‘A pity that our acquaintance will be so short.’
‘Well, not so short,’ said Robert Norris. ‘I must suppose that we are trapped here for a few days now. I can’t be sure if that is happy news or not.’
‘Don’t be so doubting, Robert.’ His wife was the teasing not the bashful sort. ‘They’ll not want dismals like yourself in Canada.’
‘It’s not the colonies that bother me, but what we might endure on the passage there. I’ve not the constitution for the sea.’
‘And nor have I,’ said Aymer. ‘But I have taken passage here by sea and I have ridden out the worst of storms.’ He remembered now the bruising to his shoulder which, truth be told, had stopped hurting the moment Katie had come in. ‘I tumbled from my berth and took a blow. But here you see me, well set up and only disembarked today. The observations to be made are these: on ship a passenger should have no fear of nausea if he stays off the deck and is not tempted by the portholes. Stay in your quarters. Let the wooden walls be the furthest horizons you allow. Let the deck above you be the sky. Take all your orientations from the space allotted you, and as the ship tips and rolls so you do too. Your body and your eye are in concord. But think to walk on deck to witness what a storm can do first-hand, and you will feel your body bucking like the ship. Your eye will sway between the still horizon or the stiller stars and battle with the masts and rigging of the boat so that your every step is like that of a drunken man. And thus seasickness will set in.’ A pleasing and a helpful lecture, Aymer thought.
‘It seems a pity to go so far and see so little,’ commented Katie.
‘The sickness is the price you pay for seeing,’ said Aymer. ‘I think there might be some general truth in that philosophy. To learn is to suffer. To suffer is to learn.’ He chuckled at his observation. And Robert and Katie Norris beamed at him with such indulgence and such attention that he felt glad to be in Wherrytown. Normally he didn’t welcome scrutiny. Not that he was the kind of man to command the stares of strangers. He liked to think of himself as a plain man, plainly spoken. He didn’t care for adjectives, or anything that was too ornamented. He liked the force of facts and objects, and he endeavoured to make his conversation instructional. ‘Still, such observations will not warm you from your walk,’ he concluded. ‘Our landlady is not at hand, it seems.’ He stepped across to the parlour sideboard, lifted the inn handbell and shook it. ‘That should bring our Mrs Yapp running.’
Mrs Yapp was not the sort to run. Anyway, she didn’t hear the bell. She wasn’t in earshot. She and George were in her sitting room with Aymer’s letters open on her table. Mrs Yapp had read them both out loud.
‘So that explains the soap,’ said George. ‘Take care he doesn’t pay for his lodgings here in bars of soap.’
‘And you take care to pay the gentleman some respect, George. He’s Smith & Sons. We’ll have to treat him sweet. I’d better see if I can find some bed sheets.’
‘What brings a man like that down here?’
‘To talk with Walter Howells, that’s what it said. Go on now, George. You’d better do as you’ve been bid and take these letters round.’ She shook her skirt and pinafore. She checked her stays and laces in the glass. She primped the jug-loops in her hair. ‘I’ll go and see if there is anything he wants.’
‘He’ll have no need of soap.’
When Alice Yapp and George came into the parlour, Aymer Smith and the Norris couple were sitting round the cold grate in happy conversation, or at least the Soap Man was in conversation and the other two were listening politely to his remarks about the beneficial freedoms of the colonies. Katie had loosed her hair and let it hang in one long bunch across her chest. Her husband had removed his boots and had his stockinged feet on a fireside settle, as if they could be warmed and dried by the memory of fire.
‘Mr Smith,’ said Mrs Yapp, as if it were the most aristocratic of names, ‘is it all pleasing to you?’ She made a genteel sweep of her hand.
‘We should like a fire.’
‘George! Lay a fire for Mr Smith. And sheets. I promised sheets.’
‘If that in’t hospitality,’ said George to no one in particular, ‘then what the Devil is?’
Aymer was cheered by the change in Mrs Yapp. So were Robert and Katie Norris. They’d been at the inn for three nights and Mrs Yapp had not so far expressed any word of welcome or shown any sign of hospitality. They had not lodged in inns before and took the Yapp indifference to be normal. But now with Mr Smith she displayed an accommodation to his comforts that was almost worshipful.
George put tinder in the grate and set off by the lane and alley to collect dry kelp and logs from the courtyard for the fire. He’d scarcely reached the courtyard when — happy chance — Walter Howells rode in, his yellow leather breeches, worsted stockings and high-lows caked in mud, his horse a little lame from galloping with a lost shoe. George ran to take the reins and pass on Smith’s letter.
‘Not now, not now!’ said Howells, brushing past George and stamping across the yard towards the alleyway of steps. ‘There’s been a wreck!’
‘What wreck?’
But Walter Howells was out of sight and at the inn’s front door. He didn’t remove his leather hat which, low at the crown and turned up at its eaves, revealed red shock hair and a redder face. Mrs Yapp and three guests whom he had not seen before were in the parlour — a fine-looking young woman and two clerkish men. He didn’t pause for pleasantries but broke into their conversation. ‘Alice. Bake some bread and pull some corks. You’ve got a full house for a night or two. That Yankee ship we were expecting has beached at Dry Manston and all the sailors on it are coming here and seeking beds.’
‘Dear Lord, how many beds?’
‘Oh, sixteen, seventeen. And a little dog! And they’ve got a Negro in a cart.’
‘You’re joking with me, Walter Howells.’
‘I am not.’
‘A Negro in a cart, you say? Well, we’ll see.’
‘You will indeed. You can expect them in the hour and, in that hour, I’ll have to find myself the smith. My horse has dropped a shoe.’
Aymer Smith — somewhat startled that this muddy, florid man should be Howells the kelp agent — stepped forward and offered his hand: ‘Please allow me to introduce myself. You say you need a smith. And I’m a Smith, but not much use with horses …’
‘Then, sir,’ said Walter Howells, ‘you’re not much use to me.’
3. Shared Beds
FOR THAT ONE HOUR between Walter Howells’s ‘You’re not much use to me’ and the arrival of the sailors from the Belle, Aymer viewed his task in Wherrytown with less timidity. The obligations of Duty and Conscience were unchanged, of course. He could not take pleasure in the lecture-with-regrets that he would have to deliver on ‘The Local Implications of Monsieur Leblanc’s Liberties with Salt’. But Walter Howells’s ill-manners in the parlour with Katie Norris there to witness had made the prospect of the lecture sweeter.
Aymer stood at the window of his room. In the courtyard Mr Howells was leading his unshoed horse to the smith that, for the moment, he might imagine more consequential than a Smith. Aymer could be patient. He would let Mr Howells absorb the wincing implications of the letter to him and its signature. How could Aymer know that George still had the letter — both letters — in his pocket and in the fever of ‘There’s been a wreck!’ had forgotten it? The letter was at that moment (he imagined) waiting on the agent’s parlour table. It would not be long, a couple of hours at the most, before Aymer could expect the verbose opportunity to accept the man’s apologies.