Longbourn (38 page)

He walked into the shallows. The water crept up quietly and brushed his feet and ankles. He shaded his eyes with a hand, and peered out across the sea. He waded out further; the waves crashed in, soaking the rolled legs of his trousers. He blinked in the low sun, his eyes scalded. He thought, I don’t even know what I am looking for. I don’t even know what sea this is; if this is the sea that I sailed across to get here, or another one. I don’t even know what I would find back in England, if I did ever return.

When he came back to the cottage, the place had changed. There was an end-of-summer cool, a stretch in the shadows; a chill seemed to gather about the house, rising in puddles, and then pools, and then slinking together, and suddenly everywhere. Perhaps it was just the turn of the season; perhaps it was the holiness of the day, but something made the air seem dim, and liquid, and far too full.

They collected inside the downstairs room. The girl slipped in, and a cat that had taken to hanging around the place, crept in with her. The child sat down cross-legged on the floor and proceeded to arrange her marbles, sorting them by size and material. The cat stretched itself out and watched the girl’s movements, and the marbles as they wobbled
into stillness. The creature was in whelp. It had made prey, no doubt, of gulls and rats once all the better pickings were gone. Its skin and bones, its shoulders and hips seemed just a sling for its barrel belly.

The women were so conspicuously not watching him that it was impossible not to feel he was being very closely observed. Had they seen him walk out onto the headland, and wade into the water? Was that somehow not allowed? He’d known that it would not be approved of; after all, he’d waited until he was sure he was alone.

When the day’s meal was served, the cat got to her feet and padded between them, and mewed. He gave her one of the gristly bits, which might have been winkles, or something similar from the sea, or might have been snails. She settled happily with it, chewing at it with needle teeth.

The girl watched this a while, then glanced up at him. He set his cup aside, and reached out two closed hands to her, knuckles upward. She tapped the left hand. He opened it, and on his rough palm rested a new marble, carved out of bone-pale driftwood, as smooth as he could make it, and with a ripple around its middle, meant to look like the rim of foam on a wave, or like the twist of colour there’d sometimes been in glass marbles, back at home, back when he was a boy. Where now, at Michaelmas, there’d be hips and haws red as blood, and blackberries hanging like lanterns, and the birds making a feast of them, as he had too, when he was young; he had chewed the flesh off haws with the fluffy sweetness of year-old apples, he had scraped the seeds out of hips to eat the peel, he had stained his fingernails purple with blackberry juice.

The cat curled and bumped around his legs, then gathered herself and leapt into his lap, and lay there. He felt the uneasy shift of the young inside her belly, their squirming immanence, and sat perfectly still.

The women said nothing.

What did they suspect? And what did they want? Had they sensed that he was dreaming now of home?

He was woken by her body. The bones of her hip and shoulder, the cool silk of her skin. Thin as a whippet, and sweetly warm. He had not known that he wanted, had not really known what it was to want, until
she coiled herself, bone and sinew and softnesses, around him, and for a while he lost himself entirely in the comfort of her body. Maria. The first woman he had ever known.

He did not know why it had not occurred to him before, that he was necessary to them. That he could make the difference between a good haul and the slip towards starvation. He had worked because work was what you did. He had worked because they had been kind to him. He had worked because if he helped someone then he was perhaps a better man for it.

The old woman eyed him as he came down from his bed. Maria had gone in the night, like a mosquito. The child arranged her marbles on the floor, but did not look at him at all, as if she knew perfectly well what had taken place, and considered it a betrayal.

He went down to the beach, and worked on the boat, and in the middle of the day, María brought him a cup of broth and sat beside him as he drank it. She was stiff, her face turned aside, as if seeing him just in the corner of her eye she could believe him to be someone he was not. He dug into the sand beside him, shoving his fingers down in the grit, rubbing his knuckles against it.

“
Espero
,” he said, “I hope …”

But the words would not come in either language. He hoped. What did he hope? That she lived to be old, that she had an easy death, and did not suffer too badly along the way. He hoped that someone might wash up here one day who could make her happy. He hoped that her daughter’s life would be better than her own. That they would forgive him.

And when she was gone, back to the cottage and her scrubby patch of vegetables and sand, he tugged his hat down low over his eyes, and turned up the collar of his smock to keep the sun off the back of his neck, and walked along the beach and crossed the far headland, dry drifting sand in his rope-soled shoes, and the sun overhead and then descending in front of him, and he walked in the dead man’s clothes, leaving behind him the dead man’s mother, widow, daughter, the dead man’s life.

He gathered sea-shells. Pale pink fans, bluish mule-ears, twirls of chalky white. He dropped them into his backpack, one by one.

1810

In Lisbon, the captain of the
Snapdragon
took him for a Spaniard: James was burnt brown with the Spanish sun, and found English words now hard as pebbles in his mouth. The captain signed him, and was glad to get him—crew being crew, and hard to come by, what with the Navy pressing every man that they could get their hands on, and the Army organizing the wholesale slaughter of the rest. This fellow seemed sane and sharp and biddable, and, though silent, could follow English when it was spoken to him, and he seemed ready enough to work.

James kept his counsel, and himself to himself. He kept his shirt on, too, though no doubt there would be those amongst his crewmates who had scars like his. It was better to avoid the question, to be unremarkable, to leave as light an impression as he could upon the world.

They sailed from Lisbon to Rio, with the mail and a cargo of linen cloth. He was too busy to feel sick, too exhausted not to snatch whatever sleep he could in his swaying hammock. They returned from Brazil to Portugal with coffee; the whole ship was heady and fragrant with it.

Back in the familiar port, James kept quiet, and pocketed his pay, and closed his eyes tight to the sights of the land beyond, the memories it conjured. They loaded the
Snapdragon
’s hold with casks of port wine, and barrels packed with blue-painted china. They sailed next for Antigua.

At English Harbour, the air was thick and warm and smelt of vegetation and rot. Slaves never crossed the gunwales nowadays, not since the new law, but they were still traded, they were still worked: slaves farmed the sugar and cut it and refined it; slaves carted it to market. Slaves
made the carts that it was carted on, they iron-rimmed the wheels, they shod the horses, mortared the bricks, and shingled and thatched and cooked and stoked the fires and treated the sick and sweated.

James, rolling barrels by their bases, wiped the sweat from his own forehead and watched, as off the ships, and down the quays, the new captives trickled past from the foreign ships, their chains clinking; they were filthy, sick, half-starved, but he could see—in the way they held their heads, the looks they gave the place—what they were thinking: This cannot be real, I do not accept this.

The slaves that came down from the plantations looked different, withdrawn; you could not see what they were thinking at all.

An English voice, harsh above the susurration of the footfalls, made James start and look round. Amongst those dark skins, a white man’s face—though not white, but pink and puffy with heat and drink—was unnatural and gross. An English agent or a steward; he moved through the crowded market with a riding crop and high boots, assessing the flesh, saying a word here or there, striking a bargain, gathering up the goods. Looking out for the interests of an English gentleman who would rather stay at home, and spend the money there.

When James hung in his hammock, eyes closed, he could still see it all again: the black shuttered eyes; the pink man’s sausage-skin sweat; the column shambling off to the inner dark of the island. If it were not for the rifle and the lash, someone could just lift their chains and wrap them around the nearest sweaty pink throat, and squeeze.

Loaded with sealed casks of sugar, the
Snapdragon
sailed for the port-town of Lancaster, in the far north of England. One night, out on the cold Atlantic, James dreamed of an endless march in the mud and snow; from a vulture’s circling flight he saw himself, his detachment, the thousands of men in a shambling trail across the land. He woke shivering and sick, and with a new, instinctive understanding of the mathematics of the world.

I handed my freedom right over. I signed it clean away. I sold myself.

It had seemed like such a small thing at the time; it had seemed to be no use to him at all.

They were chased home by the trade-winds, and docked at Lancaster, at Saint George’s Quay, in August 1811. By then, James had been with
the
Snapdragon
for nearly two years. The war seemed like a lifetime ago; those dark memories could not really be his.

He stared out at this busy city from the deck. The nearby warehouses were six storeys high, spanking-new; their fronts were slung with winches; creaking ropes hoisted crates up to their stores. The quayside bustled with dockers—men, and women too, with their skirts hitched and sleeves rolled on knotted muscle, matching the men for work and noise, matching them obscenity for obscenity. Above this clamour the city rose, built out of golden stone; the castle was lowering and ancient, but below that, on the hillside, everything seemed elegant and new. There were bright church spires and grand flat-fronted houses with big glazed sashes; the African Trade had been profitable for this place.

But, if he just turned and looked a little to the left, on the far side of the river, the rye fields stretched flat and silky, and further off, the hills swelled blue and purple like the backs of rising whales, and if you could get out there, beyond these bustling mercantile streets, and walk out through those fields, and up to those hills, and climb up through their heath and heather—the peace of that would be so deep, and so clean. He felt again that impulse that had come upon him in Spain, which had been lying suspended in him all this time at sea: to be in England, and in the service of a good man. To be at home.

He asked for shore leave, and having never yet caused one bit of bother, it was readily granted. After all, what harm could he get up to in a place like this? Why would a Spaniard go and slip his traces in a place like Lancaster?

His pay in his pocket, his bag on his shoulder, he had one drink with his shipmates in the Three Mariners, an ancient ramshackle building on the quayside, easing itself down into the mud on which it had been built. He drank a pint pot of beer while they toasted their safe return to England, and the restoration of health to the poorly king whose piss had apparently turned quite purple, and whose fat-arsed son had—it now transpired—been in charge since February; then they drank to the health of the milk-complexioned girl behind the bar, who smiled at James, and had pretty dimples. He looked away.

When they were ordering a second round of beer, he got up and said he was going for a piss. He walked out of the side door of the inn, and took his piss in the stinking privy, and then he buttoned himself up and walked away, and just kept on walking, crossing Cable Street, and then
New Street under the shoemakers’ signs, passing the tea-merchants’ offices, and a rocking horse that hung creaking above a toyshop, its spots quite faded, its mane and tail worn scrubby by the weather. On Market Street, James stopped a young gentleman of Indian complexion to ask the way, but found that he could put the words together only with some difficulty. The young man tamped his pipe, and listened kindly, and then answered him precisely with directions out of town. James was soon striding out along South Road, the carriages bowling by, and ladies with parasols out taking the air, and chattering away to each other in their muddy dialect.

It took him a month to reach Hertfordshire. When his shoes fell apart he haggled over a scuffed old pair of English boots with a toothless woman in Bolton who reeked of gin. When his shirt fell to rags he bought another in a vile shop in Digbeth, and English britches too, so that he might no longer be taken for a foreigner. He scorched the seams with a candle stub, to rid the cloth of lice.

He walked the lane-ways dressed in strangers’ clothes, his black canvas pack fading now to grey. He slept in shepherds’ bothies, hedgerows and church porches; while his pay held out, and it was still summer, none of this was a hardship to him. He spoke to very few—a labourer in a field to check his road, a yeoman to beg a day’s work from him, a farmer’s wife to buy a sup of milk. Silence became habitual, and when he was called upon to speak, the confluence of languages in his thoughts made him pause and struggle for words.