The Solitude of Thomas Cave (15 page)

21

I
T WAS ON a summer evening like this one that I first heard of Cave again. I had been here at Swole some years, living here.
I must have been about the age that he was that long winter. It is a time when a man - a man like myself at any rate for I
cannot begin to speak for him - knows the urge to settle and be with his family and feel the land beneath his feet.

I had found myself a wife and gone into business in association with my cousin who was at Aldborow, trading along the coast.
Though it was hard - business has been hard these past years, the state of the country poor and nothing easy - it had gone
well enough. The summer was fair, the evenings long and calm, and I had taken to spending them as I do this one, here before
the shore. A finer time of day I cannot imagine, when the air is still and warm, and the light long, and the fishermen spread
and stitch their nets, and the sun sets behind our backs while the sea slowly dulls before us. I was sitting pretty much as
now, with my back to a flint wall, listening with only half an ear, watching the sea before me, watching the ships. Strange
how you look out every now and then to see the passing ships, and it's so still on the shore that you think they must be fixed
there, and yet you fill your pipe and look out again, and their positions have been rearranged though they have not appeared
to move.

The talk was of a man who had knowledge of the North.

'Did you know him, Mister Goodlard? He must have been a whaler like yourself

I think that it was a moment before I took in the woman's question. I was watching the children run and play at the sea's
edge. My own two were among them. They all ran into the waves and did not mind that they got wet because the water and the
evening were warm.

'Could be this man was someone you had known?'

'Who's that?'

'The fishermen met a man down the coast, they said he had been a whaler.'

'What was his name?' I asked, and she said that she did not know his name.

I told her that the northern seas were huge and that there were on them a hundred whaleships from England alone. I could hardly
be expected to know every man or every crew.

The woman talked on.

This man had ice in him, she said, a tall, thin, bent man with the cold sea in his eyes. He came to their villages alone and
sudden like a late spring frost, and brought with him a chilly touch that stilled madmen, cooled women in the pangs of labour
and dispelled pain in the dying. It was said that he had the power to drive out devils.

At first I thought nothing of it. There were so many stories. There were so many who wandered the country, and in these eastern
counties they said more than anywhere, not only merchants and pedlars and vagabonds but men with ideas in their heads, all
kind of preachers and healers and prophesiers, and every one of them with some story to tell of the strange and the magical
and the unexplained. I had been out of England long. I cannot tell you how disconcerting it had been at first, how it had
made me feel alone and a foreigner, coming home to my own land from years at sea to walk in the crowded street or sit here
on the shore before the boats and hear such a bemusing mass of talk. But I had learnt to let it by, to smoke and look and
nod and appear to listen, and not to give offence. So many speakers there were, so many extraordinary tales: how should I
distinguish amongst them? How, in all of that garrulous discourse, should I pay attention to talk of one lone man?

My little girl fell on the beach but picked herself up laughing, such a sturdy rounded shape she was, and ran on up to me
to brush the sand off her.

'I saw a fellow could be he,' said a fisherman. 'At Blythburgh, I think it were, not far off from here. Old, he was old as
Moses, carried a stick and had few words about him as I could tell.'

There was an uncle of my wife's who lived in a village close to the marsh. He came by and stopped with us a night, and spoke
of an exorcism that had taken place in that village the year before, a stranger who had appeared from the mist and saved a
child and cast out a devil from a man possessed, and done it by some special magic and without recourse to the Name of God.

'What was he like, this man?'

'Old. A tall man grey and stiff like a piece of weathered oak. He made me afraid just to see him.'

'Did you learn his name?'

'If anyone learnt his name they did not say it. Seems he goes without names and pleasantries. No words to him that I heard.'

'And where does he live?'

It appeared that the man had vanished as mysteriously and suddenly as he had come, and because of this people were afraid
and said when they saw lights that he was still out there with the spirits on the marsh. Our visitor did not give much credence
to their talk. There were some who said the man had turned himself to vapour and blown back north from whence he came. 'No
such magic to him, I'll reckon. There's many like him, has the knack of turning a spirit, but he'll have a trade too, no doubt,
he'll just have wandered on, and because the mist was in none noted where he went.'

'No, indeed,' said I, but as he spoke the memory had come back to me of Cave and the Biscayan's fit of madness.

For the first time I asked myself if it were possible that Cave were still alive. It could be so, I thought. A man who had
honed his endurance to such a degree might well live long.

For some days after he had left I thought on this and my preoccupation must have showed.

'What is it troubles you?' my wife asked me.

'It sounds as if this was a good man, this man you knew,' she said, when I had told her everything. 'How foolish men are to
be afraid of someone like that, just because he does what they cannot do or explain. There is so much that we must accept
and that cannot be explained, we cannot be always making conspiracy or judgement over it. For sure you must go, if you once
cared about him, find this man my uncle spoke of and see if he is the same. I see that you will have no rest until you do
find out and it is settled.'

There are not many women would be so understanding.

The children climbed on me as I took my leave. My daughter cried that she did not want her father gone off again to sea. 'But
I shan't be at sea, my sweet,' I said. 'This time all my journey will be on land, and I shall be back before you know it.'

The village was a small place at the edge of the estuary where the marsh gives way to the farmland, where you can stand beneath
the height of the church and turn one way to see tilled fields and the other to see a salty wilderness. I went there and asked
about the story he had told us.

There was an old man who had a bench before his house on which he sat all through the day. His eyes were beginning to cloud
and grow milky but he could still observe well enough.

It was a sailor, this man said, who had come back from distant parts; he could not say where, only that he had been in some
piracy or battle there and become horribly disfigured, with an arm cut off at the elbow and a sword slash across his face,
so that the sight of him brought fear to the minds of his children who did not know him and ran away. His wife recognised
him despite his awful wounds, and took him in and called the children back, and cooked his meals and made his home about him.
But the sailor could not settle, and whatever horrors he had seen came back and raged before his eyes, until one day he fell
into a fever and began to scream and rave with such violence that his wife became frightened of him and ran off to ask others
for help. And almost all of the village came by, those who wished to help and those who were just curious, and when he saw
at his door the crowd come to stare at him as if he were not himself, not a man of the village but some exotic alien creature,
the poor sailor went quite mad. There was a baby in the house, a youngest child born to them even while he was away at sea,
and the moment he opened his door and met the crowd of villagers, the baby began to cry. A great, ear-splitting squawl it
was, that rang out through the village, as if the baby understood all the danger of the moment, and the sailor went quite
mad and snatched it up.

The old man said this, and more, but I had better details later from the woman herself when I went to seek her out. The sailor
now that I met him seemed a silent, sulky fellow who could remember nothing, but the woman could tell it all like it was happening
again immediately before her eyes: her husband's wild look, the stupidity of the villagers like a herd of staring, snuffling
heifers, the sudden rending sound of the baby's cry.

'Oh, sir, you would remember that cry if you had heard it. Even if you had been a mile away.'

She was standing at the side of the door, suddenly alarmed at the attention she had brought to the house but unable now that
she had called the others to fend them off. She saw the look of rage come into her husband's face, saw him grab up in his
one hand the bundle of the squawling baby, stood by powerless as he shouldered through the passive crowd, like a battering
ram pushing them aside, and ran out into the village street and to the church at the edge of the marsh.

They saw him next on top of the tower. The baby was still screaming and its noise carried down to them from the height and
spread like the sound of bells. It was a great high tower with a parapet cut like a castle wall. He stood close against this
and yelled down at the crowd, holding the writhing baby beneath his arm and leaning over so that at any instant they feared
that it might struggle from his grip and drop down into the churchyard beneath. And then he swung one leg over the flint parapet
where it faced the marsh, and in the awful hush of a moment they thought that he would jump.

'It was the Devil in him,' the woman said.

She looked up to where her baby cried, up the tower with the sky bright and white above it.

'It was not him my husband there, I swear, but the black figure of Beelzebub. Thin, horrid, weirdly hunched, a black shape
that it did hurt the eyes to see. It was the Devil and not any form of man.' The poor woman paused and clenched herself, and
looked to me for reassurance before she could continue. 'And this creature did put his leg over the parapet and sit astride
it, as a man does on a horse, and set to rocking back and forth as if the horse were galloping, back and forth, the Devil
galloping away up there with my baby under his arm. The Lord is my witness, that is how I saw it. Ask others here if they
did not see the same.'

And I did ask others, and all whom I met in the village concurred that this was how it seemed.

All of that day and through the night the madman rode the parapet. The stars came out, and a moon just full enough to make
out the shape like an excrescence on the tower. The baby was silent a long time and then set to whimpering, long slow waves
of whimpering that ran on like the gusts of wind through the reeds. The woman stood below, and others with her, only the ones
who cared now for the mere spectators had grown bored and gone home asking to be called again if any change occurred. What
change could there have been, she asked, but the final drop, the image of which ran and reran vividly before her watching
eyes, so fast it would occur that she knew there would be nothing for them to see, no action, no occurrence but only its consequence:
a flicker before the eye and then on the ground a misshapen tiny bundle of blood-spattered cloth. So fast it could occur and
at any instant that she could not bear for any amount of time to look away. All through the night she kept vigil, and the
parson and the others kept up beside her, praying. For so long she stood looking up that her neck and back and the calves
of her legs shot through with pain.

In the morning the sun rose on the silver estuary and he had not moved. There was no whimpering, no wind, no sound that reassured
of the continuance of life. All that day he held there, and another night.

The second dawn a tall man came into the village. Streaks of pink sky behind him, a soft threat of rain. The man walked with
a stick as he had a slight limp. He made his way to the churchyard and announced to those who waited there that he had been
told to come. His pale eyes glanced up to the parapet where the sailor still sat with his one hand clasping the bundle to
his chest, his body swaying gently now as if with a breeze, his face raised to the fine drizzle that had begun to fall.

'How long's he been there?'

'Two nights,' the woman said. Her voice was stiff from the silence.

'May I see if I may help?'

'If you can deal with devils. It is the Devil in him, for sure. The man he is would never, could never, do such a thing.'

The stranger's look was quite without alarm. 'Mistress, you would be surprised what a simple man can do.'

And the parson held open the heavy wooden door of the church but none of the others would enter with him.

They moved away then, stood down by the churchyard gate with the road and the village like safety at their backs. They saw
the head of the stranger emerge on the far side of the tower and hold still for a long while. The rain intensified and the
scene on the tower became no more than a blur, the man on the parapet a vague solid against the mist. The rain poured into
their upturned eyes. 'My baby,' the woman cried all of a sudden, a piercing scream that must have risen shrill to the tower,
'Save my baby!' and threw herself down thrashing on the muddied ground. Just at that moment those who still looked up saw
a puff of smoke as from an explosion and a strange black bird, long and ungainly in the start of its flight as a heron, take
off from the tower into the raincloud. Or so they said later. They said it was the Devil.