Mr Darwin's Shooter Page 9

  ‘They have made a fool of you,’ Phipps said. ‘Did you see her go with the next who waited?’

  Covington tried telling him of his pleasure but Phipps spat sideways. He said the moll was a Madam Bubble, a witch and a mulatto mutt’s true bitch to fiddle a fiddler so. She was the way of the world and the evil standard of going ashore. ‘I know this about you. You care neither for man, nor argument, nor for example. What your mind prompts you to do, that you do, and nothing will change you in your way.’

  ‘I own freely what I done,’ said Covington. ‘Remember that time—when you thought I was the easiest soul in all creation, not even knowing who I was?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘So what of it, John?’

  ‘“What of it?” It means you are without conscience.’

  Phipps took him by the throat, bringing tears to his eyes, and asked him his meaning towards him.

  ‘Nothing towards you.’

  ‘Ah, I am nought to you?’

  ‘That is not my meaning.’

  ‘I think it is.’

  ‘Very well. “Nought to you,”’ the boy replied, pushing himself off. ‘If it is what you say. But I would never say so.’

  It registered on Covington’s brains that he had grown half a head taller than most of the crew, that his fiddler’s wrists were not so much green and supple any more, but strong as weathered spars. He supposed a reckoning with God would come for his carnal sins, for all his catechising said so, but he took a chance on that and trusted his heart. As they sailed north for England, re-crossing the equator, Covington celebrated his fifteenth birthday with a boast about fighting prowess, and was subjected to hot wrestling on the foredeck, with John Phipps the ringleader against him in testing his mettle. Phipps scored a bloody nose. Seaman Door cried mercy from his handsome face, and two favoured boys, Midshipman King and Volunteer Musters, stood by smirking proud, for they fancied themselves connoisseurs of the ring. ‘You shall be our hammerman, bedad,’ said Musters, adding: ‘Covington my man.’

  Covington thought this pretty chip of gentleman Musters, who was aged eleven to his fifteen years. There was now a difference showing between King, Musters and Covington that made him smart with secret tears—a matter of who was born to advance. Would it never be Covington, with a head some said was handsome but others taunted was like a mangold-wurzel on a pole, who spoke in the accents of horse-markets and addressed his geometry and algebra aloud, as if they were living creatures? Who consorted with the gentry of the ship less often now that he was no longer a pup, and padded between decks carrying buckets of steamed cabbage and green potatoes with a look of stunned devotion on his face? Who because he was marked to slit animals’ throats tended to them more considerately than anyone else, and so smelled like an animal too?

  Thus Covington’s freedom of the ship narrowed, and on their last leg home the Adventure was a smaller, more crowded vessel in his brain than it was when he first stepped on her decks. He spent more time on his own, wedged in his favourite place in the bows considering the innumerable waves and allowing the odd one to rise and smack him full-force on the chest. Joey Middleton remained his one true mess-mate. Joey’s growth had not started yet; he was a splinter compared with Covington’s tree-trunk, and needed defending from bullies and flirts.

  Every act of kindness shown to Covington he passed along back to Joey, and had it returned threefold. When Covington was sad, who sat at his feet? When Covington went dancing wild, fiddling and making practical jokes around the ship—taking the captain’s turbot from the fish tank and having it served up to the midshipmen—who always tried to outshine him? When Covington left a space empty in the affections of John Phipps, and Phipps refused to allow him to fill it any try he made, because of a pride in Covington and a convenience in his morality, who was it that sidled up to Phipps and took him by the hand, and tried to persuade him otherwise? On all counts it was Joey, pale as waterweed, attentive as a barnacle, always behind in making headway with sacred texts.

  Sometimes Covington and John Phipps caught each other’s eye, and in the hustle to be about their duties spared a moment for each other. Then it was all the same to them as if nothing had ever changed in their affections.

  ‘It’s a wild night we’re having, Syms Covington.’

  ‘It could not be wilder, brother.’

  ‘Only a few more watches and we’ll see the Scilly Light again.’

  ‘Here’s hoping we shall not make feed for the fish.’

  ‘That’s a dismal thought to have so close to home.’

  ‘Anyway it’s my prayer.’

  ‘Oh, your prayer. Mine is to make worship together on dry land if we can, and not be about breaking each other’s noses.’

  ‘I had the same thought, John, but where did it take me?’

  ‘Come down from where you are.’

  ‘Look for me in Bedfordshire,’ said Covington, ‘or not at all.’

  ‘What, like a needle in a haystack?’ taunted Phipps. But they both had a mind-picture of a rural barn where they first gathered, and a chestnut tree in a shallow vale where they had bowed their heads thinking who they were, whence they came, what they had done, and to what their King had called them. It was all of England to them, that place. Would they meet there, ever, and mend their breach?

  Covington returned to the city of Bedford a sea-hardened young man with elbows sharp in crowds and giving out a feeling of experience bigger than he knew. Everything about his birthplace looked shrunken in his eye. The Quentins’ hide-house where he had worked was laughable, foul, the distraught faces of the clerks despicable. Likewise the pretensions of the owners, who had erected a plaque on the front wall of their works celebrating the construction of a sluice that led from the tanning vats to a piece of boggy vacant land which reeked like the cesspits of Beelzebub.

  His pretty stepmother—who in his mind’s affections he had sometimes bounced on his knee in anticipation of this moment, and kissed with surpassing warmth—had ballooned in size. Mrs Hewtson presented a chubby, breathless version of her former self when he banged the knocker of the house in Mill Lane. She filled the doorframe, almost fainting in surprise, and displayed a deference that somehow offended him.

  ‘It’s our boy, I wouldn’t a-known him,’ she dropped her chin.

  He felt a stranger as he sat on a stool with a teacup in one hand, a slice of bread and dripping in the other, making small talk in the room that had filled his heart with comfort just by thinking about it on cold and stormy nights. His speech was peppered with sailor’s slang, and if he said ‘brace up’, ‘square up’, or ‘by the wind’, Mrs H gave him a certain look, and sighed:

  ‘Oooh, just fancy.’

  His Pa’s greetings were a touch withdrawn and respectful towards him too, while his brothers’ halloos were less easy than before: ‘So who’s this sailorman,’ they mumbled, ‘that’s come to terrify his nephews with tales of fearsome sharks?’

  Somewhat a stranger, it seemed, who brought a carved coconut showing the ornate N of Napoleon Boneyparts; and pairs of sandals woven of rope, that nobody knew how to attach to their feet, and when they did they fell over; along with whalebone trinkets shaped as African heads—a man’s, a woman’s, a child’s—that when inverted turned into neatly carved private parts. Nothing like them had been seen in a Covington household before, nor in any Bedford Congregationalist’s house either, except those of backsliders and harlots. It had not occurred to Covington that the roughness of his brothers seen from the angle of returning home might be changed, and appear confined and pious to him in the new eyesight he had. He was as puzzled as they were by such turns of events.

  ‘I thought my gifts would make you chuckle and hoick,’ he told his big-handed brothers, who rolled the objects in their palms, revealed them to Mrs Hewtson—who squealed—then closed their hands around them again when their good wives came into the room. You would think their youngest brother was a pagan, the way they pursed their lips at him. But when the
y took Covington to the inn, and all drank together from frothing jugs, nothing mattered so much any more. After Covington played his Polly Pochette they hoisted him to their shoulders, rode him out into the chill night air and dunked him in a horse trough, and he was a boy again for all time.

  Mrs Hewtson reacted to his changes in her new fashion of uncertainty. While her affection was strong her playfulness was guarded. She kept telling people: ‘He may become an officer one day, he’s been associatin’ quite grand,’ which shamed Covington for his petty boasts and misleading hints of advancement. But after a few days her spirits improved and she became like her old self.

  ‘I know what they say about sailors, Syms dear. That the whole lot of you are hard to keep down.’

  ‘That we are,’ he winked. ‘But in what way, Mrs H?’

  ‘There are places where sailors go,’ she waved a pink, chapped hand vaguely in the air, ‘you know the kind of house I mean.’

  ‘Cunney-warrens.’

  ‘What?’ she blushed.

  ‘Hummums,’ he smiled, getting her going. ‘Stews.’

  She pretended vagueness, and sighed. ‘I surely don’t mean anywhere like that.’

  Covington widened his grin a little sarcastically. ‘You do so too. But we had that good man aboard, John Phipps, who kept us clear of sin.’

  ‘No man is ever as good as he claims.’

  ‘Yea, you are right about that.’

  He thought of Phipps’s jealousy and hesitated before continuing. Had he done wrong? Yes, in the eyes of the godly, but nay when he kept in his mind what was best in his mind. So he said: ‘I never strayed the way you think.’

  ‘What, you mean you have kept your heart for someone at home?’

  She pinched his cheeks like she used to, hinting it must be her, and he turned aside and found himself blushing like he never had before.

  ‘Nay.’

  ‘It is nay to everything, with you.’

  ‘Well, I loved a maid, but it was in no pleasure-house. She was black.’

  Mrs Hewtson’s eyes widened.

  They went to their chapel and sat with a small but distinct space between them. Covington was a little ashamed to twist his neck around and look at the stained-glass window again. He remembered a day when he and Joey had stood in the great cathedral at Rio, still only partly finished. It had Marys taller and slimmer than poplar trees and brocaded in gold leaf worth many cargoes of goods. They made this chapel window seem paltry and perhaps a mistake, the outcome of mean resentments against the grandeur of Westminster and Rome. Covington wished he were Anglican at least, to have something like full beauty at his call.

  He had come to a point of valuing the good workmanship of things, and recognised that the window was crudely made. The lumps of lead piping joining the glass were thick as sausages, and in the time Covington had been away had come apart and exposed holes to the outside air, where spits of rain blew in. The elders of the congregation who had ordered the window from London were mean penny-pinchers, he thought. The leaping young man’s thatched golden hair as he cleared the stile was composed all of scratches, and his golden buttons were just splodges of paint. These imperfections he had never noticed before.

  But at the call to prayer he clenched his eyes tight and strained the muscle-cords in his arms and shoulders, making himself strong in the House of the Lord.

  After service he heard from their preacher that Phipps had been through Bedford. He’d come past with a small disciple in tow but now they were gone away. ‘That will be my Joey with him,’ thought Covington with a smile. ‘They are headed for that chestnut tree. All will be well if we meet there.’ He was stung, though, that he was not sought out at his father’s house or butchery, and spat in the gutter a solid gob of envy, blaming Phipps, picturing him tugging Joey by the wrist, as he had seen him do, and dragging him over these very cobblestones away from Covington’s presence, for the simple reason that he had opposed his will sometimes.

  Nights were getting cold. Leaves had turned and were starting to fall. Gales shook the trees and spread the lanes with acorns. Covington had an instinct to meet John Phipps as an equal on solid land, and have them own to each other their true friendship. Covington believed something could be rescued from their old affection—and he knew that Phipps in his pride did too: both longing for the peace they had shared for a time. It ran deeper than hair-splitting evangelism. He wanted to say, ‘Let us all three start our walking again, and find another ship.’ Phipps it was who had propelled him into the leaky heart of the Adventure. Phipps it was who had given him his start at being a man.

  ‘Then why do you niggle about him all the time?’ asked Mrs Hewtson. ‘I hear nothing else every time you speak his name.’

  ‘I am not disloyal,’ he told Mrs Hewtson, ‘but I must be truthful to myself.’

  He told her of the vale he wanted to visit, where he thought he might find John Phipps and patch their quarrel. He thought of it often—a moon hanging in the bare trees, the distant barking of a dog. ‘We prayed under a chestnut tree, in the open air, like they did in olden times when our chapel was outlawed in the Restoration.’

  Covington decided to set off there, but did not go yet because Mrs Hewtson would not hear of it. ‘We are having you a while,’ she told him. She sat him around firesides as he told tales of going about in snowstorms, on seas of freckled ice. After the first shyness he was boasted elsewhere by his Pa, earning swigs of grog for telling his story in inns: how those wild Patagonians that they had sailed among were a people bewitched—scarcely like earthly beings and who slept in grass nests; how when they talked they frothed at the mouth, being excited beyond reason; and how when they wanted a destination they ran so fast their noses bled. ‘I have their words on catgut,’ Covington declared, ‘having written them down for our surgeon,’ and made the tick-tocks of Fuegian speech in pizzicato, wen meaning duckling, i-ish a feather, appubin a fish, tomatola a small fly to be killed with the smack of a hand.

  A sailor could keep an audience of countryfolk spellbound for hours. Covington had not met with any sea-monsters yet, but people were just as strange. He told how their ship’s surgeon had done measurements of natives, getting a few up onto the deck. Wide foreheads, smooth bellies, stout legs and broad flat feet they had. The men had little beard and no whiskers. ‘Are they hooman?’ a doubting listener wanted to know.

  ‘Well, me and a sailor saw a maid of theirs up a cliff,’ he answered. ‘We went to see if she was made like a person, and aye, she was. Except my pal and self had no agreement on the outcome of the matter, for he snorts while I stare, “I would not go to any Fuegian for my fresh greens, shipmate.”’

  A Romany man heard Covington’s Polly Pochette and proposed a fairground tent: the Musical Maltoot, he envisaged, Come Hear Him Play!—offering bed and board in his old wagon, where the young sailor might sleep on the same large bed as himself and his stinky old wife. Like cack he would! ‘I will not be stolen like any crazed Patagonian eating sea eggs on a plate of ice,’ he told his brothers, ‘dressing for dinner in orange paint with kelp in my ears.’

  As for himself, in the moan of his fiddle, Covington remembered how squalls came through the narrows, ruffling blue water and dipping tree branches in waves. The pitchy darkness and the whistling wind were in the catgut. As he curled for sleep a memory shot through him of glistening wet eyes, a wide forehead, smooth belly, and plump breasts like pouches of sand. He thought of her as he bunched himself down for sleep. Who on earth was she to bedevil him so? He followed her through water that was not cold, in his memory, but heavy and sweet as honey, in which she was held, and willing. At the last moment, as he spumed his load, she looked at him and did not turn away.

  Mrs Hewtson lifted a tattered blanket whereunder lay her newest sprogs, dubbed Spit and Polish. There was less room than ever for Covington’s knobbly knee-bones on the sleeping shelf, and he fell to the curdled boards with a knock, ready to be gone.

  In that deep October there was
rain, but then it cleared and the whole county was misty and still. Smoke hung over the town in a close, thick band. Above, the moon was a brilliant splinter. Covington went walking the countryside with bread, cheese and mulberry wine carried in his satchel. He hefted a blanket roll, too. He plucked ripe pears from overhanging branches. Away from towns the stars were brilliant, sharp, and he imagined running his fingertips across them, feeling them rough as grains in holystone.

  There was a sailor’s swing to his gait and it seemed he could hear the roar of the sea at the edge of his hearing, tempting him back. It was like a reef moaning under the drop of the horizon, and it played in the key of G. Falling asleep, he missed the pad of the night watch on the deck, the complete organisation of everything. He pulled his blanket around his shoulders and wrapped himself in it and burrowed into haystacks. Morning, he was glad to be alive.

  There was money to be had from digging ditches and clearing drains ready for the winter floods. A few shillings found its way into his pocket that way. He was a great worker, an easy companion. But there was always somewhere else he needed to go.

  One day Covington crossed six low hills, counting each one, and came around the corner of a ruined barn and found himself overlooking the shallow vale he longed for, and the remembered chestnut tree. It had been bare the last time but now was in its last full leaf and turning gold. The spikes hung like tassels on a curtain.

  He stood there in wonder. The tips of his fingers tingled, and he wanted to reach out. But what to touch? The tree was a throne in his eyes. The air was luminous around it, golden with autumn light. All creation sang in the presence of a maker who seemed, when Covington turned around quickly, to be invisibly standing at his back and smiling. The roots of the tree made places to sit, benches and settles and a soft couch. The leaves made an arbour above Covington’s head. A man starved of God had stood there, casting around with his fierce eyes and making a plea. Without Phipps to impose catechisms Covington made free with his own. By the going up of the tree his thoughts went up to heaven. By the light of the sun beaming down he thought of God’s understanding reaching him. By the roots of the tree, finding a spring, he considered his own deeper nourishment. He thought how the spirit was never seen, but felt, and so was known. Thus he ministered to his own needs roughly, clumsily, without instruction, as he was born to do.