The North Water

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Brownlee listens to the surgeon’s arguments, hoping keenly as he does so that they are wrong. He has no desire to release McKendrick. The carpenter is a convincing culprit, and if he is released (which is the end Sumner seems, for some mystifying reason of his own, to seek), there is no one else aboard the ship who can take his place without a deal of trouble and complication.

“A scrawny cunt like Hannah can be strangled with one hand easy enough, I’d say,” Brownlee argues, “thumb or no thumb. McKendrick isn’t tall, but he’s plenty strong enough for that.”

“Not with the bruises patterned as they were on Hannah’s neck, though. The twin thumb marks were as clear as day.”

“I don’t remember thumb marks. I remember a good many bruises, but there is no way on earth of knowing which particular fingers caused which particular marks.”

“Before the burial, I made sketches of Hannah’s injuries,” Sumner says. “I thought a court might want to see them if it comes to a trial. Look here.” He puts a leather-bound sketchbook on the table in front of the captain and opens it to the relevant pages. “Do you see what I mean now? Two large oval bruises, one above the other one, there and there.”

He points. Brownlee looks, then rubs his nose and scowls. He is irritated by the surgeon’s conscientiousness. What business does he have making ink sketches of a boy’s dead body?

“The boy was sewn up in his shroud already. How could you have sketched him?”

“I asked the sailmaker to loosen the stitches, then had them tightened again while the making off was going on. It was easy enough to do.”

Brownlee turns the pages of the sketchbook and winces. There is a detailed rendering of the boy’s damaged and ulcerated rectum and a labeled diagram of his broken ribs.

“These pretty pictures of yours prove bugger all,” he says. “McKendrick was seen making advances to the boy, and he is a known and notorious sodomite. Those are the solid facts of the matter. Anything else is guesswork and fancy.”

“The thumb of McKendrick’s left hand is damaged beyond repair,” Sumner says. “It is physically impossible for him to have committed this crime.”

“And you are free to express that opinion to the magistrate as soon as we return to England. Perhaps he’ll be more convinced by it than I am, but in the meantime, while we are at sea and I’m the captain, McKendrick stays where he is.”

“As soon as we land back in England the real killer will leave the ship and disappear from sight, you do realize that? He will never be caught.”

“Should I arrest the entire fucking crew on suspicion of murder? Is that what you recommend?”

“If it’s not McKendrick who killed the boy, it’s most likely Henry Drax. He’s lying about the carpenter to save himself.”

“You have been reading too many penny dreadfuls, Mr. Sumner, I swear to it.”

“Let me at least examine Drax as I did McKendrick. If he’s a murderer, then it’s still not too late for the signs to be apparent.”

Brownlee shifts sideways in his chair, tugs down on his stubbled earlobe, and sighs. Although the surgeon is certainly annoying, there is something admirable in his persistence. He is a dogged little fucker all in all.

“Very well,” he says. “If you must. Although if Drax objects to being poked and prodded, I’m not so inclined to press the issue.”

When Drax is called for, he makes no objection. He drops his britches in front of them and stands there grinning. The captain’s cabin fills with a stink of stale urine and potted meat.

“At your pleasure, Mr. Sumner,” Drax says, giving the surgeon a coquettish wink.

Sumner, breathing only through his mouth now, bends and examines, with the aid of a magnifying glass, the dangling parabola of Drax’s glans.

“Pull back the foreskin please,” Sumner says.

Drax does as he is asked. Sumner nods.

“You have the crabs,” he tells him.

“Aye, I usually do have them. But that int a hanging offense now, is it, Mr. Sumner?”

Brownlee chuckles. Sumner shakes his head and then stands up.

“No visible chancres,” he says. “Show me both your hands now.”

Drax holds them out. Sumner looks at the palms, then turns them over. They are as black and rough as lumps of pig iron.

“The cut on your hand has healed, I see.”

“That wont anything,” he says. “Just a scratch.”

“And you have full use of all your digits, I suppose.”

“Of my what?”

“Fingers and thumbs.”

“I do indeed, thanks God.”

“Take off your peacoat and roll up your sleeves.”

“Do you doubt me, Mr. Sumner?” Drax asks as he tugs his arms out of the jacket and starts to unbutton his shirtfront. “Do you doubt me when I tell what I saw by the deckhouse?”

“McKendrick denies it. You know he does.”

“But McKendrick is a sodomite, and what is the word of a sodomite worth in a court of law? Not too much, I’d say.”

“I have good reason to believe him.”

Drax nods at this and continues to undress. He takes his shirt off and his flannels. His chest is dark-pelted, broad, and stoutly muscled; his belly is proudly bulbous, and both his arms are coated in a checker-worked swirl of blue tattoos.

“If you believe the word of that cunt McKendrick, then you must fancy I’m a liar.”

“I don’t know what you are.”

“I’m an honorable man, Mr. Sumner,” Drax says, pressing down gradually on the word honorable as if honor itself is a complex and esoteric notion, but one he is proud to have mastered. “That’s what I am. I do my duty, and I have no cause to feel any shame because of it.”

“What do you intend by that, Drax?” Brownlee asks him. “We’re all honorable men here, I think, or honorable enough at least for the requirements of our calling, which is a dirty enough kind of business, as you know.”

“I think the surgeon gets my drift,” Drax says. (He is standing fully naked now — thick-limbed, fistic, unashamed. His face is burned brown and his hands are black from toil, but the rest of his skin — where it is visible beneath the mats of dark hair and the panoply of crude tattooing — is a pure pinkish white like the skin of a babe.) “Him and me are old pals, after all. I helped him search his way back to his cabin after that famous night in Lerwick. You likely won’t remember, Mr. Sumner, since you were fast asleep at the time, but me and Cavendish had a good look around before we left to make sure your necessaries was safe and sound just as they should be. Nothing disturbed or out of place.”

Sumner, staring at Drax, instantly understands. They have rooted through his sea chest, read the discharge papers, seen the looted ring.

Brownlee is looking at him curiously.

“Do you know what the fuck he’s talking about?” he says.

Sumner shakes his head. He casts his eye unthinkingly over Drax’s arms and torso, breathing carefully as he does so, pushing back against the inner uproar.

“Do you doubt my knowledge or competency as a surgeon?” he says (sounding preposterous even to himself). “I have served an apprenticeship and have certificates from the Queen’s College of Belfast.”

Drax smiles at this, then laughs. His yellowy cock thickens and twitches noticeably upwards.

“You have your little scrap of paper, Mr. Sumner, and I have mine. Now, which one of those two little scraps of paper weighs the most, I wonder, in an English court of law? I never did learn my letters, so I’m not the one to say, but a good lawyer would likely have an opinion, I suppose.”

“I have my evidence,” Sumner says. “It is not a matter of my opinion or my reputation. Who I am, or who I have been, is not the question.”

“And what evidence do you hold against me?” Drax asks more fiercely. “Tell me that.”

“We are not accusing you of any crime,” Brownlee says. “That’s not why we are here. McKendrick is still down in the hold in chains, remember. Sumner is merely curious about some details of the outrage, that is all.”

Drax ignores Brownlee and continues staring at Sumner.

“What evidence do you hold against me?” he says again. “Because if you have none, then it’s thee against me, I’d say. My solemn word, sworn on the Bible, against yours.”

Sumner steps backwards and digs his hands into his pockets.

“You are lying about McKendrick,” he says. “I know very well you are.”

Drax turns to Brownlee and taps his finger to his ear.

“Is the ship’s surgeon a little hard of hearing, Captain?” he says. “I keep asking him the same fucking question and he don’t seem to notice it at all.”

Brownlee scowls, then licks his lips. He is beginning to regret agreeing to Sumner’s request. Drax may be something of a savage, but that is no good reason to accuse him of child murder. It is hardly surprising he has taken the hump.

“What evidence do we hold against Drax in this matter, Sumner? Tell us now, please.”

Sumner looks down at the floor between his feet for a moment and then up at the cabin’s pitched glass skylight.

“I have no evidence against Henry Drax,” he confesses flatly. “None at all.”

“Then let’s call an end to this nonsense,” Brownlee says. “Get your fucking clothes back on and get to work.”

Drax gazes dismissively at Sumner for a long moment, then reaches down and lifts his britches from the cabin floor. Each of his movements is considered and powerful; his body, stinking and rotund as it is, clagged and filthy in its folds and creases, possesses a ghastly voluptuousness nonetheless. Sumner looks on without watching. He is thinking of the medicine chest and the delicious pleasures it contains. He is thinking of the Achaeans and the Trojans and the meddlings of Athena and Ares. McKendrick will hang for sure, Sumner realizes. This crime requires a villain and he has been appointed to the post. He will dangle and kick at the end of a rope. There is no way out now, no Hera to pluck him from the scaffold.

Drax bends and then straightens, prods his leg into the hole of his britches and pulls them up his thighs. His broad back and pungent arse are patched with fur; his socked feet are blockish and simian. Brownlee looks on impatiently. The outrage is behind him now, and his mind is on other things. McKendrick will swing for what he did, and that is that. What matters now is the sinking of the ship, which is a tricky business to get right. She needs to go down slow enough to ensure that all the cargo can be saved, but not so slow that any last-gasp repairs are possible. And there is no way of being sure beforehand how the ice will behave and how close or far away Campbell will be able to plausibly maneuver the Hastings. The underwriters are alive these days to various kinds of trickery; if they sense a conspiracy, they will descend on the crew in port and commence offering them rewards for useful information. If it is not done right, he could end up in a cell in Hull jail rather than enjoying his retirement strolling on the strands of Bridlington.

“What’s that gash on your arm?” he says to Drax. “Have you cut yourself again? Sumner will give you a plaster for that if you ask him sweetly, I’m sure.”

“It’s nothing,” Drax says. “A scratch with a harpoon, that’s all.”

“Looks worse than nothing to me,” Brownlee says.

Drax shakes his head and picks his pea coat off the table.

“Let me see it,” Sumner says.

“It’s nothing,” Drax says again.

“It’s your good right arm, and I can see from here it’s swollen and weeping,” Brownlee says. “If you can’t hurl a harpoon or pull an oar, you’ll be no earthly fucking use to me. Show it to the surgeon now.”

Drax hesitates a moment, then holds out his arm.

The wound, high on the forearm near the elbow, half hidden by hair and ink, is narrow but deep, and the site around it is severely swollen. The skin, when Sumner touches it, is tense and hot. An areola of green pus has gathered around and below the scabbing. And the scabbing itself is sticky and raw.

“The purulence needs to be lanced and the remnants drawn out with a poultice,” Sumner says. “Why didn’t you come to me before now?”

“It don’t trouble me,” Drax says. “’Tis just a nick.”

Sumner goes to his cabin and returns with a lancet, which he heats for a minute over the candle flame. He takes a piece of lint padding and presses it against the wound, then makes a brief incision with the lancet. A green-pink mixture of blood and pus spills out and soaks into the padding. Sumner presses harder and the wound exudes yet more of the foul liquid. Drax stands immobile and silent. The red and swollen skin has flattened out, but there remains a strange and singular lump.

“There’s something lodged inside there,” Sumner says. “Look here.”

Brownlee approaches and peers over the surgeon’s shoulder.

“Might be a splinter of wood,” he says, “or possibly a piece of bone.”

“You say you did this with a harpoon?” Sumner asks.

“That’s right,” Drax says.

Sumner presses at the small lump with his fingertip. It slides for a moment beneath the skin and then emerges white and blood-covered from the wound’s opening.

“What the fuck is that?” Brownlee says.

Sumner catches the object in the soiled padding and rubs it clean. He looks at it only once and knows immediately. He glances quickly at Drax, then shows the object to Brownlee. It is a child’s tooth, pale and grain-like, broken off at the root.

Drax snatches his arm away. He looks at the tooth, still in Sumner’s hand, and then at Brownlee.

“That thing int mine,” he says.

“It was in your arm.”

“It int mine.”

“It’s evidence,” Sumner says. “That’s what it is. And it’s all the evidence we need to see you hanged.”

“They won’t hang me,” Drax says. “I’ll see you both in hell afore that happens.”

Brownlee steps to the cabin door, opens it, and calls out for the first mate. The three men eye one another carefully. Drax is still only half dressed, his chest is bare, and he has his shirt and pea coat clutched in his left hand.

“I won’t be chained neither,” he says. “Not by cunts like you two.”

Brownlee shouts again for Cavendish. Drax glances around the cabin for any usable weapon. There’s a brass sextant lying on the table to his right and, in a pinewood rack on the wall beside him, a spyglass and a heavy whalebone walking stick tipped with an ebony pommel. He doesn’t move or reach for them yet. He calmly awaits his moment.

They hear the clatter and curse of Cavendish descending from the deck and making his way through steerage. When he steps into the cabin and the others turn towards him, Drax grabs the whalebone off the rack and swings it directly into Brownlee’s forehead, striking him just above the left eye socket and breaking the skull. He pulls it back to swing again, but Cavendish grabs hold of his arm. The two men struggle mutely for a moment. When Drax drops the whalebone, Cavendish reaches down for it and the harpooner grabs him by the hair and brings his knee up hard into his face. Cavendish drops sideways onto the rag carpet, groaning and drooling blood. Sumner, watching on, has yet to move. He is still holding the lancet in one hand and the dead child’s tooth in the other.

“What’s the point of this?” he says. “You can’t escape from here.”

“I’ll take my chances in a whaleboat,” Drax says. “I won’t go back to England to be hanged.”

He picks the whalebone off the floor and hefts it for a moment. The ebony pommel is slick with Brownlee’s blood.

“And I’ll be taking that tooth off you afore I leave,” he says.

Sumner shakes his head, then steps forwards and puts the tooth and the lancet down on the tabletop between them. He glances upwards through the skylight but no one is there. Why is Black not on the quarterdeck as usual? he wonders. Where is Otto?

“You can’t kill us all,” he says.

“I ’spect I can kill enough of you though. Now turn about.”

He waves with the whalebone to indicate his meaning. After a moment’s pause, Sumner does as he is told. While Drax quickly dresses himself, the surgeon stands staring at the dark wood paneling of the cabin wall. On top of the skull, he wonders, or off to one side? One blow or two? If he calls out now, it is possible that someone might hear him. But he doesn’t call out. He closes his eyes. He waits for the fatal blow to fall.

There is a sudden quick commotion outside. A loud rattle of voices. And then, as the cabin door flies open, the unreal roar of a shotgun blast. Dust and fragments of the ceiling cascade around Sumner’s head. He swivels about and sees Black standing in the doorway aiming the second barrel directly at Drax’s chest.

“Give the stick to Sumner now,” Black tells him.

Drax doesn’t move. His mouth is hanging open and his tongue and teeth are wetly visible.

“I can kill you now,” Black says, “or I can shoot your bollocks off and let you bleed out for a while. Whichever you prefer.”

After a pause, Drax nods, smiles faintly, then hands the stick to Sumner. Black steps into the cabin and looks down at Brownlee and Cavendish, unconscious and bleeding on the floor.

“What the fuck have you been doing here?” he says.

Drax shrugs and looks down at the tooth lying on the table where the surgeon left it.

“That tooth int none of mine,” he says. “The surgeon dug it out my arm, but how it got there is the gravest kind of mystery.”