Mr Darwin's Shooter Read online

  Come weekdays Covington sat at a high desk in a leather-merchant’s loft where he copied letters and entered transactions in ledger books. He had none of the scuttling resentment and affronted secrecy of the older clerks, but gave all to his work. He thrust his tongue between his teeth and twisted his body in keen concentration, half-slipping from his stool and balancing himself on his elbows as he wrote, one foot toeing him from the floor.

  Cattle hides came to Quentin House from South America packed in bales and tied with hemp. They arrived in barges up the River Ouse and were unloaded at Great Barford. Broken open in the warehouse they were dry as parchment and so hard that being slid out by warehousemen they made the sound of a shovel being scraped on stone. They stank with an odour of dried blood and arrested decay. It was a stink known to Covington before he was ever taken on as a clerk, for it hung about the slaughteryard of his Pa. Thistle-heads squashed flat were often found in the packages, and once a greasy-handled Spanish knife that was passed about and then wired to the wall in the front office as an exhibit denoting the romance of cattle on the estates of La Plata.

  It was a great illusion of power, sitting high above the busy town with the economy of leather radiating out from under Covington’s fingertips. Written words, with their dangling tails and spiny longitudinal bones, engrossed him as they flowed from the tip of his nib. He could go all day on a folio of long f’s and deep y’s. Bootmakers, jacket-makers, upholsterers, saddlers—all, down to the man who made leather stops for musical instruments and up again to the one who packed cushions for the royal coach, placed their bids at the auction rooms and came begging Covington’s master for terms to pay, which Covington conveyed back to them in his fine copperplate that he had learned in dame school from the age of seven.

  But when he heard his Pa say that his boy would one day rise and stand equal to the Quentin House in money and fame, then Covington felt his stomach shrink. Those Quentins were mean procurers of shoddy advantage. They were Established Church and looked down on Baptists and Congregationalists as less than thistle-weeds. ‘No mind, they have found you good work, and a lifetime’s employment to keep you away from sticking a knife into gore,’ insisted his Pa. But there were nights when Mrs Hewtson’s sprogs pulled the bedclothes from Covington in their sleep, and he rolled to the floor lying groaning and looking up at the stars through a small breath-fogged window, believing he was always to stay down.

  Covington would spit his shame out at his work by grunting like a bullock, extending his leg into the aisle of the office and tripping the messenger boys who came running past. While they were sprawled gathering their wits he took his aim and dipped a chewed-up ball of paper into a dish of ink and sent it flying from the tip of a wooden ruler. He could give a boy a wet black eye and send him howling in confusion and be poised over his next page of invoices before the ruckus began from on high, and a culprit was sought by the overseer. Covington beamed his innocence back in the face of any accusation. Though later there would be a challenge to a fight with bare knuckles along the canal-side, and Covington would find that the boy he chose to bully had great spirit, and wouldn’t give up, and so Covington wouldn’t give up either, and they would fight down to the end, slugging, mauling, damaging, until their skin rubbed raw and they powder-puffed to the finish.

  One day late in the year Mr Timothy Quentin, brother of Covington’s master and a man with the manner of an undertaker and with a foul breath besides, asked Covington and six other boys to come with him to his rooms and be given something worthy of their services. The boys jostled to be first in line and the one with his hand out most promptly was Covington. He was given two dull florins and told of an excess of hides on the market. There were just too many cattle on the plains of South America and other houses were stealing the trade. What this had to do with Covington being rewarded he was slow to perceive, and only understood when he walked out of Mr Quentin’s rooms, and found warehousemen stacking the clerks’ stools and desks away. It made no difference that Covington was the one highest-praised. The busy room of boys and penmanship was to be made a storehouse until prices rose, and then the Quentins would have their hides as cheap as anyone. At the prospect they could barely hide their glee.

  Carrying a half-eaten apple and a beef bone that was to be his dinner, Covington walked through chilly damp cobbled streets where houses leaned over his head and almost touched. He sat under the bare-limbed lime tree in Bedford town square, blinking around him at the unaccustomed hour of noon and seeing how worry and care seemed to line every face. He wasn’t hungry. A gangling youth walked around calling salted pilchards and an old woman dragged a bucket of slops between her knees and when Covington tried to help she scolded him. What was he to tell his Pa? That his sire’s pride was just a nag to the slaughterhouse, unwanted, without value, scorned? That same morning Covington had whistled and thrown conkers at stray dogs and everyone had seemed to be laughing in the brisk smoky chill. Now faces looked pinched. The same youth returned and called his salt-fish with his head thrown back, shaking his tray, and they were slow to be gone at a ha’penny a clutch. Covington dropped his head between his knees and closed his eyes. He did not know how much time went past. He was in the Vale of Despond.

  But there came a sad moaning in the air like a swarm of bees beginning its flight. He listened without raising his head or opening his eyes—only his mind came to attention. Then curiosity overcame him, and he blinked and tipped his cap behind his ears and looked around. It was not bees but the sound of a song coming from a huddle of men in the square. One was the salt-fish boy. On looking closer he saw they were all boys and not much older than Covington himself. They had weatherbeaten long faces and a look of the earth about them, as if they had climbed from sleeping in the ground. He had seen them beforehand, separated from each other, smoking their little clay pipes and scuffing their poor boot-heels in the shiny, overtrodden ground. They had seemed like anyone else he might see that day, resigned to a change in their lives that would never come. Now they formed a line. They had peculiar life in them. Covington’s spirits gave a lift. A man joined them, older than the rest by far, and Covington recognised him with a kind of longing excitement in his heart: he was thin-faced, curly black bearded, and wearing a cocked hat and a seacaptain’s overcoat that swished the tops of his boots when he made his determined stride. He had famished red lips and an excitable smile. One minute he had not been there; the next he sprang from the pavement just a few feet from Covington’s face. ‘That is my sailor,’ thought Covington, ‘who always goes round staring at a body.’ The sailor took out a jew’s harp and sounded a key of C. His companions broke into a shanty:

  Brace up the yards and put about

  Cut a fine feather and fly

  Give her a foot, she’ll go like a witch,

  Sail till the seas run dry.

  Covington jumped to his feet with a look of bright amazement. ‘I’ll be in this,’ he muttered, and ran with others to where the quintet performed outside the baker’s shop, their arms around each other’s shoulders and their boots kicking right and left. Covington clapped his hands and shouted ‘Oi!’ at the end of every verse:

  The King’s commission is all we need

  To climb the rollers high

  Eternity’s port on the other side,

  Sail till the seas run dry.

  ‘Oi!’

  Sail till the seas run dry.

  The baker came out and handed around sweet buns. Covington took one and sank his teeth into it. Then they went around the town venting their chorus on whoever cared to listen, stopping on corners, being handed more food, gathering coins. Covington went with them for a good few hours with all the fascination of a stray dog yelping at the moon. One of his brothers found him, and said they all knew what had happened at the Quentin House. They were sorry. What would he do now? He had not considered that, except that he was doing it, and his brother clapped him on the back, said it would do to warm the day, and let him alone.

>   In his uncracked soprano, Covington sang as joyfully as anyone, learning the words as he went along, adopting the rolling gait of a sailor and obeying the signals of the leader, John Phipps, the sharp-eyed seaman who at each turn when the boys formed a square raised his arm and fluttered his hand like a flag in the wind, laughing, smiling and encouraging the dance.

  More than once Phipps caught Covington’s eye. More than once Covington laughed back at him. John Phipps was a gamecock challenging and strutting.

  Then Phipps stopped still and said to Covington directly:

  ‘Do I know you, boy? I think I do. I think I know your heart what’s more.’

  Covington dropped his eyes from being known. He felt a nakedness to be covered, and nothing to shield him.

  Then the seaman slipped his jew’s harp to his mouth and cupped his hands around it, making a tune that slowed everybody down, and brought them breathing slow and feeling warm and happy into a circle around him. They were back in the town square again. There came a last twang that faded into the silence.

  ‘Be still,’ was the meaning of that signal. ‘Furl your topsails and drop your anchor.’ The sailor called for his squadron to kneel and be given a blessing. The crowd that had gathered wrapped its rags around itself and shuffled in a little tighter. They were the poorest of the parish, hungry for dreams, and if they could not have their dreams then toss them a sugar-crusted bun, and if the baker was not inclined to redouble his whim, then give them a pilchard from the fishboy’s basket. Give them something. Even words to chew upon.

  John Phipps gave them his sermon. He said he knew a great admiral, and the admiral was Lord of the Fleet. The admiral was one in a thousand and could do many things at once: he could build ships, launch them, serve in them, sharing travail with their sailors, and he could fight with them when dying, leaping from ship to ship and always being there with them. Yes, John Phipps had met him and knew him. Yes, he had fought alongside him as his Lord’s Obedient Servant and had seen him die. And behold in the morning of the third day after the battle-smoke cleared, had seen him with his very own eyes, a man brocaded in gold and wearing a hat like a crown and carrying a book in his hand that was the King’s regulations of truth writ on his lips.

  ‘How can he live when you saw him die?’ asked a beggar, with hope.

  John Phipps bent down to him.

  ‘Landlubber,’ he said, ‘for the love that he has in his King’s service, he is sure in the world that comes next to have glory for his reward.’

  He took a testament from his pocket in the last grey dusk. Resting a foot on the worn roots of the lime tree he struck an easy pose, throwing his coat-tails back. His intensity had a hunger to it, Covington saw. It demanded everything to itself. And when his audience listened, as he bade them to, and only sparrow-chirp and the grind of a passing cartwheel disturbed the silence, the hunger disappeared. Phipps’s feverish eyes and his pained smile gave over to a changed appearance.

  He caught Covington’s steady eye watching, and asked, ‘Ain’t that right, boy? Ain’t that how we can die and live?’

  ‘But isn’t he the King,’ Covington asked, ‘if he can do all them things, jump across water, live again, come back on the third day, and all? Isn’t he the one who rules everything,’ and added stoutly, ‘isn’t he the King of the Jews?’

  ‘A clever boy who exceeds my parable,’ said the sailor, putting his arm around Covington’s shoulder, ‘says my Admiral is Jesus of Nazareth and indeed he is. What an emissary he makes. Yet though he is called King and Master,’ (here twisting Covington’s ear with sharp humour) ‘I call him Admiral. He is the only man whom the Great King on High has authorised to lead the fleet in which any of you may serve. Wherefore take my meaning. Bear in mind my parable lest in your journey you meet with some that pretend to lead you right, but their way goes down to death.’

  It was almost dark and Covington’s supper would be on the table. Mrs Hewtson would be sure to whack him on the head with her wooden spoon when he came in. But he lingered and heard the boys say it would soon be time for them to get back to the place where they would spend the night. Though the boys were ready to go, John Phipps flourished his hat and placed it at his feet. A feeling hung about him like smoke. His black curls jiggled on his head like springs being constantly plucked by an invisible hand. He chuckled throatily, excitedly, with a promise in his voice. When speaking of his enemies—the mention of whose names caused his voice to tighten and rise in intensity, and the tip of his pointed Adam’s apple to tremble—he made Covington feel that whoever John Phipps hated, then they were the ones Covington hated, too. Among them were ships’ pursers, weevils, bishops, landlords, hoity clerks and all enemies of the poor and needy, and those who refused pilgrims their barns to sleep in. Also those who drove pilgrims from their natural estates, denying them the animals of the earth to grill in their fires.

  ‘You must hate all of England, then,’ said Covington, ‘if that is the case.’

  The sailor turned to Covington again, switching from ferocity to that look of quick good humour that Covington saw in him at their first coming across each other:

  ‘Are my enemies those who lie in sluggish water, and think their sluggish thoughts, and make mockery of heavenly desire by carnal mimicry?’

  Covington dropped his chin, feeling whole as a child in the company of this man. ‘They are my sins, I confess it.’

  ‘Nay,’ said the sailor, ruffling Covington’s hair. ‘Some would call them sins, but I would not—since you own them so freely.’ He turned to his boys. ‘What do you say, lads, shall we have him in our fleet?’

  John Phipps’s four adherents all said they would, but it was not their selection that counted, they added, it was the Admiral’s word.

  ‘Well spoken. But I think the Admiral would have him in his fleet any day,’ said Phipps. ‘He has goodwill for boys.’

  ‘Then heave-ho,’ said the others, grabbing Covington by the shoulders and frog-marching him ahead of them down the road. With their meeting over they declared their starvation, and broke into a trot. Covington ran with the sailor and his boys through the dark, out on a muddy road past the town and into a barn where they made a fire of sticks. They strung lanterns on beams and roasted potatoes and turnips in the coals. Covington liked the way they did everything with a snap, a rush, and then stretched their legs out before them and smoked their fierce pipes, which they plugged with tobacco handed around in pinches by John Phipps. One of them produced a pullet from his cloak and made ready to despatch it to perdition, only to find John Phipps’s cane across his neck. He asked where he had got the bird, and only allowed him to strangle it when satisfied it was from under a bush near a yeoman’s farm. ‘I would have you plucked if it came from any deserving poor,’ he said.

  With firelight licking their pinched faces the boys told stories of where they were from. All but one belonged in Bedfordshire and neighbouring counties. Like Covington they had been ejected from their workplaces or else had never known anything except wandering the roads. In the right season if they were lucky they dug potatoes, cut willows, and drove turkeys to market for the reward of a few grubby pence. Now they would take their chance on the sea. None of them except Able Seaman John Phipps had ever worked the sea, but it was their sworn intention to do so. Indeed, as Covington soon learned, such was the whole purpose of John Phipps’s preaching—to take boys with him to the ships. It was to cultivate and escort to the naval yards of Britain a clutch of would-be sailors imbued with a parable of Christ which they would live-out in rough waters. For what was a Christian to do except bear witness to his fellow-man, and if driven to extremes bear it alone where there were no spectators, on the perilous deeps. There was no better test than that of a Christian’s mettle. But Phipps was not in a mood to lead his boys to Portsmouth in a hurry and find them Christian commanders, of which he knew several. He first wanted to check they could read their scriptures, and show in their hearts a love of the unseen. Then they would be a po
wer on the four seas, and return home with treasure beyond reckoning.

  Covington did not know if he had a love of the unseen.

  ‘It was given to you by nature,’ said Phipps.

  ‘What is it, though?’

  ‘It knows you. Pray stick by my side. You and Joey Middleton here, I think you are my prizes.’

  Joey had a small, sad and eager face. He had the sniffles and a runny nose, and wiped his upper lip with the back of his hand. John Phipps gave him a woollen comforter from his deep pockets to wrap round his neck and keep himself warm. Joey was eleven years old but looked younger. He was the only one who knew ships, being a West Country boy from Devonport, where his father, he said, was a sailor with red hair. And his mother? She was in that town, too. But that is all he seemed to know, and John Phipps said that he had found him on a scow near Hull, curled up on the deck as if he were chained there. A lean bosun and his wife had taken him in charge. They claimed he was their own, whipped him when they liked, and used him as their lackey or galley slave as they made their way around the coast. They had got so far from Joey’s birthplace that he believed himself to be in another country altogether, where English was barely spoken. And he forgot that he was free, had no conception of prayer, and so was in a fair pickle when John Phipps stole him away and started breathing faith into his bones.

  By the flame of a candle the Book was passed around. All stumbled over the words until it came Covington’s and Joey’s turns. The two outshone the rest in a reading of the Prodigal Son. It had a special meaning for Phipps, and they guessed he was estranged in the way of a prodigal himself. It was then everyone’s bedtime and they heaped up the hay. John Phipps would not let Covington stay, but sent him home in the moonlight with a promise that he would call upon his father in the morning at the slaughteryard, and parley about Covington joining his boys.