Lieutenant (21 page)

If you were part of that machine, you were part of its evil.

Directly ahead was the gap in the land beyond which was the ocean that had brought the
Berewalgal
two years before. He had stared from
Sirius
at the land approaching and seen nothing but opportunity. At Sydney Cove he had watched those natives running along the shore, keeping pace with the boat, shouting their unambiguous message. They had been nothing more than naked strangers. Sitting in the bow of the cutter he had had a musket ready loaded in his hands, primed to use it if ordered.

That Daniel Rooke seemed to have been replaced, syllable by syllable, by some other man. He knew those naked people now. He did not understand them, but he could no longer think of them as strangers.

A few miles to the north, beyond the woods through which a column of men had marched earlier that day, Tagaran would be lying by a fire, asleep. There would be no candle there to
keep her awake, no blanket to scratch her skin. Only the night, wrapping itself around her as it wrapped itself around him. Only the moon, looking down on her as it looked down on him.

There was no word for what he had learned with Tagaran. He could not attach a name to what he felt for her. But she had shown him the existence of the man he could be.

That man was not just a lieutenant in His Majesty’s service. That man knew how to sit as well as act, how to listen as well as speak, and how to feel as well as think. He had discovered truths, powerful in spite of having no names, about two people and what they might share.

That man had nothing to do with expeditions involving coils of rope and muskets, much less with sharpened hatchets and bags the right size for carrying human heads.

To remain with the expedition was to turn his back on the man he had become. But to refuse any further part in it would be to step into the void.

He could still feel the harsh sunlight of English Harbour, see the cropped heads and flapping jackets of those other lieutenants. Could still smell the shit of the one who had been hanged, still choke along with him on the rope around his throat.

Some things went too deep for forgetting.

Rooke watched the uncoiling of the water, in and out. As each wave curled over itself and fell on the sand, a gleam of
light streamed along its broken edge.

It was not thought, not logic, not calculation. It was just an impulse of the body, like breathing or blinking: a reflex that was beyond reason.

‘I cannot be part of this,’ he said aloud.

The words left behind a windy hollow feeling that he recognised as fear. He did not know what difficult path this new Daniel Rooke might take him down, or where it would end. He knew only that he was prepared to welcome the stranger and follow where he led.

Back at the fire the men were rolling themselves into their blankets, arranging their handkerchiefs over their faces against the mosquitoes, banking the fire with green wood that would smoke all night.

Rooke went over to his knapsack and unfastened his blanket. The buckles seemed huge, awkward. It was his fingers, he realised. He was calm, only he could not make his fingers work.

The buckles finally forced open, the blanket unrolled, Rooke lay in it, glad of the handkerchief to hide his face. He was conscious of Silk on the other side of the fire unrolling his blanket, flapping it out with a snap, tweaking its corners straight, then lying down, folding it around him and lying still. Rooke could feel Silk listening for him to speak.
I do not know what came
over me
, that was what he was expecting.
Thank you for your sound
advice
.

Rooke waited until he heard steady breathing from Silk and an authoritative snoring from where Willstead lay before he set off. The moon made the sandy track plain. He would reach the settlement before dawn.

He stopped, looked back the way he had come. By moonlight both directions looked the same. Around him the bushes and trees gave off cool moist smells. Crickets pulsed, a silent black shape swooped across the sky. Something hummed close to his foot. A nocturnal insect, silent during the day? Or just such a quiet sound that it was only audible when all the other noises fell away?

He turned, hitched the knapsack further up his shoulder and walked on.

At dawn, as he rounded the last corner of the track before the settlement, there was the governor marching along smartly as if on his way to the brick kilns. Major Wyatt was beside him. The governor was looking at the ground and keeping up a steady stream of words while Wyatt kept his gaze respectfully on his superior’s face. Then they both caught sight of Rooke and he saw on their faces the recollection, the computation.

‘Lieutenant Rooke!’ the governor exclaimed. ‘Were you not with Captain Silk’s party?’

The man was striding to meet him, almost running.

‘Why are you here, where is the rest of the party?’

‘Sir,’ Rooke said and stopped. At some point in the night he had rehearsed what he would say to the governor. Now he was not ready, like a man with the noose about his neck being asked to say his last words and not able to think of what he had prepared.

‘Sir, I.’

I eat, you eat, we eat. We have eaten, we will eat
.

‘The natives, man,’ the governor was saying impatiently. ‘Did you get the natives? How many? Living or destroyed?’

‘No natives have been got, sir,’ Rooke said. This part was easy. ‘Not living. Not destroyed.’

‘Well, man?’ Wyatt was peering into Rooke’s face as if to prise the words out of his mouth. ‘Well?’

‘The natives eluded us, sir,’ Rooke said.

‘Tch!’ The governor’s face creased in annoyance. ‘Speak up, man, how did that come about?’ he demanded. ‘Speak up, Lieutenant Rooke, come, man!’

‘It was a failure,’ Rooke began.

Remembered the firelight, Warungin laughing. The hatchet, shiny along its blade where someone had so recently been employed to put the keenest edge he could on the iron. Silk, smiling, his eyes sliding sideways.

‘Sir, it was badly done,’ he said.

The words had come back to him. It was a relief like a sneeze to expel them at the governor.

‘It was a wicked plan, sir, I am sorry to have been persuaded to comply with the order. I would not for any reason ever again obey a similar order.’

The governor’s face was slack with astonishment. Rooke watched him, saw all his prospects wither like a leaf in the fire. It was a weightless sensation. He saw it on the governor’s face, irreversible, and felt nothing but relief.

Something was finished for him.

‘You are speaking out of turn, Lieutenant,’ Wyatt said. ‘Mind your words, sir!’

Wyatt was no friend of his but Rooke saw that he was straining, like a man holding a dam, to prevent catastrophe. He was freshly shaved, as was the governor. Rooke caught a whiff of the astringent that Barber used on them.

They were three men on a sandy track, the coarse patter of gum leaves around them agitating in the breeze, a bird nearby making a noise like a creaking door.

‘Sir, your orders were a most gravely wrong thing, I regret beyond words my part in the business.’

‘But was anyone killed, Lieutenant?’ the governor insisted as if he had not heard. ‘How many were got?’

His prim-lipped manner set Rooke alight.

‘I beg your pardon, sir, but that is beside the point. The
intention of evil was there which is all that God sees when he looks into our hearts.’

He saw the governor flinch at the word
God
and was surprised at himself for using it. It sounded like a cheap trick to silence the governor, when what he truly felt was that God was just a way for a man to interrogate his own heart.

‘By Jove, sir,’ the governor said, ‘you are mighty sure of yourself for a junior officer, and mighty free with the Almighty’s name!’

There was an awkwardness about this—
mighty
and
Almighty
—that made all three men pause and listen to the words ringing together.

‘I will ask, Lieutenant Rooke, that you attend me at midday at Government House.’

And then he was gone. Wyatt took long strides to catch him up, glancing back at where Rooke was already turning towards his future.

He would go to his hut on the point. He would light his fire, boil water, make tea. Sit outside with his back against the wall, where the morning sun warmed the planks.

Depending on when the ships arrived from England, he might have a few weeks or a few months to sit there. He would go on measuring the rainfall, taking the temperature of the air. He might even find one or two more stars and add a few more words to the notebooks.

But sooner or later, His Majesty’s grand machine would
take him into itself. He would be sent away. He would stand and listen as a court pronounced his sentence. Then he would be taken from that place and be obliged to submit to one kind of death or another: the death of the body or the death of the future.

By the time he entered the settlement, the stars could no longer be seen, the sky arching over him now a limpid early-morning blue. But they were still there, hanging in their appointed places. The earth would turn forever and sunset would follow sunrise into eternity, and the glory of the stars would blaze out whether or not anyone saw them.

A
lmost fifty years later the earth still turned and the stars still burned, and Daniel Rooke still looked up and watched them.

He had learned that the naked eye could see things a telescope could not. The exquisite instruments of astronomy could add new stars to the sum of the world’s knowledge, but it took a soul to wonder at the beauty of those already discovered.

They had not hanged him, for which he had gone on his knees and given thanks to God. But when they told him he might continue in the service, on condition that he apologise to James Gilbert and accept a loss of rank to ensign, he refused. By then he knew why he had been spared, and it was not to serve His Majesty. He went straight from the court to offer himself to another cause.

That cause had taken him back to a place he had never thought to revisit: Antigua. He marvelled at the symmetry of it. In Antigua he had once watched a young lieutenant of marines hanged for disobeying. He too had disobeyed but had been spared, and it seemed only right that Antigua should take his life and make use of it.

Now that life was fading, a star at dawn. He lay awake in the dark. Sunrise was some time off, but the window was a grey square. The tropical dawn would come too quickly, that brilliant Caribbean light that an invalid longed to shut out. Waiting for darkness was what he did now, as he had done when he was an astronomer. He thought the final darkness might not be far off.

He lay still, hardly breathing. There was a short space of time in which he was blessedly conscious only of existing. He savoured it. Then the pain returned, the pounding fullness in the head, the pangs behind the eyeballs, the aching in his shoulders, his back, his legs. It was a matter of willing time to pass, so that he might either die or recover.

Beyond the window the parrots chattered in the guava tree. Another day had to be lived through in this hot and weary bed.

The curtain, broken along its rings, still dangled lopsided as it had for every day of his illness, a shred of lining hanging down. He knew the curtain, the broken rings, that tongue of fabric, to the point of weariness. Day after day lying on the bed, he had stitched up the rip, reattached the rings, made it neat and
orderly. But only in his mind’s eye. It was weeks since he had had the strength to do anything more strenuous than sit up in bed, move to the commode, creep back again between the sheets.

Now he could make out his other familiars, the constellations of mildew on the ceiling and the cracks in the floor tile that made the shape of France. In his busy mind he had a pail of hot soapy water, a scrubbing brush. The cracks were full of dirt, the tiles themselves clouded across their terracotta surfaces. It was interesting to observe—or had been, the first hundred times—how the pattern of dirt revealed, in a way otherwise invisible, the slight unevennesses in the laying of the tiles. Where one corner was lower than its neighbour by a fraction, the dirt had settled, undisturbed. Where an edge rode high the passage of feet had worn it clean. If for any reason you needed to create an absolutely flat surface—for some experiment involving metal balls and their movement, for example—this would be a way to make sure of it. If he should ever find himself needing such a perfect surface, he would remember how you could use dirt.

He took it as a good sign, that he could still have such orderly and deductive thoughts.

The servant-woman, Henrietta, was good. But she had enough on her hands looking after him. Even before he fell ill, she stayed only out of a sense of honour. He had not been able to pay her for perhaps a year.

‘You have been good for us,’ she always said when he apologised. ‘For me, and for us.’

She meant, of course, the slaves. He had given his life for them.

Well, that was a little melodramatic. He was not yet thirty when he had begun to give his life for them. He was seventy-four now, lying on this hot bed. Call it two-thirds, roughly, something like two-thirds of a life.

Actually, it was twenty-two thirty-sevenths of a life. He wondered how sick he would have to be for numbers to leave him, that craving for the exact.

Two-thirds of a life, then, let us say, that had begun with such promise. Then he had made his choice, and it had brought him here: to this house on the hill above English Harbour.

All those who had exclaimed at his prospects had fallen away long ago and all those he had loved—wife, son and daughter—were dead or elsewhere now. If a man lived as long as he had, he supposed things could not be otherwise. Now it was just himself and Henrietta.

He could hear her clanking downstairs in the kitchen, and the mewing of the cat wanting its breakfast.

Henrietta would bring him a slice of mango from the tree outside, a plate of cold boiled yam from last night. He wanted neither, but she would bring them and scold him, in her quiet way, hold up the mango until he took a bite, wipe his chin for him when the juice ran down.

A bowl of oatmeal would be good. He had loved oatmeal as a child. Portsmouth, forever shiny in the rain, and his mother’s oatmeal, warm and sweet, fat with cream. In Antigua oatmeal was unknown. He supposed it could be bought from the ships that carried other luxuries from England, but only if you had money.

He had bought Henrietta at auction, when he still had money. By then he was used to it, standing with the other men and counting upwards aloud, turn and turn about with them, until they stopped. How many had he bought? He had started a list in the beginning, but left off after a time. For once, the number did not matter. He could only say,
I bought as many as
I could
.

Bought and freed, of course, and how they hated him for that, the men around him in the auction yard. They had agreed among themselves, and bid the price up and up to ruin him faster.

Now there was nothing, just the water in the well, the mangoes on the trees, the yams in the garden.

‘Go,’ he had said, trying to be stern, when the last of the money was gone. ‘I cannot pay you, you must find another place.’ She had not tried to argue, only shaken her head and pressed her lips together like a child refusing medicine.

He supposed he should be sorry for it now, that choice he had made forty-six years ago. He tried out the idea in his mind.
Regret. Remorse
. He tested the words against what he felt. His
head ached, his body pained him in every joint, the light hurt his eyes. He wished his wife were still alive. He would like to see his sister Anne one more time, and taste oatmeal once more, and feel the soft Portsmouth rain on his face.

All these things he felt. But he did not seem to be feeling regret. The words of regret could be summoned, but not the pang.

Regret, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, flickered, flamed, expired.

He heard Henrietta greeting someone downstairs, the rumble of a man’s voice, and could imagine it: Henrietta, a freshly washed once-red bandana bound around her black hair, and Redoubt the postman.

Through the open window he heard sounds of sweeping, and then the regular thump as a rug was beaten. Someone sang a snatch of melody, called out, there was a prolonged splash as water cascaded from something into something else. A rooster crowed triumphantly. Soon Henrietta would come up, would push back the ragged curtain and turn to look at him.

Indeed, here was her footfall on the stairs. The matting had gone long ago, so he could hear every step of her bare feet, quiet though they were. Here she was, and in her hand the old white dish with, yes, the slice of mango and there it was too, the wedge of greyish yam.

He would eat a mouthful, just to bring a smile to her face. There was a mock-hurt she did that he could not bear to see.
He knew it was only pretence, as you might pretend for a child, but still he would yield to it. He would eat the yam first, that delicate earthen taste, then the mango, sweet, fragrant, its texture almost meaty.

‘Slow, Mr Rooke,’ Henrietta whispered. ‘Slow now and easy.’

When he had eaten a mouthful of each, he lay back. The mango was sweet to the tongue but it left an aftertaste with a bitter element. He wanted to wash it away with a sip of water but could not find the energy to sit up and drink.

The room was growing hot. He could feel the sweat, a cool drop sliding down his cheek. There was the tiresomely familiar curtain, the cracked tile, the mildew. He thought he could not bear to live through another day of the light crawling around the room, waiting for nightfall.

He heard himself sigh out all his air in a sound that was half groan, half wail. Henrietta leaned forward and she sat for a long time holding his fingers in hers, caressing them. He could feel the skin of her fingers, slippery, smooth, warm against his own.

Putuwa
. That was the word Tagaran had taught him.
Putuwa
, and he had written the meaning into his little book:
to warm one’s
hand by the fire and then to squeeze gently the fingers of another person
.

There, on the far side of the world, it would be dusk. Tagaran, if still alive, would be a grown woman with grown children. She might have grandchildren, skinny and laughing
like the child she had been when she had made a friend of Daniel Rooke.

She would remember him. Of that he was certain. She would tell her children about him, the
Berewalgal
who had been her friend when she was a girl. Who had had such difficulty with her name, she had to say it ten times! Who wrote it all down in two blue notebooks, so that the words would be fixed there forever.

Did she wonder what had become of the notebooks, the record of their conversations, written down for anyone who ever opened them and read? She would know, he thought, that he would keep them always.

The books had travelled with him to London on
Gorgon
, and then to Africa, all those years, and they were with him still, in the top drawer of the dresser in the corner. But he had never got them out, never read them. It was enough for him to know they were there. When he and Tagaran were both dead, when their children’s children were dead, the notebooks would tell the story of a friendship like no other.

He had hoped to go back. He had always hoped that. Here on these islands, with black faces all around, he had seemed closer to her. Had felt himself to be travelling towards her, only a slip of land and a single ocean between him and New South Wales. He knew now, with the clarity of fever, that he would never go back there. New South Wales was as unreachable as any other past.

He did not need to look at the notebooks to remember every detail of New South Wales. He knew how it was there in the twilight. The land lost its light before the sky. The water gathered up the last of the radiance and held it, gleaming and shifting.

If he were to go back to that night on the sand of Botany Bay, would he make the same choice again, knowing that this was where it would lead him: to the raucous birds in the guava tree outside, the voices drifting up to the window, this hot room with the circling flies, the man on the bed looking at the pattern of mildew on the ceiling like dark stars?

On his last morning in New South Wales he had woken before dawn. Through the open door he could see a few stars, although the sky was beginning to lighten around them.

Down in Sydney Cove,
Gorgon
waited to take him to England. It was bad luck that the long-awaited ships had finally arrived so soon after his interview with the governor.
You know I do not have
the power to convene a court-martial
, His Excellency had said. His voice had trembled with anger.
But you will be sent back at the earliest
opportunity, Lieutenant, to face the consequences of your actions
.

He had once thought to spend the rest of his life in New South Wales, but
the earliest opportunity
had turned out to be no more than a month.

There was a good breeze, he could hear the harbour slapping itself up against the rocks at the foot of the point. As soon as it was dawn they would ready
Gorgon
to sail. There would be no timekeeper to be wound on this voyage, and no new land at the end of it, only the unknown years of the rest of his life.