Signals of Distress (23 page)

‘There, Otto, there,’ he said. ‘We’re going to put you somewhere safe, where you can’t do these people any harm, nor steal their chickens, nor rip the meat off
cows, nor go howling like a wolf all night. We’re going to put you in a pie.’

H
OW DULL
it was in Wherrytown. Even the weather was dull, a leaden sky, no wind worth spitting at. And mild! November must have lost its gloves and gone
back to October to look for them. The townsfolk – gloveless, leaden too – went about their business making pennies, making pies, helping out with pilchards and the
Belle
. Otto
only bothered them at night. Each banging gate, each barking dog, caused wives to wake their men, and men to take a nervous look outside, expecting worse than ghosts. Nathaniel Rankin settled in
the chapel green. He was not the haunting kind. The weight of stone and earth splintered the cheap wood of the coffin lid. The mound that marked his grave collapsed and sank. As soon as there was
any light two robins gleaned the open earth for worms; a dog hawk gleaned the sky for birds.

Along the coast at Dry Manston there were nets to be mended, sails to patch, peat to cut. No one bothered with the kelp. The high-tide mark was hemmed with it. It was as worthless now as sand.
Miggy Bowe had too much time. She didn’t want to stay at home. She was uncomfortable there. She hated every stone of it. Her mother hardly had the heart to speak. She just watched Miggy,
constantly, and took every chance to kiss her daughter, hug her, wish her well. Miggy fled each day to Wherrytown and idled around the quay, watching as the ship was mended, and provisioned for the
voyage with salt meat, potted pilchards, orange preserve in stone jars, dried raisins, blocks of portable soup. She looked seasick already. The sailors nicknamed her the Ghost: the white, unsmiling
face, the red kerchief, her haunted, lovelorn voice. Ralph Parkiss slipped away from work at every thin excuse. He gave her one of his best shirts, and promised her a silver wedding band as soon as
he could find the money. He’d already signed away his next month’s wage to pay for Miggy’s passage to America. The captain said he’d marry them at sea and let them have a
cabin for a night. He’d take down a side of bacon for the wedding feast. Everyone was fond of Ralph. He wasn’t calloused yet. Ralph walked to the shore with Miggy, and took her out of
sight between beached fishing boats. He kissed her on the neck, the mouth, the ear. It was too cold and open for much more. But Miggy was prepared for more. What would it be like to be touched and
kissed by Ralph when he was her husband, when they were bucking on the sea with bacon on their breath? Why wait? Why not go off and find some barn where she could throw away her clothes, undress
herself from this dull place, and be a naked child again? She wouldn’t throw away her neckerchief, though. Ralph said he liked it at her throat. It made him passionate, and she should wear it
on their wedding night, and nothing else. She thought that making love was lying still. They’d be like two caterpillars, softly wrapped, and hanging motionless from a fern on one thin,
breathless thread. Or like two boats at anchor in the same light breeze, tethered on a single line, and calm. She’d have her body matched to his, his chest against her back, their flesh
mollified not made hard by passion, their breathing slow and unified. The love she felt for Ralph would somehow – on their wedding night, or in some barn near Wherrytown – become as
tangible and soft as thistledown. No matter what her mother said.

She wasn’t pleased to see that Palmer Dolly also hung around the quay, offering to help with any heavy load or fetch some tool or timber from Mr Howells’s store. Palmer was too
intimate. He called her ‘Mig’. He pulled her coat. ‘I got a dollar,’ he said. ‘You want to see it, then?’ He put Rankin’s dollar in her hand:
‘There’s fifteen stars on that,’ he said. He pointed out the harp-winged, bowered bird on the reverse, and the date of 1794. ‘It’s old, in’t it? It’s older
than my ma and da.’

Miggy didn’t care about the date, the bird or fifteen stars.

‘So what?’ she said. But she liked the dollar’s bust, so unlike the bull’s-head portrait of the King on English coins: it was a girl with flowing, unconsidered hair,
slightly parted lips, and eyes raised to the sky.

‘Don’t that look like you a bit?’ Palmer said. ‘It’s Liberty, she’s called.’

‘So what?’ Miggy’s lips were slightly parted, too. Her hair had not been combed, it seemed, since 1794. ‘Where d’you get it, though?’

‘The captain give it me.’

‘I bet he didn’t. What for?’

He made her listen to his boasts that Captain Comstock meant – if he were asked – to take him on as a sailor. Miggy was not pleased. She and Palmer might have been sandmates when
they were small. But now she was a woman, promised to another man, and ready for the voyage to America. She wanted no one in the rigging except the real Americans. Palmer ought to leave her well
alone. She didn’t even want to speak to him.

Nor did she really want to speak to Aymer Smith. But he was so insistent with his greetings and his enquiries on her welfare when they coincided on the quay that she had little choice. Besides,
hadn’t he promised her ‘a small payment’? She didn’t like to mention it outright. But when he asked how she was looking forward to America, she said, ‘I’m
looking forward to it well enough, so long as we have pennies for our supper.’

‘You’ll not find pennies in America,’ he said. ‘The coin there is called the dollar, Miss Bowe. You will not discover the sovereign’s head on it, nor will you find
it divides into farthings. The farthing in America is called the cent, though the
scent
of money is the same, both here and in America …’

‘I’ve seen a dollar.’ She didn’t look at him. He wasn’t thistledown. This man was badger hair. She knelt and stroked the little bitch which – God knows why
– had taken quite a fancy to him. It seemed a lifetime since the dog had first come up to their cottage, the ship’s ensign in its collar.

‘You’ve seen a dollar? So then you understand, Miss Bowe.’ He stood back to let a length of timber through. ‘I see the
Belle
is getting shipshape. How soon before
she leaves?’

‘Ralph says three days or four.’

‘So Tuesday, then? Are you prepared for your encounters with the sea? I promise you – and I have voyaged both in tranquil waters and in rough – that there is nothing you must
fear except, perhaps, unsteady feet. Keep your stomach full and sickness will not bother you.’

Seeing Ralph up in the renewed rigging of the
Belle
, she walked away and said (she hoped, she feared, that Aymer overheard): ‘It’s only money’ll keep our stomachs
full.’

Aymer hadn’t forgotten his promise to the Bowes. But he would wait until the day the
Belle
set sail. Then he could make his payment to this girl and her mother in public view. He
might be required to stand beyond the chapel wall in Wherrytown, but they would see who was charitable and who was not. He didn’t think that Mr Phipps would hand out coins on the quay. He
might hand out tracts. Or New Commandments for America. And Mr Walter Howells, on all the evidence, was more likely to collect than give: a penny tax for walking on
his
quay, a halfpenny for
breathing
his
salt air, another penny for the screaming concert of
his
gulls, a shilling for the hire of sea.

Aymer felt unusually well, apart from aching legs. His chest had cleared. His throat was sweet. And his greatest fear, that Otto would be found and sent back to America, had disappeared, now
that the hunting parties were returned with nothing but a pigeon, and now that he’d discovered George with his lantern, walking on the walls towards the little hut. Aymer was in a celebratory
mood. ‘There is no better doctor than the sea,’ he told himself.

And he was getting all the sea he could. Katie Norris had expressed a plan to put the voyage to Canada to good use. She’d make a two-loop necklace from the shells near Wherrytown.
She’d have to bore a needle hole in each and then work through the thread. That would keep her busy on the
Belle
. And then she’d always have a little bit of home to wear around
her neck in Canada. She and Robert could be seen each morning with their backs bent, searching along the shore in front of the salting hall for matching, tender-coloured shells. If the Norrises
were there, then Aymer was as well. He used Whip as an excuse. She had to have her exercise. She loved the beach. So while the dog played in the surf or made life difficult for crabs and
sanderlings, Aymer joined the Norrises and made life difficult for them. He had the name of everything. He knew his winkles from his whelks. The pink and glossy chink-shell that she had chosen for
her necklace, he explained to Katie, was
Lacuna vincta
. No, he didn’t know the common name. Nor did he know the common name for what it was brought him and Whip down to the beach. He
might pretend it was
Amicitia platonica
, and that his affections were directed equally at both of the Norrises. But there was a simpler word, as ever. Even in Latin. It was
amor
.

So Aymer picked amongst the seaweeds for her, glad of every chance – when he found an unblemished chink-shell for her throat – to put his fingers in her palm. She would reward him
with a smile: ‘I thank you, Mr Smith. A lovely one.’ Sometimes a strand of sandy-coloured hair would lift up from her forehead in the breeze and reach across to Aymer’s face.
Sometimes the breeze would sway her skirts at Aymer’s legs, or tug the ribbons on her shawl. He spoke most to her husband, but hardly took his eyes away from Katie. He didn’t want to
miss those times when she bent down to search the sand and displayed her ankles, petticoats, her clothy, apple thighs, her willow back.

His love for her was undeclared, of course. She wasn’t like a Miggy Bowe, uneducated, immature, unlovable, within his reach. Katie was a distant star. Aymer wouldn’t force his lips
on hers, nor write her sentimental letters, nor even make her blush with any open display of his feelings. There wouldn’t be a duel between Aymer Smith and Robert Norris, at dawn, with
swords. There wouldn’t even be a duel of words. They weren’t the personalities for that – a chilling thought. There wasn’t time. She’d be off to Canada within the
week. What Aymer wanted, in these final days in Wherrytown, was simply her proximity. He wanted to store her up, like Rosie Bowe was storing Miggy, to load himself with images of her, to have, if
not a country wife, then some lasting, dark companion of the heart. When he was old, the greying bachelor, they wouldn’t look at him and say he’d never loved. They would instead remark
on how his silences were
her
, whoever she might be, however far from home. What would Fidia and Matthias make of brother Aymer sighing?

The Norrises regarded Aymer as a nuisance. Katie threw his shells away where they would not be found again. The whole point of the necklace was that she would only thread the shells she’d
found with Robert. She might wish her husband were a little ‘fuller’ in his conversations. She might snub him once in a while, out loud. But that was just to show her power. She loved
every blink of his eye. When the necklace was finished, she could tell a rosary of love on every shell, his, hers, his, hers, their lives looped round her throat. She didn’t want a
stranger’s shells to interrupt the chain.

By Saturday she and her husband had had enough of Aymer Smith’s unrelenting company. They avoided the nearest foreshores and walked instead along the coast towards more subtle coves. But
hardly had they found the path down from the cliff and reached the pebble beach than they heard Whip barking at them from above and turned to find their room companion waving at them with his hat.
They were still fond of him, despite his oddities. He was too vulnerable and headlong in his dealings to be disliked entirely. And he clearly regarded them as his friends and equals. That was both
flattering and charming from such an educated man. He and Robert had a lot in common, Katie thought. Yet she could not imagine two men less alike in their attractiveness. Aymer wasn’t
resolute like Robert. He wasn’t wise. He had, in fact, become an irritant for both the Norrises. They did their best to hide their impatience, though. They didn’t want to be impolite.
He meant well, after all.

And surely it was only loneliness that made him hunt them down, that made him join them over breakfast, lunch and dinner, that made him sit on his bed at night, a candle on his knees, engaging
them in conversations that had no consequence or end, or reading to them from his book, and asking them to comment on his Mr Paine or Mr Lyell or Mr Know-not-who. He seemed to watch them all the
time, and be too ready with his feeble, reedy laugh. Katie didn’t even want to make love anymore. She felt their every movement could be heard and, if she and Robert whispered in the night,
the words would bounce around the room and Mr Smith would hear. She wondered if he ever slept. Was that him wheezing, or the dog? She worried that the man was watching her when she took her clothes
off for the night, when she crept out for the pot. Did he stand with his candle, looking down on her, when she was unconscious in her bed, her hair across the pillow and her nightdress disarranged?
How could she now get pregnant for the
Belle
with Aymer Smith just yards away?

When Sunday came, despite Mr Phipps’s disapproval, the work continued on the
Belle
. ‘You will bring God’s damnation down on the ship,’ he warned. ‘Betray the
Lord’s observances and you will pay the price.’ But Walter Howells thought God had all Eternity for His observances, and Sabbaths till the end of time, while he had promised Captain
Comstock that the ship would sail at high tide on the Tuesday morning, November the 29th, 1836. That was a day that wouldn’t come again. To start the voyage in December, when the sea was at
its most unforgiving and the polar ice was sending its outriders south, would be a day too late. It had to be the Tuesday, Comstock said, or it would be next year. So Howells had every hand on
deck, tarring timbers, knotting canvas, dislodging barnacles. Most of the Wherrytowners wouldn’t work, of course, not even for the extra fourpence on the day. The Americans might leave on
time, they judged, but Preacher Phipps would not. And his memory was long and unforgiving. They didn’t want to find themselves made to stand outside the chapel walls, or be buried on the
common land without a prayer or hymn, or be told their sons and daughters couldn’t marry on holy ground. They went to all the Sunday services and made certain they were seen and heard. But
there were some who thought it worth the fourpence to risk a stay in Purgatory and help out with the ship. Palmer Dolly, for example. Some of the coastal fishermen, who lived outside Mr
Phipps’s rule. Together with the sailors, there were more than twenty men. When the chapel foghorn was blown for matins, the hammers on the
Belle
called back and didn’t stop for
prayers.