Chapter 25
The first snow falls one evening at the beginning of December, wet and heavy and mixed sometimes with sleet. Hephzibah wraps her scarf around her head and neck and trudges to the pasture to bring Sally and the heifer into the stable for shelter.
Stable—in truth, it’s no more than a hut, built of stone and roofed with thatch. The chicken coop abuts one side and the chickens have the run of the place. Hephzibah leads Sally; the heifer follows.
As she ducks through the doorway, a gaunt figure appears beneath the solemn glow of a lantern hung by a hook on the wall.
Once the poisoned limb was cut free, Ned Ramsay recovered at a pace almost too rapid to believe.
The fever receded within days. The next morning, he sat up in bed and roared for food.
Another day, and he took his first wobbling steps from the bed and damned the eyes of anyone who offered to help.
By the first of December, he dressed himself and relieved himself, trimmed his own beard, and spooned Hephzibah’s good pease porridge painstakingly into his mouth with his left hand, not spilling a drop, and sopped up the remains with bread.
Even his shorn hair seems to grow at a quickened pace.
The shaggy pieces now hang about his face.
He tucks his empty sleeve between the buttons of his waistcoat and refuses to let anybody except the doctor attend to his stump.
He drinks a pint of cider each evening, on Dr. Elliott’s prescription, yet refuses Silas’s hospitable offers of rye whiskey.
He speaks but rarely, in short declarative sentences; he never raises his voice; he talks no more of feathers and Tacitus.
He looks at Hephzibah, when looking is unavoidable, as if she’s only a shade through which he watches the real object of his attention.
He doesn’t see her now. He faces the opposite wall of the stable and moves in clumsy lunges—dancing for his audience of concerned chickens.
In his left hand, he holds an iron poker; his coat is slung over a barrel.
Each awkward movement tears a grunt from deep in his chest, yet still he lunges on, pass after pass.
What did Dr. Elliott say? So long as he draws breath, he will fight.
Behind her, the heifer bawls with hunger.
The noise disturbs Ramsay’s delicate newfound balance, the renegotiation of his sinews to accommodate the missing ballast of his right arm.
He half whirls to confront the intruder and the poker swings wide.
His weight flies after it and he crashes to the floor of hard-packed dirt.
She cries out and steps forward. Ramsay hoists himself to his knees, head bowed. The half-empty sleeve falls loose to dangle against the earth while his lungs saw the air.
Hephzibah checks herself. The heifer bawls again. The speckled hen flutters indignantly to join her friends.
How his chest heaves. The stump of his right arm moves back and forth while he gathers his breath.
She smells his sweat, his anger. Then a low animal roar that builds and builds until the rafters shake with anguish.
Hephzibah starts again toward him but his stump waves her away, as if it cannot help itself.
He plants his right foot on the ground and thrusts himself up to stand in the middle of the floor before the befuddled cow, the heedless chickens.
Straw sticks to his waistcoat and his sleeve.
“I’m sorry,” Hephzibah says. “Can I—”
“No,” he snaps. He snatches the poker from the ground—staggers as he overbalances—bites off a curse. Stalks past Hephzibah and Sally and the heifer into the night, banging the poker against the edge of the doorway as he goes.
“You cannot expect a man to be cheerful who has lost his right arm and most of his blood,” Dr. Elliott says. “And his ship, and his treasure. Everything, in short, that makes him what he is.”
“His ship will return for him.”
“If it is not taken by one of His Majesty’s men-of-war in the meantime. We but narrowly escaped ourselves when—hmmph.”
Elliott glances to the door of the lean-to, where Ramsay has retired for the night.
The doctor and Hephzibah sit at the table by the light of a single candle.
Hephzibah transcribes the day in her journal—leaving out the pirate houseguests, of course—while the doctor studies a volume of Euclid, one of the few relics remaining from her father.
A tankard of cider sits by his hand. He fiddles with the corner of one page and continues, in a hushed voice, “We are a fat prize, you know. A fine successful cruise last summer, decks stuffed with treasure. Where to make safe harbor, that’s the trouble.
The entire North American fleet hunts the Poseidon—every damned captain from corvette to seventy-gun ship of the line longs to capture her.
And not for the prize alone. Ramsay was one of their own, you see, and mutiny is the gravest possible crime in the eyes of the Royal Navy and its officers. ”
“Mutiny.” Hephzibah whispers the word—it seems too terrible to say aloud.
Elliott sits back in his chair and stares into the flame of the candle. In the hearth nearby, a spent log collapses amid a whoosh of sparks.
“Let us say you have two ships, my dear,” he says.
“Two ships built in the same yard, in the same year, to the same draft. The same number of guns arranged in the same manner along the same decks; the same masts and rigging and so on. The same number of men aboard, the same orders, the same voyage, weather, food—all of it. But one ship is a happy ship and the other is a misery, a hell afloat, worse by infinite degrees than the most wretched prison ever built. And why is that, do you imagine? What is the difference between them, the single moon that turns the tide?”
“The officers, I suppose. The captain.”
“Yes,” he says. “The captain.”
“And the captain—the ship on which the two of you served—?”
Elliott sighs. “There are men, my pet, whose capacity for cruelty you—dear child that you are—you cannot begin to conceive. What makes them so, I have wasted many hours attempting to understand. Are they born without souls? Or were their souls beat out of them—the human sympathy beat out of them by some earlier tyrant? It’s true enough, God knows, one becomes hardened to violence aboard ship.
A hundred and more bodies packed together, fighting the whims of ocean and weather, disease and hunger, to say nothing of the natural weaknesses to which every man is heir—envy, idleness, greed, anger, and the rest of them.
The discipline, the monstrous punishments; the hazards of going aloft, when the slip of a single foot means death.
Then the battles themselves, by God, the smash of guns and the blood and the maiming of perfect limbs, the immediate terrible necessity of killing another man before he kills you himself.
If it does not break you, my dear, it will turn you into somebody else—some hard, cruel beast who serves out to others what he himself has been daily served. ”
Hephzibah reaches her hand to cover Elliott’s hand, gripped into a fist on the wooden table. “But what happened? The mutiny. How did it occur?”
“My dear, I cannot give you the particulars. I ought not to have said anything—it is a crime, after all, a capital crime for which men may yet hang. But what that devil, that vile cruel depraved gargoyle of a captain, God damn his black heart if he has one—what he did to those men, what he did to James Edward Ramsay—well, I don’t say he deserved what happened, for only God can judge what lies within our souls, but I will say that every man has his breaking point, and I do believe with all my heart that Ramsay would not have lived another week had he remained under the command of Captain Harte. ”
“If he has a heart, you said. This captain, he’s still alive?”
“Oh, yes. That’s the horror of it, my dear.
Ramsay showed that blackguard a mercy that Harte himself would never have shown to another man—instead of sticking a saber through his chest, the young fellow sent him off in an open boat with water and provisions.
The old bugger made it to land—the devil takes care of his own, they say—and was given another command for his trouble, from which he spares no effort to hunt down the man who dared usurp him.
It was Harte’s ship that chased us when we made anchor here two months ago—Harte himself who led the boarding party—Harte’s men who slashed Captain Ramsay to pieces before our lads beat them back.
And I make no odds that he will try again, and again, until he has his revenge. ”
When Hephzibah crawls down from her attic pallet the next morning, she’s startled to find Captain Ramsay swinging through the front door, already clothed in coat and boots, carrying a bucket of water in his left hand. He sets it down next to the fire and nods to her speechless face.
“Good morning, madam,” he says.
Before she can answer, he turns to walk back out the door again.
When the doctor emerges, hours later, pale and crapulous, Ramsay has not yet returned.
“He told me he wished to have a walk about the island,” says the doctor. “I encouraged him, I confess—the healthful air and exercise will do him as much good as any physic. As for the weather—why, this is mild as May in comparison to a good three days’ blow in the Bay of Biscay.”
“Oh, I wish he would not,” says Beulah. “Should anyone see him—”
“What’s that? Who should see him? I thought we were alone on this island.”
“So we are. But my husband’s brother lives across the water in New London, and he makes a habit of visiting without notice.”
Elliott turns back to Hephzibah. “This brother. What sort of man is he?”
Hephzibah picks her words. “A widower, without children. His wife died three years ago. Until my sister married his brother, he was heir to this house and its lands. The new babe, of course, will alter his expectations.”