Coronach, page 91
“When he attempts to move these muskets, will you tell me?”
“Yes.”
Beyond the stones and the snakes and the deadly mosquito and the mangrove and the lurking alligators, beyond the broken shells which could never survive the reef, beyond the shimmering curtain of heat like a phantom between myself and the future, was Rosewynd Bay... his anchorage... and in the coolness of the mountains Rosewynd, never to be mine.
“Thank you for this, Noel.”
He leaned on the stick, unsmiling, the dark eyes impenetrable.
“Consider it reparation. It’s little enough.”
There were charts in that house: they were not St. James’s, and the pencilled calculations were not his; perhaps they are there still, bearing the pinpoints of the brass dividers that pierced a fathomless sea. The Windward Passage... to Bermuda, thirty-two degrees fifteen minutes north latitude, sixty-four degrees, thirty-eight minutes west longitude... to a destination further north, between thirty-two and forty degrees, north north west, north by west, the points of a compass subject to variation, a westering course conceding to sea and wind and current... at an average speed of seven knots, a thousand, two thousand miles....
It was not illegal. It was trade. There was little peace but there was no war, no severing, no crime. For him, there was little risk.
Eleven days. I could not have known, in the hours and the play of seaborne light across his charts, that I should calculate these possibilities now as he had taught me, staring at the deadness of configurations and soundings which were the living sea.
When he returned... not Bermuda’s cold sun but the Atlantic in winter would be written on his face. And on my heart.
He arrived, unannounced as usual, in the early afternoon of Sunday, January twenty-ninth, when I was at Rosewynd. On my return he was sitting on the terrace before his opened doors. The coolness of the shadows after the sun’s assault seemed pleasant to me; we talked of inconsequential things, then, at a little past four, he told me he wanted to rest. I thought him tired and subdued, constrained perhaps by an intuition that I knew of his activities. I did not recognize the onset of recurrent malaria.
Darkness is swift and complete in those latitudes, as sudden as death. By nightfall he was acutely ill. The parasites in his blood consumed him: he was gripped by convulsions, his teeth clenched, his skin icy; I closed the jalousies at his request and the candlelit hell we shared became stifling. In the night I stripped and lay naked against him in some primitive, instinctive attempt to transfer my heat, and he lay for a time in a seeming peace, as though I had arrested the uncontrollable trembling.
I slept an hour; he became restless, the embrace disturbed him. I dressed and sat in the cane chair near the bed and heard the rain, the palms, the sea.
He said distinctly, “The enemy.”
Perhaps he saw me: I thought not. The intensity of his vision was very frightening.
“There is no enemy here.”
He closed his eyes.
In the blue hour before dawn he was burning: he was neither conscious nor asleep. Coventry was invariably alone at breakfast, taken every day on the terrace outside his suite: I walked around the house into the sunrise and found him there with the coffee, the cigar, the newspaper, the pistol his companion even now.
He came with me. It was the only time he revealed the nature of his affection: I would neither see nor sense it again: St. James never knew. It was revealed by nothing but the tenderness of his hands, but all things were heightened in that hour, and I sensed also, no, I knew, by his hands, that he had been a surgeon.
He spoke very softly to St. James: only a slight movement of the fingers acknowledged him, and he looked up at me directly, measuring the pulse in the carotid artery.
I said, “For God’s sake, help me.”
Coventry left us, taking with him my absolute trust. Time passed; the morning opened, vivid, ephemeral; he had been burning for five hours. Throughout the evening, the night and the morning he had drunk nothing, nor urinated. He opened his eyes, and said with such anguish that I thought he was dreaming, “What do you want with me, eh? Poor, sick old bastard— what could you want from me?”
“I want you, Leslie.”
His pulse was very fast and faint: repeated attacks would kill him.
He said, “Margaret, bury me in England.”
He did not speak again.
Midnight, and the morning of another day. Maica and I attempted to give him cinchona bark, cinchona ledgeriana, which had been sent from Cinnamon Hill and crushed to powder in claret: the only specific for malaria, it destroys the infective agent. Its smell and taste were revolting, and he refused it, saying that it sickened him.
She was sitting by the bed, her face, like Coventry’s, impenetrable, the introspection of the slave: he was lying in my arms, sweating heavily, as he had shivered and burned and sweated at intervals, eight, fifteen, twenty-four hours: the silk sheets were transparent with his sweat.
Like Coventry, she used him with ineffable gentleness. He had drunk and vomited and refused for two days and nights.
She said, “You listen to me, man. You drink this or you die, and make this woman widow before she wife.”
In illness, as in health, he was intensely sensitive. He drank, and the sweat running on his face did not deceive me. He wept, but we both pretended otherwise, and the pretense comforted him.
With recovery came depression: he who was always mercurial seemed reflective and subdued. Twice a week he visited the ship, lying off Gun Point Wharf with an anchor watch aboard, and the office he kept in the town, but he did not speak of returning to sea, and his activities between thirty-two and forty degrees north were not confided to me.
His spirit had been shaken, either by perceived risk or an intimation of mortality. What he needed of me I gave. I asked no questions.
Coventry kept a twenty-two foot skiff called Eleuthera in Rosewynd Bay: although we had been offered the use of her, she had never previously interested St. James. Perhaps he hungered for the sea. We took her out one morning in March and steered southwest, running down the trades with Jamaica to larboard and a thousand fathoms beyond the reef.
He seemed very happy, bareheaded, barefoot, his salt-stained, seagoing shoes thrown into the sternsheets, the strong wind blowing his hair; he made fast his lines and came effortlessly aft to where I sat gripping the tiller. We sat for some time together in the silence and the spray, his hand over mine, the sun burning our backs, the tan sail thudding.
He said into the silence, “I have been offered a commission. In Philadelphia, in January, and lately by letter.”
The silence resumed, the spray bursting in the sunlight, our shadow passing, with the shadow of clouds, across the sea’s face.
“I said I was too old: they said there were others like me. I said that, in my heart, I still held the King’s commission. They said they knew of my seniority. I said I had forfeited it. They offered me a higher rank. I said that I would let them know.” His hand moved, releasing mine. “Let me take her now.”
I moved away. He sat in profile to me, the coppery hair blown over his face, his head lifted, his eyes on the sail.
“If you do this, everything we have— our lives, Rosewynd, everything— goes for nothing. For a cause you do not espouse— you don’t espouse it, do you?”
He did not answer me. Although I knew him utterly, this I never knew.
“Could you divorce yourself from your country?”
“I already have.”
“You spoke of returning. There’s no return from a traitor’s grave.” Spray like rain on my face, stinging in my eyes: salt on my lips. “If England wants to crush this insurrection, she can smash America to atoms. No rabble could stand against that power. No one will resist.”
He said, “Yes.” He did not turn his face toward me; the tanned left hand eased the tiller, the canvas trembled and filled.
“St. James—”
“Yes.”
“Listen to me.”
“I am listening.”
“I am a child of rebellion. I saw its aftermath, not immediately, but visited upon the next generation. Would you be prepared to risk that? For God’s sake, you stood in the line of battle. Would you hazard your life against that?”
“It would never happen.”
“How can it never happen when it’s almost a certainty?”
“War is a chimera. The fear of war is profitable. Christ, I’d rather die in a broadside than of boredom shipping limes to Aruba.”
“Or a thousand Charleville muskets from Brest to Montego Bay.” He shifted slightly, the light across his face, his eyes upon me, the colour of the sea. “In your heart, you are a naval officer. In your heart you never left it. How can you put guns into the hands of those who will kill your brother officers?”
“When a man dies, he dies because fate has decided it, not because the musket that killed him was of my supply.”
She dipped and lifted to the sky, leaning hard over, the water creaming down her side. Eleutheros... before her, on this tack, only a trio of windswept cays in the Serranilla Bank, and the coast of Nicaragua three hundred miles away.
He said, “I want to put diamonds around your neck. All I have is the ship and the sea. I don’t know the land, and I hate slavery. If Noel offered for Rosewynd, I’d sell it.”
Time passed, the sea here indigo and aquamarine, the land distant, mountainous, a fallen cloud in a necklace of surf. We drank watered wine heated by the sun and ate crabmeat and bread; he quoted the Odyssey, grey-eyed Athena, and the west wind singing over wine-dark seas; I removed the man’s hat of plaited palm I wore and threw it on the bottom boards, and took off my shirt and sat naked in the sun.
He said, “You make it very difficult for me to apply myself to my seamanship.”
Eventually he, too, removed his clothes, and lashed the tiller; in the heat of the sun we made love, awkwardly, passionately; I drank his essence, and tasted my wetness on his lips.
An hour: two hours.
He said, “Shall we come about?”
“Must we?”
“Perhaps a little farther. With the best will in the world, I shan’t have you back before nightfall.”
“What does night matter to me, as long as we’re together?”
I slept fitfully beneath a canvas, on the breast of the sea, but the motion was very lively and I returned to him, seated as though he had never moved, with his left hand on the tiller, the northeast trade still at his back, the sun, declining, in his eyes.
“Do you know where we are?”
“Of course. Take a glass and look over there.”
So I saw Negril and its infinite beach, vanishing beyond the power of the lens, and ours were the only human eyes upon it: the sea was ours, and the beach as empty as Eden.
“I shall take you to that beach one day, and make love to you there, and lie with you all night beneath the stars.”
We sailed through the great bath of westering light and came about, the tiller down to larboard. Eleuthera swung into the wind, her light-drenched sail thundering, up on the larboard tack; at his shouted commands I eased her tiller until she came closer to the wind; she leaned hard over, taking water across her bows. From forward he shouted, “Put your helm up,” and we steered due east: the dashing spray over her bows lessened, the sail hardened; he made all fast and came aft to me, laughing, and took the tiller.
East into evening, toward the moon that laid its glittering track across the sea, as on other evenings under the dew-drenched, quivering driver, on the Atlantic, where I had learned to love him. East until morning.
“St. James.”
He was gazing at an infinity of stars, their constellations a map to him, his face uplifted, abstracted, as though in the presence of mystery.
“When did you know you loved me?”
“On nights like this, at sea.” The shadow of the sail trembled faintly; the wind was very wet; it seemed cool, almost cold. “I wanted you. I am only human, and you are very beautiful.”
“I am not. I am very plain.”
“Whoever told you that was a damned liar.”
Time, and the stars’ passage, phosphorescence on the sea.
“You were so afraid, and I wanted you so much. I dared not even touch you... and the more we spoke, the more I wanted... not the woman, not merely a woman, but... you. The soul, the spirit, the mind, the heart. I couldn’t bear to contemplate leaving you. I thought perhaps once, at Ironshore, before leaving... you might allow me. I never thought it would be as it was— for myself, least of all. One who so ardently avoided commitment finds himself astonished by love.”
He slept an hour or two: his was the sailor’s gift of instant sleep, instant wakefulness. I took the tiller, watched the stars, an infinitesimal mote of nothing, dust on the sea.
East into morning. He woke, seemingly refreshed: the chilly sleep and the watches of the night were natural to him. We ate a little; I tried to disentangle the sea’s hands from my hair; as we had talked the sun down, like Heraclitus, so now we ran the moon into a dimness which was not yet dawn. We talked of India, of his childhood: for the first time, he gave his parents flesh.
“My mother was a Saumarez. It was considered very poor judgment on her part to have married him, and of course all the dire predictions about India came true. When my father came ashore he made a fortune, literally— which she was always very quick to remind him, and me, that he was very chary of distributing.... He was considered a handsome man, but dour, unaffectionate, disciplined. He had no vices, and she, poor bitch, had them all.”
“What was she like?”
“She was thin... not particularly pretty, although she had great charm... her voice was beautiful. Her name was Charlotte. My father called her Letty, which she hated.”
“My only friend was called Charlotte.”
“My uncle called her Carissima— I overheard it. He was not her first lover, nor she his.... My childhood friend’s name was David. I told you, didn’t I.”
“He died of cholera.”
“Yes. Poor little bastard, he would never have made a soldier. He was a gentle soul.”
There was silence. Some thought of which he did not speak had caused him great pain.
With gentleness, I recalled him from it.
“And your father’s brother?”
“He was a damned rogue, and I adored him. He gave me a midshipman’s dirk, that year of his affair with my mother, and told my father to send me to sea, as it was so obviously what I wanted.... He was always a great champion of me. Eventually, when my mother’s infidelities became known, my father convinced himself that I was not his son. And so, when he died, he left his considerable estate to some one else. That news came to me some months after my release— it was not a happy year, after Toulon.”
“And you had nothing.”
“Absolutely nothing. He was perfectly justified. My uncle was dead in the South Seas, my mother never cared to refute it. I would only have spent it foolishly.... It was a bitter blow, all the same.”
“Would you have left the sea?”
“No. I would never leave the sea— except, perhaps, for you.”
Sunrise: the mother of pearl sky, the molten light on the sea. In the minutes after rising the sun’s heat was palpable.
He gave me the telescope.
“Look there, and see the sailor’s nightmare.”
To starboard the glassy surge of undertow, the smoke of spray in the sunlight. By day on the shore it was unheard, by night a sullen thunder: here, standing well up to windward, the air quivered to its sound. It was the voice within the shell, the menace, the remorseless undernote, not of the sea but the reef.
“This is as close as I want to come to that. The undertow there would be as strong as a river— it would suck a ship onto that coral and smash out her heart within minutes, and the coral would tear the flesh from your bones. The sharks feed there, and the barracuda, and the barracuda is the more dangerous predator, because it will follow its prey into shallow water, even to the beach.”
I gave him back the glass, imagining the salt of spray across my mouth.
“Stand away, for God’s sake.”
His fingers closed around the glass: the brass and the beaten wood of the tiller were wet. The sail steamed; the smoke and spray of the reef fell away into the tumult of the sea.
He said, “The reef is death, and each one of us crosses it alone.”
“I would cross it with you, if you asked me to.”
“Dear Margaret... dear child. I believe you would.”
We came into Rosewynd Bay a day and a night after leaving it, not on the tide, not in a white dawn, but anonymously in late morning. No one saw us haul down the sail: no one watched us through a telescope from the seat beneath Rosewynd’s jacaranda. Although sometimes I am there, watching the sail and the sea, like wrinkled silk in the beauty of the morning. I wait, in the coolness of Rosewynd’s cloud, but I dream, and he never comes.
The steep, twisting streets of that harbour town spill, with garbage and brilliant shrubbery and weeds and rotting fish heads, down to the sea and the beach; the gaudy whores parade, the freed men and women of colour, the mulattoes poling bumboats in the harbour, hawking fruit and heavy rum, the naked children diving for coins, or begging, plucking at a silken sleeve or the tail of a crushed linen coat until sent sprawling into a gutter overflowing with Jamaica’s plentiful rain; planters’ wives perspiring under parasols carried by impassive slaves, men of business in sour, sweat-stained suits, their pallor in proportion to their arrogance. White cockroaches, the blacks call us... Creole, colonial, Englishwoman: we are all one to them, as faceless and contemptible as one race to another.
