The Grave Tattoo (12 page)

12

As she emerged from the farmyard on her mountain bike, Jane took a deep breath, savouring the aroma of the autumn morning. It was a glorious day, surprisingly mild for the time of year. The night’s rain had left a sparkle in the air, brightening the turning leaves and deepening the greys and greens of the landscape. The sun was climbing behind Helvellyn, casting a golden halo round the summit. She turned to look upwards at the great bluff of Langmere Fell, its craggy outcroppings dark against the sky. She could see her father’s sheep, pale grey and cream blurs against the bracken and scrubby grass of the high moorland where they grazed. A grin spread across her face and she shed the last of the city. This was where she belonged.

She turned the bike downhill and freewheeled into the village, a journey she had made more times than she could count. As always, the sudden opening out of the view caught at her heart, the light glinting on the tail of Thirlmere, the pikes and crags rising beyond in tight contours to the skyline. What must it have been like for Fletcher Christian, she wondered, coming home to this after the South Seas? Would his spirit have risen with joy and relief at being enclosed by his familiar mountains, their muted colours the palette of his youth? Or would he have yearned for the lush tropics with their improbable colours? Would the cold and damp have made his bones ache for that hotter southern sun? Would the women have seemed pallid and uninteresting after the exotic beauty who had given him a son? Would he have felt that he had come home, or would this have seemed merely a different kind of prison from Pitcairn?

Whatever his story, it couldn’t have failed to fire William Wordsworth’s imagination. In her mind’s eye, she conjured up a picture of the poet sitting in his garden at Dove Cottage, head bent over the intractable lines of
The Prelude
, that long narrative of his early life whose writing and rewriting occupied him for the best part of fifty years. So much elided, so much glossed over. While it had the appearance of candid revelation, the biographers had demonstrated that it was in fact a construct that stripped William’s early life of anything personally scandalous or politically questionable. That didn’t detract from its value as poetry, but it cast serious doubts on its worth as biography. Which, paradoxically, made Jane feel all the more strongly that there was merit to her theory. The absence of direct written evidence in William’s published work, given so much else that was absent, did not mean the events she pictured had not taken place.

Jane pedalled on down Langmere Fell, the busy water of the Lang Burn chattering on her left as it cascaded brimful towards Thirlmere. As she slowed down for the junction with the main road by Town Head, she wondered if, when they’d met again, William had recognised the prodigal immediately. Bligh’s description of the twenty-three-year-old at the beginning of the voyage stuck in her mind. He stood five feet nine inches tall, above average height for the time. He had a noticeably dark complexion, which would have been darkened further by years of exposure to the sea winds and the strong sun of the southern oceans. According to Bligh, he’d been ‘strong made’ though slightly bow-legged. She imagined him as a sort of Caravaggio figure, a chiaroscuro of light and shade at the captain’s table, his dark eyes glinting in candlelight. Striking, distinctive-looking. She didn’t think it would have taken the observant poet long to connect the apparent stranger with the spirited boy he’d known in his youth. It must have rocked him to his foundations. Just when he’d smoothed over his own slightly disreputable past and reinvented himself as the poet with moral authority, here was one of the most notorious figures in recent history standing before him, claiming the obligations of friendship. It was nothing if not dramatic. At least William would probably have been spared a witness to his discomfiture; their reunion would certainly have been a private encounter, since Fletcher could hardly have hazarded anything else.

Jane passed the turning for Grasmere and rounded the curve in the road. Now she could see the signs for Dove Cottage and the Wordsworth Museum. At least it wouldn’t be too busy today, she thought. Not like high summer, when tourists crammed into the tiny rooms where the Wordsworth family had lived their cramped, sociable lives. William would have regarded it as nothing less than his due; he had never really doubted his genius, fretting only that the world was a little behind him in that respect.

Jane parked her bike then entered the pretty café with its pine chairs and tables. Anthony Catto was sitting in a corner reading the morning paper. He looked more like an ageing rocker than a museum curator, with his long silver hair pulled back in a ponytail and his oblong designer glasses perched on his nose. He was wearing what Jane had come to recognise as his working uniform–work boots, faded jeans, denim shirt and a brown leather waistcoat whose pockets were always bulging with the reminders he constantly scribbled for himself then promptly consigned to what he referred to as ‘the working files’. But in spite of his appearance, there was nobody alive who knew more about the life and work of William Wordsworth and his family. His adult life had been a quest for information about the poet and his world that bordered on the fanatical. More than that, there was none of the jealous guarding of his knowledge that Jane had found so depressingly prevalent in academic life. Anthony was generous to a fault with his erudition. Some might have said generous to the point of boredom; Jane would not have been one of them.

‘Morning, Anthony,’ she called as she headed for the table.

He looked up, his craggy face creasing into a smile. ‘Jane, my dear,’ he said, his voice rich and plummy as Jack Horner’s pudding. ‘How lovely to see you.’ He unfolded his lanky height from the chair and extended a hand. Jane took his warm dry palm in her chilled one and shook it. ‘My, but you’re cold,’ he exclaimed.

‘I cycled down from Fellhead. It felt mild when I started out, but it ended up a bit colder than I expected,’ she admitted ruefully.

‘City life’s making you soft. You’re losing that Lakeland hardiness,’ he said, pouring her a coffee.

‘No, that’s bred in the bone. It’ll take more than a bit of cold to see me off.’ Jane sipped her coffee appreciatively.

‘Well, Jane, I’m most intrigued by this letter of Mary’s. After we spoke, I tracked it down, right where you told me it would be.’ He shook his head, mouth twisted into an expression of disapproval. ‘Extraordinary that nobody came across it before. Well, I say extraordinary. But there are still far too many items in the archive that still haven’t been fully catalogued.’

‘And it was tucked inside the wrong envelope. Do you think it refers to a poem?’

He tugged at his earlobe. ‘Mary is annoyingly nonspecific, isn’t she? It could be a letter, it could be notes for a poem, or it could be a poem itself. Or indeed, all three. Tell me why you think it might be a poem.’

‘I think Fletcher Christian came back,’ Jane said abruptly. She felt as if she’d been telling this story in one form or another for days. But she knew she would have to earn Anthony’s help so she prepared to give it a new spin.

Anthony’s smile bordered on the indulgent. ‘Ah, that old Lakeland chestnut. Still, though somewhat implausible, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility.’

‘I’m glad you think so. Now, I believe he left Pitcairn somewhere around 1793 or 1794. Certainly before the children were old enough to have any memory of him. It’s hard to know how long he took to get back to England. Whether he made his escape on a whaler or managed to sail all the way to South America in one of the jolly boats, he would still have had to make his way across to the Atlantic and work his passage back, probably as an ordinary seaman. All of that would have taken time. Years, perhaps.’

Anthony nodded. ‘Agreed.’

‘Now, even though he knew he’d probably been convicted of mutiny in his absence, he had no reason to suppose that anyone outside the seafaring establishment would know anything about it. He wasn’t to know that Bligh’s phenomenal voyage had turned the mutiny into the eighteenth-century equivalent of
I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.
It must have been a hell of a shock when he discovered he was notorious.’

Anthony frowned. ‘He was a bright chap, your Mr Christian, wasn’t he?’

‘By all accounts, yes. Why do you ask?’

‘It would have made a certain sense for him to have remained overseas while he communicated with someone at home he could trust. If for no other reason than to make arrangements for his return.’

Jane nodded. ‘Perfect sense.’

‘And that might well explain the curious incident of William’s letter to the
Weekly Entertainer,’
Anthony said. ‘You know about the letter, of course?’

‘William wrote to the paper to repudiate a pamphlet purportedly written by Fletcher describing his post-
Bounty
adventures. I’ve seen the pamphlet and it’s the most preposterous rubbish.’

‘But it had clearly gained sufficient currency with the public at large for William to rise above the parapet to denounce it as spurious. Not only is it the only reference in his writings to the mutiny, but it’s also the only letter he ever sent to a newspaper that was signed with his own name rather than a pseudonym. Doesn’t he say something along the lines of having the best authority for his assertion? Which might suggest that Edward Christian knew exactly where his brother was, or at least knew enough to persuade William to state categorically that the pamphlet was a farrago of lies.’ Anthony leaned back in his chair, satisfied with his rationale. ‘So far, so logical. But how do we get from this point to the putative poem?’

Jane smiled. ‘It’s all a question of timing. I think Fletcher stayed away until the
Bounty
was old news. I think he came back around 1804.’

‘Why then, specifically?’

‘By then, England was at war with France and every sailor’s mind was focused on Napoleon. Nelson, not Bligh, was the naval hero on everyone’s lips. It had been ten years since Fletcher had escaped from Pitcairn and I’d guess he was pretty bitter and frustrated that Bligh had robbed him of that time at home. He must have desperately wanted to put his side of the story. Wouldn’t you?’

‘Absolutely.’ Anthony rubbed his chin. ‘I see now where you’re going with this. By 1804, William was not only a poet of some reputation, he had also shifted his interest from short lyric poetry to the epic. He was working on
The Prelude.
He was probably
dreaming
in iambic pentameter. He was in precisely the right creative place to deal with the material.’

‘Right. And what could be more natural than Fletcher turning to William? Who better to tell his side of the story than someone he’d known since boyhood?’

‘Imagine how disappointed Fletcher must have been when he realised William was never going to publish it.’ Anthony smiled at her, his grey eyes crinkling at the corners. ‘Jane, you’ve spun a very pretty web out of next to nothing. How do you propose to anchor it more firmly to reality?’

Jane grinned. ‘Well, in an ideal world, Anthony, we’d open one of your boxes and find William’s notes and the completed poem.’

‘Failing that?’

‘I need to find John’s reply to Mary. That might give me some clues where to start looking for whatever it was William didn’t want anyone to see.’

Anthony pursed his lips. ‘I don’t recall ever reading anything of that nature.’

And you would if you had
, Jane thought. She still remembered once asking Anthony if he knew when the back door to Dove Cottage had been built. Without hesitation, he had replied, ‘It must have been in or around March 1804. Dorothy refers in a letter that month to it having been installed.’ If John’s letter to his mother was in the archives, Anthony would know. ‘That’s a pity,’ she said.

Anthony raised an admonitory finger. ‘But there are a couple of boxes of family letters that have not been fully catalogued. They’ve been sitting at the back of a cupboard for years. We only found them when we were packing up the archive for the transfer to the new centre. Deborah took a quick look through and they were from after William’s death, so there seemed little urgency about getting to them. You’re very welcome to take a pass through them yourself.’ Never one to hang around, he drained his coffee cup and stood up expectantly. ‘There is a price, of course,’ he added as they walked back to the kitchen.

Jane felt a slight tingle of surprise. It wasn’t like Anthony to be so direct about the trading of favours. He was normally far too much the diplomat. ‘Of course,’ she said.