The Guineaman Read online

  The wind, giving them a slant to the south and west, was light enough to rock the Enterprize with a gentle motion and Kite slept soundly for the rest of that night. When he woke and went on deck the world seemed transformed and the moment suddenly lifted his spirits. By nature he was a cheerful, if thoughful soul, not much given to fits of the blue-devils, even during the most tedious days of his young manhood. Sunshine danced upon a sea which was thereby transformed into a bright and sparkling green. Gulls abounded, with black auks, their wings thrumming in a blur of effort, skimmed the sea as they beat their way shorewards where the stacks of Holy Island rose on their larboard quarter. Beyond, he could see the mountains of Caernarvon upon which the winter snow still lay. The poignant sight of those distant summits, so like the pikes and fells of his native Cumbria, both cheered and depressed him. The notion of departure was born heavily in upon him, of an uncertain future and of what he was leaving forever. Yet Kite took comfort from the sight, seeing in it a valediction, almost a blessing from fate and he recalled again his innocence. Whatever perversion of the truth the Hebblewhites had peddled, and, he thought in the security of the outward-bound Enterprize, whatever fate held in store, he knew he was guiltless. At this point in his reflections he staggered, fetching up against the lee main pin-rail, feeling for the first time the growing discomfort of the ship’s motion as she met a heavier swell rolling up from the south west.

  ‘You’ve yet to get your sea-legs, Mr Kite,’ a voice called, and he turned to see Captain Makepeace on his quarterdeck.

  ‘Yes sir,’ Kite replied, making his way gingerly across the deck as a patter of spray swept aft from the weather bow.

  ‘You will. In a day or so you will be rolling with the gait of a hardened sea-jack, as comfortable with the motion as the rest of these lubbers.’ Makepeace paused, studying the Enterprize’s newest officer, as if for the first time. ‘Has Gerard told you of your duties as surgeon?’

  ‘Well, Captain Makepeace, he has acquainted me with the fact that I am to attend the sick and to hold a daily meeting for those of the company wishing to consult me with their ills, but so far…’ Kite felt a strange queasiness and a prickling sweat break out on his skin.

  ‘Well, you’ll be among the sick yourself for a while, I daresay,’ Makepeace broke in, ‘and then you will be called upon to provide mercury and potassium permanganate for the lues and clap.’ Makepeace gestured forward. The men of the watch were hauling the foretack down to the weather bumpkin as Gerard supervised them trimming the yards to an alteration of course. ‘Several of these wasters will have poxed themselves in Liverpool, devil take it…’

  ‘Captain Makepeace,’ Kite broke in with a sudden urgency, ‘you should know that I have no certificate…. I am not a proper surgeon…’

  Makepeace stepped towards Kite and took his arm, turning him to leeward and propelling him none too gently to the rail, bending to his ear. ‘Mr Kite, you should know that I am sufficiently persuaded that you can accomplish the duties of a surgeon well enough. A man who can stitch up a woman’s backside and pop mercury into a sailor’s gob will do the duty of a surgeon in a Guineaman tolerably well. Besides, I myself was once a surgeon, yes, yes, don’t look so damned surprised, ’tis a necessary qualification, like that of sailing as mate, for a man to command a Guinea-bound ship. Providing you have sailed your two voyages as mate or sawbones, you may yourself become master. You will have papers enough then even if Surgeon’s Hall has no present recollection of your existence. Besides, Mr Kite, a guinea or two will suffice to obtain the papers you seek and the Custom House in Liverpool is not aware that your cost that sum.’

  Kite frowned, comprehension dawning upon him slowly. ‘You mean you have lodged false papers to the effect that I am a surgeon…’

  ‘I would not put it quite that strongly, Mr Kite, Makepeace said dryly, ‘you will be competent enough when this voyage is over, that is for sure. Provided you survive it, of course.’

  Later, in the small lobby off which the cabins of the Enterprize’s officers led and which served them as a wardroom, he quizzed Gerard. The first mate, or lieutenant as he was styled, for the Enterprize bore a dozen guns and had been a privateer during the last war, belched discreetly behind his fist, dabbed at lips with a napkin and regarded his questioner over a glass. They had dined well on fresh provisions and Gerard was in an expansive mood. He was not prone to the megrims that bedevilled sea-officers just fresh from the shore where they had left the ordinary comforts of life which even the meanest cottager took for granted. On the contrary, he viewed the coming voyage with some relish, seeing in it both peril and opportunity. Of a somewhat mercurial temperament, Mr Gerard was, at that moment inclined to be friendly.

  ‘Well, Kite, you are a stranger among us indeed, I suppose you know what a Guineaman is?’

  Kite shrugged. ‘A vessel destined to trade upon the coast of Guinea, which I had supposed was somewhere in Africa.’

  Gerard nodded. ‘Well done. You are not a complete ignoramus. And what then?’ The emphasis on the adjective suggested Gerard suspected Kite’s phoney status and he faltered in his response.

  ‘Well, er, we return home with the produce of the country. Elephant’s teeth, I imagine, spices, jewels and, er, the skins of tigers. What else can net a humble surgeon the one hundred guineas that Captain Makepeace assured me… Come sir, you are laughing at me! You have the advantage, damn it. have I speculated foolishly?’

  ‘Only moderately so,’ Gerard said, leaning forward and refilling Kite’s glass. ‘There are no tigers in Africa, though you might stumble across a leopard should you prove unlucky, but the chief error is to suppose that we return home. First we go to Brazil or the Indies with the, er, the freight we take aboard on the coast…’

  ‘That is the Guinea coast?’

  ‘Just so.’

  ‘And this freight consists not of elephant’s teeth, but of something else?’

  ‘Well we shall almost certainly ship a quantity of tusks, but no, this is not the chief commodity from which your profit of one hundred guineas arises. Your principal task, and hence the importance of every Guineaman carrying a surgeon, is not to minister to the lubbers forward who ship as seamen, though you will be expected to lose as few of the fellows as possible, but to act in behalf of the blackamores who come aboard…’

  ‘Blackamores?’ Kite frowned. ‘You mean – slaves.’ The truth dawned upon him. His preoccupation had prevented his enquiring the reason for the quantities of chain, shackles and leg irons that he had seen about the ship, vaguely supposing them to be object of export, but now Gerard nodded.

  ‘Blackamores, negros, men as well as women…’ Gerard leered unpleasantly, ‘and their welfare, my dear Kite, will be your sole concern. Furthermore, may I be permitted to add, solicitude for the preservation of all of them is paramount. You will find them well treated aboard the Enterprize not, as you may have heard happens in other bottoms, abused and beaten and thrown overboard. They are a most valuable commodity and the captain will have had to purchase them with a not inconsiderable laying out of money, trade goods and rum. Moreover, my dear Kite, and of the utmost significance to you as surgeon, the dues payable to the majority of our ship’s company will be dependent upon the highest number reaching the markets in the Brazils or the Indies.’

  ‘So the burden of this enterprise falls upon me?’ Kite’s pun was involuntary.

  Gerard tossed off his glass and rose to his feet. ‘Squarely, if not fairly, my dear Kite, though as you will discover, Captain Makepeace takes a very great, no a very personal interest in the welfare, if indeed that is the absolutely correct term, for the preservation of the blacks. And now forgive me, I have but three hours before being on deck and must get a little sleep.’

  The following evening, somewhere to the north and west of the Isles of Scilly, the Enterprize ran into a gale. For Kite the experience was numbingly humiliating. The incipient queasiness, felt since the ship rounded the Skerries off Anglesey, now burgeoned int
o a violent succession of retching upheavals so persistent that his throat was rasped raw and the muscles of his gut seemed incapable of anything but a furious gagging. He was revolted by his own stench, yet powerless to overcome his lassitude and lay prostrate as the motion of the ship made his head spin. In his lonely agony, he was reminded of once having been made drunk. He had been only ten years old when Colin Hebblewhite had forced ale on him and reduced him to an intoxicated stupor from which he took two days to recover. His father had been uncensorious, and treated him as though poisoned, remonstrating with old Hebblewhite to little avail.

  ‘’Twas but a prank, Maister Kite,’ the farmer had laughed, ‘boys will be boys, d’ye know.’

  Mr Kite had told his son not to keep the company of the Hebblewhites, but it was they who constantly pressed themselves upon William Kite, seeing him as fit for guying and bullying. Kite had been of the same age as their own young sister Susan, and had sat beside her at the little dame school they were favoured with in the village. Susan was the first girl he had kissed and later, the first his questing and curious hands had fondled when she possessed growing breasts. They had other things in common. Both their mothers had died in childbed, Susan’s at her own and Kite’s at Helen’s birth. Kite and Susan were equally sensitive to this loss, but the subtle distinctions of class obtruded. Joseph Hebblewhite successfully farmed rented land, held learning cheap and needed his children, particularly his strapping lads, to work his land; Jaybez Kite practised his quasi-profession amid a small library of battered volumes, patiently acquired, some in payment for simples, others bought at Carlisle, or Cockermouth. The Hebblewhites maintained a rough claim to social distinction, though it was the Kite children who played at the vicarage.

  At puberty the lives of Susan and Kite had divided. He had gone to the grammar school at Cockermouth, she continued her work in her father’s dairy where she had found her charms useful not merely to pleasure her old classmate. Jealous, but at the same time growing away from the narrow confinements of the village, Kite had sought a new purpose in life. Friendless and lacking invitations, he found himself unable to participate in the social life of Cockermouth. Cousin Frank, older and more cocksure, had done better, though he had not won any great distinction in the little town and, in any case, left the grammar school before William. In due course Kite returned to the village, content with his own company and interests, if somewhat introverted, and relatively untroubled by his solitary existence. The village had not changed in his absence, but it seemed to the metamorphosed Kite that it had. Susan was a comely and confident young woman, her brothers prospering boors who fell to their old ways of taunting the now lettered Kite. The bullying that he had forgotten or cast aside amid the remnant memories of childhood, was now insufferably insulting to him. Wanting employment he had found himself a half-hearted, unindentured apprentice to his father’s trade, a runner of errands and messages, still living off his father’s charity though it was assumed that in due course he would be as competent an apothecary as his parent.

  Kite’s lack of interest in his assumed career was well-known to his father, but the older Kite was too conscientious and attentive a man not to fill his entire day with his own business, never quite understanding a son who seemed to his well-ordered mind, more than a trifle wayward. The senior Kite was also unable to remonstrate with his son, for the youth possessed too disquieting a likeness to his dead mother for the widower to unleash anger in the empty house. Kite’s father mourned ceaselessly, figuring the lad would come round in the end, while Kite himself suffered a long, if well-meant, neglect.

  Insofar as son was like father, the younger Kite’s enthusiasm was for the natural world. But it was not the ground-foraging botanizing of the apothecary’s necessaries that drew the young man to his native fells. Kite loved the open air of the uplands and the soaring flight of the buzzards. He loved the bottled screech of the moorland grouse and the upward whirr of the brown wings; he felt his heart thunder whenever he saw the lordly peregrine stoop like a Jovian bolt and shatter the fat bird into an explosion of feathers. He was a good shot too, with a long-barrelled musket of uncertain manufacture and had once sent a ball whistling damnably close to the head of Philip Hebblewhite whom he had met one day on the western slopes of Dander Pike. Kite’s motive had been more than fury at the insults offered him by the lout, but a fierce objection to the oaf’s presence in that high and lonely place. For the fells were where Kite sought solace, and he had tramped thither on an expedition that had lasted a week and had had a search-party trudging through a night’s mist after him when he learned of Susan’s first unfaithfulness. Not that Kite had entertained any right to her fidelity, but the unspoken bond of their first trembling sexual questing had, it seemed to him, united them. Kite felt Susan’s spurning with an acute pain.

  Beyond the vague notion that he would succeed his father, Kite’s life became aimless. Only his odd ability to bind up wounded animals was regarded with any wonder by the few people who witnessed it. For the most part, he was regarded as a disappointment, a feckless and idle waster, slowly but surely acquiring the reputation of being the young man who first turned Susan Hebblewhite into the trollop she had since become.

  Such rumours feed on bird seed in a small community and Kite knew that there would be those that would readily believe he had killed Susan. The incident when he had shot at Phil Hebblewhite would be adduced as evidence of a violent nature. That the young woman had been pregnant was beyond doubt, that she had been killed by a jealous lover was also likely. Circumstantially, William Kite was known to roam the moors for unrequited love of her, after he had received an education in Cockermouth and become too grand for the village. They had all heard how he had been seen tending her little dog, making calves eye at her all the while, though she was no better than the male members of her family, growing up without a mother. She had had it coming to her, of course, but that did not make the matter right, and someone should swing for it.

  Kite had done it, no doubt about it. He had skidaddled, had he not? It had to be him; that it should be someone else, someone still at large in the village, was unthinkable.

  But Kite had had no hand in the affair. He had fondled Susie, as she him, but not for more months than it takes to make a child, and the tending of her dog almost a year earlier had been the last time they had spoken at length. Not quite though; a week or so later, some three months ago now, he had caught her in the churchyard with a man who had made off in the dusk.

  She had laughed at him, reminding him that he too had played with her, though he had lacked the courage to fulfil matters ‘like’, she taunted him, ‘a real man’. He had blushed foolishly. Susie had been the first and only woman to grasp his eager manhood and the first to hold the sticky results of her motions as she stirred him to uncontrollable passion. And though he had probed her in a reciprocal act, her ministrations to him, pleaded for for months afterwards, increased her power over him. Thus the wounding she had given him later in the churchyard stung him the more. It seemed she had matured and, where once she had been so unlike them, had grown up with the offensive character of her brothers. Angry, he had shunned her for months before that last, tragic encounter in her father’s barn.

  As he lay reeking in his cot, watching the deckhead and the beams swing about him and feeling the endless churning of his heaving gut, he remembered again the events of that dreadful afternoon. It was strangely as if he had never recalled it before with such precision, as though his earlier terrors had missed some details in the overwhelming inflammation of mental anguish. It was as if the images that now came back to him had in some strange way been withheld, frozen by the wild reflexes of action, of self-preservation and escape. He now knew that he had not merely run from a scene of brutal and bloody murder, but from a place of unimaginable horror.

  Now, with perfect clarity, he recalled that between Susie’s white thighs there had been something other than the blood of her apparent evisceration. The vertical pitchf
ork had been planted not in Susie’s voided belly or in her spread legs, but had transfixed the thing that lay between them.

  Kite had run not so much from the bloodily bespattered and twitching corpse of the murdered woman, but from the monster she had given birth to.

  Chapter Three

  The Egyptians

  It was three days before Kite made his renewed appearance on deck and then he endured a last humiliation, being told by Gerard who popped his head into Kite’s tiny cabin, that only a surgeon would have been suffered to lie in vile indolence for so long. Had he occupied any other station in the ship, Gerard explained with heavy emphasis, he would have been turned out to keep his watch.

  Yet Kite, finding himself so much better, bore the jibe without protest. He was, after all, a neophyte and although the wind remained strong and the ship laboured with a creaking and a groaning, he now knew his condition was not fatal and he seemed to be as durable as the ship herself. The certainty overwhelmed him with relief. The very vastness of the heaving Atlantic when he finally stared out over it, was too immense a thing to be affected by the hue and cry of a handful of Cumbrians. Even the notion of the island of Britain with its bewigged judges and slavering jurymen seemed faintly ridiculous, somehow so small as to be insubstantial amid this eternal, heaving greyness. He felt at last that the matter of Susan Hebblewhite’s unhappy end belonged far astern, beyond the horizon in a world whose very existence was now doubtful. So full of the unknown was the forseeable future, that it too offered no identifiable threat to Kite. He was young enough not to be fearful of the thought of death and saw only boundless possible opportunities. He had run away to sea, and the security of that trite phrase now struck him with an accuracy that he had never before considered.

  Bracing himself against the working of the brig, he clasped a rope that led upwards amid what appeared to him a tangle of other such ropes, to be lost against the grey and racing scud as the brig’s two masts and their yards crossed and recrossed the sky in a dizzying series of arabesques. As he stood in his shirtsleeves, he muttered his triumph to himself. ‘I have run away to sea.’