Bride of the Wilderness

by Charles McCarry

  Unclothed, she was no child. As Ash watched the hectic flush fade from her skin as the fever receded, he fought against the involuntary reaction of his own body. He had feared that this might happen. Betsy had permitted him her body, but she had not been wife to him since their children died. He could never turn away from Christian marriage to another woman. But the temptation of the flesh was a constant torment, even when he was asleep. He resisted the women who came to him in dreams, turning away, commanding his body to hold back, rising from bed to pray. He began to pray now.

  “‘Walk in the Spirit,’” he cried, “‘and ye shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh.’”

  Fanny heard Ash’s voice long before she opened her eyes. He was kneeling on the deck with his back turned to her. She was not surprised to find herself naked. She knew that she had not been molested; the bath had been some sort of medical treatment. Exposure to a man’s eyes was the last thing that worried her; she supposed, without resentment, that she was dying. She was too weak to stand up, and she did not wish to embarrass Ash by asking him to help her, so she crawled to the bunk on her hands and knees, coughing so violently that her ears rang, and put on her nightdress without help.

  Ash seemed to be waiting for that. He tucked the blankets around her and went to the table where his medicines were arranged. Fanny heard him mixing a potion. He gave her something bitter to drink from a spoon. Fanny stopped coughing, and as she drifted into a kind of light sleep in which everything was sharply drawn and clearly understood, she dreamed that she was her mother on the night when she, Fanny, was born, and that she was watching while Ash baptized Rose Barebones; Ash wore a stole like the Jesuits’ and petted a white cat with his left hand while he sprinkled water on Rose’s brilliant hair with his right hand. Henry asked Fanchon to play “Tell me no more you love.” Nobody was dead. While Fanny dreamed, she heard a loud sound like a cat purring and realized that she was hearing Ash’s voice as he prayed.

  2

  Carrying Rose’s fur-trimmed cloak over his shoulder, Oliver came into the cabin shouting with his old exuberance. His sling was gone. He wrapped Fanny in the cloak and picked her up in his arms as if he’d never been wounded.

  “Come, Fanny-my-love,” he cried. “There’s something marvelous to see up top.”

  He carried her out the door and up the ladder to the deck. Porpoises, dozens of them, gleaming and jolly, were playing around the ship. They seemed to be flying as they rose effortlessly out of the sea, turning twinkling faces toward the people on deck.

  It was the first time Fanny had been on deck since her illness began. The Pamela was halfway to America, four weeks out of Portsmouth. She had been at sea for a week before Fanny knew that she had left England, and even then she had not understood why she felt the ship in motion, or if she really did. She dreamt almost constantly. Ash had treated her pneumonia with opium. It stopped her coughing, but because it was a respiratory depressant, it made breathing very difficult. When she gasped for air, as often happened, Ash carried her outside, and as she looked down from the gallery at the wake of the ship, she heard his voice commanding her over and over again, “Breathe! Think! Breathe!”

  Now it was Oliver who hoisted Fanny up on his shoulder so that she could see the porpoises. Ash had cured her. Her head was clear and she was breathing easily again.

  “Maybe one will fly onto the deck, Fanny,” Oliver said. “Other fishes have jumped aboard while you’ve been sleeping. The sea is filled with amazing things.”

  They were standing on the quarterdeck, well aft of the mainmast. Oliver grinned up at Fanny and squeezed her hand. Her face, inside the fur-trimmed hood, was thinner than before, but her color had begun to come back.

  Spray was breaking over the beak of the ship. The Pamela was sailing before the wind through a soapy six-foot sea. All her sails were up and filled. Though it was a bright June day, the sun gave off very little warmth. Even wrapped up in the cloak, Fanny felt a slight chill.

  One of the sailors, a London boy from the sound of him as he shouted to other members of the crew, was climbing into the rigging with a harpoon in his hand.

  “Fresh meat for supper,” Oliver said. “The sailors say that we’ll have a storm—it’s one of their sayings that porpoises are a sign that there’ll be wind.”

  The young sailor, tied to a spar by a line around his chest, toes gripping the shrouds, hung out over the frolicking porpoises. He cast the harpoon and missed, hauled it in, and cast it again. This time he speared one of the animals. It leaped into the air and turned completely over, wrapping a loop of the harpoon line around its body. Other sailors hauled it aboard.

  “By God, Fanny, what a fish!” Oliver cried. “Watch him twist and flop!”

  The wounded porpoise skittered across the deck, leaving a broad smear of blood on the scrubbed blond planking and emitting a high-pitched whistle of distress. While this first porpoise suffered, the young sailor harpooned another, and then another, and they, too, were hauled aboard.

  There were now half a dozen dying porpoises floundering on the deck. Barefoot sailors dodged among them, skylarking, slipping in the blood and smearing it on one another’s faces. The young harpoonist came down from the rigging. The first porpoise he had speared was nearly dead, its flippers quivering weakly, its voice gone. The sailor drew a knife. It seemed to Fanny that the porpoise was watching the man out of its small round eye. The sailor plunged his knife into the porpoise’s belly and sliced down the length of it, first exposing a layer of white fat, then a long running stitch of blood, then amber blubber, and finally cascades of blood. The creature’s eye widened in pain and terror—Fanny would have called it amazement if a man instead of an animal had been dying—and then, an instant later, the light went out of it.

  Blue guts spilled onto the deck. Ash ran to the dying porpoise and examined the offal. He snatched the sailor’s knife from his hand and with a few deft strokes completed the job of disemboweling the porpoise. While he worked, he beckoned to Oliver.

  “There are the intestines, the stomach, the spleen, the lungs, the heart, the liver, exactly as in the other mammals,” he said. “Look, it is for all the world like a swine that swims. It is extraordinary what God has made to swim in His sea!”

  Oliver nodded. He was not really interested. The young harpoonist, giddy from the slaughter, dipped his thumbs in blood and drew two crimson lines on his own face.

  Ash insisted that Fanny eat as much porpoise liver as she could while it was fresh. It tasted like sheep’s liver, but saltier and slightly fishy. Fanny was nauseated by it, but Ash would not let her refuse it. To encourage her, he tried it himself and found that it had been soused in vinegar. His face contorted, he opened the window and threw it into the sea. He shouted for the cook.

  “No vinegar!” he ordered. “Slice it thin and cook it plain with a little fat in a frying pan.

  “It will build up your blood,” he said to Fanny. “You are suffering from anemia. Do you know what the Greek word means?”

  “An—not, emia—haima? Blood?” Fanny replied. “I have no blood.”

  “You have plenty of blood. But it’s weak. You mustn’t miss a single day of liver.”

  Ash had discovered that Fanny knew Latin and a little Greek. It was strange to find such knowledge in a girl of seventeen. He asked who had taught her; keeping Evans the Jesuit a secret, she avoided the question.

  Ash asked Oliver for more information.

  “Her father talked Latin for pleasure. Maybe she learned from him.”

  “Was her father Welsh?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Fanny speaks Latin and Greek with a Welsh accent, so a Welshman must have taught her, just as a French peasant taught her to speak French like a kitchen maid,” Ash said. “She has an extraordinary ear.”

  “It must be her gift for music,” Oliver said. “She had a tutor for that—and come to think of it, he did teach her Latin and Greek, and he was a Welshman.”

  “Tell me
about this Welshman,” Ash said to Fanny a little later. “What was his name? Was he old? Young? Was he educated at Oxford? Cambridge?”

  “I hardly remember,” Fanny said. “He had a very good singing voice.”

  Ash pressed her for details. Fanny pretended not to remember. He talked to her in the ancient languages, as well as in French, to divert her mind from her sickness and to divert his own mind from his constant thoughts of her. Ash’s French was heavily accented, but perfectly grammatical, and exact also from the point of view of etiquette. He had learned it at Trinity College from a man who had gone to France as a child with the retinue of Charles II and lived at court. It was this French, formal and roundabout but clearly articulated, that Ash was attempting to teach to Fanny while she convalesced. With allowances for Ash’s English intonations, it sounded somewhat like the French the old count and the young soldier had spoken to her in Honfleur. Fanny began to sound like Ash when she spoke French, but she tried to remember how the two men in Honfleur had spoken so that she could sound like them.

  Betsy was aboard now, and she sat in the cabin with them while they talked, sewing and looking out the window. When Fanny needed nursing, she provided it, giving her sad looks and feeding her chicken soup while the chickens lasted and porpoise soup after that. Ash said that the fat of the porpoise tasted like fresh pork and the lean like beef or veal, but it made Fanny gag. Of course Betsy knew no foreign languages, and she never spoke even in English. When Ash prayed, she went outside, rising quickly out of her chair and leaving as quickly as she could.

  Like Philip Evans before him, Ash had discovered that Fanny was a natural student, and he enjoyed teaching her for the sake of observing the quickness of her mind. He began to teach her medicine as a means of improving her Latin and Greek. She learned with astonishing rapidity. Ash explained and asked questions. Fanny never asked questions; she answered Ash’s and conversed with him about his cases and Sydenham’s. She learned symptoms, treatments, medicines, herbs. She was eager to learn. For all her intelligence, she was a mild girl. She never argued, never disputed, even when he felt strongly that she disagreed. It occurred to Ash that he could keep her by his side indefinitely by imparting knowledge to her. He could teach her medicine and surgery, actually apprentice her to himself as Sydenham had apprenticed him. It did not matter that she was so young. It did not matter that she was female—she could call herself nurse or midwife, or nothing. She need not practice. She could learn for the sake of learning.

  Now that Fanny was better, Ash spent his nights in another cabin with Betsy. Oliver and Rose slept in an adjoining cabin. Sometimes he heard Rose’s voice as she berated her husband. In spite of Ash’s teaching, Rose hated the very idea of America. She only spoke to Oliver at night when they were alone, never in daylight in the company of others. But then she talked without ceasing, weeping and begging Oliver to turn the Pamela around and sail back to England, murmuring from bedtime till dawn.

  Betsy had begun talking to Ash again—but also in the dark. She was pregnant, and she was obsessed by a fear that the child she carried would be captured by the Indians and be lost to her.

  “What if the Indians take my child?” she whispered. “He’ll never come back and then I’ll have no one. There’ll be nothing left.”

  “You will have God and a husband,” Ash replied. But he knew that his answer was nonsense; Betsy had neither and wanted neither. She stopped talking to him. Her silence was not enough to drive images of Fanny out of Ash’s mind.

  Neither was prayer. For the first time in Ash’s religious life, he could not concentrate on God. He hardly ever wept anymore as he prayed. His voice would stop in the middle of a phrase; his mind would go blank. Sometimes he even fell asleep while he was at prayer and woke up a long time later, stunned by guilt. Sometimes he thought he could not pray at all, could not begin. But always, in the end, the habit of worship overcame his weakness and his voice came back. But Ash was changing; even as he prayed, he doubted that prayer would cure him.

  Once, after a long silence, he put a hand on Betsy in the dark. Betsy shook her head and took Ash’s hand off her body. Watching Ash’s face transform itself into a mask of carnality when he turned away from Fanny after one of their polite conversations, she knew well enough that it was Fanny, not his wife, that he was thinking about when he wanted her body. Fanny’s body was all he could think about.

  A day or two after the porpoise hunt, a storm blew up just as the sailors had predicted. Sails reefed, the Pamela was driven through thirty-foot seas on a long counterclockwise track that pushed her eastward and then many miles to the north. Oliver lashed Rose into her bunk so that she wouldn’t be thrown onto the deck and injured by the violent motions of the ship. He himself lay on the floor, violently sick, vomiting into a sloshing basin. The stink was maddening.

  The Bareboneses’ tiny cabin was located between the one occupied by the Ashes and the forecastle. Through one wall Rose could hear Ash’s mighty prayers; through the other she heard the sailors shouting obscenities and singing bawdy songs at the top of their voices.

  They could hear Ash, too, and like most sailors of the time they believed that prayer only made storms worse; they all knew stories about ships that had sunk because some fool had prayed aboard them in a tempest. “Shut up, you bastard!” the sailors shouted through the walls at Ash, and when he went on praying, they lowed like cattle, baaed like sheep, barked like dogs in an effort to drown him out. They nailed horseshoes to the mast and cast what remained of the porpoise meat overboard.

  After four days the winds died. The Pamela drifted in a fog, and after the tumult of the storm, quiet fell over the ship. Sailors worked quietly, whispering as they repaired the storm damage. Even Ash kept still for a time, but then, lying awake in the sour air of the cabin with Oliver asleep on the deck at her feet, Rose heard him praying on deck. Wrapped in a black cloak, a black hood covering her hair, she went up on deck to listen.

  At first she could not find him. Then she saw a shrouded figure hunched in the bow, and realized that Ash had covered himself with a sail as protection against the cold. The canvas muffled his words and even for Rose it was difficult to make them out. A person with ordinary hearing might not have been able to catch the words at all. But Rose did, and she understood at once that Ash was struggling with temptation.

  “ Whoso committeth adultery with a woman … destroyeth his own soul,’” he shouted. “‘A wound and a dishonor shall he get, and his reproach shall not be wiped away. For jealousy is the rage of a man.’”

  Rose listened, fascinated; whom else could he love but her?

  “‘Ye shall stone them with stones that they die,’” Ash bellowed inside his sail.

  Sailors, posted as lookouts in the rigging, barked and mooed and whinnied.

  The Pamela was far to the north of her intended course. It was very cold. The fog glowed with pink morning light, and as the Pamela drifted through it and Ash’s voice rolled out over the glassy water, Rose heard the sound of many birds. For a moment she did not believe that she was hearing what she heard. How could birds be singing in the middle of the ocean? Then, out of the fog, an iceberg appeared. Hundreds of birds, large and small, clung to its craggy surface.

  The lookouts, shouting frantically to one another, clambered higher into the rigging to trim the sails. On the quarterdeck, Joshua and another seaman hauled desperately on the helm. The ship groaned. Rose sensed no danger. The Pamela turned dreamily to port and the blue-white floating mountain, ten times as big as the ship, wreathed in mist and covered with squawking birds, drifted back into the sunshot fog.

  Ash, silenced, watched this spectacle from his knees. Rose pushed the hood off her hair, concentrating her mind to make him look at her. But Ash went on staring at the iceberg as if he had witnessed a miracle. The birds could be heard for a long time after it vanished.

  3

  Oliver, electrified by the idea of living like an earl in the wilderness of Massachusetts, had hardly bee
n able to wait to sail away from England. The Pamela had remained in Portsmouth for less than two weeks. Part of her cargo had been offloaded into the ship Henry had arranged to meet her there. Then provisions and water had been brought aboard and the Pamela had put to sea.

  After the storm, as soon as Ash would let him, Oliver came to Fanny’s cabin to tell her why he had been in such a hurry to depart. The Atlantic was rough that day: hillocks of seawater with plumes of spray snapping off their crests formed and disappeared in the stern windows. The Pamela groaned and creaked happily as she plunged through the waves; Fanny, who heard musical notes in nearly everything, had been surprised to discover how many peculiar voices oak and rope and sail could produce, according to the strength of the wind and the movement of the sea.

  Oliver held on to the table while he described the conviction that had come over him while he waited for Montagu to come.

  “It was like a voice I couldn’t quite hear, telling me that England was finished for me and I must go to America,” he said. “Anyway, I knew I had to go. Ash says it was God’s work.”

  “And was it God’s work?”

  “I wasn’t praying, I was drinking French brandy,” Oliver said.

  Fanny sat up in her bunk, wrapped in a cloak, with her legs folded under her skirt and her back against the sea-rocked wall, waiting for Oliver to go on. She would not have been surprised if Ash had turned out to be right. Worse sinners than Oliver were always being changed and driven into strange adventures by religious experience; one heard stories about it every day.

  “At the time, of course, I didn’t know that Montagu was going to die,” Oliver said.