His Last Fire (5 page)

A
T
ULIP
S
KY

A
disorderly parcel was handed in at the Turkish Embassy. It was brought by a boy who, panting, had carried it some distance through dung-thick streets to ever grander gateways. Painstakingly written on the outer covering was:
to xlensee turckush ambassad
with decorative flourishes beneath. Brown paper, too much thin hemp rope, newspaper and household cloths had been used to wrap five handsome copper coffee pots.

There was no indication who'd sent the parcel and the boy fled, intimidated by armed, turbaned guards at the door. The pots gleamed with years of polishing, but the embassy kitchen was fully equipped with similar vessels, so dust soon dulled them in a far pantry.

Alice White had watched the wrapping, waiting to demonstrate her writing skill and earn three pence. She tried unsuccessfully to charge more for the flourishes. She was a canny young woman, severely cut, constantly critical, certain of a higher destiny. Of course Betsy Hoddy knew more of the world, but she was old and could neither read nor write. Alice would never end up like
her
, unmarried, still a housemaid, senior only by dint of age.

Alice didn't know the pots had been stolen. Over several years Betsy had secreted each one into her box of clothing. They'd come from a vast collection of curiosities belonging to a previous employer. The thefts were never discovered, Betsy eventually left and in her final employment she'd felt free to display all five on her meagre mantlepiece. As head housemaid in a newly-built country house she had a room of her own under the eaves, warmed by a tiny coal fire. Here, when not buffing the pink-tinged copper, she contemplated clouds and stars through the roof window, her only light. The younger maids admired the pots, curvaceous, exotic, glowing in the firelight. They accepted her vague explanation, quickly forgot them.

Alice was wrong to make no connection between the parcel and Betsy's new-found piety. She assumed increased church-going was just a feature of old age. Betsy was often in a huddle with the curate. She placed an unopened prayer book on the deal table by her bed and sometimes mumbled as if in prayer. The prayer book had gold-edged pages. Betsy ran her fingers along its closed goldenness and felt doubly blessed.

She had never made a living from thieving, hadn't the wit, but she knew a lovely thing when she saw it. At fourteen she was sacked from employment as a kitchen maid in Red Lion Street. Mrs Nancy Mason found her rifling her drawers, placing silver thimbles on each of her fingers. Mrs Mason had always been exacting but her anger on this occasion was unprecedented.

Betsy returned to her East Anglian village, walking for several days, arriving faint and unwelcome at the shack from which young mud-bound siblings ran out.

‘What a come back for?' her mother shouted. ‘What will a eat? Got rid of a last time. What a come back for?'

Her father had taken her up to London and left her. It was extraordinary that she had found harmless employment, retained her virtue, for she was comely, her face a soft symmetry, her peasant origins suggested only by slight squareness of jaw and hand. And now she was back, prettier than before, a burden to indigent parents.

At first she refused to sleep in the bed with the rest of the children, but winds from the North Sea drove her to it. She wore her kitchen maid's shoes until they dropped to pieces, combed her hair enough to draw disparaging comment. She proved her value when the father fell into a mill race and drowned, leaving her to gather wood, trap rabbits and, had she wanted to, while away hours smoking on an upturned trough. She was still there at eighteen, knowing she should leave, her resolve impoverished.

*

It is August. Betsy kicks carefully through stubble, taking a longer route to delay her tasks. The edge of the wood is still; birds, leaves, too exhausted to flinch. In the heat only insects thrive. She stops by a mound high as her knees to watch wood ants running back and forth, carrying twigs as big as their bodies, eggs, carcases.

Men's voices, nearing. She backs behind a great pine in time to see two figures hurrying along the dirt road she's just left. Glimpses moustaches, long and
black, extraordinary clothes, colours. They carry a
heavy wheel between them, presumably taking it to the wheelwright; a carriage broken down.

Alert now, she hears more voices and follows the sound, but parallel to it, into the wood. Here is the clearing, bright with fractured light, where she sometimes sits and dreams. She makes for a thicket of ash sprouts and elder to watch.

She's never seen men like this before. They wear huge turbans of white and red, long-sleeved jackets, voluminous striped trousers, flat boots, belts with daggers. Several unroll an immense carpet, drive brass poles into the ground, raise a canopy over it. Others cast around for wood – Betsy shrinks into her thicket – drag logs together and light a fire.

The leader appears. A man both tall and round, bearded, turbaned, dressed in a long green silk coat patterned with leaves and sinuous stalks, he sits cross-legged on the carpet, made comfortable with cushions. From a tripod over the fire they hang a pan, measure spoonfuls from a box painted with tulips, pour hot liquid into a small copper vessel, fat-bellied, squat, its beak-spout like a bird Betsy once saw in a print shop window.

Coffee, dark, biting. She knows the smell, if not the taste, from coffee-houses she's passed in the city. Her nostrils and palate are dry; she longs to drink. Excitement and the sound of pouring press on her bladder. She lifts her skirts, plants a leg sideways in a half-crouch, pees on dry leaves and the next minute is hauled out of the thicket by two turbaned men. They carry her off, arguing in their rapid gibberish. She'll always remember how she felt no fear, for all the daggers and the strangeness.

They take her a little way off to where, on another carpet under another canopy's nacreous shade, several women recline on cushions and drink coffee while children sit with them and eat small cakes.

It seems that she stands for minutes, speechless, pressing into the marvellous carpet with her toes, breathing intoxicating coffee fumes as the women question her in their language.

‘Don't understand,' she says.

‘Turkish,' says one woman, pointing to herself and the others. ‘Am-bassa-dor,' she enunciates slowly, pointing away in the general direction of the men.

‘Oh, oh. Miss Hoddy,' Betsy says and curtsies.

Some of the younger women pull at Betsy's sleeves and sit her down, bring a bowl and jug. Wash her face, hands and feet in water smelling of roses. Children in silk clothes, like miniature adults, black-eyed, amused, come up and touch her fair hair, stroke it.

For an hour she sits with them under the canopy's tulip sky. They chatter unceasingly without Betsy understanding a word. They bring her a tiny cup in thin china, her rough fingers honoured by its touch; pour coffee into it from another beaked pot with a curving handle, its brass lid shining wheat-gold, like an elegant hat. She sips the sweetest blackness and it seeps into her veins, possesses her body. Her cheeks flush with heat and pleasure. Her eyes are dazzled by smiling plumpness on all sides, half concealed by gauzy kerchiefs, garments of pale pink silk, green, embroidered white, silver thread flowering on gold brocade, glittering bodkins, girdles embedded with lustrous jewels. Her mind fills to its very edges with coruscation to last a life.

W
HAT WAS
L
EFT TO
K
NOW

F
rom London he took stages to Colchester and Ipswich
then walked. He knew the general direction and besides, he wanted to sniff his way to the sea. There was pay in his midshipman's pocket for inns and beef and once they'd wheedled out of him where last he'd sailed and in whose fleet, he went to bed drunker than he'd intended.

Long before he saw the coast he smelled brine in the wind. It was there in the woods, even as his boots scuffed dried puffball husks, rotten stumps of stinkhorns, sank into a thick mire of leaves: all that was left of a rich autumn. Salt stench drew him to the marsh edge, the trodden path, the reeds that once hid everything from him. Soon enough the church tower appeared above the trees.

It was five years since he left, a boy. Now one-and-twenty, he'd seen war and death at sea, loyalty, hatred, victory, injustice. Had been lifted high by the spirit of radicalism, read Tom Paine; heard all about America, the promised land. What was there left to know? No parents would welcome him home, no siblings. Only one person would remember John Airey. He was returning for Margaret.

Dusk and smoke of fires. Remembered shapes:
yew tree, wall, shed leaning seawards. He went straight to the house. He knew his adoptive father was dead and had no doubt he'd left the house to Margaret, his housekeeper and erstwhile mistress.

The bell was answered by a young girl who, seeming not to understand, showed him into the parlour. Here, toasting himself before the fire, the new surgeon-apothecary took him for a patient.

No, John explained, he was a visitor hoping to find Margaret Hickling.

‘Ah! She it was who sold me the house,' said the surgeon, a ruddy-skinned man of impregnable health. He understood that before her it had belonged to the previous surgeon and pleasant indeed he found it. A little dark perhaps, but situated close to the highway, well-placed for night calls.

John asked if Margaret had moved nearby.

No, he said, she was not in the neighbourhood. She hadn't told him where she was going, though subsequently someone heard she'd gone north. It seems the house had been left her by her widowed employer but she no longer had reason to live in the district.

‘The young lad went to sea,' she'd apparently remarked. He studied John's face.

‘And did you know her well, Mr . . . ?'

But John wouldn't give his name, thanked the surgeon, glanced round and left. The house was entirely different. Its gloomy rooms, once saturated with the sorrow of his adoptive parents, smiled brightly like their new owner. He spent the night on an alehouse settle well wrapped against spring frost.

He woke early – the settle was hard; he'd rather have slept in a hammock – and set off northwards.

Those had been the first decisions he'd ever made. To leave the navy. Then
not
to go to America with his friend William Leopard to start a new life, but return instead to the woman with whom he'd enjoyed six carefree months in his youth. Six months of affection, of manhood. Before their discovery. Before his adoptive father's dismay at this betrayal, at the hurtful triumph of youth over age, at John's poor return for years of dull but worthy upbringing. He'd agreed to go away to sea.

Neither Margaret nor he made any promises – she was, after all, his adoptive father's servant and mistress, not his – and they didn't correspond. It had never occurred to him that she wouldn't be there in the house in which he'd spent most of his childhood, waiting for him, ready to resume their joy. Up in the roof of the house where she had her bedroom and he his. Where through the skylight you could hear the sea shift. Wake together to watch clouds scud. For
that
was what was left to know – the comfort of love.

He couldn't think of turning back now. To continue walking was to enter unknown land, an uncertain life. But to return was to re-enter known territory that his mind had left. He had to go on.

For days he walked, spurning no offers of rides in carts and wagons. This was seamen's country: the inhabitants had only to note his midshipman's stripe, hear the name
Ardent
to know his worth. They thought he was off to join his ship in Yarmouth and once there he did indeed wander along the dockside, alert to its signs and moods, yet detached, distracted. Soon he turned into the town where he sauntered vaguely along the smarter streets, hung about the market, glanced down alleys, into doorways at night. Yarmouth was north. But there was a lot more north between there and the Wash.

Back at the quays he watched the loading of ships for battle: hundreds of wooden boxes of ordnance, ammunition, stores. The town was full of marines. Here it was, laid out for him, recognisable, the world he knew. Arduous, companionable. They would welcome him back. Young, strong, promoted twice in three years, they needed him.

He kept close to the curve of the coast wherever he could. Dipped down to the beach to stare at the waves, as if she might rise out of them. His money ran low but his story kept him fed. And on occasion woken in the night by women younger than Margaret had been back then; for she was older than he by a number of years and already saddened, even though he'd made her smile.

The country changed, woods became rare, fields opened themselves to the sky. Where he could he walked along the beach, his boots cracking wrack and razorshells. On one side flint-grey ocean, on the other mud cliffs scraped by wind and flood, shaped like waves before they break, their crests a spume of grass. Here, in this land, sea ruled. You accepted it, lived off what it gave, grieved for what it took, fishing smacks, men o'war. Villages.

On a blustery day he heard bells ring, tolling without cease. Faint, distant, some village on the way to Cromer; he wouldn't reach the place till late. He hastened but it was quite dark when he arrived, flares had been extinguished, rescue was over for the day. A 74-gun, they said,
The Tremendous
, set sail from Yarmouth, the light good, mid-afternoon, known pilots in charge but a strong tide flowing. More than 500 men on board. Broke up in no time and only two smacks out fishing to haul in the living from the swell. Hit Hammond's Knoll, the worst of the sandbanks. So many ships lost there. So many good men gone. Yes, tomorrow they'd be glad of any help with the sea's harvest.

He joined the line of carts to retrieve those cast up by the morning's high tide, to lay them on boards hastily swept of dung, trundle them back to crowd the churchyard.

The whole village was at the beach sifting through treasures arranged by the artless sea on beds of wrecked shells. Women and children loaded their handcarts with food, linen, casks, little spoiled, so freshly drowned. Men heaved wooden boxes onto wagons, furniture, spars, planks, winters' worth of fuel. It was as if a fair were taking place in the midst of war. People must step over bodies to reach their booty.

John had seen men killed in battle, men with whom he'd eaten, laughed and argued hours before. These were not his companions, yet they were the same: the worn, the untried, hardened, soft-faced. Brave, terrified. Which of them had cried out and to whom had they called? Which had looked inward and found a sudden consolation? Or none. All day the sound of surf and wind pounded in his ears. All day he heard the voice of every man and boy whose body he gently carried to the cart.

‘Will you stay?' they asked him in the village. ‘We need more seamen.' Later in the week there would be a funeral at a great single grave dug in the glebe next to the church.

No, he told them, when all this is done he'd attend the burial but then he must travel north. He had made up his mind.

‘Leave that one,' someone said to him as he bent to lift another corpse the following day. ‘He's a local man. Fisherman. Boat capsized when the big one went down. They'll come for him.'

He laid the body on the sand. The weathered face beaten, the huge hands like nets drying.

Margaret came to collect her husband.