Still the deadly silence from the ship’s people. Again a sort of shrug.
‘Aye, sir?’
The captain’s voice became more penetrating. It rose. The muscles in his cheeks worked, as if the pressure were becoming intolerable.
‘Aye sir! Aye sir! Aye sir!’
William Bentley saw the shepherd boy give a long shudder. His own mouth was dry. There was fear in the air, it was almost visible.
Swift was breathing fast, the air hissing through his bony nostrils. It was an irregular, disturbing sound. It was some time before he spoke.
When he did, it was in a brisk, business-like way, as if he had suddenly relaxed. But the words were in direct contrast. Any tendency in the people to relax with him was swamped. He turned abruptly to the boy again.
‘Fox, get you to the main topmast yard if you please. And stay there. Mr Allgood will have you conducted.’
There were two sounds then. A low, strangled noise from the throat of Padraig Doyle, like a choke, and a harsh note from the throat of Allgood. A grunt; a fierce, angry sound. The captain turned his cold eyes on him.
‘You have a comment, sir?’
The stooped giant’s eyes glittered. Bentley saw his big red lips part momentarily. Then shut. Then:
‘No sir.’
The amazing, dazzling smile. But Swift’s voice was broken ice.
‘Good, then. Fox shall go to that yard, and stay there.’ He passed a quick glance among the company within his sight. ‘Until I decide upon the form his punishment shall take.’
He turned on his heel with a swirl of heavy cloak and strode aft, scarcely giving men time to bundle out of his way. William had almost to run to keep up.
When they reached the cabin, the captain called for wine and two glasses. When they were alone he raised a brimming glass and proposed a toast.
‘To mutiny!’ he said. ‘Much good may it do them, eh?’
William had to drink. But his thoughts were outside, in the cold, howling night. He watched his uncle’s handsome, smiling face, but his thoughts were jumbled. In his mind’s eye, the yard where the boy must be. My God, the cold!
And was the punishment still to come! The wine went down the wrong way and set him coughing. His uncle laughed.
‘Come boy, put your mind to it!’ he cried. ‘It is you who should be proposing a toast, William, for it is a fine thing to see an enemy destroyed.’ He clapped a hand on his nephew’s shoulder. ‘Come, I will be magnanimous,’ he added. ‘Credit give where credit is deserved. It is you who have brought the shepherd down, my boy, with a little outside aid. You found him out, and brought him down. Well done!’
For Thomas Fox, the journey to the yard was slow and dreadful. It was, in fact, the first time he had ever been aloft, tender of beasts and landman as he was. He was as hampered by the clothing he wore as by his clumsiness; for under the eye of Allgood, strangely tolerant for a boatswain under orders to punish, his messmates had dressed him in every stitch that they could gather. He had found it hard to bend his knees and elbows during the long struggle up the ratlines from the deck. Many times he had paused to recover his strength, closing his eyes and sobbing for breath. The swaying, slippery, alien rigging was a puzzle to him, and the manifold noises – sighing, sawing, thrumming, moaning – only served to frighten him more. His progress was abysmally slow, with sweat blinding him and making his grip dangerously haphazard.
He had known when to stop only at a shout from below; and there he sat, astride some heavy ropes near the mast, desperately clutching others. The yard was far wider than he had expected, but it did not make a solid platform, moving constantly and groaning too, loudly and all the time, like a beast in pain. For a long while after reaching it, Fox groaned also; the noises merging in his mind like a symphony of misery.
When the first terror died away, however, an odd, unlooked-for feeling came to him. The sky was like a mighty void, and he seemed to be its centre, rushing through it in a cage of wood and rope work. The sensation of movement was quite marvellous, as the wind tore at him from across the weather bow and from round and under sails and mast. The white water flung outwards far below him reminded him of breathing, flashing and glittering in the roaring darkness. Horse-rider, horse-rider, he kept thinking, just the words, over and over again. Horse-rider, horse-rider. The blast of air in his nostrils was clean, intensely clean. It burst into his lungs, a strange, mesmeric action. Empty and fill, empty and fill, clean and cold, clean and cold.
Whenever he tried to make sense of what had happened, whenever he tried to put a reason to his presence on the yard, his mind would slide away. Something to do with sheep, he knew, and that poor midshipman Bentley. He had killed some sheep, that was it, and this was his punishment. Or was it? Was there something else to come? Then off would go his mind once more, to think, perhaps, of Padraig Doyle; and his frozen lips would try to form a smile.
Padraig Doyle, at about this time, was weeping in the arms of Jesse Broad. He had put a brave face on it as he had hugged his friend farewell, but when the boy had gone onto the deck, he had retired to the pens to weep. There, later, Broad had sought him out – as much to get some comfort, he supposed, as to try and give it. For he was filled with a great sense of despair, and loss. He had almost burst with horror and rage as the shepherd boy had been led up the ladder; a helpless feeling that he guessed was in many hearts. The people, after the confrontation with the captain, had not drifted back to their dinners. The hubbub had never reasserted itself. There had been a numbness, a revulsion.
The huge bulk of Allgood had been part of it. Impassive yet involved, he had watched over the dressing up of Fox, like a dumb animal watching some act of dreadful violence to its young; like some chained beast, unable to move or to express itself. How ambiguous was his position, Jesse thought; a man so violently hated by so many of the men. A cruel, vicious instrument of work and discipline. Who yet had some unknown streak in him, who yet seemed somehow linked with Thomas Fox. And who still had had to oversee this awful act of sadism by the captain; who had had to see the pale-faced boy safely into the resting place that would probably be his last alive.
After the act, the men had been subdued. But there had been this feeling, too, this brooding air of impending doom. Broad hugged the birdlike, crippled body of the blind man, crooned to it as he had heard young Thomas do. He had a vision of despair and violence.
On deck, at midnight, Bentley came on watch and stared into the gloom above until he made out the hunched black shape at the yard. It was blowing fierce now, with the Welfare constantly being drenched by icy spray. Huddled deep in his thick wool coat, his hands thrust into big patch pockets, he nevertheless shivered from time to time. He had eaten well that night, and drunk of wine, but when he had been on deck only an hour, the warmth was gone. He huddled ever deeper into the high-collared coat, burrowing into the warmth with his mind as well as his body. He was trying, oh so very hard, to keep away from that cold black shape aloft. But mind and eyes and heart returned and returned. The dim shape, immobile as a part of the topmast furniture, throbbed in his head. Occasionally a sort of horror overwhelmed him, a kind of fear. What had he—? But he would take his hands from his pockets, bang his sides vigorously, jig up and down. At one moment he tried to engage the master, on deck to smell the weather as so often when it bade fair to be dirty, in some silly conversation. But the thin, ugly Mr Robinson gave him such a withering look, that William felt quite hollow with loneliness. Then the master checked the binnacle, and went below.
If there had been, if there was, a plot (it flashed into his mind at one point) then why had Uncle Daniel done nothing to anyone except the boy? A moment of panic— it was just a mad act, a piece of vicious… William found himself biting his lower lip, clenching his fists in his pockets. His breathing was jerky. He brought it to control, thought rationally.