Signals of Distress (21 page)

The light was fading on that Tuesday afternoon, but Aymer was not concerned. The wagon way would lead to Wherrytown if there was any logic in the world. He only had to stumble on and run the
history of the last five days through his mind; the storm, the inn, the salmon flesh, the country wife, the Cradle Rock, the African, the bruising innocence of people far from home, the transience
of life and snow, the permanence of all the damage done, and finally the distant curl of smoke which beckoned to him from the north. He didn’t know what made him leave the wagon way as soon
as he heard the chapel foghorn sound for Tuesday evensong. Except this was his final chance. Go now, while everybody was at prayer. Or be too late.

He concentrated on the curl of smoke, a dozen fields away. There was what looked to be a small stone hut nearby. The smoke belonged to it, it seemed. He’d walk that far, and then give up.
Otto, surely, would have sought some shelter, away from the town. He would have lit a fire – and Africans were good at lighting fires from stones and bark. They hadn’t lost their
ancient skills. Aymer had read the travel journals of men like Bruce and Soules, how Africans could navigate by stars, make light with bones, catch fish by hand, skin cattle with a sharpened stick,
survive for weeks without a drink, speak with the birds, protect themselves from wounds and fevers with potions made from leaves. There was a narrow track which led off from the wagon way and
skirted three small oblong fields before it disappeared in mud. Aymer checked the mud for footprints. There were none. Or none so far as he could see, because there was a sudden dusk and nothing
could be certain in that light.
Get to the smoke
, he told himself.
If he is anywhere, he will be at the smoke.

He climbed on to the wall. It was wide and flat enough on top to be a path. Someone had walked that way before, and many times. The undergrowth was flattened. Roots were snapped. The loosest
rocks had been knocked on to the earth below the wall-top path. Aymer followed it, leaping over branches, glad to be out of the mud, and benefiting from the last of the daylight and the low light
of the moon. The whole length of his body was reliefed against the sky. He looked as if he was ten feet tall, a comic, skinny stilts-man at a fair, with performing dog. A stringy hedgerow ghost. A
diabolic scarecrow on the move. He found a route around the patchwork of the fields towards the smoke and hut, and came at last into the corner of a field that had been tilled and turned for
winter. It looked at first like a landscape of ten thousand lakes; the mountains were the ridges in the earth; the valleys, furrows; the narrow pools, each shaped like icy mouths, reflecting all
the silver in the sky. Again, it looked as if some fairy silversmith had dropped a cargo of brooches, or tried to plant the soil with polished, metal leaves. Was Aymer looking down on shards of
ice? He walked along the wall a little further, so that the shards, the lakes, the leaves, the brooches, could be seen more clearly. He focused on the smell, before he focused on the ground. He
knew it well. The field was full of fish. The sea was taking everyone away, and putting fish on land. There were no leaves or lakes or brooches, just one star-gazy pie with a four-acre crust of
earth and a shoal of pilchards staring at the moon, their eyes as dead as flint, their scales like beaten tin, their fraying fins and tails like frost, their flesh composting for the next
year’s crop. The field was absolutely still. The fastest movements were the snails and slugs which were enamelling the fleshy silverwork with their saliva trails.

Whip and Aymer jumped into the field. Whip nosed about, then started eating. Aymer squatted on his heels, and backed against the wall. The fish had frightened him. Where was the order in the
universe? How long before the sky was tumbling with frogs and rats? How long before the ears of corn had fins? He’d never known such superstitious, concentrated fear, nor ever felt so far
from home. He thrust his hands into his coat. He shut his eyes. He hung his head towards his knees. This expedition had been mad.

A scuffle thirty yards away made him look up once again. At first he thought it was the dog. But Whip was standing in the middle of the field, her nose pointing, her chin greasy with pilchards,
her neck hairs hackling. She’d heard the scuffle too. There was some movement on the far side of the field, ten yards below the little hut and its twist of smoke. Some shadows shifting. Some
interruptions to the glinting silver of the fish. Aymer could convince himself he saw someone, crouching in the furrowed soil, pushing pilchards in his mouth. Aymer could convince himself by now
that there were wolves or hobgoblins or sharks. But Whip wasn’t afraid. She sped across the moonlit pilchard pie and gave chase to a feeding nest of rats.

Aymer found himself a broken length of branch and followed Whip. The smell of rotting fish was soon displaced by that of wood smoke, drier and more bitter. What fire there was hadn’t been
fed for quite a while. Its fuel was mostly root and bark and tough billets of thorn. Its grate – hidden up against the north side of the hut – was made from slates and stones that had
been dislodged from the roof and walls. There was a flat slate in the ashes, with fish bones. Someone had cooked a meal. It was instinctive: Aymer crouched again; he blew into the fire to try and
raise a flame. He got the embers to glow, but there was nothing for their heat to curl and burst around. He searched his pockets, took out the book, and fed some of the
Truismes
by
dell’Ova to the fire. The pages lifted, stiffened, blackened, smoked. He tore more pages into tiny shreds, like kindling. He blew again until the hot eye of the fire lifted up its lid and
winked a tiny flame. The fire grew strong on aphorisms, epigrams and teasing ambiguities, in French. Aymer’s face and hands were glowing now. His pulse had slowed. His blood was warm. He
added more wood to the fire. The smoke was damp.

He rolled the last remaining pages of his book into a torch. The ink burned blue. He held the torch up to the broken wall of the hut. It might have been the refuge from the rain a dozen years
before for cattle boys. It might have been a winter sty for pigs. Or some hidden place that smugglers used. There was a tiny room inside, not five feet high, not six feet long, not fully roofed, no
proper floor, but snug. Half of the ground was covered in dry bracken. There was a cup, a metal box, a demijohn, some more fish bones. Aymer stooped and went inside. He opened the metal box: some
candle ends, an apple core, some cheese, some hardbake, a button, a teaspoon, an empty pot of Dr Sweetzer’s Panacea for Salving Wounds and Burns. No pistol. Aymer lit one of the candle ends,
and stamped his torch out on the earth. He put the candle on the metal box, and searched the bracken bed. No pistol there. No body warmth. No blood. No anything. The blanket hanging from the wall
was invisible, until Aymer almost fell and had to steady himself. Then he felt the cheap perpetuanna of the woollen cloth, and took it down off its twig peg. It was a horse blanket – and like
the ones used in the stable and the tackle room at the inn.

Aymer went outside, stood straight, and slowly turned a full circle, looking for the outlines of a man. He dared not call. The landscape of his circle ducked and ridged and plunged as walls gave
way to trees, and trees arched weatherways towards the moors, and moors descended into fields and back again to walls and down onto the galaxy of fish. The only light was moon. The only life was
Whip’s.

Aymer waited for an hour, the horse blanket wrapped around his shoulders and his head, until his fire was almost dead. He tried to find a place for Otto in his life, to make amends inside his
head at least, to revive the harmony he’d squandered. Whip snoozed, one-eyed, her fur just inches from the embers. It seemed much later, but it wasn’t yet eight o’clock and he
might still be back in time for supper at the inn. He woke the dog, found his broken branch, returned the blanket to its peg, put all his change into the metal box – three shillings and a
farthing – and climbed again onto the highway of the wall. The moon provided enough light, if he was careful. The branch was helpful as a walking stick. He wasn’t certain of the way.
There were too many crossroads in the walls. Too many junctions. And, this time, no wisp of smoke to mark his destination. He tried to listen for the sea, but it wasn’t as noisy as the wind.
At last he found a policy. The wind would come up off the sea at night. The warm attracts the cold. If he could follow routes that led into the wind then he must come finally to the wagon way. Then
turn left for Wherrytown.

He found a wall that ran into the wind. He hadn’t taken more than a dozen steps when he saw a light ahead. Was it a building on the edge of town? A marker on the chapel? He waited and
watched, holding his breath, holding his cudgel-branch. The light was moving parallel to him and in a straight line. And then it took a sudden right-angled turn and was coming, more or less,
towards Aymer. It moved from side to side, like a porch light swinging on its hook. Aymer made himself as small as possible. He pushed Whip down onto the wall and held her muzzle and her back.
Again the light went right, and then resumed another path towards Aymer and the dog. Someone else was walking along the network of the walls, with a lantern. It wasn’t bravery, but cold and
cowardice that made Aymer stand up and call out, ‘Who goes there?’ Such a foolish and dramatic phrase! He even blushed. There was no reply. Perhaps the wind had shredded his words and
scattered them inland. This time he called out, ‘Hello. It’s Aymer Smith,’ and then, ‘I’m only lost.’ He could now make out the silhouette of a small man,
walking on the wall with the certainty of a goat. The lantern was fifty yards away when Aymer recognized the busy and ironic walk of George the parlourman.

‘Ah, George.’ Ah, George, sweet George was carrying a half loaf, some apples and a ripped kerseymere jacket.

‘Ah, Mr Smith. Moon-hunting or rabbiting tonight?’ George sounded uneasy – and embarrassed – for once.

‘Neither, George. I’m fishing in the fields.’ He was delighted with his joke, and happier than he could say to have the parlourman and the lantern as companions home, and to
have his conscience liberated by the happy certainty that Otto had an unexpected friend.

T
HAT NIGHT
a chicken disappeared. Amy Farrow found some feathers from the missing bird and the shells of two eggs, eaten raw, next to the coop. There
were more feathers outside, in the lane. Had Otto taken the chicken? Was he the beak hunter? Or was this the work of foxes? The older Wherrytowners who had time to gather in the inn’s
courtyard for sailor Rankin’s funeral were in no doubt. If there had been a fox prowling through Wherrytown at night then there would have been a din of squawking, and barking dogs. But no
one had been woken. The Farrows’ bedroom – an open stage of boards across the roof beams – was above their yard and Amy Farrow said she slept ‘with one ear cocked, and never
heard a thing, excepting Mr Farrow, wheezing like a steaming pie’.

‘It had to be some mighty clever fox,’ her husband said, ‘to climb our wall and smash the coop door open. And then he puts a spell on both the chickens and the dog and sends
’em dumb. If we had foxes sharp as that we wouldn’t have no need of folk. Not womenfolk, at least.’

‘I never knowed a fox before shell eggs. They eat the lot,’ a neighbour added. ‘It’s only men and monkeys can shell eggs. And I suppose we know it in’t a monkey,
unless it was the Devil’s monkey. My wager is it was the Devil’s
man
.’

They all agreed it
was
the Devil’s work. The sooner that they brought the blackie in, the safer they would be in their beds at night and Mrs Farrow wouldn’t have to sleep with
one ear cocked.

George and Mrs Yapp brought beer and mugwort tea into the yard to warm the mourners while Nathaniel Rankin, still stitched in his piece of sail, was boxed in Walter Howells’s birchwood
coffin and carried out from the tackle room. Mr Phipps placed a wooden cross on top of the coffin, smiled bleakly at his parishioners and raised his eyebrows for a moment too long when the Norrises
and Aymer Smith came down the outer staircase from their room. He would, he thought, require the man (if he were bent on coming to the burial) to stand outside the chapel grounds with his Unholy
Scepticism for a companion. He sent George down to the quay where the captain, his crew and the local artisans were working on the
Belle
, and making better progress than they’d dared
to hope. They’d have to spare an hour for their shipmate’s funeral. Mr Phipps was hoping for another large congregation, and had prepared a careful sermon and found the perfect hymn. He
was pleased to see the Dollys from Dry Manston arrive – the parents, three sons, two daughters, Skimmer. They weren’t usually a chapel-going family. They didn’t even, he
suspected, observe the Sabbath if it suited them. He shook the hands of the two older men and nodded impatiently while they explained – in unnecessary detail, he judged – how it was the
Dolly nets that had brought the sailor in, and how it was their duty now to see their ‘catch’ put to rest.

Mr Phipps was glad when the Americans arrived. He was in a hurry to begin. The sailors were happy to have a break from the tedious and unexciting work of ship repair. Their lungs were trained
for salt, not sawdust. They were even more content to have the offer of some beer so early in the day. They drank too much of it, too quickly, and when the time came for the four bearers to lift
their shipmate to their shoulders in his box, they mismanaged it. The body in its canvas shroud could be heard buffeting the wood. He’d been dead since Saturday, but still the bruises
came.

The pebbled passageway which led up through the inn was too slippery with mud, too narrow for the bearers and the coffin, and too steep. They had to put the coffin on the ground and drag it up
the steps.

‘Shake out his bones, Onto the stones, He’s only a sailor, Who nobody owns!’ the mate sang, and didn’t care who overheard.