Mr Darwin's Shooter Page 21

  ‘Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning,’ said Covington as a matter of habit. ‘Wind before seven, dry by eleven.’

  ‘It is always dry hereabouts,’ said Darwin, scooping a handful of dust. Covington saw he was making a resolve, pursing his pinkish, wind-chapped lips; rubbing a sandy, sun-burnt eyelid—he was going to have to be more patient with his manservant if this was to be possible at all. He knew that a sailor lived by the weather, and Covington was a sailor almost from childhood, was he not, having weather in his bones? No wonder he tested it constantly, boringly, tediously. Darwin understood that. Besides Covington came from a survey ship. Their very duty led them into places that all other ships avoided and their safety depended on being prepared for the worst. Darwin could be fair-minded, no mistake. So that Covington carrying a certain over-readiness from the bark to the campo was to be expected. And yet his damnable chatter! And the sore irritation! And the relentless presence of the lad! Must he hoist his crotch, spread his legs way wide, and jig a little from the knees every time he readied himself for bed?

  ‘Every night we reef our topsails,’ Covington chortled when drawing his blanket up to his chin and giving it a shake, ‘so as to lose no time if a breeze forces us to move.’

  ‘I think the worst we shall have tonight is a dew,’ invariably observed Darwin—at which Covington laughed immoderately, and agreed they well might.

  Covington came back from shooting:

  ‘Covington!’

  ‘Yoi?’

  ‘You’ve got me far too many skins,’ said Darwin. ‘More than I asked—’

  ‘Look, I have sorted them.’

  ‘You have indeed. But Covington—’

  ‘Yea? What have I saved you?’

  ‘It must be a week, I confess, at the least.’

  ‘There you are, then.’

  ‘But you have too many of the same kind. What is this?’

  ‘It came skimmin’ along the water.’

  ‘But it is half shot away.’

  ‘A pinch is better than a peck, ain’t that right?’

  ‘Not in the case of birds, I am afraid. It is a lot less than so. This might be a scissor-bird. I cannot tell. Its beak is shattered.’

  ‘I used a light shot,’ said Covington defensively.

  ‘If you could get me a scissor-bird—’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Well,’ said Darwin with a certain false heartiness, ‘I might write to the king for a commendation. It is a great rarity.’

  ‘Then a scissor-bird it will be,’ Covington swore, but thought, ‘I am not slow, except to condemn; I am not witless, except when I do not know, and cannot keep up with Cambridge men; I am not a child, who will be satisfied by excitement. So what does he mean, when he condescends? That I should go away, hide my face, hobble my tongue, and only come back when there is hefting to be done?’

  Neither was Darwin comfortable with Covington’s fiddling a few scrawled tunes in the pampas night, making a monstrous interruption to his thoughts, which were deep and slow. ‘Enough of that caterwauling there,’ he would declaim, pretending to be in the most hectic good humour about the thing. Then he’d turn his back and pull his blanket around his ears, cherishing his sleep on dry land in contrast to that at sea, where there were always footsteps on deck, thumps, clangs, bells, voices against one’s ear in the most private of cubbies, and always the queasy motion of the waves.

  Once or twice of this was all it took, and Covington crept away from the fire where he sat propped against his saddle-bed looking up at the stars, plunking the strings of his Polly Pochette with the flat of his hand, the battered instrument hard against his ear, making a repetitive medley collected along the way, a music touching his mood of obedience and making it rankle a little—telling of dark eyes, red roses, flashing steel and spilt blood. ‘Lua na testy munha,’ he sang, remembering a rough night of his life. Moon, my only friend.

  It was a marriage of convenience they had, and Darwin was like the fiancée who gives her consent to the match for reasons of suitability but through lack of love rues the intimacy—yet all the time lauding the practicality. Darwin’s beau ideal of a collector when they began was not Covington but the coxswain and captain of the maintop—Covington’s dear friend, the walking cyclopaedia of God’s mysteries who could set bird traps as prettily as steer the cutter, rig a sail or produce a Biblical reference in his best Bunyanesque style. Darwin owed a debt to Phipps for releasing Covington from a closeness of personal friendship without hostile jealousy—a dissenting, somewhat conspiratorial and devotional closeness, it would seem from the way people talked about it. From Phipps’s and Covington’s point of view it was a comfortableness so close as to seem like carrying home with them wherever they went. This attachment was famous in the ship for having a whiff of inseparability about it—there had been grumblings that the two were as tight as wax, that there would be trouble from Phipps if Covington was removed from his sphere, and so on. But no such trouble came. Phipps had a vanity he could draw the gent to their circle of prayer, which wasn’t so fanciful, when you considered the number of times Darwin ‘amened’ through Sunday service. It was Phipps had the good effect on people, they were soothed by something in his heart—immovable-seeming, yet lightsome in the practice of his faith, which he sniffed as a rare breeze, and went nimbly pursuing to catch with his texts all arrayed like sails.

  Covington was not such an inspirer. Or say he inspired something else.

  Blood was a matter Darwin came back to roundabout more times than he knew—by the light of their cookfire under the stars, and when they were stretched easy on the ground and sucking their pipes and looking for something to say—blood and back to blood, the blood of base men, as he put it somewhat forcibly. Blood by which we mean lusty thoughts.

  ‘What—of rogues, do you mean?’ asked Covington, wishing to help his gent out. Darwin was such a great cloud of confusion on divers occasions.

  ‘All classes, I suppose. The usual run of men.’

  He doubtless meant Covington himself, reference to a whoremongering reputation based on the crew’s japes over his encounter with Leza the Uglificate in Bahia, and with his Hickory of St Helena—even going back to the time he leapt in the water and grappled the Patogonian maid with her small pechos bezoomos and lost eyes, her ojos amoratodos. Nothing was secret in a ship, all was known in relation to others. But the stories had become bent with time—his leaping was upon that maid, it was said, whereas it had been around, and they had touched in surprise, not by foul design.

  The gent was no obvious gossip, and never so bold as to ask outright. But his need was clear enough on what he wanted to know, and Covington interpreted him thus: Who were the lustiest Beagles aboard, and how did they argue a woman to lie with them, by what signals did they devise the conjunction, and did the men believe there was a way of knowing a maid was willing, as distinct from other maids, say, as they were seen making their promenades in Buenos Ayres, all those pretty senoritas?

  ‘As easy as knowing if a squirrel is in the humour, you mean?’

  ‘Customs, routines, mechanisms, devices. The whole gamut if you will.’

  ‘Oh, he would ease up to her and very soon know,’ said Covington.

  ‘By what means, however?’

  ‘It is much the same as in the fowlyard—by means of her response to bravado and show. Your Rio Plato miss,’ Covington airily declared, ‘will blush like a rose-bush and feign indifference, but it is good for a man to be hot-blooded, as they say, de malas pulgas, fire strikes fire. They think our Englishness is very strange and call us budin blancos.’

  ‘White puddings?’

  ‘Something of the sort.’ In fact he had listened to soldiers at a military post using the word and seen them point their thumbs at the gent himself, a touch unfairly. ‘About what you are saying …’

  ‘Pray continue.’

  ‘There is not much to add. In other cases, among the common sort, why, it is the same the world o
ver for a sailor, he speaks his intent and shows his coin.’

  ‘There is no great mystery there,’ said the gent.

  ‘Or shows his coin first,’ continued Covington, ‘by way of flirtation.’

  ‘Really?’ asked the gent, carefully flat.

  The subject was over. Darwin could never have a conversation with Covington except when he wanted to know something. Now he knew. It was never easy.

  It bothered Darwin that Covington came after him with perfect judgement as to when to shatter his thinking— Covington knew that, but couldn’t help himself—calling out, pestering to be told something he would certainly never remember and was irrelevant to the task at hand. Then the Don’s thoughts would take wing and flee irrecoverably away. Volcanic plains: beds of coal: lakes of nitre and the Lord only knows what more. What was that about? There were times early on when they might have struck each other.

  ‘You have explained the hemoffrodiate,’ Covington boomed one day, ‘but never got round to saying if it was the same with people as hemoffrodiates—might they cross with themselves one time one way, another way next time?’

  ‘Give birth, you mean?’

  ‘Aye, to themselves,’ guffawed Covington.

  ‘We are not a hermaphrodite race of people.’

  ‘Not on our bark, we ain’t, for it’s a hanging crime, for sure.’

  It was the closest the two of them came to ever wondering about Phipps in that way. If his leading of boys was mixed with a longing to spear their bodies along with their souls, then it was kept well hidden, even from Covington.

  In his science, around Darwin, Covington was too much like Swift’s footman in a smart district of town who tried to learn all the new-fashioned words and oaths, and songs and scraps of plays that his memory could hold. Covington did it from the lexicon of Cuvier they carried aboard. He remembered best when inspired or passionate. If tired, bored, out of humour, then it was futile to expect remembrance of what a cognisant naturalist or a well-versed country man would know without question. At other times, in their beginning together, he thought it advantageous to think like his master, or how he thought his master thought, making connections and not just reporting facts but whatever facts might seem to be important. How full of himself he was, all spunk and spittle.

  ‘What was it you saw flying?’

  ‘It was very like an ostrich.’

  ‘How far off the ground did it go?’

  ‘It come over my head.’

  ‘Then why do you say ostrich? You know they don’t fly.’

  ‘In the way it threw its wings and ran along the ground.’

  ‘Pray tell me what you saw.’

  ‘It was a carrion vulture.’

  Field ornithology led the way to systematic and descriptive ornithology in the normal course of events, but there was no such expectation around Covington. The getting-and-gutting school was the only one he needed to join, but still he struggled with his terms, hating his limits, going against them. Covington was best with birds, as time went on, and that was where Darwin himself was weakest. So they complemented each other somewhat. One reached for feathers while the other hammered rocks. It was a matter of getting into Covington’s head that limits were not just inevitable—no two persons on earth having equal capacities—but indeed desirable and useful, if properly worked. It was a matter of beating Covington into the ground.

  Invited to sweep the horizons, Covington returned festooned with plenty, and would persist unto death from exhaustion, if need be, preparing skins and packing specimens. Thus despite their personal irritations Darwin was enabled to increase the sphere of his observation as if he had three or even four assistants and not merely one.

  Covington knew his worth but still felt the emptiness between them. It was his gathering small hurt. Darwin complained there were problems with being a naturalist in the field, separated by thousands of miles from fellow naturalists. He always sadly wanted somebody to talk to about his finds but knew in his heart there were few who cared one pin about them. Seaman Covington? Wouldn’t he do? Hardly at all. Not a serious idea. He was the ballocky parish bull, Cobby the young ’un, the gross leaper as he was characterised on the bark—a specimen of vigour and open-faced potency breathing in a man’s face overmuch. So much indeed that Darwin refined his manner of keeping him at arm’s length without spoiling his use. None of this was lost on Covington, who might have no science but could read the emotions the way naturalists read their Carolus Linnaeus. Darwin’s technique with his underling was more suited to making a plan or sketch in botany or geology than in human dealings. Regrettable, but there you were. Covington was to be valued as a phenomenon, but it couldn’t make him liked, and the matter of his popularity among his shipmates only emphasised the distance between them.

  It was a great mark against Darwin that Covington understood all this and more, and that Darwin never saw it, or if he did, considered it of no importance, absolutely not.

  And if only breathiness, sly grins, closeness, over-enthusiasm and an air of cunning were all. But the damnable stirring of the blood that went with it gave Darwin hot flushes—he blushed, spouting crimson like a Roman candle when he least wanted to, and so the most reprehensible of all situations came to the boil, and he found he was bonded to a servant who looked at him without moving an eye-muscle, yet seemed, ingratiatingly, to wink. It was too uncomfortable altogether.

  In this Covington had his own back. He vented his blood. The outcome most strangely was a child. Theodora.

  All the while FitzRoy’s chart of South America was added with detail. It grew, multiplied and defined itself to the eye incrementally—headland by headland, bay by bay, reef by hachure-marked reef and island spiderwebbed and caterpillared with ink lines, depth-marked with numerals carefully calculated, cross-checked from soundings, and notated with warnings of rip-tides and places where safe anchorage might be found for the world’s fleets.

  Likewise Covington’s boyhood had shaded into its new life. Away from Darwin and his manner of always making him feel unfinished and rough, he was a wandering taxidermist in the best of styles. His kit was three pairs of scissors, a whetstone, a whalebone needle, and spring forceps made of brass. He looked at his former shipmates and saw how few of them were contented at all. Like him they were caught young and broken-in before they reached their years of discretion. That was how the navy held them. But unlike him they weren’t old John Phipps’s boys any of them. They didn’t have good faith. They were rarely happy so far from home, and when it came to their devotions they only spouted them in peril at sea, swearing they would live blameless lives if saved from drowning.

  They made a short cruise to the Falkland Islands and Covington took a long walk with the guns. Darwin asked him to keep an eye open for reptiles and limestone and report back if he found any, but all he saw was a low undulating place with stony peaks and a brown, wiry grass growing on peat. There were no trees, therefore few birds, only snipes and waterfowl. The best he got was a brace of rabbits. Phipps won the day capturing a live fox and it was taken aboard.

  A man came running with news that he had found some clothes and a gun on the coast. Thick strands of kelp swayed among rocks, rising and falling in the tide with melancholy precision. In a short time there was a darker lump visible in the kelp, and when boat-hooks were found and the mass hauled closer they saw it was pale Mr Hellyer tangled in it. With some difficulty he was disengaged. He had shot his bird, and while wading to take it his legs had entangled and he was drowned. A pestilence was in the lads’ moods as the Beagle sailed north to Patagonia waters and made its way south again, then turned and repeated the punishment. It occurred to Covington that it was strong business he was about with his Don. Hellyer in contest for birds was gone. Wee Volunteer Musters wielding the gent’s gun was gone (having died in Brazil). Joey Middleton, so ardent, so fine, was rigged in his hammock, given his balls of shot for weight and dropped to the ocean floor, and whose service had he sworn himself to betimes?
Covington’s fingers were bleached and dimpled like his master’s from spirits of wine as he pickled mice and shrews, spiders, moths, and made sure there were eyeballs staring out from inside every glass. Did they want him for their companion?

  There were times when Covington looked around, saw their severe Capt, and imagined himself on the deck with old Noah looking for the rainbow marking the end of the deluge, and being first to sight the dove with the olive branch, announcing the finding of dry land. ‘The Scilly Light ahoy!’ Nothing could touch his optimism then.

  The Great Flood of the Bible was spouted on their travels as a favourite story. The idea of a ship with animals aboard was a picture of cosy creation. The Ark in everyone’s mind wasn’t much bigger than their Beagle. It had the same goats and chickens in stalls, the same tar, mouldy wet boards, damp wool and stiff tarpaulins, frozen ropes and water washing the decks to the knees. It had the same kind of Capt, precise in his rule and close to God. The midshipmen and officers all had nature-enthusiasm, and their own insect collections, but nothing like the ones Covington went around making under the guidance of his gent. Nor anything so particular as Covington kept for himself, either. The gentry were all the sons of Noah in their way, keeping a little back for what came after. As for the crew—who had been life and breath to the boy until now—they understood the parable if they bothered with it at all, but saw the whole enterprise of collecting specimens as gentry-business mostly. They went on feeling excitement as they found it, and when they did not—creatures of the moment—only grumbled. They had a regular gripe over their Cobby getting above himself and being bound to the Derbyshire gent. It had been heard before about him in different guises. They wanted a cut in rum whenever he returned from shore, meaning a share of his rations, and called him a land-swab, which he greatly resented. Old John Phipps showed restraint on the matter. He was a friend of Darwin, now—did fowling for him betimes, and coddled and kept alive the ship’s fox. Phipps had the parable to work himself into as well. After Noah came to Ararat and emptied the Ark, the width of the world lay open to him. The animals went forth and multiplied. The beached Ark was dismantled and used to build houses. So the old tub that had once been everything shrank to other uses in God’s imagination, and the whole wide world became his vessel.