Mr Darwin's Shooter Read online

  ‘I did,’ said Covington, somewhat startled. It was quite a time back. It was among the men.

  ‘The story is told by Captain King.’

  Covington felt himself colouring. ‘Is it indeed,’ he clenched his jaw. He had wanted to be known; he had better wear his colours with pride.

  ‘King is my beau ideal of a captain,’ said Darwin, answering Covington’s stare.

  ‘Well, as I say, I am ready,’ said Covington. ‘In taking to water or carrying your guns I am ready as anyone could be.’

  ‘Learn this of me, Covington, I do everything in small parts.’

  ‘Yet the whole ship sails for you,’ said Covington.

  ‘That is nonsense. She is on a survey.’

  ‘I do remember that,’ said Covington with a smugness that made Darwin frown.

  ‘There is a matter of getting your release from the captain.’

  ‘It will be easy. Capt hates my face.’

  Darwin’s eyebrows rose and he irritatedly ran his pink tongue across his lips. ‘For goodness’ sakes.’ Then he cleared his throat, and climbed to his feet turning a deep angry red. ‘You endanger your employment with a loose tongue.’

  ‘It was only gossip I heard. Capt doubts that he loves me.’

  ‘Must a captain love? We are not in a Bedford chapel, Covington, we are not down to splitting texts. We are in a ship of His Majesty’s Service.’

  ‘Pardon me, I forgot that we were,’ said the boy, keeping the derision from his voice this time, and meanwhile being sure to etch the Bedford meeting house in the upper part of his mind where he etched the Celestial City.

  Darwin sat down again and his face paled. He rapped his fingertips on the chart table.

  ‘I am keeping you too long.’

  ‘Yes, I have scrubbin’ to do.’

  ‘There is just this with me, Covington. Please remember it: I will begin to doubt my decisions if you niggle me.’

  ‘You shall doubt me never,’ swore Covington.

  ‘That is all we need between us, then.’

  ‘Indeed,’ nodded Covington. But still he waited.

  Darwin said, with a sigh, ‘What is it?’

  ‘You must tell me yea or nay,’ said Covington. ‘Am I to have the work?’

  ‘Must?’

  Darwin was affronted all over again. To his landsman’s eye it was the romance of all sailors to make free, yet quite incomprehensible and hardly to be credited. ‘I shall have to be sure of you,’ he said, blushing as if in a courtship—and doubling around on all his unmade promises in an instant, it seemed to Covington, who stepped back in the doorway and radiated touchiness.

  ‘But you are sure of me,’ Covington returned. ‘I have had my proof. You praised me in this very room—and see—I have my trowsers on.’

  ‘I hear you have made an insect collection,’ said the gent.

  ‘Have I?’ said Covington after a long pause.

  ‘You boasted it to Mr Earle an hour past.’

  ‘There is no harm in that,’ Covington swallowed.

  ‘How curious, though.’

  ‘“For a sailor”, or what?’

  ‘Indeed, “for a sailor”—crossing the seas with beetles and grubs on the waves. Note I am out on the deck every day hauling butterflies and bees from under the ocean.’

  ‘You are laughing at me.’

  ‘Well, I am sorry.’

  ‘There are grubs enough on our bark,’ said Covington defensively. ‘Weevils and mites and cockroaches. I can make money from the art if I try. That is what I am told. And anyhow,’ he slyly added, ‘you have been aboard when a butterfly came through. I remember you chased it along with your net, and then Midshipman King sat on it, didn’t he?’

  ‘That is true.’

  ‘And that collection, it was not made by me,’ said Covington stoutly. ‘I went to a man and bought it. A Mr Beskey, a naturalist. Our artist told me where to go.’

  ‘Full marks to him.’

  ‘The frame was all broken, so it was cheap. I fitted it together again in a jiffy, and now I have one, and more to the point as they say—I know how it is done.’

  ‘Leave me now,’ said Darwin, and when he spoke those words there was no disobeying him at all.

  Covington dipped his head, said, ‘Very well,’ and drew his shirt around him, stepping backwards through the door into the dark.

  There seemed no end to the confusion Dr MacCracken felt in those early months when Mr Covington bought the cottage ‘Coral Sands’ and came to stay, establishing himself, with Mrs Covington, as a fixture in his daily life. If ever a man was made to stake out and invade another human being’s territory it was the brutalised old bruiser, as MacCracken dubbed Covington, with his whiff of mystery and resentment in about equal doses, and his deaf-man’s blundering stare.

  The month was April, Sydney’s autumn, with the first cool nights wafting up from the south and pockets of heat through the day making for a glassy stillness on the waters of the harbour. On starry nights the only civilised companions for a man were a bottle of claret, a portion of ripe cheese, a volume of Keats and a proper sense of melancholic withdrawal from outer distractions.

  But it was too much like an island where they lived, and MacCracken itched at the possibility of running into Covington everywhere he went, of having him come to his house at whatever hour pleased him. Yet what could he say? MacCracken’s temper must take a lesson from his dog, and ‘do when told’ because of the dependence that had developed between them.

  The profitable business MacCracken ran with Covington meant he could not afford to be rude, even when Mrs Covington acquired for herself a milking cow, and when her dairymaid—and sometimes Mrs Covington herself—led it clattering past his front porch, where it swiped his mint bushes and deposited cowpats on his Italiano tiles.

  Beginning by feeling a frank affection for the man, MacCracken came to feel he might strangle Mr Covington pretty soon. He began to wonder if Covington’s harbour-side self, as it now somewhat daftly declared itself—canvas trousers, linen shirt, bare feet, floppy hat woven from cabbage-tree leaves—was a sign for MacCracken to give up his place and shift his horizons. The man was too close. The man was a confounded nuisance. Men like Covington had no easy retirement about them. Yet there he was, an avuncular Napoleon in his exile. And for why?

  After playing skittles in his head on the question MacCracken decided it was up to Covington to make a change and ease his irritation: he wasn’t going anywhere. His pleasure in Watson’s Bay was blunted, not sated. His days were not demanding. He loved his daily swims, which he took with a boy named Charley Pickastick to watch for sharks. He dreamed into the night over many a page from his well-stocked shelves. And he tarried with Miss X, who pleaded little of him except to tweak his ears and twist his hair in her fingers and ask, ‘Am I not beautiful? Do you not love my eyes? What colour are they, Davy?’—to which MacCracken readily gave proper answers, thus gaining her most intimate favours. Though when she asked him if he loved her he became cranky, and criticised her on some small pretext, such as the hour she arrived or left being a nuisance to him. He reminded her that their arrangement was gratifying to them both—sworn in delightful secrecy at a midnight rendezvous. And so what else did she want from him, that made her demanding of a sudden, and unattractive with tears?

  ‘I don’t know,’ she pouted.

  ‘Come here then.’

  She nuzzled close.

  Then he smiled to himself, being quick at putting her at ease, pleading for his good opinion, and getting all back as before—close and generous to his desires.

  MacCracken would say just this, however, if pressed to expose a hidden-away part of his honesty: that his life had an over-calm suspension about it, being neither passionate nor fraught. It was at his father’s insistence he had studied medicine and through coming near the bottom of his class had found himself practising surgery. Though he disdained the sawbones’ trade, a rote mastery of anatomy and the sure hand of yo
uth meant he kept busy, content in the knowledge that a few days’ hacking on broken frames each week secured his name under heaven, so to speak. But Covington? There he was tapping on MacCracken’s window pane at an ungodly hour.

  ‘Who is it?’ reacted Miss X in alarm.

  ‘It’s Mr Covington,’ MacCracken answered her. ‘Stay where you are.’

  ‘What does he want?’

  MacCracken was ready to wound him. ‘Don’t know.’

  He took a candle to the window and signalled Covington away. Go, get off with you. Yes now immediately. Covington had the insomniac’s look about him, the frantic obliviousness to time of those who live in their thoughts. MacCracken opened the latch and through a gap in his door of a mere inch, that widened, Covington began speaking in a rush.

  ‘Has there been a package addressed to me?’ he demanded to know, ‘that might have come with your mail by mistake, MacCracken, do you remember it at all?’

  The doctor shook his head.

  ‘Has anyone said, “I have something that isn’t mine, a book that isn’t mine, a strange book, perhaps, a frightening book that a decent person might wish to hide away”?’

  MacCracken shook his head again and rolled his eyes, making a sound like a mournful owl in mockery of his stone-deaf caller. ‘Good night, Mr Covington!’ he shouted.

  ‘Nobody speaking of the devil’s work,’ Covington persisted with his line, ‘more than is warranted? And mentioning my name in that connection?’

  MacCracken raised his eyebrows. ‘“Covington”?!’

  ‘Certainly. “Covington”. A name that might be written in that book. Doubtless in small print but written there all the same, MacCracken, as an acknowledgement of, ah, existence. Damn me for an imbecile, man, and just tell me. Any book?’

  ‘No!’ MacCracken yelled into Covington’s eyeballs.

  Covington’s boot stayed thrust in the door and his glance went darting zigzag towards MacCracken’s library where an inner door stood ajar, and Miss X’s naked toes showed pink and glowing in the light of the hearth. MacCracken saw that Covington on sighting those feet forgot his book altogether, and took to the dark somewhat enlightened.

  Down on the shore one day, at the lowest ebb of the tide, MacCracken saw Covington kneeling with a short blunt knife and flicking barnacles into a basket. His motion appeared leisured and unhurried, yet his basket soon filled. MacCracken forbore from malice to say a word about Covington’s choice of dish, which his noble blacks, being connoisseurs in such matters, disdained as unsuited even to nature’s table. Nonetheless Covington filled that basket. And the next. So MacCracken mimed a coin between thumb and forefinger. What will you get for those?

  Covington looked around to see if there were ladies present, and seeing there were not, made an obscene sign of disgust. ‘I’ll get less than nothin’,’ he grunted.

  ‘You’re right about that, Covington old mullet,’ MacCracken said. Malice whipped him along and he scored an edge to his pleasure as he squatted on his heels, because he knew Covington couldn’t hear him. Yet to his absolute surprise as Covington sorted through his load he responded, ‘Fish?’

  MacCracken stopped cold and looked quizzical. Who had mentioned fish?

  MacCracken himself had.

  ‘You called me a mullet,’ said Covington.

  ‘You heard me?’

  Covington turned his back and acted as if nothing had been said.

  The day continued as it had begun. But MacCracken was stupefied, and retreated in thought, leaving Covington to the shore. So Covington could read lips. So he’d kept the secret from MacCracken this long time past—an ace up the sleeve in his dealings with men, and doubtless the key to his fortune and much else about him besides. Here was a man of secrets wrapped in a secret indeed.

  That night MacCracken took hold of himself. So that when Miss X (let him not be so coy—Georgina) tapped the glass, entered his study, and found him under a pool of lamplight, she saw him engrossed in his native philosopher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, within whose psychology he retreated as others went to their prayers. He hushed her, making a ‘get thee hither’ gesture. She knelt at his knee. ‘David?’ she plucked at his trousers. ‘Appleblossom?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Am I still your special annoyance?’

  ‘Yes. Indeed. Of course. Whatever.’

  He needed to be removed from his own vanity. Emerson was his guide for the moment. His enmity towards Covington subsided under the balm of a wider wisdom. And what on earth was that irritation based upon? MacCracken’s own nature most certainly. He was enough of a student of the mind to know it, and yet enough of a human being to be caught by the feeling as stickily as a fly gets caught in a web.

  A few days later MacCracken went walking the cliffs on the ocean-side of the Heads and saw, away below him, treading the eyelid of the great Pacific, the strange figure of Mr Covington balanced on a dripping block of stone. He was at his barnacling again. But at what risk!

  The sea in that place was a wonder of the world. It rose in a bejewelled surge containing many tons of water, and sank rhythmically, relentlessly, draining enormous square boulders. All was tide. All was deeps. All was the hidden mystery upon which MacCracken’s subject took his toes— protected by canvas shoes—and dared his unfathomable life.

  Note there was no land between this point and the desert coasts of Chile four thousand nautical miles distant. Between falls of water—white, green, all streaming in guttered torrents in a heaving Niagara—MacCracken saw Covington stepping out and back, prising shellfish from rocks in his studied manner. From directly above, MacCracken’s eyes followed where Covington stowed his baskets on a ledge. He came to them. He reached up. He spun around. He flattened himself against the honey-brown walls as a wave came and wetted him hard. Then out he went again, reaching with his long arm into crevices rumbling with power. MacCracken saw him remove a spiny sea-egg, hold it to the harsh and twinkling light, and drop it back in the water again. The place was so dangerous that nobody save wrecked sailors ever stood there, to MacCracken’s knowledge—and then in great fear of their lives. He was ignorant of Covington’s purpose, having dismissed the possibility of rare and valuable collections being made for sale. There was no beauty in what he scraped. Strange that MacCracken gave no thought to Covington’s courage in his lonely chasm. Nor that he might have intelligence as his guide. Nor that the book that haunted him was real enough, representing a danger to Covington greater than any cliffs and raging seas—the nails in his coffin, so to say.

  How the fellow had descended the cliff MacCracken did not know; and now he waited to see the route of his climb back up, because it made him laugh, and thrill with anticipation to think of his managing it at all. But even witnessing the climb he was unable to tell the way Covington did it. Hand over hand, balancing like a goat, dancing like a monkey, he confounded the picture given so far of a stolid figure of scarred flesh and crippled blood. One moment MacCracken hoped he would fall, and cease his niggling ways. The next he slapped that devil in his mind, and spat in its face: and there Covington arrived festooned with baggage and limping the clifftop path, extending a slimy hand towards him, ‘MacCracken!’—the other hand running with small cuts as Covington dropped his baskets and wiped his forehead leaving smears of blood.

  ‘What a show you gave me!’ mimed MacCracken, and then, mindful of Covington reading lips, repeated the same sentiment aloud, with a more careful shaping of his mouth for Covington to read as skilfully as he chose.

  About Covington was the air of challenge that prickled MacCracken so. His voice boomed like the sea. ‘I don’t ache when I’m working,’ he confessed, giving his equipment a kick. ‘That’s one good thing about ’im.’

  He began unpacking himself onto a flat rock baking in the sun. MacCracken wanted to ask, ‘Him?’—but before he could speak to Covington’s face—wanting to try his lip upon that eye—he was barked an explanation:

  ‘The man I send things to. From time to t
ime. If it pleases me.’

  ‘Of course, “If it pleases you”, so on and etcetera,’ MacCracken prattled behind his back.

  From around Covington’s knotty shoulders was slid a canvas knapsack. It was furnished with four tin boxes like anglers’ worm boxes made of different sizes. Into them Covington sorted various shells from his baskets: small black and shiny ones, others whorled like the spirals of a straw hat. The best he retained were dullards. Yet he had risked his life for them. MacCracken leaned forward, keenly following his choice.

  Covington wore a kind of quiver made of wood resembling a butcher’s knife-holder. It was strapped to his waist and contained a small hammer and chisel, plus an assortment of oyster knives. As he squatted and packed the shells, leaving the live creature within, completing his ‘work’, as he called it, MacCracken saw him as a salt-crusted smithy or indeed a butcher of the natural world. It was MacCracken’s first intuition of the simple truth and a way-point in the journey he was already embarked upon with Covington that would change their two lives absolutely.

  ‘That man I send ’em to,’ Covington grunted. ‘I call him La Naturalista. You know your Spanish, MacCracken?’

  ‘¿Es posible cruzar estas dos especies?’ MacCracken quipped, pointing to two different shells, aware that Covington’s eyes were very much upon him.

  Covington gave a dry laugh. ‘“Can you cross the two species?” Aye. You’re just like him.’

  ‘Your naturalista?’

  ‘Some might say so. A man who knows everything. That’s you,’ he faintly curled the end of his smile (‘I daresay in honest admiration,’ thought MacCracken).

  ‘But of whom do we speak?’ MacCracken teased at him. ‘A Spaniard?’

  ‘What’s that you say?’

  Covington looked MacCracken in the eye.

  ‘A Spaniard. Your Don Sia Di,’ MacCracken enunciated.

  Covington turned aside. ‘A Spaniard in treachery, may be.’

  A familiar bitterness overcame Covington. MacCracken had observed that curl of the mouth often enough to assay its quality. It was not loathing or malice but more a response to the aftertaste of a medicine.