Chapter 34
They passed by together (Psalm 48)
As for man, his days are as grass: as a flower of the field, so he flourisheth. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more (Psalm 103)
The days passed, and the weather grew warm. Rosella discarded the stick and began to limp about on her own, and it was not long before she was able to join him when he went rabbiting or egging, though he would not let her climb along the ledges while the neat kittiwakes whirled round his head. He often thought that one small slip, one careless move, would send him crashing down and all this would have been for nothing and she'd have no one to look after her, so he moved slowly and thought about each handhold.
Crows arrived, and a jackdaw or two. They hopped about the meadow slope, and once Pert found that they'd pecked and pecked at a small rabbit until it died, and then fed upon it messily. After that he drove them off whenever he saw them. They were his rabbits, and no one else was going to eat them.
Their exploration took them further and further afield as Rosella grew stronger, and they began to make some interesting discoveries. By climbing to the very top of the combe they found they could get down into another one just like it, that ran down to the south of theirs but faced less towards the sea and more along the coast. There were several sloping meadows here, one below the other in terraces, all with their own populations of tame rabbits, and a much deeper and more forested gully with a substantial stream at the bottom. Here birds twittered and flitted that were not seabirds at all, and swallows swept overhead, and a hawk patrolled high above. There were dragonflies over the stream, and Pert looked for demoiselles but couldn't see any. The dragonflies perched on stalks near the water, and arched their tails into the water, then flew on.
From the very top of this combe they could just catch a glimpse of the top of the town. They could see grey roofs glinting in the sun, and patches of black where the fire had been.
“What do you think they're doing?” Rosella wondered. “What are my sisters up to, and who's looking after them?”
“Your mother, I expect. And Floris is probably helping her.”
“I didn't know Floris. Is she nice?”
“Yes. And she's in love with the curate, and he's in love with her. I think he couldn't pluck up the courage, so she just told him they were going to get married. She's a managing sort of person.”
“I should think he needs managing.”
“He does. My mother did it a bit, but now Floris is in charge.”
She thought for a while, watching the roofs in the distance. “You know, when my father's head came off I didn't mind at all. Do you think that's awful of me? But he wasn't very nice, I don't think. I never liked him. He was very taken up with Grubb, and he used to shout at Mother. He always did that, even when I was small, and she never shouted back. They'll be better off without him. I think that's why I kick. I never want to be like her, frightened.”
“You won't be.”
“And you'll never shout.” She smiled at him, and tucked her arm in his. “Let's never go back, shall we?”
“No, let's not. I'd like to see Fenestra one more time, though.”
“She's got her Billy, hasn't she? I didn't really know him, just through the grating. He seemed nice.”
“He is. He's not scared of anything, and he worships Fenestra.”
“Is she up to it? I mean, can she take being worshipped, and not be cruel to him?”
“Oh yes. She ... sort of ... dotes. Is that the right word? She dotes on him. She calls it lusting, but really it's doting.”
She laughed. “She's a bit young to know about lusting! How old is she?”
“She'll be fourteen soon.”
“Much too young. You have to be at least sixteen to know anything about that.”
“Do you, then? You're nearly sixteen.”
“Ooh, look at that pretty plant!” she exclaimed, running to the rock face and examining a small, orange-leaved plant growing in a crack. “It's a roseroot, I think.”
“You're changing the subject.”
“Yes, I am, aren't I? I'm not ready to talk about some things yet.”
“There are some things to talk about, then?”
“Yes.” They stood very close together, and she looked at the plant, not him. “We will. Just not quite yet.”
The days grew longer and warmer, and the sun stayed for most of each afternoon on the patch of level ground in front of the cave. Rosella's limp had gone, and the swelling on her face had subsided though one place on her temple would always be a little red. She moved lightly and well, and could leap from rock to rock as well as he. They went up the combe and down into the next almost every day, and found some plants that could be eaten.
There were green leaves of watercress waving under the surface of the stream, that tasted fiery but pleasant when mixed with other leaves from the banks, almost like lettuce but with a greener taste. There were still some eggs to be had, and always plenty of rabbits. Their stack of firewood in the cave grew larger for when the nights drew in, and they made a much more elaborate bed of branches and bracken and dried grasses. Clothing was still a problem, but they were rarely cold. The west wind was warm, and the sun shone each day, and down on the sparkling sea they could see fishing boats as the town returned to normality.
Rosella's dress was gradually falling into total ruin, and one day she became impatient of the tatters that remained and took it off, and went round in her drawers all day. Pert found it hard to keep his eyes from her breasts, and in the afternoon she declared that she wanted to wash her drawers and took them off too.
“If I'm going to be like this,” she said, “so should you. Your clothes could do with a wash as well,” so they went bare-skinned to the stream and washed themselves and their clothes on the stones, and laid the clothes out on the rocks to dry. After that there didn't seem much point putting them on again, so they ran around and hunted like a pair of savages among the rocks where the red valerian bloomed in every crevice. Rosella picked a flower head and put it in her hair.
“Just imagine if they could see us!” she giggled. “Imagine Miss Throstle, and all those other frosty old dames! They'd have a heart attack!”
“It would be old Merridew who had the heart attack,” Pert said. “We could just walk into the classroom and sit down as though nothing was happening, and he'd go red in the face and his head would explode!”
That night they lay in their prickly bed, arms entwined, and watched the bright moon rise over the ocean, making a silver track that reached towards them. A soft chill wind blew into the mouth of the cave, but they were warm.
“I'm just thinking about all the things that happened,” she said.
“The nasty things, and the brave things you did. It all seems a long way off now. How do stories end? This all happened to us, and that's our story. But what happens now?”
He kissed her hair “Stories don't end,” he whispered, “I don't suppose. They go on, but they get boring.”
“Boring sounds good to me. Put your hand there. That's nice.”
There was a moment's silence broken only by the soft crackle of the fire and a fall of ash. “But ours can't end here, not in this cave. It'll be winter soon. We'll freeze, and starve, or get blown away or something.”
Pert grunted. “We'd better make a move, then, before it happens. I climbed up here, so we must be able to get down again if we take our time and go careful. The boat will still be there. We can't go back or we'll be arrested, probably. But we can go north, along the coast, and find somewhere no one knows us.”
“Yes. All right, let's do that. Ooh! What did you do just then?”
“Sorry, I ...”
“No, it was lovely. Do it again. Do it quite a lot.” And she pulled him down on top of her and breathed rather hard in his ear, and he thought he had never felt anything so soft in his life.
It took them three whole days to get down to t
he beach, resting each night when they found enough ground to perch, and two days before that to put their clothes in some sort of order. Pert's shirt and trousers would serve one more turn, but Rosella's dress was a wreck so they cut it and sewed it together with the rabbit bone needle and thread pulled out of the dress itself, and made a passable skirt from it. Then she put Pert's jacket on over the top, and was decent at least.
The climb down was not pleasant, and they went very slowly. Going down was physically less tiring and they were fresh and rested, but it was no safer than coming up. In fact, there were times when it was decidedly more dangerous, and their hearts were in their mouths as their feet slipped and missed their grip, or the gravel fell away beneath them and they clung to each other as a small landslide rattled away into the void.
But with care, and helping each other, and being on the whole quite brave, they made it to the jumble of great rocks at the bottom, and then it was just a long and tiring clamber over and around and through until the little beach lay before them, and the Bight of Benin just as Pert remembered it, and Better Times lying faithfully half in and half out of the water as though she knew they would come back and need her again.
Pert handed Rosella in and pushed off, then jumped in and took up the oars. As he turned the boat he looked back at the Bight of Benin and thought of what lay within. There was still something he had not told Rosella, something that had happened the last time he was there, something he had done, or thought he had done.
He had climbed down into the deckhouse. A ladder led down into a small cabin. In front would be the fish hold, but in this narrow space with two benches along the sides and a table down the middle the crew would have eaten and sheltered when not working on deck. Pert looked down at his feet. The floor of the cabin was gone, just a few cross members remaining, and below he could see straight down into deep water. The Bight of Benin had made it to this safe haven, but the rocks had ripped her bottom out on the way.
He had sat down at the end of one of the benches and put his arms on the table.
“Hello, grandfather,” he had said.
The body sat at the far end on the other side, slumped back in the corner, its head on its chest. It wore the lacy remains of a canvas smock and trousers. In its hand was a knife, the ivory handle intact but the steel blade almost rusted away. In its chest, buried between the yellow ribs, was another.
“I'm Pertinacious, your grandson,” he said.
“Obadiah's boy?” asked the body.
“Yes. I'm not sure what happened to him, but I think he might still be around."
“Ah. Nice little tyke, he was. I was quite fond of him.”
“Why did you go, then? Did you really take the treasure, like they said?”
“Ha!” his grandfather said. “Ha ha! They said that, did they? Well, they would. And they were right. Of course I took it, what do you think? I found out where they'd hid it, under the floor in the church vestry, and I snuck in and lifted it clean as a whistle, and put it in sacks and carried it to me barky and stowed it in the hold. I'd 'a got away with it, too, but for the weather and that stinking little turncoat Teague!”
“He's dead now,” said Pert. “He sailed in here and the waves scrobbled him up.”
“Good. So they should. He did this to me, you know.” His grandfather seemed to point to the knife in his chest without actually moving.
“Why did he do that?”
“He didn't want to share. Greedy, he was, he wanted it all. I got him to help me, you see, I told him where it was and how we was going to lift it, but I needed someone to help carry it and then sail the barky out because the weather was blowing up, and he was a man on his own who'd an eye for money, as I could tell. Ha! So much the worse for me! He had an eye for money all right. He had an eye for his own money, and mine as well, and he jumped down into the cabin and stuck me when I wasn't looking, just as we were coming out the end of the creek.”
His voice was quiet and gravelly, and seemed to come from a long way off, rising up through fathoms of green water lit by sunbeams, where seaweed waved and little fish swam in schools that flashed in the light. It was the voice of a bad man, a naughty man, who had been washed clean by years and the currents. Perhaps that was what happened to you after Davy Jones had done his grisly work. Perhaps it wasn't too bad after all.
“So he got the treasure, then?”
“Nah, he never had it. I wasn't killed, see, so we fought, and I was bigger and heavier than he was, and I fought dirtier. He was just a beginner, and I knocked him over the side and left him behind. But I knew he hadn't drowned because when I looked the dinghy was gone, that we were trailing astern, so I reckon he got to the dinghy and got back to land all right. But I had the treasure.”
“And then you got washed in here?”
“Yes, she's a heavy old girl, the Bight of Benin, too heavy for one man, and the waves was bigger and bigger and before I knew it I was among the rocks and here I ended. And his little pig-sticker was longer than I thought, because I got weaker and weaker and had to come down here and have a little sit, and that was it fer Mascaridus Potts the Pirate!”
“And you were definitely a pirate? Not a fisherman?”
“No, I was a pirate, all right. Learned my trade with Benido, down the Portugee coast and down the Africa coast and right round to the Bight. That's what this barky's named for, the Bight of Benin. A dreadful fever-ridden place that is ... 'Remember, remember the Bight of Benin, There's few that come out, though many go in!' But we had to go in there because that's where the slaves came from. We started as slavers, see, and then after that it was easier to rob the slavers than it was to be one, so we did that.”
“And you weren't a fisherman at all?”
“Oh, I tried. I tried to be respectable. Got married, had a nipper – that's Obadiah, your dad – but it wouldn't stick. I couldn't get on with it. Once the fever's got you, it's got you and you has to obey it, that's how it was with me.”
“So what happened to the treasure?”
“Gone, lad, all gone. The rocks ripped the bottom out of her as she came in, me being weak from losing blood, and not being able to control her, and the spiky rocks went through her bottom and all the treasure fell out. Bloody great candlesticks, and crosses, and holy cups and golden plates and stuff. All gone, all lying down on the bottom somewhere out there, so the little crabbies can sit in 'em, and the pretty little seahorses can admire their own reflections. Very sad.”
His tone brightened, though his face could not. “There was one thing, though, just the one that I'd slipped in me pocket because it was small. Here, you have a feel in my right hand side ... there ... no, the pocket's gone and it's slipped down on the seat. There, you've got it. You can have that. Little present for you. No use to me, not down here. Still, it's quiet ... shut the door on your way out. It gets a bit nippy down here, and I ain't got the flesh to keep me warm like I used to ...”
Pert knew he'd imagined it, of course. He'd been through the storm, and the Black Joke had burst apart, and Urethra Grubb had flown and popped her head open, and he'd watched Rosella fall to her death, so it wasn't surprising that his mind wasn't working properly. You couldn't have conversations with dead people. He'd made it up, for sure. It was probably a conversation he'd wished he could have, but he hadn't really had it.
Except ... he looked at Rosella, kneeling on the thwart in the bows, looking out towards the open sea. He was sculling with one oar over the stern so he could see where he was going, and Better Times was just starting to feel the waves coming in. She was stirring like the good little ship she was, eager to be out at sea. Out at the mouth of the gully the sea looked blue and inviting, and the breeze stirred Rosella's hair.
They'd be out soon, and then he would raise the sail and turn north and go up the coast away from the Old Man and the town. He didn't know the coastline, but it was gentle sailing weather. There would be fishing villages, or even a town where they could stop and no one would know th
em.
No, it must have been his imagination. Except that when he put his hand in his trouser pocket, there was something there. It was a little leather bag with a leather drawstring to keep it closed. The leather was salt stained and worn thin, and there was a dark blotch on one side that looked suspiciously like blood. And the bag was surprisingly heavy, and when you shook it, it clinked. Rosella heard him clinking it, and turned back to see what he was doing, and smiled.