I cast off well before 10:00 p.m. in a cold drizzle and choppy water. Otter Ransom had procured ten liters of fuel from the police yards, so I was able to motor us into the harbor. Grandfather’s Angel of Death answered to her helm smartly—an elegant, well-built, seventy-six-foot schooner, carrying a jibsail, foresail, mainsail, with spruce masts, an oak keel, a mahogany cabin, registered at sixty tons. I had an exhausted, untried crew—three Americans, three Furores, three Turks, three Swedes, a Ukrainian, and four dogs—and a precious supercargo: Molly, her baby, my father’s fate. I set Babe and Otter Ransom at the bow to man one of Thord’s fixed automatic weapons and our light. I set Wild Drumrul and Orlando the Black in Black Crane, which we towed close behind. I set my hand on the Fiddle Bible.
We anchored a half mile off the island. Grandfather wanted me and four others—I chose Guy and Earle; Lazarus chose himself and Babe—to approach in Black Crane. For appearances, we were relatives come to claim a corpse. We were not alone; there was a cluster of small craft just off the floodlit pier, held back by sweeping searchlights and the presence of a company of the Evangelical Brigade. The procedure began with a name called on the megaphone. A boat then bobbed toward the floating raft below the pier, as several chained convicts emerged from the portal at the base of the prison tower abutting the pier. They were hauling a body bag down to the raft. Finally, relatives in the boat reached to be reunited with their dead. We waited hours in that damp, watching as dozens of bodies were processed through, the ordeal slowed now and again because of questions about a corpse’s identity. They were headless, after all, and likely so starved that there was no resemblance to the man arrested. The Evangelical Brigadesmen were rigorous. Rings and scars were checked carefully. Mass execution seemed to bring out the shopkeeper in the military, the patron in the bereaved. Guy distracted us by telling stories about Vietnam. Lazarus then told about a gruesome massacre he had witnessed in South America, where he had traveled either as a journalist or observer, or perhaps a student. Guy talked openly with Lazarus; Lazarus seemed sympathetic to Guy’s disgust for the American military. Earle asked Lazarus about some of the hand signals he used to communicate with Babe. Their month together seemed to have given the four of them respect for their separate agendas. I mention here—incidentally, because it proved to be less significant than one might think—that Lazarus was a Yale graduate, like Guy and Earle. Orlando the Black had attended the American Roman Catholic university called Notre Dame; he had considered a career as a professional athlete before turning from that to travel with Lazarus, Babe, and Cleopatra in South America.
The wait wore us down. Earle sat beside me, his hands white from gripping the oars. We passed food to a family nearby that had almost succumbed to the cold and their fear. Those poor people, terrified children, weeping and shivering for their fathers and husbands and brothers. We should have helped. We did nothing. Our moment arrived when the megaphone announced “Peregrine Ide!”
Guy handled the tiller. We pulled hard and smooth. We shot toward the floating raft. The searchlight found us. On the shore, I spotted an approaching convict party carrying a body bag on their shoulders. Right behind I saw Grandfather’s white hair. He towered over the figures of Charity Betham and Cleopatra Furore walking behind him.
I bent to my oar. We bumped to a halt at the raft. The officer on duty, a short man whose hands were stained with blood from the inspections, challenged us, “Who are you here for?”
“Peregrine Ide,” said Guy.
I heard clamoring behind me. I heard Grandfather end a psalm with a flourish: “Hosannah!” I heard the leg chains of the convicts. I turned enough to see the officer stoop to open the body bag.
“No need!” boomed Grandfather.
“Get away!” cried Charity Bentham. She seemed hysterical. Even though he knew it was a ruse—to divert the guards—Babe flinched at the sight of his mother’s twisted face.
“Yes, Lieutenant, do not waste your time,” said Grandfather. “No Christian burial for this fiend.”
“We have a right to him,” said Guy.
“Get rid of them!” said Grandfather.
“I cannot do that, sir,” said the lieutenant. “My orders say that I must turn over the body to those who claim it.”
“I signed those orders!”
“I understand, Reverend, sir, but,” tried the lieutenant.
“He’s dead, that’s enough,” shouted Guy.
“You want him? You want this thing?” shouted Charity Bentham at us in Black Crane, moving to the bag. “He murdered my husband! He tore out my heart! Tell me how giving him to you will give me back my husband? Tell me how anything matters? He died only once, and I have to live with nothing! Do you hear? I want nothing for him! Nothing!” She kicked the body bag as she screamed. Cleopatra tried to pull her mother back. Babe shook with effort to hold himself in check. Earle took Babe by the shoulders to comfort him.
“They want something?” continued Charity Bentham. She moved her arms under her cloak. “Here! Take it, here!” With that, she slammed a dark object so hard on the raft that it bounced into Black Crane. The sound was hideous. Lazarus leaned forward, took the gory thing with both hands, and tossed it into the water.
“Mother! Mother!” cried Cleopatra. I turned full around to see Cleopatra lift her Mother clear of the body bag. How much of Charity’s performance was masquerade? Peregrine had indeed murdered Cesare. I was never sure. Cleopatra had surprised me again: she was as strong as she was strong-willed, and as strongvoiced, commanding, “I don’t care what you do! Stop tormenting my mother! Have you men no decency?”
“Please, understand,” started the lieutenant.
“Do those orders say he is to have a Christian burial?” said Grandfather. “Surely you see this woman has a right to revenge herself. I did not condemn this man to have him shown respect!”
The lieutenant looked to his sergeant. The blood, the mourners, the night—they did not have enough of a will left for this. The lieutenant suggested he send for his captain. Grandfather started to lecture him on the vengeance of Lord God. The lieutenant interrupted Grandfather in order to ask for a solution.
“Give me one of your men, and this vermin here”—Grandfather indicated two convicts—“and we’ll feed him to the fish. He needs worse.”
“I cannot do such a thing,” said the lieutenant.
At that Cleopatra struck the lieutenant in the back, then thrust against him with her shoulder, sending him over the side and into Black Crane. He landed hard and rolled toward Earle, but was only stunned, and tried to sit up. Earle reacted with a motion so swift and tight than none of the Brigadesmen saw. Earle struck to kill.
Grandfather immediately began his thunder: “Get that man out of there! Stand back! Sergeant, you will provide us a trooper, that one there, him, get in, you will help me! Get that body aboard! I shall take charge here! Trooper, get in! Ladies, now you! Give way!”
Grandfather stepped into the stern of Black Crane, seizing the tiller from Guy. Earle, Lazarus, and I fixed our arms on the raft to steady the boat as we balanced the new passengers. Grand father bellowed, all rage and righteousness. What a magnificient bluffer; despite everything I had heard of him and seen, I was awed, and just as amazed that by a twist he was on my family’s side, more, he was my family. He assumed total charge, getting the convicts and the women aboard, berating a Brigadesman who moved sluggishly, suspiciously, to take position as a guard in the bow, warning the troops on the pier to mind their own, tend their duty, for he was “the Reverend Mord Fiddle, doing the work of Lord God!” That magic tongue overwhelmed them. One wanted to believe him in order to escape his wrath. I think now they permitted us to shove off for their own release. Then again, there is the fact that Grandfather really was the would-be despot of the Evangelical Republic of Sweden; and that in revolution, it is not the prudent man who prevails, rather the fanatical, the tyrannical, the pitiless.
This is to speak prematurely of the phenomenon of a b
lack prince. I have studied this matter as best I can. Grandfather was never in the rank of such as Savonarola, Torquemada, Cromwell, Robespierre. And I can speak with the authority of one who has seen what it is to pretend to self-elected omnipotence. Grandfather’s sense of the coming kingdom of his Lord God was always informed, however tardily, by a faith in the possibility of reconciliation. What he helped wreak in Sweden should not be forgotten, though it probably has been by now, another passing disgrace. I cannot say what happened there, in the North, after we fled. I presume that all improved once the passion of insane prejudice ran its course. The Loyalist call for purity was not a masterwork, it was a cowardly surrender. For their shame, for Grandfather’s shame, I pray to God for forgiveness. I say this with intimate knowledge of far worse, with liability for far worse, than anything Grandfather and his thugs did there. I must not telescope my story too far ahead. There is much I must record for clarity. It is appropriate here to say that aboard Angel of Death, I and my family escaped a kingdom cursed by fire, and that aboard Angel of Death, we fell into an age cursed by exile and toward a kingdom cursed by ice, and that it was in so falling that Grim Fiddle was to discover that most profound of human treasures, his own destiny.
CHAPTER THE SECOND
THE FLEET
OF THE DAMNED
Hope Abandoned
PUNISHMENT had transformed Peregrine. And, one-eyed, emaciated, bent, he came back to us more changed than even his physical distortions would suggest. He had rid himself of his anger. He was peaceful; no, not merely that, for there was also his fascination with the sea, the food he ate, whatever we said to him. He had not relaxed—as might a man who has been broken by five years of incarceration—he had intensified about the commonplace. He spoke to me peculiarly with his new self, saying things such as, “No man has a truer son.” I had no ready reply, usually smiled, which set him at ease, as if I were the lord and host and he the wayfaring guest. Did he feel impermanent? He made being alive and on board Angel of Death seem a reward.
The metamorphosis disturbed me, not unhappily. Before, Peregrine and I engaged in conversations that circled around our love for each other, that were grounded in events, objects, history. After, all we talked about was our relationship. Peregrine had seized upon fidelity, loyalty, devotion, upon what I presume he meant with the single word true. Before, Peregrine had only rarely spoken candidly about family, America, Sweden. He had avoided the deepest truth-telling. And his deception had been most damaging when directed against himself. He had made believe more than he had believed. After, he seemed to fasten on that intangible Greek concept, the Truth, as if it were his next breath.
“He got away,” said Guy of Peregrine’s metamorphosis.
“He got her,” said Israel.
Indeed, it was not possible to determine how much of Peregrine’s new identity was self-generated and how much was called forth by his intimacy with Charity Bentham. She was with him like a new limb. She held him, sang to him, fed him, helped him on deck for exercise, slept with him in that narrow bunk. She seemed to animate his wasted body. He was my father, and Israel’s friend. He was her devotion.
Charity Bentham also changed after the rescue. From what I learned of her conduct beforehand, she had known despair but overall had been assertive, effective, self-generating. Her performance on the pier with the Brigadesmen was typical of her power. On board Angel of Death all that disappeared. She gave the impression that if Peregrine left her sight, she herself would disappear. If Peregrine was more loving afterward, Charity was all sentiment, a creature so fragile and vulnerable that one worried the sea might wash her away as she huddled with Peregrine in the gangway. She stopped speaking in complete sentences. She must have talked at length with Peregrine, for I saw them wrapped in conversation. I never overheard her. And as he grew stronger, Peregrine developed a way of speaking for Charity, as if there were two bodies, one voice, one heart. Where was the Nobel Laureate? The answer is that she was in place. She had turned inward. Charity Bentham was an extraordinary human being. Before, she had pursued fortune and power. After, she pursued Peregrine. She applied that will of hers to reawakening a man who should have died soon after his rescue. It was as if she kissed him back to life, adored him, in order to keep him from quitting us. She performed a miracle of love and hope.
And as Charity’s hope filled Peregrine, their love conjoined affected all of us on board. We did not become new men, like Peregrine, but there were changes. Israel joked less, spoke seriously, perhaps heavily, to me. He explained how wrong he had been to spurn Charity’s help, saying, “I should never have given up on those two.” He warned me never to wait for love, as he had done with Molly. Guy was more patient, doting not just on Earle but also on Molly and me and even my dogs, whom he had never much liked. Thord talked less and brooded more, but even he acted pleased to be alive when not upset by Orri’s ordeal with Gizur’s hallucinations. Earle remained steady, as taciturn as ever, with the change that he spoke up more readily in our shipboard councils; he was fatherly toward the Turks and conciliatory toward the Furore brothers, not waiting for Guy’s lead.
We had each changed some, then, not entirely for the better, certainly in concert with our expectations. We congratulated ourselves for having survived the fire. We felt tempered. We had lost everything we possessed and yet held to our community. Those first few days out of Stockholm harbor, we could admire Charity’s care for Peregrine, and Peregrine’s metamorphosis, and all our reconciliations, and have reason to believe that we were free of Sweden’s murder.
Yet we were not so free that one of our number could not easily remind us of our troubles. Cleopatra Furore patrolled our consciences. It was unfair and cruel of her, yet I know now it was in character, and is therefore condemnable only in that we had so many immediate obstacles that we could have been spared her dissent until later. Her brothers seemed to restrain their moods and did cooperate with the business of getting on. Cleopatra alone stood apart, and imperially. She treated Lazarus as her prime minister, the other two as her courtiers. She treated us as vulgarians. Whenever there was gaiety on deck, she would appear in a rush, a cloaked and accusatory look about her, and try to intimidate us into sobriety, which generally worked, even on the gentlest, least culpable of us, Molly.
And why? Guilt alone would have been sufficient. We really had rescued the man who had murdered her father. And we were openly prideful of our action. Yet that was our initial reaction, our affair to digest, and I believe would have eventually settled into a manageable history. Perhaps Cleopatra sensed that the passing of time would make her conduct out of place. And so she did more than silently accuse us. She was belligerent. I was her target. Toward me, she was cynical, manipulative, venomous. I dwarfed her physically, and she was no slight person. In reply she made me feel an intellectual mite. In conversation, between us or in a group, she would cut me off, dismiss me, overwhelm me. She was as eager to mock me as I was to avoid her. She wanted to humiliate me, and went farther on one of the first nights on Angel of Death: she cursed me.
“Any woman who could love that man is no mother to me,” she said. This is typical of her talk, premeditated hyperbole. “And if you could see as I do, Grim Fiddle, you would know how odious to me is everything that man loves. You are worse than he is.”
What did that mean? It was non-sensible, so filled with revulsion as to be pitiable. At the time, though, I thought it impossibly profound and undecipherable. I could not reply. I moved away, afraid of her temper. There was nowhere to hide on seventy-six feet of Norse timber. And she pursued me, running on about how she held me responsible for Charity’s love for Peregrine, and Peregrine’s escape from death, and all that had happened. It seemed for Cleopatra that I was Peregrine’s first and most contemptible crime, the one that had engendered the divorce, the remarriage, and Cleopatra’s conception. Therefore, for Cleopatra, I was the germ of all that had befallen the Furores.
Israel several times attempted to explain to me
how he saw Cleopatra’s attitude toward me. He said that Peregrine had wrongly murdered Cesare Furore and been rightly condemned for it. Charity had delivered Peregrine from his ruin, for her own contradictory reasons. All this confused Cleopatra and gradually came to sicken her. Cleopatra was left with a murdered father whom she wanted to revenge, and an aggrieved mother whom she wanted to help. Then Charity had actually involved Cleopatra in a conspiracy to rescue the man she naturally reviled. Cleopatra had cooperated, reluctantly but effectively. Afterward, she reconsidered her actions and, feeling shame for what she thought was the betrayal of her father, turned against everyone who reminded her of the sadness. With the best and most praiseworthy of motives, love for her father and mother, Cleopatra felt something she was constrained from acting on—revenge—and Cleopatra had done something she could not accept in retrospect, helped to deliver Peregrine. She could separate herself from Charity, and could continue to condemn Peregrine, and could regret her fate. But that was not enough, or at least it did not satisfy her. Her frustration unbalanced her. I recall Israel saying she felt stained by her father’s blood. Cleopatra herself became murderous. And she stabbed at what represented to her Peregrine’s dark side—the side that had murdered—and this was his bastard, Grim Fiddle.
I remain cautious of all this. It seems too neat to me now, certainly too Greek. Israel would appreciate my suspicion of his theory. If people were so logical, there would be no difference between mankind and the stars. Yes, Cleopatra might have hated me from the first, without need for specific cause, with a general disgust for her condition. Yet she also seemed to have need of me. And I argue now that what she needed was my presence, the fact of me, the eagerness and awkwardnesss of me trying to understand her, pity her, help her. I represented to her not only her persecuting fate, as Israel said, but also her success at standing up to her tormentors, her father’s murderers. I was her pride of conquest, in that she could feel herself most righteous and indomitable when she could strike at me. I provided her a certain sense of identity in her confusion of roles, for to revile me was to demonstrate that she remained unreconciled to her fate. Seeing me would hurt her, hurting me would hurt her, knowing I was hurt would hurt her. All this pain, cruelty, hardheartedness would make her feel justified. It does seem contradictory that one can cling to pain, and pain-making, as firmly as one can cling to joy and joy-making. That is what Cleopatra seemed to do, passionately. In this peculiar way, from the first, I was Cleopatra’s passion. She lavished on me a nakedness of soul that one would ordinarily give to a lover. This confounded me as it compelled me. I risk to argue here that I became Cleopatra’s passion as Peregrine had become Charity’s. As we were father and son, they were mother and daughter, by blood, by manner, and by persuasion to love and to hate and to remain unresolved.
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