Jim Crace - The Pesthouse

Margaret was exhausted, too, and impatient. What kind of freedom had she found since she had left the Ark? The freedom to be cold, tired, hungry, anxious? She felt more trapped than she had done for months. But even so, much of the euphoria of rediscovering Franklin and seeing the ocean for the first time remained. They spent the afternoon placating Jackie and discussing their options. Stay safe and starve? Push on and take the risks? Wait for a sign?

In those brief periods when the girl slept, they looked out through the spy pipes from a half-open cabin door. Keeping watch. They had good views across the ocean as well as clear sight of all the land around them. Anybody coming to their hideaway could not avoid showing himself; then the pipes would allow for close inspection.

It was not through the pipes, though, that Franklin caught sight of his first oceangoing ship, full-rigged and shirty in the wind. It was heading between the outer banks, which appeared when, inexplicably and once or twice a day, that great expanse of water drew back on itself, as if it had been inclined as easily as slops are tilted in a bowl. Where earlier there had been nothing but waves, bars and pebble banks appeared, and narrow islands of sand. The ship was rising and falling in the sea, uncertain of its own weight, now light enough to hardly break the surface, now so heavy that it sank deeply into the water and all that showed above the ocean were its upper masts and sails. Franklin and Margaret held their pipes to it, picking out the details. There were huts on board, and flags and men among the riggings, and the carving of a huge eagle’s head at the prow. Here was their salvation, then, their means of escape. They hugged each other, and when they parted, Franklin danced, despite his unexpected apprehension at this first sight of a sailboat.

“That’s the call that we’ve been waiting for. Deliverance,” he said, embarrassed more by their embrace than by his dance. “Tomorrow morning, Mags, I’m going for that ship. It must be putting ashore close by. I’ll see if we can get aboard.” She shook her head. He took her hand. “I’ll come back with some food for Jackie. It’ll be okay. I’ll be wary for myself. You just keep low and out of sight.”

“You’ll not go anywhere,” she said. “I’ll go. It’s better if I go. No one’s hunting for me. I don’t stand out like you, not since my hair grew out a bit.”

“It’ll be okay…”

“No, Franklin. You’re to let me have my way. I couldn’t bear it if you went and we never saw a hair of you again. Anyway, I’m used to begging for a bit of food. And women make a better hand of getting information out of sailors. That’s well known.”

They laughed at that, then argued briefly, but Franklin saw the sense of what she proposed. He was relieved, in fact, and a bit ashamed to be so uncourageous yet again. “Take this, Mags.” He gave her the spy pipes. “You can trade it for some bacon and our passage fees. I’m sure it’s worth a lot, especially to sailors.”

Margaret took the pipes. “Good meal ticket,” she agreed, but knew at once that she could part with them only if they were prized from her fingers. She needed them to see the distant world. They were of more value to her than to any sailor.

That night they slept with Jackie at their feet and not between them. When he could, when her breathing said that she was dozing, Franklin found that he had taken hold of Margaret’s hand. He fell asleep with one of her fingers wrapped inside his palm. He felt her tug it free at sunrise and heard her washing at the water trough. But he kept quiet and still when she slipped outside into the cold and started on her explorations. It wasn’t prudent to tempt fate by exchanging goodbyes, not when the task ahead was dangerous. He tried to sleep.

Franklin could not expect a restful day. He was not used to children, so having sole care of Jackie would be a test, not all of it welcome. Over winter he had learned to be less of an optimist. Whereas the old Franklin might have happily envisaged Margaret’s journey to the ship as being safe and easy and bound to succeed, the new one needed no encouragement to imagine her in trouble. Margaret robbed or raped, kidnapped or lost at sea, Margaret deciding to abandon him and the girl, Margaret attacked by gulls or tumbling down a cliff into the waves, Margaret losing her way back to the cabins and having to spend the night outside. A landscape full of Margarets undone.

Once he was up and washed, though, and had seen the egg-blue, cloudless sky, Franklin determined to be high-spirited. He would keep his hands and his imagination busy with domestic matters. He’d be a useful rather than a moping husband for the day. He muttered a list to himself, counting off his tasks. He’d take good care of Jackie, but when she allowed it he would see what improvements he could make to their quarters, which for some reason and despite his hunger he already felt reluctant to abandon. He’d make a more comfortable family bed with some fresh-cut grasses. Even though it might be difficult, he’d start a fire in the afternoon, as soon as it was safe to make a little smoke. He’d started fires without a spark stone when he was a boy. Why not now? He’d gather shoots and roots and find a way of sieving clean the drinking water in the trough. He’d find some way of preparing a meal as well. A feast, with meat. Surely he could trap a rabbit or a bird. Surely these salt marshes should boast some prairie chickens or quail. There was no shortage of netting to drape between bushes. He had all day. Even Margaret had caught a quail, that first frosty morning out of Ferrytown.

What Franklin did not have was bait. Although he visited his bush nets every so often during the morning, they remained empty, apart from a few hollow plant stems brought in by the breeze and some sticky yellow spume sent up from the ocean. He tried laying out some of the smoked fish, but not even the spring flies or the gulls seemed tempted by this leathery treat. Why would they be tempted when only a short flight away the sea and the shore were tumbling with food?

He walked with Jackie down to the beach and, once he had washed her, kicked about in the shallow water, much to her amusement, but there was nothing there that he could trust as edible. It all smelled bad: the weeds, the water and the sand, the shells, the battered lengths of drift, the pink-gray armored parts of animals that were not spiders exactly. He did not like the shore. It seemed ungenerous. Its music was funereal. It was a mystery.

He was glad to turn his back on it and return to the dune top and its fringe of slanting thickets, wedged by the wind. As a farmer, he could judge what kind of living such land could provide if — just if — he and Margaret and the girl were forced to make their futures there. He knew it was a foolish fantasy. But somehow he was more comforted by it, by this ill-sited version of the life he knew and understood, than by the growing prospect of the new world overseas and, more immediately, by the thought of swapping solid ground for a tossing deck.

He had heard too many tales about the treacheries of ocean travel for all of them to be as false as his hope that it would only take “all day” to cross: ships becalmed on windless plains of water with great birds circling, waiting for the passengers to die; ships swept forward by such determined winds that water slammed and crashed against the hulls until their timbers split and the ocean’s tongues had reached across the decks and snacked on all the voyagers; ships where captains, maddened by the noise and stench of life aboard, relinquished their command to rats the size of mules; ships where travelers who didn’t want to starve would have to dine on weeviled bread, share meat with maggots, and drink bilge wine. Then there were pirates, mutinies, and lightning storms to survive.