The captain closed the bedroom door. He should have dressed and gone down to the pilchard nets. He should have shown his captaincy. Instead he went to Mrs Yapp and took refuge in an hour more of sleep. His head ached badly when he woke. His shoulders were like wood. Hard winds, bad luck, a bar of sand had beached his ship. His masts were down, the cattle lost, the African set loose; the ground was deep in snow; and every half-wit in the land was either staying at the inn or banging at his door in the middle of the night with more bad news: damned Rankin had been found! What kind of day would Monday be? Oh praise the Lord if it could be a turning point! The Belle afloat. The cattle rounded up. The nightmare coming to an end.
9. Star-gazy Pie
WALTER HOWELLS had been sleeping unusually well, but he was woken abruptly before dawn. Someone with sopping feet was hurrying — too closely — past the window of his seafront home. Was home the word for where he lived? Or even house? Warehouse, perhaps. This was the man to see and bargain with if firearms were wanted. Or silk. Or books. Or laudanum. Or contraband. If anybody required horses, or had a letter to be sent, or needed to hire labour, acquire a wedding coat, buy shoes, a bed, a block of tea, some timber, a ticket for the Tar, then Walter was the man. He had the world beneath his bed in boxes, weighed and priced. ‘Everything supplied,’ he used to say, ‘excepting payment on the slate. Or loans.’
Who could that be at such an early hour walking by his house? Not excise men or smugglers. They couldn’t even sniff in Wherrytown without first informing Walter How-ells and agreeing on percentages. Some filchers, then? Some early rising thief? He took his ancient German flintlock off its bedboard hook. Its ram’s-horn butt was icy cold. As was the floor on his bare feet. As were the misted panes of window glass on his nose and forehead. He hadn’t known that so much snow had settled. He’d been asleep too soon. The seashore and the lane beyond the glass seemed inside out, the dark parts light, the ground much brighter than the sky. The sea was oddly matt. Its only scintillations came from the offshore lamps on the fishing boats, and the bobbing outlines of their masts and rigging, separated in the shallows by sparkling, turbulent circles of pilchards. No doubt the footsteps that he’d heard had been a fisherman’s. He left the flintlock on the windowsill, and wrapped himself in the Spanish rug which he used as his bed cover. The rug caught on the flintlock’s barrel and knocked it off the windowsill into the cushions of a chair, where it was lost. He wasn’t sorry to be woken early. This would be a busy day, for Walter Howells and Wherrytown. Everyone would earn a decent crust. High tide, high times!
There was still a smoulder meditating in the bedroom grate. Walter Howells knelt down, his knees in ashes, and revived what heat there was with kindling and some pages from a used ledger. He lit a candle from the flame. He mixed and warmed a little ink and then stood at his high desk to write out his Monday tasks. Bring the catch ashore. Get the pilchards salted and barrelled up. Bring the cattle in. Refloat the Belle. He noted down how much salt he’d need, how many panniers and barrels, how many men and women, what weight of wood, what boats, what rope, what cattle feed. He wrote ‘High Water — 2 p.m.?’ and circled it.
There was a letter to be sent, on behalf of Shipmaster Comstock, to William Bagnall, debtor, rascal, bludger, footpad, horse-thief, pugilist. Walter chuckled to himself. The very thought of William Bagnall’s many skills! He smoothed a piece of paper and wrote with hardly any hesitation and in high spirits:
My good friend Will,
You won’t & can’t deny you owe me favours. I wd. not have you in my debt for ever. So I urge you, pay me off thus, and easily, & let’s be done with it. There is a man who much deserves a beating & has quitt’d Wherrytown w’out settling his accounts or providing for his Reckoning. He is a fellow from yr. town. I cannot think it will be hardship for you to find him isolated in some place & break a bone or two, & well deserv’d. Some broken teeth wd. suit my purpose also, to stay his conversation for a period. Do this with trusted, vigorous friends to whom a sovereign might be pay’d, & say no more, & you must count y’self acquitt’d from my debt. His name is Aymer Smith, & you will know him from the soap works of that name & family. You shd. not stand in fear of him, but deal with him as you might deal with what he is, a thief & not a gentleman. Send proof of his misfortunes, & so we are confederates & league’d together in good friendship, xcept my name shd. not be known in this.
I sign myself on Monday 21st of November,
Walter Howells
It was a fine start to his day.
Walter Howells was mounted on his re-shod horse and organizing pilchards on the beach a little after eight. Most of Wherrytown was there. The women too. And many of the women from the coast had joined their husbands and their neighbours for the landing of the catch. How could they resist it? Good pennies could be made that Monday morning by nimble hands that didn’t mind the withering of salt or the rasp of fish-scales, that didn’t care if their nails, softened in the brine, were ripped, or if their arms were pickled to the elbows. Why should they mind? This wasn’t Paris, after all. This wasn’t Lah-di-dah-on-Sea. They wouldn’t need fine hands or perfect nails. They didn’t spend their day in salons, waving Chinese fans, or playing cards, or offering their fingers for gentlemen to kiss. There weren’t any Chinese fans or salons in Wherrytown. Nor any gentlemen either. But there was snow, and that was rare so early in the winter. Coastal snow does not last long; the Wherrytowners hurried out of bed to be the first to walk in it, to break its crusts, to roll it into balls. They gathered on the beach, made almost eager for the pilcharding by the crispy coverlet of white which hid the sand. It made them feel rosy with well-being. It brought the colours out. The blue and buff of the women’s smocks and aprons seemed exotic, almost tropical, against the arctic white.
What would the sea make of the snow? They watched the tide swell up, curl its lip and skim the beach of snow like children skim the cream off cakes. Soon some crewmen from the Belle, too bored and restless to stay in bed, joined the Wherrytowners on the beach. Snowballs began to fly. The snow was mixed with sand, and was dangerous. Walter Howells decided it was time for pilcharding.
MIGGY BOWE had had her fill of fresh beef the night before. Her dreams were bilious. Her stomach wasn’t used to large amounts of meat. She’d had to get up in the dark to pass an aching stool into the flattened heather behind their cottage. The night was cold and white. She squatted, shivering, and watched the lanterns of the fishing boats beyond the broken Belle. Her gut ached. It took its time. She didn’t like the snow at night. It put her on display. She could be watched. She’d heard the movement in the undergrowth when she’d first hurried out of doors. She’d taken it to be the cattle or a fox. The dogs were barking and pulling on their ropes. They always barked when there were foxes near. But now that she was bent up double with her nightshift bunched onto her knees, scarcely balancing, and constipated too, the night sounds seemed more sinister. The undergrowth was not asleep. It fidgeted. It stirred. She heard the snap of wood, and then a chilling silence as if someone twenty yards behind her back were standing on one leg, mid-step, and watching her. She couldn’t think that anyone would be about at such a time, on such a night, excepting fishermen, of course. Or Devils.