Bring Larks and Heroes (6 page)

After Halloran had presented himself, the boy said nothing for a wearing time, waiting, with his mouth characteristically pained, for some arcane malaise to leave him be.
Piles
,
hoped Halloran.
Angry
,
he hoped.

‘It is normal,' the boy said at last, ‘to answer an officer when you are hailed. When I failed to hear you answer me, Corporal, I thought, perhaps there is a ferryman in charge of that boat. Eh?'

I won
'
t fawn on your ehs
,
roared a voice in Halloran's belly.

‘Yes, sir,' he said.

‘You have – how many transports in your boat?'

‘Three, sir.'

The lieutenant tapped Halloran's flint-lock with his cane.

‘Are you loaded?'

‘No, sir.'

The pain of this made Rowley close his eyes and nod.

‘Why not?' A small perilous voice. Just the thing to frighten shit out of Irish yokels. But not out of this one.

‘Begging your pardon, sir, the quartermaster asked us not to use the cartridges. There are only three rounds for every Marine in the garrison.'

‘I know that, Corporal. Yet you have three desperate men and a boat which could, at a pinch, sail to the Dutch East Indies. Sense, Corporal, sense!'

There was no doubt about it. Halloran's lack of sense had brought anguish into the corners of Rowley's eyes, and he would bear it only by calling on his reserves of good-breeding.

‘Load now, please!'

The eyes remained close if not closed, as Halloran rigmaroled the butt of the flint-lock to the sand and swung his thin legs apart, trying to achieve the rangy indolence of the good driller, of the soldier never flustered. He allowed himself to be rebellious to the extent of not fumbling. When he'd bitten the cartridge and poured the charge down, he took a moment or two to flick grains of powder from the muzzle, reminding himself inevitably of the priest cleaning the paten before the Purification of the Mass. The ironic image stayed in his mind.

Chins skyward, the men in the opaque river slopped at their industry, but everyone else was quite rapt at the small melodrama. Attending to the priming pan, Halloran thought,
Sure to go off before we're round the next bend, and cure that boatman of his scurvy.
He followed the rubrics of getting the weapon to his shoulder and himself to attention.

‘The surgeon here,' said Rowley immediately, ‘wants a message taken to the Crescent.'

He took his elegance back a pace. It was a placid elegance now, his back to a hill-side whose cicada-voice roared its indifference at him. Pointlessly, since only Halloran was aware.

Surgeon Partridge moved in. After Rowley, he seemed studiously affable.

‘You're carrying some letters to Surgeon Daker, Corporal?' he asked.

Halloran said he was; to deny was not within his duty, though he knew that His Excellency meant to purge Daker from office, while the gentlemen meant to bolster him.

Partridge sent a Marine to get his coat out of the shade at the top of the beach. He took from it a letter marked ‘Of Great Importance'. Whatever was a threat in the letters from Government House, this of Partridge's was the antidote. While brash Rowley, His Excellency's
aide-de-camp
,
stood by without blinking.

‘You'll deliver this one with it. You won't forget?'

The surgeon watched Halloran pocket it, Halloran feeling smeared by the meanness and discontent of all the officers.

‘Good!' said the surgeon, and took no more notice of him.

‘Ah, Ewers,' Partridge called then. ‘Ewers, old fellow. Come up here! I've something amazing to show you.'

Ewers left the boat and came up the beach stooping. Whether it was petulance or humility or petulant humility, no one could have told. He murmured good-mornings and bowed to both gentlemen.

‘Ewers, I've done what armed detachments have failed to do.'

‘You have, sir?' Ewers paused. ‘What particular thing is it which armed detachments have blundered in yet you've brought off?'

‘Ha,' said Partridge, clipping Ewers' ear and grinning, ‘these gentlemen-convicts, Rowley. They're bastards!' He slapped Ewers a second time. ‘Bastards!'

Ewers bowed his head. From where Halloran stood, the forger's nasal, mortified breathing could be heard.

‘Come on, Ewers!' The surgeon grabbed the man's coat-sleeve and moved him towards the long-boat. Without a glance from Rowley, Halloran was left ridiculously at attention in the midst of the beach. But even in this barren situation, he knew it would be deadly to dismiss himself or stand easy. He did not enjoy, however, being a monument without import, straight on to nothing, overlooking and flanking nothing, in line only with some mystery of pride and idiocy in that lily of a boy's mind.

Near the boat, Ewers was coughing; for he could tell there was some pungent rot in the bows and dreaded to be brought abruptly upon any monstrosity.

‘In the tarpaulin there,' said Partridge.

It seemed that an immense baby had been wrapped in canvas, with a peak for its head. The surgeon pulled the peak aside. Ewers saw two native heads nodding.
They were blind with the blind, mouthing purposelessness of snails. Their faces had the same marks as Mr Calverley's savage, and their hair was fibrous with muck and hung in ropes. Days before, before the smallpox found them, they had corded strips of raw fish around their foreheads, and the sun had fried them, and the runnels of fish oil had caked them against insects. Surgeon Partridge now saw fit to lean down and cut these cords away with a pocket-knife, saying, ‘It's the sting of death that's the only sting they'll be worried by now.'

‘What do you want them for, sir?' asked Ewers. He tried not to voice his numb incomprehension, not wanting to be cuffed again for his sensibilities. The man of talent, if that was what he was, stood and waited for an answer as for a crust.

‘I'll attempt to cure the poor fellows,' the surgeon said. ‘Then we'll civilize them. His Excellency intends to ship two fully genteel natives home to England when the fleet comes in. These could be the lucky two, Ewers.'

He frowned. The frown was for whether they could be cured. About the civilizing part of the project he was quite blithe.

Halloran, hearing this, wanted to spit and slap his thigh. But his mouth was, of course, dry with heat and conflicts and his own and Ewers' humiliation. Working as orderly of a day made a man soft to humiliation. Still he remained, without making a demonstration, at
his skew-whiff sentry post. For comfort, he thought that to educate two savages to the surgeon's level, to teach them to carry their backsides as Rowley carried his, should take the whole of one summer's day.

‘There's no doubt they're very sick,' said Ewers complimentarily, over by the long-boat.

‘How far now?' said Halloran.

The river had become spacious again, but not in any classic sense. Spits of reeking silt ran out from the bank, peopled with mangroves and harsh birds, cutting the river into zig-zags. The four oars flapped up and down like the legs of a beetle.

‘Three miles,' someone grunted.

‘It's a grateful thing to live in an age of philosophy,' mumbled Ewers, without consequence, reclining in the stern.

Halloran snorted, implored the sky, held up his left hand and shook it as if it contained a pomegranate. But he said nothing of what he wanted to say, that is, that they had both willingly abased themselves. Which was no disgrace in a relative way, but by the standards of absolute things was an abomination. He felt that they earned their salt meat by servility, but lost the right to deal in ideas. Therefore, Ewers should not mention such a sacred word as philosophy.

‘I didn't mean what he thought. He's a hard man for misconstruing,' he had muttered when he came back
from watching Partridge's curiosities. He did not see any virtue in having made a small score against Partridge. Instead, he denied having intended to score; he did not seem to believe that it was wrong to be clouted for having an independent wit. But being clouted on suspicion of having an independent wit, that appalled him. So that now he was oblivious that he had forfeited any rights as regards sacred words.

‘Rousseau,' he pressed on, recitative again, ‘makes a fashionable thing out of cultivating savages. Savages are
us
,
it appears, unspoilt. It is the mode to be patient with them, as one is patient with the childishness of a saint. It is a pity that no one has a fashion of patience towards convicted men and women.'

‘Why tell us?' asked Halloran over his shoulder. ‘We know. There are six of us in this boat, and we've all got a spirit of rebellion, and we'll each of us keep it as big a secret as we can because not one of us wants to be flogged. So if you're feeling rebellious – well, you might as well not talk about it here. It's stale news.'

‘Maybe.' Ewers sounded easeful; lolling on his back and looking here and there across the sky through nearly closed eyes, as if he were Michelangelo about to quote a price for illuminating the firmament. ‘However, Corporal, listen to this! All these petty men: Partridge, Major Sabian, perhaps even Rowley, are writing their diaries, observing, recording the quirks of this land in the hope that one day
a putrescent weed, transplanted hence to Kew Gardens, will bear the name
Flos Perniciosus Partridgensis.
'

Ewers opened his eyes, raised his head, secure that no one had understood his Latin joke.

‘I see,' said Halloran impatiently, but kept to his principle of not rebelling in private for some hours after he had grovelled in public.

‘Hah, yes. Partridge intends to publish a record of the colony, so too does Sabian, if an editor can be found to spell for them and to stand between them and the mysteries of the comma. And you, Corporal, would not have to be the Prophet Isaiah to tell who will prepare the plates for those sublime works and to foresee whose name will not appear on the title page. Well?'

‘I suppose the answer to both is your name, Ewers.'

Ewers' blind skyward face waggled.

‘Yes. My name, Ewers!'

The smell of mud affected Halloran with indifference to Partridge's schemes. Mangroves faced him with their lizard-skin front feet in the water. It was all millennia away from the printing presses and polite journals and medals struck by the Royal Society. In the zenith heat, on his way home to the town, Partridge might understand this and, in his lassitude, hurl the two poor blacks overboard.

‘You are a blessed man,' Ewers continued, having
an option on Halloran's ear despite the mangroves and slow, silty water.

‘Do you think so?'

‘Yes. You have quick eyes and you respect the Arts. You're the type of man who should be free of the restrictions of the service.'

‘Aren't we all?'

‘In two years, you will be back amongst your people. If I could say the same . . .'

For half a minute and without warning, Ewers wept, still flat on his back, and his split, navy-style sleeve clamped against his eye-brows. The corners of his long mouth had drawn back prodigiously to show tall, grimacing eye-teeth.

Halloran leant over and nudged his right elbow gently.

‘Man, there are pardons you know. I'd imagine you'd be amongst the first to be pardoned.'

‘A pardon is useless.' He sat up. ‘If I had the decency, I'd die here of shame. Because I'm known as a forger in Dumfries. Even in Edinburgh.'

‘Hah!' said Halloran, going gusty and bluff and gesturing over his right shoulder with his thumb. ‘There are worse crimes against man and God. Down the river and not so far, there are far worse.'

‘I forged four bank-notes on the Bank of Scotland. The Bank's engraver said at my trial in Dumfries that their qualities as forgeries astounded him. I was proud.
I can still remember my pride. I was proud, I can remember, and my aunt sat up in the public gallery, and people pointed her out behind her back.'

He turned his face to the north bank and with his hand over his mouth, whimpered or giggled. In that heat it was anybody's guess.

At last, his long face turned back to his brother-boaters. It was stained with grief, not at all its clean-shaven self.

‘Let me tell you about my aunt,' he implored.

In common mercy, ‘Yes,' sighed Halloran.

This will be as good
,
he thought,
as one of those fruity sermons on the crucifixion.
On two and a bit pounds of meat every week, he had no emotion to spare for Ewers' aunt in Dumfries.

At this moment Ewers began to doubt himself. As if from a great distance and painfully, he peered at the two transports. He was gratified to find their eyes rolling, their ears full of their own rhythmic exhaustion.

‘Her name is Miss Kate Norris. I went to her when I was three years old. I became her life, as you'd expect with a spinster.'

He
'
ll say next that there was never a better woman
,
thought Halloran.

‘There never lived a better woman,' said Ewers. ‘Every woman whose company I ever found myself in, I observed closely, to see if she had the qualities of Aunt
Norris in however immature a form. None of them ever did reproduce the range of her virtues.'

‘I see,' said Halloran. He spoke, not out of enthusiasm for Aunt Norris, but because he felt it within him one day to make Ann's fortune by writing a farce called
The Master-Forger Chooses a Wife
.

‘The thought that she rebuffed a number of suitors for my sake is one which I eat with ashes every day.'

There and then, he began to eat it with ashes again and wept for a full minute with most of his face hidden behind his sleeve, his sobbing hidden by the groan of the boat and the slowly plangent river.

‘I want you to assure me you'll do a thing for me. For her.'