Signals of Distress (8 page)

He walked back to the inn’s courtyard. He pressed his nose against the window of the tackle room and tapped on the boarding. Better than a writ of habeas corpus, Aymer thought. The world
would change at once. The bolt was stiff and cold. Otto wasn’t sleeping. He was hoping for some food. Aymer didn’t smell of food. He smelled of animals. He smelled of damp. Otto let him
take his hand and shake it. He let the man sit down beside him on his blankets. He listened to the sentences, the grinning storm of words. The man was pointing at the open door saying, ‘Go!
Go! Go!’ Whip was barking, running in and out the tackle room. Otto couldn’t bear this loss of privacy, nor the commotion that the bare-legged man had caused. He stood and tested how
his ankle would support his weight. He wrapped a blanket round his shoulders, put on his boots, said, ‘Uwip, Uwip,’ and walked out into Wherrytown.

S
ABBATH SNOW
was coming in from Canada, preceded by a morning of tepid and deceitful air. There was no frost and just an ounce of wind, but anyone could
tell that cold was on its way. The sea was pearly with pilchard shoals; seals and porpoises were seeking shelter close to shore; cormorants meditated on the rocks and did not fish; and there were
hardly any penitents in Wherrytown who’d left their beds for morning prayers with Mr Phipps.

At Dry Manston the cattle from Quebec stood in squads or lay under the few low thorns between the high ground and the beach, their backs against the wrecking sea. Miggy and her mother hoped it
would be easy to trap one of these mournful, docile cows. They’d have fresh meat, and what they couldn’t eat within the week, they’d salt. They were up and out soon after dawn and
planned to have one killed, butchered and concealed in an hour. They each had rigging ropes, flotsam from the
Belle
: one rope round the neck would hold the cow, one round its hind shins
would bring it down. It should only take a single blow with a rock between the eyes to make the beast insensible. Then perforate the spinal column with a knife and cow was beef. That was the
principle at least. They’d never had to kill a cow before. They hadn’t had the chance. The most they’d done was club a seal to death and skin it on the beach.

The cows were wary and unpredictable. They wouldn’t let the Bowes get close. They put their haunches in the air, hauled their bodies from the ground, and stood, face on, whenever Rosie or
Miggy approached. They lowed in protest at the cold. They weren’t fooled by gifts of grass. They backed away. They ran.

It was amusing for a while. Rosie tried all kinds of tricks to trap a cow, and entertain herself. She crept up on the cattle from behind, but got no closer than before. She tried to hypnotize a
cow with weaving hands. She’d seen a donkey hypnotized that way at the farthing fair in Wherrytown. She made a sudden dash – with no success – and then fell down into the spongy
bracken, laughing unselfconsciously. Miggy was embarrassed by her ma. She wanted beef. She was too old to be amused.

‘We’ll never get one if you fool around,’ she said.

‘Don’t be so frownin’, Miggy. We’ll never get one anyway. Those cows in’t wanting to be caught. I’m getting back indoors. My feet and back are soaking
through. You coming with me, or will you stop and sulk?’ Rosie was annoyed. Her daughter wasn’t much of a companion. She was as clawed and joyless as a cat.

Miggy let her mother go. She liked to be out on the coast alone, the windswept heroine. Besides, she’d seen a distant figure on the path. It wasn’t usual to see strangers – or
officials – walking on the Sabbath. That’s why Miggy and her mother had chosen Sunday to help themselves to beef. There was a chance, then, that it was Palmer Dolly. Might he come by?
And let his black hair mix with hers? Miggy wanted to be kissed. What must it be like to be kissed by someone other than your ma? More nourishing than beef! Sometimes at night she practised kissing
her own mouth. She wet the insides of her lips and let them slide. She teased her palate with her tongue. She skimmed her chin and cheeks with her fingers. She licked the tissue on her palms. She
found that, by touching the folds between her legs, she could reproduce the breathless tremble that she felt when she encountered men of her own age. A better place than home was just a touch
away.

She’d not been alone for long when she discovered one of the shipwrecked heifers, grazing in an impasse of rocks and furze above the coastal track. She only had to stand resolutely at the
open end and make a noise to trap the cow. It backed in more deeply. It dropped its head, either in resignation or to butt its captor. Miggy looped a rope round its neck and kept it back by
slapping its nostrils. What should she do, with Rosie gone? Slaughter it alone? There wasn’t any way that she could drag it home herself, or whistle it. The cow was not a dog. She’d
have to brain it with a rock and butcher it before the crows and gulls found out. Would she have the strength and resolution? Could she relieve her boredom on the cow? Would Palmer Dolly come in
time to help? The walking figure she had spotted earlier was getting closer.

There was a sharp, pointed stone almost within reach that would do for butchering. Miggy turned to pick it up, and stole a glance along the coast. It wasn’t Palmer Dolly on the path. This
man was blond. It was the sailor from the
Belle
, the one who’d held her waist. Ralph Parkiss was honouring his sailor’s boast, to see what she’d got hidden in her breeches.
He’d volunteered to walk the six miles to the ship to discover how it had fared since it had beached, but he was looking for the girl. He couldn’t fail to see her. She made a din
– in case he passed her by.

‘Is that you, Miggy?’ He climbed up from the path across the winter bracken. ‘Well now, that’s fortunate. I never thought I’d see a friendly face.’
Miggy’s face was hardly friendly, though. She judged a smile to be unladylike, particularly as she had lost a bottom tooth and her lips were cracked and dry. She knew she had good eyes. Her
mother told her so. She did her best to widen them, and not to blink. Ralph spoke the line that he had practised for six miles: ‘I came to see the
Belle of Wilmington
and found myself
the belle of Wherrytown instead …’

‘It hasn’t shifted much last night,’ Miggy said. She wished she’d put a ribbon in her hair. They both looked down across the beach towards the
Belle
. It
wasn’t showing any sail. Its masts and rigging looked as bare and clean-picked as finished fish-bones. The carcasses of three drowned cows were floating in the shallows.

‘I see you’ve roped yourself a cow. Is this one off the
Belle
?’ Miggy let the rigging drop. She’d not be caught red-handed, poaching cattle. She was ambitious, but
not for travel in a prison ship and not for Botany Bay.

‘I wasn’t stealin’ it,’ she said. ‘Don’t say I was.’

‘I’ll not say anything. Steal ten, and still I’ll not say anything.’ He picked the rigging up and handed it to Miggy. ‘Go on. The captain won’t miss one. He
doesn’t even know how many got ashore. Don’t sell the steaks in Wherrytown, that’s all.’ He was unnerved by her round eyes. ‘Is that our ensign round your
throat?’ he said. ‘It suits you better than the
Belle
.’ And when she didn’t reply, ‘I thought you were a boy. Those breeches aren’t for girls.
You’re not a boy, I hope. How can a sailor tell?’

‘I got a dress at home.’

‘What colour, then?’

‘White. Blue ribbons. I got long hair, ’cept it’s up.’

‘You can let it down so I can see.’

‘I can’t.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I’ll not do anything. Why should I, anyway?’

‘I walked six miles for nothing, then? Must I go back without a kiss? Miggy? Miggy? It’s
twelve
miles, not six, by the time I’m back in Wherrytown. I tell you what. You
kiss me once and then I’ll dream of you.’

‘I’ve got no time for kissin’. Kiss the cow if you’re so keen on it.’

‘I will, if you say no. And then I’ll dream of cows, and you won’t be my sweetheart any more.’

‘Am I your sweetheart, then?’

‘You are if you will kiss.’

What was Ralph Parkiss hoping for? The only girls he’d kissed before had been his sisters or, most recently, the cheap lorettes and dollar doxies in harbour inns in Montreal and
Charleston. With prostitutes he’d put his lips and hands exactly where he’d wanted to, exactly when he’d wanted to. The women didn’t care if they were in his dreams or not,
so long as he could pay and finish what he’d come to do in less than half an hour. There wasn’t any need for strategy or sweetness. They hadn’t touched or kissed him in return.
He’d had to serve himself. There was no happiness in that. Yet Miggy – who, so far, refused to kiss – made Ralph Parkiss feel as fragile as a blown egg. And happy too. He
didn’t mind her boyish clothes, her chilled, unsmiling face, her lack of decoration, her stillness and her secrecy. Such rapt, unconscious gravity was irresistible. Thank God the
Belle
had beached him here. Thank God for storms.

‘What will we do then?’

‘You can help me if you want.’

He helped her pull the cow out from the rocks and coax it down the incline to the path. He used a strip of gorse to beat the cow forward. He even risked a playful gorsing of Miggy’s
thighs. Try as she might she couldn’t stop her smiles. Miggy had two creatures captive on her rope, the heifer and the man. She felt as mossy as the ground. She’d give Ralph a kiss of
thanks when she got home for helping with the cow. Where was the harm in that? Thank God the
Belle
had beached him here. Thank God for storms.

They were halfway to the safety of the cottage and thinking only of themselves when Aymer Smith, touting his Duty along the coast, caught sight of them. He was in a cheerful mood. What a relief
it was for him to be free of the bells, the guests, the corridors of the inn, to walk, and contemplate the fascinations of the coast. He had noticed, as he progressed away from Wherrytown, how one
mile differed from the next, how landscape could transform in minutes from welcoming to inhospitable, how vegetation changed from rich to meagre, how time appeared to wind back on itself so that
the 1836 of Wherrytown, its modest comforts and its steadiness, seemed a hundred years away as he approached Dry Manston. There weren’t many trees for shelter now. And what trees there were,
compared to those around the town, were angular. They shrank and thickened; they turned their trunks against the wind, and wore more bark. The people did the same. Aymer could regard himself as
lean and willowy compared to them.

He called to Ralph and Miggy to wait for him, with a directness and informality that in a town would be considered improper. A morning out of Wherrytown had taught him that the diffidence and
the reverence that marked the Spirit of the Age when strangers of two classes or two sexes met on city streets had not yet migrated here. The kelping families he’d encountered hadn’t
been paralysed by such a visitor. They didn’t gape or turn away. They spoke to him openly, shook his hand and asked unsolicited questions. Boys and girls – children in nothing else but
size – investigated him, pulling his clothes, pressing the leather of his boots, and treated Whip, Aymer’s new companion, to strips of fish, yet didn’t offer Aymer anything to
drink.

He rehearsed with their parents the innovations in the soap industry, and what it meant for kelpers. ‘We’ll manage without kelp, God willing,’ they said. ‘The
fishing’s good enough these last few years. There’s pilchards up tonight and we’ll do well.’ Aymer wondered why he’d come so far, with such a conscience, if the damage
to their lives when the patronage of Hector Smith & Sons was withdrawn would be so inconsequential. Perhaps, if they had offered some brief signs of dismay, he would have felt less
slighted.

‘You’ll miss the money, surely?’

‘Hah! Mr Howells has most of it!’

The kelpers took Aymer’s shilling and some bars of soap, and called their daughters for inspection, the ugly and the lean, the comely and the plump, the sour and the sweet, and all of them
smiling wildly. This Kitty, fourteen years of age, was healthy and hard-working. She’d make a decent maid. This Mary, only ten, was useful round the house and would be glad of any work in
Hector Smith & Sons. This Janie, seventeen, could work as hard as any man, ‘Look at her muscles, Mr Smith!’ and she could wet-nurse, cook or scrub. Did Aymer know of anyone who
could offer employment to any of these girls? Aymer wrote their names down in his notebook and made promises he knew he couldn’t keep. They’d let him take their daughters there and
then, he felt, and not expect to see them any more, so long as they had ‘prospects and positions’.

Aymer’s appetite for kelpers and their daughters was diminishing when he saw Miggy Bowe and Ralph Parkiss with their stolen cow.

‘Good morning, sirs,’ he called, a long man in a black tarpaulin coat, hurrying to catch up with them on the path. ‘Please stand and wait for me.’ They turned to answer
him. He waved. They stood stock-still, uncertain what to do. Miggy knew the type of man he was, though he was out of season, a winter cuckoo. From time to time, usually in the spring and summer,
she’d come across such pale-looking fellows walking on the coast, with knapsacks on their backs, and walking sticks. These were the only people that she’d ever met that were more than a
day’s walk from their homes – apart from Ralph. They might be alone, in pairs, in groups of four or five. Often they were lost. They asked directions to the Cradle Rock which, it
seemed, they’d travelled all this way to see. Their purpose was to touch and sway the Rock. They’d missed it by a half a mile or more. There’d always be a penny in it if Miggy
would lead them to the Rock and show them where they had to put their backs to set it in motion. Sometimes these men took their easels to the beach, or sat on dunes with sketch pads on their knees.
Sometimes they came with hammers and broke up rocks, fossil-bibbing, or spent inexplicable hours attending on the sea birds. Miggy would then earn pennies by showing where the razorbills were
nesting, or clambering down loose cliffs to collect gulls’ eggs for them. Occasionally there were ladies, too, with umbrellas and clothes that were, for Miggy, colourless and disappointing.
One of Walter Howells’s men from Wherrytown or George from the inn was often in attendance as a guide and porter. Then there’d be a picnic on the sand and Miggy, if she smiled and was
polite, could importune some bread and mutton for herself. She dreamed some man – some gentleman – would buy her for a penny and take her far from home.