The Devil's Mask (5 page)

I followed the officer down to the dock and along the quayside. He walked more slowly once he was within sight of the water, and before he reached the
Belsize
he paused to fill and tamp and light a pipe. I would have approached the man then, but found myself holding off. I stood at a distance, watching the officer observe the preparations for another voyage with a stillness that presented itself to me as longing. The ship leaving port was called the
Sally-Ann
. Stevedores were loading her up. There on the quay stood the usual barrels of brandy and beer and bolts of carefully wrapped cloth. Beside them were muskets in crates marked Belstan's of Birmingham, and more crates no doubt filled with new kettles and pots and silverware, and there … of all things … stood a shrouded grandfather clock whose chimes sounded in protest when two of the dockhands picked it up.

The noise nudged the officer on towards his own ship. It had been moved along the quay and now lay berthed beneath the new Merchant Venturers' crane, the shadow of whose arm juddered across as I watched the man march authoritatively aboard. He was the Captain, presumably: I saw a seaman leap from the rail at his approach; even the gulls flapped from the deck at the pistol-shot succession of his hobnail boots up the gangplank. The crane-arm passed overhead again and I looked up at it, took in the ponderous sweep of the boom as it
bisected the flat unfathomable web of lines that comprised the rigging. The sky above was thronged with towering grey clouds. They seemed to be rushing to keep the ship's masts in place. As I watched, the sun edged a valley of cloud with silver, then broke through blue sky and warmed my face. The rigging acquired an extra dimension, turned from cross-hatched lines to a Chinaman's puzzle hanging in space. I imagined myself a gull twisting in flight to skewer the lattice of ropes from bow to stern and was suffused with a sense of the possible; then another cloud overran the sun and the ropes tightened to a flat mesh and the crane-arm swung the dead weight of a pallet strapped full of casks back over my head again.

The gangplank was warped and rutted. I advanced up it and fingered the rope handrail and stared down at the wedge of black water between the ship's side and the dock. It smelt of brackish sweat and rot. Something welled up in my breast, an uncertainty gripping me from within. I was reminded of something I'd known once but lost. I blinked and saw for an instant two parallel scars high on a soft, dark cheek. Then I was staring at the ship's side, which suddenly seemed colossal up close, pulsing with ingenuity and purpose and labour: so much work. Trees planted and grown and felled and hewn into boards cut to size and shaped and steamed and bent and fixed in place and caulked. Bristol, with its tidal port, had a tradition of building ships hardy enough to withstand a dumping, twice daily, fully loaded, on to the mud of the river bed:
shipshape and Bristol fashion.
From this hard start they set off for the furthest reaches. The tension in their sprung sides, the intricacy of their design, now appeared to me as raw capability and vision. I've always known I was delivered to
these shores in the cradle of a ship like the one I stood before then, but the knowledge was so familiar that I rarely felt it to be true. Wavering before the
Belsize
I experienced the thing again as a debt I had no means of repaying. I felt belittled.

What exactly did Carthy expect me to look for on board anyway? I didn't know. Yet his blind leads are nothing new. Instead of hailing one of the crew and asking for permission to come on board, I bounced heavy-footed up the gangplank, aping the Captain's assuredness; just as entitlement is evident in a man's bearing, so an assured bearing creates the appearance of entitlement.

I paused on the main deck. Towards the stern it was piled high with more casks on pallets, and crates and barrels filled, presumably, with tobacco and sugar and rum. Two men crabbed sideways round an open hatch, a chest slung between them, and set it with others on a pallet to await the returning crane. The larger of the two figures disappeared immediately behind a mound of webbing up towards the foredeck, but his mate, whose shirt was stuck to his back with sweat, turned to me.

‘Yes?' the man asked, wiping his face.

I nodded good morning and pulled a notebook from the pocket of my coat. The book, a present from Lilly, was bound in leather. I flicked through its blank pages, but my tactic – of not appearing hurried – backfired.

‘You here in search of your tongue, lad? Or can I help?'

I shifted my weight to my front foot and drew myself to my full height. ‘How was the voyage?'

The man scratched at the hair bristling from his open collar, which ran uninterrupted into a mess of beard at his throat. ‘What's your purpose in asking?' he said.

‘My purpose? That's my master's business, owed to the Dock Company. But I'm also curious for my own part as to whether or not your voyage was a successful one. Perhaps you can begin by answering that?'

‘No, I can't.'

I took a step forward and the man held up a hand.

‘Which isn't to say that I wouldn't if I could. But I didn't sail with the ship, Sir, so I'd be taking a liberty in guessing how those that did found the voyage.'

The man explained this as if to a half-wit, but at least he'd dropped the ‘lad' in addressing me as ‘Sir'.

‘No, all that sailed with her has vanished ashore. Bar the stragglers. If you're quick you may still find one or two sloping around.'

‘I see.'

‘Which is understandable, considering. No matter how much they enjoyed the scenery afloat, there's things they'll have missed.' The man scratched at his throat again, becoming expansive. ‘But if you and the Dock Company are really asking whether she turned a profitable trip, I'm looking around me here and I'm thinking she might have done. They stuffed her full. I know that in every bone.' The man's hand moved from his throat to the back of his neck. He glanced up. ‘Still, it's a marvellous help, the loading gear. That should make sure we get the job done on time.'

I looked up too as the crane, trailing its chain and an empty hook, swung back across the deck. Somebody barked an order and the man flinched, then continued more gruffly, ‘Provided nobody gets in our way, that is.'

Although the hook passed well above my head, I took a couple of steps backwards and followed its progress with my eye. The Captain was standing at the rail of the upper deck. He appeared to waver there, silhouetted against the rushing sky. It seemed he'd been watching the conversation, for he now forced out a smile – the silver shards in his beard twitched – and called down, ‘Good morning to you. Maybe I can help.'

I shaded my eyes and nodded and skirted a deflated mountain of tarpaulin to make my way up to him, pocketing my notebook again in order to hold on as I climbed the steps. The Captain met me at the top with his hand extended. As I shook it, the sun broke through again and the two of us were enmeshed in a net of shadow cast by the empty rigging and masts.

‘I'm here on behalf of the Dock Company,' I explained. ‘My client wants particulars of your latest voyage.'

‘Captain Charles Addison,' he said smilingly. ‘A pleasure to meet you …'

‘Inigo Bright, of Carthy and Co.'

‘And I'd be pleased to furnish you with whatever “particulars” I can,' the Captain went on. ‘What are you after? Details of the goods we've traded are all set out in the ship's ledgers. As is an account of the delay we suffered. The storm
damage. It's all in the log. Our limp back to Speightstown. That's Barbados. The refit costs.'

The Captain still hadn't let go of my hand. He pumped it one last time and the white daggers either side of his mouth twitched upwards again. There was something odd about Addison's eyes. They were red-rimmed, sunken deep beneath his weathered brow. He held my gaze and I blinked. The pupils, that was it. Given the brightness, they were too black, too large, too round.

‘The log you say. And ledgers. Well, I'm sure my client will want to inspect both.'

‘You're welcome to them. All of it.' Addison waved at the mass of goods stacked on the deck and, smiling at the joke, said, ‘Everything's … quite literally … above board.'

The Captain's garrulousness did not suit him. It was as unnatural as the light now flashing in his eyes, which appeared less reflected than released, as though it were burning from within. I let him go on.

‘Yes, we were away longer than expected, or longer than the owners would have liked, because in a sense they should expect it, don't you see? The Windward Isles. Wind! Christ, did it blow. In all my years. See the mizzenmast, this one here?' Addison advanced across the deck and kicked the foot of the mast in question. ‘Sheared straight off, below deck! What with that and the damage to the forecastle. But what did us was the rudder. It sprang clean apart. That mast killed a man coming down. Took his legs off and punched a hole in the foredeck for good measure. Waring couldn't save him. We couldn't go on. It was God's will that I got us back round the north of the island and into port.'

It seemed Addison wanted me to doubt what he was saying, or at least to question it so that he could restate its truth. He scratched the palm of one square hand with the fingers of the other now, itching to go on.

‘Killed a man,' I prompted. ‘By breaking his legs.'

‘Yes! Not just broke, though. It took them clean off. Look, come below. I'll show you the new joinery, whole sections, green timbers, the repairs amidships.'

I let myself be led forward at the Captain's insistence. Had Carthy spoken with him already, prepared the way for a visit? I could think of no other likely reason as to why Addison had required no persuading, no warrant, or other evidence of authority, no proof even of who I was.

I followed the Captain down the steps and across the weathered timbers of the main deck. His rolling gait first appeared to me as right for one accustomed to life on board a ship, but then he stumbled against a low spar and missed the rail he clutched for and ended up down on one knee, his hat awry. He pulled it off and slapped it against his stocky thigh and shouted ‘Gulls' Eyes!' as he stood and punched the hat roughly and set it back in its rightful place, and I suddenly suspected that the man must have been drinking; at the very least, frayed nerves had put him in this discomfited state.

‘No harm done I hope,' I said quietly as I waited for him to go forward again towards the hatch.

We made our way below. I had not set foot on a ship such as this since my passage to England as a small child but immediately, before my eyes had a chance to grow accustomed to the dark, the smell of the thing gripped me as something primal and familiar and horrific. There had been a strong,
purifying breeze on deck, but even with the hatches open and the hold all but emptied, the dark interior of the ship filled me with claustrophobic dread. It smelt of rotten meat, gaseousness, death. I stifled an urge to wretch. One hand was still wrapped tight around a ladder rung: it was all I could do not to bolt straight back up it towards the light. As well as the horrible gloom and smell, the awareness that I was not on land but afloat intensified in me: I felt it as a ghastly weakening in my legs. The ship, tethered tight, was barely moving, but its gentle nuzzling at the dock, the imperceptible bumping and chafing of wood against stone, was magnified in the confinement of the hold, so that to me it seemed the ship was menacingly unstable. I locked my knees, fearful I might otherwise sink to the floor.

‘Come along. Mind your head. Wood against timber, timber on wood. That's it, Mr Bright, through here. The mast sheared straight through the bulwark, took a wall of shiplap with it. Infernally heavy. And these timbers here, and those ones, they were splintered by the blow. Something the matter?'

Having staggered after the Captain through a series of low doors with raised sills, past cramped storerooms disgorged of their contents, I now drew up short on entering the wider space between decks. It being impossible not to, I pressed my palm to my mouth and nose. The smell here was … raw. The air that bore it had a thick, unholy quality, cloying as earth dug from a grave. A wad of revulsion rolled through me, from my stomach to my chest to my throat, and this time it broke over the back of my tongue, flooding my mouth with sick. I fought to swallow it back down and contain the next wave: the sensation was so overpowering, the effort of resisting it so
obliterating, that for long moments I had no idea what the Captain was saying, much less why I had followed the man down here, what I was looking for. My very awareness of where I was faltered; every sense, every shred of reason, all of it dimmed.

‘… and Waring. That's the surgeon as was. Well he … impossible to staunch. No point wasting … he said, if I hadn't … we lashed the man down, against himself you understand, but there was no need … my God … quickly faded. It was an almighty squall, you see … a proper blow.'

I took in the new joinery the Captain appeared so keen to highlight, blond wood whose rough-cut grain was still beaded with sap in places. Against it the old timbers looked like something burned and buried and dug up. But they had held firm. Addison stroked a length of black plank and explained how nearly the ship had come to wrenching entirely apart. Perhaps the memory of this recent scare was to blame for having unhinged the Captain? I tried not to breathe in through my nose and nodded with him.

‘But she's a marvellous tough tug. The squall would have stowed many a newer vessel in the locker, I'm sure of that.'

My legs still swaying beneath me, I steadied myself with a hand on one of the ship's ancient spars. Instantly I recoiled: the woodwork had the greasy feel of cold meat.

Addison stumped off further into the hold, pointing this way and that at the refitted interior as if by doing so he could conjure the nightmare the ship had endured. There was something frightening in his enthusiasm. It was manic,
sharp-edged
. I could think of no reason to hang back, however, and followed the Captain deeper into the hold's recesses.

‘We were broadsided by the swell! The sea shipped itself through that hole, dropping us three feet nearer the waterline. I tell you, by the time we made port, the waves were lapping at the waist!'

Pawing at my coat-tail to rid my hand of the ship's clammy touch, I managed a further sympathetic nod. I did not feel I was beneath the waterline so much as interred; the planks of the ship's hull and deck seemed the walls and lid of a buried coffin. My breathing was shallow, confined to sips of the rotten air. How on earth did sailors manage to survive the long months of a transatlantic voyage? The tour of the empty hold continued aft, past a storeroom strewn with filthy straw. Perhaps disturbed by the sound of our approach, a rat sped out of the open door, around the Captain, and straight over the toe of my right boot. I kicked out instinctively, but missed; the rat fled.

‘You have to be quicker than that to catch them,' Addison grunted. ‘The log's still in my cabin. As are the ledgers.' He pointed past the stairs to the upper deck and continued, ‘Back this way.'

I faltered. The light pouring through the hatch into the ship intensified at that moment, the sun having emerged from behind clouds above no doubt, so that the block of brightness in the hold appeared suddenly celestial. I walked towards it. ‘No need,' I said. ‘No need.'

‘Why ever not? The delay is all accounted for, written down in black and white. You'll need to see it, won't you? Ink! It runs in lawyers' veins, does it not?'

‘It does,' I muttered, my foot upon the first step.

‘Well the log's taut rigged, Sir.'

I climbed towards the light. ‘I'm sure it is. You've no objection to my taking it back to the office, have you? My master will want to review it …'

‘As you wish,' Addison muttered, disappointed. ‘As you wish.'