The New World

by Andrew Motion

  ALSO BY ANDREW MOTION

  Biography and Memoir

  The Lamberts: Georgie, Constant and Kit

  Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life

  Keats: A Biography

  In the Blood: A Memoir of My Childhood

  Criticism

  The Poetry of Edward Thomas

  Philip Larkin

  Ways of Life: Places, Painters and Poets

  Edited Works

  Selected Poems: William Barnes

  Selected Poems: Thomas Hardy

  John Keats: Poems Selected by Andrew Motion

  Here to Eternity: An Anthology of Poetry

  First World War Poems

  Fiction

  Wainewright the Poisoner

  The Invention of Dr Cake

  Silver

  Poetry

  The Pleasure Steamers

  Independence

  Secret Narratives

  Dangerous Play: Poems 1974–1984

  Natural Causes

  Love in a Life

  The Price of Everything

  Salt Water

  Selected Poems 1976–1997

  Public Property

  The Cinder Path

  The Customs House

  Peace Talks

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Andrew Motion

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN is a registered trademark and the Crown colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published, in slightly different form, in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, a division of the Random House Group Limited, London, in 2014.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Motion, Andrew, 1952–

  The new world / Andrew Motion. — First American edition.

  pages cm

  Sequel to Silver.

  I. Title.

  PR6063.O842N49 2015

  823'.914—dc23

  2014030289

  ISBN 9780804138451

  eBook ISBN 9780804138468

  eBook design adapted from printed book design by Elina Nudelman

  Cover design by Anna Kochman

  Cover and title page illustration by Hughes, Nigel (b. 1940)/Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Andrew Motion

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Foreword

  Part I: The Shore and the Land

  Chapter 1: My Afterlife

  Chapter 2: A False Start

  Chapter 3: In the Black Bay

  Chapter 4: Savages

  Chapter 5: On the Clifftop

  Chapter 6: The March Inland

  Chapter 7: A Conversation in the Dark

  Chapter 8: Angels of Mercy

  Chapter 9: Black Cloud

  Chapter 10: The Open Door

  Part II: The Wilderness

  Chapter 11: Under the Stars

  Chapter 12: The Hunting Party

  Chapter 13: In the Village

  Chapter 14: Paradise

  Chapter 15: Her Kill

  Chapter 16: Our Second Exodus

  Chapter 17: A Flock of Birds

  Chapter 18: The Entertainment

  Chapter 19: My Confusion

  Chapter 20: Cat’s Field

  Chapter 21: The Performance

  Chapter 22: Our Mistake

  Chapter 23: Nowhere Else

  Chapter 24: Healing the Sick

  Chapter 25: The Thicket

  Part III: The River and the Sea

  Chapter 26: Achilles Williams

  Chapter 27: The Southern Angel

  Chapter 28: Lost—and Saved

  Chapter 29: The Interlude of a Foggy Night

  Chapter 30: Ashore Again

  Chapter 31: Things That Happen

  Chapter 32: Our Evening Together

  Chapter 33: What Is Mine

  Chapter 34: Forgiveness

  Chapter 35: My Father’s House

  Acknowledgments

  FOR KYEONG-SOO

  The stars streaming in the sky are my hair

  The round rim of the earth which you see

  Binds my starry hair

  Adapted from Jeremiah Curtin,

  Creation Myths of Primitive America,

  Boston, 1898

  FOREWORD

  When one book is the child of another it is courteous to acknowledge the parent, so without delay I will say this volume continues the story of my life with Natty Silver, which I first brought to public attention a little under three years ago. I should also make clear at once that Natty is the daughter of Mrs. Silver, formerly of the West Indies and in more recent times the landlady of the Spyglass Inn, Wapping, London; and of Mr. Silver, better known as “Long John” Silver on account of him having only one leg, or as “Barbecue” since he used to work as a ship’s cook. My own father Jim Hawkins was his companion on their celebrated journey to Treasure Island.

  In my first installment I described how I was persuaded by Natty to return with her to the Island in the summer of 1802; our purpose was to recover the bar silver left behind by Squire Trelawney, when he made off with the other spoils that Captain Flint had previously buried there in secret.

  Nothing turned out as planned. Where we expected a primitive wilderness we found a barbarous kingdom, ruled by three villains the squire had marooned on the Island; when we thought to enjoy an easy and profitable return to England we faced a catastrophe. Our ship the Nightingale was blown off her intended course and back through the Bay of Mexico until she was smashed on the coast of Spanish America, in the part called Texas. In that disaster I lost a great deal, including the human cargo I had helped to liberate from the three maroons, and the promise of my own future wealth and comfort.

  The fact that I am able to say as much proves I did not also lose my life. For instead of following almost the whole company of our ship into Davy Jones’s locker, and never seeing the light of this world again, I managed to scramble onto dry land. Here, as I shall soon explain, I had good reason to think my Maker would have dealt more kindly with me if he had allowed me to die with the rest.

  But I must not judge the events of my life before I have remembered them, and shall therefore now wind back the clock forty years and return to the waters of that savage coast. The Nightingale lies in pieces; the storm has abated; the moon is almost set; and the latest pulse of seawater has carried me onto a beach of black stones. I am exhausted—fluttering between life and death.

  But I am alive.

  I am alive.

  The Hispaniola

  1842

  PART I

  THE SHORE AND THE LAND

  CHAPTER 1

  My Afterlife

  When I approached the gates of heaven there was no brightness of the kind we are told to expect. No dazzle, no promise of homecoming, no rapture. There was only darkness, like a sky at night without stars or moon or cloud, and a mild but steady breeze blowing in my face, making me turn and look backward over my shoulder.

  Miles below me, dozens of miles but perfectly clear as if caught in the eye of a microscope, I saw—myself. My own young body stretched on a black shore, with my hair in my eyes, and my arms flung about, and my legs half-in and half-out of the wa
ter, and my skin puckered with cold, because…

  Because why? Memory failed me, then sparked again.

  Because of the hurricane.

  The wreck.

  My plunge from our ship.

  The plunge, and the water rushing into my throat, and the wave that suddenly lifted me up. The smaller and gentler wave, that singled me out and brought me safely to land.

  The lens of the microscope left me there and shifted back to the sea. Outlined in starlight was the miracle that had saved me—a rock-ledge jutting out from the beach, keeping the worst of the storm at bay. And beyond it, sixty yards off where the waves still surged and battered, with the first gleams of daylight brightening their white caps: the Nightingale. But not our home as she had been, never that any more. The Nightingale quite finished, with her two masts torn down, her sails billowing underwater, her hull smashed through, and deep at the heart of her wound—our treasure.

  But the microscope would not let me see that. The microscope darted off once more, suddenly impatient with the sea and switching instead to the black cliffs that enclosed the beach where my body lay unconscious, scouring the rock-crannies and birds’ nests, searching the clefts and cracks, before deciding it had done with them too and must turn instead to the shoreline.

  Where at last it found what it wanted.

  Which was Natty.

  When I saw her there in the eye of the microscope, her bare feet stamping on the stones for warmth, I felt my grip loosen at my enormous height, and the breeze in my face strengthening, trying to shake me off.

  But I was not yet ready to slip back to myself, my earthly self. I still hung at my distance, high and separate.

  Except that nothing was separate now, because everything was Natty. Natty in her tattered white shirt and knee breeches, with the cliffs rearing around her, and the ocean roaring, and the moon dipping between clouds. When her head tipped forward I caught the sheen of her beautiful brown skin, and the gleam of her eyes. And her hair—the tight curls of her hair shining as brightly as metal as they blustered around her face.

  What was she doing, though, staring at the waves continually and paying me no attention? I was lying no more than a few yards away from her! Had she not seen? Or had she seen all too clearly, and given me up for dead?

  “I am here!” I called to her. “Me, Jim Hawkins! Your Jim!” But I was not just a few yards away; I was still dozens of miles above her, and she did not notice.

  I knew then I must find my way back to her, not wait for her to search for me. I knew I must tumble down through miles and miles of swirling air and rain and spray until I landed smack on the stones, the black stones.

  Where she would find me and know who I was. Where she would fold me into her heart.

  CHAPTER 2

  A False Start

  She reached me at once, hauling me out from the waves with the stones grinding beneath my heels. When I was clear she knelt down and rested my head in her lap; when she whispered my name there was no other sound I wanted to hear.

  But I moved my head. I rolled it from side to side for pure pleasure, with life running warm in my veins again, and so I lost sight of her, finding the cliffs instead.

  All through the hours we had floundered in ruins, with the Nightingale shattering beneath us, and her corridors flooding, and her cabins breaking open to the sky, and our friends dying, I had thought these cliffs were a blank wall. A vertical stop; the end of the world.

  Now as they dizzied into the rain above me I saw they were covered with scrapes and scratches—there, near the summit, where the first daylight was crawling across. Rockfalls I thought, my eyes blurry with salt. Gouges made by the rain and sea. But as the light grew stronger, much stranger than that.

  They were teeth and tongues; but just for a blink because now a new ghost-mark had appeared. A fissure that ran from the crown of the cliffs in a zigzag down to the beach and ended twenty yards off.

  A stairway.

  I opened my mouth to tell Natty, to say she must see this too and help me to walk and climb and make our escape. But I only groaned, which made her whisper my name again.

  So I forgot the cliffs. I forgot them along with the path and the stones and the storm and the wreck and the friends we had lost.

  I’ll sleep for a moment longer, I told her, or meant to at least. I’ll sleep and we’ll find our way home together, and heal ourselves in the old world we know, and be happy.

  And I’ll find my good sense there as well.

  And my sentences.

  But first I must sleep; I must sleep and dream.

  CHAPTER 3

  In the Black Bay

  “Jim?” Her voice was so small the sea almost smothered it.

  “Natty?” It was my first word and I could think of no better.

  “I saw you,” she said. “I thought you were…” She did not like to continue, but the word she had left unspoken hung between us in the half-light, until she placed her hands either side of my face and a flame sprang in my heart.

  “Natty?” I spluttered. “Who else is alive?” I felt like an infant, born for the second time.

  She was adrift and not thinking of me, even while she brought me her comfort. “Where are we, Jim?” she said vaguely. “Where are we?”—then she lifted my head from her lap and floated away from me over the grinding stones like a sleepwalker.

  When I propped myself on my elbow I saw her standing on the shoreline with her back turned, staring out to sea. It was not the waves she saw; it was the dark shapes that weltered there, all lifeless now.

  I redoubled my efforts and sat up straight, then shuffled toward her and for a moment we were silent, waiting for the sunrise to show us the horizon.

  “Is there no one else?” Natty said at length, and still with her back to me. “No one at all, and no silver?”

  This I could answer. “There is no more silver,” I told her. “Don’t think about silver, Natty…”

  “I meant for our friends,” she said, then twisted round to stare at the cliffs behind us, as if a voice had suddenly called out.

  A moment before I had sketched a stairway there, and the beginnings of faces. Now in the stronger light I discovered a kind of madhouse, with cats and dogs and creatures like freaks and devils all carved in the stone together.

  “What are they, Jim?” Natty whispered. She was pointing toward a gigantic bear, a monster looming over the zigzag path with a mound of bodies heaped on his tongue. His eyes had almost popped out of their sockets with the effort of swallowing so much flesh.

  “Who made them?” I said, more to myself than to her.

  “Wickedness,” she said, as if I had asked a different question. “But why here?”

  “Why not here?” I said.

  “This is the New World!”

  “Wickedness is everywhere,” I said.

  She glanced round then and I saw she was weeping. This was my doing, I felt sure of it, and gathering all my strength I stood up at last and caught her in my arms. I dare say it made a very dull sort of embrace, a kind of deadlock in fact, but for a second or two the world disappeared: the sickening surf, the gull-cries, the hiss of the wind. All I could hear was Natty’s heart; all I could feel was her breath.

  Then it was over and she was shoving me away. “No, Jim, no!” she gasped. “Look there in the water behind you!”

  I expected—I don’t know what I expected. Broken timber. A twist of rope. But when I dipped my hand in the surf whatever it was felt slick as a bolt of silk.

  I almost choked, but I kept on looking and found a kind of mouth grimacing at me. A neck that was severed clean through.

  I clattered away on the stones. “Not yet,” Natty said, holding her ground; this was her old voice now, which I knew from London and the start of our life together. “I need you to help.”

  “Help you with what?” I asked, looking toward the skyline as if the answer might be shining in the distance; there was light everywhere now, with the purple gone from
the clouds and a pearly brightness coming in.

  “We must bring them ashore,” Natty told me; she had forgotten all her fear. “We must bury them.”

  “Who?” I said, still wavering.

  “Everyone,” she said.

  “Everyone?” I said, beginning to understand. “But everyone is too many! We should leave them and look after ourselves, that’s all we can do.”

  Natty smiled her smile then, the same that had brought me from England, and so to the Island, and so to our disaster, and now had raised me to life again.

  “We can think of ourselves soon enough,” she said. “First there is this.”

  She was so definite I simply nodded and stepped into the water; I bent over and found the monstrous thing that bulged beneath the surface; I felt the slithery skin and gripped.

  Then we took the weight together, scrabbling backward over the stones, and a second later I recognized it—recognized her I should say. She was Rebecca, the slave I last saw on the Island with a Bible pressed to her heart, the friend who read from the good book when we buried the captain. When her head jarred and twisted as we dragged her forward, and her tongue flopped over her teeth, I paused to straighten the body and give it some dignity; we only stopped for good when we reached the high-water mark, where we laid down our burden on a bank of seaweed.

  A moment later I faced the sea again, the sea and the ship that was no longer our Nightingale but a graveyard. Not even a graveyard in fact; more like a death-spout, a fountain hurling up severed arms, and legs, and feet, and heads, and hands.