The North Water Read online

  “So what’s the story with the leg?” Brownlee asks, waggling his own ankle by way of encouragement. They are sitting in the captain’s cabin on the Volunteer drinking brandy and reviewing the voyage to come.

  “Sepoy musket ball,” Sumner explains. “My shinbone bore the brunt.”

  “In Delhi this is? After the siege?”

  Sumner nods.

  “First day of the assault, near the Cashmere Gate.”

  Brownlee rolls his eyes and whistles low in appreciation.

  “Did you see Nicholson killed?”

  “No, but I saw his body afterwards when he was dead. Up on the ridge.”

  “An extraordinary man, Nicholson. A great hero. They do say the niggers worshipped him like a god.”

  Sumner shrugs.

  “He had a Pashtun bodyguard. Enormous sod named Khan. Slept outside his tent to protect him. The rumor was the two of them were sweethearts.”

  Brownlee shakes his head and smiles. He has read all about John Nicholson in the Times of London: the way he marched his men through the most savage heat without ever once breaking sweat or asking for water, about the time he sliced a mutinous sepoy clean in two with one blow of his mighty sword. Without men like Nicholson—unyielding, severe, vicious when necessary—Brownlee believes the empire would have been lost entirely long ago. And without the empire who would buy the oil, who would buy the whalebone?

  “Jealousy,” he says. “Bitterness only. Nicholson’s a great hero, a little bit savage sometimes from what I heard, but what do you expect?”

  “I saw him hang a man just for smiling at him, and the poor bugger wasn’t even smiling.”

  “Lines must be drawn, Sumner,” he says. “Civilized standards must be maintained. We must meet fire with fire sometimes. The niggers killed women and children after all, raped them, slashed their tiny throats. A thing like that requires righteous vengeance.”

  Sumner nods and glances briefly downwards at his black trousers grown gray at the kneepiece, and his unpolished ankle boots. Brownlee wonders whether his new surgeon is a cynic or a sentimentalist, or (is it even possible?) a little bit of both.

  “Oh, there was a good deal of that going on,” Sumner says, turning back to him with a grin, “a good deal of the righteous vengeance. Yes indeed.”

  “So why did you leave India?” Brownlee asks, shifting about a little on the upholstered bench. “Why quit the Sixty-First? It wasn’t the leg?”

  “Not the leg, God no. They loved the leg.”

  “Then what?”

  “I had a windfall. Six months ago my uncle Donal died suddenly and left me his dairy farm over in Mayo—fifty acres, cows, a creamery. It’s worth a thousand guineas at least, more probably, enough, for sure, to buy myself a pretty little house in the shires and a nice respectable practice somewhere quiet but wealthy: Bognor, Hastings, Scarborough possibly. The salt air pleases me, you see, and I do like a promenade.”

  Brownlee seriously doubts whether the good widows of Scarborough, Bognor, or Hastings would really wish to have their ailments attended to by a short-arse hopalong from beyond the Pale, but he leaves that particular opinion unexpressed.

  “So what are you doing sitting here with me,” he asks instead, “on a Greenland whaling ship? A famous Irish landowner like yourself, I mean?”

  Sumner smiles at the sarcasm, scratches his nose, lets it go.

  “There are legal complications with the estate. Mysterious cousins have appeared out of the woodwork, counterclaimants.”

  Brownlee sighs sympathetically.

  “Ain’t it always the way,” he says.

  “I’ve been told that the case could take a year to be resolved, and until then I have nothing much to do with myself and no money to do it with. I was passing through Liverpool on my way back from the lawyers in Dublin when I ran into your Mr. Baxter in the bar of the Adelphi Hotel. We got to talking and when he learned I was an ex–army surgeon in need of gainful employment he put two and two together and made a four.”

  “He’s a fierce sharp operator, that Baxter,” Brownlee says, with a twinkle in his eye. “I don’t trust the bastard myself. I do believe he has some portion of Hebrew blood running in his withered veins.”

  “I was happy enough with the terms he offered. I’m not expecting the whaling will make me rich, Captain, but it will keep me occupied at least while the cogs of justice turn.”

  Brownlee sniffs.

  “Oh, we’ll make use of you one way or another,” he says. “There is always work for those that are willing.”

  Sumner nods, finishes off his brandy, and places the glass back down on the table with a small clack. The oil lamp depending from the dark wood ceiling remains unlit, but the shadows in the corners of the cabin are deepening and spreading as the light outside begins to fail and the sun slides out of sight behind an iron and redbrick commotion of chimneys and roofs.

  “I’m at your service, sir,” Sumner says.

  Brownlee wonders for a moment exactly what this means but then decides it means nothing at all. Baxter is not a man to give secrets away. If he has chosen Sumner for a reason (besides the obvious ones: cheapness and availability), it is probably only that the Irishman is easygoing and pliable and clearly has his mind on other things.

  “As a rule there is not much doctoring to be done on a whaler, I find. When the men get sick they either get well again on their own or else they turn in on themselves and die—that is my experience at least. The potions don’t make a great deal of difference.”

  Sumner raises his eyebrows but appears unconcerned by this casual disparagement of his profession.

  “I should examine the medicine chest,” he says, without much enthusiasm. “There may be some items I need to add or replace before we sail.”

  “The chest is stowed in your cabin. There is a chemist’s shop on Clifford Street besides the Freemason’s Hall. Get whatever you need and tell them to send the bill to Mr. Baxter.”

  Both men rise from the table. Sumner extends his hand and Brownlee briefly shakes it. Each man for a moment peers at the other one as if hoping for an answer to some secret question they are too alarmed or wary to ask out loud.

  “Baxter won’t like that much, I imagine,” Sumner says at last.

  “Bugger Baxter,” Brownlee says.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, Sumner sits hunched over on his bunk and tongues his pencil stub. His cabin has the dimensions of an infant’s mausoleum, and smells, already, before the voyage has even begun, sour and faintly fecal. He peers skeptically into the medicine chest and begins to make his shopping list: hartshorn, he writes, Glauber’s salt, Spirit of Squills. Every now and then he unstoppers one of the bottles and sniffs the dried-up innards. Half the things in there he has never heard of: Tragacanth? Guaiacum? London Spirit? It’s no wonder Brownlee thinks the “potions” don’t work: most of this stuff is fucking Shakespearean. Was the previous surgeon some kind of Druid? Laudanum, he writes by the eggish light of a blubber lamp, absinthe, opium pills, mercury. Will there be much gonorrhea amongst a whaling crew? he wonders. Possibly not, since whores in the Arctic Circle are likely to be thin on the ground. Judging by the amount of Epsom salts and castor oil already in the chest, however, constipation will be a sizable problem. The lancets, he notices, are uniformly ancient, rusty, and blunt. He will have to have them sharpened before he begins any bleeding. It is probably a good thing he has brought his own scalpels and a newish bone saw.

  After a while, he closes the medicine chest and pushes it back beneath the bunk, where it rests beside the battered tin trunk that he has carried with him all the way from India. Out of habit, automatically, and without looking down, Sumner rattles the trunk’s padlock and pats his waistcoat pocket to check he still has the key. Reassured, he stands, leaves the cabin, and makes his way along the narrow companionway and up onto the ship’s deck. There is a smell of varnish and wood shavings and pipe smoke. Barrels of beef and bundles of staves are being loaded
into the forehold on ropes, someone is hammering nails into the galley roof, there are several men up in the rigging swinging pots of tar. A lurcher scuffles by, then stops abruptly to lick itself. Sumner pauses beside the mizzenmast and scans the quayside. There is no one there he recognizes. The world is enormous, he tells himself, and he is a tiny, unmemorable speck within it, easily lost and forgotten. This thought, which would not normally be pleasing to anyone, pleases him now. His plan is to dissolve, to dissipate, and only afterwards, some time later, to re-form. He walks down the gangplank and finds his way to the chemist’s shop on Clifford Street, where he hands over his list. The chemist, who is bald and sallow and missing several teeth, examines the list, then looks up at him.

  “That’s not right,” he says. “Not for a whaling voyage. It’s too much.”

  “Baxter’s paying for everything. You can send him the bill directly.”

  “Has Baxter seen this list?”

  Inside the shop, it is gloomy and the brownish air is sulfurous and thick with liniment. The bald man’s finger ends are stained a glaring chemical orange and his nails are curved and horny; below his rolled-up shirtsleeves Sumner sees the blue fringes of an old tattoo.

  “You think I’d trouble Baxter with shit like that?” Sumner says.

  “He’ll be troubled when he sees this fucking bill. I know Baxter and he’s a tight-fisted cunt.”

  “Just fill the order,” Sumner says.

  The man shakes his head and rubs his hands across his mottled apron.

  “I can’t give you all that,” he says, pointing down at the paper on the countertop. “Or that either. If I do, I won’t get paid for it. I’ll give you the regular allowances of both and that’s all.”

  Sumner leans forwards. His belly presses up against the burnished countertop.

  “I’m just back from the colonies,” he explains, “from Delhi.”

  The bald man shrugs at this intelligence, then sticks his forefinger in his right ear and twists it noisily.

  “You know I can sell you a nice piece of birch wood for that limp,” he says. “Ivory handle, whale tooth, whichever you prefer.”

  Without answering him, Sumner steps away from the counter and commences gazing around the shop as though he suddenly has a good deal of time on his hands and nothing much to fill it with. The sidewalls are crammed with all manner of flasks, bottles, and tantali filled with liquids, unguents, and powders. Behind the counter is a large yellowing mirror reflecting the hairless verso of the bald man’s pate. To one side of the mirror is an array of square wooden drawers, each with a nameplate and a single brass knob in its center, and to the other is a row of shelves supporting a tableau of stuffed animals arranged in a series of melodramatic and martial poses. There is a barn owl poised in the act of devouring a field mouse, a badger at perpetual war with a ferret, a Laocoonian gibbon being strangled by a garter snake.

  “Did you do all those yourself?” Sumner asks him.

  The man waits a moment, then nods.

  “I’m the best taxidermist in town,” he says. “You can ask anyone.”

  “And what’s the biggest beast you’ve ever stuffed? The very biggest, I mean. Tell me the truth now.”

  “I’ve done a walrus,” the bald man says casually. “I’ve done a polar bear. They bring them in off the Greenland ships.”

  “You’ve stuffed a polar bear?” Sumner says.

  “I have.”

  “A fucking bear,” Sumner says again, smiling now. “Now that’s something I would like to see.”

  “I had him standing up on his hindmost legs,” the bald man says, “with his vicious claws raking the frigid air like this.” He reaches his orangey hands up into the air and arranges his face into a frozen growl. “I did it for Firbank, the rich bugger who lives in that big house on Charlotte Street. I believe he still has it in his grand entrance hall, next to his whale tooth hat stand.”

  “And would you ever stuff an actual whale?” Sumner asks.

  The bald man shakes his head and laughs at the idea.

  “The whale can’t be stuffed,” he says. “Apart from the size, which makes it impossible, they putrefy too quick. And besides, what would any sane man want with a stuffed bloody whale anyway?”

  Sumner nods and smiles again. The bald man chuckles at the thought.

  “I’ve done lots of pike,” he continues vainly. “I’ve done otters aplenty. Someone brought me a platy-puss once.”

  “What do you say we change the names?” Sumner says. “On the bill? Call it absinthe. Call it calomel if you want to.”

  “We already have calomel on the list.”

  “Absinthe then, let’s call it absinthe.”

  “We could call it blue vitriol,” the man suggests. “Some surgeons take a good amount of that stuff.”

  “Call it blue vitriol then, and call the other absinthe.”

  The man nods once and does a rapid calculation in his head.

  “A bottle of absinthe,” he says, “and three ounces of vitriol will about cover it.” He turns around and starts opening up drawers and picking flasks off the shelves. Sumner leans against the countertop and watches him at his work—weighing, sifting, grinding, stoppering.

  “Have you ever shipped out yourself?” Sumner asks him. “For the whaling?”

  The chemist shakes his head without looking up from his work.

  “The Greenland trade is a dangerous one,” he says. “I prefer to stay at home, where it’s warm and dry and the risk of violent death is much reduced.”

  “You are a sensible fellow, then.”

  “I am cautious, that’s all. I’ve seen a thing or two.”

  “You’re a fortunate man, I would say,” Sumner answers, gazing round the grimy shop again. “Fortunate to have so much to lose.”

  The man glances up to check if he is being mocked, but Sumner’s expression is all sincerity.

  “It is not so much,” he says, “compared to some.”

  “It is something.”

  The chemist nods, secures the package with a length of twine, and pushes it across the counter.

  “The Volunteer is a good old bark,” he says. “It knows its way around the ice fields.”

  “And what of Brownlee? I hear he’s unlucky.”

  “Baxter trusts him.”

  “Indeed,” Sumner says, picking up the package, tucking it under one arm, then leaning down to sign the receipt. “And what do we think of Mr. Baxter?”

  “We think he’s rich,” the chemist answers, “and round these parts a man don’t generally get rich by being stupid.”

  Sumner smiles and curtly nods farewell.

  “Amen to that,” he says.

  * * *

  It has started to rain, and above the residual smell of horse dung and butchery there is a fresh and clement tang to the air. Instead of returning to the Volunteer, Sumner turns to the left and finds a tavern instead. He asks for rum and takes his glass into a scruffy side room with a fireless grate and an unpleasing view into the adjoining courtyard. There is no one else sitting in there. He unties the chemist’s package, takes out one of the bottles, and dispenses half of it into his glass. The dark rum darkens further. Sumner inhales, closes his eyes, and downs the concoction in one long gulp.

  Perhaps he is free, he thinks, as he sits there and waits for the drug to have its effect. Perhaps that is the best way to understand his present state. After all that has beset him: betrayal, humiliation, poverty, disgrace; the death of his parents from typhus; the death of William Harper from the drink; the many efforts misdirected or abandoned; the many chances lost and plans gone awry. After all of that, all of it, he is still alive at least. The worst has happened—hasn’t it?—yet he is still intact, still warm, still breathing. He is nothing now, admittedly (a surgeon on a Yorkshire whaling ship—what kind of reward is that for his long labors?), but to be nothing is also, looked at from a different angle, to be anything at all. Is that not the case? Not lost then, but at liberty? F
ree? And this fear he currently feels, this feeling of perpetual uncertainty, that must be—he decides—just a surprising symptom of his current unbounded state.

  Sumner feels a moment of great relief at this conclusion, so clear and sensible, so easily and quickly reached, but then almost immediately, almost before he has a chance to enjoy the new sensation, it strikes him that it is a very empty kind of freedom he is enjoying—it is the freedom of a vagrant or a beast. If he is free, in his current condition, then this wooden table in front of him is also free, and so is this empty glass. And what does free even mean? Such words are paper-thin, they crumble and tear under the slightest pressure. Only actions count, he thinks for the ten-thousandth time, only events. All the rest is vapor, fog. He takes another drink and licks his lips. It is a grave mistake to think too much, he reminds himself, a grave mistake. Life will not be puzzled out, or blathered into submission; it must be lived through, survived, in whatever fashion a man can manage.

  Sumner leans his head back against the whitewashed wall and peers vaguely in the direction of the doorway opposite. He can see the landlord over yonder, behind the bar, hear the clink of pewter and the clatter of a trapdoor closing. He feels, rising inside his chest, another warm swell of clarity and ease. It is the body, he thinks, not the mind. It is the blood, the chemistry that counts. In a few more minutes he is feeling much better about himself and about the world. Captain Brownlee, he thinks, is a fine man, and Baxter is fine also, in his way. They are dutiful men both of them. They believe in act and consequence, capture and reward, in the simple geometry of cause and effect. And who is to say they are wrong? He looks down at his empty glass and wonders about the wisdom of requesting another. Standing shouldn’t be a problem, he thinks, but talking? His tongue feels flat and foreign, he’s not sure, if he tried to speak, what might actually come out—what language exactly? what noises? The landlord, as if sensing his dilemma, glances in his direction and Sumner hails him with the empty glass.