Signals of Distress

5. Dry Manston

SABBATH SNOW was coming in from Canada, preceded by a morning of tepid and deceitful air. There was no frost and just an ounce of wind, but anyone could tell that cold was on its way. The sea was pearly with pilchard shoals; seals and porpoises were seeking shelter close to shore; cormorants meditated on the rocks and did not fish; and there were hardly any penitents in Wherrytown who’d left their beds for morning prayers with Mr Phipps.

At Dry Manston the cattle from Quebec stood in squads or lay under the few low thorns between the high ground and the beach, their backs against the wrecking sea. Miggy and her mother hoped it would be easy to trap one of these mournful, docile cows. They’d have fresh meat, and what they couldn’t eat within the week, they’d salt. They were up and out soon after dawn and planned to have one killed, butchered and concealed in an hour. They each had rigging ropes, flotsam from the Belle: one rope round the neck would hold the cow, one round its hind shins would bring it down. It should only take a single blow with a rock between the eyes to make the beast insensible. Then perforate the spinal column with a knife and cow was beef. That was the principle at least. They’d never had to kill a cow before. They hadn’t had the chance. The most they’d done was club a seal to death and skin it on the beach.

The cows were wary and unpredictable. They wouldn’t let the Bowes get close. They put their haunches in the air, hauled their bodies from the ground, and stood, face on, whenever Rosie or Miggy approached. They lowed in protest at the cold. They weren’t fooled by gifts of grass. They backed away. They ran.

It was amusing for a while. Rosie tried all kinds of tricks to trap a cow, and entertain herself. She crept up on the cattle from behind, but got no closer than before. She tried to hypnotize a cow with weaving hands. She’d seen a donkey hypnotized that way at the farthing fair in Wherrytown. She made a sudden dash — with no success — and then fell down into the spongy bracken, laughing unselfconsciously. Miggy was embarrassed by her ma. She wanted beef. She was too old to be amused.

‘We’ll never get one if you fool around,’ she said.

‘Don’t be so frownin’, Miggy. We’ll never get one anyway. Those cows in’t wanting to be caught. I’m getting back indoors. My feet and back are soaking through. You coming with me, or will you stop and sulk?’ Rosie was annoyed. Her daughter wasn’t much of a companion. She was as clawed and joyless as a cat.

Miggy let her mother go. She liked to be out on the coast alone, the windswept heroine. Besides, she’d seen a distant figure on the path. It wasn’t usual to see strangers — or officials — walking on the Sabbath. That’s why Miggy and her mother had chosen Sunday to help themselves to beef. There was a chance, then, that it was Palmer Dolly. Might he come by? And let his black hair mix with hers? Miggy wanted to be kissed. What must it be like to be kissed by someone other than your ma? More nourishing than beef! Sometimes at night she practised kissing her own mouth. She wet the insides of her lips and let them slide. She teased her palate with her tongue. She skimmed her chin and cheeks with her fingers. She licked the tissue on her palms. She found that, by touching the folds between her legs, she could reproduce the breathless tremble that she felt when she encountered men of her own age. A better place than home was just a touch away.

She’d not been alone for long when she discovered one of the shipwrecked heifers, grazing in an impasse of rocks and furze above the coastal track. She only had to stand resolutely at the open end and make a noise to trap the cow. It backed in more deeply. It dropped its head, either in resignation or to butt its captor. Miggy looped a rope round its neck and kept it back by slapping its nostrils. What should she do, with Rosie gone? Slaughter it alone? There wasn’t any way that she could drag it home herself, or whistle it. The cow was not a dog. She’d have to brain it with a rock and butcher it before the crows and gulls found out. Would she have the strength and resolution? Could she relieve her boredom on the cow? Would Palmer Dolly come in time to help? The walking figure she had spotted earlier was getting closer.

There was a sharp, pointed stone almost within reach that would do for butchering. Miggy turned to pick it up, and stole a glance along the coast. It wasn’t Palmer Dolly on the path. This man was blond. It was the sailor from the Belle, the one who’d held her waist. Ralph Parkiss was honouring his sailor’s boast, to see what she’d got hidden in her breeches. He’d volunteered to walk the six miles to the ship to discover how it had fared since it had beached, but he was looking for the girl. He couldn’t fail to see her. She made a din — in case he passed her by.

‘Is that you, Miggy?’ He climbed up from the path across the winter bracken. ‘Well now, that’s fortunate. I never thought I’d see a friendly face.’ Miggy’s face was hardly friendly, though. She judged a smile to be unladylike, particularly as she had lost a bottom tooth and her lips were cracked and dry. She knew she had good eyes. Her mother told her so. She did her best to widen them, and not to blink. Ralph spoke the line that he had practised for six miles: ‘I came to see the Belle of Wilmington and found myself the belle of Wherrytown instead …’

‘It hasn’t shifted much last night,’ Miggy said. She wished she’d put a ribbon in her hair. They both looked down across the beach towards the Belle. It wasn’t showing any sail. Its masts and rigging looked as bare and clean-picked as finished fish-bones. The carcasses of three drowned cows were floating in the shallows.

‘I see you’ve roped yourself a cow. Is this one off the Belle?’ Miggy let the rigging drop. She’d not be caught red-handed, poaching cattle. She was ambitious, but not for travel in a prison ship and not for Botany Bay.

‘I wasn’t stealin’ it,’ she said. ‘Don’t say I was.’

‘I’ll not say anything. Steal ten, and still I’ll not say anything.’ He picked the rigging up and handed it to Miggy. ‘Go on. The captain won’t miss one. He doesn’t even know how many got ashore. Don’t sell the steaks in Wherrytown, that’s all.’ He was unnerved by her round eyes. ‘Is that our ensign round your throat?’ he said. ‘It suits you better than the Belle.’ And when she didn’t reply, ‘I thought you were a boy. Those breeches aren’t for girls. You’re not a boy, I hope. How can a sailor tell?’

‘I got a dress at home.’

‘What colour, then?’

‘White. Blue ribbons. I got long hair, ’cept it’s up.’

‘You can let it down so I can see.’

‘I can’t.’

‘What will you do?’

‘I’ll not do anything. Why should I, anyway?’

‘I walked six miles for nothing, then? Must I go back without a kiss? Miggy? Miggy? It’s twelve miles, not six, by the time I’m back in Wherrytown. I tell you what. You kiss me once and then I’ll dream of you.’

‘I’ve got no time for kissin’. Kiss the cow if you’re so keen on it.’

‘I will, if you say no. And then I’ll dream of cows, and you won’t be my sweetheart any more.’

‘Am I your sweetheart, then?’

‘You are if you will kiss.’

What was Ralph Parkiss hoping for? The only girls he’d kissed before had been his sisters or, most recently, the cheap lorettes and dollar doxies in harbour inns in Montreal and Charleston. With prostitutes he’d put his lips and hands exactly where he’d wanted to, exactly when he’d wanted to. The women didn’t care if they were in his dreams or not, so long as he could pay and finish what he’d come to do in less than half an hour. There wasn’t any need for strategy or sweetness. They hadn’t touched or kissed him in return. He’d had to serve himself. There was no happiness in that. Yet Miggy — who, so far, refused to kiss — made Ralph Parkiss feel as fragile as a blown egg. And happy too. He didn’t mind her boyish clothes, her chilled, unsmiling face, her lack of decoration, her stillness and her secrecy. Such rapt, unconscious gravity was irresistible. Thank God the Belle had beached him here. Thank God for storms.

‘What will we do then?’

‘You can help me if you want.’

He helped her pull the cow out from the rocks and coax it down the incline to the path. He used a strip of gorse to beat the cow forward. He even risked a playful gorsing of Miggy’s thighs. Try as she might she couldn’t stop her smiles. Miggy had two creatures captive on her rope, the heifer and the man. She felt as mossy as the ground. She’d give Ralph a kiss of thanks when she got home for helping with the cow. Where was the harm in that? Thank God the Belle had beached him here. Thank God for storms.

They were halfway to the safety of the cottage and thinking only of themselves when Aymer Smith, touting his Duty along the coast, caught sight of them. He was in a cheerful mood. What a relief it was for him to be free of the bells, the guests, the corridors of the inn, to walk, and contemplate the fascinations of the coast. He had noticed, as he progressed away from Wherrytown, how one mile differed from the next, how landscape could transform in minutes from welcoming to inhospitable, how vegetation changed from rich to meagre, how time appeared to wind back on itself so that the 1836 of Wherrytown, its modest comforts and its steadiness, seemed a hundred years away as he approached Dry Manston. There weren’t many trees for shelter now. And what trees there were, compared to those around the town, were angular. They shrank and thickened; they turned their trunks against the wind, and wore more bark. The people did the same. Aymer could regard himself as lean and willowy compared to them.

He called to Ralph and Miggy to wait for him, with a directness and informality that in a town would be considered improper. A morning out of Wherrytown had taught him that the diffidence and the reverence that marked the Spirit of the Age when strangers of two classes or two sexes met on city streets had not yet migrated here. The kelping families he’d encountered hadn’t been paralysed by such a visitor. They didn’t gape or turn away. They spoke to him openly, shook his hand and asked unsolicited questions. Boys and girls — children in nothing else but size — investigated him, pulling his clothes, pressing the leather of his boots, and treated Whip, Aymer’s new companion, to strips of fish, yet didn’t offer Aymer anything to drink.

He rehearsed with their parents the innovations in the soap industry, and what it meant for kelpers. ‘We’ll manage without kelp, God willing,’ they said. ‘The fishing’s good enough these last few years. There’s pilchards up tonight and we’ll do well.’ Aymer wondered why he’d come so far, with such a conscience, if the damage to their lives when the patronage of Hector Smith & Sons was withdrawn would be so inconsequential. Perhaps, if they had offered some brief signs of dismay, he would have felt less slighted.

‘You’ll miss the money, surely?’

‘Hah! Mr Howells has most of it!’

The kelpers took Aymer’s shilling and some bars of soap, and called their daughters for inspection, the ugly and the lean, the comely and the plump, the sour and the sweet, and all of them smiling wildly. This Kitty, fourteen years of age, was healthy and hard-working. She’d make a decent maid. This Mary, only ten, was useful round the house and would be glad of any work in Hector Smith & Sons. This Janie, seventeen, could work as hard as any man, ‘Look at her muscles, Mr Smith!’ and she could wet-nurse, cook or scrub. Did Aymer know of anyone who could offer employment to any of these girls? Aymer wrote their names down in his notebook and made promises he knew he couldn’t keep. They’d let him take their daughters there and then, he felt, and not expect to see them any more, so long as they had ‘prospects and positions’.

Aymer’s appetite for kelpers and their daughters was diminishing when he saw Miggy Bowe and Ralph Parkiss with their stolen cow.

‘Good morning, sirs,’ he called, a long man in a black tarpaulin coat, hurrying to catch up with them on the path. ‘Please stand and wait for me.’ They turned to answer him. He waved. They stood stock-still, uncertain what to do. Miggy knew the type of man he was, though he was out of season, a winter cuckoo. From time to time, usually in the spring and summer, she’d come across such pale-looking fellows walking on the coast, with knapsacks on their backs, and walking sticks. These were the only people that she’d ever met that were more than a day’s walk from their homes — apart from Ralph. They might be alone, in pairs, in groups of four or five. Often they were lost. They asked directions to the Cradle Rock which, it seemed, they’d travelled all this way to see. Their purpose was to touch and sway the Rock. They’d missed it by a half a mile or more. There’d always be a penny in it if Miggy would lead them to the Rock and show them where they had to put their backs to set it in motion. Sometimes these men took their easels to the beach, or sat on dunes with sketch pads on their knees. Sometimes they came with hammers and broke up rocks, fossil-bibbing, or spent inexplicable hours attending on the sea birds. Miggy would then earn pennies by showing where the razorbills were nesting, or clambering down loose cliffs to collect gulls’ eggs for them. Occasionally there were ladies, too, with umbrellas and clothes that were, for Miggy, colourless and disappointing. One of Walter Howells’s men from Wherrytown or George from the inn was often in attendance as a guide and porter. Then there’d be a picnic on the sand and Miggy, if she smiled and was polite, could importune some bread and mutton for herself. She dreamed some man — some gentleman — would buy her for a penny and take her far from home.

Aymer didn’t have a bag or easel. She presumed he was a man who’d missed the Cradle Rock. Except he didn’t seem lost, but purposeful. Perhaps he’d come about the Belle. An excise man? No, he was far too tall and clerky, and excise men didn’t work on the Sabbath. A shipping agent, then? Someone with proper title to the cows? Now Miggy was alarmed. He waved at them again, and whistled. A dog — the same small bitch that had gone off with the American sailors the day before — ran out of the furze, circled the stranger, and then ran barking towards Miggy, Ralph Parkiss and the heifer. The young cow broke away and ran. Miggy didn’t attempt to hold her. She let the rope fall. She waved back at the man, and when she lowered her arm tucked her neckchief, the red-and-white ensign from the Belle, under her smock. Perhaps he was a ship’s officer. He had the ship’s dog, after all. And one sleeve of his coat was armless. Perhaps he’d hurt it in the storm. Perhaps he’d lost it in a brawl with pirates, or a whale, or in the war with Bonaparte. Perhaps he’d seen they’d roped the cow. Ralph would be in trouble. Miggy Bowe rocked from foot to foot. She was set in motion by two men like the Cradle Rock, swaying, heavy, inconsolable. Her heart was beating fast.

‘Is he your captain, Ralph?’ she said.

‘I don’t know who the fellow is. I saw him at the inn last night.’

The dog did not respond to Aymer’s ‘Down, Whip. Down.’ She’d found two friends, one who smelled of other dogs, and one who was a shipmate. She nuzzled Ralph. She jumped at Miggy’s legs and licked the stains of breakfast from her fingers.

‘Good morning, gentlemen.’ Aymer reached them on the path. He put his hand out, first to Ralph. ‘I know you, sir, I think. We dined together at the inn. Yes, yes. I know a face.’

He turned to Miggy.

‘My little lady,’ Miggy said, using Whip to shield her from the handshake that Aymer was offering, ‘come to see us, have you, sweet? Is she yours, this little ’un?’ Aymer blushed. Not his first blush of the day. He hadn’t known she was a girl, a pert-faced, handsome girl at that. She was dressed like a farmboy.

‘I’m Aymer Smith of Hector Smith & Sons,’ he said. His face had quickly cooled and paled. ‘And you? What are your family; kelpers?’ Any hopes that Miggy had that this man had lost an arm to whales were shattered. His voice was not heroic, but clipped and fussy. You might imagine him to be distinguished, dashing at a distance, but now his face was close she saw he was quite old, older than her mother anyhow, and gaunt. He had a second arm, as well. It moved below his coat.

‘We kelp a bit,’ she said.

‘And do you supply Mr Howells with soda ash?’

‘Walter Howells? He has our kelp.’

‘So then, what is your name?’

‘I’m Miggy Bowe.’

Again he offered her his hand. She hid her hands, and backed away. ‘I’m only seventeen,’ she said.

‘What does that mean? That you’re too young to shake my hand?’

‘I never had to shake a hand before.’

‘My dear Miss Bowe,’ he said, ‘it is not important that you shake my hand. I merely offered it to mark our meeting and to introduce myself. A dog that rushes to you with its tail in motion is a dog you need not fear. And so it is with strangers, except of course we shake our hands and not our tails. A footpad or a common thief does not hold out his hand to shake, but only to relieve you of your watch or silver. But still, I will not trouble you to shake my hand. You should not do what does not suit you, or else you will be unhappy all your life.’ He put his hand into his coat. ‘Here, take some soap,’ he said. ‘It is more useful, I agree, than handshaking.’ Miggy Bowe, who had no watch or silver and was unhappy all her life, could not see the relevance of soap. She turned her back and ran. She didn’t think that she’d be caught by Aymer Smith. He was too flimsy to give chase. But Ralph and Whip were fit. They soon were at her side.

ROSIE BOWE released her mongrels and went out, stick in hand, to meet the man that Miggy and the sailor had described.

‘We’d roped a likely little cow, Ma, and got it halfway home and then he tries to fetch hold of my hand. I don’t know what he might’ve done if Ralph didn’t come by. I never seen a man so long and thin and strange. He’s talkin’ like you never heard before. He had his arm hid in his coat. He might’ve had a pistol there. He said I was to tell if we sell kelp to Walter Howells. And then he gave me soap.’

‘Let’s see the soap.’

‘I wouldn’t take no soap.’

‘Miggy Bowe, if this is lies …’

‘It in’t no lie. I wouldn’t tell no lie on Sabbathday.’

‘She’s right,’ Ralph said. ‘The fellow’s got a pocketful of soap. And when he talks it’s like a sermon.’

The man, when he arrived, it’s true, was tall — but Rosie felt no fear of him. He was a spindleshanks. He wouldn’t have the strength or pluck to trouble them. She calmed the dogs and put her stick away. She even shook his hand. She didn’t want him in her home — where Miggy and the sailor stood behind the door — and so she made him state his business in the cold and open air. She listened as he gave his name and that of Walter Howells. She’d heard of Smith & Sons, of course. She knew her soda ash was sold to finish up in soap. She guessed as soon as Aymer mentioned Duty and Conscience that there would be bad news.

‘Alas,’ he said, after what seemed an endless doorstep homily on everything from soap to sin, ‘my brother has no further need of kelp. His business with Dry Manston and with you and Walter Howells cannot survive the summonses of science or of progress. I come to thank you for your efforts in the past and to present you with a shilling for your troubles, and some soap.’ He put five bars of soap down on the yard bench. Whip sniffed at them, but wasn’t interested. Rosie felt the same. Already, she was angry with the man. How would they live without their thirty shillings for a ton? And then he held the shilling up. ‘For you,’ he said. ‘By way of thanks. And may it bring you better fortune.’

Rosie couldn’t stop herself: ‘That in’t no use. You think we’re going to bake our bread from soap? How will we live? A shillin’ is a fine price to be paupered by. It’s a bad-luck shilling and we’ll have none of it.’

‘I intended it to be …’

‘Intended in’t enough!’

Miggy put her head around the door. She thought she’d turn a shilling to a crown: ‘I had a cow roped, Ma. He chased it off. And now we’re gonna starve.’

Aymer blushed again. He’d already spotted Miggy with the young American, peeking from behind the door, and though she was no Katie Norris, she was alluring in a colourless and undramatic way. He liked her peevish, boyish inhibition, and didn’t want to seem a fool in front of her. He didn’t know what he had done to cause such anger, except be honest and considerate. ‘You should not blame me, Mrs Bowe,’ he said. That would have been enough, but he was ill at ease — as ever — and couldn’t stop the puffing elongation of this simple self-defence. ‘I have been the kelper’s friend.’ A pause to find another reason to demand their sympathy and thwart their anger. ‘I have braved a storm at sea in order to be here. Indeed, I’ve sustained an injury. My arm and shoulder bone are cracked.’ (Now his sentences were under canvas. Their sails were full of wind.) ‘But pain has not deterred me from my duty. I have walked a fair few miles from Wherrytown, and it is cold, and there are many kelpers to be spoken to. Your neighbours took my shilling and my soap. I’ve been this morning to the homes of Mr Fowler, Mr Dolly, Mr Hicks … All kelping families, but they were civil.’

‘They’ve got the reason to be civil, in’t they? Kelping’s not their meat and drink. They’ve sons, and boats. Fish is their livin’. Kelping’s for their daughters and their wives to earn a bit of extra for the pot. But we’ve no men or boats.’ ‘I beg you, Mrs Bowe. Do not upset yourself.’ ‘I’ve got a right to speak my mind. You’re standing on my step, and I will speak my mind. What’ll we do without our kelp? Who’ll take my Miggy off my hands, if we’ve no work to keep us proud?’ Aymer waited for Rosie Bowe to sing her daughter’s praises, how she could cook and sew and be a lady’s maid if only Mr Smith would write her name down in his book and find employment for her. But she said nothing more. She simply shook her head and looked at Aymer’s boots.

‘I’m sure your daughter has more worth than what you earn from kelping …’

‘There in’t no worth to being poor, not when it comes to marrying.’

‘Oh, Ma!’

‘ “Oh, Ma,” she says! She’s no idea, that girl. She’s living in her dreams. No man will take a pauper for his bride.’ Behind the door, Ralph Parkiss had his hand on her daughter’s back. She let his fingers tell a rosary of vertebrae down to her waist. She stopped his hand with hers and held his fingers tight. A thought occurred to Miggy Bowe that she would never let his fingers go. She’d hold them here, and on the sea, and in America. She rubbed the rope burns on Ralph’s palm. She faced the stranger in the doorway and she smiled.

A thought occurred to Aymer Smith as well, an extravagant, rushing inspiration which, had he been at home, amongst the comforts of his sitting room, or in the prudent offices of Hector Smith & Sons, might not have found the thinnest purchase on his imagination. But here, emancipated by the open air, by the distance he had come, and by the dislocating alchemy of sea and loneliness and strangers, and by the smiles that he had got from Katie Norris, his head was free for reckless possibilities. There was no one to rein him back. No one to stop him thinking that, perhaps, he’d found a wife at last. What better man than he to take a pauper for his bride? The thought was not preposterous. He’d dress her well. He’d mould her into shape. She’d learn to read and write and cypher. She’d pick up the proprieties of city life and adopt a more womanly demeanour, not gaping or being quite so busy with her legs. She could be taught to breathe through her nostrils and not her mouth. He’d turn her into Katie Norris. She was too gauche and innocent herself to mind that he was inexperienced and old and would not make a pattern husband. He’d offer her the wealth, the education, the status, the emancipation that otherwise could only flourish in her dreams and prayers. She’d bear him children: Aymer Smith & Sons. What would Matthias make of it? He’d be appalled. And jealous, too. Fidia Smith, Matthias’s wife, was thirty-six and pinched in everything but shape. But Mrs Miggy Smith was like a chrysalis. Her best days were ahead. And so were his. So long as he could mend the damage done and earn the sanction of the Bowes.

‘I did not mean … to …’ Aymer said. ‘I take the shilling back.’

‘You’d better grab it, Ma!’

Rosie did what Miggy said. She wasn’t angry any more. Her passions were short-lived, and hardly worth a shilling. She put the coin in a jar.

‘You can come indoors,’ she said. Aymer was relieved and startled by her change of voice and countenance. ‘I’ll get you something warm to drink before you set off back.’

The Bowes had lit a Sabbath fire of kelp, cow dung and timbers from the Belle. It burned in colours that Aymer thought he’d never seen before, colours that an artist could not mix. Miggy and her mother sat together on a bench, their faces halved and reddened by the floating firelight. Ralph Parkiss, petting Whip, squatted on the floor, which was simply earth, flattened once a week with a shovel. He didn’t speak. Aymer had the only chair. They’d made both men hot mahogany, with water, country gin and treacle. (Aymer did not require them to remove the sugar from his drink.) It smelled of fish. The whole place smelled of fish. Smoked herrings hung across the fire. Tubs of salted pilchards were stored beneath the bench and chair. A leather bucket held fish oil, for cooking and for light. Great white wings of fish stiffened on ropes around the cob-and-wattle walls like lines of underwear.

The single room was divided by a sacking curtain, with a box-bed in the almost hidden part. It stood on bare earth which rain had softened to a paste. The only touch of colour to the room was a red petticoat, thrown over rising dough to keep it warm. There weren’t any curtains, cushions, rugs or tablecloths. There was no ceiling, but a raft of timbers made from wrecks. A little light and some dust from the thatch of turfs came through and peppered Aymer’s hair. There were no ornaments, except an embroidered passage from the Bible on the chimney breast:

Weep sore for him that goeth away:

for he shall return no more,

nor see his native country.

Jeremiah

Aymer found the room a little disconcerting: the fish, the petticoat, the privacy, the lack of daintiness, the quiet. But soon the dancing semi-darkness shut out the universe and made their silence comfortable. The two men concentrated on their drinks. Miggy Bowe untied her hair. Rosie had her first chance now to wonder how they’d cope without the benefit of kelp. Some farmers to the east of Wherrytown used untreated seaweed to fertilize their fields, but they would only pay a shilling for a wagon-load. There would be work in summer on the farms across the moor — but what a walk for fourpence a day! Who could live on that? What could they do, then? Find some work in Wherrytown. Cut peat where they had rights of turbary. Joust fish for the boatmen on the coast. Scrump nuts and apples. Poach rabbits, heathcocks, lapwings’ eggs. Glean oats and nettles for bread and soup. Cadge clothes. Steal turnips. Emigrate? They’d find a way. Rosie Bowe was not a melancholic. She had no time for lasting sorrows. Like many people living by the sea she had the bedding of a beggar but the spirit of a bull. There was no denying that the man who sat in her one chair had beached the family just as firmly as the gale had beached the Belle. Their masts were down. Their sides were holed. And they were stuck. But not for long.

‘Well, then … So that’s the way the bad luck settles in. It’s muck and nettles from now on,’ she said, and looked at Aymer in the bending flattery of light, defying him to say another word.

Aymer kept the silence easily. He didn’t know what he could say. He knew, though, what to do. He’d take the Bowes beneath his wing. A shilling was a paltry sum, a blushing sum. It was what he’d paid to George for merely fetching Mr Phipps. Aymer would give the Bowes more than a shilling’s worth if he could find the means … to what? To be straightforward and suggest the benefits for everyone if Miggy … Margaret. He’d have to call her Margaret … would come back on the next Tar with him to be his wife. He wouldn’t mention love. He couldn’t love the girl, not like the love that danced till dawn in fairytales or books. He was too old for dances and for dawn. But he could liberate the girl. What better dowry could there be? He’d break her chains of poverty, just like he’d snapped the chains of slavery for Otto. He looked across the room at Miggy’s silhouette. Her face was fine enough. Her skin was pale and clear. Mrs Margaret Smith, a healthy country catch, a woman less than half his age. He wouldn’t want a wife too well experienced. He didn’t need to win her heart. But he could court and win her head. Her body, too. She’d use the bedside chamber pot. He’d run his hands across her thrushy thighs. Her hair would hang in one loose tress. It would be best, he thought, to talk first to her mother. She’d understand the common sense of his proposal. She wouldn’t have much choice.

Aymer felt light-headed. Excitement? Fish fumes? Or the gin?

‘I’ll go,’ he said. ‘I cannot trust myself to find the way when it is dark.’ And then to Ralph, ‘Will you be walking with me, sir? A companion shrinks the miles.’

‘Gladly, Mr Smith,’ he said. He couldn’t tell the truth, that he would rather stay and spend the night exactly where he was. Both men stood up, pulled on their coats and jostled at the door. Whip ran through their legs into the open air.

Aymer made a parting speech: ‘I promise you I will return within a day or two. I will consider some proposals that might ease your condition. You have accepted my shilling with reluctance, but you will, I hope, accept my friend ship and my help with …’ He could not find the proper words. With greater deference, perhaps? Or with docility? He left the farewell uncompleted. For the third time that day he offered his hand to Miggy Bowe. She stretched her arm and touched him on his finger ends, much in the way that she had touched the African’s toes on the beach the day before, much in the way a child would dare to touch a jellyfish. His hand was damp and hot.

‘I would’ve had that cow if you in’t come,’ she said.

Aymer Smith was not a Revolutionist. He could not abet the theft and slaughter of a cow, and square it with his conscience, or with the excise men, or — more to the point — with Walter Howells, who’d taken on the task of rounding up the cattle from the Belle. But what if the cow was not alive? ‘I saw three dead cows, ready salted, in the shallows of the wreck,’ he said. ‘That’s flotsam, isn’t it? I do not know the finer points of law. But isn’t wreckage floating in the sea the property of those who find it? And what is a lifeless cow but wreckage of a sort — just leather, horn and flesh? Who will oppose you taking meat out of the sea? It is fishing by another name. Besides, the flesh will putrefy unless you rescue it. It is almost a duty to oppose such waste.’

And so they took a handcart, a wood axe and some heavy knives and went down to the sea. The Bowes and Ralph waded in, despite the cold. Whip ran barking at the waves. But Aymer didn’t want to chance his boots. He used his strapped arm as an excuse for staying idle. One cow was almost beached. Between them and the free help of the waves, the Bowes and Ralph managed to drag it into the shallows. Its orifices drained of water and lance eels squirted through a thousand punctures in the hide. Its eyes had gone, and crabs were feeding on the titbits of the skull. Its tongue was white and bloodless. There was some evidence already of putrefaction in the head. The women would not take the tongue or brains. But the clammy, musty, tainted meat from the neck and clod would still be edible if washed in ashy water and then roasted. They went to work without emotion, beginning at the leg and cutting meat from off the bone up through the topside, silverside and flank into the aitch bone. The salty water caused the fibres of the open flesh to contract and drew the juices from the cow so that the sea became a rosy brine. The women stood in water that was tumbling with tiny, feeding fish. By the time they’d reached the rump and sirloin the water and the sand were red. Gulls were circling so close that the mayhem of their wings was louder than the sea.

Aymer found the fish more shocking than the cow. He was used to seeing fish on plates, cooked, gormless, dressed, not tumbling like molten lead, not smelling so. He retreated up the sand. He couldn’t help. He had only one arm. They posted him to stand with Whip next to their handcart, to keep birds off. No tumbril in Robespierre’s Paris could have been as bloody or macabre, or smelled as bad. He turned his back to it and looked along the shore, where turnstones and oyster catchers were picking through the beached and draining kelp. Aymer had seen these seaweeds many times before, and knew their names in Latin: Ascophyllum nodosum, Fucus vesicolosus, Laminaria cloustini. There was a folio in the offices of Smith & Sons, with over fifty specimens pressed, labelled and isolated on smooth sheets of white paper like doilies or like fans. When they were boys, Aymer and Matthias had learned to recognize each species. ‘I suppose that now,’ thought Aymer, ‘there’ll have to be a folio with specimens of Monsieur Leblanc’s common salt.’ He knew the shapes of the weeds, perhaps. But the colours were a shock. The folio seaweeds for all their dry and flattened delicacy were only brown and black. But on the beach the living kelp was as polished and as leathery as a prince’s boot, in mustards, crimsons, purples, tans. In the shallows, where the tide was frowning white round rocks and bars, the deeper kelps and wracks spread darkly on the surface, or danced arabesques in undulating groves of weed, like spirit-women at a ball in heavy satin frocks. Aymer looked beyond the kelp, beyond the figures in the sea, beyond the Belle abandoned in the suds, into the feeble, sombre sky. There was so little daylight left, that winter afternoon.

‘We’ll have to go now, Ralph,’ he called.

They left the Bowes to push their meaty handcart home alone, and set off with the dog, at a pace too fast for Aymer, towards Wherrytown. Miggy — her hands as red as two anemones — called out to them, ‘You’ve got to come again!’ Both men replied, ‘I will!’

At first, Ralph’s shoes made rodent noises as he walked. But soon the sea drained out of them. His legs and feet were wet and cold.

‘We’ve done a decent job today,’ said Aymer. ‘They’ll not want for meat.’

‘We have,’ said Ralph, smiling to himself.

‘Good women, too. That is, when one considers all the deprivations in their life. The daughter, don’t you think, might make a tolerable wife for a man? She has the country virtues.’ Ralph did not reply.

The path was level as it skirted round the bay, and soft underfoot. First there were dunes which shielded them from the cold and bloody solitudes of the seashore. Then there were salty flats with skew trees and flood-tide debris, and tracts of open, windblown heath where grasses mocked the sea with mimic waves and clapping stalks matched the distant, wet applause of tumbling pebbles in the tide. But soon they had to scramble over rocks, and Aymer, with one arm in a sling, made clumsy progress. Ralph waited on the headland for his companion to catch up. Someone had set a wooden bench across two rocks and Aymer, when he arrived, sat breathlessly on it, while Whip went rabbiting and Ralph displayed the patience of a sailor by carving ‘R.P.’ in the bench with his clasp knife. Other names were carved in it with dates: Thos. Pearson 1829; C. Stuart, Edinbgh. May ’33; Bartolli, Claudio, ROMA 1831. There were initials, too, with hearts and arrows. Aymer, motionless, was feeling cold and hungry and wearied by the ceaseless noise and wind. The inn was still two hours’ walk away. He’d allow himself a minute more of rest. He tried to make his weariness seem purposeful by identifying, for Ralph, the hornblende and the feldspar which added the white and flesh-red garnish to the granite thereabouts. He grubbed out coloured stones which enamelled the turf at his feet and rubbed them clean between his fingers. He broke free crusts of salt and mustard lichens. He murmured his familiarity with them, by naming them in Latin and in English. Ralph shook his head at his companion’s learning. ‘I don’t know names for those,’ he said. And then, ‘I do know other things …’ Ralph’s was a stranger’s ignorance. Aymer’s was a stranger’s knowledge.

A narrow side path led down from Aymer’s bench, through boulders, to a grassy bowl, and then rose steeply to a tonsured promontory where the granite was too exposed for ferns or lichen or algae. It was a perfect paradise of rocks, much loved, in summer, by watercolourists and lizards. But in the winter, with so much grey about and so little light, the dull pinks of the exposed stone were warm and beckoning. No child could pass it by without first attempting to climb the tumbled pyramid to reach the square mass at its summit. If it was natural masonry, then it had been weathered by a geometric wind and shaped by architectural frosts. This topmost block — the shape and size of a small stone cottage — rested with solid poise on the nipple of a flat but slightly rounded rock. If anyone sat, like Aymer, on the bench and stared for long enough it could seem the block was hovering an inch above the world. It had a tarred cross on its side.

‘So that’s the Cradle Rock,’ Aymer said, pointing.

‘What is the Cradle Rock?’

‘A rock that moves when it is pushed. Let’s go and see. I think we can afford the time.’ Even Aymer couldn’t pass it by.

They found a way between granite slabs marked by tarred arrows and climbed to the rounded platform where the Cradle Rock rested on its pivot. Reaching it wasn’t as easy as it looked. Aymer couldn’t find footholds. He had to accept the sailor’s hand around his wrist, and then his palm against his bottom. The Rock, they saw, was not a square on every side. Its hidden part was thinner and irregular. Ralph clambered up twelve feet or so and soon was standing on its summit, testing where the balance was. But Cradle Rock was so exactly poised that Ralph’s weight only deadened it. He couldn’t make it move. Both men searched the two sides where they could find safe footholds. At one point, on the southern face, the stone was worn away. The feet and shoulders of a thousand visitors had rubbed it bare.

‘Try here,’ Ralph said.

‘I’ll need both arms.’ Aymer shook off his sling and threw it to the ground. His shoulder didn’t hurt at all although his arm was a little stiff from its confinement in his coat. The wind picked up the sling and turned it once or twice, then took it on a seagull flight inland.

They put their backs against the naked stone, wedged their feet and pushed. At first their task seemed hopeless. But on their third and fourth attempts they sensed the softness of the mass. They moved across a foot or two and tried once more. Again the Rock seemed to give a quarter-inch against their backs. They found a rhythm to their exertions, with Ralph, experienced at team-work on the Belle, calling out, ‘And push! Let-her-go. And push! Let-her-go.’ The quarter-inch expanded on each push, and soon the Cradle Rock made grinding sounds as it ascended and declined at its own pace. Ralph and Aymer were redundant now. They stepped back to a safer spot and watched as eighty tons dipped and rose like a child’s cradle, with a displacement at its outer edges of nine or ten inches. Ralph was laughing at the joy of it. And Aymer, too, had seldom felt such unselfish pleasure. With just their backs, and half a dozen curses from the American, and some barks from Whip, they had rocked the grandest boulder on the coast. And left it rocking.

They were too pleased, at first, to feel the snow. But soon the Cradle Rock, its motion halting imperceptibly, was capped in white. They wanted to stay where they were until the Cradle was at peace. But the snow came driving in too thickly; soft snow, not wet. It fell inertly for a few minutes and then was taken up by a gusty wind. Both men were badly provided against such weather. They had no hats or gloves. Only Aymer’s tarpaulin coat was waterproof.

They climbed down to the path and left the Cradle Rock to tremble in the snow, unwitnessed. Ralph was too cold to talk. Aymer was too nervous and elated to stay quiet. He asked about the seaman’s family, but couldn’t tell if Ralph had heard. He gave his solo verdict on the Bowes, on ‘rocks that rock’, on emigration, the American ‘language’, slavery, the beneficial properties of sea air, everything except the aching wetness of his knees and calves and boots. He pointed at and named the trees, the rocks, the fleeing birds, until there was nothing left to see or name excepting snow. Their path had disappeared. Their legs and faces nagged with cold. Their clothes and hair turned white. They couldn’t see the sea. It boiled with pilchards which would, at least, be safe until the Sabbath ended. On this God-flinching coast it was bad luck to catch or eat a Sunday fish. But then — at midnight — all the boats would put to sea for this godsend of oily flesh. It wouldn’t matter that it snowed. Snow can’t settle on the sea. They’d shoot their nets into the lanes of pilchards and pack their stomachs, lamps and purses with the catch. ‘Meat, money and light, All in one night.’ And what a night, for fishermen! Snow. Pilchards. Floating cows. The flotsam of the Belle. And twenty yards below the Cradle Rock the sea-logged, bloated body of a man. Not the African. He has his first experience of snow. But Nathaniel Rankin, the Bostonian, drowned for almost two days now, and ready for the nets.