His consciousness did not fully register the sound, but it came back at Teal’s pinched, scared face and a current of fear prickled up his back to the base of his hair.
This was nonsense; the boy’s superstitious ignorance was clearly catching. All such folly is, Skipwith noted grimly.
Kim looked up from the diaries he was reading in the Archives, and closed his eyes for a moment as he took in the scene.
Giles’s father, Sir George Skipwith, Bt., an elegant and urbane widower at the time, married Fidelia Ormonde, the tall and clever daughter of a portrait painter, during a tour of diplomatic duty in Parthenopolis where the painter was chronicling the Bonapartist regime in exile. Giles was her only child, and the product of his father’s old age, a most beloved boy who precociously enjoyed the company of adults, both in the kitchen quarters and in the drawing room, until Sir George decided, ‘He must become an English gentleman, my dear’. So off went Giles to the university, to All Saints’ in the fens of Albion, with a tutor who was a balladeer and poet; he learned to pronounce Latin as if the language were a kind of Anglo-Saxon rather than the ancestor of his mother tongue. From the window seat of his rooms he’d look across the court in the darkness, and scan the powdering of stars on the secret face of the fenland skies; they called him away, singing their melancholy harmonies as they combed light out of the blackness and scattered it below, so sharp sometimes that on moonless nights, he cast a shadow on the cobbles as he returned to his rooms. He felt connected to vast distances, not with the investigative tools that Isaac Newton had set up in the same court two centuries before, but by something more deeply interfused, as the poet he admired had written. He was out of sorts when he was staying put; on the move, his finds led him on from one to another. He never could gather all the pieces, just as he could only decipher the stars intermittently, in broken phrases.
When Sir George died and Giles inherited the baronetcy, he was invited to the newly resplendent terraces of Regent’s Park and other domiciles of his father’s circle, was initiated into the Hellfire Club and had his portrait painted for the Society of Dilettanti, wearing a turban with his stock loose at his long supple throat and smoking a long clay pipe. He travelled, making maps, tracing on to living terrain places that figured in the histories and the mythologies he had read and was still reading; he visited monsters and found them to be geographical wonders – the spurting blue gas fumaroles of fire-breathing Chimaera, the groans of toppled giants deep in the craters of volcanoes, the current seething through the straits where Charybdis swallowed ships twenty fathoms down. He noted the way seaweed rooted and bunched on the hulls of boats drawn up on the shore for their winter careening, and saw in their strong lithe spathes and dangling fronds the long necks and bedraggled plumage of the fabled barnacle goose.
Skipwith published, on his return from his first exploration of the near east, a pamphlet on the geography of the Alexander Romance; it was warmly reviewed in the Gentleman’s Magazine. ‘Sir Giles Skipwith has most ingeniously distinguished two of the principal breeding grounds of eagles in the regions conquered by Alexander: it was in one of these that the story sprung up, he proposes, that the emperor harnessed the giant birds to transport him aloft, by attaching them to a scaffold above which a goat was tethered, for ever out of reach. Thus the birds, straining to devour the tantalising meal, flew upwards, drawing up the emperor in a basket below them. Sir Giles is of the practical persuasion called Euhemerist, holding that for all the prodigies and marvels in the ancient world, there must exist some historical or physical explanation. Alexander’s maiden flight reveals the practical mind that informs our culture, and has led to its great scientific revelations, in contrast to the barbaric imagination of the more ancient epics, which treat of flying gods and goddesses as a matter of no remark, and offer no contrivance by which they could have accomplished their swift turns about the globe, presenting only magical appurtenances, such as winged helmets and sandals.’
But Skipwith could not settle to an English life. Planter families returning full of complaints from the post-abolition sugar islands proposed their daughters endowed with their still considerable fortunes; Giles duly flirted, but a lassitude soon overcame him, and he found he did not have the energy to argue his many differences from their point of view.
He went travelling again; he was gifted at languages and his digestion was doughty. He enjoyed nothing better than marking his maps and turning a spouting mermaid from a Dutchman or Portuguese seaman’s portolan into a rocky outcrop or an ocean vortex. He hunted for correspondences with epic and romance, that had turned a dry and dusty and featureless wilderness of rocks or a relentless expanse of water into a landscape of horrors and wonders; yet his own careful research and collation did not undo their marvellousness, not in his eyes. That the past was real and had taken place was infinitely more miraculous to him than the fantastical shapes in which it was so often clothed: he’d give all the cloud-capp’d palaces for a single cast shoe from a medieval farrier, all the gorgeous pageants for a deep dry midden in which the oyster and mussel shells, the pomegranate husks and the artichoke stalks of the vanished villagers were interred for him to retrieve.
When he first reached Lycania and came across the drowned sanctuary of the necropolis and its temples, the dry chamber tombs high in the cliff-face, the steles carved with reliefs and inscriptions, he viewed the rubble with mounting delirium of excitement at what was there, and fury at what had already been lost, plundered, destroyed. He determined to rescue what remained.
Using all the charm of his father’s memory, he approached contacts in St James’s to raise money for the return expedition.
‘It’s for the nation,’ he said. ‘We’re the guardians of classical civilisation now. The only ones left.’
‘“Some talk of Alexander”, and all that sort of thing, what-o?’ hummed one acquaintance.
‘Indeed. Absolutely. Though the site predates Alexander, he came through there, and of course, they never could stop talking about him afterwards, commemorating him – we can’t know what we’ll find until we can look carefully at the fragments we can recover.’
His friend was glad to assign him a banker’s draft of forty guineas. And so it went on: he persuaded the navy to provide a vessel and he accumulated the wherewithal to leave, with enough silver (and some gold) to buy provisions for the sea voyage, for the pack mules and their drivers, for the douceurs to soften any local difficulties.
Two years later, after this spell of feverish negotiations in a metropolis he found increasingly brash and shallow and foolish, he joined the Shearwater and set sail again, for Lycania.
The hot afternoon when Sir Giles Skipwith came down below and, at Teal’s insistence, clambered through the hold towards their hiding place, Leto was ready for him. The twins were communicating loudly to each other and she couldn’t quell them any longer: Phoebus would trill till he made bubbles of saliva, and Phoebe would laugh and then imitate him, exaggerating till out came a sudden fart and so delighted the two of them that Leto had to clap a hand over their mouths to keep them quiet.
She struggled out of the tarpaulin, and, clutching both children to her knees, stood up to face him.
‘Stowaways!’ muttered Captain Winwalloe. ‘Never in my life have I been inflicted with stowaways.’ He looked aghast at the woman with the two children. Their bodies slumped against hers, unhealthily, he thought; they appeared to have been charred, they were so ragged and dirty. Yet the woman didn’t seem cowed by her circumstances, but was casting about around the cabin, her eyes flickering over his table, as if searching for something. Instinctively, Winwalloe covered the ship’s log and planted himself firmly in his chair facing her.
A smell hung about her, rank and feral, or, worse, diseased – something like the reek of that foul toadstool he liked to uproot and smash as a child when he found it in the hedgerows of his childhood home: stinkhorn.
Skipwith stood to the side, leaning against the wooden wall of the ca
bin with his arms folded across his chest, silently observing. When he had found her, under the tarpaulin, she was crouched in the hull with her babies like a Madonna of Humility on the ground. He asked her who she was in several languages; but she had shaken her head mutinously. He’d brought her above, stumbling and blinking at the light.
‘What the confounded devil can you have been thinking of?’ Winwalloe glared at her. ‘What possessed you to smuggle yourselves aboard my vessel?’
The stowaway looked him full in the face, and the captain baulked at her expression. It was like looking into the eyes of a statue, one of those classical jobs that Skipwith was so enamoured of; that had no irises or pupils and didn’t blink either, so that they seemed to be all soul and no body. She was standing there, a thin, drained, foul pillar of rags, and he would like to blast her with his words and his glance till she turned into a pillar of salt, with caked hair, and he could order her to be tipped over the side and melt into the empty expanse of the sea, leaving not a trace. But something about her made him quail. He told himself it was because she was a woman with children, that she was small and weak and needy and he was a captain of a ship of the line, a man in power, with men at his command, and a national history of chivalry to live up to.
The stowaway was fishing inside the girl’s wrappings, where she’d tied the pouch during their sojourn below. She found what she was looking for – a gold bead earring.
She held it out to the captain. She said her name, and asked for food with gestures to her mouth and the children’s. Winwalloe recoiled from her approach, as if she was threatening him. So she put it down on the table between them. She gasped as she did so, her voice cracked from hunger and thirst. Her breath was foul.
Skipwith moved from his position in the wings and picked up the earring. Winwalloe looked over his shoulder.
‘Exquisite work, very pure, so soft some of the beads are a little dented,’ said Skipwith. ‘It’s broken and the hoop is missing.’
‘Good, so she’s got an eye for rich pickings,’ said the captain. His scowl deepened.
‘She wants to buy food, Geoffrey, don’t you see?’ rejoined Sir Giles. ‘If we were Ancient Greeks we’d offer hospitality freely – provide nourishment for unexpected guests. However beggarly and brutish.’ He swung the gold grapes of the earring in front of his eye. ‘Don’t you think you could tell Strugwell we have some company?’
The captain spluttered. Various solutions spun through his head, each one making him more nauseated than the next. If he had the woman thrown overboard, and her brats with her, the order might not be easy to justify; he could have it done sub rosa, and fail to enter it in the log, but then that fanciful dilettante Skipwith might not go along with it and he’d have to come clean and there might be unpleasantness. But how could they keep a woman on board? A woman with two wailing sprogs to boot? They could hardly spare a boat and send her off on her own with a pair of oars and a barrel of their precious water.
They could maroon her, put her off on one of the islands, making sure there were springs and sources of food – berries, fruits.
But he was a captain in Her Majesty’s navy, not a pirate from the Barbary Coast. Still, the solution hung in his mind.
In spite of the crust of filth, she was young and rounded; her breasts showed high and small under her thin torn clothing; her thighs, too – hell and damnation – he could see her legs and her small feet and neat toes, in spite of their crust of grime.
Skipwith was saying, ‘I think she may be someone, don’t you know, Geoffrey. Why shouldn’t the jewel be hers?’
‘Of course she’s someone, you think I can’t see her standing plain as day in front of my eyes? All too much flesh and blood. Though I’d like to think I was hallucinating, I can tell you. Why, for heaven’s sake, why, why this ship?’
He switched direction to address his expostulations to the woman’s face. It looked stubborn to him, untender and cold, in spite of the children, one of whom stood clutching his mother’s legs, the other on her thin jutting hip.
‘No, Geoffrey, I mean someone – who counts. A fugitive from . . . I don’t know. It’s romantic, don’t you think? A tale of high misdeeds probably lies behind this. I vote we treat her with proper consideration.’
‘Where in heaven’s name are we going to stow her – and her brats – now that we’ve found her?’
The captain was furiously at a loss. If he left her exposed, tied up on deck or below, the crew’d be at her for far less – or far more depending which way you looked at it – than the value of those gold beads. Where could they put her? She couldn’t sleep amidships with the men. Perhaps she should be tied to the mast below, and a guard mounted at the hatch to prevent anyone gaining access to her. But the men’d conspire and have their way. He shivered – he couldn’t allow that.
He was cursing the fate that had delivered him, in the course of an absurd mission on behalf of saving classical civilisation, into this hideous quandary.
They were on course, with no landfall in sight that wasn’t infested with bandits and pirates or worse, and they needed to keep out to sea, out of sight of the raiders who lurked in the concealed harbours of the shore and the islands peppering the chart; he wanted to keep making headway to more friendly waters. The original plan was to sail up the coast and then round the peninsula, avoiding a gulf crossing with this weight of cargo, then put in for water and provisions in the sheltered harbour off the straits. If they changed it, it would still be three, four days at least before they could locate civilisation and put in to a secure mooring. Three days was a long time to keep that kind of woman on board without incident. Besides, he didn’t need to ship supplies or water and he didn’t want to change course.
They’d have to maroon her – that would be best. Row her ashore and leave her and the children wherever they landed. But the problem remained: coming in to shore would expose them. Which of these islands wasn’t sheltering raiders?
Now he had it: that scribbling dreamer Skipwith could give up his cabin – he was so interested in her and her baubles, he could make way for her.
‘Don’t lose courage, old boy,’ Sir Giles responded, to the captain’s challenge to his chivalry. ‘I’ve an idea. We’ll use one of the crates – it’ll serve as her quarters. One of the document crates; we’ll deposit the papers in my cabin for the time being. Punch some airholes in the sides, and padlock it. Lock her in there at night, keep the key on my person, and they’ll be no trouble. She can stay there, with her dirty cherubini, safe and sound,’ said Sir Giles, smiling. ‘Until daybreak, when there’s less opportunity for mischief. I’ll keep an eye on her in the daytime, till the men get used to having a young mother around them. They’ll adjust, you’ll see. I’ll vouch for it. She’ll not introduce licence to the Shearwater, as God is my witness. Let’s leave aside Sodom. The men might even grow fond of the little family in flight – you never know the secret tenderness of the human heart, and it’s not often that you get to see children playing on one of His Majesty’s – sorry Her Majesty’s – ships.’
‘I’m putting her off in the next anchorage we can be sure of, Sir Giles.’
‘We’ll see.’
The crew watched the little group emerge from the captain’s cabin: the stowaway holding on tight to her children, Skipwith, Captain Winwalloe, and Strugwell, who had been summoned and ordered to give the stowaways a bucket of slops to wash in, a clout, biscuits, water. Teal’s eyes crossed Phoebus’ who suddenly flashed a smile, to which Teal grimaced back, his sharp face impish: at thirteen, he was closer to the three-year-old than to any of the men on the boat; one child recognised another, and Teal’s heart gave a jump. The rest of the crew stared ravenously at the same children and at their mother but did not smile. They rather frowned and hooked their heads as if the species was unknown and repugnant to them, and she looked away, frightened. Lone men, without connections, without possessions, encased in their hardened carapace, like stag beetles waiting for some plunde
r to fall into their clutches.
The boat was under way in a good breeze, and clouds were high, now and then plunging the brilliant sparkle of the waves and the shimmering blue of air and sky and sea into a chill shadow as Leto was hustled past the staring crew to the stern, where she was shown a canvas bucket on a rope; she lowered it to the sea and began hauling, but the filled pail was heavy for her cramped light body and she failed; they were watching her from a distance, silently. Then Teal was running up, and took the rope and swung it, brimming full, on to the deck so that she could rinse off the accumulated grime of the last week in the hold from the children’s faces and feet and arms and hands. She spoke to them under her breath; the salt was terrible and stung the abrasions and bruises they’d sustained down below.
Kim saw the sailors in his mind’s eye watching her as she sluiced herself down. He could feel her thinking, I couldn’t look up and catch their eye. They were seeing the body of a woman: had they ever been looked at or touched with love or interest since their mothers had borne them?
Another mind picture came up: of sailors playing with the twins, on the deck in the sunshine. Could this happen? She wouldn’t try appealing to them now. She must concentrate on the leaders for the time being. For her to look back at the men, she knew, would make them see their lack, and the weakness that lack dug deep into them. She was the thing they didn’t have here on this boat and probably never would have. She didn’t want to spark the men’s fury by inflicting a request for reciprocity on them. The children might enrage them even more: the pleasure in trampling the weak, the glory of destruction, the rush to the head that causing pain brings.
The Leto Bundle Page 20
