The North Water(4)
CHAPTER TWO
Brownlee considers himself, after thirty years pacing the quarterdeck, to be a fair judge of the human character, but this new fellow Sumner, this Paddy surgeon fresh from the riotous Punjab, is a complex case indeed. He is short and narrow-featured, his expression is displeasingly quizzical, he has an unfortunate limp and speaks some barbarously twisted bogland version of the English language; yet, despite these obvious and manifold disadvantages, Brownlee senses that he will do. There is something in the young man’s very awkwardness and indifference, his capacity and willingness not to please, that Brownlee, perhaps because it reminds him of himself at a younger and more carefree stage of life, finds oddly appealing.
“So what’s the story with the leg?” Brownlee asks, waggling his own ankle by way of encouragement. They are sitting in the captain’s cabin on the Volunteer drinking brandy and reviewing the voyage to come.
“Sepoy musket ball,” Sumner explains. “My shinbone bore the brunt.”
“In Delhi this is? After the siege?”
Sumner nods.
“First day of the assault, near the Cashmere Gate.”
Brownlee rolls his eyes and whistles low in appreciation.
“Did you see Nicholson killed?”
“No, but I saw his body afterwards when he was dead. Up on the ridge.”
“An extraordinary man, Nicholson. A great hero. They do say the niggers worshipped him like a god.”
Sumner shrugs.
“He had a Pashtun bodyguard. Enormous sod named Khan. Slept outside his tent to protect him. The rumor was the two of them were sweethearts.”
Brownlee shakes his head and smiles. He has read all about John Nicholson in the Times of London: the way he marched his men through the most savage heat without ever once breaking sweat or asking for water, about the time he sliced a mutinous sepoy clean in two with one blow of his mighty sword. Without men like Nicholson—unyielding, severe, vicious when necessary—Brownlee believes the empire would have been lost entirely long ago. And without the empire who would buy the oil, who would buy the whalebone?
“Jealousy,” he says. “Bitterness only. Nicholson’s a great hero, a little bit savage sometimes from what I heard, but what do you expect?”
“I saw him hang a man just for smiling at him, and the poor bugger wasn’t even smiling.”
“Lines must be drawn, Sumner,” he says. “Civilized standards must be maintained. We must meet fire with fire sometimes. The niggers killed women and children after all, raped them, slashed their tiny throats. A thing like that requires righteous vengeance.”
Sumner nods and glances briefly downwards at his black trousers grown gray at the kneepiece, and his unpolished ankle boots. Brownlee wonders whether his new surgeon is a cynic or a sentimentalist, or (is it even possible?) a little bit of both.
“Oh, there was a good deal of that going on,” Sumner says, turning back to him with a grin, “a good deal of the righteous vengeance. Yes indeed.”
“So why did you leave India?” Brownlee asks, shifting about a little on the upholstered bench. “Why quit the Sixty-First? It wasn’t the leg?”
“Not the leg, God no. They loved the leg.”
“Then what?”
“I had a windfall. Six months ago my uncle Donal died suddenly and left me his dairy farm over in Mayo—fifty acres, cows, a creamery. It’s worth a thousand guineas at least, more probably, enough, for sure, to buy myself a pretty little house in the shires and a nice respectable practice somewhere quiet but wealthy: Bognor, Hastings, Scarborough possibly. The salt air pleases me, you see, and I do like a promenade.”
Brownlee seriously doubts whether the good widows of Scarborough, Bognor, or Hastings would really wish to have their ailments attended to by a short-arse hopalong from beyond the Pale, but he leaves that particular opinion unexpressed.
“So what are you doing sitting here with me,” he asks instead, “on a Greenland whaling ship? A famous Irish landowner like yourself, I mean?”
Sumner smiles at the sarcasm, scratches his nose, lets it go.
“There are legal complications with the estate. Mysterious cousins have appeared out of the woodwork, counterclaimants.”
Brownlee sighs sympathetically.
“Ain’t it always the way,” he says.
“I’ve been told that the case could take a year to be resolved, and until then I have nothing much to do with myself and no money to do it with. I was passing through Liverpool on my way back from the lawyers in Dublin when I ran into your Mr. Baxter in the bar of the Adelphi Hotel. We got to talking and when he learned I was an ex–army surgeon in need of gainful employment he put two and two together and made a four.”
“He’s a fierce sharp operator, that Baxter,” Brownlee says, with a twinkle in his eye. “I don’t trust the bastard myself. I do believe he has some portion of Hebrew blood running in his withered veins.”
“I was happy enough with the terms he offered. I’m not expecting the whaling will make me rich, Captain, but it will keep me occupied at least while the cogs of justice turn.”
Brownlee sniffs.
“Oh, we’ll make use of you one way or another,” he says. “There is always work for those that are willing.”
Sumner nods, finishes off his brandy, and places the glass back down on the table with a small clack. The oil lamp depending from the dark wood ceiling remains unlit, but the shadows in the corners of the cabin are deepening and spreading as the light outside begins to fail and the sun slides out of sight behind an iron and redbrick commotion of chimneys and roofs.