The Last Killiney

by J. Jay Kamp

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  So Christian got what he’d wanted all his life: marriage to his cousin, the money accompanying this arrangement, and best of all, the opportunity to threaten and get back at James without him ever even knowing it.

  It was difficult to keep James from learning what had happened. When she asked him to save Christian from the prison, his first impression was nearly correct, that she’d been tricked. Since she’d never been any good at lying, it took some doing to convince him that really, she’d not expected it, but the sight of Christian, alive and breathing and asking to come home with them, had affected her at the deepest level. After all, he’d been dead. To have him now miraculously returned, safe and enlightened by his experience, was—

  “A bad omen,” James said. He stood on the beach at Nootka with his hands at his hips, his brown fingers tapping at the hilt of Paul’s sword. For a long moment in the failing light, he did nothing but bite the corner of his lip as he considered her question: Could Christian make the passage home with them?

  In the end, he had to say yes. After all, Ravenna wasn’t wandering off in fits of depression anymore. She was asking, yes, even begging to bring Christian along on the voyage. She had to know he was safe, she said. She couldn’t leave him on that coast and in the months ahead, wonder, Did he die of malnutrition in that Spanish prison because she had left him?

  “So blame me,” James insisted.

  But then there was this other matter, this information Christian now possessed which James wanted, and wanted badly.

  You see, Christian had been captured by Indians. He hadn’t really deserted Discovery at all, but fallen prey to a series of mishaps that had eventually led to his being taken to a village and, of all things, enslaved. His story gave a considerable amount of detail about the native peoples of the Pacific Northwest, and these details could beef up James’s paper for the Royal Society.

  All James had to do was put up with his cousin for a few months. That and actually talk to him.

  So their voyage home consisted of hours and hours spent cooped up in a cabin the size of a pantry while Christian recalled everything he could about his adventures. It had started with the hunting trip, he explained. Paul and Ravenna had gone off to the island, and knowing what they’d do with their privacy, Christian had followed in a fit of jealousy. For five days he and his cohorts had spied on them, dodging Paul’s hunting attempts while scaring away the deer. They’d watched Ravenna dig clams, dive for crabs, had even made bird calls from the bluff above her head.

  Most amusing of all, they’d seen every move the pair had made in their attempts at lovemaking. Every move. Remembering the pictures he’d taken from the tent, Ravenna didn’t doubt Christian’s word.

  When finally the lovers had returned to the ship, Christian and his buddies had intended to do the same. Yet on their way back, something had happened. The same storm that had ruined Ravenna’s watercolor pictures had sneaked up on Christian, and all the rowing in the world hadn’t saved him from being swept out into the strait. He and his friends had been lost for weeks, rowing along the desolate coast, searching for the ship, so that by the time the Indians had picked them up in a thirty-foot canoe, Christian had been delighted to be enslaved so long as slavery included food.

  Taken to the Indians’ summer village, he’d soon found himself digging clams with the women. He’d done it gladly, he explained, because within the first week of his Indian captivity, his two friends had been murdered. A neighboring chief had come to call, arriving at the village in a huge canoe, and the hapless sailors had been marched right down to the beach where, in a grand display of wealth and ceremony, they’d been clubbed to death.

  Christian described the beatings in detail. He explained how his friends, having fallen to the sand, had been placed under the neighboring chief’s canoe. They’d acted as rollers in the beaching process, enabling the great man to keep his feet dry.

  But washed in a curling ribbon of blood, his crucifix dragging over the rocks, it wasn’t lifeless Mr. Bailey or Mr. Browne that Ravenna saw in her mind’s eye.

  Of course it was Paul.

  Not able to bear it anymore, Ravenna broke from the cabin then. Right in the middle of Christian’s description, she threw back the door and raced above decks to breathe the cold air of the Oregon coast, to whisper Paul’s name and steel herself madly against the stories she knew she’d hear yet again in the weeks to come.

  Barely two days passed before Christian told another, this time the victim being a native man brought from some far flung village as a prize of war. A slave like Christian, this man’s death had been part of a similar ceremony. There’d been a feast at the occasion. Abalone, sea urchins and hundreds of fish had been eaten from wooden, animal-shaped bowls while the Indians had danced in frightening masks and long, flowing mantles of sea-otter fur.

  These details James scribbled down furiously as Christian explained how the slave had been led before the Indian chiefs and shoved to his knees, his face forced down to the cedar bark soil. A dagger had been brought out, an iron dagger with a carved, painted haft. The slave’s tangle of hair had been brushed aside in readiness for the kill, and instantly Ravenna saw Paul’s shortened locks, saw the pine needles caught in his blondish brows. The slave in Christian’s story had struggled, and so did Paul when they forced down his head and raised the iron dagger high, drove it into the slave’s neck—right into the base of his Indian skull.

  And then she knew.

  Christian’s detailed description of the knife, the way Paul’s face had been shoved to the ground, the death of the Indian who’d given up the watch…all these things were blatant lies.

  Paul was still alive.

  She must have made a sound when she realized it, for James turned sharply. Under his gaze she tried not to cry. Christian had warned her what would happen if James should start asking questions about the watch, but as her mind raced with the possibilities invoked by Christian’s lie, Sarah interrupted everything.

  “So you’re sayin’ this happened, m’lord?” she asked. “Right before your very eyes, they murdered the savage?”

  Christian sighed. “Haven’t you been paying attention?”

  “Yes, but is it true, m’lord, that’s what I’m askin’.”

  Christian scowled at her, and still James kept his gaze on Ravenna. Hope and pain mixed behind her eyes, surely James saw it, for she was burgeoning with wild and desperate thoughts even as Christian lifted his hand, pointed to himself. “You accuse me?” he asked Sarah with innocence. “As emaciated as I am, and scarred for life, I might add, you charge me with fabricating my enslavement by Indians?”

  “Plagiarism’s more the word I’d use,” Sarah replied.

  “Given the quality of your education—”

  “You don’t think I know the meanin’ o’ the word, do you, m’lord?” In disgust, Sarah shook her head. “Plagiarism an’ lyin’ are near the same, but the way I see it, the first takes less imagination.”

  Christian laughed nervously. “How can you say that? I’ve told you my gruesome tale as a favor, as a contribution of information toward his ridiculous aspirations in the name of friendship, and you have the audacity to suggest I’m lying?”

  “I’m not suggestin’, m’lord, I’m tellin’ you. It was your own skull those savages run through like a highwayman’s head on a pike, least that’s the way m’lady put it down in her book near on two years ago, isn’t that right, m’lady? An’ now he’s quotin’ your words as if he lived ’em when it was your dream, m’lady, an’ only a dream at that.”

  James raised his hand against her for silence. “Desist,” he said gently, but his gaze never left Ravenna’s brooding. “What is it?” he asked her. “What do you see?”

  Ravenna couldn’t speak. She was certain if she did, there’d be one set of words to leave her mouth: Turn the ship around.

  In the silence that followed, James pushed his chair from the dinette table, bent down to kn
eel at Ravenna’s side. Oh, God, Paul’s back there, she thought madly, he’s alive and I’ve left him.

  Taking her balled up fist in his hand, James waited patiently, but still she resisted the urge to cry out. She closed her lips tight. She forced herself to look straight into the worry of James’s expression until she thought she’d explode from fury and hope, while beside her, she heard Christian’s clothes rustling and his disgusted little sigh when he rummaged through his coat.

  Suddenly an object was tossed on the table.

  “That is what disturbs her,” Christian said.

  Shining like a dull moon against the scratched oak, Paul’s watch moved, slipped with the pitch and roll of the ship.

  Seeing it, James’s brow furrowed. The muscles in his cheek tensed; a dangerous cast came over his countenance, and as he glanced at Ravenna, he let go her hand.

  He stood up slowly, and the look he gave Christian, with his brown eyes blackened to smoldering coals, could have put the fear in anyone. The smugness vanished from Christian’s features. In an instant, he was scrambling for cover as James ducked under the beam of the cabin’s ceiling and straightened over Christian. “Where is he, Cousin? Tell me where he is or I’ll break every bone in your miserable little—”

  “On my mother’s grave, I don’t know!”

  “You know well enough.”

  “That watch was given to me by a savage,” Christian stammered. “How was I to learn the details of its thieving? Do I speak their savage language?”

  “From your endless Indian stories, yes, I think you do.”

  “But this was a different sort of Indian, and I couldn’t possibly—”

  “So this wasn’t in the village? You received this watch at Nootka Sound?”

  “Yes! In the prison, I—”

  “When?” James asked. He took another step. “When did you meet this Indian at Nootka?”

  Cowering against the cabin wall, Christian hesitated. His eyes roved wildly, glancing around at the planked floor, the table, at anything but James until finally James reached down and seized him by the collar, lifted him slowly off his feet. “When.”

  “Three…four days ago,” Christian said. “The savage gave me the watch four days before you arrived and then the Spaniards shot him! How could I have asked from whom he’d stolen it? We couldn’t converse but with simple gestures.”

  Hearing this blatant contradiction of his earlier claims, his detailed story of Paul’s death, Ravenna couldn’t help speaking at last. “He’s lying,” she muttered under her breath.

  James raised Christian higher against the wall, gave him a shake. “Why does she call you a liar, Cousin?”

  Swallowing hard, Christian glanced at her. There was trouble building in those gray eyes, she saw it, trouble born of that fear and cowardice which drove everything about him so that when he managed to regain his composure, when his voice steadied, Ravenna wasn’t surprised at all. “I fabricated a version of the Paddy’s death,” Christian said carefully. “I do understand your indignation, but you must believe I’m sorry. It was merely something that had to be done.”

  “You told me they put a knife through his head!”

  “I did tell you that, but only to make you believe my story.”

  “A knife through his head?” James nodded toward her. “As she sits there grieving, you told her that?”

  “Would you rather I’d told her the truth? That I got nothing from the savage, save his fleas?”

  With a grimace, James put his face near to Christian’s, intimidating, threatening. “If you’re lying to me—”

  “I don’t speak savage, I’ve told you as much.”

  “And I’m telling you that when we get back to Nootka, you’re going to show me who shot this Indian and together, we’re going to comb that coast for Paul night and day, you understand me, Cousin? If those Spaniards remember anything at all, which nation he belonged to, what dialect he spoke or the type of his canoe, then we’ve only to hire soldiers to accompany us to every village until you and I have—”

  “Has mourning driven you both mad?” Christian stared at James in shock. “Listen to yourself! He’s dead! You’ve told her so a dozen times at least, and now you fill her head with hopeless fantasy?”

  “Better that than the daggers you’ve put in his.”

  “It’s beyond your understanding, isn’t it, James? Why I’d invent that awful description?”

  “Stole,” Sarah reminded him.

  “Yes, deliberately, so my words would ring true, so she’d believe and get on with her life!”

  James’s hands loosened the slightest bit. Christian slipped an inch down the wall. “She needed a finality which the truth couldn’t provide,” he went on, “and as much as it wounded her to hear my lies, at least she faced the brunt of her grief, which is more than I can say for your notions of going back to that godforsaken place.”

  “She needs to bury him,” James insisted. “Should she have his remains for a fit and proper service—”

  “Then she’d have a plot in the ground, wouldn’t she? We all know he’s dead—would you have her wandering that coast for years, searching for him, endangering herself and her child merely for the sake of burying his corpse?”

  James’s shoulders hunched uncertainly.

  “If you love her,” Christian said, “then convince her there’s no point in going back. You paint the image of the Paddy’s death. She’ll listen to you. She’ll do anything for you.”

  From behind him, Ravenna saw only the back of James’s head, all that black, straight hair messed in a ribbon.

  Wave after wave rocked the ship.

  Finally James lowered his head, lowered his grip and, wavering with the pitch and plunge of the deck, he set Christian down and stepped away.

  She couldn’t believe it. She was about to yell at him, to demand that he strangle Christian, tear him limb from limb or whatever it took to get the truth, but as she started to open her mouth to say so, James turned around. Only then did she see the look on his face.

  His brows were drawn together in an agonized expression. His jaw was clenched, and she realized what Christian had so skillfully done—he’d transferred the blame. He’d played on the remorse and self-damnation that shone so readily in James’s eyes and invoked the guilt already there; after all, Christian was thinking of her welfare, and what was James thinking of?

  Swaying with the rollers that crashed against the hull, James went to her then. He put his arms around her, crushed her against him with penitent urgency, and Ravenna didn’t like the things he whispered. “They shot him, don’t you remember how I told you? They shot him in the chest with a musket, Love, and he died…I know he died.”

  He whispered such things for three days.

  And after hearing again and again how Paul had fallen while the gun’s report echoed down the riverbed, how James had seen Paul’s eyes close and his limbs go lifeless as they pulled him through the tall salal…with all that emotion charging James’s voice, she had to believe him.