Abigail was angrier than Jane. She reminded them that Robby had been beaten by the Roses; she used the word torture. She said Robby was in her care until this matter was settled to her satisfaction, and it had better be peacefully, and that any bullies that might come along would find her a harder adversary than a lame simpleton. She added, too tendentiously, “I won’t be the one to name Lena’s persecutor. I can name Robby’s. He’s bad sick now, his face all swollen and ripped, though it’s been a week. Let Christian Rose and his brave brothers answer for Robby.”
Over the following weeks, the people of Gaunttown, stirred up by the shamed Roses and the conniving Hospidar, turned against Elephant Frazer. Where before they had blamed the Patties, the beasties, the British, the “Divil cold,” they came to fault Elephant Frazer, and for great and small things, what can go wrong in periods of long siege—bad water, lost sheep, miscarriages, and an outbreak of pneumonia in the beastie camp that spread to Gaunttown. Most of the time, the dissension was too mixed with heartfelt calls for justice for Lena for one to be sure who was seditious and who was outraged. Elephant Frazer had no resources with which to do detective work. It was hoped that the real criminal would confess, or that Lena would name her attacker.
Meanwhile, Robby Oldmizzen remained at the Frazer camp, where he became sullen and timid, heavily dependent upon Abigail. She mothered him, made him like one of her children, so that he played with Samson’s two sons, Gabe and Adam, and rocked my Sam to sleep. I visited when I could, though I was not good about my time. Lazarus drove the both of us to finish the constitutional draft for the spring; he directed me to visit the families with drafts, like an itinerant evangelist. I was not usually welcome and spent much of my visits in the kitchens arguing with the women and old men about the beasties, the Frazers and Gaunts and Roses and, above all, Robby. No one would dare to say openly that Robby was guilty. They were angry and suspicious, because Elephant Frazer continued to protect Robby from questions. One old man, a Lindfir, surprised me when he used Lazarus’s vocabulary, saying it was “the bloody will of the people” that Robby be brought up on charges.
Winter ebbed, the ice did loosen. Lena recovered enough to leave hospital and was taken in to continue her convalescence by her great-aunt, who was, significantly, one of the old wives living in a common house on the market square.
“They poison her, those witches,” Jane told me soon after. “The poor dear, she don’t know what happened to her. They tease her about a bairn. She’s no pregnant, I can tell ye, Abbie and me made sure. They won’t let me or Abbie close, threw mud at Abbie when she called. They make that child feel like she’d done wrong. Those witches. You must do something.”
I balked, asking, what could I do about old women and gossip?
“Take hold,” said Jane, her sense of republicanism melting like the ice, “ye, Mr. President, take hold and make right.”
I told her Elephant Frazer had made more concessions to the Hospidar, among them sending the Frazer’s adopted beasties to live with the Zulemas in the beastie camp.
“And we’ll see Saint Peter himself on the High Street afore those two sort out their minds. Ye, and Germanicus, take hold now.”
Elephant Frazer did confer increasingly with me and Germanicus, and even Lazarus, since he was pushed away by the elders of Gaunttown, who were bitter about Robby. These meetings, between father and son and adopted son, made Germanicus uneasy. He felt it was coming to look like Frazer rule. For all his instinctive sympathy for absolutism—rule by strong men—Germanicus was not insensitive to the peril of what Lazarus called “crypto-royalty.” And more worrisome to Germanicus than this hint of Frazer dictatorship was that Lazarus’s solution to the Robby dilemma was to begin advocating the formation of a “revolutionary court” to settle disputes while we waited for the constitution to be accepted and to set in place a judiciary. It was not a bad idea. It was too much for the Frazers, especially since the Hospidar seized on the rumor of Lazarus’s notion to agitate for his obvious goal: a Volunteer state, military rule.
We did find what we hoped was a wise course, during one of our late night talks at the KELPER. Germanicus, just back in King James from exploring the breakup of the ice and from taking several whales, admitted to us that he had delayed his marriage too long, for good reasons: war, weather, catastrophe. He offered not to wait for summer, rather to marry Jane in the spring. Lazarus toasted the idea, and we took it upstairs to Elephant Frazer, working that night with the whaling factory foreman on rationing. He was delighted. None of us thought it was polite to mention aloud that the major reason it was such a good idea was that it would go a long way to repairing the rift between the Frazers and the Gaunts, and with that, all the major families might come to peace at the ceremony. Jane was informed belatedly. She stopped by the Assembly Hall a few days later to confront me and Lazarus. She said she would agree to the ploy; she also said she thought it contrived.
“There’s not flour for a proper cake,” she said. “That’s yerr real threat, not Roses and that Simon Brackenbury neither. Ye men get us flour and let us heal ourselves. No finery will have done like cargoes of fruit and wheat.”
The day of the wedding was wet and anxious. There were sooty icebergs on the northwestern horizon. The people of Gaunttown turned out in their gray best. The bride, at twenty, wore white, Abigail’s gown, which had been her great-grandmother’s, with a veil provided by Frances Gaunt, Luff Gaunt Senior’s voluble widow who had recently been caught up by spring love and had declared her intention to marry Simon Brackenbury come summer. I was the best man. Abigail was the matron of honor. There were Gaunt and Frazer flower girls, though we had no flowers, used heath grass and candles instead. Trip Gaunt, Jane’s uncle, stood up for her. The Hospidar, Christian Rose, Simon Brackenbury, and Kevin Gaunt stood at the last pew for the Volunteers and Falkland Irregulars. Roses, McHughs, Lindfirs, Harrahs, Moogs, Oateses, Macklemurrays, and more filled the chapel, family by family, the young intermingling as they would, for the years since the war had seen a new generation of taciturn patriots push into the ranks. The Zulemas sat on the Frazer side of the chapel with the adopted beasties; Lazarus and Violante sat on either side of the young beastie prodigy who had originally been knifed. Longfaeroe preached a long, sentimental sermon beforehand, impromptu, on the spring of hope, and he closed it with a psalm that made Abigail cry. I was nervous, but collected enough to be bursting proud of my fellow South Georgians, who were strong to admit that their weaknesses needed heavenly intercession, and a little fun. By the time of the exchange of rings, I had relaxed, took note of the little Gaunt and Frazer girls, and that there seemed a missing place in the flower children, six on the right, and five on the left. The groom kissed the bride, and she him back, warm and lingering, and we paraded over to the Assembly Hall, decorated for dancing and feasting. There I got my first opportunity to talk with Orlando the Black, who had come down from Shagrock with his men for supplies and had stayed on for the ceremony.
My memory is that Orlando the Black and Lazarus and I were reminiscing about Angel of Death, awkwardly, painfully—it was one week shy of six years since we had set sail from Stockholm—when someone dropped a platter of haggis. It was not an extraordinary ruckus, barely discernible over the piper standing outside the door, bleating good cheer through Gaunttown. I did look up, to find Abigail’s face across the room. She tightened, darkened, walked directly to me, drew me aside, saying, “It’s Lena, Grim, oh, Grim, go and see. Dear sweet Jesus, why, why?” She wrapped her arms around me, would not sob. “I’m up to home. Come as soon as you can.”
The dancing and piping continued. Motherwell and I got down to the High Street, were met by Wild Drumrul. He led us down to the near quay, backing on the church. There we found Christmas Muir and Peggs and several old sealers using poles to pull a body out of the water. We ran when we saw, cold inside, and by the time we got there, Christmas Muir was wrapping a flower girl in a shroud.
“Drowned herself, she did,”
said Christmas Muir. “Petey sawd it and couldn’t get to her in time. Two feet of water. Might’ve been shock, water’s hellish cold, maybe.” He spat. “Divil cold did it.”
Why did she do it? People do not make consistent sense, and are not obliged to; it might then be superfluous for me to exaggerate my inquiry. Ascribe that day, all of that day, to the power of the irrational, the mystery of the spirit. It does now come to me that there is something telling to what Dolly Frazer later told me and Motherwell. We had carried Lena’s corpse up to the undertaker. Dolly crowded in with some of the other matrons, intending to wash Lena and put her in a good black frock. She told me to get along, then took my arm, paused, said, “It was Janey’s weddin’. She died for that. Whyn’t ye men ken wee folk? Struttin’ and scratchin’ ye go. It were love, want of it, that killed the lamb.”
I insist now it was a futile act of flight. I insist it was not the Devil’s work, no, Grandfather, whatever your idea of Satan means, I declare the darkness cannot touch minds as gentle as Lena’s. I declare that it was men who did it, in this case those hags who teased Lena to the point she believed she was as unclean as they said Robby was, and all of the elders in the community who used the crime and Robby’s fear to advance their plans, forgetting, or not caring, that Lena and Robby were children incapable of knowing the difference between what they did and what was said they did. And I declare that if it was the wedding, it might have been anything else too that made Lena feel lost forever to her high dreams of love and family. The birth of the spring lambs, a christening, even a public kiss, might have triggered Lena’s yearning for release from her degradation. Does this seem as if I am excusing Germanicus and Lazarus and me from contriving our solution to the feud—the wedding—rather than facing openly the fact that it was, on South Georgia, people with the very best motives who can do the very worst deeds? I am not. I know what we did. I will take the blame for it, not alone, my share.
Grief swept Gaunttown that day, like fire, fed madly by the longing that had hours before rejoiced at the seeming conciliation of the Frazers and Gaunts. Our hearts were open. The finality of what had happened tormented us. Elephant Frazer was dumbstruck; I know because I was the first to tell him of Lena. I watched him pull the frozen hair from her face. He could not talk, and would not wipe the tears from his face. The wedding party was consumed by the same grief, celebrants fleeing to their homes. I walked Germanicus and Jane to their bridal rooms at the inn behind the helper. In the pub, the drinking was silent. By early evening a gang of Roses and their cousins had taken over the helper, joining in a drunken wake for Lena. I was told that a wilder bout began at the sealer’s pub, night sun, where the men made terrible curses against the one living thing they truly believed had cursed Lena and, through her, themselves and South Georgia—Robby Oldmizzen.
I remember the skies cleared at sunset, a rosy gray over the peaks with towering clouds above the hornstone ridge, a usually happy vista from the balcony off my rooms at the Assembly Hall. I had gone home exhausted from running from the undertaker’s to the church to the helper, trying to get a sense of the gloom. I can remember not eating supper because I had a notion that I would get up to the Frazer camp later and eat with Abigail. The evening passed quickly, and very late I was still in my rooms, with Motherwell. Wild Drumrul, Otter Ransom, and Peggs had joined us. I do not recall Christmas Muir being there. We discussed small things, the ice, Iceberg’s pups. My clock needed winding, and I fussed with it. We smoked Peggs’s tobacco, which had been a wedding present, a great treasure, black and African. What was I doing at the very moment? I think I was winding the clock with a bent key, with difficulty, for I could not get my fingers to work correctly. I had the shakes. How delicate I was.
Lazarus came through the door. I turned and sensed trouble. He should not have been there so late. It was not his way. He asked me to sit down beside him. I noticed Orlando the Black and Violante in the vestibule outside the door. He pulled me down to my chair, began deliberately.
“Elephant Frazer has been killed,” said Lazarus.
“I knewd it, I knewd it,” said Peggs.
“Elephant Frazer, about a half hour ago, walked into the night sun and put a harpoon into Christian Rose,” said Lazarus. “Saul Rose took it out of him and put it through old Frazer’s heart. He stood there and took it. They’ve dragged Germanicus out of his bed and put him in chains. The Hospidar has declared himself governor-general. Hear me out. Kevin Gaunt and Toddy McHugh are downstairs with ten Volunteers. You and I are under arrest for haboring a suspected murderer.”
“Easy, laddie, give it again,” said Motherwell, on his feet, reaching for the harpoon oer the fireplace.
“Elephant Frazer is dead? Elephant Frazer killed Christian Rose?” I said.
“No, old Rose isn’t dead,” said Lazarus. “Frazer struck to unman him, they said. Davey Gaunt came for me at the school and told Vi that Frazer never missed a throw. Kevin Gaunt’s asked that you and I surrender without a fight. They want you, too, Sergeant Motherwell, and you and you.” He nodded at Wild Drumrul and Otter Ransom. “They won’t say about Orlando, afraid of his men, I guess. Gaunt doesn’t want more killing. I agree, this time, I do.”
“Lazarus, why did he do it?” I said. I was numb. I put my hands over my ears, but could not muffle my mind’s voice. I knew, as Lazarus said, “It’s Abbie, oh, Mary and Joseph, forgive, forgive.”
I screamed then, threw my body back and screamed off the chair. I might have done more if not for Motherwell, who then expertly knocked me senseless with the butt of the harpoon. He struck to kill. He later told me he wanted me dead but could not use the spear tip, it was rusted and would have shattered. He had seen me take Germanicus’s bullet at Stanley and did not really believe he could kill me. He tried, partly because of what I might do, berserker among the panicked, partly because he was a hunter and knew mercy for the mortally wounded. He meant to spare me.
They had burned the Frazer camp. I am talking about a mob of a dozen boys bloated with drink and the black thoughts of their elders. They had stormed up to the Frazer camp’s main house, a two-story stone-and-pine-built manse amid cottages and barns, and hammered down the door. Robby, as the only man at the camp, faced them. In some peculiar twist, he momentarily found his bravura long lost on the Falklands; but when they grabbed at him, demanding he account for his whereabouts that day, telling him as they did that Lena was dead, Robby was overwhelmed. He fled within the house, waking those upstairs. Abigail and Meg and Dorothy, Germanicus’s two sisters, were already awake from the barking of the dogs. Dolly Frazer was still with Lena’s corpse and the old wives in town. Abigail took charge and came down. She must have comforted Robby and taken him with her back to the front hall to rebuff the threat. The reports were sketchy hereon. An argument followed, Abigail commanding, “Get out, and fast with you, before our men come.” The boys were ready to run. Robby started his screaming at them and went for a harpoon. There was a struggle on the front steps, and Robby was thrown down. The dogs sent up a howl. The claim later was that Abigail shot first, with a sealer’s double-barrel shotgun loaded with buckshot, ripping away the face of Ian Brackenbury, wounding two of the other boys, a Rose and a Lindfir. The boys shot back as they fled, one salvo, aimed blindly, that struck Abigail. She was not dead, perhaps mortally wounded, perhaps just stunned.
Someone threw a torch, or perhaps a torch had been dropped in the scramble. In that wind, fire is sudden in the dry timbers of a house. Meg and Dorothy (Meg very pregnant by her husband away in the north) got the youngest babies out, one of them my Sam. They were all hurt by the smoke, and there must have been hysteria for the rescue work to have been so inept. There was no explanation as to why the boys who had not been wounded did not go back to help.
The toll was unbearable, eight of the Frazer household dead, including five children under twelve years of age: Gabe, Adam, Michael, Louise, Augustina, the cook, the servant girl, and Abigail. My Sam did not die; he was put in hospital, w
here Jane Gaunt did not leave him, breathing for him when he could not work his smoke-clogged lungs. The dead, including Meg Frazer the next morning, were buried two days hence in a mass ceremony, along with Elephant Frazer, Ian Brackenbury, and Lena Rose.
We, the arrested, were not permitted the funeral, a precaution by the Hospidar that was bald cruelty. Germanicus, Lazarus, and I were kept in separate cells. Otter Ransom, Wild Drumrul, and Motherwell were in the same cell, at the Volunteers’ fort surrounding the lighthouse on Cumberland Bay. We could converse across the floor of our dungeon, did not at first. Longfaeroe came out to us the night after the funeral in order to sing psalms. I was still weak from Motherwell’s clubbing and my grief, and listened disinterestedly until he stood right before my cell and sang Psalm 19, “The heavens tell out the glory of Jehovah, the vault of heaven reveals his handiwork. One day speaks to another, night with night shares its knowledge, and this without speech or language, or sound of any voice—”
I resented Longfaeroe’s presence. He did not seem grieved by the loss of his daughter and two of his grandsons. His face was undecipherable, his words were not. He sang with cunning. I might have been wrong at the time, but I heard in his psalm a call for a hero, for me, to rise up and take hold of South Georgia: “Their music goes out through all the world, their words reach to the end of the earth. In them a tent is fixed for the sun, him!, who comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy, rejoicing like a strong man to run his race. His rising is at one end of the heavens, his circuit touches their farthest ends; and nothing is hidden from his heat—”
I also thought at the time that he might have been calling on Germanicus. I had no patience for Longfaeroe, regarded him as much at fault as others I could name. He visited us several more times in the next week, to sing and to pass on messages from Orlando the Black and Dolly Frazer, not a word from Jane. Germanicus would not talk with Longfaeroe, a shunning that was the single sign he showed of his fury. Germanicus told me that his father would want us to keep calm, to gather our strength for our time. Germanicus seemed the same as before to me—hard, fatalistic, resourceful, the qualities that had first attracted me at 2 de Diciembre. There was nothing different. What was new was that he was focused, on revenge. I could not, would not, speak against it. Lazarus would not counsel against violent retribution; he did make it clear that he thought the Hospidar would have to put us on trial, and that we should not act beforehand.
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 28