Mr Darwin's Shooter Page 24

  Then they were closer than speaking.

  It was noontide and the next day. Covington was skilled at finding advantage in declivities and hollows, where he waited prone with his gun and lay back with clouds drifting over, watching larks climb almost from sight and then float down pouring out their song until they settled in grass near his head. Mrs FitzGerald lay beside him. He spread his nets and waited. The next lark that came he caught, and handed over, telling her not to put the least pressure on her fingers, or its heart would stop. She admired its gleaming eye and noted its palpitating breast, and then she set it free. Covington thought: If Colonel de las Carreras came upon them he would want to know what they were doing, so close and so smiling. Then he would take Covington as she took the lark, with ease, but whether he would set him free was a question. He would possibly shoot him or at the very best pluck his feathers. Contrariwise he might arrange for him to be feted a hero and be given a sash for his protection of a virtuous bride. You could never tell in this country what it would be—unless you were an Indian: If you were an Indian you would be chased, ridden down, betrayed, clubbed, knifed, slaughtered. If you were an Indian girl above fourteen years you might be kept and used, but other wise Rosas’s men went out in troops two hundred horses strong and crossed the plains to the snowcapped Andes. They went on chases five hundred miles long, night and day forsaking food and drink except for mares’ blood. It was not wise to even begin thinking about it.

  Mrs FitzGerald reached out a hand again, and tweaked Covington’s ear. ‘Did you hear what I said?’ she asked. He hadn’t, he was going deaf, and so she said louder, ‘You have two cock birds in your bag and shouldn’t you get you a hen?’ Well, he told her, he tried to get one each of whatever he bagged, the cock and the hen, but was never sure what he scored. Sometimes he killed the same kinds over again without realising, skinning and preparing like mad, binding the trays to his packhorse frame and sending them off. Variety was what mattered—the differences showing in beak and tailfeathers, speckled backs, breast markings, often easily observed, sometimes harder to tell. Mrs FitzGerald seemed to follow what he said, but he thought she was not listening to the words as such.

  They lay parallel, propped on their elbows. She moved from tweaking his ear to stroking it a little absent-mindedly. It was all about phylogeny, he said—what belonged with what, which bone fitted where, which gaps in knowledge an animal explained. If you had a fancy, continued Covington, you might think of birding, bugging, and bone-study as an argument running back and forth, in which the samples from the Beagle’s voyage played their part. When they got back to England there would be their great congregation on the matter, and Darwin would be in the driving seat.

  ‘I am tired of your colleague,’ she said.

  ‘Colleague is flattering. He is a Cambridge University man and I am a boy from a boneyard. He is one of those who is always “joshing” all the time. But he never joshes me.’

  ‘Is he rich?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Is he a looker, Syms Covington my lad?’

  ‘Better than a pig and worse than a peacock.’

  ‘Oh, he must be then,’ she smiled. ‘I never trust a man to tell me anything worth knowing about another man. It’s in their blood.’

  He liked it she called him a man after calling him a boy.

  ‘I might tell you anything I wanted,’ he said.

  ‘What is stopping you? I heard you admired my gloves, but that is all. Do you have nothing left to say?’

  ‘Nay, but you are betrothed.’

  ‘Pledged but not bounden,’ she said, a little tartly.

  He took a breath and considered the danger of her. Eyes watched in these empty plains and made their reports. Who knew if any watched now? Troops were stationed not far ahead. There was a chance she would turn the tables and want him to flee with her if he made a grab for her bezooms, which he was close as his next breath to doing. Did he really want to run away with her? It was the whim he’d had. But not now. Not on his life.

  Yet he drew close, and his blood was stirred.

  Covington told it to Mrs FitzGerald as they rode along— that his master lacked warmth. Didn’t he realise that if he wanted a dog, Covington would even learn to bark, and fetch a bone?

  ‘You do all you can and more, and you have a great heart,’ said Mrs FitzGerald, tilting her head to one side and looking meltingly at him. By unspoken agreement and mutual plotting they nudged their horses towards a grove of poplars that marked a slight rise on the plain. The ground would be dry in there and the place sheltered. A burnt-out chimney showed where a house had been. There were no other buildings around. As they came closer they could smell the sweetness of poplars.

  The air was clover-fresh, pungent, tangy with new growth. Covington drank it as wine. Ribbons of smoke wafted through the stillness and hung in bronze bands across the lower sky. Covington believed he could sniff mischief-making gauchos a league distant and sense their savage guile. There were none too close, no smell of burning meats ribboning the flatlands. But if he was wrong he carried his pistol in his coat to make things equal. Likewise for ostriches, hawks, ducks, anything else that clawed the blue sky or pecked green grasses. He sensed where they were; went after them; and because he wanted them, he found them. A small dose of lead so as not to damage them, only kill them, understand, and then they were ripe for skinning.

  In such a way Mrs FitzGerald was delivered to him in the grove of poplars in the warmth of the day. She stood down from the saddle before him peeling her gloves, and then impatient with the pearl buttons she tore them off.

  For the rest it was soon done, a matter of a carnal greed and exchange of pleasure most satisfying and exhausting: an education in lasciviousness. It happened over two days yet seemed without limit and was rich with animal instinct. Their chiefest glades were swathes of old thistles, dark woody trunks from the previous season that only ever hid treacherous Indians (but they were gone) or wandering cattle (but they had no fear of them) and so they had only prickles to remind them of sanity, which state of mind was last in their thoughts. Their marks of civilisation were a coarse blanket, an embroidered pillow, and Covington’s bird-hide with a length of cane holding it from the ground and making a shelter for two. With their game declared he was in a rage of wanting her any way he could. She held him off with a small hand, laughing and asking had he been with a woman before. His eyes hooked into her, ‘Not a white ’un,’ he breathed, and she cooled (he thought) considering his worth. Not with a woman the way I want you, madam, his mind rumbled, either, with your legs in the air and your back in the dirty. Would he ever get into her business-end this way? While she plucked at buttons and tugged pretty bows he tensed and waited. The bullock of Elstow had nothing on him, his blood so full that his eyes stretched tight in his skull. ‘You are no help to a woman at all,’ she taunted, but when he lunged, getting a hold of her bubs, she was exasperated and pushed him off. ‘Not so fast,’ and she asked him to kiss her but only to kiss her, nothing else. Was the horn in his trousers never to have its toss? She guided his touch, a quick hand for squeezing, a slow hand for stroking, and a chuckle around his getting to her under-silks—‘push it back’—and a purr—‘roll it back’. Her breath was sweeter than plums, all softness was in it, and when she fell back, crying, ‘Take me, buen mozo, I love you,’ in a most dramatic way, his need led him into her— quick, there, done.

  And there she was with her skirts under her chin and her eyes like a cat’s, and ready for scratching and hissing again. It was a good pattern they had.

  Except that while they still had a day or two left of their ride Mrs FitzGerald began tidying herself too much, frowning with irritation at her jacket all stuck with burrs, and dismissive of Covington when with all his boy’s humour he tickled her at the waist and grabbed her ankle to bring her down, and she turned on him hostile.

  On their last night they were among friendly troops and she was queen. He was like a whipped spaniel over the q
uickness of her passion. Through the days before he’d downed everything on the wing in the neighbourhood, a figure of eighty birds and also twenty small quadrupeds, rats, mice, pests, night visitors. Uncountable more than that was the number shot and rejected as being spoiled. He was in bad spirits and totally gone on a rampage over his situation with her.

  A ringing in his ears came on while he squatted on his haunches in a small mud hut, peeling birdskins by the light of an oil lamp, his forearms bloody and his fingers running with the warm, yellowish crop of seed-eaters. The business put him in mind of a useless meal. The sound came like a screech of wineglasses being hummed by a wet finger, and he looked through to the next dim room where Madam was dining with officers, to see if a game was being played, as he had seen the gentry doing at captain’s dinners, but their cups were forged from clay as you might expect in that country, and they were eating meat from their knives. So he went to the outer door and stood watching the stars, wiping his hands on his apron. Maybe it was them—the heavens. They sang, did they not, as they rotated in their spheres? He was tired and his head was not right. Maybe it was time for three shining ones to come to him and salute him with Peace Be To Thee, to set a mark on his forehead and set a seal upon it, or something of the kind, because he felt like death after enjoying her favours so mightily, and death brought to mind sin and disappointment after such ripe whirligigs. The sound came from within material matter and from around it at the same time, which is what he understood an emanation to be, and there was only an eternal explanation for that. He was betrayed, confused, stung, and reduced to a desperate nonentity and he wanted to be gone from this life.

  ‘Do you hear that noise, a small bell, a cricket?’ he asked her when she came through for air, sweeping somewhat grandly in her new importance. He was conscious of over-politeness to her, arch and offended.

  ‘Dear oh me,’ she hissed, ‘whatever is wrong with you? You are not in love with me, are you? Don’t spoil it.’

  Smiting his head with the flat of his palm he said, ‘The ringing, don’t you hear?’ Mrs FitzGerald looked alarmed because he yelled. What sort of passionate fool had she lumbered herself with, when she had only wanted his desire? The soldiers that came through calling her back to the table wondered at Covington crawling around on his knees, bothering his head like a dog with a sore, looking under casks and following into the corners of the room for the source of the ringing. They blocked a hatch and closed him in, and he yelled that he would have them shot, for which they kept him longer, cackling as long as their adored one allowed it, which was not for long, and then spewing their apologies. A post-rider had been sent to fetch Colonel de las Carreras and now shots were fired, shouts were heard, horses whinnied being spurred most cruelly and reined in at the same time to keep them frenzied. A great jangling of silver was made and elaborate orders shouted, responses given, and there went Mrs FitzGerald open-armed to a portly, suspicious Carreras illumined by a flaring torch of thistles carried by a peon.

  The next day they rode into sight of Buenos Ayres and Covington had his last look at Mrs FitzGerald. A night’s sleepless thinking had diminished her in his mind. She rode at the side of the Colonel resembling a pouter pigeon, and nothing would make you think there was anything in her policy except reflecting his importance. Carreras belonged to the Rosas party that was blockading the city and not letting food in or people out. He was a great Indian-killer no doubt, for Mrs FitzGerald said his cattle were all safe from them. The polished walnut stock of Covington’s bird gun attracted the eye of Carreras and he wanted it, offering safe passage through his lines as his price. But Covington was astounded and refused, on the honour of his master, whose bird gun it was, and said his passage was already promised by Mrs FitzGerald, and that the Colonel was obliged on her honour to provide it. Carreras took this to be immense effrontery, which it was, being a correction of the morals of a man of pride, and also courageous in the extreme from an English weed, and so to be admired. He muttered to an assistant for a few dark moments, and then the assistant came over, bowed, and said he was Covington’s guide.

  They waited until nightfall. Mrs FitzGerald came and took his hand, and then kissed him, quite formally, on the cheeks. Carreras bade him good fortune. They went around the fires of one group of soldiers and skirted the fires of the next. Neither side was in a mood to fight. There was just a little skirmishing, a few killed by day, and by night a kind of peace in their war. Halfway to the town they went through a plain of mud and the horses went up to their bellies. It was where the gun slipped from Covington’s hold. He turned around in the blackness and saw his escort leaning away from him in the floundering, as if adjusting something on the port side of his mount. They were skilled scoundrels all of them. Whether the guide relieved him of the gun or it fell in the mud he had his suspicions. When they reached the stones of the city he found himself alone. He learned that Darwin had waited at the Estancia of the Merchants and then given up on him, having caught the packet to Monte Video a few days previously.

  So Covington was able to arrange for his private birds to be sent to Leadbeater’s without other eyes around. He required payment to be made to Mrs Hewtson of Bedford on his behalf. It was a good feeling and went partway to restore his wrecked pride. At Merchant Lumb’s everything was in chaos and there was constant fear of the town being ransacked. Covington waited on a balcony and saw the rebels enter, five thousand strong, and when he saw Carreras he ran down intending to face him over the gun: really there was a wish in his heart as hot and sharp as a dagger; but who should come along in a flurry but Mrs FitzGerald, almost stopping his breath, and she crimsoned and bustled him into an alcove and whispered, hot-worded, that he was the silliest, most callow fool, but she wanted him to remember her better, after all, and if he ever became rich from all his bird-plundering he was to write to her in care of Merchant Lumb’s. Then she gave him a folded handkerchief, saying it was hers in Ireland as a girl, and he must treasure it close.

  Her kiss was full passionate, dizzying warm, renewing every promise her touch had made, and she was gone.

  Covington retreated inside himself somewhat as the voyage went on. From his close living together with Darwin he added patience and long-waiting to his virtues. He learned being one thing to one person, another to the next. It was a change enlarging his usefulness in service, though narrowing to his spirit. Or more truthful to say, packing his spirit down in the nether-hold until it cried to be taken out. He did not press so much for what he wanted any more. Silence bulged around him. Deafness boxed him in.

  They sailed down the coast and he missed Mrs FitzGerald with a mighty sorrow that made him shed tears into her handkerchief. He did not know why, it was a painful souvenir, but he kept it till its scent faded, which was not long, then shoved it deep in his seabag, and took it out and stroked his thumb on it many times after. It was embroidered BF and had a four-leaf clover in green, and was a fine, soft piece of work. It was all his heart as he recollected his time with her.

  The Beagle stood off-shore in a gentle swell. They were on the low coast of Patagonia, at Punta Alta near Bahia Blanca. Covington found himself standing on a beach where bits of worn skeleton rolled around in the waves. They were old bones: all bigger than horses’ and cows’ bones by far, and strangely configured. To get them back to the ship’s boat, at a riverbank landing, a packhorse was hired. Water and land intermingled dizzying a vision of one in the other, and the floating bark seemed to break from itself in globules of glass. Men broke in two walking only a short distance off, and the brain buzzed with excitement over what was found, the very brain itself breaking in half trying to understand what was in these problematical shapes that the living and the dead brought forward. The place was like a great slaughtering yard where hides only had been taken, and the rest left to rot, as was typical in that country (and how the Quentin House of Bedford got its profit). But who by, or by what agency had the bones been laid down? And what hides had they had, that must have been thic
k as turf on cottage roofs? All were agreed that a sweeping power of water must have brought the bones to the plains, and it was never cattle skeletons that came in such size, but debris of a race of animals gone from the earth before Noah.

  Covington followed his gent’s bootsteps scrambling a loose cliff and spent a day dislodging more bones still, making use of pinch bar and spade, thus proving his energy for ten masters and more. Darwin made notes and Covington asked him what he was about today. He answered, ‘Quien Sabe?’ with a short laugh, but Covington insisted.

  Gent rested his chin on the handle of his spade and said he was about getting good South American fossils to display in England, because there was only one, a fossilised sloth, in the whole Kingdom, which was held at the Royal College of Surgeons. It seemed what they’d stumbled on was unique, except in Madrid there was a Megatherium specimen described by Cuvier as having a curious osseous coat. Could these bones be it? For they put Gent in mind of living species of the armadillo, only bigger by far.

  ‘I have trouble enough with your standard issue armadillo,’ said Covington. ‘The lead-bellied bastard even gets in my dreams, and I still can’t pull him from the ground, owing to his strength.’

  ‘See what you can do with this one,’ said the gent.

  ‘I shall, if it takes all day and night,’ said Covington.

  ‘You are changed since we sailed,’ said Darwin, making a hesitant probe in return for Covington’s probing him.

  ‘Well, I have my reasons, I am glad to be back with ’um,’ Covington jerked a thumb at his shipmates, who were preparing an upturned boat on the shingle and making a passable shelter for the night. But Darwin knew better— there being few secrets aboard when it came to men and their carnal temperature—and it was said his coarse Cobby had had him a whore and fallen the full-bottle. Darwin, being pricked with interest over the matter, was unable to make any straight reference, of course, otherwise he might crimson and splutter. What he could say was that he’d rather missed Covington in the way of a busy, bustling wife.