The Story of Land and Sea: A Novel (15 page)

A man standing at the boarded window says he can see British troops passing by outside. “Don’t we shoot them?”

“We could just take these guns and powder back to camp,” another says. “There’s no worth in the house itself.”

“If we left, we’d be surrendering.”

“What about balls for the cannon? Aren’t they aimed right at the ships?”

“Haven’t any cannonballs. No funds for them.”

“Not a man who could melt some iron scrap to make a ball?”

The men scuff their shoes along the wood floor and avoid each other’s eyes.

“You don’t think they’ll kill us here?” William asks.

John presses his palms back against the cool brick wall. “I don’t think they know this is a magazine,” he says. From any angle, there is no room for heroism here.

After the British troops have passed, the world outside is once again silent. There is no indication that it’s Friday in a fishing town, that they are three blocks from a wharf. That it’s April, when children cannot be kept indoors. John pulls a biscuit from his bag. The other men watch and wait.

Helen has never spent so much time on a boat, even one that isn’t moving. When the ship hugs the swells of the tide, her stomach rocks. Her eyes are tired from the sun and the salt, and her legs stagger beneath her like a child’s. She has spent most of her time in the captain’s cabin, which, with the removal of his maps and letters and gun, has been transformed into a lady’s room. This token of respect has drained her of fear. When she considers her actions, her first thought is not God but John. And John’s world is so much wider; her courage is expanding within it. Her chief concerns now are maintaining her digestion and impeding her town’s capture. She has taken a vow of silence as her first act of rebellion.

When the second night falls, she seeks out the oysterman, who sleeps on deck with the other Beaufort men. A British soldier, no more than sixteen, watches them with his gun half-raised. The lantern tied to the main mast has been snuffed; they don’t want to provide an easy target for the Beaufort cannon. She puts her hands on his wrists in the dark, feeling the rope against them. The British boy takes a step closer.

“There’s little hope for rescue, miss,” the oysterman says, scratching the ropes against his knee. “Not unless you can take this young fellow’s gun and then maybe swim ashore. Are you much of a swimmer?”

Helen shakes her head.

“That’s as God would have it. They won’t harm you, miss. They haven’t yet, have they? There, I knew they weren’t so bad as all that. I won’t say as there’s great hope—you never know what makes sense to a man in wartime—but it does seem we’re more prisoners for barter than for making a lesson of. It’s too bad you don’t know how to swim.” He scrabbles in his beard with his tied hands and picks out crumbs from their supper.

The boy, having been patient, now motions Helen away with the tip of his gun.

An hour after Helen has fallen asleep in the captain’s cabin, she is awakened by the rattling of the door. She crawls from the bed with soft feet and seizes a brass telescope that had been propped against the window. Standing behind the door, she holds the instrument above her shoulder, waiting, shivering. A man on the other side begins to moan; he slides his fists down the wood and begs for entrance. She can smell his fermented breath through the door.

“Go away,” she whispers. She puts the telescope down. Her hands are shaking.

When the room is quiet, the man having either left or slumped into sleep, Helen pushes a trunk against the door and crawls into bed. She begins to plan. Her father would already have been alerted and would be approaching the town from the north with a regiment of Hillsborough legislators; they will arrive tomorrow evening perhaps. John would be here. John must be already here. They won’t shoot the cannon and risk harming the prisoners. With her hands untied, then, she is the only one who can act.

Despite never having properly learned to swim, she is very good at treading water; she spent her childhood splashing in the shallows of the sound. If given several hours and frequent rests, she could probably swim to shore, or at least to Bogue Island, where someone would find her. But she could only do it if no one saw, if soldiers didn’t line the decks to shoot her out of the water. Her second plan is to come upon a man unawares and take his gun. In her mind, this requires only a few quick movements, a twist of a wrist. Once she has one gun, she can convince the soldiers to give her more, as long as she comes upon them singly and with surprise. It will be a game, until she has gathered all the firearms on deck and the British are tied to the masts. The fishermen can then sail the boats to land and they will be free. Her third plan is to beg, like a woman. To take whatever her body affords her. To answer the man at the door, and use him.

She falls asleep before she is finished thinking.

The third and fourth days are no different; she is given bread and water and can move freely on deck. She does not speak to the British, some of whom give her fresh strawberries that they have stolen from the town’s gardens. She eats them without a smile. She gives every man a look that suggests she would murder him if he touched her. The soldiers travel to shore in dinghies and return with prizes. Through the fishermen, who have no compunction about conversing with the enemy, Helen learns of Beaufort’s state: the town is a new carcass, just unraveling, picked at by the British plunderers. Shots have been traded, but there are no men dead. In most houses, the fresh bread and meat were taken first, then men came back for the silver—no worse than any bandits. The American regiments held their fire once the British threatened to burn the town. Some Beaufort men have locked themselves into the powder magazine, but the British have turned a blind eye to the villagers sneaking them food and drink, as though the humiliation of six men trapped in a single room was best ignored. Helen places John in all these settings: the front lines, the wounded, the magazine. Only after days without news of his body does she remember to pray.

On the sixth night, when the stars are out, she carries her chamber pot to the ship’s side and empties it while a soldier looks the other way. She is grateful that she has been spared the indignity of the beakhead, where men sit on open holes above the ocean. But some convicts too are treated well before hanging. In her other hand she holds the telescope, just in case. She would use it on the stars, except that then she couldn’t see a man behind her.

She returns to the captain’s room and removes her stays and underskirts and shoes. She has saved her dinner and now wraps the boiled potatoes in a kerchief. The flask of water she ties with a cord around her waist. She climbs into bed and waits for the sounds of the ship to settle. First the hard sound of boots as the men patrol the deck. The laughter from the night’s last mess. The creak of the capstans as the ropes are tightened. The splash of supper’s refuse thrown overboard. Boat sounds, which she is now used to.

When she wakes, the wind is breathing through the door. She has a cramp where the flask dug into her side. She is cold, not having crawled beneath the blankets, so she wraps the captain’s coat around her and puts the potatoes in its pocket. The sound of her door opening is swallowed by the general groaning of the ship. Without her shoes, she makes as much noise as a gull walking across the deck. Two boys are curled up near the quarterdeck, one with a musket in his arms. The Beaufort fishermen are tied and tangled together along the beam, some men resting their heads on others’ stomachs. One is awake and leaning against the gunwale, stargazing or thinking about home. He glances at Helen as she walks by.

The ship floats in the channel behind Bird Island and Shark Shoal, the small dunes of sand and sea oats that buffer the town from storms. The prisoners have been shuffled to the third ship, the prow of which now faces Bogue Island and the ocean beyond. Helen can see the white sand glowing through the dark.

She does not think of sharks or merhorses when she climbs over the side of the ship and drops like a sack into the black water. She doesn’t think of how she struggled to catch her breath racing Moll down the length of the creek. She clings to the sharp barnacled hull until she is sure the ship is silent, and then she sets out, one arm in front of the other, shivering in the cold water of early April, toward the glowing stroke of sand.

When she first stops to tread water, to rest her arms, she struggles to keep her head above the sea, which heaves around her like an animal. There are no waves, no surf, but a strong and terrifying heaving that swamps her mouth when she opens it. She starts to pull at the ocean, to yank it into her arms. Sometimes she can see the island and sometimes it disappears in the moving blackness. She finds herself facing the wrong direction and fights her body around until the sand appears again, surely closer now. She is infinitely heavy. Halfway to the island, she squirms out of the captain’s coat and lets it sink beneath her. Her body buoys to the surface again, and for the next few yards she is hopeful, like a slim fish. She doesn’t have enough strength to control the sound she makes in the water. Her splashing must be dampened by the night wind, for she hears no shots in the water.

She stops again and turns on her back to float, not caring which direction the ocean takes her. Her limbs are numb and melting. In the stars above she looks for patterns, but she cannot focus her eyes long enough to steady them. When the ocean rolls, so do the heavens. This is where her life has brought her, the life that she built so carefully from the blocks of duty and goodness. Love has killed her. If this is punishment, if God is looking down on her and witnessing her turned heart, then he will surely let her sink; the ocean is the space below the hand he pulls away, into which her body will drop. Her bones among fish bones, her beauty dissolved and consumed. She will learn whether or not her mother waits where the dead wait. She closes her eyes against the stars, waits for the hand to pull away. She waits. But still she floats. This is not what life has done to her, but what she, Helen, has done to her life. Not a soul to witness. Not a soul needed. She begins to feel the water beneath not as a vast emptiness but as a vessel in which she travels. She cannot feel the cold anymore. A faith is resuscitated within her that is independent of her survival. The vessel moves whether or not she is inside.

Turning on her stomach again, she kicks out into the dark. She is choosing, and moving, and her will is God’s will. The night carries her, and the next time she lifts her body up to gasp at air, her feet brush against sand. Her toes dig into the bottom, hungry for purchase, and she steps and crawls the rest of the way to Bogue Island, dragging eelgrass by her ankles.

She lies on the damp sand until her breathing steadies. The journey could not have taken more than half an hour, and yet she expects to see dawn soon. She wills her muscles to stop spasming, and gradually the shivers fade into a calm, bone-aching cold. She waits again for gunfire; nothing. Crawling on her hands and knees, she tops the nearest dune and digs into the gully on the other side. The sand still holds some of the day’s warmth, and she rolls herself in it, coating her wet limbs in white grit. There is a wildness in this moment that she savors, beneath all her discomfort and fear. It is as if she had never been human. Layers of guilt and decency are scrubbed clean. She sleeps.

The gentle gray before morning wakes her, and she drags her stiff body inland, past another high dune, through blankets of pennywort and marsh elder, to the half-built fort. Its bundles of sticks resemble firewood piled high. She crawls around the side, through the unfinished wall, and curls up against the clay daub that coats the interior in patches. Through the open roof, clouds swell like dozens of bulbs. Her stomach begins to tighten, and she feels around her dress for the kerchief of potatoes. She finds nothing. They were in the coat pocket. She begins to cry, and the wildness collapses a little. The flask is still around her waist, so she drinks and falls asleep again. Her dreams are empty.

On Wednesday, April 10, a group of British soldiers walk from cannon to cannon along the town battery and drive barbed spikes into the vents so the artillery can’t be fired. John hears the sound of hammering from the magazine, which has turned into a prison. Three men had managed to slip out one night, but a message was later sent from the colonel to maintain position. They periodically empty the night bucket when no soldiers are around, but the stench remains. There is no purpose in defending a barrel of powder in a siege. The British can just as easily set fire house by house; they have no stake in the powder. John would have slipped out too, except, as a poor man and an orphan, he cannot run the risk of discharge. There is no future for him without the honor of this position, and the future forms the bulk of his thoughts these days. He has to keep telling himself: Helen is either alive or dead, and these are unchangeable facts. Right now, she is either dead or she is alive.

A battering on the magazine door wakes John from his morning doze. A messenger from Colonel Easton reports that the British have retreated to the ships and are interested in negotiations.

“What sort of negotiations?” John asks. “They make the rules of this game.”

“There were four British officers in New Bern prison,” the messenger says. “They’ve been brought down for trade.”

“Are all the prisoners safe?” William Dennis steps out into the morning and squints. A heavy sheet of clouds puffs out above them. “The woman?”

“We give and we get,” he says, and orders them to report back to the encampment along the line of pines outside town. “Colonel wants the guns and powder too.”

“Now he wants the powder,” the third soldier says, and he and John heave it between them while William collects the dusty muskets and balls.

The British officers are already at camp, shackled and conversing with the American soldiers. They were treated well at New Bern, they say, especially by the ladies. This earns them a couple of slaps and some laughter. There is only danger when men forget they are men.