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When he leaves the Lamb Inn, he can taste the returning snow in the air, like the scent of smoke, and his flesh still carries the feel of Clayton’s grip on his. The street looks unchanged. It does not care that a midshipman, a stranger in this town, has died. Who had helped him through his first seasick day, who had been a friend to him, who saved him from death this day. The bell should toll, the street should silence. A death must be marked, he thinks; a life must be mourned.
He remembers working beside Clayton on deck, a song under the man’s breath. When will we meet again, sweetheart, when will we meet again —
There was a brief time, when he had first joined the Justinian, once he had gained his sea legs, that he had thought it was perhaps the closest thing he had ever known to happiness: the companionship of the other midshipmen, sitting with them in their berth, listening to their talk and to Clayton’s violin. That peace all lost when Simpson returned aboard. He saw how they all changed: the tension, the quiet shame. Clayton’s guarded look, Archie’s seizure. He and Clayton, struggling to quiet him, to lift him back into his hammock. Standing there, he had been reminded of his first night: Clayton helping him, seasick and stumbling, to his hammock; Clayton, standing over him, still a stranger, his kindness laconic and reassuring.
He had always felt it must be childish of him to be so affected by kindness, to set so much store by it. A sign of weakness. That, too, in how keenly he remembered others’ touches.
Twice Clayton had helped him down from the rigging. The first attempted climb, drawn up there by Simpson, who had left him trapped by his own fear and inexperience. The world about him dissolved into a blur of sound, the wind in his ears and the cry of the gulls, and the rope cutting into his hands and limbs, and all became like a living death until Clayton reached him and steadied him as he guided him free. I have you, he had said; you won’t fall. He kept a hand on Horatio’s back, on his arm, as needed, until they reached the deck.
The second time: his punishment in the lashing rain, holding to the rigging so long all his body ached. It was Clayton who ordered him down, after hours that felt like days, and Clayton who climbed up when Horatio could neither move nor reply. I know, Clayton had said, it hurts to open the hand. It passes. Let go your left hand first. Now take hold here, go slowly. Carefully and quietly he had talked Horatio through the painful descent, and caught him before he collapsed on the deck. He had taken Horatio below to the midshipmen’s berth, even holding onto him on the wooden steps, and made him change into a dry uniform, and told the mess attendant to bring Horatio tea. Rest for a while, he had said, and Horatio was left sitting, staring at the floor, feeling still Clayton’s hand on his wrist, Clayton’s arm around his waist.
A fancier of boys, Simpson had taunted him. A lucky hit, Horatio wanted to believe; something Simpson taunted every midshipman with. It meant he had to fight, however badly hurt he might be; he could not show any more weakness in front of Simpson, in front of anyone.
Simpson’s breath on his face, Cleveland’s trembling hand. He had known only that Clayton was not one of the men holding him down. A hazy memory of the beating, and then nothing. Voices, indistinct, above where he lay. Clayton’s, he thought. And then he was on his feet, somewhere else in the ship, kept upright by Cleveland and Hether: taken to Hepplewhite, tallow light on the walls, blood in his mouth. And Clayton was not there, Clayton was still somewhere behind, where Simpson was —
I think you intervened on my behalf, he ventured quietly to Clayton the next morning on deck, near dawn, and Clayton said, Not soon enough. Looking, then, at Horatio’s face, swollen and bruised, as if unwillingly held by the sight. For a moment Horatio thought Clayton might touch him, and he wanted it, even if any touch stung him. And then a command from one of the lieutenants cut across them, and Horatio knew again the impossibility of it, the rashness, the danger. They were never alone. Even if Clayton would have allowed any greater closeness. They slept near enough that Horatio could have reached out and taken his hand. Yet they were never alone.
There was blood on Clayton’s nails, at the end. On his trousers, too. They had taken away the shirt, that must have been bloodied and torn — had a scrap of cloth been buried in the wound, he thinks, could Clayton have been saved if they had extracted it? But he knows they would have tried. He knows Clayton could not have been saved. Shot in the gut, dying slow.
He should have been a doctor, he thought miserably as he felt Clayton’s grip tighten on his, he should have followed his father, he should never have chosen the sea. If they had never met. If not for him. Clayton’s death is his. His life is Clayton’s. He cannot repay the debt. Whatever he may accomplish in his life, he owes to Clayton. And if he accomplishes nothing — that will be an insult to the man who died for him. He must be better than he thinks himself to be.
You were right, Clayton said, but he knows, now, he was wrong; he had been a fool; he had not understood. Clayton had understood the danger, and he had done the only thing he could. Horatio had done nothing but bring about the death of a good man, one of the only friends he had in the world, whom he had loved.
Sometimes, in the cramped crowded spaces below deck: Clayton’s hands on him in passing, steadying him or himself; brief moments in motion. He has held fast to such moments, meaningless though they probably were: buried them deep inside himself, locked them in the secret treasure-hoard of his chambered heart. By night he has lingered on them, let them run into deeper imaginings.
He remembers how at once Clayton had reached out to him, and how instinctively Horatio had taken his hand. Had Clayton known, realised, recognised? Horatio had wanted to sail with him always, wanted him by day and by night, ached for him as a place of safety and comradeship and something else altogether. If they had been alone, would Horatio have dared more? Not under the watchful judgment of Dr Hepplewhite, who only knew he was to blame.
I have you, he wanted to say, as Clayton had murmured to him. But he was helpless, they both were; the doctor knew it. Just lie quiet, he wanted to say, like Clayton had said to him his first night onboard. But he could not bring himself to interrupt any ragged word Clayton spoke.
For he spoke as if the world beyond this room were slipping from his grasp. His body trapped, his mind slipping free into the street below, wanting to see, to understand, the noisome crowd. Go quiet them, he had begged of Archie, wanting to calm Clayton, wanting still more simply to be alone with him: the only and last opportunity. And Archie had sensed that, perhaps. But Horatio could not ask Dr Hepplewhite to leave his patient, and Hepplewhite had watched him, blaming him, and Horatio knew he was to blame.
When people speak of the murdered king of France, it will be Clayton he thinks of, Clayton he remembers, Clayton whose voice and face he will try to preserve forever in his mind. He is afraid he will forget, in time: details blurring, fading: like eyes losing their sight, like evenfall. The words echo in him still: Is it evening?
For all they had lived and worked so closely beside each other, he knows so little of Clayton. Not how long Clayton had sailed, nor from whom he had learnt the fiddle, nor from which port he had first set sail, nor what he had left behind. And Clayton had asked few questions of him. No one pried into one another’s lives, except Simpson. Among the other midshipmen, friends of a sort, they had always spoken of outside things. Napoleon, Pitt, the King and the Prince Regent, the condition of the sea, the competence of officers. He regrets all the things he never asked. He wanted to sail on a frigate, Archie says, and Horatio feels some violent emotion he cannot name: fresh guilt, grief, envy that Archie knew something of Clayton he did not.
Why, he thinks, as the squalling wind cuts bitterly, did Clayton call himself a coward at the last, when he is — was — the bravest man Horatio’s known? From what did he think himself to be running? What secrets did he carry, what shame was his, was it in Horatio’s ability to ease them. Or perhaps every man at heart believes himself a coward.
He knows there was no great courage in his challenge to Simpson: only desperation to be rid of him, for his own sake and all the crew’s, and death in combat is a more honourable death than self-slaughter. His father would not have had to think him a coward. The men of the Justinian will; they will think he willingly let Clayton take his place. But he would have suffered anything rather than risk the life of another.
He had weighed and measured; he had calculated the odds; he had chosen a course. He had thought that an end to it. Clayton had weighed and measured, as secretly as Horatio himself, and calculated differently.
Whatever Clayton believed himself to be, he taught Horatio courage. He feels as if he has left a part of himself behind: his boyhood, perhaps, and a brave friend: half of his heart, in this grey sea port town. There are no easy escapes, he thinks, from duty or grief. He will never again try to take them. Instead grief lodges like a thorn.
The dead do not speak; the dead do not share; the dead only wait, and watch. In the last minutes, trying to give what comfort he could, there were a dozen questions he wished he could ask, a hundred things he wished Clayton would confide. He dared not; he dared not cause him more hurt. Clayton’s laboured breathing, his face white with pain, the bloodied bandage too bright, too red. Horatio dared only listen, and hold onto him.
Clayton’s dunnage, with its few belongings, will sent home to whatever family he had. The honey-coloured violin left to lie silent in its case: to be given away to someone else perhaps, or sold on. Horatio is glad, if he can be glad of anything, that Clayton will be buried on land. A place Horatio will visit, whensoever the sea releases him to the shore.
He had closed Clayton’s open grey eyes and laid the thin woollen blanket over him — not to cover his face but because he looked frail and cold in the unshuttered room. And he had wanted to kiss Clayton, on the brow or cheek, but he did not trust himself not to betray himself, nor not to weep in front of a stranger. He could not stay. Duty commanded. Men would take the body away. This is all.
The hammock beside him will be empty, and then another sailor will take it, and Clayton will be in his grave. Until the autumn leaves that fall from trees are green and spring up again.