Glimpse of a pale gleam here or there
Come and gone as quick as thought,
Which might be hand or hair.
SHEERNESS WAS AN old garrison town on the coast, at the mouths of the Thames and the river Medway. It was forty-six miles east of London on the London, Chatham and Dover Railway line, and Swinburne had spent two hours and nine shillings to get there in a drafty second-class railway carriage that he had shared with half a dozen women, apparently the wives of laborers in the dockyard. Swinburne had reflected that any one of the women looked capable of throwing him bodily off the train, and he had left his copy of Baudelaire’s scandalous Les Fleurs du mal in his overcoat pocket and had instead contented himself with reading Dickens’s David Copperfield. He had even pulled his ridiculous sou’wester hat down at the sides to somewhat conceal his possibly affronting hedge of coppery hair.
He was out in this Godforsaken corner of England because Lizzie had died two days earlier, apparently by her own hand.
A five-minute walk from the Sheerness station had taken him to a railed lane overlooking the shore, and since the sun had only a few minutes ago gone down over the Gravesend hills behind him, and the sky was still pale, he had stood there for a few minutes with the cold sea wind flapping the long back brim of his rubberized hat. A couple of distant figures trudged along the darkening expanse of sand below him, carrying a pole that might have been a mast or some fishing apparatus, and a man on horseback a hundred yards farther away was trotting north along the band of darker damp sand by the gray fringe of surf. Off to his right, near the empty steamboat pier, Swinburne saw a long open shed with what looked like a row of a dozen gypsy wagons in it — and then he recognized these as bathing machines stowed away for the winter. Come June they would be wheeled out, and ladies in street clothes would climb in and pull the doors closed, and then the vehicles would be drawn by horses down the slope and a few yards out into the shallows, where the ladies, having changed into bathing suits, could open the seaside doors and step down to splash about in the water, unobserved from the shore. In spite of the purpose of his quest tonight, Swinburne had forlornly wished that one hardy lady or two might have braved the cold sea this evening; and that, if any had done it, he had brought a telescope.
He had sighed and walked on to the brightly gas-lit Grand Hotel, where he had moodily drunk three brandies before strolling southeast down Broadway, away from the lights of the town. The slow crash of surf against the seawall a mile out to his right was the only punctuation to the steady wind, and the coming night looked likely to be far darker out here than any ever were in London.
Soon the lantern on the pier Chichuwee had told him to watch for stood out clearly ahead of him, and Swinburne trudged up to within a few yards of the foot of the short pier and stood there for a full minute, nerving himself to take the last few steps of this long day’s journey. Someone must have lit the lantern and hung it on its pole at the end of the pier, but Swinburne couldn’t see anyone.
He took a deep breath now and squeezed Baudelaire in his pocket for luck, then tramped down the booming planks of the pier, threading his way delicately around buckets and lengths of rusty chain.
Several moored boats rocked gently on the black water in the lantern light, but only one seemed occupied. If it were the one Chichuwee had directed him to, it was a fishing boat, and Swinburne couldn’t imagine this vessel being anything much else. The grimy, battered vessel was no pleasure craft, certainly.
The boat was about twenty-five feet long. The short mast was bare, and the sail on its tethered boom was furled, but smoke was fluttering up out of a short tin pipe on the deck forward of two wide rectangular holes; stepping closer and peering over the gunwale, Swinburne saw that the rearward hole was partly filled with what appeared to be wet gravel. Perhaps it was some unattractive sort of shellfish. The chilly onshore wind was metallic and sulfurous, with a taint of coal smoke from the little chimney.
“Are you a singer?” came a harsh voice from only a couple of yards away, making Swinburne almost dance in surprise.
A stocky gray-bearded man in a voluminous oilskin coverall was sitting against the far gunwale among untidy heaps of rope, puffing on a short clay pipe.
“No,” said Swinburne. He gestured inexpressively. “Uh, no.”
The old man waved his pipe. “On your way then. I was informed that I’m waiting for a singer.”
Swinburne bit his lip and looked up and down the miles of dark shore under the starry vault of the sky, and then at the three other boats moored here. They looked long abandoned. The wind in the ropes and the textured crash and hiss of the waves emphasized the overall silence.
“Could it,” he ventured, “have been ‘a poet’?”
For several seconds the old man squinted at him in the lantern’s light; then he nodded. “Aye, the relay bird might have meant poet just as well. Are you a poet then?”
“Yes.”
The old man’s face crinkled with something like disgust, but he got his boots under him and struggled to his feet.
“You’re going to find it a cold night,” he said. “Your hat and gloves look good enough, and I’ve got a spare pair of boots and a neck wrap, but in between will suffer.”
“Suffering will be helpful, I think,” said Swinburne, stepping aboard. “Especially in between.”
“I’m Chess,” the old man said, and as if to emphasize it, he stamped twice on the rocking deck.
“Algernon,” said Swinburne. Apparently they were not to shake hands.
The stamping had evidently been a summons, for in a few seconds two other men appeared, climbing laboriously up out of a previously unnoticed square hole in the deck near the tin chimney. Their beards were if anything whiter than Chess’s, and Chess introduced them, perhaps seriously, as his father and grandfather.
“The bait’s aboard for our catch tonight,” Chess told them, waving at the skinny, top-heavy figure of Swinburne.
The two older men had closed a hatch cover over the opening they had emerged from, and they set about casting off lines and freeing the boom and unfurling the sail. Swinburne stepped cautiously around the open pit full of wet gravel to lean against the front side of the mast and look out over the bow at the black sea.
By his shadow on the raised bow ahead of him he could see that the silent mariners had carried the lantern aboard and fixed it somewhere amidships, and then he felt the deck move as they poled the vessel away from the pier.
When the offshore wind had filled the sail and the boat had begun to tack against it, surging out across the water to the south, Chess stepped up beside Swinburne.
“You’ve brought payment,” the old man said.
Swinburne nodded and with one gloved hand dug a stoppered bottle out of his pocket.
When he had laid it in Chess’s palm, the old man held it up, squinted at it, and shook it. “Catholic?” he asked.
“As specified. From St. Ethelreda’s in Holborn.”
“Cheat me and this enterprise won’t work.”
“I know,” said Swinburne irritably, “the bird man told me that.” He waved at the bottle. “It’s genuine.”
He wondered why, if Catholic holy water was so valuable to Chess, the old man didn’t simply go ashore and fetch some on his own. Perhaps these three never did go ashore, Swinburne thought fancifully — perhaps they were a trinity that was somehow not able to.
The wind was already achingly cold on his face as he squinted past Chess at the few lighted windows on the receding Kentish hills. “How far out do you have to go?”