Signals of Distress

10. The Faintest Voice

IT WOULD HAVE been wise for Aymer Smith to have listened to the message swelling from the sea, ‘Enough’s enough. You must go home.’ Unlike the Belle he didn’t need his rigging fixed. He could go now. He only had to have a word with George and pay two sovereigns for the day hire of a horse. He could reach the Seven Springs by evening, spend the night in civilized company at the Cross and Crown Hotel, and then secure a place, first class, inside the mail coach going east. Three days and he’d be back where he belonged, amongst his books, with good acquaintances, fellow Sceptics and Amenders to converse with, and his work at Hector Smith & Sons to take his mind off Wherrytown.

So what if he didn’t know the way to the Seven Springs? Or if he was too timid for the horse? Or if he was nervous of travelling on his own across moors where there were highwaymen and bridgeless rivers? Then he could go home in company. There were a dozen wagonloads of salted pilchards leaving on the Wednesday morning. If he could only tolerate an exposed place amongst the hogsheads and put his shoulder to the wheel when there was mud, or a heavy hill, then he’d be back with the Sceptics by the Sunday night. His duty would be done. More to the point, he would be free of Wherrytown and all of its embarrassments. Nobody at home would know what a mighty fool he had made of himself.

He’d had a dream that Monday night, made turbulent by pilchard oil and too much beer, in which he danced a jig with Miggy, Katie and Alice Yapp as his three partners. He had no trousers on. The captain punched him on the chin, but no one tried to intervene. Otto shouted at him, pointing at the door, ‘Go! Go! Go!’ The sailors pelted him with kelp.

Aymer woke to daylight and an empty room. The Norrises were out of bed. Either they had gone to breakfast or they were on their morning walk. His throat was dry and sore. His head ached. Whip was stirring in her sleep at his side. He stretched his hand and stroked her ear. Was she the only friend in Wherrytown, this scraggy, undiscriminating dog? He feared, he knew, she was. And that was why he wouldn’t take the wagon or the horse. He had to put the world to rights. His world, that is. He wanted to be liked. He wanted to regain his dignity before he left. He couldn’t fool himself that he still had any tasks in Wherrytown. He’d paid his shillings to the kelpers. He’d spoken to the agent Howells. His work was done. And any foolish hopes that he might find a country wife had — just in time — been dashed. Otto haunted him, it’s true. But surely Otto would be far from Wherrytown by now. And surely in good hands. Aymer wouldn’t allow himself to consider the bleak alternatives. His conscience was too bruised already. Still, he was persuaded he must stay in Wherrytown, but not for Otto’s sake. Good sense dictated it. He couldn’t go back home just yet. After all, he had a chesty cold. He couldn’t travel in this weather until the infection had eased at least. It would be suicide.

Instead? Instead he’d stay on till the Wednesday week and take a passage on the Tar on its next return along the coast. That was a symmetry worth waiting for. And in the meantime he’d have seven days to know the countryside. He’d always been an admirer of the Picturesque. He could take George as his guide, perhaps. And Whip, of course. There might be antiquities to see. He’d botanize. He’d read. He’d try a little poetry, and begin a diary of his observations. He might attempt some sketches, too: the Cradle Rock, the harbour boats, the charming, unconceited cottages above Dry Manston beach. His health would benefit from rambles and diversions such as that. At night he wouldn’t be able to avoid the company in the parlour, of course. But he would be a mended man, keeping his own counsel and maintaining an educated distance from the conversations of his fellow guests. He knew that he had volunteered himself too much. Had been too generous and too exotic. Had interfered. He had seven days to be more reticent, more taciturn, more worthy of respect. He would be reckless with his reticence, a pleasing paradox.

There was no one in the parlour. Nor was there any fire. He didn’t ring the handbell. He helped himself to a cold breakfast from what had been left on the side table: potted hare, a dish of plain pilchards, oat bread, some cheese, some lukewarm grog. He didn’t touch the pilchards or the grog. He put his nose into a book — Emile dell’Ova’s Truismes, in French — and ate just bread and cheese. Surely it wouldn’t be long before someone came, and could encounter him sitting quietly at the table, preoccupied, contained. But no one came for half an hour, and Aymer soon grew bored of dell’Ova’s company. He hand-fed the dog on potted hare and pilchards and then, when she wouldn’t stop wimping at the outer door, he took his coat and went into the lane.

Here was a town more preoccupied than Aymer could ever hope to be. He walked up towards the chapel first. He nodded gravely at a balding, elderly woman spinning in her outhouse. Hanks of flax hung from a beam between the hams and herbs. A pig, tied by the leg, sent Whip away. The woman didn’t look up from her wheel. One nod and she might snap her yarn. There wasn’t anybody else to be grave with, or to show the new, forbidding brevity of his conversation. The lanes and yards were quiet and empty, and all the windows shut. The chapel door was open, though, and there were two old men digging in the chapel green, with Mr Phipps the preacher looking on. Aymer might have found some company there — another man who loved debate, who took his pleasures from a book — for Mr Phipps was Aymer’s twin in many ways. Both were prisoners of priggishness, and dogma, and vocabulary. Both had Latin. Both were smitten by Katie Norris. They were two peas, except they disagreed on everything they had in common. So Aymer didn’t catch the preacher’s eye but persevered with his walk, following the path round to some rough-cut steps in rock behind the chapel. They led up to a muddy overhang which opened out to flat, high ground and a patchwork of stone-walled fields. Aymer turned towards the sea. There was a perfect panorama of chapel, town and harbour, with thinning wraiths of smoke haunting the sky in silent, crooked unison and the last remaining smudges of the snow slipping down those roofs that had no warming chimneys.

Was this worthy of a sketch, a verse, an observation in his diary, Aymer wondered. What was that phrase he’d read that morning in dell’Ova? He took the book from his pocket and found the passage: ‘The solitary Traveller has better company than those that voyage in the multitude, for he has Nature as his best Companion and no man can be lonely in its Assemblies of sky and earth and water, nor want of Friends.’ Aymer read this passage several times. It ought to comfort him, he thought. He was one of life’s ‘solitary travellers’ after all, a Radical, an aesthete and a bachelor. He didn’t voyage in the multitude. He knew that he was destined to a life alone. He looked for solace in the Assembly of sky and earth and water that was spread out before him. But there wasn’t any solace. He couldn’t fool himself. He’d rather be some cheerful low-jack, welcome at an inn, than the emperor of all this landscape.

Thankfully the sound of Wherrytown at work disturbed his Melancholia. The two men on the chapel green were striking granite with their shovels. Nathaniel Rankin’s grave already had collapsing sides. Down on the shore and all around the salting hall, the local women shouted to each other and clattered barrels. And from the harbour there were the sounds of distant carpentry, of mallets hitting nails, and saws in wood. Aymer could see that there were men hauling recut spars and repaired masts into place on the Belle and much industry on deck and on the quay. But he would need an eyeglass to decipher who was who. Was that a couple arm in arm, standing partly hidden by the ship? Was that the Norrises? The only figure he could name for sure was sitting on a horse and waving his arms like a general.

Whip didn’t seem to like the height. She snapped at Aymer’s shoes and barked.

‘Good morning, Mr Smith.’ Preacher Phipps was standing fifteen feet below the overhang and looking up. ‘What brings you to my chapel? You come to be baptized, I hope? What Scriptures are you holding in your hand?’

Aymer resisted the temptation to summarize his views on God and churches. ‘I came only to admire the outlook,’ he said.

‘What do you see then? A man of God engaged in God’s good work.’

Aymer couldn’t stop himself. ‘I do not see you working, Mr Phipps. You do not seem to have a shovel in your hands. I did not spot you yesterday amongst the pilchards. Nor do I expect to see you tomorrow labouring with wood and rope.’

‘I was not sent here to labour with my hands, but to grace the pulpit. The Good Lord chose me for my Morals not my Muscles. And which of those do you excel in, Mr Smith?’

‘I do not aspire to either.’

‘Then I will pray for you.’

‘What will you pray? That I should be more muscular?’

‘More muscular indeed. But hot in body, sir. More muscular in Spirit. More muscular in Faith.’

‘I thank you for your kind concern. But I have walked here simply for the view and not to join your congregation.’ Aymer looked out once again towards the quay. Why hadn’t he been ‘more reticent, more taciturn’? It wasn’t dignified to be caught in debate above an open grave. ‘I thank you, Mr Phipps,’ he said again. ‘I only wish to see what progress they are making on the ship and then I will vacate this lookout and leave you to your holy duties.’

‘See if you can spy your African from there and earn yourself a sovereign.’

‘What do you say?’

The preacher explained how Walter Howells had put a sovereign up for anyone who brought the slave back to the ship. ‘Warm or frozen. The reward is just the same. There is to be a party organized to search for him tomorrow morning after we have put the sailor to rest in this grave. We’ll sniff the fellow out.’

‘Why don’t you leave the man at liberty?’

‘Come, come. We cannot let the man roam free. He is a savage. Dangerous. Unbaptized!’

‘You are a Christian, Mr Phipps. You should concern yourself with his emancipation, not his capture.’

‘We must first capture the body, Mr Smith, and then we can make amends for that by attending to the emancipation of his soul. Is that not your philosophy? Or have I misapprehended it?’

‘Amenders are opposed to slavery. But you are not, it seems.’

‘No, sir. Nor are the Scriptures or the saints. I might refer you, sir, to Moses. And to St Jerome, “Born of the Devil, we are black.”’

The preacher beamed at his two gravediggers. ‘We will dig a grave for him in holy ground if he is found and he is dead. You cannot say my heart is closed to him.’

‘Well, he in’t dead, and that’s for sure,’ one of the old men said.

The second one agreed. ‘He in’t. He’s up to mischief though.’

Between them they recounted all the evidence that they had heard that morning from their neighbours: the theft of clothes and bedding from the inn, the outsized footsteps in the snow, the wind-like, wolf-like howling in the night, the dismembered cow that had been found by the Americans on the beach at Dry Manston. (‘Ripped apart it was. By human hands. And nothing left excepting hoof and bone.’ ‘Not human hands. Not human, anyway, like us.’)

‘I can assure you, gentlemen, that Negroes do not howl at night, nor do they tear up cows like tigers, nor do they have the six-inch remnant of a tail,’ said Aymer, addressing the two gravediggers with what he meant to be a kindly and a patient tone (and an example for the preacher). ‘If they are distinguished from the European then it is by their virtues, not their savagery. It is true that the Negro has great strength and must have if he will toil beneath the blazing sun of Africa. But he also has these further strengths of character, that he is cheerful, loyal and does not harbour grudges for the sorrows and the cruelties of life. I do not speak from theory only. I have met with the man. His name is Otto and I promise you, there is no cause to fear the African …’

‘Not when the blackie’s got a pistol in his hand?’

‘He does not have a pistol in his hand.’

‘Well, that in’t so. He’s broke into Walter Howells’s house and made off with a pistol.’

‘I cannot think that that is true …’

‘And so it is. Mr Howells’s place is only two spits down the lane from me. I’m locking up my doors at night, until the man’s chained up again …’

‘Save a stranger from the sea,’ his friend recited, in his wisest voice. ‘And he’ll prove your enemy. They should’ve let the bugger drown. He in’t worth the sovereign.’

AYMER HURRIED BACK with Whip to the inn. Again there were no signs of life. He put his warmest clothes on underneath his tarpaulin coat. He filled his pockets with the half-stale breakfast bread that was still on the side table. He wrapped some pilchards and some cheese in a napkin. Where should he go? He headed out of Wherrytown on the path that he knew best, the one that met the Cradle Rock. He had an image in his head of Otto sitting on the rock, becoming stone, his blackness camouflaged by sea salt and by lichens the colour of mustard. Aymer’s legs already felt like pease pudding. His heart was beating like a wren’s. He knew his duty now. He knew why he had stayed.

When Aymer was out of earshot of the town, he started calling ‘Otto! Otto!’ and then ‘Uwip! Uwip!’ but only Whip responded. His trousers and the skirt of his coat were soon muddy from her front paws and his patience with the dog was exhausted. After an energetic, breathtaking half hour of walking at a speed more suited to a horse, Aymer slowed. He stopped calling out for Otto. He stopped expecting a reply. He didn’t even search the countryside for distant, single figures, or giant footprints, or wolf-like cries. He concentrated only on the path. Come what may, he told himself, he’d reach the Rock. And if the African was there? His plan was this: he’d bribe the Bowes to take him in, hide him till the Wednesday dawn, and then bring him — disguised in a dress and bonnet — to the quay at Wherrytown and the safety of the Tar. He’d give Otto a job at Hector Smith & Sons. The plan was not preposterous. He’d dress him well. He’d mould him into shape. Otto would learn to read, write, cypher, be a gentleman, and enjoy the status and emancipation that otherwise could flourish only in his dreams. If he was not at the Cradle Rock? What then? Aymer could do little more than leave the meal of bread and cheese, protected from the gulls by stones. That wasn’t much of a rescue. But at least Aymer wouldn’t have abandoned his freed man for a third cold night entirely without provisions. He must make some amends for the haste and carelessness of emancipating Otto without a scrap of food. Without a hat, a weathercoat or money. He wondered if there were a sign that he could leave, a simple warning that Otto would be hunted down and put back on the Belle unless he ran and ran and ran.

Of course, there was no sign of anybody at the Cradle Rock, not even fishermen at sea. Something else was odd, too, an absence from the scene. At first Aymer couldn’t say quite what. But then he saw the cabin lockers, the seamen’s chests, the double-barrelled cannon, the ship’s supplies, the stacks of timber partly covered in tarpaulins and left for safekeeping above the tideline amongst the salty foliage of the backshore dunes. There, too, were the cattle from Quebec herded in two gorse-fenced compounds. He remembered. That then was the oddity. The American ship had been removed. The sea was more remote without the Belle, as if now its only urgency was moon and tide. Two days before the Belle had seemed to be a solid fixture on its sandbar. More solid than the Cradle Rock.

Aymer climbed up to the rounded platform, found the spot that he had shared with Ralph Parkiss on the Sunday, put his back against the granite mass again and pushed. How had it ever moved? Its weight seemed anchored to the coast. A third Ice Age might move it from its pivot stone, but not a man alone, not Aymer, not a thousand Aymers. He might as well have put his back against the door of a great cathedral and hoped to shake the pigeons from its spire.

He called ‘Otto’. Just once. Whip turned and growled. But no one came to help him with the Rock. He went back up the narrow path onto the headland and sat down on the wooden bench where he had rested with Ralph Parkiss before they’d grappled — together — with the Cradle Rock. Ralph’s initials were freshly carved on the seat, the splintered wood still fleshy brown and free of timber mould. Aymer put the cheese, the bread, the pilchards on the seat where they couldn’t be missed. He covered them with the napkin and weighed the corners down with stones. The walk had made him hungry, and thirsty too. He lifted up the napkin edge and broke off just an elbow of the bread and one small whang of cheese. The gulls came down to watch him eat. It wasn’t yet one o’clock. There was no hurry to return. He took a sharp stone and scratched a careless A.H.S. in the wood. He added Otto’s name beneath. And then he circled Ralph’s carving with a heart, and added Miggy’s initials, M.B., below the deeper, more painstaking R and P.

He walked down to Dry Manston beach, nosed amongst the loose equipment from the Belle, walked to the water’s edge to see what kelps and carcasses there were, threw scraps of broken timber for the dog. He watched the dunes and the path beyond for anybody passing by. At last he was so cold and thirsty that he found the courage he’d been waiting for. He walked up past the Bowes’ kelping pit, along the track where Miggy had refused to shake his hand, until he reached their cottage yard. He didn’t have to knock at the door. The two Bowe mongrels leaped up on their ropes and barked. Whip’s tail was uncontrolled. The Bowes had returned from pilcharding, it seemed. Thank God for that. The curtain cloth was pulled back and Miggy’s face was pressed against the bottle-glass, her red kerchief refracted in a dozen glassy crescents, her cold face flushed with tears. Aymer raised his hat. He mouthed, ‘Good morning, Miss Bowe.’ She did not move. Her mother opened the door.

Why had he come? He didn’t know how to explain except to say, rather lamely, ‘I was passing by, and thought I might impose on you.’ Again he had the only chair, but on this Tuesday there wasn’t any warm mahogany to drink, nor any fire, nor any bending flattery of light except the thin, cold, steady light of day which came in through the window and spread its square and chilling carpet on the earth floor. Should he, perhaps, explain he had the influenza and was merely seeking some respite from the weather? Or that he hoped to gain permission to sketch their cottage at some later date? Or tell the truth, that he was looking for the African, the African that in a day would be brought back as a slave? Was that the truth? Had Otto brought him to this door, this dark room? Or was it that he simply liked it there, its smell of fish and half-dried clothes, its lack of ornament, its womanly silence, its calm?

He watched the women’s silhouettes as they made room for him and cleared some floor space for his legs. They gave him water flavoured with a little mint, and bread with beef. Rosie Bowe sat in the corner on a box. Miggy went beyond the sacking curtain, lay down on the box-bed and soon was talking to herself, like young girls do when they are full of hope and tears. Aymer’s eyes were soon accustomed to the light, and he could see the room more clearly and just pick out on the chimney breast the few embroidered lines from Jeremiah. ‘Weep sore for him that goeth away …’ he began to read out loud, and meant to say something about Otto. But Rosie Bowe interrupted him. ‘Not that!’ she said, and stood to turn the embroidery around, so that the letters were reversed and all the working threads revealed.

‘She says she’s going to America.’ Rosie pointed to the bed. ‘She says she’s going to be with that boy Ralph.’

‘I am, Ma. Yes, I am.’

‘He hasn’t asked you yet?’

‘He will, though. He says that’s why he came here. So’s me and him could meet and be together.’

‘He din’t choose to come here, girl. He was brought here by the sea.’

‘That’s why the sea has brought him, then.’

‘You think that husbands get washed in by storms, is that it?’

‘I do think that. I do.’ She hadn’t thought it, up till then, in fact — but the image of her Ralph delivered to her in a storm was like a fairytale, and she the princess in her hut. ‘Why should I stay here any more?’ she said. ‘I’m seventeen. There’s Oxy Hobbs, she went away when she was only fifteen, and married since.’

‘She’s gone ten miles, that’s all.’

‘Well, Mary Dolly, then. She’s gone to London … That in’t ten miles.’

‘Gone to be a chambergirl and not to wed, and not gone to America …’

‘She don’t have Ralph, though, and I do. If he goes off without me, Ma, I’m going to drown myself from swimming after him.’

‘You’re talking wild and silly, Miggy Bowe.’

‘I in’t.’

‘She in’t, she says.’ She spoke to Aymer Smith. ‘She don’t know what it means, America. She thinks it’s down the coast. She thinks they’ll walk back here on Sundays for a bite.’

‘I know better. Ralph has said.’

‘Has Ralph said how you’ll never see your ma again?’

‘I’ll send you word.’

‘How will you send me word? Who’s taught you how to write since yesterday?’

‘You can’t read in any case.’

‘So that’s it, then? I might as well be dead to you.’

‘Oh, Ma, don’t start.’

Rosie Bowe sighed loudly, shook her shoulders and her head, stood up, sat down, sighed deeply once again. ‘Well, then …’ she said. She’d have to settle for it, she supposed. She’d never known her daughter so implacable.

Aymer hadn’t said a word. Had Rosie Bowe expected him to repeat his offer of yesterday, his promise to ‘enhance’ their lives by taking Miggy as his wife, in lieu of kelp? She’d said, ‘My Miggy in’t for you. She’s only but a girl.’ But had she staged this public argument with her daughter so that Aymer could intervene, and count off the seven certain benefits of being Mrs Margaret Smith? He couldn’t speak. He couldn’t try to take this girl from Ralph. She would flourish in America. He had no doubt of it. At last he could admit it to himself — her country face would not transport so well to Aymer’s home. She’d never be a Margaret. Look at the way she sat, her manly breeches and her busy legs. Listen to her breathing through her mouth, and speaking in an accent full of wind and salt. See, in that half light, the narrow tightness of her face, the unsophisticated hair. She wasn’t Katie Norris. He wouldn’t wish to travel to the end of tired with her. She didn’t even have her mother’s virtues, a kind and ready smile, good, open, unembarrassed eyes, a spirit made from weathered oak.

‘If she must go,’ he said at last, ‘then, I hope, you will allow me to … to make your new lives less uncertain. I can provide a little money for you both …’

Miggy came down off the bed, and stood beside her mother.

‘… Before I leave, or Miggy leaves, I will arrange a … small payment.’ He was embarrassed by their stillness and their silence. ‘I must leave now …’ He stood up hastily. He was so clumsy in their house, both in his body and his speech. ‘I mean, I must go back.’ He shook both women’s hands and fled into the cottage yard. He almost ran away. Whip barked and followed him. The two roped mongrels growled as he passed. The sea air slapped his blushing, sweating face. Betrayed, betrayed, betrayed. He didn’t stop until he reached the path above the Cradle Rock.

There wasn’t any sign of Otto’s food or the napkin on the seat. They’d disappeared. One of the stones Aymer had used to weigh the napkin down had rolled, almost, onto the heart scratched in the wood, obscuring Ralph’s and Miggy’s initials. A heart of stone, Aymer thought. He looked beneath the seat. He pushed the grass aside with his boot. No crusts or fishbones there. No snubs of cheese. There were seagulls about, one-legged on rocks, their necks tucked in. Had they the strength to pull the napkin free of stones? He called out Otto’s name again. Then Miggy’s name. Then Katie’s name. Then all the swear words he knew. He was uncontrolled, despairing, angry, faint, ashamed. He’d missed Otto by a half hour at the most. He kicked the seat. He threw the napkin’s stone onto the ground. He banged his forehead with his fist. He cursed himself, out loud. Whip and seagulls echoed him.

If he hadn’t been shouting, perhaps he would have heard more clearly what he took to be a distant voice, coming off the land. He called again, ‘Otto! Otto!’ and yes, there was the faintest voice. It was the echo of his own, rebounding off the rocks. He climbed up off the path onto the headland until he had a decent view inland. The coastal granite bluffs; the bracken and the gorse; a narrow wind-break of stooping skew and thorns; the first low wall; the salty grazing land; the miles of distant fields; the moors. He ranged from left to right, searching for some sign of human life, some moving shadow. He only spotted birds and something that might have been a bending man but turned sideways to prove itself a tethered goat.

At first he thought there was a single, cussed wedge of snow, surviving in the shadows of a thorn which grew behind the nearest drystone wall, a hundred yards away. But when he saw it for the second time, it appeared to lift and change its shape, then drop and hang like washing on a line. Was that the missing napkin from Otto’s meal? It seemed to be. Its weight looked right for cloth in that low wind, and it was white and square. Its corners showed against the darker branches of the tree. Surely, Aymer thought, it didn’t walk there on its own. And it couldn’t be carried by the flimsy wind that had been blowing all that day. He wet his index finger in his mouth and held it up. What little wind there was was heading east. The napkin had gone north. ‘We have him, Whip,’ he said. ‘He’s there.’

The going wasn’t hard at first. The land was wild and wet, but Aymer made stepping-stones of granite, and even though he slipped from time to time, and had to slither once on his haunches down a mossy outcrop, he found a route towards the cloth, that white and flapping signal of distress. When he reached the dip beyond the headland though and the sea was out of sight, the soil was deeper. There were no granite stepping-stones. The ground refused to take his weight. His boots sank in. The earth expired its brackish coffin smells. His ankle turned. He fell again onto his outstretched hand. He sank up to his cuff. Aymer headed for the bracken to his right, and found firmer footing there, though the gorse that grew beyond was thicker than it looked. He had to force his way through. His trousers and his legs were spiked. The gorse snapped. The air about him smelled of coconut. Whip wasn’t happy on this walk. She barked that they should go back to the path. She ran away. She waited. Barked again. But finally she followed Aymer through the bracken and the gorse to the dry, slight rise beyond, to the thorn tree and the wall.

Aymer wedged his foot into the wall, pushed himself up on a low branch, and pulled the white cloth free. His hopes were dashed. It was too big and flimsy for a napkin. He recognized it, though. It was the sling he’d had for his bad arm. He’d flung it to the ground when he had needed both his hands to help Ralph move the Cradle Rock. He remembered how the heavy wind that Sunday had picked up the sling, turned it once or twice, then took it on a seagull flight inland.

He called for Whip. But Whip had gone. She’d scaled the wall and run across the pasture in its lee. When Aymer called she barked for him to follow her. He climbed up on the wall, and clapped his hands. Whip had her chin pressed to the grass. Her tail was wagging heavily. She rolled on her back. What had she found? Rabbit droppings, probably. A rotting crow. Manure. Something irresistible and smelly to mark her coat with. Aymer followed her. At least the pastureland was firm. He held Whip by her collar. She had rolled in something dead. The smell was unbearable. He flipped her over by her legs and wiped her back on the grass. And then he wiped his own hands on the grass. They were as smelly as the dog.

They walked up to a second, higher wall, climbed over it and then headed eastwards towards Wherrytown. To the north there was a lonely curl of smoke, a second lonely curl of hope that Otto might be found. There was a rough gate in the corner of the pasture. It led into a rutted wagon way, the quicker, more direct back path from Dry Manston which the Bowes had used the day before. Their footprints could be followed in the mud. Aymer would be happy to get back. He’d had a disappointing, empty day. Nothing he had done would change the world. The hunting party would go out the next day, and Otto would be carried back, at best half dead. Aymer Smith of Hector Smith & Sons, the meddler, the emancipationist, would be to blame. They’d shared the moment when the bolt was pulled, and he was pointing at the open door and telling Otto, ‘Go! Go! Go!’ Now they’d share the moment when the bolt was shut again.

The light was fading on that Tuesday afternoon, but Aymer was not concerned. The wagon way would lead to Wherrytown if there was any logic in the world. He only had to stumble on and run the history of the last five days through his mind; the storm, the inn, the salmon flesh, the country wife, the Cradle Rock, the African, the bruising innocence of people far from home, the transience of life and snow, the permanence of all the damage done, and finally the distant curl of smoke which beckoned to him from the north. He didn’t know what made him leave the wagon way as soon as he heard the chapel foghorn sound for Tuesday evensong. Except this was his final chance. Go now, while everybody was at prayer. Or be too late.

He concentrated on the curl of smoke, a dozen fields away. There was what looked to be a small stone hut nearby. The smoke belonged to it, it seemed. He’d walk that far, and then give up. Otto, surely, would have sought some shelter, away from the town. He would have lit a fire — and Africans were good at lighting fires from stones and bark. They hadn’t lost their ancient skills. Aymer had read the travel journals of men like Bruce and Soules, how Africans could navigate by stars, make light with bones, catch fish by hand, skin cattle with a sharpened stick, survive for weeks without a drink, speak with the birds, protect themselves from wounds and fevers with potions made from leaves. There was a narrow track which led off from the wagon way and skirted three small oblong fields before it disappeared in mud. Aymer checked the mud for footprints. There were none. Or none so far as he could see, because there was a sudden dusk and nothing could be certain in that light. Get to the smoke, he told himself. If he is anywhere, he will be at the smoke.

He climbed on to the wall. It was wide and flat enough on top to be a path. Someone had walked that way before, and many times. The undergrowth was flattened. Roots were snapped. The loosest rocks had been knocked on to the earth below the wall-top path. Aymer followed it, leaping over branches, glad to be out of the mud, and benefiting from the last of the daylight and the low light of the moon. The whole length of his body was reliefed against the sky. He looked as if he was ten feet tall, a comic, skinny stilts-man at a fair, with performing dog. A stringy hedgerow ghost. A diabolic scarecrow on the move. He found a route around the patchwork of the fields towards the smoke and hut, and came at last into the corner of a field that had been tilled and turned for winter. It looked at first like a landscape of ten thousand lakes; the mountains were the ridges in the earth; the valleys, furrows; the narrow pools, each shaped like icy mouths, reflecting all the silver in the sky. Again, it looked as if some fairy silversmith had dropped a cargo of brooches, or tried to plant the soil with polished, metal leaves. Was Aymer looking down on shards of ice? He walked along the wall a little further, so that the shards, the lakes, the leaves, the brooches, could be seen more clearly. He focused on the smell, before he focused on the ground. He knew it well. The field was full of fish. The sea was taking everyone away, and putting fish on land. There were no leaves or lakes or brooches, just one star-gazy pie with a four-acre crust of earth and a shoal of pilchards staring at the moon, their eyes as dead as flint, their scales like beaten tin, their fraying fins and tails like frost, their flesh composting for the next year’s crop. The field was absolutely still. The fastest movements were the snails and slugs which were enamelling the fleshy silverwork with their saliva trails.

Whip and Aymer jumped into the field. Whip nosed about, then started eating. Aymer squatted on his heels, and backed against the wall. The fish had frightened him. Where was the order in the universe? How long before the sky was tumbling with frogs and rats? How long before the ears of corn had fins? He’d never known such superstitious, concentrated fear, nor ever felt so far from home. He thrust his hands into his coat. He shut his eyes. He hung his head towards his knees. This expedition had been mad.

A scuffle thirty yards away made him look up once again. At first he thought it was the dog. But Whip was standing in the middle of the field, her nose pointing, her chin greasy with pilchards, her neck hairs hackling. She’d heard the scuffle too. There was some movement on the far side of the field, ten yards below the little hut and its twist of smoke. Some shadows shifting. Some interruptions to the glinting silver of the fish. Aymer could convince himself he saw someone, crouching in the furrowed soil, pushing pilchards in his mouth. Aymer could convince himself by now that there were wolves or hobgoblins or sharks. But Whip wasn’t afraid. She sped across the moonlit pilchard pie and gave chase to a feeding nest of rats.

Aymer found himself a broken length of branch and followed Whip. The smell of rotting fish was soon displaced by that of wood smoke, drier and more bitter. What fire there was hadn’t been fed for quite a while. Its fuel was mostly root and bark and tough billets of thorn. Its grate — hidden up against the north side of the hut — was made from slates and stones that had been dislodged from the roof and walls. There was a flat slate in the ashes, with fish bones. Someone had cooked a meal. It was instinctive: Aymer crouched again; he blew into the fire to try and raise a flame. He got the embers to glow, but there was nothing for their heat to curl and burst around. He searched his pockets, took out the book, and fed some of the Truismes by dell’Ova to the fire. The pages lifted, stiffened, blackened, smoked. He tore more pages into tiny shreds, like kindling. He blew again until the hot eye of the fire lifted up its lid and winked a tiny flame. The fire grew strong on aphorisms, epigrams and teasing ambiguities, in French. Aymer’s face and hands were glowing now. His pulse had slowed. His blood was warm. He added more wood to the fire. The smoke was damp.

He rolled the last remaining pages of his book into a torch. The ink burned blue. He held the torch up to the broken wall of the hut. It might have been the refuge from the rain a dozen years before for cattle boys. It might have been a winter sty for pigs. Or some hidden place that smugglers used. There was a tiny room inside, not five feet high, not six feet long, not fully roofed, no proper floor, but snug. Half of the ground was covered in dry bracken. There was a cup, a metal box, a demijohn, some more fish bones. Aymer stooped and went inside. He opened the metal box: some candle ends, an apple core, some cheese, some hardbake, a button, a teaspoon, an empty pot of Dr Sweetzer’s Panacea for Salving Wounds and Burns. No pistol. Aymer lit one of the candle ends, and stamped his torch out on the earth. He put the candle on the metal box, and searched the bracken bed. No pistol there. No body warmth. No blood. No anything. The blanket hanging from the wall was invisible, until Aymer almost fell and had to steady himself. Then he felt the cheap perpetuanna of the woollen cloth, and took it down off its twig peg. It was a horse blanket — and like the ones used in the stable and the tackle room at the inn.

Aymer went outside, stood straight, and slowly turned a full circle, looking for the outlines of a man. He dared not call. The landscape of his circle ducked and ridged and plunged as walls gave way to trees, and trees arched weatherways towards the moors, and moors descended into fields and back again to walls and down onto the galaxy of fish. The only light was moon. The only life was Whip’s.

Aymer waited for an hour, the horse blanket wrapped around his shoulders and his head, until his fire was almost dead. He tried to find a place for Otto in his life, to make amends inside his head at least, to revive the harmony he’d squandered. Whip snoozed, one-eyed, her fur just inches from the embers. It seemed much later, but it wasn’t yet eight o’clock and he might still be back in time for supper at the inn. He woke the dog, found his broken branch, returned the blanket to its peg, put all his change into the metal box — three shillings and a farthing — and climbed again onto the highway of the wall. The moon provided enough light, if he was careful. The branch was helpful as a walking stick. He wasn’t certain of the way. There were too many crossroads in the walls. Too many junctions. And, this time, no wisp of smoke to mark his destination. He tried to listen for the sea, but it wasn’t as noisy as the wind. At last he found a policy. The wind would come up off the sea at night. The warm attracts the cold. If he could follow routes that led into the wind then he must come finally to the wagon way. Then turn left for Wherrytown.

He found a wall that ran into the wind. He hadn’t taken more than a dozen steps when he saw a light ahead. Was it a building on the edge of town? A marker on the chapel? He waited and watched, holding his breath, holding his cudgel-branch. The light was moving parallel to him and in a straight line. And then it took a sudden right-angled turn and was coming, more or less, towards Aymer. It moved from side to side, like a porch light swinging on its hook. Aymer made himself as small as possible. He pushed Whip down onto the wall and held her muzzle and her back. Again the light went right, and then resumed another path towards Aymer and the dog. Someone else was walking along the network of the walls, with a lantern. It wasn’t bravery, but cold and cowardice that made Aymer stand up and call out, ‘Who goes there?’ Such a foolish and dramatic phrase! He even blushed. There was no reply. Perhaps the wind had shredded his words and scattered them inland. This time he called out, ‘Hello. It’s Aymer Smith,’ and then, ‘I’m only lost.’ He could now make out the silhouette of a small man, walking on the wall with the certainty of a goat. The lantern was fifty yards away when Aymer recognized the busy and ironic walk of George the parlourman.

‘Ah, George.’ Ah, George, sweet George was carrying a half loaf, some apples and a ripped kerseymere jacket.

‘Ah, Mr Smith. Moon-hunting or rabbiting tonight?’ George sounded uneasy — and embarrassed — for once.

‘Neither, George. I’m fishing in the fields.’ He was delighted with his joke, and happier than he could say to have the parlourman and the lantern as companions home, and to have his conscience liberated by the happy certainty that Otto had an unexpected friend.