Aymer wasn’t watching Nat. If he was breathless it was not because the corpse had winded him. He watched his new friend Ralph clasp Mrs Margaret Smith around the waist and put his fine young nose into her hair. Aymer took his spectacles off and wiped his eyes. ‘Too late to talk, I think,’ he said to Rosie Bowe.
‘She’s only but a girl.’ Rosie put her hand out and touched him on the arm. ‘She in’t for you. You must know that.’
‘I in’t for no one, Mrs Bowe.’
He bowed. No one had ever bowed to her before. It wouldn’t do to laugh. Instead, while he was stooped in front of her, she brushed the fish skin from his nose. ‘Pilchard tears,’ she said. He turned and followed Nathaniel Rankin into Wherrytown, with the heavy head of a mourner.
So Nathaniel Rankin came ashore with ninety tons of pilchards. The Dollys put him in the tackle room where Otto had slept. The Americans came in ones and twos to peek at him, and count their blessings. The captain ordered John Peacock, the Belle’s sailmaker, to sew the drowned man up in the piece of canvas he’d been carried in. George hovered at the door and watched. John Peacock smoked his pipe, and hummed to himself. He didn’t seem to mind the work. ‘You lose a man, you lose a piece of sail,’ he said. ‘This ain’t the first I’ve stitched. Nor will it be the last.’
‘What was that tale you told in the parlour the other night?’ George said. ‘The iced-up man from Canadee that ended up in Liverpool, and never died at all? They thawed him out. You think I ought to fetch some towels and grog for this one?’
‘Nat Rankin won’t see Liverpool,’ John Peacock said. ‘He won’t be calling out for grog. I’ve stitched him in for good. There now.’ He’d wrapped his shipmate out of sight. ‘And that’s the end of it. Except for digging him a hole. And prayers.’
‘And worms,’ said George.
THE PILCHARDS had been brought ashore before midday, and though the townswomen still had several days’ more work to do in the salting hall, the men were free at last to take advantage of the heavy, flooding tide and get the Belle clear of the bar at Dry Manston. The fishermen took in their nets, and made the best of a modest breeze to get along the coast before high tide at a quarter after two. Their task: to put a dozen towlines on the Belle, and steady it from drifting further inshore once the keel was floating free of sand. The Americans and another fifteen willing hands from Wherrytown were hurrying along the coast by foot. The snow was slush by now. The day was mild. And they could make fast progress. Ralph Parkiss pointed out the Cradle Rock as they passed by. His comrades teased him endlessly about the girl he’d found. ‘Dump her, Ralph,’ they said. ‘We don’t want ballast on the Belle.’
Walter Howells had got the Monday organized with military precision. He loved to be the mounted major-general, deploying men with stabs and swipes from his riding crop. He would have had his flintlock in his belt if only he could have found it in his house. He would have fired it in the air to start the men off on their journey down the coast. ‘Not now. No time,’ he said, when anybody threatened to delay him with questions or pleasantries. He heeled his horse from shore to inn and back. He might seem bad-tempered to those he shouted at. But Walter Howells, in fact, was happy with himself, and red-faced only with high hopes and skin that didn’t like salt air. His day was going well. And it was fine, thank God; no awkward wind, no squally sea. He’d have no trouble with the Belle of Wilmington, so long as he made haste. There was no time to waste. He found a birchwood coffin and took it from his storeroom to the inn, balanced across the saddle of his second horse. He leant it up against the tackle-room door, and nodded at the corpse and at John Peacock, the sailmaker, within.
The agent marked the coffin price on his pocket ledger against the Belle’s name, called George to mind the horses for a moment, and went in search of Captain Comstock. He didn’t have to hunt. The captain was exactly where he’d been the morning before; in low spirits, sitting with a bottle in the snug.
‘Now, sir, to horse,’ Howells said. ‘There’s work that must be done if you’re to see America again.’ He put the stopper in the bottle, and pulled the captain from his chair. ‘What did I say about we’re partners now? I never meant that you’d sit idle while I did all the work and worrying …’
‘I worry, Mr Howells, because I have one seaman dead and needing burial, and another man gone missing in this wretched land …’ He recounted, as he pulled his deck boots on and hurried down to the courtyard, how they had wrongly blamed ‘that Smith’. He’d not stolen Otto after all. ‘We could have blacked an innocent eye.’
‘Too late, too late,’ said Mr Howells. His letter to William Bagnall was signed and sealed. The sovereign was put aside. ‘So where’s your blackie, then, if not with Soapie Smith?’ Shipmaster Comstock shrugged. ‘He won’t have gone far, Captain. He’ll have found some little nest, and rats and grass to eat. Let’s bring the Belle around to Wherrytown today, and then I’ll organize a hunt to track the fellow down, or find his body at the very least.’ And then he said, ‘Let’s put a sovereign on his head. Whoever finds your blackie gets the prize! That’s an entertainment for your men.’
George steadied their horses in the courtyard while Howells and Comstock mounted. He watched them go down to the quay, then turn westwards along the coast. A comic sight. The American did not sit squarely on his horse. He didn’t match his bottom to the rhythms of the horse’s back. The mare would do her best to kick him off.
‘There’s a man who’ll be bringing blisters home tonight,’ he said. ‘Prepare the poultices!’
Now the only living men in Wherrytown, apart from George, were Aymer, Robert Norris, Mr Phipps, John Peacock, the undertaker-cum-sailmaker, and those few gouty veterans too stiff and ailing to step out of doors, except for funerals.
It was a lucky day for everyone except Aymer. By the time the riders had arrived at Dry Manston beach, the landlubbers and gangs of boys had found and roped eighty of the cattle from Quebec. They’d made rough fencing out of gorse where they could keep the herd until they could be loaded on the Belle. ‘There’s plenty more,’ they reported to Walter Howells.
‘Keep thirty separate,’ he ordered them, and winked at Captain Comstock. ‘A little candle-end for us,’ he said.
They rode down to the shore. The captain jumped onto the sand. His thighs and back were stiff and bruised. He’d never been so tossed about, not even by the ocean off the Cape. He stood amongst his men and watched the fishermen attach their lines to the Belle. The smaller boats came into the shallows. Palmer took the captain’s arm and helped him climb into the Dolly boat, and at last Captain Comstock and his crew took to the sea again. Quite soon, and hardly dampened by the spray, they were aboard the Belle. America!
First they had to reduce the ship’s draught at the bow where it was held most firmly. The rigging and the masts were wrecked, the decks were broken through, but — thank the Lord and Neptune — the ship was savable. They cleared out the bilges, and examined the inside of the hull for signs of cracks and movement in the frames and planking. The larboard bow was holed. The outer planks on the orlop deck had sprung. The captain ordered that they should be patched and braced immediately. All the loose gear — lockers, broken timber, equipment and supplies, the mounted double-barrelled cannon — was taken on deck, and loaded on the smaller fishing boats, then put ashore above the high-tide line. Quite soon the beach at Dry Manston, despite the one or two remaining carcasses of cows, began to look like the landing point of some immigrant community in Canada or in Australia. How long before a settlement would spring up amongst the dunes? How long before the natives came with spears?