Part 17 (1/2)

'Well, man?' Wyatt was peering into Rooke's face as if to prise the words out of his mouth. 'Well?'

'The natives eluded us, sir,' Rooke said.

'Tch!' The governor's face creased in annoyance. 'Speak up, man, how did that come about?' he demanded. 'Speak up, Lieutenant Rooke, come, man!'

'It was a failure,' Rooke began.

Remembered the firelight, Warungin laughing. The hatchet, s.h.i.+ny along its blade where someone had so recently been employed to put the keenest edge he could on the iron. Silk, smiling, his eyes sliding sideways.

'Sir, it was badly done,' he said.

The words had come back to him. It was a relief like a sneeze to expel them at the governor.

'It was a wicked plan, sir, I am sorry to have been persuaded to comply with the order. I would not for any reason ever again obey a similar order.'

The governor's face was slack with astonishment. Rooke watched him, saw all his prospects wither like a leaf in the fire. It was a weightless sensation. He saw it on the governor's face, irreversible, and felt nothing but relief.

Something was finished for him.

'You are speaking out of turn, Lieutenant,' Wyatt said. 'Mind your words, sir!'

Wyatt was no friend of his but Rooke saw that he was straining, like a man holding a dam, to prevent catastrophe. He was freshly shaved, as was the governor. Rooke caught a whiff of the astringent that Barber used on them.

They were three men on a sandy track, the coa.r.s.e patter of gum leaves around them agitating in the breeze, a bird nearby making a noise like a creaking door.

'Sir, your orders were a most gravely wrong thing, I regret beyond words my part in the business.'

'But was anyone killed, Lieutenant?' the governor insisted as if he had not heard. 'How many were got?'

His prim-lipped manner set Rooke alight.

'I beg your pardon, sir, but that is beside the point. The intention of evil was there which is all that G.o.d sees when he looks into our hearts.'

He saw the governor flinch at the word G.o.d and was surprised at himself for using it. It sounded like a cheap trick to silence the governor, when what he truly felt was that G.o.d was just a way for a man to interrogate his own heart.

'By Jove, sir,' the governor said, 'you are mighty sure of yourself for a junior officer, and mighty free with the Almighty's name!'

There was an awkwardness about this-mighty and Almighty-that made all three men pause and listen to the words ringing together.

'I will ask, Lieutenant Rooke, that you attend me at midday at Government House.'

And then he was gone. Wyatt took long strides to catch him up, glancing back at where Rooke was already turning towards his future.

He would go to his hut on the point. He would light his fire, boil water, make tea. Sit outside with his back against the wall, where the morning sun warmed the planks.

Depending on when the s.h.i.+ps arrived from England, he might have a few weeks or a few months to sit there. He would go on measuring the rainfall, taking the temperature of the air. He might even find one or two more stars and add a few more words to the notebooks.

But sooner or later, His Majesty's grand machine would take him into itself. He would be sent away. He would stand and listen as a court p.r.o.nounced his sentence. Then he would be taken from that place and be obliged to submit to one kind of death or another: the death of the body or the death of the future.

By the time he entered the settlement, the stars could no longer be seen, the sky arching over him now a limpid early-morning blue. But they were still there, hanging in their appointed places. The earth would turn forever and sunset would follow sunrise into eternity, and the glory of the stars would blaze out whether or not anyone saw them.

Almost fifty years later the earth still turned and the stars still burned, and Daniel Rooke still looked up and watched them.

He had learned that the naked eye could see things a telescope could not. The exquisite instruments of astronomy could add new stars to the sum of the world's knowledge, but it took a soul to wonder at the beauty of those already discovered.

They had not hanged him, for which he had gone on his knees and given thanks to G.o.d. But when they told him he might continue in the service, on condition that he apologise to James Gilbert and accept a loss of rank to ensign, he refused. By then he knew why he had been spared, and it was not to serve His Majesty. He went straight from the court to offer himself to another cause.

That cause had taken him back to a place he had never thought to revisit: Antigua. He marvelled at the symmetry of it. In Antigua he had once watched a young lieutenant of marines hanged for disobeying. He too had disobeyed but had been spared, and it seemed only right that Antigua should take his life and make use of it.

Now that life was fading, a star at dawn. He lay awake in the dark. Sunrise was some time off, but the window was a grey square. The tropical dawn would come too quickly, that brilliant Caribbean light that an invalid longed to shut out. Waiting for darkness was what he did now, as he had done when he was an astronomer. He thought the final darkness might not be far off.

He lay still, hardly breathing. There was a short s.p.a.ce of time in which he was blessedly conscious only of existing. He savoured it. Then the pain returned, the pounding fullness in the head, the pangs behind the eyeb.a.l.l.s, the aching in his shoulders, his back, his legs. It was a matter of willing time to pa.s.s, so that he might either die or recover.

Beyond the window the parrots chattered in the guava tree. Another day had to be lived through in this hot and weary bed.

The curtain, broken along its rings, still dangled lopsided as it had for every day of his illness, a shred of lining hanging down. He knew the curtain, the broken rings, that tongue of fabric, to the point of weariness. Day after day lying on the bed, he had st.i.tched up the rip, reattached the rings, made it neat and orderly. But only in his mind's eye. It was weeks since he had had the strength to do anything more strenuous than sit up in bed, move to the commode, creep back again between the sheets.

Now he could make out his other familiars, the constellations of mildew on the ceiling and the cracks in the floor tile that made the shape of France. In his busy mind he had a pail of hot soapy water, a scrubbing brush. The cracks were full of dirt, the tiles themselves clouded across their terracotta surfaces. It was interesting to observe-or had been, the first hundred times-how the pattern of dirt revealed, in a way otherwise invisible, the slight unevennesses in the laying of the tiles. Where one corner was lower than its neighbour by a fraction, the dirt had settled, undisturbed. Where an edge rode high the pa.s.sage of feet had worn it clean. If for any reason you needed to create an absolutely flat surface-for some experiment involving metal b.a.l.l.s and their movement, for example-this would be a way to make sure of it. If he should ever find himself needing such a perfect surface, he would remember how you could use dirt.

He took it as a good sign, that he could still have such orderly and deductive thoughts.

The servant-woman, Henrietta, was good. But she had enough on her hands looking after him. Even before he fell ill, she stayed only out of a sense of honour. He had not been able to pay her for perhaps a year.

'You have been good for us,' she always said when he apologised. 'For me, and for us.'

She meant, of course, the slaves. He had given his life for them.

Well, that was a little melodramatic. He was not yet thirty when he had begun to give his life for them. He was seventy-four now, lying on this hot bed. Call it two-thirds, roughly, something like two-thirds of a life.

Actually, it was twenty-two thirty-sevenths of a life. He wondered how sick he would have to be for numbers to leave him, that craving for the exact.

Two-thirds of a life, then, let us say, that had begun with such promise. Then he had made his choice, and it had brought him here: to this house on the hill above English Harbour.

All those who had exclaimed at his prospects had fallen away long ago and all those he had loved-wife, son and daughter-were dead or elsewhere now. If a man lived as long as he had, he supposed things could not be otherwise. Now it was just himself and Henrietta.

He could hear her clanking downstairs in the kitchen, and the mewing of the cat wanting its breakfast.

Henrietta would bring him a slice of mango from the tree outside, a plate of cold boiled yam from last night. He wanted neither, but she would bring them and scold him, in her quiet way, hold up the mango until he took a bite, wipe his chin for him when the juice ran down.

A bowl of oatmeal would be good. He had loved oatmeal as a child. Portsmouth, forever s.h.i.+ny in the rain, and his mother's oatmeal, warm and sweet, fat with cream. In Antigua oatmeal was unknown. He supposed it could be bought from the s.h.i.+ps that carried other luxuries from England, but only if you had money.

He had bought Henrietta at auction, when he still had money. By then he was used to it, standing with the other men and counting upwards aloud, turn and turn about with them, until they stopped. How many had he bought? He had started a list in the beginning, but left off after a time. For once, the number did not matter. He could only say, I bought as many as I could.

Bought and freed, of course, and how they hated him for that, the men around him in the auction yard. They had agreed among themselves, and bid the price up and up to ruin him faster.

Now there was nothing, just the water in the well, the mangoes on the trees, the yams in the garden.