonsense,” Brownlee says. “Get your fucking clothes back on and get to work.”

  Drax gazes dismissively at Sumner for a long moment, then reaches down and lifts his britches from the cabin floor. Each of his movements is considered and powerful; his body, stinking and rotund as it is, clagged and filthy in its folds and creases, possesses a ghastly voluptuousness nonetheless. Sumner looks on without watching. He is thinking of the medicine chest and the delicious pleasures it contains. He is thinking of the Achaeans and the Trojans and the meddlings of Athena and Ares. McKendrick will hang for sure, Sumner realizes. This crime requires a villain and he has been appointed to the post. He will dangle and kick at the end of a rope. There is no way out now, no Hera to pluck him from the scaffold.

  Drax bends and then straightens, prods his leg into the hole of his britches and pulls them up his thighs. His broad back and pungent arse are patched with fur; his socked feet are blockish and simian. Brownlee looks on impatiently. The outrage is behind him now, and his mind is on other things. McKendrick will swing for what he did, and that is that. What matters now is the sinking of the ship, which is a tricky business to get right. She needs to go down slow enough to ensure that all the cargo can be saved, but not so slow that any last-gasp repairs are possible. And there is no way of being sure beforehand how the ice will behave and how close or far away Campbell will be able to plausibly maneuver the Hastings. The underwriters are alive these days to various kinds of trickery; if they sense a conspiracy, they will descend on the crew in port and commence offering them rewards for useful information. If it is not done right, he could end up in a cell in Hull jail rather than enjoying his retirement strolling on the strands of Bridlington.

  “What’s that gash on your arm?” he says to Drax. “Have you cut yourself again? Sumner will give you a plaster for that if you ask him sweetly, I’m sure.”

  “It’s nothing,” Drax says. “A scratch with a harpoon, that’s all.”

  “Looks worse than nothing to me,” Brownlee says.

  Drax shakes his head and picks his pea coat off the table.

  “Let me see it,” Sumner says.

  “It’s nothing,” Drax says again.

  “It’s your good right arm, and I can see from here it’s swollen and weeping,” Brownlee says. “If you can’t hurl a harpoon or pull an oar, you’ll be no earthly fucking use to me. Show it to the surgeon now.”

  Drax hesitates a moment, then holds out his arm.

  The wound, high on the forearm near the elbow, half hidden by hair and ink, is narrow but deep, and the site around it is severely swollen. The skin, when Sumner touches it, is tense and hot. An areola of green pus has gathered around and below the scabbing. And the scabbing itself is sticky and raw.

  “The purulence needs to be lanced and the remnants drawn out with a poultice,” Sumner says. “Why didn’t you come to me before now?”

  “It don’t trouble me,” Drax says. “’Tis just a nick.”

  Sumner goes to his cabin and returns with a lancet, which he heats for a minute over the candle flame. He takes a piece of lint padding and presses it against the wound, then makes a brief incision with the lancet. A green-pink mixture of blood and pus spills out and soaks into the padding. Sumner presses harder and the wound exudes yet more of the foul liquid. Drax stands immobile and silent. The red and swollen skin has flattened out, but there remains a strange and singular lump.

  “There’s something lodged inside there,” Sumner says. “Look here.”

  Brownlee approaches and peers over the surgeon’s shoulder.

  “Might be a splinter of wood,” he says, “or possibly a piece of bone.”

  “You say you did this with a harpoon?” Sumner asks.

  “That’s right,” Drax says.

  Sumner presses at the small lump with his fingertip. It slides for a moment beneath the skin and then emerges white and blood-covered from the wound’s opening.

  “What the fuck is that?” Brownlee says.

  Sumner catches the object in the soiled padding and rubs it clean. He looks at it only once and knows immediately. He glances quickly at Drax, then shows the object to Brownlee. It is a child’s tooth, pale and grain-like, broken off at the root.

  Drax snatches his arm away. He looks at the tooth, still in Sumner’s hand, and then at Brownlee.

  “That thing int mine,” he says.

  “It was in your arm.”

  “It int mine.”

  “It’s evidence,” Sumner says. “That’s what it is. And it’s all the evidence we need to see you hanged.”

  “They won’t hang me,” Drax says. “I’ll see you both in hell afore that happens.”<
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  Brownlee steps to the cabin door, opens it, and calls out for the first mate. The three men eye one another carefully. Drax is still only half dressed, his chest is bare, and he has his shirt and pea coat clutched in his left hand.

  “I won’t be chained neither,” he says. “Not by cunts like you two.”

  Brownlee shouts again for Cavendish. Drax glances around the cabin for any usable weapon. There’s a brass sextant lying on the table to his right and, in a pinewood rack on the wall beside him, a spyglass and a heavy whalebone walking stick tipped with an ebony pommel. He doesn’t move or reach for them yet. He calmly awaits his moment.

  They hear the clatter and curse of Cavendish descending from the deck and making his way through steerage. When he steps into the cabin and the others turn towards him, Drax grabs the whalebone off the rack and swings it directly into Brownlee’s forehead, striking him just above the left eye socket and breaking the skull. He pulls it back to swing again, but Cavendish grabs hold of his arm. The two men struggle mutely for a moment. When Drax drops the whalebone, Cavendish reaches down for it and the harpooner grabs him by the hair and brings his knee up hard into his face. Cavendish drops sideways onto the rag carpet, groaning and drooling blood. Sumner, watching on, has yet to move. He is still holding the lancet in one hand and the dead child’s tooth in the other.

  “What’s the point of this?” he says. “You can’t escape from here.”

  “I’ll take my chances in a whaleboat,” Drax says. “I won’t go back to England to be hanged.”

  He picks the whalebone off the floor and hefts it for a moment. The ebony pommel is slick with Brownlee’s blood.

  “And I’ll be taking that tooth off you afore I leave,” he says.

  Sumner shakes his head, then steps forwards and puts the tooth and the lancet down on the tabletop between them. He glances upwards through the skylight but no one is there. Why is Black not on the quarterdeck as usual? he wonders. Where is Otto?

  “You can’t kill us all,” he says.

  “I ’spect I can kill enough of you though. Now turn about.”

  He waves with the whalebone to indicate his meaning. After a moment’s pause, Sumner does as he is told. While Drax quickly dresses himself, the surgeon stands staring at the dark wood paneling of the cabin wall. On top of the skull, he wonders, or off to one side? One blow or two? If he calls out now, it is possible that someone might hear him. But he doesn’t call out. He closes his eyes. He waits for the fatal blow to fall.

  There is a sudden quick commotion outside. A loud rattle of voices. And then, as the cabin door flies open, the unreal roar of a shotgun blast. Dust and fragments of the ceiling cascade around Sumner’s head. He swivels about and sees Black standing in the doorway aiming the second barrel directly at Drax’s chest.

  “Give the stick to Sumner now,” Black tells him.

  Drax doesn’t move. His mouth is hanging open and his tongue and teeth are wetly visible.

  “I can kill you now,” Black says, “or I can shoot your bollocks off and let you bleed out for a while. Whichever you prefer.”

  After a pause, Drax nods, smiles faintly, then hands the stick to Sumner. Black steps into the cabin and looks down at Brownlee and Cavendish, unconscious and bleeding on the floor.

  “What the fuck have you been doing here?” he says.

  Drax shrugs and looks down at the tooth lying on the table where the surgeon left it.

  “That tooth int none of mine,” he says. “The surgeon dug it out my arm, but how it got there is the gravest kind of mystery.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  For four days and nights, Brownlee lies insensible on his cot, open-eyed but barely breathing. The left side of his face is blackened and misshapen. His eye is swelled shut. Unknown liquids ooze out of his ear; high on his forehead where the skin is split apart the bone is palely visible. Sumner thinks it unlikely that he will live, and, if he does live, impossible that his mind will ever fully recover. He knows from experience that the human brain cannot tolerate such contusions. Once the skull is breached, the situation is almost hopeless, the vulnerability is too immense. He has seen such injuries on the battlefield, from saber and shrapnel, rifle butts and the hooves of horses—unconsciousness is followed by catatonia; occasionally they shout out like lunatics, or weep like children—something inside them (their soul? their character?) has been scrambled, reversed. They have lost their bearings. It is generally better, he thinks, if they die rather than go on inhabiting the twilit half-world of the mad.

  Cavendish has a badly broken nose and has lost several of his front teeth, but is otherwise unaltered. After a brief period on his back sipping bouillon soup from a serving spoon and taking opium against the pain, he rises and resumes his duties. On a gloomy morning with clouds clagging the horizon and the scent of rain hovering in the air, he gathers the men on the foredeck and explains that he is taking command of the Volunteer until Brownlee recovers. Henry Drax, he assures them, will certainly hang back in England for his murderous and mutinous acts but for now he is firmly chained in the hold, rendered incapable of mischief, and he will play no further part in the voyage.

  “You may ask yourself how such a fiend came to move amongst us, but I have no good answer to that,” he says. “He bamboozled me as much as he did any man. I’ve known some deviant and malignant fuckers in my time, but none, I confess, a patch on Henry Drax. If the good Mr. Black here had chosen to put that other shotgun barrel in his chest when he had the opportunity, I for one would not be mourning over much, but, as it is, he is caged below like the beast he is and will not see the daylight till we land again in Hull.”

  Amongst the crew, the sense of amazement as to what had occurred in Brownlee’s cabin is soon replaced by a general certainty that the voyage itself is cursed. They remember the gruesome stories of the Percival, of men dying, going mad, drinking their own blood for sustenance, and ask themselves why they were ever foolish or ill-advised enough to sign on for a ship commanded by a man so notable for his fearsome ill luck. Even though the ship is less than a quarter full of blubber, they would like nothing better now than to turn round and sail directly home. They fear that worse is yet to come, and they would rather reach home with empty pockets but still breathing than end up sunk forever below the Baffin ice.

  According to Black and Otto, who do not try to keep their opinions to themselves, it is too late in the season to be in these waters—the majority of whales have swum farther south by now, and the farther north they stray as the summer recedes, the greater the risk of ice. It was Brownlee’s own particular idiosyncrasy, they say, to set them on this northerly course in the first place, but now that he is no longer in command, the most sensible action is to return to Pond’s Bay with the rest of the fleet. Cavendish, however, takes no account of either the superstitions of the crew or the suggestions of the other officers. They continue moving northwards in the company of the Hastings. Twice they see whales in the distance and lower for them but without success. When they reach the entrance to Lancaster Sound, Cavendish lowers a boat and has himself rowed across to the Hastings to confer with Campbell. On his return, he announces over dinner in the mess that they will enter the sound as soon as a suitable passage opens up in the ice.

  Black stops his eating and stares at him.

  “No man has ever caught a whale this far north in August,” he says. “Read the records if you doubt me. We’re wasting our time here at best, and if we enter the sound we’re putting ourselves at risk also.”

  “A man don’t profit unless he takes a little risk from time to time,” Cavendish says lightly. “You should show more boldness, Mr. Black.”

  “It is foolishness, not boldness, to enter Lancaster Sound this late in the season,” Black says. “Why Brownlee took us north again I can’t say, but I know if he were here, even he would not consider taking us into the sound.”

  “What Brownlee would or wouldn’t do is moot, I’d say, since he can’t speak or even
raise his hand to wipe his arse. And since I’m the one in command now, not you or him”—he nods at Otto—“I guess what I say goes.”

  “This voyage is marked with enough calamity already. Do you really want to add yet more to the total?”

  “Let me tell you something about myself,” Cavendish says, leaning in a little and lowering his voice. “Unlike some, perhaps, I don’t come whaling for fresh air or for the fine sea views. I don’t even come for the pleasing company of men like you and Otto here. I come whaling to get my money, and I will get my money any way I can. If your opinions came in gold with the Queen’s head stamped upon ’em I might pay them a little mind, but since they don’t, you won’t be too offended, I hope, if I take no fucking notice of them at all.”

  When Brownlee dies two days later, they dress him in his velvet morning coat, stitch him into a stiff canvas shroud, and carry the body on a pine plank to the stern rail. Drizzle is falling, the sea is the color of boot polish, and the sky is wadded with cloud. The crew sing “Rock of Ages” and “Nearer My God to Thee,” and Cavendish leads them all in an off-kilter version of the Lord’s Prayer. The voices of the mourners as they sing and pray are low and reluctant. Although they mistrusted Brownlee by the end, believing him unlucky, the nature of his death is a blow to the general confidence. That Drax, who they thought was reliable, even admirable, is actually a murderer and a sodomite, and McKendrick, who they thought was a murderer and a sodomite, is actually an innocent victim of Drax’s godless machinations, has created amongst the men of the forecastle feelings of perplexity and self-doubt. Such unlikely reversals make them uneasy and fitful. Their world is hard and raw enough, they think, without the added burden of moral convolution.

  As the men disperse, Otto appears by Sumner’s side. He touches the surgeon’s elbow and leads him forwards until they are standing by the bowsprit looking out at the dark sea, the low gray cloud, and, in the middle distance, separated from the Volunteer by several loose floes of ice, the Hastings. Otto’s expression is somber and gravid. Sumner senses he has news to impart.