The Solitude of Thomas Cave (8 page)

9

S
OME DAYS THE cold is so sharp even within his chamber that he must warm stones at the fire and wrap them and hold them to
the small of his back to keep himself from freezing. He huddles curled, immobile, within the few square yards of warmed space
before the stove, his awareness so dulled that he cannot reckon the hours.

And yet he preserves his discipline.

Whenever the temperature rises, just so much as to lift the numbness or the pain, he forces himself out. He takes up his skins
and a musket, and hunts. Even were there no chance of prey the affirmation implied in this activity would help to keep him
alive. As it is, if there is prey to be had then he will find it.

His shipmates have always known him for his skill at hunting. It was a knowledge he brought with him out of his boyhood on
the land, a knowledge of tracking and trapping that he had learnt before ever he saw the sea. He is proud of his skill and
has always been among the first to go ashore for meat in whatever place he has come to, be it these Greenland shores or the
hot coasts of Africa or the Americas. He has shot antelope and alligators, he has caught green parakeets on limed twigs, set
snares for monkeys and lizards, brought down such other nameless extraordinary beasts that he thought would amaze the people
of his distant home. And yet it is all one, whether you trap a rabbit or an armadillo. It comes down to a question of instinct:
the eye for the pattern of an animal's movement, the tension on the thread of a snare. Instinct, and patience.

By the end of January there is a twilight lasting hours on end. He watches through it, watches for movements of shadows, for
indications of life, and the minutes pass and his mind seems to fall between them into other times. There have been so many
waitings in his life: the waiting in port, the waiting on ship, waiting through calms, waiting for wind, waiting for the child.
He looks out into the long twilight and it seems to him that he has been waiting all of his life. There was a waiting in the
English winter when he would go out with his slingshot to hunt the pigeons that roosted in the trees on the commons before
the river, he going out early with his brother into the mist and watching through that long vulnerable moment before dawn.
So many years it must be since he has thought of that. A half-light like this, and yet it was not like this, for there he
knew that it would soon be over, and the birds begin to call and colours break the sky. Here in the North there is no relief:
the hung moment extends to the edge of his endurance. He wraps himself tighter against the cold, plods further into the snow,
searches, checks traps, moves on. Sometimes he tracks a bear a long way and must turn back daunted at the distance it would
appear that the animal can cover, the speed with which it seems to travel. And yet always he is back before the twilight dims,
and it lingers longer and longer so that it begins to seem a ghostly kind of day.

Whenever there is a chance of it I take out the musket and look for game. I have had no success since that great bear before
Christmas, more than one month past, though I have made a number of sightings. My situation is not yet desperate though God
grant that I may have an outcome soon.

It being close to the end of January and thus by my calculation a halfway point in my stay here I have these past few days
made a thorough inventory of the stores remaining to me and their condition. I still have a fair quantity of dry stores, biscuit,
sugar, cheese. All the ale and wine has frozen in its casks yet the wine at least is palatable when thawed. lam confident
that if meat be forthcoming I shall have stores sufficient to last until the summer. Even so I have designated Wednesday a
second day of fast in the week, in which I shall subsist on water and biscuit alone, in addition to the Fridays I have kept
until now.

He continues to be meticulous in his reporting of the material things of his existence. He does so because, he tells himself,
that is what interests Marmaduke — daylight practicalities, the physical things of life - but also, and this he knows but
will not put into words, because the writing of this log holds him steady, every detail he writes, each bag of sugar that
he counts, like ballast on his imagination. On the pages at the back of the log he has listed his inventoried stores and ruled
lines down before them so that he can record in columns neat as those of any accounting housekeeper the quantities consumed.
It has become a part of the preparation of each little meal he has: the measuring and the making of an entry in his little
book; another piece of his monastic rule, like the saying of his prayers, the reading of his Bible, the making of another
pair of wooden heels.

'You are a methodical man, Thomas, I never knew a man so methodical as you.'Johanne had watched him as he brought in his things
for the first time, unpacked them into the room above the shop that was to be their own. He put his Bible on the table before
the window, folded his clothes into the chest at the foot of the bed, set pegs into the wall from which to hang his fiddle.
He was conscious of the way she looked at him, with a kind of tender respect that made him feel wiser than he was.

'It is so many years at sea,' he said, 'carrying about with you just a few things that you can call your own. It makes you
tidy with them.'

It was not such a remarkable thing to say but she received it as if it was. Perhaps that was part of why he liked so much
to be with her, that she gave him identity. She laughed at his jokes, took his thoughts as wisdom, touched him and made his
body more alive.

Her breath is a warm draught down his neck.

'Such a methodical man, Thomas Cave.'

He hunches over his log, a monk-scribe resisting temptation. Only a crack in his thought and he has let her in.

I was disturbed this morning to discover when I went to fill my powder-horn that one of the powder-bags I had in store had
somehow become damp and frozen. I have brought the bag as close to the fire as I dare to lay it and spread its contents to
dry.

'I wish my dear that you would not read over my shoulder.'

'But Thomas you know that I cannot read.'

'In that case will you not see how by standing there you press in on me and take the light?'

He does not turn to see her but looks fixedly ahead, his tight words spoken from tight lips. Always he has been a man to hold
his feelings tight. This is not Johanne, he tells himself, this is a phantom; he might rage at her if he would and he need
feel no guilt. If only she would go. He wants her quite gone, out of his light and out of his mind. He pushes the chair back
and it grates like the anger held in him. For the second time in a day he puts on his furs, takes the musket, the horn, the
shot, and goes out into the cold twilight. He will not look back though he can sense her there watching. Such a glow there
is in the sky now, such hints of dawn colour, that he can scarcely believe that the sun will not appear within minutes above
the horizon yet he knows that it will not. For days this light has tantalised him and put his nerves on edge.

He decides that he will climb the mountain behind the beach where he last saw the sun. Each day conditions permit he will
do that now, climb the mountain or at least to the lookout and watch for the first moment that the sun returns. It was always
a steep climb and it is the harder now, as his old path is all gone and he must remember his way and tread it out again. Close
to the summit he pauses, panting for breath, and looks down the way he has come. The slope looks smooth in the flatness of
the light, steep and perfect as a sugar cone, a lilac glimmer to its surface. It looks as if he could sit and give a great
push with his arms and slide back down on his behind smoothly as a child at play, slither right down to its base and come
to a slow halt on the beach below. He follows the gradient with his eye, back down the way he came, and starts suddenly to
see movement down there on the path he has made. Just movement he sees, for in the twilight he cannot make out the form, which
is no more than a smudge on the snow.

He climbs on, turns again. The pale shape follows his path, but closer now. All he need do is load the musket and wait for
it to come within range. So lightly it moves, slowly gathering form as it approaches, advancing uphill with easy light steps,
tracking him. A big bear, it seems, though he knows from experience how thick the fur is on these Greenland bears, how much
bigger they look than they are when it comes down to meat and bone. He holds his breath as it comes, the wind blowing fine
grains of snow into his face, wondering if at some point the bear will decide that his tracks are too fresh, will become wary
and begin to circle round. Lord, let it not be so. Let the beast come close . . . The bear pauses, stands a moment on its
hind legs, disconcertingly like a man, and sniffs the air. Thomas Cave fires the musket, directly at its head. And the animal
lets out a great howl and is thrown backwards down the steep mountainside, somersaulting over again and again and continuing
to howl as it falls. The sound stuns him where he stands above it in the landscape. It is so long since any sound of life
has been heard here, any sound so gruesomely redolent of flesh and blood. Over and over it rolls and at last comes to rest
against a rock.

He follows cautiously, reloads the gun, fires again at close range. The howls fade to whimpers and, at the last, a wet gurgle
in the creature's throat. He goes and stands above it, like a bear himself in his furs. Deep inside he is hot, exalted with
the killing. A grand beast bigger than himself, meat to last him many weeks, if he can get it home. See, woman, what a man
can do. Out here, even here, where one man is so small, so minute on the face of God's frozen Earth.

10

'F
ATHER SAYS THAT you do not need to take ship again when the child is born. He will have you work with him in his shop. He
says that you have good hands.'

'The sea is what I do. I shall go, for the season, but I shall return.'

'Last year when your ship did not come, I was afraid for you. Will you not stay with us?'

'There's money in a whaling voyage more than your father could dream of in a lifetime. I shall go back, once, twice, until
we have what we need. But do not worry, I shall come back to you. Perhaps, if there have been many whales and a good season,
we can build ourselves a new house, a bigger house than this one, somewhere new but close so that Hans can move his shop but
people will know it still.'

'I should like that. But I should like to stay somewhere near to the Strand.'

'Or we could move to the island. They are building many new houses there. I saw when I went walking there just the other day.'

'A house with a carving about the doorway.'

'Perfect glass in all the windows.'

'With furniture made of oak and pictures on the walls.'

'A tiled floor, black and white in chequers.'

'And a rug on it to warm our feet, placed just so.'

'And you shall have a fine new dress, or dresses, many dresses, and white aprons, and collars of the most delicate white lace.'

'And caps, please, and ribbons, and silk threads for my embroidery!'

'And oranges to eat whenever you please.'

'I shall dry some of them then and put them out to scent our rooms.'

'And our children shall run in and out through the open door and see the ships and tell us who has come and from where and
what they have brought with them.'

'How many children shall we have?'

'Oh, very many. After this one, many more.'

And Johanne fell silent and looked into the fire and he saw how her hand stroked her belly and did not know if she was conscious
of it.

She became nervous as her time approached. 'Thank the Lord that you will be here still, that you will not be gone to sea.'

'You are a sailor's wife, you must know how to do without me.'

'Not for this. For this I want to know that you are here.'

'It is your doing, not mine. I can be of no assistance.' So vulnerable she looked when he said that, but he was out of his
depth. 'I am a man, you understand. I know nothing of all this.'

He wished she would not make this demand which was beyond him.

'Well, I can call on Kirsten Pedersdatter if you like, if it is necessary.'

And he went to see Mistress Pedersdatter that same day and she gave him herbs to calm her, and when he asked if there was
not something else, she gave him also a strange white stone that Johanne must wear on a string about her neck. It was egg
like and rattled as if it had a loose piece inside and she said that it came from an eagle's nest. He paid much for the stone
and did not know if his money was well spent. She took the coins in her clean white hands and smiled then to assure him that
the words to follow came free of charge. Her smile was odd because of the length of her teeth in her narrow face, as if she
was a very old horse, but her eyes were warm as chestnuts. 'See that she eats well. You don't want to have her pine away.
See if you cannot get her some good greens, the darker the better, and red meat, liver; such dark foods will make her strong.'

'Will you come to visit her? You could speak to her and that I'm sure would help.'

'You would be wasting your money to have me there now. Wait and have me when you need me.'

And he went back to Johanne and she prepared her own tisanes, and he bought food at the market and she cooked it. What she
needed was a woman, he saw, and felt then brutish and inadequate. Hans Jakobsen, though he was so talkative in his shop, was
silent at home, far away. He tried to ask Johanne once if it had always been so, if her father had always sat like that at
nights, silent in his chair, and let her play her games about him, even when she was small. Johanne had looked puzzled at
his question and said of course, but wasn't it always thus, didn't every man like thus to quietly mull over all the words
of the working day? So that, he saw, was how she had learnt the stillness of her evenings, those long evenings when she rustled
and stitched and moved only to feed the fire; how she had learnt the appearance of self-reliance that, in all but this question
of her pregnancy, gave her a presence beyond her years.

'Stay with me.'

He was about to go out, to the market and to the harbour. He had his hat and coat on and was tying his boots. That memorable
winter had not let up although it was February; the cold had seemed only to intensify with the winds that swept in on them
these last few days from the Baltic, that howled in from iron skies and drove even the skaters away indoors.

'Please stay.'

'Come on, girl. I'll only be a short time. And your father's in the shop.'

She was looking pale, now he thought of it, but that might be due only to the biting cold, which whistled in through the cracks
in the shutters and through the door as he opened it.

When he came back she was leaning forwards across the bed, her face held in tightened hands, heaving with silenced pain. He
dropped his things and went to her but could not touch her; a person in pain is so alone. He held her only when the spasm
was gone.

It was too soon, she said. She knew that something was not right. Kirsten Pedersdatter had told her the day to expect, the
time of the moon.

'You cannot be sure, Mistress Pedersdatter could be wrong. She is no physician after all.'

'No physician, but people about here say that she has more knowledge than any Latin-speaking doctor of medicine in all of
Copenhagen.'

In the pause before the next pain came they prayed together. And when she rose from her knees he wrapped her shawl about her,
placed pillows on the bed, made her comfortable as he could. He made to go downstairs to prepare a tisane but she would not
let him at first, would not let him leave her alone in the room. He had to tear her hands from him and hold them by her sides
before he could free himself from her, and then he went down and called to Hans, and went to the neighbouring women's houses
to get them to come and help, and once they were with her and there seemed to be some relief or at least a pattern to the
pains, he went out and walked a long way through iced and empty streets.

He had no sense of how long he was gone. There was little enough light in the sky, less to penetrate the narrow gap between
the old houses that leaned towards one another overhead. The darkening of the end of day was scarcely perceptible save in
the intensifying glow of candles and firelight from the windows he passed. He walked slowly, watching the ground, for the
dark ice was deceptive and it was easy to slip. Once or twice he hovered before the rumble of noise from an inn or beer cellar.
The idea of warmth enticed him, the thought of a shot of liquor spreading its warmth inside him, but each time he drew back
thinking that he could not take the press of people. Such a crush of men you found in a bar, such brightness of face and voice.
He was not a man for crowds, he had spent too much of his life apart from them and his soul needed space about it. So he walked
to the water. That was what one did in that crowded city, one walked to the water for calm. He walked north until he had reached
the ramparts and put all the houses behind him, and stood at the edge and gazed into space, a long view out beyond ice-bound
ships into the blankness that had been sea, stood and thought until the wind cut through to his bones, and only then turned
back, guilty for the stolen time.

When he came to the midwife's house he knocked at the door, and waited a long time until he heard a clatter on the stairs
inside and a younger woman came and answered who he saw must be Kirsten Pedersdatter's daughter, so like her she was, only
younger and her face a little plumper, more flesh about the teeth.

'My name is Thomas Cave. My wife is in urgent need of your mother, at least I guess that Mistress Pedersdatter is your mother.'
The likeness in the young woman's face was so complete that he wondered that any father, any man, could have had a part in
the making of her.

'My mother is out. She was called away.'

'Will you tell her then soon as she comes back?'

'I cannot say when that will be.'

'Tell her anyway. Tell her we need her to come.' Almost he had asked the daughter to come instead, as if she must have inherited
her mother's cunning along with her features.

'Wait one moment.' She left him standing at the door and disappeared down the dark passage that ran beside the stairs, came
back a few minutes later with something in her hand. 'I think she would give you this for your wife.'

'What is it?

'For the pain. If it becomes very bad.'

The faces of the women at the house barely registered his return. He felt that they did not care that he had been gone or
for how long, as if he was quite irrelevant to the event. Only Johanne wished to see him. She was walking about the room,
her face taut, a glitter in her eyes.

She put out a hand to him. 'You went out. I told you not to go.'

'I went to look for Mistress Pedersdatter.'

'You were gone such a long time.'

'It is the state you are in, my dear, that makes a few minutes seem like an hour.'

At that moment a wave of pain broke in her and she gasped and bent forward across the bed and held her weight up on clenched
fists that dug into the covers. She did not speak again until it had receded.

'Where is she then?'

Kirsten Pedersdatter did not come until after midnight. There was no sleep in the house save for the apprentice up in the
attic. Hans had kept up in his shop working in a fixed silence that he did not break even when he unlocked the door to her.
He made no acknowledgement that he knew either her or the cause of her coming, but let her pass him and go to Cave who had
descended the stairs at her knock.

'At last,' said Thomas Cave. 'You said you would come when she needed you. What kept you?'

She did not bother to reply. Her lips pursed over her teeth and the look in her eyes was too sharp for him. She told him to
make the women who were watching go. And when they were alone, she had Johanne lie on her back on the floor where she could
handle her most easily and pulled up her nightgown to expose the great pained whale of her belly. She knelt then beside her
and with those pale hands felt her systematically, prodded and pressed, spread her legs wide and folded them up and felt between
them.

'I thought so. I thought it was too soon. It is far sooner than it should be. I do not know why it has started now.'

'What can you do?'

'I? I can do little but wait, like you. And tell her also to wait, to be patient. Have her waters gone?'

'No. Nothing has occurred but the pain.'

'Then there is still a chance that this may settle. The baby is the wrong way up, and too high in her. Perhaps I could give
her belladonna to still the spasms and that would give more time for it to move.'

'Do that then.'

'Wait. Not so urgent. I will watch awhile, I will see how it is going.'

And she told him to sleep and he went to sleep in the room next to that one which was Hans's room, and as he left he saw her
go down on the floor again and press and pummel with her strong white hands, and heard her begin to speak some long spiel
in a rhythmic undertone whose words he could not catch.

He must have gone to sleep still listening to it because when he woke the first thing he noticed was the silence in the house.
There was not a sound from her room, barely a sound from the sleeping city save for the clock chimes and the early cockerels.
Hans slept on the bed beside him: so he had at last put away his work and pulled himself upstairs, and Thomas Cave had been
unconscious of his coming. There was grey light enough to make out his form, scrunched to the side with the blanket pulled
over and one thin leg bent from it, shuddering slighdy with his exhalations ofbreath. When a dog barked somewhere close to
the house he rolled over and began to snore, a soft rattling snore, as another dog took up the call and a wave of barking
spread through the district. Thomas Cave took himself up then, gentle beside the other man, and creaked through to the room
where the women waited.

Kirsten Pedersdatter sat in an upright chair close to the window, arms dangling, body limp as if she slept but her eyes open,
watching. Her patient lay on the bed now, coiled as far as her bulk would allow her. He could not see if she was asleep or
awake, and before he could come closer Kirsten Pedersdatter put a finger to her lips and led him out to the landing and down
the stairs.

In the thin daylight of the parlour below she spoke.

'I have given her something to help her sleep a little. She is going to need all the strength that God can give her.'

It had begun, she said, not as childbirth but as a disturbance of the womb. She could not tell the cause but looked out where
the last star faded and the sun rose between the roofs in a painful streak of pink. She shrugged: God's will; an evil eye.

'Or just luck,' said Thomas Cave. 'Chance? Or the way she is made, some inherited feature like that hair of hers or her blue
eyes, but this a flaw, some flaw in her body passed down from her mother? Did you know that her mother died at her birth?'

'I know because I was there. But be reassured, it was not like this, it was not the same.'

For five days it went on. The pains came and racked her and she gasped and screamed cat's screams, and sometimes she would
growl and bite on a piece of leather he brought up from the shop downstairs, thick hide that she gnawed through with her teeth
and clenched and kneaded with her hands. In the intervals she breathed with deliberation to quell the whimpers and then sought
him with her eyes. And then he looked into them and saw a calm deep inside her and thought of a madonna with dark-gold hair
tumbling about a face of childish innocence.