Signals of Distress (14 page)

‘There’s truth in that,’ said Mrs Yapp. She couldn’t laugh. She had to swallow it. Smith’s clothes and soap and bag were on the settle in her room.

The Wherrytowners couldn’t be blamed for their alarm. Not only had the African escaped, but now it seemed that he had burgled someone at the inn and might be hiding from the snow in
Wherrytown. They wouldn’t have been more worried if they’d heard a bull was loose. They understood the dangers of a bull. You could lock your door against a bull. But Africans? Lord
preserve them from the savages. They might be raped and eaten in their beds. Some hurried off to check their daughters and their outhouses. Some looked uneasily into the shadows. How well would
women sleep that night, with all their men at sea in pilchard boats and Otto on the loose?

A voice at Aymer’s shoulder muttered, ‘You are a provocation, sir.’

‘Ah, George!’

They walked without speaking till they reached the lintelled door of the inn. Inside, Americans and Wherrytowners were waiting to be served with beer.

‘No blisters! And two sovereigns saved, I think,’ said Aymer. He was delighted with himself, despite his throbbing ear. Ashamed as well. And then, ‘I can rely, I hope, on your
discretion?’

‘Two sovvers buys discretion, sir, and also can provide you with some clothes that are a match for those the blackie stole. Such wickedness! And sheets and soap, if you require. And some
very clever books from George’s Lending Library. Do you begin to see my strategy?’

It wasn’t long before Aymer was reunited with his property, and George (just a half-crown better off) was warming ale and punch for anyone with ha’pennies to spare.

Aymer took a candle to the room. How glad he was the Norrises were there, and still awake and talking softly to each other. He placed the candle on the sill and called to them behind the
bed-curtain. ‘I have my clothes. The parlourman has brought them back. There has been some misapprehension by Mrs Yapp and the Americans.’

He recounted to the curtains what had happened in the lane, and how it had required ‘unusual restraint on my behalf, and dignity’ to check the captain’s temper. ‘He spoke
to me with a deal of freedom, and he struck me once, but did not dare to do it twice,’ he explained. ‘I could not admire it. But I am glad that my rebuttals were not expressed with any
greater roughness than was absolutely requisite.’

His hands were shaking again. Retelling what had happened was reliving it.

‘I cannot regard the captain as a man of much gentility,’ he said. ‘But it is good to share a room with people of distinction, such as you, dear friends. I hope I can regard
you both as friends?’ His nose was running now. He wiped it on the damp arm of his coat. He sniffed back tears as best he could. But soon he couldn’t stifle them. The tears had let him
down, and he was sobbing. ‘I am not easy that the African is out in weather such as this.’

At last the curtain was drawn back and Robert Norris poked his head into the room. ‘Don’t upset yourself. Whoever set the poor man free could have chosen better times, it’s
true. But that’s for
his
conscience, not yours.’

And then his wife, invisible behind his back, said, ‘We should be grateful he’s free from his imprisonment. It broke my heart to see him so derided in the yard.’

‘You are so good,’ said Aymer Smith. His sobbing now was unrestrained, and he was shivering. Katie Norris stepped across the room into the candlelight, and pressed Aymer’s head
against her stomach and her cotton nightdress as if he were a child and not a man.

‘No, you are good to care so much for a stranger. You are a Good Samaritan,’ she said.

‘You think too kindly of me.’ Aymer would have lifted up his hands and held her by the waist, and sunk his face more deeply into the cotton, into her mottled, salmon quilt of flesh,
except that Robert Norris had crossed the room as well. He put his arm around his wife and placed his spare hand, like a preacher, on Aymer’s head. ‘Of course, we are your
friends,’ he said. They held each other for a moment, and listened to new noises in the courtyard, two flights below. Footsteps on the hardened snow. A wooden door banged shut. A sneeze. Had
Otto come in from the snow? The parlour clock was striking twelve.

‘It’s only fishermen,’ said Robert Norris. ‘The Sabbath’s over and they’re going to their boats. But we must sleep.’

‘I cannot.’ Aymer’s pulse was hammering.

‘You must,’ said Katie. But she was looking into Robert’s eyes when she recited,

T
HE
D
OLLY BOATS
had no regard for Sabbaths. They’d rather catch the Devil’s fish than none at all. They put to sea
before midnight and took advantage of the snow-bounced moonlight and a little wind to shoot their unblessed net up-water from the
Belle
, two tons of it, a looping quarter-mile of rope and
cork and lead, and every knot hand-tied. It curtained off the stem of sea beyond the Cradle Rock. Dollys had fished there for a hundred years at least. It was known to be an alleyway for
shoals.

The larger boat, with Henry Dolly and his two younger sons aboard, rode on its anchor at the mouth of the net, with lanterns burning on both sides. They shared a pipe and, if they prayed, prayed
only that the dawn or fish would come before they died of cold. They didn’t speak. What should they say? That they would rather be asleep, farting supper in their beds? That they would rather
they’d been born miles from sea and never had to smell or touch a fish again? They watched their boots, their knees, the backs of their hands, the final lamplit flurries of the snow. They
listened to the wind, the distant flap of tattered canvas on the
Belle
, the grieving timbers of their boat, the never-ending tug of war between the granite and the sea, and didn’t for
a moment feel bored, excited or afraid. This was their life, and it was hard.

Their elder brother, Palmer Dolly – with only the old man Skimmer as a mate – was master of their smaller boat, fifty yards astern. He’d put it at the centre of the loop of
net, halved its sail and now was waiting at the tiller for the call –
Tuck ’em in! And tuck ’em-IN!
– that fish were coming through and that the tuck net should be
dropped. And then a night of labour, trawling pilchards from the curtained sea. If there
was
a call, if any pilchards
came
, that is. He’d fished this stem before, all night, all
day, and netted nothing but some kelp. But on this night he was an optimist. He felt elated by the snow, the snubbing of the Sabbath and by the
Belle
’s enticing, twiggy silhouette. The
stranded ship, he felt, had brought good luck. The
Belle
would bring the pilchards in. The
Belle
would change – would
save
? – his life.

Palmer Dolly was no gadabout. He’d hardly ever been inland. He’d never seen the sea beyond Wherrytown. He was a fisherman and not a mariner. But he was of an age – at nineteen
– when he could see his life mapped out, dry ink on the page. He’d marry someone from the coast – ‘We weds wi’ Dry Manston folk,’ his mother said. ‘We
don’t have owt to do with Wherrytown.’ He’d spend his life with some girl like Miggy Bowe. She’d have the kids. He’d have the boats. He would take his sons to tuck for
fish and she would keep their girls to help out with the kelp. A waste of time, as kelp was worthless now. There’d be no strangers in their lives, just cousins, neighbours, Mr Howells. And
they would sit, between their cottage and the sea, repairing nets for Ever and Ever, World Without End. There’d been no prospect of escape until the
Belle
had come. But now he mapped a
life out of his own. He could be a sailor on the
Belle
, and sail back to America to speak their showy, manly English baritone, and make his fortune in the sun. There always was a blue sky
and a sun in Palmer’s dreams. He only had to volunteer. Shipmaster Comstock, after all, already knew he was a willing and a useful hand. It had only been a couple of days since the captain
had stood on deck and picked out Palmer Dolly to help with that ‘one injured
party
, on the
orlop
’ (remote, seductive, big-ship words). Palmer had been the first one
pointed at, the first one chosen, the first one
favoured
by the captain.

Palmer hoped he’d proved himself a good man to employ. They’d gone below decks on the ship and seen the African. Nothing in the sea was quite as strange as that brown, bleeding man.
But still Palmer had done as he was bid and put the fellow in a palliasse and hammocked him on deck and thence into the Dolly boat – the same boat, in fact, in which he and Skimmer were now
waiting for the pilchards. The African had bled onto their boat. He’d marked their wood. Palmer couldn’t see the bloodstain in the dark. But it was there, and probably would still be
there when Palmer Dolly was elsewhere, a mariner, the optimist at sea, the emigrant, the escapee, the freeman in the Yankee sun.

‘My money is we’ll land a decent catch,’ said Palmer. He stood and urinated off to leeward. He was in a rare and happy mood. ‘Now, there’s a bait’ll bring
’em in.’

‘My money is we’re only netting snow tonight,’ said Skimmer. He spat into the sea: the Devil’s brew of piss and phlegm and salt. He was not an optimist.

They didn’t have to take a Devil’s fish. It was gone midnight when the pilchards came. The snow had stopped, but there was now a storm of fish. The sea was drenched in fish. It was
as if the water had lost its liquidness and was turning into solder. The pilchards winked and weaved their blue-green backs, their silver undersides, in teeming, wet stampedes. They trenched and
ridged themselves between the deep-shore rollers. The solder boiled and swelled. Dozens of hake and some tunny fish, the smallest more than ten feet long, were at the pilchards’ tails,
herding them, and gorging on the ones they broke loose from the shoals. The pilchards bunched and fled into the in-shore pools. They stripped their rhombic scales and ripped their soft bellies on
granite scree below the Cradle Rock. They banked up amongst the cattle carcasses in the shallows off Dry Manston beach, where tunny could not reach. They butted at the shoreline with their sulking
lower lips. They threw themselves onto the beach. There was no need for boats or fishermen or nets. The Dollys could have saved themselves the trip, and come down to the beach with lanterns. They
could have bucketed the fish by hand and carted them away by donkey-load and only got their ankles wet.

The pilchards seethed and tumbled round the Dolly boat, attracted by the light, and panicked by the dolphinlike clicks and whistles that the Dollys made.

‘Tuck ’em in! Tuck ’em in! Tuck ’em in!’

They passed through the gateway of the net like one great metal eel, a half a mile in length, and twenty yards across. A giant could put a saddle on its back, and flank the shoal, and ride those
pilchards like a horse. He’d not get wet. He’d not be ducked in Palmer’s piss or Skimmer’s phlegm. The shoal was solid tin.

The Dollys didn’t close their net for fifteen, twenty minutes. Each wrap and fold of sea turned pilchards on their sides in heavy, silvered arcs. It was a blessing pilchards make no sound.
If they could voice their bafflement at nets, then theirs would be the saddest lament in the world. The Dollys were no longer cold, and missing bed. They were too busy to be cold. If they worked
hard and luck was on their side, they’d make enough on this one night to see them through to spring. So long as there was not a glut.

But there was a glut, of course. Too many pilchards. And far too many boats. Everybody had full nets. The thirty families or so who’d put to sea that night and worked their stem down-coast
from Wherrytown were overwhelmed with fish. They’d brought as many pilchards as they could on board in baskets. Now the gunnels of their boats were so low that one good wave would flood their
decks. They had to let their nets fill up, then herd the nets along the coast into the shallows beyond the channel buoys and harbour lights at Wherrytown and wait for day.

By four thirty in the morning there were forty-three nets bunched up like massive lily pads. The untucked pilchards tumbled in the water, struggling for their passage east, doing what they could
to escape the hake which had been netted too. Those few that had the strength to leap over the nets only fell amongst the captive pilchards of a neighbour’s net. The fishermen watched and
waited in the melting darkness. A bumper catch. Not that that would do them any good. Mr Howells would shake his head and say, ‘The fatter the shoal, the thinner the shilling. We’ll not
get rich from these.’ Not rich, perhaps. But it was satisfying to have netted such a tumult. When dawn came, then the fun would start. They’d need a hundred volunteers to bring the fish
ashore.

‘We’ll put those Americans to work,’ said Henry Dolly. ‘We’ll break those jiggers’ backs with lifting fish.’ Again he shared a pipe with his two sons.
It was all they had to keep them warm till daybreak. Monday would be fine and clear. There was no wind, and there were stars across the western, clearing sky. The paling and descending moon was
touched with green. Good luck. Good weather. The seagulls didn’t mind the dark. They shrieked like Saracens at such an easy feast of fish.

Skimmer in the smaller boat had made a canvas bed and – God knows how he managed it – was fast asleep, despite the cold and gulls. Palmer Dolly sank his head into his coat and pushed
his hands into his sleeves, like a teacup Mandarin. He was Midshipman Dolly on the midnight watch. Crewman Dolly. Palmer Dolly, captain of the
Belle
. Mr Dolly and his dollars! He was
dreaming distantly, though he hadn’t got a landscape for America, or any idea how cruel the voyage there would be. He couldn’t guess the span of the Atlantic, nor how the ocean, far
from land, would scarp and dip like wolds, the
Belle
a wind-tossed wooden hut amongst the water hills. He had no proper sense of anything excepting Home, and three boys to the bed, and nets
and nets and nets.