They return to the ramshackle and burned-over camp, weary, bone-chilled, and low in spirits, having pulled hard all day and seen no sign of the Hastings nor found any indication of her possible fate. The cook builds a fire from barrel staves and sawed-up sections of the mizzenmast and fashions a sour-tasting stew of salt beef and ancient, woody turnips. After the eating is over, Cavendish taps a cask of brandy and has a ration served to each man. They sullenly drink down their allotted portions and then, without asking further permission, begin taking more until the cask is emptied and the atmosphere inside the tent is liquorous and unstable. Soon, after a period of drunken and cantankerous arguing, a fight breaks out and a knife is drawn. McKendrick, a mere onlooker, is slashed deeply in the forearm, and the blacksmith is knocked senseless. When Cavendish tries to intervene, his head is split open with a belaying pin, and Sumner and Otto have to step in to save him from a worse beating. They pull him outside for safety. Otto goes back to try to calm the men but is himself abused and then threatened with the knife. Cavendish, back on his feet, cursing foully, face gruesomely checkered with his own blood, takes two loaded rifles from the whaleboats, gives a third to Otto, and ventures back inside the tent. He fires once down into the ice to gain their attention and then declares that he will gladly put the second bullet into any cunt who fancies his chances.
“With Brownlee gone, I’m captain still, and I’ll cheerfully murder any mutinous bastard who dares think otherwise.”
There is a pause, then Bannon, a loose-eyed Shetlander with silver hoops in his ears, picks up a barrel stave and rushes wildly forwards. Cavendish, without raising the rifle from his hip, tilts the barrel upwards and shoots him through the throat. The top portion of the Shetlander’s skull detaches and flies backwards against the steeply pitched canvas roof, leaving a broad red bull’s-eye and, around it, a fainter aureole of purplish brain matter. There is a guttural roar of dismay from the other men, and then a sudden, leaden silence. Cavendish drops the empty rifle at his feet and takes the loaded one from Otto.
“You other cunts take heed now,” he tells them. “This pox-arsed foolishness has just cost a man his life.”
He licks his lips, then looks curiously about as though selecting who to shoot next. Blood seeps off his eyebrow and beard, and spatters down onto the ice. The tent is smeared with shadows and smells fiercely of liquor and piss.
“I’m a loose fucking cannon, I am,” Cavendish tells them quietly. “I do whatever takes my fancy at the time. You best remember that if you ever think of crossing me again.”
He nods twice in silent, bullish confirmation of this candid self-accounting, sniffs, and draws his hand across his blood-soaked beard.
“Tomorrow we make a run for Pond’s Bay,” he says. “If we don’t find the Hastings on the way there, we’ll surely find another ship to take us when we arrive.”
“It’s a hundred mile to Pond’s Bay if it’s an inch,” someone says.
“Then you bastards best sober up and get some sleep aforetimes.”
Cavendish looks down at the dead Shetlander and shakes his head.
“It’s a fucking foolish way to go,” he says to Otto. “Man’s carrying a loaded rifle, you don’t take him on with a barrel stave. That’s simple common sense.”
Otto nods and then steps forwards and, with a solemn and pontifical air, makes the sign of the cross above the corpse. Two of the men, unbidden, take the Shetlander by the boot heels and drag him out onto the floe. Off in a corner, unnoticed amidst this uproar, Drax in chains sits like an idol — cross-legged, smiling, watching from afar.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The next day, Sumner is too feverish to steer or row. As they pull east through layers of thick fog and showers of freezing rain and sleet, he huddles in the stem covered by a blanket, shivering and stomach sick. Every now and then, Cavendish shouts out an order or Otto commences whistling a Germanic air, but there are no other sounds except the death-rattle creak of the oarlocks and the asynchronous plash of the blades in the water. Each man, it seems, is wrapped up in his own silent forebodings. The day is gloomy, the sky dun-colored and raw. Twice, before noon, Sumner has to pull down his britches and hang his arse over the gunwale to sputter out a pint or so of liquid shit into the sea. When Otto offers him brandy, he swallows it down gratefully, then retches it straight back up. The men watch all this without comment or mockery. Bannon’s murder has flattened their resolve, left them stranded warily between equal but opposing fears.
At night, they camp on the floe edge, raise the bloodstained tent, attempt to dry and feed themselves. Near midnight, the bluish twilight thickens briefly to a gaudy and stelliferous darkness, then an hour later reasserts itself. Sumner sweats and shivers, dips in and out of an uneasy and dream-afflicted sleep. Around him bundled bodies grumble and gasp like snoozing cattle; the air inside the tent feels iron cold against his cheeks and nose, and has a stewed and crotch-like reek to it. As his flesh yearns, aches, and itches for the absent drug, his mind drifts and circles. He remembers the solitary journey from Delhi, the humiliations of Bombay and then London in April. Peter Lloyd’s Hotel in Charing Cross: the smell of semen and old cigar smoke; the squeals and shrieks of whores and their customers at night; the narrow iron bed, the oil lamp, the threadbare fauteuil spitting horse hair and grimed with bear fat and Makassar oil. He eats pork chops and peas and lives on questionable credit. Every morning for two weeks he goes out to the hospitals with his diplomas and his outdated letters of introduction; he sits in corridors and waits. In the evening, he seeks out acquaintances from Belfast and Galway — not good friends but men who will at least remember him: Callaghan, Fitzgerald, O’Leary, McCall. They reminisce over whiskey and ale. When the time is right, he asks for their help, and they tell him to try America, Mexico, or possibly Brazil, somewhere where the past does not matter so much as it does here, where the people are more free and easy and more likely to forgive a man’s mistakes since they have made a few themselves. England is not the place for him, they tell him, not anymore; it is too rigid and severe; he must give it up. Although they believe his story, they assure him, others never will. Their tone is friendly enough, comradely even, but he can tell that they wish him away. They greet news of his great failure as a reassuring reminder of their own more modest success, but also, more deeply, as a warning of what calamities might overtake them if they ever lose their vigilance, if they ever forget who they are or what they are about. In their worst imaginings they see in his disgrace a garish prophecy of their own.
At night, he takes opium and walks about the city until he is tired enough to sleep. One evening as he scuffs lopsidedly along Fleet Street, then past Temple Bar and the Courts of Justice, his ferule tapping the pavement as he goes along, he is astonished to see Corbyn coming straight towards him. He is wearing his campaign medals and red dress uniform; his tar-black boots are polished to a mirrored sheen, and he is in conversation with another, younger officer, mustachioed and similarly attired. They are both smoking cheroots and laughing. Sumner stands where he is in the shadow of a castellated doorway and waits for them to reach him. As he waits, he remembers Corbyn’s manner at the court-martial — casual, unconcerned, natural, as if, even as he lied, the truth was in his gift, as if he could make or unmake it exactly as he chose. As Sumner remembers the scene, he feels an avalanche of rage beginning to gather inside his chest; the muscles tighten in his throat and legs; he begins to shudder. The two officers draw closer, and he feels for a ghoulish moment excarnated, transcendent even, as if his body is much too small and slight to contain his furious thoughts. As they pass him, smoking and laughing, Sumner steps out from the doorway. He taps Corbyn on the brass-buttoned epaulette and, when he turns around to see who it is, strikes him across the face. Corbyn topples sideways. The younger officer drops his cheroot and stares.