Coronach, page 84
I said, “Nothing is a mystery to you. All is known, all is calculated,” and was conscious of his stillness, and a dissonant roaring beyond the timbers of this world, which was the fury of the sea.
He said, “That is a mystery to me, and an entity. It suffers us to pass, and sometimes it demands a sacrifice. Its behaviour is not predictable. And the winds change, and the position of the stars is not immutable— they alter with the seasons, and with latitude. Only the relationship between the sea, the sailor and the stars is eternal.”
“Like the woman who stands under an infinite heaven, on land she believes she knows, and land and heaven conspire to destroy her.”
In the silence there was rain or hail or spray against the darkened glass: our ghostly reflections were there as they had been in other nights, other worlds, in the angry prelude to other storms, in an imitation of intimacy.
“Who are you, Margaret?”
“I am a lost soul. I have no resting place.”
“Why didn’t you write to your friend?”
“My only friends are dead.”
He came around the desk, but no closer, as though he sensed that his use of my name had been violation enough.
“Is she your mother?”
For him, who had never even seen me smile, it must have seemed a travesty of bitterness. He would never understand why I laughed: a hundred hours of this spurious companionship would not suffice to explain it.
“When you return to England, will you go back to her? Or to the soldier?”
“If you knew him, you would know he was in Halifax. My place is not with him.”
“I thought you were his mistress.”
“He was my guardian.”
“It sometimes goes by that name.”
“I was never his mistress. I believed he was my father.”
“Then he’s a bloody fool.”
“I don’t wish to know your thoughts, or your speculations on my private life.”
“Is that why you married?”
“I married for love.”
“Yes, and love looks like death out of your eyes. You must think me insensitive as well as criminal.”
She seemed to shudder, and the deck fell away. The furniture, shackled to ringbolts, did not move, but the shuttered lantern overhead strained out and swung wildly, and the crystal glasses in their case, although restrained, smashed against one another. The chart and quills and heavy silver standish slid from the desk. Had I not been seated, I would have fallen with her.
He said, “I’m going up. I’ll come to you when I can.”
“St. James—” He was already at the door, with the oilskin dripping over his arm. “Let me come on deck with you.”
“I can’t allow it.”
I said, “Don’t leave me. I’m afraid,” and he paused there: the pitching shadows gave only a chiaroscuro impression of the windburned face and the tense, exhilarated smile.
“You? You have more courage than a soldier of the line.”
When one is in terror the moments of truth are endless, and mine endured for hours, while death clawed the night and the sea sought her sacrifice. The lantern smoked and showered me with burning tallow, the skylight leaked and the drops were salt; in the darkness beyond the coaming the companionway streamed water, not rain but the sea. In her bowels the pumps began. She was running before it, under driver and jib and topgallants alone: further attempts to reef were defeated, and the heavy seas into which she smashed swept one man overboard and threw a helmsman from the wheel. The shock of her uncontrolled breach to the wind communicated itself even to me. And in the seconds before others threw their weight on the wheel, my life, all our lives, were ephemeral, balanced on the strength of a breaking wave and in the hand of God. The night and the moment and the dark world that encompassed me hung, and seemed to hang, and his sword fell from its hooks on the bulkhead, and the chair at the desk slammed forward; and then, with her timbers almost a human protest, she lifted. The sword in its scabbard slid toward me, the crystal smashed in its case, and the unsecured drawers of the desk slid open and spilled their contents: bullets, sealing wax, cigars, a pocket pistol, a silver card case, letters and objects that could not be recognized, or reached or replaced while I was unable to stand.
There was no dawn, only a greyness straining through the salt-caked glass, the bells were heard again, the slide removed from the skylight although neither sky nor person was visible. There were shards of crystal on the soaking canvas, his sword lay where it had fallen, his letters were blurred and scattered, the detritus of an unknown past into which I desired no invitation. I imagined a lessening of the sea’s fury: perhaps this was so. The wind was still violent, but her movements, although heavy, were stable: she was carrying more sail.
Deadened with the aftermath of fear, I could not have moved, but when the sound came I seemed bodiless, beyond the pain of bruised flesh and acute self-knowledge. It was Harris, mute, intractable and soaked to the skin, with a pot of coffee and a single cup.
“Cap’n sent un,” he said, and left me.
I drank it, and later slept; there were sounds and voices, of the sea and the living ship, but they did not disturb me. And no nightmare tore my sleeping mind, and no dream.
Once more she turned her white, serene face to the south, with gilded eyes on a blinding horizon, and with her, child of the north that I was, I entered eternal summer.
We crossed the Tropic of Cancer on the thirty-first of March. Now, favoured by the northeast trades, we averaged two hundred and forty miles a day, through an unsurpassable sea. By day there were dolphins, by night phosphorescence, in which I took a childish delight: the noon sun burned, the darkness was sudden, lit by distant, soundless storms or the thousand unknown stars beyond the rigging. There was beauty and coolness at dawn, when I sometimes rose and walked with St. James, and respite from the curious eyes of others in the indigo shadows of the dusk. Degrees of intimacy existed now, as the degrees of latitude had diminished. I had not sought them, but I was utterly dependent upon him, even for dressings when I menstruated. I had nothing and no one but him.
His behaviour toward me remained irreproachable. He never failed to greet me with pleasure and solicitude, or to provide me with what comfort was possible, but he did not force his presence upon me or intrude on my privacy. There was no physical contact between us, not even the most casual touch, no shadow of innuendo in his conversation, and the absence of invitation, or apparent interest, in one who was both virile and isolated was very marked: so marked that I knew it was deliberate.
We lived together, occasionally we dined together, we passed the hours of the nights in conversations which have become precious in my memory, and a skein of time allotted to us unravelled and was lost, in the turn of a glass, in the streaming of the log, in the wake of a thousand sea miles.
It was evening: it was the first of April; we were east of the Caicos Islands, with the hundred fathoms of the Mouchoir Bank to leeward. He was smoking in the darkness at the taffrail: he had seemed happy, and now was oddly subdued.
Eight bells struck. Twilight had long vanished, and the moon, nearing the full, had not yet risen. The cigar glowed and faded and he threw it into the sea.
“I intend to enter the Windward Passage tomorrow. I expect to make landfall on Sunday.”
“Then it is finished.”
“The watch that ends the night. Yes.”
“And you are content.”
“On the contrary, I find myself becoming extremely melancholy. I think of all my actions, this has the greatest finality. There is no return. I find that difficult to accept.”
“There was no return from the first night you dealt in contraband. That was the end of your safety.”
“My life has never been safe. What life is safe? Is yours?”
“If it were, I should not be here.”
“It was written,” he said. “I believe in fate. Do you?”
“I believe in the doctrine of predestination. My survival was preordained. There seems no other reason for it.”
He said, “My dear,” and paused, as though it had surprised even him. “I never meant you any harm.”
“The harm was done. It was not by you.” Darkness on the dark sea, no moonlight to reveal his face to me. “Will you never go back?”
“No. I shall never return.”
“What will you do?”
“Oh, I shall become a grocery captain, plying my peaceful trade from here to America.”
“And if your peace is broken? Will you seek a letter of marque?”
His hands were resting a few inches from mine on the taffrail, where the day’s heat lingered.
“Not in this lady. I built her for speed and for the trade, not as cannon fodder. And war is a young man’s game. I am no longer young.... No, I shall observe the proceedings with interest, and perhaps gamble against the outcome. And what will you do?”
“I shall write, and remember.”
“Would it be inappropriate to request that, occasionally, you might write to me?”
“I think it would be unwise.”
“I think I agree.” And he laughed: I had not known that so charming a sound could seem so inimitably bitter. “Poor old Saint James, so many sins.... I shall become a leathery old man with white hair sailing a skiff amongst the islands, drinking rum and dreaming of old glories, and what never was, and was never written.” The moon was rising: I could have seen his face, but there was privacy in the sea, and I sensed that he sought it also. “Does the soldier love you?” Voices murmured where the compass light burned, behind our backs, in another world. They did not intrude upon us, or the silence between us. “I thought so.”
He had moved; I saw the fine profile now faintly in the growing light, lifted to the sails overhead. If what he saw there displeased him, he did not speak.
“Where is she now, the woman you loved?”
“When last I heard she was in Antigua, where her husband was lieutenant-governor. And I never loved her. The self-immolation of love has never appealed to me.”
“Was it merely cold seduction, then?”
“It was a mutual seduction. She was younger than me, and I, difficult though this may be to credit, was almost as virginal as she. She was a passenger in Conquest, my first frigate. She was my admiral’s wife.”
He paused. Perhaps memory was sweet, perhaps insidious, an enemy and an assault, as it was for me.
“I was a captain at twenty-six. I was posted in ʼ51. My son was born the following year. The affair continued for seven years.” Another pause: this time it was bitter. “My son was raised as another man’s heir, my inamorata decided, eventually, that life on a post-captain’s pay did not appeal, and the cuckolded spouse attained a position of power in Admiralty, from which it pleased him to destroy me. He could not harm her, either physically or financially, because she far outranked him, and he, how may we charitably put it, feared the frown of the great. The humble post-captain was easier meat.”
The moon had risen, and its light touched what I could not: his face.
“I was very conscious of my disgrace. If I could have been dispatched to the ends of the earth it would have been done. Fortunately, the war came— and Louisbourg, and Quebec, and Martinique, and eventually Havana, and Bacchante. And Bacchante, which I was given for my sins, was almost as old as myself and had the disposition of a syphilitic whore. Still, she was a happy ship, God damn her.”
He was silent a few moments, staring at the sea.
“I never knew how many died that day. I remember holding a middy’s hand— sitting, holding the hand, although I had been standing— and his head was lying against my leg, and his lips were moving, although he had been decapitated. One of my officers was dismembered: I only knew him by his hair. What was left of his face had been peeled away like a mask. My mouth was full of blood and brains and shreds of flesh.... I used to wake up weeping for them, months afterwards... for my friends and myself. And then gradually I came to understand that they were to be envied. After the ignominy of their deaths, they were at peace, and it was I who was condemned to a restless immortality.”
He turned, the moonlight at his back.
“Cuba is out there, off the starboard bow. You won’t see it, or that other damned place Haiti. But I shall always feel it in these waters, like a summoning of ghosts.”
“We carry our ghosts with us, in our hearts.”
“That’s true. And when you go you’ll be another, and what was unwritten in our lives will haunt me more than all the blood I ever shed. And you will be the sweetest of my ghosts.”
So he said. So he was, to me.
At half past seven on the evening of Palm Sunday, April third, I set foot upon the coral sand of Jamaica, and, with him, entered paradise.
III
Like all my dreams, Jamaica is an illusion, a sanctuary only of ghosts, her peace precarious, her gracious prosperity built on blood and human sacrifice. All who come to this island are enslaved, the whites to the cane and the market and the obsessive pursuit of wealth, and the disease bred by a languorous heat, and the debauchery inherent in this narcotic dream... gambling, alcohol, the south American weed, the sensuality that pervades an incestuous plantocracy: sex with other men, other women, neglected wives, jaded husbands, virgin daughters, uninitiated sons; sex with the blacks whose blood and suffering are the foundation of all wealth, sucking from their forbidden flesh the essence of an enigmatic race and an inscrutable continent.
And the blacks, slaves to the cane and the seasons and the insect and the sun and the tortures inflicted upon them, raped bodily and in spirit, take refuge from slavery in madness, or prayer, or magic, or ambush, or poison, or armed rebellion, and are mutilated, branded, whipped and hanged. All are Jamaica’s slaves: all are punished, and all perish. None are inviolate.
She punishes with the pitiless sun, the waiting jungle, the alligator, the knife in the night, the poisoned cup, the obliterating hurricane. She punishes with this excess of beauty, beauty and savagery, beauty and death: the rains wash these blue mountains, the orchids that creep and tangle, the butterfly that feeds on decay, this lushness that is almost obscenity; the negligible tides of this coral sea sweep her pristine beaches. Her beauty is constant, the flower that fades and daily is renascent, but life dangles by a thread: death is sudden and often inexplicable. She is a memory and an illusion, an implacable killer, an unhealable wound.
And yet... I loved, and was loved... and in my dreams we never left her. I, too, am Jamaica’s slave.
Noel Coventry was sixty-four when I met him, and in his swarthy, unhandsome face I would come to recognize forty years of sun and dissipation and malaria: there was also humour, and immense vivacity, and a burning intelligence. His lips were smiling, but his eyes, so dark that the pupils were not visible in the lamplight by which we met, assessed my face and body and heavy salt-stained clothing, and St. James’s inflections and silences, and finally the secrets or revelations in my own eyes, and then, as if approving or intrigued by what he saw or sensed or had been told, he said, “You are welcome in my house, madam.”
In the hard habitation of body and spirit over the past dozen years I had divested myself of feminine grace, and I did not assume it now. I merely extended my hand to shake his, and perhaps the masculinity of the gesture offended him: he raised my hand to his lips. His palm was as hard as leather, although his touch was delicate. I withdrew my hand, and he the intimation of a magnetic sexuality, and he said, “You must make yourself entirely at home. My housekeeper will show you your rooms.”
The title itself was a Jamaican euphemism. She was perhaps forty, a quadroon of French and Haitian blood like others at Ironshore; her lips were beautifully sculpted, pale, her eyes the greyish green I would see in others of mixed blood. He had bought her in Port au Prince, christened her Jamaica for the island of his obsession, and taken her to his bed. Twenty years later she was still the mistress of his household, although no longer his lover or his slave: he had freed her upon the birth of their daughter, Mazarine. All this the still perfection of her face concealed on that first evening: she was only a slender shadow behind him with a lamp uplifted, her black hair hidden by the slave’s white headcloth, the rubies glowing in her ears evidence of Coventry’s esteem or possession. She did not smile or welcome me: the perfect features remained perfectly blank, the eyes shuttered, the habit of the slave.
Disquieted, I turned towards St. James, and knew the subtleties of his face well enough to understand that he was telling me to go. Coventry said, “A word with you, Leslie,” and he gave me a little enigmatic smile.
The woman with her upheld lamp glided away, and moths like birds blundered softly out of the humid night; she brushed them from the ornamented glass with a slim hand etched against the flame. Neither he nor I had moved.
“Are you leaving me?”
I wondered if they had noticed the absence of Christian names between us, or affection, or touch, so many absences: he was offering me only the untranslatable language of his eyes, and the faint smile which did not reassure me, and separation seemed suddenly imminent.
“I have business to discuss. I shall see you within the hour.”
The lamp and the slender back and the slave who had preceded her, ceremoniously carrying my meagre baggage, were crossing the wide flagged terrace with no apparent intention of lingering. St. James, still standing with Coventry near the stone stairs, inclined his head very slightly to me, and in his eyes I read again the request for my compliance.
She was waiting for me. Wordlessly she conducted me up a splendid staircase: mahogany appeared promiscuously throughout the house, from the broad seats in jalousied windows to the exquisitely carved bedposts and furniture in the suite already appointed for my arrival. The girl who had borne my parcel of shirts and the toilet articles I had acquired from St. James placed them on the pale silk bedspread; the woman rebuked her sharply in patois and they were removed. The slender fingers laid them out pitilessly on the red and cream striped silk cushions in the window seat: the jalousies were tightly fastened, and the candleflames did not waver.
