The boy found himself standing on top of the decapitated whale’s head, his feet slipping on the slick wet surface, and a bucket was passed up to him.
‘In you go,’ shouted the captain.
The boy was sobbing, but he nodded and looked once at the heavens as if seeking divine protection. And then he climbed into the whale’s head.
Around the head were buckets and barrels containing the special oil – spermaceti, they called it – which had already been removed. Some of it was beginning to solidify in the outside air. Hanging off the larboard side of the Martha was the eviscerated carcass of the whale, now missing its head and most of its blubber.
Abigail had watched, awe-struck, as they stripped the blubber away. Two mates had cut a hole in the whale’s side, into which they had placed a huge, ugly metal hook. Half a dozen seamen had begun turning the windlass, pulling the ropes through winches and the hook up and away from the whale. A strip of blubber was ripped from the side of the animal. Round and round the windlass went the sailors, and the strip became longer and longer, until twenty feet of thick blubber dripping with blood was hanging over the side of the ship.
The flesh was lowered into the blubber room below deck – spraying blood onto the deck as it went – and another hole was torn in the whale’s skin. The same hook went in. The ugly process began again.
Finally, men had climbed onto the awful eviscerated thing carrying saws and knives, and severed the head.
Now the cabin boy was inside the head, while two seamen were poking a lance around inside the intestines of the skinned whale that still hung from the ship’s side.
‘Looking for ambergris,’ said the steward.
Abigail had known where ambergris came from, but now, watching two ignorant men manipulating an iron lance inside the guts of a dead giant, she wondered at the women of London spraying scent onto their smooth, pampered skins, the noses of gentlemen twitching with delight at the smell which came from this obscenity.
The cabin boy’s head reappeared, to her relief. The seamen barely noticed him as he clambered down with his bucket full of oil. Her heart went to him, as it did every time she saw him. He was only a little older than Rat had been.
Every day, when they woke into this lurching terror of water and whales, and Charles left the tiny cabin to fetch food to break their fast, she punched herself hard in the upper arm. There was a bruise there, a blue-black thing about the size of an oyster. Rat had put it there. She’d called out to him from the bedroom of the Lower Gun Alley apartment, and he’d come running in around the doorframe just as she’d been walking out, and his forehead had hit her square in the arm with the force of a swung cricket bat. The bruise had appeared the next day. Every day she punched it to make sure it did not go away. What would Dr Drysdale have made of that, she wondered?
This ship, the Martha, was profoundly ugly. It was festooned with elements which had no place on a ship. The steward’s cookhouse, for one, and the large iron pots held in brickwork for another – the things looked impossibly heavy and bizarre against the wooden-and-cloth world of the ship.
The resentment towards her was oppressive. Superstitions about women bringing bad luck were as old as navigation, but she saw their wellspring in the hours after they had left Gravesend behind. A different peace had descended, a male comfort which was interrupted by only one thing: herself. She had found this both fascinating and pathetic.
From Gravesend they sailed to Plymouth, then south-west into a veil of fog and rain which belied the growing summer. Two weeks of fresh winds and occasionally astonishing squalls filled with such danger that she had thought she would run mad with the horror of it, and they were passing Portugal on the lee bow, another week and they were sailing between the island of Madeira on their starboard and the islands of Porto Santo and Desertos on their larboard, then Palma (one of the Canaries) appeared off in the distant south-west. Yet another week, and there were the islands of Bravo and Fogo, where slavers lay at anchor.
She had felt the fresh salt air, and despite the fear and the nausea she had imagined her spirits lifting as the fog and rain lifted and the sun beat down upon them and in the water around them the impossible sight of flying fish accompanied their progress. Yet every morning she punched her arm, remembered Rat, and thought of her sessions with Dr Drysdale, as if the bruise on her arm and the bruise in her head were joined.
The female mind is a delicate instrument, yet one of remarkable power, he had once said in his attractive Yorkshire accent. At the time, she had wondered what he had meant by that, but then that awful final revelation: that he thought she had this power of moral projection, as he had termed it, that she had therefore been the wellspring of the events inside Brooke House the previous year, events of which she had only a blurred recollection. She watched the poor cabin boy climbing out of the whale’s head, and the comparison was obvious and disgusting, her head becoming the whale’s, the cabin boy the doctor poking around within.
She remembered the feeling of a lamp in her hand, a lamp she had used with which to read, a lamp she had placed on the little table by the window in Lower Gun Alley. She had read countless books at that table, with that lamp: books on natural philosophy, on history, novels and poetry, geography and astronomy, her learning growing under the light of the lamp, her understanding illuminated by print and the lamp. Illuminated by whale oil.
Men were lighting fires beneath the big iron pots on the deck. Blubber was brought up from below and put into the pots. Oil began to run out of the pots into copper coolers which stood at their side. As night fell, the lights of the fires beneath the tryworks grew bright and fierce, and Abigail imagined them a devil-boat, a destroyer of lives, crewed by demons with knives and saws, glowing with hell-fire as they pulled south.
She wondered how many other whalers were currently slipping through the waves, how many other whaleboats were chasing how many other schools, and she thought of that lamp and that light and those books, and finally she went back to her little cabin and failed to sleep at all, the bruise on her arm pumping with her own blood in the oil-stenched dark.
ACT 2
ST HELENA
When any two of these three have been noted, what kind of third is to be sought can, accordingly, be known. The anatomies of these three – peculiar to them separately – are in the other two, but in a different way, celestial, terrestrial, or microcosmic. For example, I suggest to you the sun, gold, and man’s hearts as objects to be considered by means of the laws of Anatomical Magic.
John Dee, Propaedeumata Aphoristica
1765: THE YEAR MINA BAXTER’S MOTHER DIED
Mina didn’t like the man from the Company. Taylor, her father called him, always with a splash of venom in his voice. She thought her father didn’t like Taylor either. She wondered if he’d seen the way Taylor’s greedy face darkened whenever he saw her, like he wished to do her damage of some kind.
When Taylor was in the house, she usually made herself scarce; she’d plead with Fernando to take her down to the bay, or to accompany her down to James Town, where she’d sit in the square and watch the people go by while Fernando hid in the hills, as was his way. She enjoyed it when the children of James Town approached her with their insidious intent, and she told them she knew the Cannibal of whom they often spoke, and they ran away shouting.
Sometimes a boy (never a girl) would stay behind, fearlessly saying he didn’t believe her, and then she’d take the boy up into the hills above James Town, and Fernando would rise from the rocks and the boy would scream and run away, and she’d watch him while she laughed and held on to Fernando’s only hand. She never told her mother or father about this sort of thing, and Fernando kept it to himself.
Childish games, these were. She wondered if tonight those childish games had come to an end. Taylor sat in her mother’s chair, and that was enough to anger her, but she didn’t say anything. Her father had told her often enough that she was to be polite to the man from the Company.
It had been ten minutes since her mother last screamed.
‘How is the King?’ she asked, as sweetly as she could manage. Her question seemed to shake the Company man from whatever thoughts he was thinking. He seemed very distracted, this evening. He frowned at her.
‘The King? Which King do you mean, child?’
Now it was her turn to frown. Surely England only had one King? Even a lonely little girl on St Helena knew that!
‘Why, King George, sir. Is there another King?’
‘King George is dead, child. His grandson has replaced him.’
‘Oh. How sad.’ And it was sad. She hated to think of men dying. ‘And what is the new King’s name, sir?’
‘King George.’
‘They could not think of a new name for him, then?’
Taylor didn’t answer that, and she decided that this meant he wanted to hear no further questions. She considered asking some anyway, just to annoy him.
There was still no sound from her mother’s room.
Taylor stood up, and began looking along the bookshelves. He often did this when he visited, and she wondered what book he looked for. Once, he had exclaimed joyfully at finding something, only for his face to fall when he took it down and opened it. When she went to look at the book later on, the only words she saw were in Greek. She could read a little Greek and Latin – her father had been teaching her – but it was not sufficient to decipher what Taylor had found.
There was a movement at the library entrance, then. Her father appeared there. She looked into his face, and saw nothing but emptiness. Taylor stepped towards him, and the two of them went away, leaving her alone with the books and the yawning silence.
Eventually, she decided to go to bed. Sometimes she wasn’t sure when the best time to go might be – she usually just waited until exhaustion pushed her bedwards, or her mother insisted. She could pretend it was whatever time she wanted it to be, if she didn’t go outside. But now her bed felt like a refuge, a comforting soft shelter from the strange emptiness of feeling she felt in the air. As if something had departed.
She climbed into her bed without bothering to undress, her clothes smelling of the sand and salt of the bay where she had spent most of the day, gazing up at the endless blue sky and imagining flying up into it, away and over the endless ocean to those far parts of the world that she saw only in books and in the stories of her mother. She often dreamed of flying. It seemed the only way she would ever get off this island. Her family had been here for almost two hundred years, her father had told her, and he’d made her memorise all her forebears, even the ones named Aakster who spoke Dutch and had names that seemed to her to come from the Bible.
She tried to sleep, but couldn’t, and waited for her mother to come to her, to kiss her cheek and read to her and sit beside her until tiredness seized her and dragged her away.
But her mother did not come. It was her father who came and sat on her bed. He didn’t touch her as her mother did – didn’t stroke her head or her face – and she thought about taking his hand and putting it on her head but something about the way her father sat beside her stopped her doing it. He looked at the corner of the room, and she wondered if he could see anything there.
‘Your mother is dead,’ he said, eventually. ‘Your brother, too.’
Her brother, whom she had never met, who had only been a promise inside the blossoming girth of her mother’s belly. She felt cheated by his non-arrival, even while she tried to wrestle her understanding into some grip on the words ‘your mother is dead’.
‘We must start work tomorrow, Mina,’ he said, and now he did look at her, and she wondered when her father had become so old and so lost.
‘What work, Papa?’
‘Memory work, Mina. You have a very great deal to learn.’
‘Learn about what?’
‘About the reason we are here, my child. Now sleep well. Tomorrow, your life will not be as free as it has been heretofore.’
He did not kiss her as her mother had done, but he did shift a stray hair from across her forehead, and she thought that would have to be enough.
THE HORTONS ARRIVE AT ST HELENA
Approaching from the south (because of the winds, Abigail was told), the island gave no welcome. Brown rock cliffs rose up and behind these cliffs she could see the steep peaks of the interior. The hills were so high as to be in cloud; the whole place was crowned with mist. It was breathtakingly lonely.
Charles was making himself busy somewhere, so she had no one with whom to share the joy of arrival. At last, the prospect of land.
The ship rounded the island, and the north face came more into the view. The battered cliffs were pierced by tiny valleys, barely more than geographical filaments in the enormous walls of rock. How did such a thing come to be here? Did Neptune build a fortress for himself but then forget about it?
Atop some of the highest points on the sea-facing cliffs sat manmade enclosures of military fastness, prickly little structures that gave the island the aspect of a maritime fort, an outpost of Empire. An ocean-clapped castle.
The winds were quieter on the north side of the island, but the rollers on the sea were still large, and even a virgin voyager like Abigail could see how unapproachable the island was. There were no significant landing places at all, only the occasional tiny bay giving out from one of those needle ravines. She imagined the men who discovered this place sailing round and round, trying to find a way to approach, wondering what secrets those brown rock walls preserved.
They rounded a final point and, at last, a landing place. This, then, must be James Town. The town sat inside one of those ravines that pierced the outer rock wall of the island, carved out presumably by a river or stream, and unlike the other defiles this particular valley was just wide enough to insert a community. The ingenuity and determination of explorers struck her. The same energy that captured and cut that enormous whale built those little white houses which clustered up into the tiny valley. A great wall ran across the front of the valley, between the town and the shore, and behind it rose the tower of a church.
They anchored off a huge rock, at the top of which bristled one of those batteries. They climbed into a whaleboat which was lowered into the sea. The captain, Wallace, had joined them, though he still preferred to render her invisible. She could smell the destroyed sperm whale in the wood of the ship even now, though the carcass itself was left to sink into the ocean days before.
Inside the whaleboat the ocean rollers were more pronounced. She shrieked as one hit the boat, grabbing her husband’s arm and holding onto it as they were rowed over to the wharf beneath the massive rock. The bruise on her own arm – Rat’s bruise – throbbed under the effort.
She thought there must be ceremonies to perform – would they be greeted, questioned, even searched? This place was fortified, that much was clear, and their arrival had already sparked some activity along the wharf; other men in other boats were rowing out to the Martha, presumably to sell supplies. But Wallace ignored them, as did Charles, and this tipping boat was no place for questions.
It was almost impossible for her to get out of the boat and onto the wharf, so strong were the rollers. Charles climbed out first, turned and virtually swung her up to the wharf. She felt astonishingly uncomfortable, an ill-suited creature in this world of men, and for a moment as she lunged out of the boat she spied a man in the boat looking at her as the wind blew her skirts. She had experienced all sorts of looks and heard all sorts of mutterings during the voyage, and expected little else, but this felt more of a violation than any of them. She scowled at the man when she was safely on the wharf, and he grinned and looked away. The bitch was safely ashore, and his voyage could continue without the inconveniences of women.
Charles picked up the large ticking bag which contained their belongings. They walked along the wharf, and reached the point where the fortified wall protected the entrance to the town. A drawbridge across the channel of water between the
wharf and the town entrance was guarded by two soldiers. Wallace went up to them.
‘Master of the Martha, whaler out of London,’ he said. ‘Two passengers with us with business here on St Helena. I’d like to take them to the Governor.’
The soldiers nodded, pointing inside.
‘Know your way?’ one of them asked.
‘Aye,’ said Wallace, and in they went.
On the other side of the wall was a terrace running between a square and a large plain building towards which Wallace made his way. On the far side of the square was the church she had seen from the water, facing a fine-looking garden which looked over a street lined by terraced houses. The buildings were recognisably English – not unattractive but staunchly functional. The only decoration was supplied by Nature – the trees and plants in the garden opposite the church and, rising up on either side of the town and beyond it, the green-and-brown walls of St Helena.
The green lushness of the hills was a stark contrast to the brown fastnesses of the outward-facing cliffs. In the distance, along the valley, she could see a tantalising prospect of craggy peaks. The air was pleasantly warm, the only clouds those that ringed the peaks of the interior. In many ways, it felt like a pleasant English spring day, though in a part of England – the South Downs, perhaps – where the land had been squeezed by titanic hands to form steep valleys and impossible slopes.
And, Lord, it was good to be on solid ground once more.
Abigail saw Wallace glance uneasily at Charles as the three of them were about to step into the building wherein the island’s Governor was to be found.
‘You’re both coming in?’ he said, to Charles.
‘Men’s business, is it, captain?’ she said, no longer disguising her dislike. ‘Well, then. Men’s business it is. I shall wait here.’
The Detective and the Devil Page 18