My Bonny
James
LESS than a year into their marriage, James—who had always, in his brief visits ashore, been tilted and clumsy, startling every four hours to interior bells, twitching to get back to the harbour and slide out on the falling tide with not one look, not even one thought for his loved ones left at home (You will be sorry, Agnes, her mother had told her, if you marry a man with clean fingernails)—passed over the visible edge of the world a final time and was lost (not, as it turned out, completely lost), his ship gone down far out to sea, witnessed only by spider crabs and hagfish and other untalkative actuaries of the deep.
Agnes would not marry again. John, not yet six months old, would be her first and last child. She would live another sixty-eight years a widow, sixty-eight years of relentless, erosive work, the cuckoo hunger gaping in her ribs. Had she known this when they came to her door with their heads bare and their eyes sideways, she might have knelt on the fire and waited for death, as widows were said to do in more fragrant corners of the Empire.
Both native to this Scottish port, they had been living, since their marriage, in a narrow cottage on the north side of its harbour. A good spot to watch the boats come and go, James always said. To watch the storms sweeping in, Agnes said. To see the waves blooming above the breakwater, the tattered sails of spray hanging in the air. The small boats staggering like crane flies, the ships listing and turning, helpless as leaves in a weir. The silent processions winding up the hill.
James would laugh, tease, finally lose patience. He remarked only those who made it through. The seven pulled from the water when the packet ran aground. (Sixty lost, Agnes said.) The master of the Simeena, saved within sight of the harbour. (And the rest of her crew drowned.) James held the sun’s unquestioning belief in his return. As if wind and sea wove a downy pallet that he could nestle into, safe as the kingfisher’s brood. When he was away, Agnes would try on his faith, pull it over her head like his Sunday shirt. She tried to imagine him fixed and solid among the flying ropes and scurrying men. The wind broke on his broad face, cleaved north and south of him, combing his hair smooth. His mouth was white with salt, his eyebrows frosted. He narrowed his eyes to the east, looking for Goteborg or Riga, Helsingor, Konigsberg, Drammen.
She preferred to render the watery section of his journey negligible. His destination lay just below the horizon, and the ship was even now safely tied up among surly Norwegians or Balts or Russians, the crew packing her holds with flax and timber and hides and thick black balsam spiced with aniseed and tar. After days of stacking and stowing, there would be another quick voyage, the moon pressing a pale track into the water, the waves humming sweetly. If Agnes stood a little straighter, if she went up the hill a short way, she might be able to spy the tops of the masts.
James had gone to sea as a boy of twelve. Back then, he had told her, he would watch for the long smudge of pearly cloud that would gradually clump and fray to reveal the moors behind the town, then the tower of the ruined abbey, then the smaller spires of churches and the low streets beneath them. Now, after twenty years of industry and innovation, of the harvests of the Empire flowing in and out of the harbour, the first thing he saw would be a wintery forest of tall chimneys. So many chimneys—a new one each time he came home, it seemed—marking the very flax mills and jute mills, the sailcloth and rope factories that his cargo would feed. The chimneys reached higher than the church spires, higher even than the abbey tower. From every one, smoke streamed straight up, then bent and set in thick, grey horizontals across the town, like a hundred signposts pointing in the same direction, as if just over there, out of sight, was something wonderful.
Stewart
Stewart Doig, master and, on that morning, sole crew of the fishing boat Clio, was idling towards shore, dwelling on the recent death of his mother, which had brought to mind also the more distant death of his father, and the sermons addressing this subject that he had sat through, sometimes dozing, sometimes thinking about fish, and what he had nonetheless garnered of death and burial and that surely still far-off day when the graves would crack and the saved would come forth riotous and laughing like a holiday parade (Would they be clothed in flesh, he kept wondering, or would they be just shinbones and clavicles and broken-toothed skulls?), when the body that had been James bumped at the Clio’s hull, sodden and swollen, as if in dark answer to Doig’s questions.
Wrecks were common. Every winter there were four or five on the Great Rock alone. Dozens on all the reefs and sandbanks and rocky shores around the coast, dozens more in deep water. James was one of hundreds who drowned during that year of 1829, whalers, soldiers, fishermen, a whole consignment of convicts, cooks, doctors, farmers, labourers, emigrants and immigrants and deportees, men and women and children and pigs and sheep and cats and rats and dogs. The unexplained fate of James’s ship—swamped by a freak wave, consumed by fire, holed by a rock or a vengeful kraken—was common, too, even in the increasingly crowded shipping lanes of the Pax Britannica. The sea was a veritable soup of dead people, whispering sedition and blasphemy and wrapping their cold fingers around the fisherman’s heavy nets.
The body floated face down, and Doig had no reason to suppose it was the boy two years his junior that he had once pinched and pulled and knocked to the ground until James grew tall and stout enough to break young Stewart’s nose. What he did know was that it would be twice the weight of a body on land, unwieldy, waterlogged, slippery.
He thought of his mother, how her face shrank in the instant of death and her mouth fell open as if in surprise.
By the time the thing was hauled over the transom, Stewart’s hands were nearly as white and bloodless as it was. When it landed, he recognised James, even without the eyes. They had seen, perhaps, too much horror to come back to this upper world. Or been taken. There were other signs on the face and hands that needy parishioners below had profited from the occasion. Doig drew a piece of sacking over the head, as if to show respect, and put up all the sail he dared.
It was time, he thought, to leave the sea. Enterprises were springing up all over town: boatyards, mills, foundries. He would take a wife. There were new widows aplenty in the port this week, handsome young widows who knew how to keep a good house and look the other way when it was called for. Not James’s widow, her waist still thick from the child dragging round her neck. No, he would choose a woman free of encumbrances, with a sweet figure and laughing eyes, and enough put aside to set up a man in his new life ashore.
Euphemia
By a combination of intelligence, thrift, and reluctance to bestir so much as one finger except to her own immediate advantage, Euphemia Symon had kept the small general grocery on Muir Street for three decades, first with her husband, and then without. After his death, she had a low upholstered chair carried into a corner of the shop, and there she sat, comforting herself with liquorice and coconut ice, sugared almonds and candied violets. As the years went by, Euphemia expanded to fill the chair and gradually to spill over its edges. Sugar draped crystalline, frosty webs across her memory, so that the details of her earlier life softened and receded. She found fault with the girls nowadays, who were no better than they should be, marrying too young and squandering their pennies on collars and China tea, with the wives who skimped on mending and with those whose husbands wore patched clothes, with the mothers who kept their children in school and with those who sent them out into the blighted sea fogs of autumn to risk scarlet fever, whooping cough, and measles (the disease to which, some twenty-five years earlier, she had lost both her children in the space of a week).
Euphemia was James’s cousin by marriage. He had been a man poor in relatives, at least local ones, so when she heard of his death she expected his relicts to turn up, and so they did. Agnes, with the baby thrashing in her arms, stumbled through routine flatteries and pleadings, while Euphemia, not mentioning the very recent departure in disgrace of her moon-eyed maid-of-all-work, looked the pair over. She listened to the child’s furious roars and thought it unlikely to be struck down by any of the thousand poxes. She saw that Agnes, although short, was sturdy and determined. She judged her not so pleasing as to distract the gentlemen, nor so displeasing as to tire a mistress’s eyes. With a happy synergy of kinship, charity, and economic considerations, she offered Agnes a roof and employment.
Agnes scrubbed, swept, swilled, roasted, carried, boiled, rinsed, scoured, emptied, mended, scalded, blacked, starched, polished, while Euphemia sat in her corner, offering occasional advice or criticism. You are fortunate, she told Agnes often, and no one would have disagreed, even as Agnes’s heart withered like a rosehip. In Euphemia’s own veins, small threads of remembrance wormed forth and then burst, and she knew this, too, was fortunate.
Euphemia took a special interest in John. He had the same broad face as his father, the same far-sighted blue eyes, even—one would swear—the same tilt to his walk. She would tempt him with sugar mice and marzipan pigs, and as he stood at her knee with sticky face and fingers, she would tell him about the press gangs that ranged up and down the coast when she was young, parents hiding their children in trunks and cellars and pot cupboards. She told him the fates of the boys who were taken, of those, more foolish, who ran away to sea. The beatings, the sickness, the stench, the never-ending work, the dry tack soaked in coffee until the weevils formed a scummy layer on top (John testing with his tongue the melting nose of a pig). The boys who crashed from rigging to deck or had their bones peeled clean by chains and ropes or were ground like meat between boat and dock. The boys who died, the boys whose bodies were twisted to cages of pain so that they begged for death.
She described the death of his father, which she had seen for herself in the bare acidic reaches of the night. The groans and shudders of the vessel, the planks folding underfoot, icy water waist- then neck-high, men sliding unstoppable through the splintered decks, cursing and screaming and then silenced as the ship, like an overturned cathedral, plummeted into glacial blackness. Up on the surface, the unlucky few who had jumped or fallen clear floated for an hour or more in the moonlight, calling to each other, their limbs growing first cold then insensate, their voices failing as beside them, dripping salt and phosphorescence, rose monsters with the faces of angels and huge, uncurious eyes.
If Agnes disliked Euphemia’s idea of education she did not say so. She took John to the sailcloth factory at the age of nine. If John had other ambitions he did not voice them, remaining silent through the transaction and afterwards taking up his new responsibilities without protest.
When Euphemia died, Agnes was fortunate again, quickly finding employment in the newest flax mill, and a room for her and John in the shadow of its chimney. The wind and the rain seemed to visit that corner of town with especial interest. Agnes slept with her hands over her ears. Sometimes she still dreamed, as she had since she was a child, that the sea did not stop at high tide but kept rising up the hill, until it lay all around in a rippling, hushed mass. This time, she thought every time, it is not a dream.
John
The people of the port raised their eyebrows over John, shook their heads. He spoke English as if it were foreign to him, went through his days widdershins. ...
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