The New World (16 page)

“Black Cloud,” I said, without feeling sure he would understand.

But he did understand, and he was interested. More than interested. He was on his guard, looking around our camp, then back at me again. How did he know about Black Cloud? Had Natty told him? Was this one of the things they had talked about while I had been unconscious?

“Black Cloud, yes,” he said. “But where? Did you see where he was?”

“In you,” I told him.

The Rider flinched. “Where in the world?”

“Nowhere. I saw him here.”

“You are sure?”

I nodded, and the Rider held my gaze for a moment, his eyes refusing me like a cat.

“I'm sure. He was only in you.”

I said this to hurt him; to punish him for taking Natty away. And who knows, it might have led to more words between us, to blows even, but Boss saw what was happening and suddenly busied up. He was carrying pots and blankets to stow in the wagon.

“Headache, dear boy?” he said much too loudly, scattering whatever else had been in the Rider's mind, and in mine. “I have heard that potion produces a most tremendous headache. Indeed, I remember suffering myself, on one particular occasion, on more than one perhaps, on one or two, and having for hours, I might even say for days, a distinct…”

Boss dropped his load into the wagon and took out the saddle for his pony without drawing breath, then rambled away with the stirrups banging against his thighs. He had done what he meant to do; my quarrel was not over, but it was finished for the moment. I stood up and brushed the dust off my legs, and the Rider leaned into the wagon to fetch something he needed for our journey.

But then Natty laid a hand on his shoulder. She laid a hand on his shoulder and he bent his head to whisper in her ear. It was all done in a second, but it was enough. All my anger returned and all my confusion. While I had lain unconscious something had passed between them; I was sure of it.

Natty saw me notice.

“You'll feel stronger soon,” she said, letting her hand drop to her side and giving me her sweetest smile.

I did not reply but walked to the further end of the wagon, where I could stand a little apart. I stared at the earth; at the grains of dust and the shadows of the wagon and the seeds in the grass-heads.

“It's nothing to worry about,” Natty said, following after me and speaking in the same deceptive way.

I still did not answer.

“Jim?”

The world expanded a little.

“What have you done?” I asked. I did not care if the others heard me; although in fact none of them did—they were all still busy preparing for our journey.

“What do you mean, what have I done?”

“What have you done?” I did not want to say any more; I could not find the words.

“Nothing,” Natty repeated. “I've done nothing. It was you who did something. You poisoned yourself.”

“Not that.”

“What, then? I can't understand you.” Natty reached forward as though she wanted to brush the hair out of my eyes. At another time I would have loved her for this; her gestures of this sort were rare. Now I thought it was deceitful and stepped away.

“That's not true,” I said. “You understand perfectly well what I'm asking.”

Natty's eyes widened. “Jim,” she said, with great deliberation. “I think…”

But once again Boss appeared, barging round the side of the wagon to interrupt us, and a moment later had swept us off to our ponies, lifting us on a wave of prattle about the need for an early start, and the heat to come, and the uncertainties of the way ahead, and a hundred other things that did not interest me in the slightest.

“Here we are, then, here we are,” he said, stemming his flood for a moment to hand us the reins of our ponies. “And now—all aboard! Are you with me, friends?”

As he jumped into his saddle and began fussing over the Spectacle, straightening her dress and wiping the dust from her face, Natty tried to finish what she had started.

“I thought you'd lost your mind,” she told me, bending close to my face; her breath touched my cheek.

“Perhaps I have,” I said.

“That would be…” She paused, staring into the wilderness and biting her lip.

“That would be…too much,” she said at last.

“It would?”

“Certainly.” She nodded firmly, as though knocking the word into my chest; when she felt sure it was driven home, she turned her back and kicked up one heel so that I could help her onto her pony. The brown skin of her leg, streaked with trails of dried-up water that showed where she had washed herself, almost made me cry aloud. I grasped her ankle, and felt the heat of her skin, and hoisted her up.

Then I scrambled onto my own pony, straightened the satchel against my tunic, and we resumed our journey—with me taking my place beside the Boss, who passed me a piece of bread and a flagon of water, and Natty trotting beside the Rider as she had done the previous day.

In England one sort of landscape flows very quickly into another: marsh into pasture, plains into hills, woods into water meadows. In the wilderness there are no such quick changes. Threadbare scrub, dust devils and lilac horizons: they are all the same yesterday as today, and the same today as tomorrow. How Boss kept cheerful in the face of such tedium I cannot say. Why we endured his chatter and continued to follow his lead are simpler questions. He was the only guide we had, because he was the only one with enough spirit to consider himself worthy of the role.

I soon lost my sense of time as an orderly thing, and lived once more in a dream of clanks and rumbles, sways and lurches, dazzles and darkness. Did I still think a town might exist somewhere in the country ahead of us? Did I think we might die before we got there? To tell the truth I did not care much in either case; I felt too consumed by the sight of Natty and the Rider still moving along very smoothly together; too distressed by the speed and depth of her absorption in him; too preoccupied by their occasional laughter and their contented silences.

And still too preoccupied a day later, a week later, then ten days later, whenever it was that the trail broadened at last, and we found the country tensing as it will often seem to do before vanishing under bricks and mortar.

Boss soon began to share my sense of expectancy, lifting his hat from his head and then cramming it down again, his red face turning scarlet and his back straightening as though he had swallowed a poker. All this was wonderful—hilarious, in its way—and so were the greetings that erupted when we saw our first living and breathing strangers. A farmer leaning on his rake in a field. A clerical-looking gentleman riding in a buggy. A cowboy lounging against a tree. Each of them in succession were hailed with such a stentorian “Good morning!” I thought they might be frightened straight back into oblivion.

For my own part: I felt perfectly astonished to see such people and such proof of civilization. Wide fields began to appear, with hedges and gateways. Then the smallholders who owned them, rattling along in carts or ambling on ponies. Then well-to-do men and women who had no other purpose in life except to survey what belonged to them, and enjoy it. Creamy skins and feathered bonnets! Fancy waistcoats and clean hair! The shine on watch-chains and eye-glasses! The newness of everything felt so great it was almost painful—especially because no one returned our stares, our waves, our greetings, with anything like the same enthusiasm that we showed to them. They seemed pleased to see Boss himself, because he promised them some entertainment. But I was mistaken as an Indian, and judged accordingly. I am sure Natty and the Rider felt offended in the same way, although I did not ask them.

Then the roofs of a few buildings broke the skyline, and we knew we had reached the town that Boss had predicted for us.

The first houses we saw were more like fortresses than homes, with high palisades all around, and thick walls made of rough logs and planks, and small dark windows in which the only signs of life were a shadow passing among shadows, or a shutter pulled to and bolted. The effect, despite all the warm opinions that Boss continued to pour forth at every turn (“Charming, charming,” “most ingenious,” “very practical and robust”), was to make us feel the place was closed against us.

Boss never so much as suggested this, and after a while I had to admit he was right to persevere, because these fortresses gave way to less forbidding homes, with gardens front and back, and windows where families gathered to wave at us. A little farther, and the welcome was even more enthusiastic, with doors opening, and men and women stepping out to stare, and children asking Boss who we were, and where we came from, and what we meant to do, some in English, many in Spanish, a few in French, and others in languages I had never heard before.

To each of them—and over their heads as well, so their parents heard and their neighbors, and regardless of whether they understood him or not—Boss explained in his loudest voice that we were the Entertainment, oh yes, indeed we were, and shortly we would be performing for the delight of everyone, and he would be most obliged, really very sincerely obliged, if they would take it upon themselves to spread the word, since a diversion as remarkable as this, a spectacle as spectacular, was the first of its kind in the New World, and might never be repeated as long as a world of any description continued to exist.

Admiring this cascade, and watching the children pluck up their courage to come close, and tell one another how strange we looked, or in the case of myself and Natty how dirty, I felt like a hermit dragged off his solitary pillar. A moment before I had been surrounded by wide horizons; now everywhere I looked there were walls and turnings and obstacles and faces—faces with work to finish, and friends to meet, and plans to make, and all of them peering about, and laughing, and scowling, and frowning, and sneering, and commenting, and criticizing, and appreciating, and gossiping, because here was their home. Home with a wide road, and now even tidier houses on either side, wooden houses, houses two stories high, and a church, and shopfronts, and glass shining in these shopfronts, and an open door with fiddle music, and horses tethered along a rail, and more shops, and a shaded walkway where people clattered to and fro, and a hotel, and another church, and another hotel, this one much smaller, at the farthest end of the main street, where the bustle died down again, where a tortoiseshell cat slept in the sun, where a yard opened before us, where Boss led the way and our wagon groaned in behind us, and we pulled at our reins, and slithered to the ground, and handed over our reins to the stable boys, and stroked our ponies on the nose, and patted their shoulders and thanked them, and looked at one another, and knew that for the moment at least we had reached the end of our travels.

We stood in amazement, Boss speechless for once in his life: at the row of stables ahead of us; at the fresh straw that lined the stalls; at the patterns of sunlight that came through the tiles of the roof; at the saw-marks on the beams overhead.

Boss recovered first and told us—with a great deal of hand-rubbing and back-slapping, and a tender embrace of the Spectacle—that the place was well found, very well found, before leading us away from the stableyard and in through the back door of the hotel. With his shoulders square and his hat shining on the back of his head, he looked as though he stayed here every night of his life, and was the best of friends with the manager, and had personally arranged for the paraphernalia of tassels and drapes and picture-frames and pictures that greeted us.

“Business!” He pounded on a desk that stood in the lobby, and shouted as though he meant to be heard across the whole of America.

In the pause following this eruption, several doors slammed shut on the story above (I imagined guests crouching behind them, wondering what tornado had blown into their shelter), and a piano in the neighboring room tinkled to a halt.

Then silence, and the suffocating sense of being
indoors
, as though everything had suddenly closed around me and squeezed the breath from my lungs: the dark yellow stripes of the wallpaper, and the milky candle-bowls, and the carpet that showed little blue waves rippling endlessly toward an invisible shore.

What was the need for it all? What sort of wrong turn had mankind taken, when it abandoned the life of simple things and open air? I gasped, and found I had clutched the arm of Clown, who quickly shook me off. Was I the only one choking like this? Apparently. Even the Rider seemed perfectly at ease, gazing at the picture of a sunset fuming on the wall beside him, while Natty kept her shining eyes fixed on his face.

Then doors creaked open again upstairs and feet shuffled along a landing. The piano trickled back into life. Shadows shook in the alcove behind the lobby-desk. And the hotel owner Mr. Vale appeared: small, stooped, wearing a green eye-shade, and apparently as mournful as his name, which hung above him on a neat wooden sign.

Boss hailed him with tremendous vivacity, giving orders about how many rooms we needed, and what kind, and for how long.

“You, Wee Man…” he said, scanning our faces in turn as though to remind himself how many disciples he had gathered around him in the desert, and feeling impressed by the number. “You, sir, I think must sleep outside in our wagon to protect our possessions. Are you content?” (He made no pause.) “I see you are content. You, my love…” (He beamed at the Spectacle, who clasped her hands together and rose onto tiptoe as though the tether that kept her tied to the earth was being sorely tested.) “You shall of course remain with me, in the matrimonial bower. Now…” (He pointed at Clown and me and Natty and the Rider.) “You and you and you and you will all have a room to yourselves. A room each I should say. Extravagant, I grant. Extravagantly extravagant. But we shall have great profit from our Entertainment, great profit, Mr. Vale, and pay you when we have made that profit, which will be tomorrow night. You accept our terms, I am sure. Very good, very good. Excellent in fact. We shall be very generous to you. Generous to a fault. We are generous people. We are brave hearts.”

What else could Mr. Vale do but agree? He winced. He tugged at his eye-shade as though it was the peak of a cap. He winced again. Then he meekly passed Boss a handful of keys and murmured that he accepted us gladly into his hotel, before returning to the shadows from which he had been summoned.

Even as I watched all this my mind was hurrying to understand what Boss had done. He had not put Natty and the Rider into a room together. But at the same time he had not exactly forced them apart. He had given them a room each, and with that sort of separation he had also allowed them the chance to move from one to the other, to be together in secret.

I wanted to think more about this, while at the same time dreading what conclusions I might reach, but Boss was in flood again. “Come come, now,” he called. “Come come. With me now, with me. Go to your places, and find your beds, and close your eyes, then rise up again, and wash your faces, and meet me—” he jabbed at the carpet rippling beneath his feet—“
here
in an hour, so we can proceed with our business.”

He did not wait to explain what this business might be. He merely jerked his head a few times when he had finished speaking, to show that what he had said was the law, then stamped up the stairs that rose at the end of the lobby, dragging the Spectacle behind him. She had a way of covering the ground with small and rapid steps; these, combined with the baldness and smoothness of her large head, and the glamour of her dress (though now very dusty), made her seem not like an earthly thing at all, but a visitor from the clouds whose natural tendency was to return there.

I dare say I ran this little fantasy through my mind as a way of preventing myself from thinking how Natty had reacted to her instructions. When I turned away from the Spectacle I found her hoisting a blanket-roll onto her shoulder; her face was flushed.

“We're the lucky ones,” she said.

“We are?”

“A room of our own? We're very lucky. When did we last have a room of our own? Not since before we stepped on board the
Nightingale
. And goodness knows how long ago that was. We have luxury here, Jim, luxury.”

I suppose this was well meant; it seems so, when I think of it now. At the time it felt like a dismissal. A denigration of all the time we had spent together. A humiliation. And because I did not want to show as much in front of our friends, I immediately swung off and followed Boss upstairs.

Quick as I was, I thought everyone must surely have seen what was in my mind; I felt their amusement and their pity and their curiosity all burning into me as I disappeared, and stumbled when I reached the top step.

Natty laughed when she saw this—I heard it, but I did not look back. I pressed on down the corridor and shut the door of my room smartly behind me. In one part of my mind were thoughts I detested: Natty and the Rider trotting side by side, talking together, turning to one another in the darkness while I was drugged and ignorant. In another part: voices telling me I had nothing to fear, I was inventing things, I was exhausted, I had been away from home too long. Both sides feinted and dodged, advanced and retreated, locked and gripped, with nothing to prove which was the wiser, and no one to resolve them.

I shook my head and told myself to concentrate on here and now, on this room, which was the first I had seen for a lifetime. For two years and more. To look at the plain plaster walls and the plain ceiling. The single window. The curtains made of brown sackcloth. The heavy afternoon light soaking through. The bare table beside the bed. The white pitcher and basin, on another table by the window. The metal bed, with its stained bolster and yellow shawl stretched over the mattress.

I threw myself down expecting to lie awake until Boss needed us, and to torture myself by grinding my thoughts together—but I did no such thing. I closed my eyes. I lay in darkness for a moment, and then I slept.

When I awoke again there was no more sunlight seeping through my curtains, and no more gentle day-noises, but shadows blackening my room, and laughter and singing from the saloon below. I scrambled to my feet, splashing water into the basin to wash my face, pulling my tunic straight, tucking my satchel inside it, then tumbled downstairs into the lobby.

But there was no sign of Boss and the rest, only Mr. Vale simpering behind his desk. Although it was dark outside, he was still wearing his eye-shade.

“I expect you are wanting your friends,” he said; his voice was a whispering drawl, and when he finished he wiped his mouth as though his American accent was an embarrassment to him.

I told him I was.

“They are in Cat's Field,” he said.

“Cat's Field?”

“At the edge of town, where tomorrow they will perform the Entertainment. They are rehearsing; they will be waiting for you.”