The North Water(74)

“I’m a surgeon,” he tells him quietly. “A surgeon now, and that’s the all of it.”

The priest thinks awhile before he speaks again.

“I know you have suffered, Patrick, but you are not alone in that,” he says.

Sumner shakes his head.

“I’ve brought the sufferings on myself, I’d say. I’ve made mistakes aplenty.”

“Show me a man who hasn’t, and I will show you a saint or a great liar. And I haven’t met too many saints in my long lifetime.”

The priest looks at Sumner for a moment and smiles. There are green-gray clots of mucus in both corners of his mouth and his milky eyes look swollen in their sockets. He reaches out his hand, and Sumner holds on to it. It is cool to the touch and almost weightless. The skin is puckered above the joints, and at the fingertips it has the dull sheen of worn leather.

“You should rest,” Sumner tells him again.

“I will rest,” the priest agrees. “That’s what I will do.”





CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Baxter’s man is waiting at the quayside. His name is Stevens, and he says he is an office clerk, although he doesn’t much resemble one. He is close to six feet tall, broad in the chest and belly with dark pinprick eyes, muttonchop whiskers, and a paucity of teeth. Sumner packs his meager necessaries in a sack and says his farewells to Captain Crawford and the crew of the Truelove, then he and Stevens walk south together towards Baxter’s chambers on Bowlalley Lane. They turn down Lowgate, past the Mansion House and the Golden Galleon Inn, past George Yard and Chapel Lane. After the long weeks at sea, the simplicity and sureness of the land strikes Sumner as an aberration, a sleight of hand. He tries to tell himself that all this—the cobblestones, the wagons, the warehouses and shops and banks—is real, but it feels like an elaborate pantomime, a sham. Where is all the water? he thinks giddily. Where is all the ice?

When they reach Bowlalley Lane, Stevens raps hard on the double doors and Baxter opens one of them. He is wearing a navy frock coat piped with lace, a green felt waistcoat, and pin-striped trousers; his teeth are amber and skew-whiff, and his gray hair dangles untrimmed over his ears in a lank and perfumed page boy. They shake hands and Baxter, smiling, looks at him intently.

“I hardly believed it when I read your letter from Lerwick,” he says, shaking his head. “Yet here you are, Mister Patrick Sumner, alive and in the fucking flesh. We thought we’d lost you, drowned or frozen with all the other poor bastards, yet here ye are indeed.” Baxter laughs and slaps him on the shoulder. “Would you take something to eat now?” he says. “Can I get you a plate of oysters or a pork sausage or a nice morsel of calf’s tongue at least?”

Sumner shakes his head. Beneath Baxter’s eager bonhomie he senses an edge of wariness, fear even. His presence here is disturbing, he imagines, and unnatural. He’s the man who should be dead but isn’t.

“I’ve come for my wages only,” he says. “Then I’ll be on my way.”

“Your wages? On your way? Oh no, you fucking won’t,” Baxter says, a look of mocked-up outrage slewed across his face. “You’re not leaving here till you’ve sat and taken a drink with me. I won’t allow it.”

He leads them up the stairs into his first-floor offices. There is a low fire crumbling in the grate and two identical armchairs set on either side of it.

“Sit your arse down there,” Baxter tells him.

Sumner hesitates a moment, then does as he is bidden. When Baxter pours two glasses of brandy and gives one to him, he takes it. They say nothing for a minute; then Baxter speaks again.

“Both ships sunk by ice and you miraculously saved by passing Yaks,” he says. “That’s quite a story you have to tell the waiting world.”

“Maybe so, but I won’t be telling it anytime soon.”

Baxter raises his eyebrows and takes a quick sip of his drink.

“And why is that?” he asks.

“I don’t wish to become known as the one man who survived the Volunteer. I should never have been on that ship. I should never have seen what I saw there.”

“There are widows and orphans aplenty in this town who would like nothing better than to meet a man who could tell them the first-hand truth about what happened. You’d be doing them a great kindness, I’d say.”

Sumner shakes his head.

“The truth won’t help them any. Not now.”

Baxter licks his lips and curls a strand of gray hair behind his darkly bristled ear. He smiles briefly, as if entertained by this idea.

“You may be right,” he says. “Keeping quiet may be the greater kindness, I suppose. Since the men are long dead, the details of their deaths hardly matter. What purpose will it serve to stir things up? Let the poor bastards rest in peace, I say. It was a terrible accident, but such things must be endured.”

Sumner shifts about in his seat. He rubs the nerveless tip of his healed-up tongue against his lips and teeth.

“Some of it was accident and some wasn’t,” he says. “You read my letter. You know about the killings.”

Baxter sighs and glances sideways across the room. He takes a drink and then peers down for a while at the gleaming toe ends of his patent leather pumps.

“Horrifying,” he whispers. “Just horrifying. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. Cavendish? Brownlee? A fucking cabin boy?”