Jane (26 page)

The Journal of John Clayton

Below it had been added in a fine, spidery script:

and Alice Clayton

I found my eyes locked on those few words on the page, but my mind was racing. The family name was familiar to me, if only vaguely. Clayton. John Clayton. I turned the page to the first entry and stared at the date: 2 March 1885. Leaning my elbows on the table, I covered my face with my hands and went inward, searching my memory as I had taught myself to do when studying. I sifted and rummaged through the multitude of acquired facts and knowledge of my twenty years. It was far easier for me, I thought, to remember the names of the twenty-eight bones of the foot than it was recalling minutiae about a member of the English aristocracy for which I had so little patience … but that was what I must do, for I was quite certain that the name Clayton was of the peerage.

I had some faint memory of it. No more than gossip overheard at an afternoon tea.
Greystoke.
The title came suddenly and unaccountably to mind. Lord and Lady Greystoke.
A long and high lineage. A tragedy. Died prematurely.
Yes, dinner at the Blanchforts’ London house was where I had heard it. A heated discussion of a vast fortune languishing in limbo with no heirs. John Clayton and his young wife, against the advice of his aging father, had taken a diplomatic post in some godforsaken outpost. The ship’s wreckage swept up on remote shores. No survivors. The vulturelike families of England petitioning Queen Victoria to award the Greystoke title to one of them. A legal quagmire. What to do with the London mansion, the country great house, the many properties? Lost at sea. Lost at sea. Godforsaken outpost. John and Alice Clayton, Lord and Lady Greystoke.
The man and woman in Tarzan’s locket. His parents!

With trepidation and anticipation the likes of which I had never known, I began to read.

2 March 1885

I had not thought to begin writing in this journal until we had made landfall and set up our household in the port of Angra Pequena, but circumstance has a way of riding roughshod upon the best-laid plans, and the disquieting turn of events of the past several days has me concerned that my sweet bride and I shall never set foot on the coast of West Africa.

That we are here, hiding in our cabin of the
Fuwalda
—a rough sailing ship with a crew of scoundrels and cutthroats—is a folly born of equal parts ambition, loyalty to my Queen, and the influence of my wife. As a peer of the realm I had, as all men of honor do, served as a soldier when I came of age. But there had been no war worthy of making me a hero (and I sometimes wondered, had I seen battle, would I have even been one?). Instead I’d read the law and entered Victoria’s service in the lower ranks of the diplomatic corps. There I would surely have languished had it not been for the family alliances of my lovely young wife, Alice Rutherford, an intimate of our queen’s eldest daughter, the Princess Victoria, known to all as “Vicky.”

Her marriage into the German royal family to the son of Kaiser Wilhelm—the Crown Prince Frederick—had taken Alice’s friend away from her in all but letters. That passionate friendship (of a kind that only women seem able to continue from girlhood to old age) produced one missive that changed our lives forever … and if our luck runs out, may end it at the bottom of the sea.

Vicky and her royal husband were of a liberal bent. They sat in fierce opposition to that tyrant, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, a man who held the German Kaiser in his thrall. One evening at a state dinner, she had chanced to overhear Bismarck’s plan to begin the colonization of Africa, a policy he and the Germans had always eschewed as a serious fiscal blunder. The objects of Bismarck’s colonial desires were territories along the west coast of Africa, including a puny port town (though any port is better than no port at all) called Angra Pequena. But the place was legally held by the English Crown and run by her consul of the Cape Colony at the southern tip of Africa.

It was well known that Bismarck had spies reading all of Vicky’s letters to her mother, the English Queen, but no one bothered to read those sent to her girlhood friend Alice Rutherford-Clayton. In short, Vicky told Alice of the planned coup, Alice told me, and together in an audience with Queen Victoria, we passed along the secret intelligence. She, in return, rewarded me with a posting to Angra Pequena to keep a close but tactful eye on the German machinations.

I would have jumped at the chance had Alice not recently announced her first pregnancy, so instead I privately balked. But she would have no part of any refusal to help her Queen and Empire. She was young and strong, with several sisters who had had no trouble birthing babies. We were going to Africa together, and that was that.

With little fanfare, save the vigorous protestations from both our families—our true mission kept even from them—we set sail out of Portsmouth, with all believing me the purveyor of Victoria’s new moneymaking enterprise … bat guano, which was found in abundant quantities on the islands off the coast of Angra Pequena.

Alice was a trooper from the moment we’d boarded that vessel and had suffered far less seasickness than I had. Indeed, her pregnancy nausea disappeared entirely, and she became a woman with a mission. My mild-mannered bride was suddenly bursting with confident purpose. Of course equatorial Africa was a foul posting and a dangerous place with its savages and malarial fevers, but she was certain that our destiny was calling us to this godforsaken outpost and that, of course, it would not last forever. Before we knew it we would be back in England with my diplomatic career assured.

Neither of us had expected the mutiny.

At the Gabonese port of Libreville, we had boarded a second ship, an aging barque, to take us the rest of the distance. If the crewmen aboard the
Fuwalda
are the minions of hell, its captain, one Marston James, is Satan himself, and his officers incubi. Vicious and ignorant, the captain takes daily pleasure in corporally abusing his men with a belaying pin and threatening them with his revolver. We, of course, loathed him utterly. We wondered between us why the men stayed under his captaincy and reasoned that their own histories must render them unfit for more convivial situations.

But two days south of the Gabonese port at Libreville, Captain James stepped beyond the pale.

While speaking on deck to Alice and myself, he stumbled over an old crewman scrubbing the deck, fell, and soaked himself in filthy water. Humiliated, he struck out at the poor man with the belaying pin, only to be confronted by another deckhand coming to his friend’s defense. This crewman was a great hulking fellow aptly named Great Henry. He fearlessly put his body between the captain and the scrubber, who lay bleeding on the deck. Without hesitation, James withdrew his revolver and pointed it at Great Henry’s head. A swift brush of my hand on the captain’s firing arm caused the bullet to merely wound and not kill the sailor, who limped away. For this I was roundly chastised by Captain James and told to mind my business on his vessel.

Two days later, the crew was primed for mutiny. Great Henry gave us fair warning of the coming carnage and instructed us to stay below in our cabin.

Since then Alice and I have had the first serious argument of our marriage. I am a man of the law, and despite the appalling behavior of the ship’s captain, I regard mutiny as a most heinous criminal offense. I felt it my duty to warn him. Alice would hear nothing of it. That Great Henry told us of the rebellion and cautioned us to stay below convinced me that he means us no harm, that he is grateful for my having saved his life and will return the favor by saving our lives. But I am morally torn and in fear of the outcome in either direction.

Good Christ! The first shots have been fired above deck! Alice, more stoic than I ever imagined her to be, is sitting upright on her bunk, knees pressed together, back straight as a rod. I must go to her now. Sit beside her and hold her hand. Await our fate. I pray that there will be another entry in this journal, and that a peaceful fate awaits us, one that will not have us fish food at the bottom of the Atlantic.

Written belowdecks in our cabin on the
Fuwalda,

John Clayton

1 April 1885

There may be eloquent words to describe the predicament in which Alice and I now find ourselves, but I am no Daniel Defoe, and we, unlike his heroic creation, Robinson Crusoe, have not been battered, half drowned, or shipwrecked upon an island. We have instead been set down upon a wild, deserted shore by mutineers, some of whom wished, I believe, to throw us overboard with the abhorred captain and his officers, but one of which—Great Henry—was a man of honor and gave us our lives as well as our possessions, and even a promise that when they were next in a “safe port” he would convey our location to the authorities in order that we might be rescued.

Alice astonished me with her fortitude, never shedding a tear, even as the
Fuwalda
disappeared around the point, leaving us alone with piles of crates of our personal items, furniture, tools, rope, food provisions, two of the ship’s old canvas sails, and, blessedly, my box of rifles and ammunition—far more than I might have expected from that scurrilous company of ruffians.

It is true that Alice had no earthly idea what we should do with ourselves as the sun set in a shocking blaze of crimson and gold. Nor did I. Thankfully she had bullied the sailors into piling our things as far back from the water’s edge as possible, under the row of coconut palms, for we had no idea of the action of the waves, and sensible girl that she is, Alice did not wish for our belongings to be ruined in the first high tide. They grumbled but complied, and so placing the canvas over the great pile, and ourselves with them, we settled into the sand for our first night—with my Winchester loaded and close at hand.

I never slept, though she did. In the morning she said that she had had a prescience that we would be found in less than a week’s time by a stroke of good fortune, having nothing to do with our mutinous benefactors. Choosing to trust her optimism, we spent the next day scanning the horizon for our saviors and I, therefore, failed to put forth any effort whatsoever in improving our circumstances.

That night, unfulfilled of our hopes, we huddled again under the canvas as a great tornado raged over the sea, whipping the waves so high on the beach that I blessed Alice’s foresight a hundred times, as in the morning light we found all our possessions spared. But in the next two days, as we vainly awaited rescue, flotsam began washing up on our shore. Great chunks of a wrecked vessel, most certainly undone by the tornado. A good portion of the deck and timbers, and some of the aft with its brass porthole window still intact were gifts from the sea on successive mornings. When a jagged bit of the bow with the lettering “Fuw” washed ashore, I found it first and tried to hide it from Alice … most unsuccessfully.

Finally she wept, her premonition “a worthless scrap of wishful thinking,” for now our location would never be passed along to the authorities, and if the wreckage were found, we, along with the unlucky crew, would be presumed lost. I began to berate myself for demanding we embark on this fool’s errand. It was nothing of the sort, she insisted. We were doing our duty to God and country, and besides, she told me, we might still be found.

Nevertheless, sobered by this inconceivable reality, I began that day to build a shelter. The one large tree on the wide, sparkling beach would be perfect, I told her. I had never built so much as a wooden box, but there were tools and excellent pieces of timber at hand. Further, I had a brain in my head and a very serious purpose—to protect my wife and my unborn child from the elements until the time we were rescued … or died. I thought again of Robinson Crusoe, his courage and manly self-reliance, and silently vowed to emulate him. I counted myself infinitely more fortunate in having not a Negro servant as my companion but my young wife, who appeared to me more beautiful with every passing hour.

My marriage to Alice Rutherford was, as all marriages in our society are, an arranged one. We’d been pledged to one another from the time we were children by our fathers, who saw some great benefit to both our families. She had always been a plucky girl, but I never knew her mettle till that day I spread my tools about me on the sand and took stock of the materials I might use for our new “home.” I looked up and saw Alice, who, having crowbarred open a crate, was similarly taking stock of our food stores—salt meats and biscuit, even a small supply of potatoes and beans—with as much calm assurance as she might have overseeing a half dozen kitchen maids preparing for a dinner party at Greystoke Manor.

God grant me the strength to keep her safe, she and our child who will, I fear, be born on this terrible shore. And let me build a strong fortress against the wild elements of nature that will surely test us in this great adventure, one that we neither asked for nor expected, but one, I pray, that will make better people of us.

Written apprehensively on a Gabonese beach,

John Clayton

*   *   *

I closed my eyes. I could not bear to read any more, nor did I wish to look at Tarzan, for my heart ached with grief for him. Yet I refused under any circumstances to regard him with pity. I must make him understand what the horrors within this room revealed of his past, unsure what result it might achieve. Here was a young man who had conquered unspeakable adversity and become extraordinary. He was not, for all I could tell, unhappy with his circumstances. Indeed, Tarzan had shown himself to be a man of courage, honor, and intelligence far surpassing any of my English suitors and equaled only by my father. Who was I to rip apart the finely woven fabric of his remarkable existence? What would be the consequences if I did?