Chapter Text
For thou hadst cast me into the deep, in the midst of the seas; and the floods compassed me about: all thy billows and thy waves passed over me.
-- Jonah 2:3, King James’ Version
***
It was Twelfth Night, and John Thornton was having the most ridiculous day of his life.
He struggled up from the hold—the precious cargo he held in his charge was a lost cause—the wind struck him like a body blow—the lightning cracked again and the doomed ship groaned. As if from miles away, John heard his friend Will Wilson shouting some unheard words, ripped away into vasty air—he looked up—the mast was beginning to go—he scrambled away, sheer terror putting wings into his feet. Only that morning, these wintry seas had been as calm as a millpond…
The ship rocked, hard, gallons of freezing water crashed over him and he gasped in shock. Too late, he slid on the iced over deck scrabbling for a hold as the rocking waves lifted the prow of the ship and the deck disappeared from under him. A rope slid through his hand, burning off skin as he was flung away. The shock of the waves engulfing him stopped his breath and he flung one despairing hand out to seize what little hope remained to him. The darkness of the waters swallowed him whole.
***
Last week:
John Thornton strode briskly into the tavern where his friend was wont to hold court. Will was lounging at the back of The Unicorn, a tankard in his hand, regaling to three other sailors a long story about a mermaid once seen in the South Pacific, and the stratagems whereby a man might attempt to catch her tears. Thornton waited patiently, his arms across his chest, a scowl blackening his face, until Will was finished.
“Well, man?” Will asked.
“It’s decided. We’re sailing on the morning tide.”
Will swore a great oath, although he was a good-natured fellow enough.
Thornton said naught—he had expressed his opinion—indeed, had expressed it pithily when in private conversation with his employer, but the matter was done, and he’d a reputation to keep.
“The North Sea? In this season?”
He shrugged. “Your master thinks it can be done; my master wants the premium for early delivery.”
“M’appen there’ll be short shifts and frost bite for us—excep’ for yo’, yo’ nesh bastard.”
John smiled, a great toothy grin. “I can pull a rope when I need to. I’ll see you at five.”
***
It was yet full dark when Thornton arrived at the dock the next morning. The dock workers had put up lanterns into their cranes; the rigging of their ship, the Grey Bear, was likewise adorned, like the Christmas trees that fashionable folk down in the South had set up for the season. Glasgow had shot its bolt but a few days ago, and they were left with the dregs of the festive season: burned down candles, ashed over fires, and hard work in the dark of a cold morning.
“Hold on by!” he shouted at the steersman of the flatboat that had chugged itself up the river to meet them. “Give it some love,” he told the men tying ropes to the first of the crates he escorted. “Like you would a beautiful woman.”
Their response was something unprintable, and some laughter, but they slowed their work so that he might check the fastenings. “Alright,” Thornton said, “raise her up a foot. Gently now—if it breaks, we’ll be sending back to Glasgow and explaining to Macrahanish why he has to found another engine.”
The crates swung in the dark, with the gleam of lanterns catching brief flashes of faces and hands, the occasional glint of bright metal, the stamping of feet against the cold. After two hours of hard labour, he had his cargo packed and dogged down to his satisfaction and went to find the ship’s master. “Cargo’s stowed,” he told the man, “and ready to sail whenever you are. Sir.”
The Scotsman nodded laconically. “Alreet. Get yourself doon in the hold, lad, while the work gets done.” And he started calling to his sailors and the pilot boat that would lead them out of the Clyde and past the islands that protected the river mouth. Ropes were loosened and with a great sigh the smallest of the ship’s sails was raised to assist the steamboat tugging them out of the harbour. Thornton did not follow his instructions—he’d done this of old, and as long as he stayed out of the way, the sailors did not mind him on deck. They broke into the Irish Sea just as dawn was leaking out in the world: blackness ahead with a subtle gleam on the waters, behind them the slowly arching light flowing over the low hills mounding over the Clyde Valley. A fierce wolfish grin overspread his face. As the Grey Bear hoisted its main sail and they waved farewell to the pilot, Thornton laughed, a great body laugh belling out of him.
“Well, that takes me back,” Will said next to him, at a momentary pause in his work as the wind had steadied. “Yo’ try gettin’ yo’sel on one on ’em pilot boats in a high wind with the cap’n in a mardy at yo’.”
Thornton turned his head. “You’ve done so, I take it.”
“Oh ay,” Wilson said, “m’appen about fifteen years gone. Before I was married, like. Days like this’n take me back is all.”
But he was called away to the confusion of a ship getting underway, and a mate’s work of making good the coils of rope and stacks of seachests, ordering the livestock and butchered carcasses brought onboard for provender, calming men who were fresh and rowdy from their shore leave. In fact, it was some days before they renewed their conversation.
It was another morning, bright and clear, when John brought up a mug of coffee for Wilson, who was taking his turn as steersman. The wind was strong and even from the northeast, and Will was able to tie off the wheel for a few minutes to take some gulps of the bitter hot liquid. “Does a man good, that,” he told Thornton. “Will yo’ keep a fellow comp’ny for a mite?”
“Gladly,” John said. They were picking their way through the Hebridean archipelago, a brisk wind clipping them along, mounds of green and grey hills emerging from the mists, black-barred gulls screaming around them. His breath came out in a fog, and he huffed on his hands to warm them, glad of the thick black beard that protected his face.
“Yo’ know,” Wilson said, “for a fellow that talks proper, you don’t have so high an opinion o’ yo’sel’ to not talk to the likes o’ me.”
John laughed. “My best friend is a weaver out of Burnley. Before that, the best man I knew, a disgraced clergyman from the wilds of Southampton. I’ll take my friendships where I can find them.”
“How’d you end up in Glasgow, a good Darkshire man like yo’sel? If’n yo’ don’t mind me asking,” Will added diffidently, a Lancashire man in his own right, and thus by decree Thornton’s natural rival and his more natural ally in this ship of Scotsmen.
“Work,” John shrugged. “I used to be in cotton. When I failed—when I stopped my business—a friend of a friend wanted someone who knew his way around machinery to babysit a fragile shipment. I took a one time job to tide me over and kept at it. I’d no heart for book keeping back then, anyhow. And you? Liverpool would be a nearer port to your people, would it not?”
“Weel,” Will said, “I’ve folk o’er here, north o’ the border. My aunt Alice, that raised me was from Burton, but she ‘ad some Scots blood in her, enough that people would write from time to time, an’ know my name.” Will had glints of red in the sandy brown ringlets of his hair; John could believe it. “And then, all on ‘em as is family, or as good as, in Manchester, either died or picked theirsel’s up and moved to Canada. Old McIntyre sails out of Toronto w’en he’s o’er th’other side,” Will paused to sound out the syllables of the foreign port carefully, “an’ that’s where my Margaret and her grandfather are, out o’ th’city a bit, wi’ my cousin Jem an’ his Mary. He’s a good sort, is our Jem Wilson, an’ a clever man, clever as Job Legh, each to his own way. Next time Macrahanish has yo’ sent out our way, I’ll take you out to theirs for a good meal.”
“I would be honoured,” John said gravely. He blinked, a name in this history had caught his attention, an old fact swimming to the surface of his memory, like a minnow rising through turgid waters. “James Wilson?”
“Ay, that’s him.”
John was silent for a time, as Wilson was calling out orders for the ship to be rerigged for a change of tack and—well, it was an embarrassing story. But Will was in a talkative mood.
“Ay, yo’ heard the name aright. My cousin, James Wilson, as was tried for murder. A course, he couldna ha’ done it, he was on the road to Liverpool wi’ me that night, but for I was out on the James Cropper gettin’ ready for to sail, and heard none o’ this business at all, at all. Our Mary, Mary Barton as was, ‘ad to come out in a boat an’ call me back to Liverpool to be a witness in the Assizes. That were a todo, alreet. If’n I’d na made it back in time, our Jem would ha swung for it. Rich folk, justice comes quick for ‘em.”
“So you came back in the pilot boat,” John said with a smile.
“Ay, and my captain swearing he’d ne’er sail wi’ me agin. But fam’ly’s fam’ly.”
“And you’re sure he was innocent?” John asked. The newspapers at that time had been full of lurid details and public denunciations and disgusted editorials at the flagrant miscarriage of justice. Justice did indeed come quick and loud when the victim had wealth and engaged in the business of Manchester, milling cotton. “Ay. An’ Jem, no decenter fellow alive, an’ still there were folks who’d known him all their life who ‘ad a wonder in their heads about it. It was our Mary. There’d been a fight between Jem and this factr’y owner’s son all o’er her, yo’ see. No one who’d seen our Mary could doubt a good man might be moved to murder, fo’ her sake.”
“She’s pretty, then?”
“Nah, not pretty. My Margaret’s pretty. No, our Mary, she’s a glow about her. Farrantly. Like one on ‘em stained glass windows, with the light just coming through. Th’kind o’ beauty a man might lose his head and do murder for. Do yo’ know anyone like that? That people’ll think the worst of yo’, just for loving her?”
John smiled ruefully, in resigned—fond—contemplation of his past. “Yes. Yes, I used to know a woman like that. And may God bless her, wherever she may be.”
“Ay, so yo’ know.”
***
Twelfth Night:
“Well, then” John said, “so this girl dresses up in her brother’s clothes—she’d been wrecked with some of them—and takes service with the local Count, a fellow called Orsino. Of course, she falls in love with him, but he’s in love with someone else, and he sends Viola off to do some lovetalking.” As cargo, and in the eyes of some of the crew, superfluous cargo at that, he was accustomed to singing for his supper.
“This Viola lassie—?” one of the off duty crew asked. “She’s dressed as a boy, you say? What happened to her bubbies?”
John laughed. “Strapped ‘em down, I suppose.”
“My wife’ll never do tha!” another sailor interjected. He gestured in appreciation.
“My good wishes to the lady. Back when that story was written, it wasn’t played by a girl, anyhow. It was a boy actor, pretending to be a girl, pretending to be a man.”
“Do ye dinger,” one of the older crewmen, Donaldson, said. “Ye maun not be talkin aboot shipwrecks in weather like this. It be coorse the night.”
“It’s Twelfth Night,” Thornton said peaceably, “auspicious.” But he changed his story, anyway. “Once there were three sisters, each very beautiful, but the third was the most beautiful. Farrantly,” he said, in a nod to Wilson, who had come into the mess from his shift, shivering.
“It’s rainin’ pikels wi’ th’ tines downward,” Will said. “It’ll be a hard night. My thanks,” he said at the mug of hot rum that John passed him. “What’s your story, man?”
“Well, this third daughter—people used to say of her that she was as beautiful as the goddess of Love, Venus; maybe even her daughter on the wrong side of the blanket, if you take my meaning. Venus, as it happens, didn’t like rivals, and sent her son Eros to make this girl fall in love with someone disgusting.”
“My cousin did tha’!” came a heckle. John nodded. He shifted in his seat—he needed no sailor to tell him about the storm coming, his leg ached too much for any doubt.
“But Eros made a mistake, and instead of cursing this girl Psyche, he cursed himself to fall in love with her instead.” He took them through the old tale: the monster-marriage, and the sacrifice, and a young girl wandering through an empty palace, the silent wedding night in a darkened room, the mystery lover: the heckling had fallen silent—there was naught more sentimental than a hard-bitten Glaswegian sailor, John had found, once you’d caught his attention—
The boat rocked, hard. Will Wilson swore—looking up, they could hear the bell for all hands on deck. “Bloody Scotland,” he swore. “Don’ like the weather, there’ll be mo’ comin’ at yo’ in an hour.”
John rose and struggled his way to the cargo hold—the last thing anyone needed in this storm was heavy crates coming loose and changing the trim. There was a crack, another crack and a great booming of thunder—the ship lurched and John fell back against the hull cursing. The boat rocked again, keeping him on his back like a flailing insect, then—
There was a great skriking noise against the hull, and a jagged rock broke through the timbers: with sick fascination he watched it emerge mere inches from his nose. With an oath he sprang back—his lantern had fallen, a mere flicker in a puddle of oil, he ran past it. The time for putting such things out was well gone.
He struggled up from the hold—the wind struck him like a body blow—the lightning cracked again and the doomed ship groaned. “We’re holed!!” John shouted, into nothingness. As if from miles away, he heard his friend Will Wilson shouting unheard words back, ripped away into vasty air—the mast was beginning to go—he scrambled away, sheer terror putting wings into his feet. The flailing rope ripped the skin away from his hand as he tried to make for the lifeboat.
The ship rocked, hard, gallons of freezing water crashed over him and he gasped in shock. Too late, he slid on the iced over deck scrabbling for a hold as the rocking waves lifted the prow of the ship and the deck disappeared from under him. A rope slid through his hand, burning off skin as he was flung away. The shock of the waves engulfing him stopped his breath and he flung one despairing hand out to seize what little hope remained to him. The darkness of the waters swallowed him whole.
***
It was a long, slow rise to consciousness.
John lay face down on rough sand, a sprawled piece of seadrift, the crying of gulls wheeling about in some distant land. He blinked unseeing eyes, crusted with salt, with sand; a bare breath barely escaped his lips. In the far distance he could see a three legged man walking along the bleached white sands, past the sharp black rocks, one plodding step after another through the dead lands. He blinked again: it mattered not.
It was an age and another age before aught happened, he existed merely as a whisper of breath, a speck at one with the sea and the sky and the wheeling gulls. The black figure approached and knelt closer, an old severe man, leaning on a walking stick. John turned his face a little to the new event.
“Weil, laddie. Are ye flotsam or jetsam, now?”
“I hardly know.” John Thornton flopped his head back on the sand, and closed his eyes.