Deluded Your Sailors (34 page)

Mounds of soil, piles of rocks and broken spades impeded passage through the settlement. I supervised the disturbing of the graves myself, pleased to recognize Wren's clothes – a dry burial, all this time. No gold shone in the cold rocks and mud. We found only the stouter remains of adults and infancy's soft bones.

22) CALENTURE
A
S TOLD
J
UNE
1734
TO
L
IEUTENANT
J
OHN
K
ELLY
, RN,
BY
C
APTAIN
C
HRISTOPHER
M
ATTHEW
F
INN
.

So, now you know the most of how came I to this fuckery of wreckage and rocks. Aye, no doubt I screamed and fought.

Possessed? You need to ask Con Pilgrim about demons, lieutenant, for I got no Godliness to me. I know only what I feel. Do you not see the marks on me? Your captain's inquiries have no courtesy.

No, sir, I shall not rescind my words. Ask him yourself. He ordered me tied to this chair for a reason. Not that he need fear I'd take a belaying pin to his head. I be spent there. Tilley, the fool – he'd not got the sense to let me be. None of you did. Sweet Jesus, Kelly, I gave you the truth of me, and I gave you the truth of the gold. I spent the gold buying
Kittiwayke
from Jericho Gosse. I stole it – no, I earned it, earned it off Michael Farr, because he meant to beat me to death.

And the best kiss was the deciding lot: whether the boy fucked you, or I the boy.

I've naught left to say. No. No.

Just let me be. Can you not just let me be?

23) BLURRED ROUGHWORK
J
UNE
15, 1734,
ON BOARD
D
AUNTLESS
,
AT ANCHOR IN
P
ORT AU
M
AL
, N
EWFOUNDLAND
.

—Ash on bone.

Con Pilgrim licked his lips after saying that. His tongue rasped over flattened bits of skin that felt like charts laid out. He bowed his head to the creaks and rattles of the navy frigate
Dauntless
, creaks and rattles very like those of
Kittiwayke
and yet utterly strange.

Kelly's freckled hands disappeared as he lifted his arm and coughed into his elbow. Pilgrim heard wheezing.
Odd thing, me
being the prisoner but sitting down, him the man in the right and
standing.

Trying to catch his breath, Kelly coughed again, and again.

Wet spasms.

—Mr Pilgrim, would you repeat that?

Staring at the table, Pilgrim divined patterns in the oak beneath the varnish. Bright airiness of the lieutenants' mess. Too much light, after the brig.

—I said, ash on bone, Mr Kelly. A noise I shall not forget.

—Belaying pin to a human skull, aye, dare say you'd not. The fireball?

—Afterwards. Likely a rock at the core of it.

Head pounding, Kelly shuddered beneath his coat.
Now, of all
days of this wretched voyage, now I take sick?
—Tell me more of the belaying pin.

—Loose. No lines made round it. Finn took the pin – —Murder, then.

—I said no such thing.

Hands still clasped behind his back, Lieutenant John Kelly walked a tight circle around the table. Con Pilgrim wished his own hands were smaller. Nails like coins. Knuckles like knots. Palms as hard as the table.

—Mr Pilgrim. I need your faithful accounting of events. Trying to protect Finn will only delay – —Where be your captain?

—Captain Cleasby shall look to the final justice. My unenviable task is to muck out the details.

—And the devil?

Kelly said nothing.

Pilgrim sniffed.
Certainty of disease. Not just the brig.
—Wide is the gate, and broad is the way. Finn is my captain. As Cleasby is yours. —I commend your loyalty. Ships would stink less if all captains deserved such loyalty. But to whom will you give your final reckoning, Pilgrim? Your captain, or God?

Pilgrim's face burnt red. —To God, sir. But I might ask the same question of you.

—You spoke of ash on bone. Finn took the belaying pin, a fierce club by any measure – —A belaying pin is merely a tool, sir. It holds lines.

—Answer me, Pilgrim, for the sake of your captain's neck.

Consider me your interlocutor as you give your account to God.

Speak we of murder?

Ash on bone. Face – Coltman's face –
—Mr Pilgrim!

—Can you not see it, Lieutenant? Guess it? Smell it? She is not responsible.

Kelly thought Pilgrim meant
Kittiwayke
. Then, in Kelly's memory, Runciman at Admiral Dunton's house:
Consider Finn my
prodigal, Mr Kelly, my
rara avis
. Consider yourself Finn's escort back
to me, alive and in good health, for I will have Finn's usefulness.

Trying to hide his anger, his disgust, his sense of gutting betrayal at being made an ignorant tool –
ha, a very agent
– Kelly spat.

Unbefitting conduct for an officer, that glob of saliva, but at least it gagged the curses.

—
She
?

—Aye. She.

Runciman with his wandering eye knew. Of course he knew.

An agent who could disguise herself and not only sail but command – for Christ's sake –
she!
A fine prize. Runciman would treat the murders on
Kindly One
as an inconvenient mess, quickly mop it up. No spymaster would permit sacrifice of such a one to the nuisances of the law. Finn would stand no trial but instead conveniently disappear and be made once again an agent. A tool.

For the good of England.

—‘She' be damned. Speak we of murder?

Pilgrim looked up from the table, his large face wet. —‘But if thine eye be evil, thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness.' Aye, Mr Kelly. Murder. But Finn – my – my friend, til I did see, and again after I chose not to see – Matt Finn – she be not responsible. Cannot be.

—Do you truly believe that, Pilgrim?

—I believe in order that I might understand.

—Man, woman, or demon, did Finn swing that belaying pin?

—Aye. At the head of a man long thought dead. The falling stars I tried once to explain to Finn: was it Wormwood?

—Enough Scripture!

Kelly suffered another coughing fit, spitting phlegm into a handkerchief this time.

—How came we to this?

Defeat tugged Pilgrim's shoulders down.—I do not know the full story. Some I've heard at night, some by day, and the rest I've guessed. Consider this: the
Kindly One
boatswain Finn killed, he did badly use her when a youngster. Repeatedly. The sight of him, so unexpected after a long respite, inspired some buried rage. I doubt Finn even thought of what she did. The speed of it, sir:

heartbeats.

—Murder is murder, but here at least I see some reason.

Explain the death of Captain Tilley.

—He got in the way.

Stiff silence.

Pilgrim tried to smile.—Newman Head calls it the unswerving punctuality of chance.

—I call it sickening. Pilgrim, do you understand the punishment for murder?

And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
—I do.

Short of breath, Kelly almost fell into the bolted chair opposite Pilgrim. He tightly crossed his arms.
How in Christ's name will I
keep this from Cleasby?

As Pilgrim quietly prayed, Kelly struggled not to cry and not to laugh. He nearly coughed his lungs out instead.

Then Pilgrim spoke. —Mr Kelly. I got a proposition.

24) CUNTSPLICED TO THE BUMMARY
J
UNE
16-17 1734,
ON BOARD
D
AUNTLESS
, A
T ANCHOR OFF
P
ORT AU
M
AL.

Rehearsing a conversation with Cleasby that demanded privacy and therefore might never happen, Dr Hugh Pollard designed his sentences to sound scientific and abstract. Perhaps cold reason would influence the captain.

I must caution you, sir, as I would caution any man, and indeed
as I might caution the angels in my prayers for the stability of the
universe: appetites need balance and order. Justification will not suffice.

No, sir, I do not object to interrogation and truth, nor to following orders,
and certainly not to acting for the good of the service. I merely point out
the dangers in thoughtless exercise and indulgence of the baser appetites
of man. How careful must be the man who exercises both authority and
law, careful to sidestep the seductive and corrosive pleasures of being right.

Pollard's hypothetical conversation with Cleasby caught on another hazard: Pollard deeply disliked his captain. Disliked him, distrusted him, feared him. As their tedious and apparently pointless mission found few triumphs – and as the ship's surgeon detected a stink of politics – Pollard increasingly felt little emotional shoves from Cleasby. One expected friction at sea, just as one expected good sense to mellow it. But Cleasby exploited the friction and played games with his officers. His blatant hatred for his first lieutenant stained almost every word and action; the men joked of the day Cleasby and Kelly would finally go shirtless and bare-knuckled, or the day Kelly would die with his arm twisted behind him as he tried to pluck a knife from his back.
Whatever it takes, hey, my man?

Foul, this man, a captain who slurped and gnawed his power.

Coward, his lieutenant, who hid and disputed with the prisoner Pilgrim.

Dislike being a luxury and Pollard being a subordinate, the untended good patch in the doctor's soul shrivelled while his anger festered. It would burst – only one prick needed – the prick of certainty – Pollard suddenly knew he'd never see his sister. Less than a day's sail away, a few hours...

Dreaming he flew at the captain with his fists, almost hearing the thud, Pollard knocked on the door of Cleasby's cabin and announced himself.

A Marine let him in. Cleasby stood with his back to the door, gazing out the windows. Blood and bile stained the floor. Finn, bleeding from the nose, rolled over and tried to get on hands and knees but gave up. Saying nothing, Finn looked at the surgeon.

Pollard reached for his patient.

Blocking the light, Cleasby crouched beside Pollard. —Sir, did you trip?

—With respect, captain, I object – —You object, sir? To what?

—To your treatment of the prisoner.

—Sergeant, help the surgeon to his feet. Can't have you down in the muck, sir. I shall note your objection, if you wish.

But, sir: this is no brother officer, nor even half the man you are, and I count you a limp and soggy man. This is a murdering thief.

And I will have that thief 's prize for the King. How does Mr Kelly?

Pollard tested the grips of the two marines who held him – no, who helped him. One on either arm. He could break free, but that meant lunging into the captain.