Ian McGuire - The North Water

“Aye, but he’s wrong about that. These seas are still crammed full of fishes.”

Campbell shrugs. He has an upturned nose, broad cheeks, and long side-whiskers; his narrow lips are poised in a semipermanent pout, giving Brownlee the uncomfortable impression that, even when he appears silent and absorbed in his own thoughts, he is always just about to talk.

“If I was a gambling man, Baxter is one horse I’d like to put a little of my money on. He doesn’t fall at many fences; he jumps ’em pretty clean, I’d say.”

“He’s a shrewd fucker, I’ll give you that.”

“So are you ready?”

“We’ve got time enough to kill a few more whales. No need to rush on, is there?”

“The whales is small change in this game,” Campbell reminds him. “And you may not get too many good chances to sink her nicely and make it look just as it should. It’s the way it looks that matters most, remember. We can’t make it any too obvious or the underwriters will start up with their querying, and that’s what none of us wants. You least of all.”

“There’s a deal of ice about this year. It won’t be so hard to manage.”

“Sooner is better than after. If we leave it too long, I risk getting trapped myself. Then where the fuck would we be?”

“Give me a week in Pond’s Bay,” Brownlee says. “A week more only, and then we can look about for the right spot to get well nipped.”

“A week will do it, and then I say we head back northwards,” Campbell says, “up to Lancaster Sound or thereabouts. No one will follow us up there. You find yourself a snug little lead near some hefty land ice and wait for the wind to blow the floes back in on you. And from what I’ve seen of your crew, those fuckers won’t be doing too much to help.”

“I’m minded to leave that carpenter where he is.”

“Accidents do happen,” Campbell agrees. “And a man like him ain’t so likely to be missed.”

“It’s a fucking outrage,” Brownlee remembers. “Did you ever even hear of such a thing? A little girl is one thing. A little girl I halfway understand. But not a fucking cabin boy, Good God, no. It’s evil times we live in, I tell you, Campbell, evil and unnatural.”

Campbell nods.

“I’d venture the Good Lord don’t spend much time up here in the North Water,” he says with a smile. “It’s most probable he don’t like the chill.”

When the ice opens up, they enter the bay, but the whaling is poor. There are scarcely any sightings, and on the few occasions the boats are lowered, the whales quickly disappear below the ice and there are no strikes. Brownlee begins to wonder whether Baxter might be right after all — perhaps they have killed too many whales. He finds it hard to believe that the vast and teeming oceans could be emptied out so quick, that such enormous beasts could prove so fucking fragile, but if the whales are still about, they are certainly learning to hide themselves well. After a week of these dispiriting failures, he accepts the inevitable, signals as agreed to Campbell, and announces to the men that they are leaving Pond’s Bay and turning north to seek for better luck elsewhere.

* * *

Even with the aid of laudanum, Sumner cannot sleep for more than an hour or two consecutively. Joseph Hannah’s death has aggravated and incited him in ways he doesn’t understand. He would like to forget it now. He would like to rest, as the others appear to rest, in the certainty of McKendrick’s guilt, and eventual and inevitable punishment, but he finds himself signally unable to do so. He is troubled by memories of the boy’s dead body laid out on the varnished tabletop, where every night they eat their dinner still, and of McKendrick standing naked — ashamed, passive, gazed upon — in the captain’s cabin. The two bodies should match, he thinks, should fit together like twin pieces of a puzzle, but whichever way he twists and turns them in his mind, he can’t make a whole.

Late one night about a fortnight after the carpenter’s arrest, as the ship moves north past looneries and icebergs, Sumner descends into the forehold. McKendrick in his slop suit is lying in the small space that has been cleared for him amidst the various boxes and bundles and casks. His legs have been chained together, one either side of the mast, but his hands are both free. There are some fragments of biscuit on a tin plate, and a cup of water and a lighted candle by his side. Sumner can smell the high tang of the slop bucket. The surgeon hesitates for a moment, then leans down and shakes him by the shoulder. McKendrick unfurls himself slowly, sits up with his back against a packing case, and gazes indifferently at his latest guest.

“How’s your health?” Sumner asks him. “Do you require anything from me?”

McKendrick shakes his head.

“I’m hale and hearty enough, considering,” he says. “I ’spect I will live until they choose to hang me.”

“If it comes to a trial, you know you will have a better chance to make your case. Nothing is decided yet.”

“A man like myself finds few friends in an English court of law, Mr. Sumner. I’m an honest fellow, but my life will not stand for too much peering into.”

“You’re not the only one who feels that way, I’d say.”

“We’re all sinners, right enough, but some sins are punished harder than others. I int a murderer and never was one, but I’m many other things, and it’s the other things they would wish to hang me for.”

“If you’re not the murderer, then someone else on this ship is. If Drax is lying, as you claim he is, it’s possible he either killed the boy himself or knows the man who did and is seeking to protect him. Have you thought of that?”

McKendrick shrugs. After two weeks in the hold, his skin has taken on a grayish tinge, and his blue eyes have turned murky and recessed. He scratches at his ear, and a piece of skin flakes off and flutters to the floor.

“I thought of it all right, but what good will it do me to accuse another man if I have no proof and no witnesses of my own?”

Sumner takes a pewter flask from his pocket, passes it over to McKendrick, then takes it back and has a sip himself.

“I am running short on baccy,” McKendrick says after a moment. “If you could spare a pinch, I’d be much obliged to you.”

Sumner passes him his tobacco pouch. McKendrick takes the pouch with his right hand after jamming the pipe between the middle two fingers of the left. With the pipe secured in this peculiar fashion, he fills the bowl and tamps it down with his right thumb.

“What’s the trouble with your hand?” Sumner asks him.

“It’s only the thumb,” he says. “Got crushed by a cock-eyed fellow with a lump hammer a year or two back and haven’t been able to move it even a quarter inch one way or the other since then. Makes some difficulties for a man in my trade, but I’ve learned to make the adjustment.”

“Show me.”

McKendrick leans forwards and holds out his left hand. The fingers are normal, but the joint of the thumb is badly misshapen and the thumb itself appears stiff and lifeless.

“So you cannot grip with this hand at all?”

“Only with the four fingers. ’Tis lucky it was my left one, I suppose.”

“Try to grip my wrist,” Sumner tells him, “like this.”

He rolls up his sleeve and holds out his bare arm. McKendrick grips it.

“Squeeze as hard as you can.”

“I’m squeezing now.”

Sumner feels the pressure of the four fingers digging into his arm flesh, but from the thumb, nothing at all.

“Is that the best you can do?” he says. “Don’t hold back.”

“I ain’t holding anything back,” he insists. “Man hit my thumb bone with a fucking great lump hammer two years ago aboard the Whitby , I tell you, when we were in dock repairing a hatch cover. Smashed it near to pieces. And I have plenty of witnesses to that occurrence — including the captain himself — who will happily swear on the Bible to his foolishness.”