‘There’s truth in that,’ said Mrs Yapp. She couldn’t laugh. She had to swallow it. Smith’s clothes and soap and bag were on the settle in her room.
The Wherrytowners couldn’t be blamed for their alarm. Not only had the African escaped, but now it seemed that he had burgled someone at the inn and might be hiding from the snow in Wherrytown. They wouldn’t have been more worried if they’d heard a bull was loose. They understood the dangers of a bull. You could lock your door against a bull. But Africans? Lord preserve them from the savages. They might be raped and eaten in their beds. Some hurried off to check their daughters and their outhouses. Some looked uneasily into the shadows. How well would women sleep that night, with all their men at sea in pilchard boats and Otto on the loose?
A voice at Aymer’s shoulder muttered, ‘You are a provocation, sir.’
‘Ah, George!’
They walked without speaking till they reached the lintelled door of the inn. Inside, Americans and Wherrytowners were waiting to be served with beer.
‘No blisters! And two sovereigns saved, I think,’ said Aymer. He was delighted with himself, despite his throbbing ear. Ashamed as well. And then, ‘I can rely, I hope, on your discretion?’
‘Two sovvers buys discretion, sir, and also can provide you with some clothes that are a match for those the blackie stole. Such wickedness! And sheets and soap, if you require. And some very clever books from George’s Lending Library. Do you begin to see my strategy?’
It wasn’t long before Aymer was reunited with his property, and George (just a half-crown better off) was warming ale and punch for anyone with ha’pennies to spare.
Aymer took a candle to the room. How glad he was the Norrises were there, and still awake and talking softly to each other. He placed the candle on the sill and called to them behind the bed-curtain. ‘I have my clothes. The parlourman has brought them back. There has been some misapprehension by Mrs Yapp and the Americans.’
He recounted to the curtains what had happened in the lane, and how it had required ‘unusual restraint on my behalf, and dignity’ to check the captain’s temper. ‘He spoke to me with a deal of freedom, and he struck me once, but did not dare to do it twice,’ he explained. ‘I could not admire it. But I am glad that my rebuttals were not expressed with any greater roughness than was absolutely requisite.’
His hands were shaking again. Retelling what had happened was reliving it.
‘I cannot regard the captain as a man of much gentility,’ he said. ‘But it is good to share a room with people of distinction, such as you, dear friends. I hope I can regard you both as friends?’ His nose was running now. He wiped it on the damp arm of his coat. He sniffed back tears as best he could. But soon he couldn’t stifle them. The tears had let him down, and he was sobbing. ‘I am not easy that the African is out in weather such as this.’
At last the curtain was drawn back and Robert Norris poked his head into the room. ‘Don’t upset yourself. Whoever set the poor man free could have chosen better times, it’s true. But that’s for his conscience, not yours.’
And then his wife, invisible behind his back, said, ‘We should be grateful he’s free from his imprisonment. It broke my heart to see him so derided in the yard.’
‘You are so good,’ said Aymer Smith. His sobbing now was unrestrained, and he was shivering. Katie Norris stepped across the room into the candlelight, and pressed Aymer’s head against her stomach and her cotton nightdress as if he were a child and not a man.
‘No, you are good to care so much for a stranger. You are a Good Samaritan,’ she said.
‘You think too kindly of me.’ Aymer would have lifted up his hands and held her by the waist, and sunk his face more deeply into the cotton, into her mottled, salmon quilt of flesh, except that Robert Norris had crossed the room as well. He put his arm around his wife and placed his spare hand, like a preacher, on Aymer’s head. ‘Of course, we are your friends,’ he said. They held each other for a moment, and listened to new noises in the courtyard, two flights below. Footsteps on the hardened snow. A wooden door banged shut. A sneeze. Had Otto come in from the snow? The parlour clock was striking twelve.
‘It’s only fishermen,’ said Robert Norris. ‘The Sabbath’s over and they’re going to their boats. But we must sleep.’
‘I cannot.’ Aymer’s pulse was hammering.
‘You must,’ said Katie. But she was looking into Robert’s eyes when she recited,
‘Go to bed. Go to sleep.
Go all the way to the end of tired.
Sleep well. Sleep tight.
Don’t wake up until it’s light,
And all your heartaches have expired.’
8. Rankin’s Dollar
THE DOLLY BOATS had no regard for Sabbaths. They’d rather catch the Devil’s fish than none at all. They put to sea before midnight and took advantage of the snow-bounced moonlight and a little wind to shoot their unblessed net up-water from the Belle, two tons of it, a looping quarter-mile of rope and cork and lead, and every knot hand-tied. It curtained off the stem of sea beyond the Cradle Rock. Dollys had fished there for a hundred years at least. It was known to be an alleyway for shoals.
The larger boat, with Henry Dolly and his two younger sons aboard, rode on its anchor at the mouth of the net, with lanterns burning on both sides. They shared a pipe and, if they prayed, prayed only that the dawn or fish would come before they died of cold. They didn’t speak. What should they say? That they would rather be asleep, farting supper in their beds? That they would rather they’d been born miles from sea and never had to smell or touch a fish again? They watched their boots, their knees, the backs of their hands, the final lamplit flurries of the snow. They listened to the wind, the distant flap of tattered canvas on the Belle, the grieving timbers of their boat, the never-ending tug of war between the granite and the sea, and didn’t for a moment feel bored, excited or afraid. This was their life, and it was hard.
Their elder brother, Palmer Dolly — with only the old man Skimmer as a mate — was master of their smaller boat, fifty yards astern. He’d put it at the centre of the loop of net, halved its sail and now was waiting at the tiller for the call — Tuck ’em in! And tuck ’em-IN! — that fish were coming through and that the tuck net should be dropped. And then a night of labour, trawling pilchards from the curtained sea. If there was a call, if any pilchards came, that is. He’d fished this stem before, all night, all day, and netted nothing but some kelp. But on this night he was an optimist. He felt elated by the snow, the snubbing of the Sabbath and by the Belle’s enticing, twiggy silhouette. The stranded ship, he felt, had brought good luck. The Belle would bring the pilchards in. The Belle would change — would save? — his life.
Palmer Dolly was no gadabout. He’d hardly ever been inland. He’d never seen the sea beyond Wherrytown. He was a fisherman and not a mariner. But he was of an age — at nineteen — when he could see his life mapped out, dry ink on the page. He’d marry someone from the coast — ‘We weds wi’ Dry Manston folk,’ his mother said. ‘We don’t have owt to do with Wherrytown.’ He’d spend his life with some girl like Miggy Bowe. She’d have the kids. He’d have the boats. He would take his sons to tuck for fish and she would keep their girls to help out with the kelp. A waste of time, as kelp was worthless now. There’d be no strangers in their lives, just cousins, neighbours, Mr Howells. And they would sit, between their cottage and the sea, repairing nets for Ever and Ever, World Without End. There’d been no prospect of escape until the Belle had come. But now he mapped a life out of his own. He could be a sailor on the Belle, and sail back to America to speak their showy, manly English baritone, and make his fortune in the sun. There always was a blue sky and a sun in Palmer’s dreams. He only had to volunteer. Shipmaster Comstock, after all, already knew he was a willing and a useful hand. It had only been a couple of days since the captain had stood on deck and picked out Palmer Dolly to help with that ‘one injured party, on the orlop’ (remote, seductive, big-ship words). Palmer had been the first one pointed at, the first one chosen, the first one favoured by the captain.