Blessed Isle Page 2

  I suppose I should cease this drivel and pick up the account where Harry has left it off. That momentous instant when Cupid’s arrow pierced us both. Straight through one heart into the other it flew. Metaphorically speaking, you understand, though at the time, had I looked down and seen blood, I would not have been surprised. The rosy-dimpled boy, having done his worst, clapped his bow back between his wings and flew off, chuckling. I was left trying not to smile, trying not to flirt or to stare. Trying not, in short, to get the pair of us hanged.

  I had enjoyed the game of it, in the past. I did not enter the Navy because I feared to put myself at risk, and I have always found that life tastes sweetest with a slight spicing of terror. If you go looking for them, there are always men to be found, three weeks out of port, who are willing to take the chance of a quick fumble. From a whisper misjudged so that the lips brush skin, to the torment of squeezing by, just that little bit too close in a confined space. All this leading to a hasty climax on the cable tier or in the spirit room. The gunpowder magazine, that’s my favourite. Biting kisses and the little death in the dark, surrounded by all that slumbering fire.

  I’m not a gambling man, despite what my present neighbours might tell you. But I believe the reckless compulsion a man finds at the tables, I found in this. Knowing I could be destroyed at any moment, loving the high stakes and the thrill.

  And so I was singing in invitation when the door opened and Harry ducked beneath the sill. He has waxed lyrical over my charms. It is only fair I be allowed to do the same, lest you think that he is all the gainer and I the loser of this transaction. Nothing could be further from the truth. He is a broader man than I. Strongly built. Traces of the lower deck lingered in that awful jacket he wore and in his hands, made muscular and large by manual work early in life.

  I would not dream of a liaison with a tar. A crewman could not in all conscience say no to me, an officer. I could never be truly certain he was as willing as I, and so I have never dallied outside my rank. But I’ve looked. And I must say Harry’s slight coarseness appeals. He has a pugnacious face, and keeps his hair cropped to the scalp. It is darkly rich as walnut wood, and I wish he would let it grow, just a little. He says it irks him in the heat, but I would make it worth his while.

  Yet it was his eyes I noticed then. A beautiful blend of brown and gold, like the colour of the stone called “tiger’s eye.” They changed from shadow to light, from expression to expression. I thought I saw a different me in them, a man I liked better than I had liked myself hitherto.

  I drew out my own chair for him and made him sit. He toyed with his wine, his tanned face white as if freshly painted. I thought he looked as thunderstruck as I felt: still deafened and dazzled by that moment of the divine. No wonder Jove’s lovers burned up entire when he revealed his full power to them! We had seen but an instant of it and we were as shaken as a two-year-old by the blast of his first cannon. Such a physical thing, I could have fallen on my arse from the recoil, and bawled for fright.

  He looked afraid too. Instinctively, once I had made my introductions, I found a patch of shadow in which to sit, and let the Second Lieutenant, Angus Kent, fill up our silence with a long account of those things our old captain used to do, which he supposed our new one would wish to continue.

  Harry nodded in appropriate places. I saw his eyes stray to me, once. I wondered why there was no crack, no snake of lightning following the path of his glance, for I felt it in me. Every fibre of my frame clenched and then released with a strange tingling snap.

  He snatched back his gaze when he saw me watching, and coloured. His jaw hardened. “Well, gentlemen,” he said, “I honour your captain’s name, and he seems to have run a taut ship. But I go my own way. I will keep those traditions I find useful, but I do not intend the hand of a dead man to guide me. You must reconcile yourselves to change.”

  A firm voice, a frank stare. They were impressed. But I noticed that, after that first glance, he did not look my way again. His eyes travelled from one side of the room to the other by way of the table, avoiding me. I sat in a notional abyss cut out of the wardroom by his will, consigned to Coventry or to Hell, whichever would suit me best.

  Oh, I thought, feeling the chill of it already, so that’s the way of it. He means to reject this. The most extraordinary event of my life, and I’m sure of his, and he intends to pretend it did not happen? I will admit that grudgingly I was pleased he was wiser than I and more self-controlled. But I was wounded to the quick in my pride.

  To be so easily dismissed was more than I could bear. Oh no, I thought. You do not feel the thunderbolt of Jove, and go on as though nothing has happened. The gods punish hubris such as that. You do not have the strength to fight against Olympus.

  Look at me again, sir, I thought. You do not want to make them angry. But he would not, and neither of us would have believed the retribution that was to come.

  So now you know what I have to deal with—this bundle of antic superstition and high self-regard, which does not think to ask a man before commandeering his private journal and making light of his secret thoughts. He is gone now to his work. With his gracious manners and good looks, his well-bred courtesy and flair for the dramatic, he is amply in demand by the diamond exporters of Brazil to negotiate with and translate for their English clients. Part guide, part spy, part bodyguard, it is an occupation not without its danger. Scarcely a day goes by without an attempted robbery on the warehouse both from land and sea, and on the individual persons of the company as they walk about town. I believe that too contributes to Garnet’s ease here. He could not be content in a less perilous employment.

  I have another hour in which to savour my coffee and pão de queijo—which is a kind of heavy cheesy bread—before I go to my own work at the customs house. I sit in the little roof garden of our house with herbs in pots about my knees, and the distant shape of the sugarloaf mountain casting a shadow like a sundial across the waterfront of Flamengo.

  I believe some inner reluctance is preventing me from continuing the story. Indeed, I do not like to think on the days between our first landfall here and our second.

  Because of the trade winds, which make it easier to cross the Atlantic twice than to tack laboriously down the coast of Africa, Rio de Janeiro is a common port of call for vessels of all nations—a final experience of cosmopolitan civilisation and a chance to refresh one’s men and restore one’s ships before rounding either Cape Horn or the Cape of Good Hope as we intended. If we had known what was to come when we arrived here fresh from England in August of the year 1790, so many lives could have been saved. So much suffering averted.

  I see Garnet attributes our ill fortune to my resistance to his charms. How like him! He is, I am afraid to say, a poet: a great habitué of the opera and the theatre, and a haunt of every bookshop in Brazil, scraping up ancient love verses and horrid modern fiction with promiscuous abandon.

  Do I agree with him that the gods were angry? No, not at all. I believe he makes that excuse to avoid accusing me of the gross mismanagement of which I must otherwise be suspected. I should have noticed sooner. I should have bowed earlier to wind and weather, turned west sooner. Then perhaps when the disease came upon us, we would still have been strong enough to fight it.

  And perhaps he is right in this—that had I not been so busy resisting him, avoiding him, repressing my thoughts and desires and emotions, then possibly I would have had more energy and attentiveness to spare for my work.

  And yet I had the convicts taken on deck under guard to receive the benefits of fresh air. I had their bedding destroyed and replaced with new, their apartments fumigated and scrubbed. They were fed meat and fruit to keep them from scurvy. I examine my conduct nightly and I am satisfied that, in this respect at least, I could not have done more.

  But I am getting ahead of myself again. Enough of this. In future I will tell the story plain, with none of these intrusive musings. And you, Pest, if you read this, must try to do the same. I sha
ll not attempt to keep you out of my private journal. I know now how futile such an endeavour must be. But pray at least make yourself useful while you are here.

  So then. A hot, tropical sun shone upon us as we anchored our small fleet off Ilha das Cobras not far from Saint Sebastian, the great city of Rio de Janeiro. Our ensigns drooped heavy in the windless air, and the men in the boats before us, towing us into place, drooped like the flags, gasping. The sky curved like hammered gold above, and across it flew, cawing like crows, a flight of birds so blue they looked like little machines of enamel and brass, too vivid for life. The wind smelled of rank swamps and green, growing things, smoke and sewage and fish.

  I stood at the rail and marvelled at the fine stone walls and forts of the city, the extraordinary mountain on its peninsula, very like indeed to a loaf of sugar stood upright on a dish. I watched the little boats set off from the shore: Pedlars in skiffs laden with yams and persimmons, acerola and guava, melons, bananas, and carambola. Whores piled onto rafts, rowing towards us with brawny bare arms, bared breasts gleaming with oil.

  Men lined the rail on either side of me, leaning over, waving and grinning, proffering kisses and pennies. I tapped the arm of the marine sergeant Elliot, making him start and drop his shilling into the snatching hands. “Ready the launch, Mr Elliot. I’m going ashore.”

  Elliot turned away from the saucy lass he had been eyeing, and looked at me with no great goodwill. I was unrepentant; I expected the men to sate themselves in whatever way they could, but I expected a sergeant of marines to exercise a little more decorum. He could at least wait until I had gone ashore to turn his mind to pleasures of the flesh. After all, I had had to exercise restraint through three weeks of subtle provocation from a certain black-haired lieutenant, and I was in no mood to pander to Elliot’s whims.

  Out of the crush of folk on deck, the said lieutenant appeared like a dutiful shadow, joining me at the rail. He moved aside to let the purser heave aboard a sack of bread, and “accidentally” touched his knee to mine. He shifted, and our thighs were in contact. The atmosphere of unbridled lust aboard hit my nostrils like opium smoke, making me reel. He saw it and leaned in, smiling, to murmur some pleasantry I could not quite catch, my heart so thundered in my ears.

  “Step back, Mr Littleton,” I said, my voice harsh from being forced unwilling through a closed throat. “This is not a cattle market. What do you mean by crowding me like this?”

  Our eyes spoke: His expression hurt, puzzled, a little defiant, as if to say I know you want me. Why won’t you take me? I don’t understand. Mine, I hope, stern, unrelenting.

  “Forgive me, sir,” he said. “I only wished to enquire if I might come with you into the town. I speak Portuguese fluently. Spanish too. I may be of some help.”

  We had not spoken of this thing between us. In truth I had avoided him, hoping that he would have the sense to leave it alone, that the attraction would die of its own accord for want of encouragement. But it seemed he had not the sense, and for all my neglect it would not die. Perhaps it was time to face it, head on. For me to tell him outright it would not do.

  “Very well,” I said, as repressively as I could. “You may accompany me.”

  He smoothed down his hair then, and smiled at me like a tomcat eyeing its prey.

  I will not deny that I was glad of his company. I had had my servant polish everything it was possible to polish in my uniform, and my starched neckcloth was choking me. It was my first visit to a foreign country as a captain of His Majesty’s Royal Navy, and at the sight of the fortifications on Ilha das Cobras—even though they truly looked to me more sugar-pastry than stone—I became convinced that courtesy required me to introduce myself to the governor. But in doing so, I would bear, on my inadequate shoulders, the dignity of my country and my king. I, a bargeman’s son, without a drop of truly gentle blood in my veins.

  The Casa dos Governador—the Governor’s House—was a long, white building, reassuringly severe. I remembered to wipe my hands on my handkerchief, like a gentleman, and not on my coat, and I went in with such an assumption of dignity and so straight a back I must have walked like a heron in a pond, cold eyed and dainty, hiding my inadequacies by a show of pride.

  I believe I had begun to struggle with my gutter Portuguese—picked up in the tavernas and bawdy houses of Lisbon—through an utterance resembling “I come, bring hello his Great George,” when Garnet stepped into the fray, bowed with just the right amount of civility, and rattled off the improbable names and titles of the governor and his staff as though born to the idiom. He charmed and smiled and translated, briefly and succinctly, leaving me with little to do but stand and look the part. This I could manage.

  Even when the formalities turned into an unwelcome invitation to dine, he enabled me to play the part of “picture of silent strength,” rather than the clown I must have otherwise appeared. My gratitude for his aid was such that when we spilled out of the dining room and into the clinging damp velvet of the Brazilian night, both of us a little merry from wine and port, I nodded indulgently at the first thing he said.

  In the avoidance of diplomatic disaster, I had forgotten the other, larger disaster that loomed like a lee shore beside us both.

  I began to have an inkling of it again as he led me past the fountain that played so decorously in the square before the Governor’s House—its severe symmetry speaking of reason and enlightenment and self-restraint—and out, ducking through narrow alleys and long shuttered streets that cut across the Calabouço point, the fortress on our left, the land rising on our right into a noble, tree-clad hill. The military hospital glowered like a further crag atop it.

  Paving gave way to channels of dust. The torches, which had burned in front of the civic buildings, guttered out, and only the moon hung, ivory-gold and swollen above the whispering trees. Something, an ape maybe, chattered in the profound darkness outside the city, and others answered it, whooping. I looked at Garnet. His lips, sleeked by the pale topaz light, turned in as if to smother a smile. His eyes gleamed like the moon.

  “Where are you leading me, Mr Littleton?”

  “Just here, sir.”

  A mud-brick building, visible in the darkness only as scattered yellow dots of light, lay like a rock fall on the side of the hill. My eyes adjusted, picked out the gaps where dirt had fallen and lamplight shone through the chink. The roof was all holes, like a colander turned over a lantern. When the door opened, the whisper of human voices was added to the sea and trees, and a drum began to thud out a dim irregular heartbeat. Something like a lute, sweet and stringed, picked out a lazy, meandering melody, now approaching the drumbeat, now drifting apart, like a long silken pennant falling, twisting and fluttering from a high mast.

  Within, it was dim: a tawny, confiding, ill-lit place. They crammed us into a little stall like a donkey’s at the back of the room. Indeed, I believe the place may have been a stable-block once, now tricked out as something else—a ballroom, a bawdy house, I wasn’t sure. A woman with long hair as straight and black as poured tar and skin the colour of polished rosewood put down before us bowls of some kind of stew, and flagons of wine as raw as vinegar. I took off my hat and turned my coat inside out to hide the gold, but as I did so, the small stir caused by our entrance evaporated. One by one the onlookers took their fill of watching us and looked away.

  The music began again, like rainfall.

  The table gave us scarce room to put down knives and tankards together. Behind it, we needs must touch. The buttons of Garnet’s pocket-flap poked me in the hollow of my hip. Our elbows jostled as we ate, and the stew was spiced with little red flecks that bit my tongue like fire, until I had no option but to quench it in long pulls at my wine.

  I drank too much, too quickly. Sweat beaded on my scalp and itched beneath the wig. I took the damn thing off, wretched horsehair and sticky pomade and authority abandoned all together.

  Folding it into my coat, I sat on both to keep them safe. And all the while that
heartbeat went on pounding, lazy and hot and sweet, until the room reeled about me, and I could not get the scent of Garnet out of my mouth, no matter how burned. It wound about me, like the music, every time he moved—some modern cologne, orange blossom and rosemary, overlaid atop of tar and sweat and heat.

  “This . . . this is a mistake,” I said, not quite sure whose mistake it was, his or mine. I should not have followed him here, let alone come through the door. I did not know why I had, except that I had very much wanted to.

  A little ripple of applause went through the room. Voices called out in soft encouragement, and Garnet leaned over to whisper, like a friend with a confession, his lips just grazing my ear, his breath warm on my skin, raising all the little hairs on the nape of my neck with shivery, appalled desire, “On the contrary, it’s most carefully planned. There is even a bed waiting upstairs.”

  “We’re in a crowded room!” I snapped, shocked, and realized too late that my shock was itself a confession. An innocent man would have taken Garnet’s word only as an invitation to get very drunk, the assurance one would not have to walk far to find a bed in which to sleep it off. I, who was not innocent, could no longer pretend not to catch his meaning. If I wished to break off this courtship before it started, I had now lost my chance to lie.

  He understood this too. “You can’t tell me you are anything other than what I am, sir. You can’t say you didn’t feel what I felt, that day.”

  I had no need to ask him which day, and that shook me. So he had experienced it too, had he? That revelation, utterly unlike the infatuations to which I had been subject in my youth—he had shared it. A kind of bitterness against Garnet’s youthful recklessness, which would not see or acknowledge the inconvenient impossibility of its desires, made me look away, his frankness unanswered.