Collector of Lost Things (35 page)

‘What happened to them?’

‘Sometimes they lived, but not always. I think I learnt that often a bird never gets over its fright. When they are injured, they are also very frightened, and it is the fright that kills them. They are nervous.’

I remembered again how I had first met her father, on that spring morning among the dunes of Blakeney Point in Norfolk. How the man had been cruel and aggressive from the start, and how, in pushing the tern back into his collector’s sack, he had deliberately snapped one of the bones in its wing. He had called it a
sea swallow
.

‘And did your father bring these birds to you?’ I said, spurred on with the memory of the outrage. ‘Did he catch them and break their wings for you?’

Clara recoiled, shocked. ‘Eliot, that is … is an ugly thing to say. Why would you say such a thing?’

My memory of that period of the voyage is unreliable. When I shut my eyes I see glimpses of Clara, continuing to nurse me, and with her help I began to regain my strength. I remember asking her to tie her hair back in a braid across the top of her head. She obliged, saying it gave her a youthful appearance. Quite so, I replied, but secretly I had viewed her with renewed elation and amazement, for it was the same hairstyle that Celeste had had. ‘Another thing, dear Clara,’ I had ventured, ‘a couple of weeks ago you wore a pearlescent silk dress. It was very lovely. Would you mind wearing it again?’ A simple request, one that in ordinary conversation would have been an innocent remark to make. But not for me. Pearl silk was the colour of the gown that Celeste had worn, as she had been led along the brick path by her mother.

Re-dressing Clara, re-creating Celeste, it had been a natural urge. And I was delighted as, each time Clara obliged, it felt as though she was allowing it one step at a time. Allowing herself to become Celeste once more.

As the ship was put back in order, I sensed a restoration of my own spirits too. Whatever malaise had struck me, I believed I was able to overcome it. The body can lead the mind out of its troubles. I would walk the deck at a brisk pace, try to eat as much food as Simao would supply, and at all costs I would avoid any preparation of drinks that Bletchley or French offered.

Preoccupied as I was, I failed to notice how the storm had affected Edward. Ever since it had ended, he had spent much of each day on deck, wearing a sealskin hat he must have procured from one of the Esquimaux settlements. He wore it pulled low across his forehead, as he would a bandage, and paced from side to side, examining the countenance of the sea and looking towards the distant coast of Greenland with one of the captain’s telescopes. He was distracted and I generally avoided him, but there were occasions when his and my routes crossed, and it was at one of these times I decided to press him for answers.

‘What is it you are studying, Edward?’ I asked. ‘You seem fascinated by the sea, yet all morning it has not changed one bit.’

He looked at me curiously from beneath the brow of his sealskin hat, as if the complexity of replying was beyond him.

‘The sea?’ I repeated.

‘Yes, yes,’ he answered, impatiently.

‘Would you care for some tobacco?’ I offered, hoping it might settle his nerves. He reached for his pipe and held out a hand, much as a child might do.

‘That sailor standing by the blocks,’ he muttered, ‘he has no stem to his pipe. Have you noticed?’

‘I have, Edward. In fact, I have asked him about it. He told me that he scorches his cheeks when he smokes.’

‘They are strange men,’ Bletchley snorted. ‘Happiest near flames. They are devils.’

I chose not to comment, hoping he wouldn’t become agitated.

‘I have been meaning to ask you about Clara,’ I said, between the puffs of lighting my pipe. ‘It has perplexed me since the start of our voyage. I have been wondering whether I recognise her.’ I nursed the flame in my pipe, trying to calm the rapidity of my heartbeat. ‘I was raised in Suffolk, you see.’

‘What of it?’ he asked.

‘Well, I believe Clara is from Norfolk. I am familiar with several of the Norfolk families. Was her home near Somerleyton?’

‘I was never allowed to go to her home,’ Bletchley replied, remembering an old slight. He looked out to sea once more, as if I could not entirely hold his attention. ‘Her father banned my visits.’

‘Yes, her father,’ I mused, seizing an opportunity. ‘Am I correct in thinking he is a magistrate? He has a fine collection of birds’ eggs.’

‘The father is an ogre, that is the sum of what I know of the man. I am only in contact with Clara now because it’s behind that man’s back.’

I couldn’t decide whether Bletchley was being open or dishonest in his responses. He appeared to be both, and I was in danger of making a fool of myself. I decided to take a bolder approach, thinking it might cause the breakthrough I required.

‘It is strange, but I believe Clara has not always been her name.’

A flicker of vexation flashed across his face, but it was fleeting and may not have meant anything. He had the tendency to try out expressions, even when he was alone. Even while he slept by the stove, with his blanket wrapped around him, his face flinched with tremors and twitches.

‘An intriguing theory,’ he replied.

To stop at this point would have been maddening for me, but I could tell Bletchley had little interest in continuing. ‘Was she once known as Celeste?’ I asked.

‘
Celeste
, you say? A pretty name—she would be deserving of it. We have discussed her charms and attractions at an earlier occasion, have we not? But Mr Saxby, I do not quite understand you. You are suggesting she is two people?’

‘One person, but with two names.’

‘How queer. You have a curious mind. But in truth there isn’t any one among us who is one person. We are all many personalities. Now if you will excuse me, I have much thinking to do.’

I reached out and held his elbow, frustrated by his evasions. He looked surprised, staring at my hand as if it was something he could not comprehend. ‘You are holding me,’ he said.

‘Edward …’ I wondered how to continue. ‘What is the nature of your friendship with Clara?’

He turned in my grasp, a little hostile. I thought of him wrestling with French, how he had forced a stronger man up by sheer tenacity. ‘She is my cousin,’ he said, properly. ‘More than that I do not know it is any of your business.’

‘She cares greatly for you.’

‘Yes, she does. We have this—’ he tapped his head. ‘A connection.’

‘My point is that she cares for you, and I do not wish your actions to hurt her.’

‘My
actions
?’

Our exchange was rapidly slipping away from my control. Already, several of the men had noticed I was restraining Bletchley by the arm. I adopted a kindly tone towards him: ‘This voyage appears to have changed you considerably.’ I let go of his arm and he deflated somewhat, as if I had been bolstering him.

‘Yes, that is true,’ he conceded. I glimpsed a relief in him, that he was able to acknowledge it publicly. ‘The journey has not been as I expected. I have told you, Eliot, about the expression the seal had, when I shot it? I can see that it troubles you for me to mention it again. But I am still haunted by it. And this ship is haunted by it, also.’

‘The
ship
? In what way?’ I asked.

He chuckled, as if it was clear to anyone who bothered to notice.

‘You will have to explain,’ I pressed.

‘The Esquimaux are interesting people,’ he began. ‘It is their belief that all things have a soul. Not merely man, but also the animals and the world at large. In this manner, all things are connected by a continuation of life that we have little understanding of. If you wish to know what troubles me and forces me to wait by the stove night after night, it is because this journey has made a great imbalance. We have filled the hull of this ship with dead things. It is the weight of their souls that has caused us all to suffer.’

I listened with alarm at the elaboration of his thinking. Nights of vigil at that stove had enabled him to construct something quite wild.

‘Some creatures have several souls,’ he reflected, to himself.

‘You were fully aware of the nature of this trip before you started,’ I tried. ‘Why, you even had guns made for you, with engraved stocks for the purpose of your hunting …’

He scoffed. ‘Those guns!’ he said, disgusted. He looked on the verge of tears, haunted by the man he had once been, a man he now wished to deny. He stared at me with an appeal in his expression I had never seen before. His mood was very volatile. ‘Illness is a small death of the soul, and I have been ill, Eliot, as have you. I recognise things in your eyes, my friend. Deep secrets. I
see it
.’

‘What do you see?’ I asked, cornered.

‘Damage.’

I wanted to escape him. I felt my blood pounding in my ears.

‘My remedy has been extreme,’ he continued. ‘May I tell you?’

‘You must.’

‘I have been tying myself to my bunk,’ he said, ‘so that my soul might be freed from my body. It is a practice of lustration performed by the shamans of these communities we have visited. I can see you are horrified.’

‘I am attempting to understand you, that is all.’

‘My conclusion is that the ship and all of us upon it have committed a wrong. It is full of the dead and we have not been forgiven. This ship is carrying a migration of souls, but it is upon a route not of their wishing.’ He looked at me as a teacher might, who has outlined a theory but is disappointed that the student cannot grasp it.

‘It is why we were in that storm,’ he explained.

‘Edward, I have to stop you. It was a
storm
, a natural occurrence, that is all—it was nothing else.’

He continued to look at me with disappointment. ‘It is why we were in that storm,’ he repeated, as if to say it once more would validate his theory, ‘and it is why the voyage shall end in disaster.’

This time, it was Bletchley who reached out to hold my elbow. ‘But do not worry. I will correct the imbalance,’ he said confidently. With an enigmatic wink he added:

‘I shall see to it myself.’

Occasionally, the distant coast of Greenland would appear, little more than a charcoal smudge above the horizon, as if a wipe of a cloth could remove it from the world. We had left a curious litter on that land: a scattering of manufactured goods, Sheffield steel, needles, rifles, shells and primers, flints, hooks and line, forged tools and blades, cutlery and cloths. We had left the bones of the auks on the shore at Jakobshavn, for the gulls and ravens—Sykes had overlooked the fact that even their skeletons would have value to museums—and we had left the headless stump of the walrus on the shingle where it had been slain. Perhaps we had left illness, too. It is said that the Europeans are murdering the Esquimaux, simply by bringing influenza and smallpox. So that was the sum of our trade: a hull emptied of English steel, and replaced with the skins and feathers and bones of a wilderness. Bletchley was correct. It was a hold full of death.

It was the same story with all the ships that travelled north. They arrived empty, hungry to be fed, at an Arctic where they would feast and feast until they could take no more. The whales would be lashed to the ships and their blubber sliced, peeled in strips as wide as a mattress by flensing hooks and cables, before being boiled and rendered and poured into barrels. Jawbones would be opened and baleen extracted with axes, for corset stays and parasol ribs, and ambergris would be searched for in the rank miles of intestines, men reaching up to their shoulders into unimaginable filth, groping for secretions more valuable by weight than gold itself. Birds would be shot from the sky or plucked from cliff ledges, their eggs gathered or smashed and their pelts reduced to pillow down and writing quills. Seals would be clubbed with oars and hakapiks and hammers and spikes, their colonies would erupt with slicks of blood on the ice. Some of their hides would be unsheathed while the animal still thrashed with life and their pups looked on bewildered. This Arctic, so grey and white and endless, contained a welling of blood that was as bright as fire, and this frozen sea that was as vast and lonely and as wild as any place on earth, it had been set fire to. It was a burning sea.

The men who came here plundered indiscriminately: wherever they saw life there was profit or trade. Some animals were a greater challenge than others, but for every animal there existed a method, and all could eventually be killed. Knife, hammer, wooden stick or gun. It was a larder with apparently infinite resources, yet it was clear the Arctic was not infinitely replenished. The seals are harder to find now, the whales are scarcer. The nesting ledges are falling quiet.

We had stumbled across a rarity akin to a pot of gold at the tip of a rainbow: the last family of great auks. It had been a test, where the conscience and nature of man would be questioned. He had met it with a simple, practised answer: to slaughter, and slaughter, and slaughter again.

From this fire we had extracted a single flame of hope. A bird that, with the true tenacity of nature, had become a bird and its egg. A single thread of life on which might hang the future of an entire species.

The bird was now eating voraciously, either from Clara’s hand or my own, taking the fish with a dry parted beak, much as a parrot carefully takes a nut, before throwing back its head to swallow it whole, with quite a flourish. The auk’s eyes were glistening with a new-found lustre, and it growled and wheezed so comically and loudly that we had to tie the binding around its beak to keep it calling for us when we were elsewhere.

‘She is quite a character,’ I said to Clara. ‘She fusses with that egg as if it’s a hot potato.’

‘And she mumbles considerably. Sometimes at night I think I hear her, grumbling and complaining. I lie there wishing she would be quiet—even though I know it’s not possible to hear her from the cabins.’

The
Amethyst
was making good progress, flying before a zephyr wind, which meant time was running out.

‘Clara,’ I whispered, alone with her after breakfast one morning, ‘it is only a few hundred miles of ocean between here and England. We might not even
see
land, let alone discover a sheltered cove or appropriate cliff or reef where we might release the bird.’