Chapter Forty-One
By the middle of August, the larger trading parties have all come and gone, and thoughts inside the Factory begin to turn instead to ship time and the impending arrival of the Prince Rupert from London.
In preparation, Hearn orders all loose furs and skins to be properly packed away and the launch to be mended and caulked, and he sends Cartwright the mason with a small party across to the point at Cape Merry to drill holes in the sunken rocks so new beacons may be erected to aid the ship’s safe entry in case of fog.
On the twenty-third of August, the lookouts first spy the ship’s gray outline from the merlons, and when it comes closer, Hearn hears the signal gun and orders Haycock to load a six-pounder and respond in kind.
The ship drops anchor in the Bay to wait for the ebb tide to turn, then it enters the river safely and easily and moors in the usual place in the channel about a hundred yards from the shore.
Captain Richards, a stout man of middling height, with a thick dark beard, scarred cheeks, and a confident and capable manner, comes ashore that same evening with a packet of letters from England and is received at the dock by Hearn and Hutchins, who, once greetings are exchanged, explain immediately all that has gone on since his previous visit.
Richards is naturally saddened and discomposed on first learning that Magnus Norton and John Shaw, men he has known and done good business with for a decade, are both dead.
But after further conversation, when Hearn reassures him that nothing important has changed and that all the trading arrangements, both public and private, that Norton put in place before will be faithfully adhered to, the first shock appears to lessen and signs of the captain’s usual good humor begin to reappear.
Over supper that evening in the chief factor’s apartments, surrounded on all sides by the garish residue of Norton’s recent reign, after raising a solemn toast to fallen comrades, the three men agree that the most fitting way to honor the memory of the departed is not to waste time on fruitless lamentations but rather to do as they themselves no doubt would have counseled.
Leaving the souls of the dead to the merciful judgments of heaven, they turn their combined vigor and attention instead to the many earthly tasks that must be successfully completed before the ship is able to turn about and begin its long voyage home.
For the next week, as long as there is light enough to see by, from dawn until dusk, the launch shuttles back and forth between the shore and the ship until the holds are emptied and the Factory yard is piled high with crates of trade goods; barrels of salt pork, black powder, and brandy; hogsheads of beer; and teetering sacks of flour, oatmeal, and bran.
Hearn is so absorbed in overseeing the work and making sure that nothing is forgotten about, misplaced, pilfered, or broken that he has little time to consider other, larger matters, and it is only when the second and final stage of the lading process is completed and the contents of the Factory’s warehouse—sixteen tons of fur and skins—have been transferred safely onto the Prince Rupert that he steps back from his labors a little and allows himself to consider what is, for him at least, the true but hidden meaning of all these events.
On that final evening, after the hatches are closed and battened and Richards has given notice that Hearn and other men who are returning to England with him should all be on board by noon the next day at the latest, there is a farewell gathering in the men’s house with bowls of rum punch, bottles of brandy, and jugs of wine and strong beer.
After the toasts and speeches are completed, Bellew the carpenter takes up his fiddle and the men dance together arm in arm, wheeling about and stamping their feet in time to the music as it coils and uncoils in the dusty, smoke-filled air.
Hearn, as he watches them, remembers dancing with Stephen Cowper in a crowded room in a tavern by the dockside in Gothenburg or possibly Riga.
He recalls how it felt being pressed together among a crowd of drunken strangers—Frenchies and Russians, Germans and Poles—the bright look in Cowper’s eye as he kicked and capered; the sound of his laughter; the rough, sweet smell of his breathing; and the hardness of his skin as they touched and then parted.
The past won’t disappear completely, he thinks.
It will always be there waiting to catch me by surprise, but from now on when it does come back, when it springs out of nowhere, it won’t take me over in the way it did before.
That power it had is gone now, and though it saddens me, I know I shall only be the better and happier for it.
Afterward, once he has said his last farewells and made his excuses for leaving the party, he sits alone in the apartments sipping brandy and thinks back to the day when Magnus Norton, seated in this very room smiling at him, pushed the pedlar’s rock across the desk and asked what he made of it.
Whoever would have guessed in that moment, he thinks, that the tale would end like this: with the world turned on its head, a sack of gold in my sole possession, and all my rivals vanquished?
Perhaps, for all my doubts, there is some secret scheme at work in the world after all, some steady current flowing, strong but invisible, beneath the pain and chaos, for if there is nothing, he thinks, no direction or form, no purpose or plan, then how do we explain the incongruity and self-denial of a nothingness that forges in men’s minds, despite itself, such deft, consoling patterns?
Darkness is falling outside and the room is lit by a single candle on the mantelpiece.
From the kitchen lean-to, Hearn hears the sounds of Nantouche the maid still moving about.
He stretches out to put more wood on the fire, then closes his eyes and drifts briefly off to sleep.
In his dreams, he’s standing on the gravel driveway outside the big house in Norfolk.
When he looks through the window, he sees a group of people seated around a table playing cards, and when he taps on the glass and waves at them, they smile and beckon him inside.
He walks up to the portico and knocks at the door, but no one comes, so he opens it himself and steps into a narrow, windowless hallway with another door at the opposite end.
He is sure that the people playing cards are seated just behind the second door ready to make space at their table and bid him welcome, but as he reaches for the brass handle, he hears a low growling from the other side, and when the door swings open, instead of the brightly lit drawing room he expected, he sees a cold expanse of heath and sky, and standing just before him at the threshold looking up, a red-eyed wolf with its lips drawn back and its dripping fangs exposed.