“I think you hope to die,” said Chess, shouting into Swinburne’s ear, “but haven’t the industry to kill yourself in a straightforward fashion.” He laughed. “No, lad, you’re not dead — nor am I. But it seems we both have grandfathers wanting such care as dead men can receive.”
With his gloved right hand he pulled back the bunched left sleeves of his coverall, coat, and sweater, and then quickly tucked it all back into the glove gauntlet, but not before Swinburne had glimpsed a raw cut on the man’s wrist.
Swinburne squinted ahead at the curling wisp that was his own grandfather’s ghost. “But this isn’t them.” He pounded one fist on the gunwale. “I mean—is it?”
Chess said loudly, “They break up, when they die. The core goes away, but the shell sometimes stays. And even the shell is part of what they were.” He nodded out over the bow. “And there’s your grandfather’s.”
“No,” said Swinburne. And then he shouted, “No!” at the white figure curling in the darkness.
“What for me?” piped his grandfather’s ghost.
“Nothing from me,” said Swinburne into his clenched hands on the gunwale; he had spoken almost too quietly for even Chess to hear him over the thrashing wind, but the ghost sprang to fading mist.
Swinburne raised his head, glaring into the infinite night.
“Lizzie!” he called now. “Lizzie Siddal!”
The ghosts all just stood out there, like a million bleached banners of a long-ago defeated army.
“Lizzie!” he called again.
And another ghost came into sharper focus where his grandfather’s had been, and this one managed to look vaguely feminine in its shifting outlines.
“Algy, who are your friends?” it said, and its voice was like notes violined out of glass and sharp edges of bone.
Swinburne’s spray-stung eyes strained with the effort of getting her into focus. “Sailors,” he shouted. “Lizzie, I—”
“The dead leading the blind,” said her ghost. “Algy, it’s always cold here.”
“I’ve come to take you back,” Swinburne called, cupping his hands around his mouth.
“Back! How?”
Swinburne’s teeth stung as he took a deep breath. “Marry me! I love you! With Gabriel it was just ‘till death did you part,’ and that’s — done. Marry me and live in me, in this body, this warm body. ‘One flesh.’” He was still holding Chess’s opened knife, and now he stabbed his finger right through the leather glove and shook drops of blood out into the wind. “With this blood I thee wed!”
But the white figure was now smaller and less distinct. “I’m naked,” came its fainter voice. “You mustn’t look at me.”
“Clothe yourself in me! I love you! We can — travel, read, eat, drink, together!”
“I don’t have that anymore.”
“Have it all again, in me! Marry me! Here’s a ship’s captain, we can be together, a hermaphrodite—”
“No,” came her voice; then, much louder, “No.” And she was gone. The other ghosts, filling the night apparently to the invisible horizon, crowded closer, their arms waving like a moonlit kelp forest on the sea floor.
Swinburne gaped at the space where Lizzie’s ghost had been.
Chess pushed away from the bow. “Shouldn’t have spilled your blood till she agreed to take it,” he said before striding back along the rocking deck.
The old man shouted to his two dead crewmen, and they shambled to the tiller and rigging, and in moments the boat was heeling around in the wind.
Ghost limbs flailed at the taut shrouds and were whisked into vanishing fragments, and for a few tense moments as Swinburne clung to the bow their voices were a buzzing, clattering racket in his freezing ears.
“Don’t listen to them!” shouted Chess from behind him.
But Swinburne couldn’t ignore their voices, the things they were saying: “Here, where the world is quiet; / Here, where all trouble seems / Dead winds’ and spent waves’ riot / In doubtful dreams of dreams…” These were lines he had written himself, and so they were convincing. “Even the weariest river / Winds somewhere safe to sea…”
He had already got one knee up on the gunwale when Chess tugged him back to sprawl painfully on the deck.
“Not your style,” Chess called to him.
Then the boat had come around and was surging northwest before the wind, and the ghost multitude quickly receded into the remote blackness.
Swinburne got wearily to his feet and gripped the rail, lowering his head and taking deep breaths of the cold sea air.
“You’ll be among ’em soon enough,” said Chess, not unkindly. “Why don’t you get in out of the wind now.”
Swinburne climbed back down to the belowdecks cabin, stunned and despairing, for he had thought his main challenge would be finding Lizzie’s ghost — it had not occurred to him that she might refuse his proposal.
WHEN THE BOAT’S PITCHING fell to a gentle rise and fall, he knew they had passed the Sheerness breakwater, and he pulled himself back up onto the deck. The kerosene torches had been extinguished, and the old lantern was again glowing on the mast.
The lights on the Kentish hills were bright yellow dots in the night. Out in the cold air again, Swinburne was shivering violently, and he had to ask Chess, who shambled up to him, to repeat something he had just said.
“It don’t work with fishing-boat captains,” the old man said more loudly.
“Wh-what doesn’t?”
“Shipboard marriages.” He shook his head. “But did you truly expect me to marry you to a ghost?”
“Oh, what d-does it matter now?”
Chess grinned, without cheer. “Just so you know in future — they couldn’t say ‘I do.’ There’s no I, and they haven’t the wherewithal to choose to do anything.”
“She chose to reject me!”
“That wasn’t a choice, lad — that was an empty gun saying click.”
“She chose to reject me,” said Swinburne again, and Chess shook his head and shambled back to rejoin his laboring dead ancestors.
After a few minutes, the mariners let the sail go slack and one of them leaned on the tiller, and Swinburne saw the pier only moments before Chess threw a line over a bollard on it and began pulling the bow in.
And the figure standing at the foot of the pier wasn’t visible until a match flared in the darkness and lit what must have been the end of a cigar.
Chess and his ancestors finished mooring the boat and tying up the lowered sail, and then Chess plodded wearily across the deck to the mast and extinguished the lantern; the darkness was total. A minute later Swinburne heard the hatch cover clatter down.
His business here seemed to be ended.
Swinburne shrugged and stepped up onto the pier.
“And how do you do, sir?” he called toward the tiny orange-glowing coal of the cigar.
“Stupidest question I’ve ever heard,” came the gruff answer.
Swinburne clenched his teeth and made himself step forward, but the cigar coal bobbed in quick retreat.
“Stay back, you fool!” came the unseen man’s voice. “Don’t you know anything? I can survive their notice, but I doubt you could.”
Swinburne forced his voice to be steady. “Whose notice?”
“Not at night, under an open sky. Noon tomorrow — in the Whispering Gallery in the dome of St. Paul’s. Stand at the southernmost point, by the stairs. Don’t fail to be there, if you hope to save your life or your soul.”
Then the cigar coal fell to the ground and went out, probably under a heel. After Swinburne had called hello a few times, he slowly but resolutely began walking forward, but his measured trudging took him all the way up to the road without hearing a sound from the man who had spoken to him; and he exhaled and relaxed and began trudging back toward Sheerness to get a room at the hotel for the remainder of the night.