Silver

by Andrew Motion

  “Tired of hiding?” Smirke spoke at last, with extravagant insolence, his wet mouth adding a horrible shine to the words. They were the first I had heard him speak that were not insults of some kind, yet thanks to the manner of their delivery they might as well have been.

  None of us answered, which gave me the chance to look at him more closely. Beneath the creases of his topcoat, and around his cuffs, the shirtfront was stiffened with grime.

  “Tired of slinking around not showing your faces?” Smirke continued, then suddenly raised his voice to a shout. “Tired of murdering men as they sleep?” The words were intended to make him superior, and he increased their effect by glancing around for victims of his own—especially toward the shore, where the bo’sun and Mr. Tickle were now herding the prisoners into a tight little group. Scotland was at the head of them, with his bare arms extended behind him as if his body were a shield.

  I noticed him with admiration but also a curious detachment. Most of my attention was now focused on the captain, as I silently urged him to ask about Natty, and discover what had become of her.

  But the captain was following his own course. “No one has been hiding,” he said, with a convincing appearance of calm. “I have merely been observing. I have been watching how you run your estate here.”

  “My estate!” Smirke echoed. “It is more than an estate, I assure you.” He was no longer interested in the shore, having satisfied himself that his prisoners were still within his reach. Instead, he was examining the captain once more—not just looking at his face to read his mind, but at his boots, his trousers, his coat, even the way he had trimmed his whiskers (which was ruggedly, but well enough). As he did this, the tip of his tongue, which was very chubby and red, continually appeared between his sunburned lips to soften them. He was, I realized, suffering a second paroxysm of curiosity; one part of him wanted to kill the invader; another longed to sit down and hear news from the wide world.

  The captain understood the confusion as well as I did, and stood ready to use it for his advantage. “Say what you mean,” he said, with commendable boldness. At no time did he make any mention of Jinks, and neither did Smirke seem interested in remembering him.

  “My estate is a kingdom,” replied Smirke. “And now you are here, you are one of its citizens. One of my citizens.”

  “I belong to no one but myself and England,” said the captain, in a voice as still as a mill pond. “And thanks to that I call myself a free man. Free enough to take a view of your kingdom, at any rate.”

  Smirke looked awkward at this; he was not used to hearing opinions that ran counter to his own. Although his instinct was to crush them immediately (as I could tell by seeing his fingers tighten around the handle of his sword), he remembered what he used to be: an ordinary sailor, who knew his betters because he had served under them.

  “And what do you guess the verdict would be, Captain—once you had taken your view?”

  “I do not need to guess the verdict,” the captain replied. “I know it. The verdict would be that you are a disgrace. A thief, and a traitor, and a murderer. I am resolved that you will come back with us to London, where you will get the justice you deserve. You and the rest as well”—here he swept his hand sideways, to include everyone standing behind or beside Smirke.

  Looking over these words now, which reproduce exactly what the captain said, I can see they are somewhat stiff and schoolmasterly. The captain had such qualities about him. But they were an aspect of his decency, not a flaw, and did not seem inadequate at the time. They sounded nothing less than the truth—and although it increased our danger to hear him spell out our purpose so definitely, it was also a relief. We had set our course, and knew we must stick to it.

  Smirke was stung, as the captain wished him to be. But he kept still, which the captain also intended. The longer their confrontation continued, the more time it allowed for the Nightingale to sail to our rescue. “You forget yourself, Captain,” Smirke burst out, his lips quivering. “Your life, and the life of all your crew—they belong to me. If I decide you live, you live. If I decide you die, you die. I’ve sailed the seas in my time, and I’ve come to know the land. I’ve seen good and bad, better and worse, fair weather and foul, provisions running out, and whatnot. And I tell you, I’ve never seen good come of goodness yet. Him as strikes first is my fancy; dead men don’t bite; that’s my view—amen, so be it. Dead men don’t bite.”

  His words might have terrified me, but they were delivered with such bluster and eye-rolling, they meant less than they should have done. My mood soon changed, however, since after he had let fly with his threats, Smirke tipped back his head and gave a great shout of laughter. The guffaw was so loud, a group of parakeets were disturbed from the trees nearest the compound, and whizzed off toward the Anchorage like green arrows.

  Such roaring seemed to me like absolute insanity, and finished as abruptly as it had begun. Whereupon Smirke fixed on the captain more intently than ever, and said in his horrible soaked voice, “You will die like that brat you sent ahead, you coward. That scout or whatever you might call him. Fancy you, playing chuck-farthing with the last breath in his body. Fancy you sending him for pork.”

  By this he meant Natty, and although I knew it might challenge the captain’s authority, I could not stop myself in what followed. I rose up from my position beside the gateway of the stockade, and shouted at Smirke: “What have you done?”

  This was greeted by a moment of stillness, in which the captain turned to look at me, and at the same time slipped the pistol from his belt. He evidently believed my question would disturb the balance he had made, and lead more quickly to violence on one side or the other.

  “What have I done?” Smirke replied, with a languid swivel of his hips. “What are my doings to you, you pup? Have you lost something precious?” There was something uncanny in his phrasing, which made me think he had seen through Natty’s disguise. His next words, dreadful as they were, reassured me that he did not know what he had implied.

  “Your shipmate,” he said, “won’t be sailing with you again. He’s walking about underground now, safe from the sea and the storms.”

  When Smirke spoke these words, which squeezed my heart as definitely as if he had pushed his hand into my chest, the pirates gathered around him more tightly, muttering and fidgeting. This seemed to confirm what he said—although the precise meaning was obscure to me. I took it to be the worst, in any event, and would have begun my grieving instantly had everything else allowed it. But as Smirke finished his little speech, and folded his arms across his chest, which made him look delighted with his own wickedness, his henchman Stone at last stepped forward. There was a listlessness about Stone that showed he cared nothing for anything or anyone—yet at the same time made him seem implacable in the pursuit of his own aims. He had decided that he was weary of Smirke’s methods, and wanted a more direct route to the end of things.

  This made me crouch down again, and peer as before around the edge of the gatepost as before; I felt I was seeing a dead man who could feel no more pain, but only inflict it on others.

  The captain was still determined to drag out the encounter for as long as possible. “You are mistaken,” he said, ignoring Stone and speaking only to Smirke. “I have given you the chance to recognize the evil you have done here, and to submit to justice. If you will not, I have no choice except to take you prisoner—you and all your fellows.”

  This provoked another great roar of laughter. “Do you hear that, boys?” Smirke said, when he was capable of speech again. “The captain is going to take prisoner all us fo’c’sle hands. We can clear a storm, but we’re only good enough for the gallows. What do you think of that, eh, lads?”

  As he expected would happen, the muttering behind him now rose into baying and yelps. I knew it would be impossible for him to restrain his men much longer, and turned for a moment to look behind me, hoping to see a sign of our deliverance. It was a most melancholy disappointment. T
he trees along the bay were shivering in the gray light, as if they felt the same fear as we did ourselves. Also the foliage on the White Rock, which lay half a mile off and completely encircled by water; its plume of ferns was trembling with a peculiar vigor, and beyond it the waves lay empty as far as the horizon.

  When I swung back, I found our long delay was over. Smirke had finally lost patience with the captain, with criticism, with his men stirring for action—and was pulling his pistol from his belt. It was a marvelously old-fashioned and cumbersome contraption, but I had no doubt it would do the necessary. As Smirke drew back the firing pin, he closed one eye and peered lovingly along the barrel; like much that he did, it was an act performed with the most disgusting sort of insinuation.

  This gave our captain the chance to raise his own weapon, which Smirke did not seem to mind or even notice; he evidently believed the captain would not have the determination to fire first, and—in the long debauch of his life—had come to think of himself as immortal. When this performance was finished, both men stood with their weapons pointed at one another’s hearts.

  I am ashamed to say it was only now that I fully understood what I was seeing. I had always known our adventure would be perilous. I had seen two lives lost at sea. I had feared for Natty and expected soon to be mourning her. I had almost lost my own life and been made to contemplate Last Things. But I had never believed my existence would lead to this moment. Not to the captain in mortal danger. The captain, who had led us through difficulties of every kind. Whose kindness seemed a match for all the cruelties in the world. Who had taken care of me as considerately as if he had been my own father.

  With this thought—he had been like a father—I jumped to my feet again, and the single word “No!” burst from me as uncontrollably as if I were indeed a child. No sooner had I spoken than I saw my wish to protect the captain had in fact put him at greater risk—because he now had to push me further behind the shelter of the stockade for my own safety. And when he straightened from doing this, and began to aim his pistol again, Smirke tightened a finger around the trigger of his own weapon and fired.

  The two men were no more than ten feet apart: the captain was certain to be killed. That was my instant conclusion, swept into my mind on a torrent of confused feelings—dismay, guilt, shock, dread. But this turmoil immediately subsided, or rather changed. Instead of producing an explosion, the chamber of Smirke’s pistol—which had been kept too long in readiness, and was useless with damp or some other infection—smoked, and spluttered, and that was all.

  I expected the captain to say something about this, if only as a means of filling more minutes. But he knew the time for talking had passed. Accordingly, and with a courage I thought exceptional, he refused to acknowledge what had occurred, and merely continued pointing his weapon. Smirke lost his energy and hung loose in his clothes like a large puppet. The captain, by contrast, seemed to intensify and harden, even leaning forward a little to make sure his bullet found its mark.

  He fired—a hard sound, like two short lengths of wood clapped together, and the echo bounced back from the surrounding trees.

  Did Smirke fall? Did his crew support him, then furiously spring forward to cut us down? I imagined all these things—but saw none of them. For in almost the same second that Smirke reeled backward, yet another sound had occurred, which at first I did not notice. This was a sharp clang, such as you might hear in a blacksmith’s forge. I stared wildly at Smirke, searching for an explanation. Although his face was twisted like a gargoyle, he remained standing. His wide mouth had opened not to breathe his last, but to release another hideous bellow of laughter.

  “You think …” he shouted, as he caught his balance again, and the mirth in his face curdled into hatred. “You think you can quench old Smirke so easily, Captain? You think you can tear the crown from the head and possess the kingdom? Or creep here with your crew of fools and children, and take me away over the sea where I’ve no wish to go?” He paused to catch his breath, glowering like a Goliath; the captain, I was dismayed to see, no longer met him eye to eye but was fumbling with his pistol, and then with the satchel I threw toward him, so that he could begin reloading. It seemed a singularly forlorn tactic, and did nothing but fuel Smirke’s fury.

  “Damn you for a coward, Mr. Captain,” Smirke roared on. “Damn you for a fool, and an imposter, and a puffed-up, bragging, tedious … I’ll split you to the chine, I’ll …” His excitement was so great, his words piled on top of one another, struggling for space, then shriveled into sounds that were like gasps or grunts until they ceased entirely—at which point he began grabbing at the buttons of his topcoat, where the mark of the captain’s bullet showed clearly over his heart.

  A strange clumsiness now hampered his movements—unless it was the sluggishness of my own mind, which did not want to understand the things it began to see. Smirke slowly lifted the cloth of his coat—which he persisted in wearing (as a sign of his authority, I suppose), despite the rising heat of the day—and then his shirt. Beneath it was a square of thick brown metal, hung around his neck on a length of tarred string; it was covered in the silvery marks of hammer blows, and I thought was probably the base of an old skillet that had been cut and altered. The remains of the captain’s bullet were pressed neatly against its surface, looking as wrinkled and harmless as the pupa of a butterfly.

  The captain groaned when he saw this, and his shoulders drooped. There was something in this loss of confidence that shocked me more deeply than anything that followed, yet also made me love him more deeply. He flung his pistol to the ground, where it bounced toward me across the turf as though it had a life of its own; I snatched it up and felt the handle damp with sweat. My intention, of course, was to reload it myself, but fate was taking our authority away from us. My fingers shook as they set about filling the breech, and I glanced up expecting to make an apology for my delay.

  There was no need. The captain had forgotten his pistol and was pulling his sword from its scabbard. Once this was done, he flourished his blade bravely enough in the face of our enemies, daring one of them to advance. Yet it was not a convincing performance, and seemed done more in sorrow than anger. Smirke was unimpressed, at any rate. He took a long stride forward, drawing his own sword and prodding his breastplate with a dirty finger, so the metal gave a muffled chime. His clothes no longer seemed to hang on him, but were tightly filled with his heavy arms and legs.

  “You’ll kill me with that needle now, will you, Captain?” he said. “You’ll murder me with your pin, like you murdered my shipmate Mr. Jinks, God rest his soul?” He threw a glance across his shoulder, more by rolling his eyes than turning his head. “I’ve sailed the seas with my friend Mr. Jinks. I’ve shared more solitude with him than I want to say. And you murder him in his sleep? Now, I ask you, is that the action of a Christian gentleman, Mr. Captain? Is that the example to be setting your young friends and mess mates?” He paused here, to swallow and give me a leering smile, then continued with his deliberate slowness. “You a murderer and me a murderer, Captain, that’s the way I see it. What’s the difference between us? Nothing. No difference between us. Except I might be a little more …”—here he shrugged his shoulders, so the breastplate heaved on his chest—“a little more comfortable.”

  Smirke was holding his sword low now, tapping the ground sometimes with the tip as though flushing out game. And while he advanced on the captain, his crew moved up behind him like his own shadow; they were so packed together I thought they might not fight us with blows at all, but instead smother us to death.

  Then the picture changed again. Whether it had always been his intention, or whether it was a whim, Stone broke from the throng and stepped in front of them all. Smirke seemed a little surprised, and ready to divert his flow from the captain in order to assert his command. But when he looked into Stone’s blank eyes he changed his mind, and closed his mouth, and nodded—before beginning to suck his teeth with a disgusting relish.

 
Stone brushed his long wisps of white hair away from his face, then with great deliberation lifted his right arm, holding it very straight and apparently pointing out to sea. But he was not pointing with a finger. He was pointing with a gun. A little silver pistol. And it was not directed toward the ocean, but at the captain’s forehead. Stone did not say a word, and his eyes never blinked. They merely gazed at their target as his finger tightened, then narrowed a little as the explosion sounded.

  Because I had seen Smirke survive a similar threat, I thought for an instant there would now be a similar reprieve. But this was impossible. The moment Stone fired, the captain fell backward, straight as a tree; when his body hit the earth, it sent a hard ripple of shock into my own hands and knees where I knelt on the grass. His face was a yard from my own, with his old cocked hat, green with mold along the seams, knocked away behind. I saw him more clearly than in my life before: the freckles across his nose and cheeks, the sandy-colored eyelashes that darkened where they met the lids, the silver whiskers along his jaw. In the center of his brow, which I had admired so often for its candor, was a neat black hole with a fringe of smoke clinging to its edges.

  “Oh, sir,” I heard myself say, in a voice I scarcely recognized as my own. It was the first sound to break the silence, traveling through the heavy air like a crack through ice—and suddenly, to my great astonishment, producing an echo from the shore behind me. No, not an echo. A loud cheer—which I could not understand until I turned and saw the Nightingale, looking as pretty as a ship in a bottle, carving through the waves at the tip of the headland and sailing toward the Anchorage.

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