Signals of Distress (20 page)

Of course, there was no sign of anybody at the Cradle Rock, not even fishermen at sea. Something else was odd, too, an absence from the scene. At first Aymer couldn’t say quite what. But
then he saw the cabin lockers, the seamen’s chests, the double-barrelled cannon, the ship’s supplies, the stacks of timber partly covered in tarpaulins and left for safekeeping above
the tideline amongst the salty foliage of the backshore dunes. There, too, were the cattle from Quebec herded in two gorse-fenced compounds. He remembered. That then was the oddity. The American
ship had been removed. The sea was more remote without the
Belle
, as if now its only urgency was moon and tide. Two days before the
Belle
had seemed to be a solid fixture on its
sandbar. More solid than the Cradle Rock.

Aymer climbed up to the rounded platform, found the spot that he had shared with Ralph Parkiss on the Sunday, put his back against the granite mass again and pushed. How had it ever moved? Its
weight seemed anchored to the coast. A third Ice Age might move it from its pivot stone, but not a man alone, not Aymer, not a thousand Aymers. He might as well have put his back against the door
of a great cathedral and hoped to shake the pigeons from its spire.

He called ‘Otto’. Just once. Whip turned and growled. But no one came to help him with the Rock. He went back up the narrow path onto the headland and sat down on the wooden bench
where he had rested with Ralph Parkiss before they’d grappled – together – with the Cradle Rock. Ralph’s initials were freshly carved on the seat, the splintered wood still
fleshy brown and free of timber mould. Aymer put the cheese, the bread, the pilchards on the seat where they couldn’t be missed. He covered them with the napkin and weighed the corners down
with stones. The walk had made him hungry, and thirsty too. He lifted up the napkin edge and broke off just an elbow of the bread and one small whang of cheese. The gulls came down to watch him
eat. It wasn’t yet one o’clock. There was no hurry to return. He took a sharp stone and scratched a careless A.H.S. in the wood. He added Otto’s name beneath. And then he circled
Ralph’s carving with a heart, and added Miggy’s initials, M.B., below the deeper, more painstaking R and P.

He walked down to Dry Manston beach, nosed amongst the loose equipment from the
Belle
, walked to the water’s edge to see what kelps and carcasses there were, threw scraps of broken
timber for the dog. He watched the dunes and the path beyond for anybody passing by. At last he was so cold and thirsty that he found the courage he’d been waiting for. He walked up past the
Bowes’ kelping pit, along the track where Miggy had refused to shake his hand, until he reached their cottage yard. He didn’t have to knock at the door. The two Bowe mongrels leaped up
on their ropes and barked. Whip’s tail was uncontrolled. The Bowes had returned from pilcharding, it seemed. Thank God for that. The curtain cloth was pulled back and Miggy’s face was
pressed against the bottle-glass, her red kerchief refracted in a dozen glassy crescents, her cold face flushed with tears. Aymer raised his hat. He mouthed, ‘Good morning, Miss Bowe.’
She did not move. Her mother opened the door.

Why had he come? He didn’t know how to explain except to say, rather lamely, ‘I was passing by, and thought I might impose on you.’ Again he had the only chair, but on this
Tuesday there wasn’t any warm mahogany to drink, nor any fire, nor any bending flattery of light except the thin, cold, steady light of day which came in through the window and spread its
square and chilling carpet on the earth floor. Should he, perhaps, explain he had the influenza and was merely seeking some respite from the weather? Or that he hoped to gain permission to sketch
their cottage at some later date? Or tell the truth, that he was looking for the African, the African that in a day would be brought back as a slave? Was that the truth? Had Otto brought him to
this door, this dark room? Or was it that he simply liked it there, its smell of fish and half-dried clothes, its lack of ornament, its womanly silence, its calm?

He watched the women’s silhouettes as they made room for him and cleared some floor space for his legs. They gave him water flavoured with a little mint, and bread with beef. Rosie Bowe
sat in the corner on a box. Miggy went beyond the sacking curtain, lay down on the box-bed and soon was talking to herself, like young girls do when they are full of hope and tears. Aymer’s
eyes were soon accustomed to the light, and he could see the room more clearly and just pick out on the chimney breast the few embroidered lines from Jeremiah. ‘Weep sore for him that goeth
away …’ he began to read out loud, and meant to say something about Otto. But Rosie Bowe interrupted him. ‘Not that!’ she said, and stood to turn the embroidery around, so
that the letters were reversed and all the working threads revealed.

‘She says she’s going to America.’ Rosie pointed to the bed. ‘She says she’s going to be with that boy Ralph.’

‘I am, Ma. Yes, I am.’

‘He hasn’t asked you yet?’

‘He will, though. He says that’s why he came here. So’s me and him could meet and be together.’

‘He din’t choose to come here, girl. He was brought here by the sea.’

‘That’s why the sea has brought him, then.’

‘You think that husbands get washed in by storms, is that it?’

‘I do think that. I do.’ She hadn’t thought it, up till then, in fact – but the image of her Ralph delivered to her in a storm was like a fairytale, and she the princess
in her hut. ‘Why should I stay here any more?’ she said. ‘I’m seventeen. There’s Oxy Hobbs, she went away when she was only fifteen, and married since.’

‘She’s gone ten miles, that’s all.’

‘Well, Mary Dolly, then. She’s gone to London … That in’t ten miles.’

‘Gone to be a chambergirl and not to wed, and not gone to America …’

‘She don’t have Ralph, though, and I do. If he goes off without me, Ma, I’m going to drown myself from swimming after him.’

‘You’re talking wild and silly, Miggy Bowe.’

‘I in’t.’

‘She in’t, she says.’ She spoke to Aymer Smith. ‘She don’t know what it means, America. She thinks it’s down the coast. She thinks they’ll walk back
here on Sundays for a bite.’

‘I know better. Ralph has said.’

‘Has Ralph said how you’ll never see your ma again?’

‘I’ll send you word.’

‘How will you send me word? Who’s taught you how to write since yesterday?’

‘You can’t read in any case.’

‘So that’s it, then? I might as well be dead to you.’

‘Oh, Ma, don’t start.’

Rosie Bowe sighed loudly, shook her shoulders and her head, stood up, sat down, sighed deeply once again. ‘Well, then …’ she said. She’d have to settle for it, she
supposed. She’d never known her daughter so implacable.

Aymer hadn’t said a word. Had Rosie Bowe expected him to repeat his offer of yesterday, his promise to ‘enhance’ their lives by taking Miggy as his wife, in lieu of kelp?
She’d said, ‘My Miggy in’t for you. She’s only but a girl.’ But had she staged this public argument with her daughter so that Aymer could intervene, and count off the
seven certain benefits of being Mrs Margaret Smith? He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t try to take this girl from Ralph. She would flourish in America. He had no doubt of it. At last he
could admit it to himself – her country face would not transport so well to Aymer’s home. She’d never be a Margaret. Look at the way she sat, her manly breeches and her busy legs.
Listen to her breathing through her mouth, and speaking in an accent full of wind and salt. See, in that half light, the narrow tightness of her face, the unsophisticated hair. She wasn’t
Katie Norris. He wouldn’t wish to travel
to the end of tired
with her. She didn’t even have her mother’s virtues, a kind and ready smile, good, open, unembarrassed eyes, a
spirit made from weathered oak.

‘If she must go,’ he said at last, ‘then, I hope, you will allow me to … to make your new lives less uncertain. I can provide a little money for you both
…’

Miggy came down off the bed, and stood beside her mother.

‘… Before I leave, or Miggy leaves, I will arrange a … small payment.’ He was embarrassed by their stillness and their silence. ‘I must leave now …’
He stood up hastily. He was so clumsy in their house, both in his body and his speech. ‘I mean, I must go back.’ He shook both women’s hands and fled into the cottage yard. He
almost ran away. Whip barked and followed him. The two roped mongrels growled as he passed. The sea air slapped his blushing, sweating face. Betrayed, betrayed, betrayed. He didn’t stop until
he reached the path above the Cradle Rock.

There wasn’t any sign of Otto’s food or the napkin on the seat. They’d disappeared. One of the stones Aymer had used to weigh the napkin down had rolled, almost, onto the heart
scratched in the wood, obscuring Ralph’s and Miggy’s initials. A heart of stone, Aymer thought. He looked beneath the seat. He pushed the grass aside with his boot. No crusts or
fishbones there. No snubs of cheese. There were seagulls about, one-legged on rocks, their necks tucked in. Had they the strength to pull the napkin free of stones? He called out Otto’s name
again. Then Miggy’s name. Then Katie’s name. Then all the swear words he knew. He was uncontrolled, despairing, angry, faint, ashamed. He’d missed Otto by a half hour at the most.
He kicked the seat. He threw the napkin’s stone onto the ground. He banged his forehead with his fist. He cursed himself, out loud. Whip and seagulls echoed him.

If he hadn’t been shouting, perhaps he would have heard more clearly what he took to be a distant voice, coming off the land. He called again, ‘Otto! Otto!’ and yes, there was
the faintest voice. It was the echo of his own, rebounding off the rocks. He climbed up off the path onto the headland until he had a decent view inland. The coastal granite bluffs; the bracken and
the gorse; a narrow wind-break of stooping skew and thorns; the first low wall; the salty grazing land; the miles of distant fields; the moors. He ranged from left to right, searching for some sign
of human life, some moving shadow. He only spotted birds and something that might have been a bending man but turned sideways to prove itself a tethered goat.

At first he thought there was a single, cussed wedge of snow, surviving in the shadows of a thorn which grew behind the nearest drystone wall, a hundred yards away. But when he saw it for the
second time, it appeared to lift and change its shape, then drop and hang like washing on a line. Was that the missing napkin from Otto’s meal? It seemed to be. Its weight looked right for
cloth in that low wind, and it was white and square. Its corners showed against the darker branches of the tree. Surely, Aymer thought, it didn’t walk there on its own. And it couldn’t
be carried by the flimsy wind that had been blowing all that day. He wet his index finger in his mouth and held it up. What little wind there was was heading east. The napkin had gone north.
‘We have him, Whip,’ he said. ‘He’s there.’

The going wasn’t hard at first. The land was wild and wet, but Aymer made stepping-stones of granite, and even though he slipped from time to time, and had to slither once on his haunches
down a mossy outcrop, he found a route towards the cloth, that white and flapping signal of distress. When he reached the dip beyond the headland though and the sea was out of sight, the soil was
deeper. There were no granite stepping-stones. The ground refused to take his weight. His boots sank in. The earth expired its brackish coffin smells. His ankle turned. He fell again onto his
outstretched hand. He sank up to his cuff. Aymer headed for the bracken to his right, and found firmer footing there, though the gorse that grew beyond was thicker than it looked. He had to force
his way through. His trousers and his legs were spiked. The gorse snapped. The air about him smelled of coconut. Whip wasn’t happy on this walk. She barked that they should go back to the
path. She ran away. She waited. Barked again. But finally she followed Aymer through the bracken and the gorse to the dry, slight rise beyond, to the thorn tree and the wall.

Aymer wedged his foot into the wall, pushed himself up on a low branch, and pulled the white cloth free. His hopes were dashed. It was too big and flimsy for a napkin. He recognized it, though.
It was the sling he’d had for his bad arm. He’d flung it to the ground when he had needed both his hands to help Ralph move the Cradle Rock. He remembered how the heavy wind that Sunday
had picked up the sling, turned it once or twice, then took it on a seagull flight inland.

He called for Whip. But Whip had gone. She’d scaled the wall and run across the pasture in its lee. When Aymer called she barked for him to follow her. He climbed up on the wall, and
clapped his hands. Whip had her chin pressed to the grass. Her tail was wagging heavily. She rolled on her back. What had she found? Rabbit droppings, probably. A rotting crow. Manure. Something
irresistible and smelly to mark her coat with. Aymer followed her. At least the pastureland was firm. He held Whip by her collar. She had rolled in something dead. The smell was unbearable. He
flipped her over by her legs and wiped her back on the grass. And then he wiped his own hands on the grass. They were as smelly as the dog.

They walked up to a second, higher wall, climbed over it and then headed eastwards towards Wherrytown. To the north there was a lonely curl of smoke, a second lonely curl of hope that Otto might
be found. There was a rough gate in the corner of the pasture. It led into a rutted wagon way, the quicker, more direct back path from Dry Manston which the Bowes had used the day before. Their
footprints could be followed in the mud. Aymer would be happy to get back. He’d had a disappointing, empty day. Nothing he had done would change the world. The hunting party would go out the
next day, and Otto would be carried back, at best half dead. Aymer Smith of Hector Smith & Sons, the meddler, the emancipationist, would be to blame. They’d shared the moment when the
bolt was pulled, and he was pointing at the open door and telling Otto, ‘Go! Go! Go!’ Now they’d share the moment when the bolt was shut again.