The New World (29 page)

Natty was not listening to me. She had fixed her eyes on Black Cloud and decided, or very nearly decided. “There will never be an end to it,” she said quietly, speaking to herself. “There will never be an end to it, except this end. This.”

She spoke the last word very oddly, breaking it into two pieces so the “s” was separated and turned into a hiss. I think she was about to fire—that she would have fired anyway. As it was, Joshua suddenly jumped forward from the shadows.

“I'll do it,” he said, “I'll do it. A woman should not do it.”

I believe to this day he planned to disarm her, to take the gun and lead our prisoners away to jail. But Natty gave a sudden jolt of anger, as though her great effort of self-control was over, and she had let herself loose.

“A woman!” she said, arching her shoulders like a cat. “Being a woman has nothing to do with it.”

This was the moment when all her arguments were settled. After that, she fired the gun very quickly—once, twice—then Black Cloud leaned back on his heels but kept standing, glancing down at the blood on his chest before brushing it away with his fingertips. Then he did the same for the Painted Man, with a kind of nursing tenderness.

I heard my own voice squeezed out of me—a gasp. Then another gasp from Joshua and Anne Marie together, which I thought sounded like admiration. From Natty herself there were no words, no sound at all. Just the gun slowly lowering, still clasped tight in her two hands, and the barrel releasing its coiled breath, and the sound of the shots rippling away from us over the river until they struck faint echoes from the mud-islands in the distance.

“You stole from me,” Black Cloud said, glaring at the necklace for the last time. “You took what I loved. I have tried…”

But that was all. He had more breath left in his lungs, and chose not to waste it on us. Instead, he slung his arm around the shoulders of his friend and together they turned their backs and stepped off the wharf, their bodies making a single splash as they slipped through the surface of the river.

No one noticed what we had done. No footsteps pounded over the square behind us. No voice cried out. No lights flared between the dark houses or in the long window that overlooked the wharf. The city was asleep or cared about other things. Rigging on the ships docked upstream, and crumbled mountains of merchandise beneath them, were all still as a picture. And we were still too, standing at the center of the picture. Turned to stone by what we had done.

What
we
had done.

Natty had made the final decision. Natty had pulled the trigger.

But we had all played our part.

Joshua with his hanging back, then blundering forward.

Anne Marie with her timidity.

And me. Me with my thieving and my stubbornness and my weakness.

I swung away from the edge of the wharf and turned round and made myself stop exactly where Black Cloud had stood when he spoke his last words to me. I saw the bullet strike him again, and the blood. I saw him fall. I thought: I am alive. Then I thought: I have done the same as my father. I have killed a man.

I closed my eyes, expecting my father would immediately step into my head and confront me. But it was not him I saw. It was Mr. Silver with his white bristles and his lank hair and his old blue sailor's coat. He grabbed me by my shirt-front and the snake-tattoo writhed along his arm. “What more do you want, my boy?” he hissed, his voice wet-sounding and lascivious. “What more do you want? You have Natty safe and your treasure too. That's everything, surely. Everything. Well then. Go to her now and comfort her. Look, she is sad. Sad, because the rest of you were gutless. Gutless. Comfort her if you love her.”

That is all the time we were allowed together; as Mr. Silver gave me a shake, like a terrier shaking a rat, he faded. And it was not Natty who drove him away but Joshua—Joshua gathering his wits and bounding forward, twisting the pistol from Natty's fingers, tucking it into his belt again, buttoning his coat, seizing Natty with one hand and Anne Marie with the other, then rushing toward the stairs that led up to the square and calling for me to follow.

There was no mention of what we had done. No shock, or remorse, or blame, or guilt, or relief, or pity, or praise. Just quickness and caution, which had me tucking my satchel out of sight inside my shirt, then following up the steps as though this had always been my intention and I went quite willingly.

All the way through the square, and then into the tangle of streets around our hotel, Joshua kept his arms around Natty and Anne Marie. Swooping and sweeping them onward. Silent. His coat-tails flapping behind him. Glancing into shadows left and right, into the arcades and blind alleys, across empty balconies and verandas, into the hollow doorways and windows.

He heard me coming after but never looked back. Was he avoiding my eye? Did he think I was most to blame? I pressed my hand to my chest and felt the shape of the satchel once more inside my shirt, its strap securely knotted, and the necklace sleeping inside it. Then I pressed my hand to my wound, where Black Cloud had scratched me. For the first time I thought this must be all he had ever intended to do—to give me a flesh wound and make me remember what I had done, not to kill me. If we had let him finish admiring his treasure, he would have left us alone. Taken what was his and left us. We had never had a reason to murder him.

“Come on, Jim!” Natty called to me. “Be quick!”—and my thoughts left me. Everything was scurry and dash now, ducking and darting, until suddenly we were back where we wanted to be, at the hotel and still undetected. The lobby empty, with the blades of the fan standing still over our heads, and the piano silent beyond the door into the parlor.

I have often wondered since: what if Joshua and Anne Marie had thought we would see them again next day and thereafter? This had been their plan, after all. In which case I can imagine us wishing each other goodnight, even embracing. As it was, friendship had become impossible. We were ashamed of one another. We stared at the carpet, and its white zigzags racing through the blue like waves. For my own part I felt glad. I never wanted to think of them again, or remember what they knew about us. And they must have felt the same, because as soon as they got their breath back they left us, Joshua seizing Anne Marie by the hand and hurrying her upstairs to their room. Still with never a word spoken, we heard the door click behind them, then there was silence again.

I offered Natty my arm but she would not look at me.

“Will you be able to sleep?” I asked.

She nodded. She had drifted away from me and I needed to call her back, to be practical and sensible. “We'll go to the
Mungo
in the morning early,” I reminded her. “At first light.”

Now she glanced up at last, her eyes vacant. I could not decide whether she had suddenly grown much older, or was much younger—like a child again.

“You'll come with me, won't you?” she said.

“I shall,” I told her. “Nothing has changed.”

She smiled. “I had no choice, you know.”

“That's not true, Natty.”

She stared into the mirror hanging on the wall beside Mr. Brydges's desk; she might have been a cat, to whom a reflection of itself means nothing.

“All right, then,” she said. “But did I make the wrong choice, Jim?”

“You killed him,” I said.

“I killed them both.” She faced me directly. “And now they'll never follow us again.”

“They may. But if they do, it'll be our choice.”

Natty held my gaze. “And is it your choice, Jim? Will you let them follow us?”

Once again, I could not decide whether she spoke innocently, or as someone who understood more than I did.

“We'll find out,” I said. It was the best I could do.

Natty bowed her head. “Very well,” she said. Then she reached for my hand, turned it over, and began to trace the lines on my palm with her fingertips. In the gloom she could not possibly have seen what she was doing, and I soon bunched my hand into a fist, catching her finger in the trap.

“And what about this?” She touched my shirt with her free hand, where the blood had already begun to dry. I shrugged, and told her what I had told myself: it was nothing.

Then I led her away from the lobby and upstairs to our room, with Natty wriggling her hand free from my grip, finding the key in my pocket, and afterward locking the door behind us again. In the time it took me to take off my shirt and bathe my wound, she crawled into bed and fell asleep. I slipped in beside her and lay as quiet as possible—like a figure on a tomb, except I could feel the weight of the satchel pressing against my heart.

I do not remember that night; my sleep was a sort of darkness, an abyss, and next morning I wished it would swallow me again, because when I came to my senses I saw Black Cloud still alive and sneering at me on the wharf-side; I saw the Painted Man laughing in his cascade of silvery light; I saw the two of them stepping into thin air, and floating face down over their underwater kingdom.

Then I opened my eyes and found Natty perched on our windowsill in the sunlight.

“At last!” she said, with a kind of impishness, and came closer to peer into my face; she had put her Indian dress back on, ready for our journey. “Are you wearing those same clothes as last night?”

I could not answer.

“Better for working on a boat, I suppose. But really, my green dress…I'll keep it for England.”

I still did not answer.

She relaxed against the window frame again and pouted. “Not even a ‘good morning' from you, Jim? I've been waiting for you to wake up for such a long time.”

I was tongue-tied—this chatter was all guilt, I thought; guilt and anxiety mixed. I stared at her. Then still without speaking I pulled back the cover and stood upright, running one hand over my face and flattening my hair. I had work to do. I had our possessions to collect, my old Indian clothes and Natty's dress. I had to place them on our bed and roll them inside the blankets we had used in the wilderness, and in this way carry them safely home.

“So this is my punishment, is it, then?” Natty went on. “If so, how long will it last?”

Again there was no answer from me, and now she lost patience, rocking on her perch by the window. “You are not being fair, Jim,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I said, breaking my silence at last. I had been folding her dress, making it small and neat and placing it inside the blanket; now I looked up and felt the blood pumping into my face.

Natty was not in the least abashed. “Am I the only one who needs punishing?”

“I haven't said anything like that,” I told her.

“You might as well,” she said. “That's how it seems.”

“You think I need punishing too?” I was struggling to keep my voice steady. “Believe me, Natty, I am being punished.” I raised one hand and banged myself on the chest, striking my satchel as I did so. “Here.”

It was only a word, but I said it with so much heat, Natty started from her place in the window, resting one hand on my arm.

“Listen a minute,” she said. Suddenly she was herself again, and I stared down at the bed; at my dusty Indian tunic, stained with sweat and covered in thorn-scratches; at my moccasins almost worn through.

“Neither of us needs punishing,” she went on. “That's all I'm saying. We have to do the next thing now—we have to be free.”

“But we can't forget,” I said.

“That would be our choice,” she said, and squeezed my arm. I glanced up; she was smiling, and her right cheek looked flushed, a rosy color in the brown, where the sun had warmed it. I could not resist her then, as I had never been able to resist her when she gave me her kindness.

“Do you know what I think?” she said, looking straight into my eyes. “You still haven't understood.”

“Understood what?” I asked. There was a kind of emptiness in my head, which I was so anxious to have filled, I knew I would accept whatever she said to me next.

“Black Cloud was a murderer,” she said. “He deserved what happened—him and the other one, both.”

“But we don't know that, Natty,” I replied. “We never saw that. We saw his village but not him in it—or only at the end. We heard stories about him, that's all. Rumors. And we made up stories ourselves.”

I turned to my work again, rolling the blanket with the clothes inside. Natty watched me in silence.

“Besides,” I added when I was done. “Is that why we killed him? For being a murderer? Or did we kill him to save ourselves? Because we'd stolen from him?”

Natty would not answer directly. “Jim,” she said with a sigh. “Does that matter any more?”

“You know it does. It has to.”

She shook her head. “He would have killed us, anyway, whatever the reason. We had to be first if we wanted to stay alive.”

I stared around the room—at the light touching the bed-frame and the ewer and the basin; they seemed to be looking at me, waiting for my answer.

But I did not have answers any more. I had used them all, and Natty had replied to them all. And yet she was not triumphant; she was gentle. “Come now,” she said, and stretched toward me, taking hold of my hand and laying it against her cheek. “Here,” she said. “I am here.” And that was all. We were done.

We were done, and the day began again. I shrugged, as though I had only that moment awoken. Natty went back to her place by the window. I finished my folding and tidying. The sun shone more brightly. The breeze blew. The curtain lifted and bloomed. And a moment later we were downstairs in the lobby, flying past Mr. Brydges's empty desk, out into the warm street. Ten minutes more and we had reached the docks—weaving our way through the sailors, the passengers, the stevedores, the gawpers, the idlers, the pickpockets, the touts, until we found Captain Yalland at his place in the stern of the
Mungo
, and heard him calling down to us as if we were old friends and his most valuable sailors.

“All aboard!” he boomed. “Almost too late…” And so it continued: climbing the gangplank and shaking the captain's hand (which felt callused like a claw); meeting our shipmates (a dozen of them, who made us welcome enough); admiring the ship (which I thought would turn into a greyhound when she was slipped from her leash); finding our cabin (a coffin, with two bunks squeezed on top of one another); stowing our possessions (but not the satchel, which I kept safe inside my shirt); returning to the deck to begin our work (which began with loading and varnishing, then involved mending a sail, then continued with more loading).

By lunchtime it was finished: Captain Yalland was satisfied; our cargo was all aboard; everything was ready; and we would sail at once. “Time and tide!” I heard him muttering to himself, as climbed onto his platform and spun the wheel, dreaming of the high seas and not a moment too soon.

I might have been back on the
Nightingale
almost three years before. A gang of shipmates heaved at the capstan to raise our anchor; other men shouted fore and aft as they pushed us away from the quayside with long poles—and then we were off, the first sail breaking out on the foremast and the breeze filling it with a delightful clean smack; the waves chattering against our prow as the
Mungo
entered the lanes that ran along the midstream of the great river.

By this time I had found a place beside Natty in the stern of the ship and seen the docks fall away behind us, then the tatty outskirts of the town, then the slimy marshes where no houses could be built. The first soft lights of evening began to shake out their colors here—salty green, and purple, and brown. The same colors as home, and the same mist rising. But in a mile—in no time at all—shadows had stepped into this mist and turned into faces which were the opposite of home. Of my original home, at any rate. The faces of White Feather and Hoopoe; Boss and the Spectacle; the Rider; Talks to the Wind and Fire Wife; Mr. Vale and Mr. Brydges flustering under the blades of his fan. But not Black Cloud and not the Painted Man. I could not find them, although I saw their village and their house standing empty, with dust blowing in through their open door.