Mr Darwin's Shooter (12 page)

More delay, and then full readiness again. They were tired of the sight of the town looking miserable in all its shoregoing dullness, with damp slate roofs, blackened chimney pots and driving hoops of rain. Then wind caught their bark, and she was away again. Out into storms she ran, bucking like a burro. With much hauling-in of canvas and landsmen spewing and no distance made day after day, Door said, with a great sneer: ‘There is someone ashore keeping a black cat under a tub.' So turnabout home to Old England they steered, unable to fight the moods of the planet. They did not go, and would it have been better if they had never gone at all?

With the ship at her moorings again and looking likely to stay, the young gent went ashore for shooting in a lord's park. Covington saw his slightly stooped, broad back, his gun case and powder horn, and felt a pair of rounded eyes pass over him, seeing nothing at all. Or seeing, at best, the world as it was arranged. You could love the naval service and be part of it, and still be offended to see how it made a landsman smug.
Mister
King was heard to say he would have a good time of it now, and while Covington went about with a bucket and rag wiping spew from mahogany fittings in the poop cabin, King slipped ashore with a gun of his own.

Covington kept a hangdog attitude as he swabbed. Christian forbearance was all very well but the poop cabin
was not his part of the bark, he was lodged in the forecastle above the coalhole. It was Joey's place there, aft among the toffs, Joey who waited on table and was offered marrow bones to suck and plum pudding in hefty slices, Joey who softened Capt's Christian eye and made the Patagonians they had on board giggle and like his sweetness and true affection.

Joey showed Covington nets, guns, microscopes, telescopes, hammers and tongs. The first solid bit of their gent that Covington ever knew was yellow bile on a letter case. Joey said the gent had a plate of Wedgwood's pottery showing a black man in chains, and the words, ‘Am I Not A Man And A Brother?'—at which responded Joey with tears in his eyes about the fate of slaves, ‘
El pobre se siente intimidado
,' for when he wanted to speak from the depths of his heart and not be laughed over he chose the Spanish they learned on La Plata with Capt King. There was another reason, too, thought Covington.

‘You have been lying in brother Phipps's arms, and he has been a-whispering in your ear, and lo he has made a slave of you to his affections.'

 

There was nothing for it, for a time, but chores and duty as the
Beagle
was going nowhere. Indeed the whole Royal Navy went nowhere, staying clustered in harbour like clotted leaves on a pond.

A portside hatch needed painting. They worked amid shouting, curses and laughter, with bursts of rain on the tar-slicked timber. A gadabout gull came skewing down the adverse winds to defile what it could, extending its claws, wings flapping, and made a great squirt. ‘
¡Hola! ¿Como estas?
' They would have no more of its foulness as they boasted their lingo. Covington shoo'd the thing away, his fingers trailing on feathers as he lunged.

‘Had 'em, Haddums!' cried Joey to its screeching face. ‘Does your mother know you're out?'

That was when their gent grunted up the side and for the first time in all creation met Covington's eye—the boy registering a round coppery face and lubberly sea legs—one, two, and a clumsy haul, and Covington had his man to observe, all the height of him uncoiling shy. All he knew of him at present was that he liked to go out with his gun and his dog in the rain. He was, some said, a young squire of the sort who passed time with philosophers discoursing on whether Greeks ate melon seeds, or if they had privies in their gardens. He came from dockside in a cutter near sinking under the weight of extra goods that he wanted this late, everything awkward-shaped and dripping in the December mist as it was hoisted: a bundle of guns, a crate of jars, a sack of books, a rectangular basket lined with paper that was meant for dead birds. As he wondered, ‘Might he trouble them with his extras?' Covington held his gaze and heard the words, but the gent's brown eyes still looked through him. ‘I am ashamed,' thought Covington, ‘to be who I am.' His way to counter that shame was a sudden whim: he would get the gent's attention and if need be wrestle his service away from Joey.

It was at this moment there came the sound of a splash that Covington would never want to hear again, as when a bucket of swill is tipped overboard in a calm, and a small voice in the heart of him cried, ‘Joey? Was this Joe?'

Yes it was Joey slipping from his rope and falling in the water.

Yet even while thinking this thought, so shrill with alarm, something kept Covington staring at their gent, trying for a response.

Joey Middleton dear sailor chum unable to swim, where was he then? At Covington's feet with his fingers clasping holystone, he wished. But really where was he at all? Swinging above the deeps lashing at gulls with a coil of
hemp? Then what? Blood on the shit of the wind!
Drowned
. Covington's attention was elsewhere for the count of three. For he was
still looking at the gent
, musing on being of service with a warmth inside him akin to desire.

‘
Boy
overboard?' FitzRoy burst from his cabin under the wheel to roar like a furnace. Yes with your sharp nose like a blade and your fishy lips you may have your spectacle, Capt, of a soul entering heaven.

MacCurdy dived, Door went after him, trod water and hoy'd. Phipps's arms pinned Covington to the rails to stop him leaping. ‘The two of them are enough. More will get in their way.' MacCurdy broke the surface, dived again, returned shaking his head, ‘He is
gahn
!' Covington trembling aghast, Gent likewise mumbling a prayer, plucking at shirt buttons in the icy wind, the crew gathering, climbing every vantage point on the ship, bewildered, shivering, delivering the news to each other in undertones. Phipps, meantime, what was he thinking, his eyelids tremoring, his mouth tight shut, surely also of heaven?

‘Gahn!' came the bellow again.

Capt echoed the sour word in disbelief and grim-featured called for hooks. He could ask for no better crew than a hydrography ship's to plumb the depths of a harbour. Oarsmen dipped by and held. Dipped and returned. Men able to tune the wind and furrow the four seas grieved for skills denied them in the matter of a small life.

Joey was down there a long time.

‘He is gone to his father,' said Phipps, grabbing hold of Covington again. ‘I knew it would come. He was too sweet for our world.'

‘Let me go, John Phipps, or I'll use my strength on you.'

Phipps was sobbing, poor man, and there was nothing for it except to turn aside from him lest Covington's own sobs crack his bones.

‘We have summat!' cried the West Country men in the evening light. Covington clutched a rope and began
hauling. They brought Joey up. His lips were nipped by fish, his sides were torn by grappling hooks, his clothes were peeled away, his eyes were hollow sockets!—he was upside down, dripping like a sponge, and their angry FitzRoy never spoke a truer word as when he boomed out in the presence of crew and weeping Patagonians, ‘Lord God of Hosts, Joseph Middleton was your
friend
!'

‘Amen!' answered Phipps. ‘He formerly lived by hearsay, now he shall live by sight.' But all the texts in the world were clay in the mouth and thoughts of heaven collapsed, and Phipps wept, unable to get the words out.

Covington fled the
Beagleand ferried ashore in the dark.

‘'Ullo, it's the mudlark.'

The nightwatchman with his lantern on high signalled him through the dockyard gates.

He carried his Polly Pochette with him as he ran, holding her by the neck, her dry dusty bow thrust deep in his inside belt. Sailors heaped bonfires in the wet streets and swigged rum. Covington wanted no more of their game. A wild gang passed by, grabbing men. Covington huddled against a chandler's warehouse, listening to his heartbeat through the walnut space that was no bigger than his heart itself and as flimsy. Then he ran on. The rain stopped. There was nowhere for him to go. He sat on a stone and plucked strings, and wept. It began to rain again. In spite of the horror of his dear friend being flayed by water he would be shown the cat on his return. He knew it and returned in the miserable pearly light of morning. Their Capt eschewed exceptions. He spake the law of God. Covington could rely on him.

It was said that in fine weather, sails bellying full, there was no joy a seaman knew better than departure. He was rid of the woes of the land, the ship heeling nicely to leeward—the sea washing her decks in a torrent of green—the steersman heading her up to the wind and ever into warmer climes.

Covington considered this without bitterness as he bared his back. A brightness sparkled on the water. He was given a rag to bite upon. ‘Good cheer, Cobby,' said a mate, and Covington gave a smile in return and shouted before his mouth was stuffed:

‘It will be all the same in fifty years!'

As he submitted to Regulations he saw the gent watching and taking pity, hand to mouth to hold back spew as their bark went on. Covington did not allow himself to have any thoughts, then, except just one, that he was no dumb beast and the pain he would fling from him like water, because it was his temporal body, that's all. The gent was braving himself in FitzRoy's eyes as one who would not speak out loud, but hold, as a guest aboard must bravely, to naval lore in a flogging. Phipps stood by with the others—his own back was scarred, written plain with the transgressions of his youth. Covington till now had only ever suffered tongue-lashings, and boxings around the ears. Other thoughts crowded in. He thought about the sweetness of
Joey, blaming himself for his drowning—those few moments of neglect, of not seeing what was happening. He might have pulled him back. He might have said, ‘Don't, Mudlark, Noodle-head,' and gone for his own turn at swinging above the water. He might have drowned in his place, and not had this bitterness on his palate, which was made of the taste of seawater, weed, stale cotton and shame. He might have averted his eyes from their gent, instead of coveting his service.

Bring it down.

The lash whistled and Covington was flayed for his shoregoing. A stroke for each hour taken without leave, making fourteen in total.

Captain FitzRoy stood watching, a severe young man with a long slim nose like a paperknife. His firm full lips were thoughtful even in a rage. Two times seven he eyed the rope descending and surely he thought of drownings, and knew of Covington's grief from his eyes, and his pain, but thought of obedience making all things right on ships, and surely in heaven, and so, to be sure, was soothed in his hard decisions around men and boys.

 

After Covington was done, his back sliced and his groin weeping bloody piss, there were the greater shore offenders to be dealt with, Christmas punishments for drunkenness making a stern tally of one hundred and thirty-four lashes in all, their cries piteous, their flesh lying on the decks in scallops as if from a carpenter's plane.

Covington was hurt. He stood aching by the ship's rail, swollen with his body's water. A bucket of saltwater stung him. The surgeon's mate applied linseed mash. He saw his skin hanging when he twisted around, donning his shirt. The surgeon, Mr McCormick, said he was fine. King failed to meet his eye. Musters bawled and hid his face. Phipps came to him and gave him a swig of rum. The other topmen
left Covington alone; gormless whales of conscience, they regarded whippings akin to weather, to be ridden through and rewarded with fine passage after.

Covington nursed his body through the next weeks and ate Mrs Hewtson's plumcake in sorrowful nibbles. There was little conversation in him and no light banter. He moved in the vessel with a sullen power, answering no arguments, entering no pleas. From this date he stood, as on some fearsome headland, remote and proud, surveying his years ahead. It broke hearts to see him, for he was still just a boy. FitzRoy gave his Sunday sermon on the open deck, making his verse the rainbow of hope that Noah saw at the end of the Great Flood. There would be a gathering-in on this voyage and a putting out, he said. A spark would be lit in Tierra del Fuego and it would be a beacon to Christians the whole world over. The men hardly knew what he meant, or cared; they just agreed that if there were missionaries in wild places then maybe their chances of being rescued from shipwreck would be better.

Covington saw their gent fashion a bonnet from canvas and attach ropes to its sides, trawling it through combers, bringing up sea creatures, marvelling at their smallness on the deck. ‘It creates a feeling of wonder,' said their gent to Revd Matthews, who was ever lolling nearby, ‘that so much beauty is created for such little purpose.'

‘Aye, but we see it now,' said Revd, ‘and offer our hosannas.' The young gent turned and stared at Covington as if he were cousin to those jellies, and truly, as if to flatter his opinion, Covington was silent as a fish.

On Sundays, for an hour, he sat with Phipps side by side and strove for understanding. They riffled the pages of their book with Phipps tactful and withdrawn. He knew that Covington's entire soul and not just his skin was flayed—why, Phipps was no different—and they did not know or care if it was Joey or Christ they whispered about. The texts reminded them both ways:

Covington would not have been able to say, if asked, what he remembered about Joey to rouse such an ache in the heart. Memories were so slim, threadlike, that they seemed hardly to exist at all in the face of a life's passing. Joey was a boy who used nicknames, was honest about his failings, who danced lightly on the water, screeching ‘Had 'em, Haddums!' before he fell. And that was just about all.

Mostly Covington and Phipps went to their different parts of the vessel and were strangers to each other. There was just this love they had, that was without its joyfulness any more, and was only sustainable in their private devotions when they asked God to take it to him.