‘I did not mean … to …’ Aymer said. ‘I take the shilling back.’
‘You’d better grab it, Ma!’
Rosie did what Miggy said. She wasn’t angry any more. Her passions were short-lived, and hardly worth a shilling. She put the coin in a jar.
‘You can come indoors,’ she said. Aymer was relieved and startled by her change of voice and countenance. ‘I’ll get you something warm to drink before you set off back.’
The Bowes had lit a Sabbath fire of kelp, cow dung and timbers from the Belle. It burned in colours that Aymer thought he’d never seen before, colours that an artist could not mix. Miggy and her mother sat together on a bench, their faces halved and reddened by the floating firelight. Ralph Parkiss, petting Whip, squatted on the floor, which was simply earth, flattened once a week with a shovel. He didn’t speak. Aymer had the only chair. They’d made both men hot mahogany, with water, country gin and treacle. (Aymer did not require them to remove the sugar from his drink.) It smelled of fish. The whole place smelled of fish. Smoked herrings hung across the fire. Tubs of salted pilchards were stored beneath the bench and chair. A leather bucket held fish oil, for cooking and for light. Great white wings of fish stiffened on ropes around the cob-and-wattle walls like lines of underwear.
The single room was divided by a sacking curtain, with a box-bed in the almost hidden part. It stood on bare earth which rain had softened to a paste. The only touch of colour to the room was a red petticoat, thrown over rising dough to keep it warm. There weren’t any curtains, cushions, rugs or tablecloths. There was no ceiling, but a raft of timbers made from wrecks. A little light and some dust from the thatch of turfs came through and peppered Aymer’s hair. There were no ornaments, except an embroidered passage from the Bible on the chimney breast:
Weep sore for him that goeth away:
for he shall return no more,
nor see his native country.
Jeremiah
Aymer found the room a little disconcerting: the fish, the petticoat, the privacy, the lack of daintiness, the quiet. But soon the dancing semi-darkness shut out the universe and made their silence comfortable. The two men concentrated on their drinks. Miggy Bowe untied her hair. Rosie had her first chance now to wonder how they’d cope without the benefit of kelp. Some farmers to the east of Wherrytown used untreated seaweed to fertilize their fields, but they would only pay a shilling for a wagon-load. There would be work in summer on the farms across the moor — but what a walk for fourpence a day! Who could live on that? What could they do, then? Find some work in Wherrytown. Cut peat where they had rights of turbary. Joust fish for the boatmen on the coast. Scrump nuts and apples. Poach rabbits, heathcocks, lapwings’ eggs. Glean oats and nettles for bread and soup. Cadge clothes. Steal turnips. Emigrate? They’d find a way. Rosie Bowe was not a melancholic. She had no time for lasting sorrows. Like many people living by the sea she had the bedding of a beggar but the spirit of a bull. There was no denying that the man who sat in her one chair had beached the family just as firmly as the gale had beached the Belle. Their masts were down. Their sides were holed. And they were stuck. But not for long.
‘Well, then … So that’s the way the bad luck settles in. It’s muck and nettles from now on,’ she said, and looked at Aymer in the bending flattery of light, defying him to say another word.
Aymer kept the silence easily. He didn’t know what he could say. He knew, though, what to do. He’d take the Bowes beneath his wing. A shilling was a paltry sum, a blushing sum. It was what he’d paid to George for merely fetching Mr Phipps. Aymer would give the Bowes more than a shilling’s worth if he could find the means … to what? To be straightforward and suggest the benefits for everyone if Miggy … Margaret. He’d have to call her Margaret … would come back on the next Tar with him to be his wife. He wouldn’t mention love. He couldn’t love the girl, not like the love that danced till dawn in fairytales or books. He was too old for dances and for dawn. But he could liberate the girl. What better dowry could there be? He’d break her chains of poverty, just like he’d snapped the chains of slavery for Otto. He looked across the room at Miggy’s silhouette. Her face was fine enough. Her skin was pale and clear. Mrs Margaret Smith, a healthy country catch, a woman less than half his age. He wouldn’t want a wife too well experienced. He didn’t need to win her heart. But he could court and win her head. Her body, too. She’d use the bedside chamber pot. He’d run his hands across her thrushy thighs. Her hair would hang in one loose tress. It would be best, he thought, to talk first to her mother. She’d understand the common sense of his proposal. She wouldn’t have much choice.
Aymer felt light-headed. Excitement? Fish fumes? Or the gin?
‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘I cannot trust myself to find the way when it is dark.’ And then to Ralph, ‘Will you be walking with me, sir? A companion shrinks the miles.’
‘Gladly, Mr Smith,’ he said. He couldn’t tell the truth, that he would rather stay and spend the night exactly where he was. Both men stood up, pulled on their coats and jostled at the door. Whip ran through their legs into the open air.
Aymer made a parting speech: ‘I promise you I will return within a day or two. I will consider some proposals that might ease your condition. You have accepted my shilling with reluctance, but you will, I hope, accept my friend ship and my help with …’ He could not find the proper words. With greater deference, perhaps? Or with docility? He left the farewell uncompleted. For the third time that day he offered his hand to Miggy Bowe. She stretched her arm and touched him on his finger ends, much in the way that she had touched the African’s toes on the beach the day before, much in the way a child would dare to touch a jellyfish. His hand was damp and hot.
‘I would’ve had that cow if you in’t come,’ she said.
Aymer Smith was not a Revolutionist. He could not abet the theft and slaughter of a cow, and square it with his conscience, or with the excise men, or — more to the point — with Walter Howells, who’d taken on the task of rounding up the cattle from the Belle. But what if the cow was not alive? ‘I saw three dead cows, ready salted, in the shallows of the wreck,’ he said. ‘That’s flotsam, isn’t it? I do not know the finer points of law. But isn’t wreckage floating in the sea the property of those who find it? And what is a lifeless cow but wreckage of a sort — just leather, horn and flesh? Who will oppose you taking meat out of the sea? It is fishing by another name. Besides, the flesh will putrefy unless you rescue it. It is almost a duty to oppose such waste.’
And so they took a handcart, a wood axe and some heavy knives and went down to the sea. The Bowes and Ralph waded in, despite the cold. Whip ran barking at the waves. But Aymer didn’t want to chance his boots. He used his strapped arm as an excuse for staying idle. One cow was almost beached. Between them and the free help of the waves, the Bowes and Ralph managed to drag it into the shallows. Its orifices drained of water and lance eels squirted through a thousand punctures in the hide. Its eyes had gone, and crabs were feeding on the titbits of the skull. Its tongue was white and bloodless. There was some evidence already of putrefaction in the head. The women would not take the tongue or brains. But the clammy, musty, tainted meat from the neck and clod would still be edible if washed in ashy water and then roasted. They went to work without emotion, beginning at the leg and cutting meat from off the bone up through the topside, silverside and flank into the aitch bone. The salty water caused the fibres of the open flesh to contract and drew the juices from the cow so that the sea became a rosy brine. The women stood in water that was tumbling with tiny, feeding fish. By the time they’d reached the rump and sirloin the water and the sand were red. Gulls were circling so close that the mayhem of their wings was louder than the sea.