Act of Oblivion, page 39
He groped his way the length of the cabin – some eighty feet in all – bent double in the dim light, between the hammocks, up one side and down the other, stumbling over crawling infants and dogs and baggage, trying to spot her. It wasn’t until he was almost back where he started that he saw her, face turned towards him, lying in her hammock, close enough to touch. She looked white and frightened. He glanced away at once. After all his searching, her berth was no more than ten feet from his own.
He squeezed his way to the foot of the ladder and climbed up onto the deck. There he stayed, leaning over the gunwale, listening to the cries of the seagulls, watching as the last of the passengers and cargo came aboard, the gangplanks were hoisted, the cables cast off fore and aft and the ship pushed away from the quayside, until he was certain she had not escaped.
The one luxury he had – if such a word could ever be used in connection with a voyage across the Atlantic – was time. Weeks of close confinement stretched ahead. There was no need to arouse suspicion by making a hasty move. He could stalk his prey with patience.
For the first three days he kept himself apart, spending most of his time in his hammock, ostentatiously reading his Bible by candlelight. On the fourth day, when they were out of sight of land, he joined the Puritans for their Sabbath prayer meeting, crowded onto the raised half-deck close to the stern. They made up perhaps half the passengers. A congregation from Essex was emigrating with its leader, a minister named Humility Fuller, who insisted on lecturing the entire assembly. He preached a two-hour sermon, his words about sin and temptation fighting against the wind. Nayler, stationed at the back next to the ladder down to the main deck, tried to maintain an expression of interest. The extensive prayers at least were easy enough – it was a relief to bow his head and close his eyes – but the unfamiliar chanting of the psalms he found impossible to follow. He mouthed the words as best he could. At the end of the meeting, he uttered a loud and heartfelt ‘Amen’, then stood back to allow the worshippers to leave ahead of him. As Frances brushed by, he murmured, ‘God be with you.’ She turned and gave him a surprised look. ‘And God be with you, friend.’
For the midweek prayer meeting he tried a different approach. Once again he positioned himself at the back. This time, however, as soon as the session ended, he quickly descended the ladder and stood at the bottom to offer his assistance to the womenfolk coming down the final rungs. Some shrank at the prospect of a strange man’s touch, but Frances briefly took his hand.
‘Thank you.’ He felt a jolt run through his fingers before she released them.
‘God bless you, sister.’ He touched his hat. ‘Richard Foster.’
She nodded briefly and moved away without making a reply.
Plainly, the wooing of a good Puritan woman would be no easy task. Still he persevered – Perseverance Foster! – contriving to run into her occasionally over the following weeks when they were taking the air on deck, remarking on the weather or the condition of the sea, which heaved around them to infinity – sometimes grey, sometimes oily black and flecked by whitecaps, with never a glimpse of a passing sail to relieve the monotony.
‘“And the Spirit of God”,’ he quoted, ‘“moved upon the face of the waters.”’
‘It does indeed, Mr Foster. It is a most awesome sight.’
These carefully arranged but seemingly chance encounters were the chief purpose of his day. Everything else was boring, squalid, hideous.
The further they voyaged, the worse the food became. He warded off hunger by gnawing at the ship’s biscuits they were issued with each morning, first picking out the red worms and spiders. Sometimes he took his ration of fatty, green-tinged meat to the firebox in its bed of sand and tried to cook it. He drank a lot of beer (as did the Puritans, for that matter, and their children too – the Blessing’s supply of fresh water was brown and, like the biscuits, full of tiny wriggling creatures). He pissed and shat in the communal buckets and scraped the lice off his skin when they started to appear. Otherwise he spent his time out on deck when the weather was clement, and when it rained, as it did most afternoons, he lay in his hammock and leafed through his Bible. The most frustrating aspect of posing as a Puritan was that it prevented him from joining in the constant games of cards the less religious passengers played to while away the time. With every page of the testaments, his dislike of God intensified. What a monster he was, smiting, punishing, testing, sending his son to be killed and ignoring his pleas for help.
Throughout, he kept an eye on Frances. He noticed how social she could be in her quiet way, laughing with the other women, helping to look after the children and nursing the babies – something else about her that reminded him of Sarah. It gave him an idea, and he went in search of the occasional offcuts of timber that lay around the ship and used his knife to carve figures, which he presented to her for the children to use as toys.
Gradually their exchanges lengthened until they began to border on something like conversation. One day, as they were leaning on the gunwale contemplating the ominous black thunderheads forming on the horizon, he decided to take a risk. ‘May I enquire your destination?’
It was a mistake. For the first time, she looked at him suspiciously. ‘My plans are not yet formed.’ She returned her attention to the clouds, and he feared he had thrown away all his careful work. But then she said, as if making amends for her curtness, ‘May I enquire yours?’
‘A little town called Hadley, on the Connecticut. Doubtless you have never heard of it.’
He watched carefully for her reaction. She shook her head. ‘No, I do not know New England at all.’ Her tone was neutral. Unless she was a consummate liar, which he was certain she was not, she was telling the truth. But his question had clearly unsettled her. ‘God be with you, Mr Foster,’ she said, and moved on.
‘And with you,’ he called after her.
Still she did not give him her name. That evening, as the crew closed the hatches as a precaution against the looming bad weather, he saw her talking to an elderly man whose name he did not know. Something in the way the pair glanced at him, and quickly looked away when they saw him watching them, suggested he was the subject of their conversation.
Later that night, the threatened storm struck. The wind roared and moaned through the rigging. Each crack of thunder sounded like the splintering of the masts. Seawater crashed across the deck above their heads and poured in thin torrents, occasionally lit by the lightning, through the gaps between the planks. The ship pitched so violently, Nayler was almost tipped out of his hammock. The buckets of waste upended. The candles blew out. From the total darkness arose a cacophony of screams and shouts of panic, pleas to God, children crying, babies wailing, guttural sounds of retching. The cold, damp air was filled with the emetic stink of vomit. Nayler gripped the sides of his hammock, leaned over and heaved up what little there was in his stomach.
The storm went on all night and did not let up the following morning. A pale grey light filtered through the cracks in the deck, faintly illuminating the devastation – scattered belongings, bloodied heads, limbs dangling limply. The Blessing swung like a pendulum. Possessions hurtled from one side of the hull to the other. Unable to stand, too exhausted to shout or scream, the passengers clung to their hammocks and cots, silent mostly, apart from the occasional sob and moan, and the wail of a man crying out repeatedly that his wife was dead. Nayler lay shivering, drenched by salt water, knees drawn up to try to relieve the pain of the cramps in his belly. This was far more terrible than his last voyage. Any moment he expected the keel to crack and send them plunging to the bottom. His wretchedness was such he would almost have welcomed it.
He endured the day and another night, twisting and turning, his mind possessed by dreams, but when he woke at dawn on the second morning, the wind and rain had stopped, the keel was even. Passengers with hammocks closest to the hull started to open the shutters to let in fresh air.
He put his feet to the floor and tried to stand. The wood was wet and slippery with a mixture of seawater, vomit and human waste. The soles of his boots skidded. He almost fell, but managed to catch himself, grabbing the ropes of the hammock. He pulled himself upright. Cautiously he moved between the sleeping bodies to the ladder, climbed it to the hatch and tried to push it open. It was hard to shift it. When at last he succeeded, a cascade of seawater drenched him all over again. Protests rose from below. Ignoring them, he went up onto the deck.
It was a relief to be out of the stinking darkness. He breathed in the cold salt smell of the ocean. The sea was flat, the sky a smooth pearl grey. Thank providence the masts were still intact. Apart from a couple of sailors clearing up the debris, he had the deck to himself. He made his way aft and peered over the side. Her sails furled, the ship was drifting in the current. She must be miles off course. He heard footsteps behind him and turned to see the thin, elderly man to whom Frances had been talking before the storm.
‘God be thanked,’ said the man, coming to stand next to him. ‘I thought we were lost for certain.’
Nayler turned back to the sea. He had no desire for conversation. Nevertheless, he felt some comment was required. ‘It was the worst weather I ever encountered.’
‘So you have made the crossing before?’ And when Nayler didn’t answer, he added, ‘But of course you must have, if you are a Hadley man.’
Nayler’s hands tightened on the gunwale. He sensed trouble.
‘You must know the magistrate there,’ the man continued, ‘John Russell. And Peter Tilton, the minister.’
‘Naturally I do.’
The man gave an unpleasant croak of triumph. ‘But naturally you do not, Mr Foster, or whatever your real name may be, for if you did, you would know that Mr Russell is the minister and Mr Tilton the magistrate.’
‘I never said I lived in Hadley, sir. It is my brother who resides there. I’m on my way to join him.’
‘Another lie! There’s no one in Hadley named Foster. I know, because it is my town!’
Wearily Nayler turned again to examine him. What were the odds against this? A thousand to one, at least. And yet here was this skinny old fellow, poised to wreck his plans – a typical interfering, pinch-faced Puritan, eyes alight with self-righteousness, as if he had just sniffed out a witch. Rage, long suppressed, boiled within him.
The man continued, ‘I believe you must have been sent among us as a spy. Either that—’
The rest of his words were stifled. Nayler clamped his left hand across the man’s mouth, forcing him backwards against the gunwale, checked swiftly that he was unobserved, then drew his knife with his right and stabbed him with all his strength below the ribs, thrusting up and twisting the tip of the blade towards his heart. The man’s eyes widened with shock. He managed a muffled grunt before Nayler scooped his arm under his knees and tipped him backwards. His body hit the sea with a splash so loud it made the sailors look round.
Nayler shouted and pointed. ‘Man in the water!’
He was breathing hard, had a pain in his back. He leaned out to check if the old fellow was dead, but he couldn’t tell. If they fished him out and he was still alive, or even if they simply discovered the knife wound, he would be finished.
The crewmen hurried down the ladder from the half-deck. By this time, more passengers were emerging from below. They ran and crowded along the side of the ship. The man was floating face down, drifting away from them.
‘What happened?’
‘Did anyone see him fall?’
Nayler clambered up onto the gunwale, collected himself for an instant, and jumped into the water. The shock knocked the breath out of him. He came up tossing his head, spluttering for air, looked around, then struck out towards the body. When he reached it, he rolled it over. The man was dead right enough, riding the swell, staring with wide-open eyes and mouth at the heavens, as if he had been granted some final wondrous vision. Nayler could hear shouts from the ship behind him. He put his hands on the man’s shoulder and pushed the corpse under. For a few moments it hung, suspended, and then slowly it slipped from his grasp, the white face gradually dissolving as it sank, until it disappeared.
He turned and struggled back in the direction of the Blessing, already dangerously far away. The weight of his sodden clothes was dragging him down. A sailor shouted to him, threw a rope. It took the last of his strength to reach it and hold on, wrapping the end around his hand. He was towed towards the side. By the time he reached it, he was almost dead himself. He was dimly conscious of another sailor coming down a rope ladder, of a cable being tied around his chest, and then he was roughly hauled up the side of the ship, over the gunwale and onto the deck, where he lay on his back coughing salt water, gasping for breath, staring up at the faces of the passengers, Frances’s among them – a murderer and yet, miraculously, a hero.
He passed out.
Frances took charge of him. He was trembling with cold. Crewmen carried him below. She showed them his hammock. They stripped him of his sodden coat, boots and trousers and laid him out to recover. He had a cord around his neck, she noticed, with a pouch. She hurried to the firebox, begged a cup of hot chicken broth from one of the wives and carried it back to his hammock. She cupped her hand behind his head – his hair was thick and sticky with salt water – and raised it so that she could hold the liquid to his lips. His eyes flickered open. He took a few mouthfuls, then sank back, shivering, unconscious. She fetched her own blanket – it was drier than his – and wrapped it around him.
She felt obscurely guilty about what had happened. He had been so friendly, always asking after her health and giving her dolls for the children, yet she had kept her distance. There was something about him (God forgive her) that she hadn’t altogether trusted, and as the voyage had gone on and he had lost weight – thanks to the poor food and the constant diarrhoea they had all shrunk to skin and bones – she sometimes fancied she knew him from somewhere. Goodman Jones, her neighbour in the next berth, a widower returning to America after burying his wife in England, had observed her talking to him and asked who he was. She told him what little she knew. That had been just before the storm. And now Mr Jones was drowned, despite Mr Foster’s gallant attempt to save him, and the fault was somehow hers, a punishment for her lack of Christian charity.
She carried his clothes up to the deck and laid them out to dry. When she returned, she saw a small leather bag beneath his hammock. Perhaps he had a spare shirt. She rummaged through it, lifted out his Bible and an object wrapped in oilcloth. It was hard to her touch, not a piece of clothing, but she was too curious not to look. It was a miniature of a young woman, very pretty, finely dressed, with a fashionable hairstyle.
The figure in the hammock stirred. She replaced the miniature quickly and stood. He opened his eyes and tried to sit up.
‘Soft,’ she said, laying her hand on his forehead. ‘Rest.’
‘You are very kind.’ He lay down again. ‘And I do not even know your name.’
‘Frances,’ she said. ‘Frances Stephenson.’
By the end of the afternoon, he was back on his feet, dressed in his dried clothes, a little hesitant in his movements but otherwise seemingly none the worse for his ordeal. He acknowledged the praise of the other passengers with a shrug. ‘I did no more than any other Christian would have done. I trusted my life to God in the knowledge that he would protect me. I am only sorry I could not save the poor fellow.’ Asked by the captain how the unfortunate episode had come about, he repeated the same story: that he had seen Goodman Jones leaning dangerously far out over the gunwale, had bade him good morning, moved on, then heard a cry and a splash. The captain seemed satisfied. Such things happened on a long voyage. They had already lost two dead in the storm, a woman and a child. He would enter the incident in his log as a fatal accident.
But later, when Frances and the modest hero were walking around the main deck and came to the spot where the incident had occurred, he swore her to secrecy and quietly told a different tale: that he had seen Jones climb up onto the gunwale, and after a moment’s hesitation, jump.
She looked at him in horror. ‘You mean he took his own life?’
‘I fear he must have done.’
‘But that is a mortal sin.’
‘True enough.’
‘And yet he appeared so devout.’
‘Who can say what is in a man’s heart? Perhaps the storm had briefly robbed him of his reason, and he was in despair. Forgive me for sharing this burden with you. There is no one else I can tell. Will you join me in a silent prayer for his soul?’
Together they knelt.
After that, she was the one who sought out his company rather than the other way round. She was curious about him.
‘Forgive me,’ she said one afternoon about a week later, ‘but I have a confession to make. I looked in your bag while you were asleep to see if there was a shirt you might put on, and I saw the portrait. Is she your wife?’
