The Legacy of the Lynx: Three people, two murders, one oath... Read online

  Ruan had no idea if this was the man’s intent or merely his own way of coping, a survival mechanism to get him through that dreadful night. He remembered the fat man from the Collybuckie, having played cards with him on several occasions. He’d talked a lot then too, much to everyone’s irritation but by Christ, Ruan was thankful for it now. He was terribly worried about Golo and whether he’d managed to get aboard one of the lifeboats or rafts, for he surely wasn’t on this one. His eyes smarted with the assault and battery of wind and salt, but every time he thought on Golo the tears came spilling out, no matter how hard he tried to stop them.

  ‘Think on me as buoyancy,’ the fat Italian was starting off again. ‘Sure I’m big, and far more corpulent than I’ve any right to be, but that just goes to show I’ve a good lifetime behind me. And I can assure you I’ve done my duty by family, friends and church so, if I go, feel free to utilise me anyway you can: as an extra buoy if that’s helpful…a bit of meat and blubber if not. All grist to the mill for the continuation of human life and continue we will, my friends, in one way or another…’

  He talked and talked like this, all through the several hours that were left of the night after the storm subsided and before dawn came and the sun began to move up from the horizon. It was then that they realised his optimism was well-founded; the sea they’d been so fearful of become an ally, delivering them within a quarter-mile of the shore.

  ‘It’s only fair to tell you,’ the fat Italian said then, ‘that I can’t swim a stroke, so it’s up to the rest of you to tug me in.’

  And by God, they were more than glad to do that small service for him and those strong enough and able threw themselves into the water, pulling the raft and the fat Italian behind them. The tide was with them but still it was a battle, the waves strong and still huge, crashing chaotically all about them, rocks and reefs to left and right and no idea which way was best to get them in. And they maybe would have been defeated right at the last had there not been men on the beach, men who’d been up and early, raking at the weeds the storms were throwing gratis on their shores.

  They wasted no time once they spotted the bedraggled company in the water – mostly due to the fact that a hugely fat man was waving his sodden coat above his head to alert them. They kicked off their boots and tore off their coats and chucked themselves into the water, swimming out until they reached the raft, taking over the ropes, hauling in every last survivor, depositing them shivering and shaking upon the sand, removing them back to life from the uncaring sea.

  They were taken up the shore into their rescuers’ cottages, placed about their fires to dry out a little, warm up, while a messenger was sent to the Servants of the Sick to come and take these incomers off their hands. Ruan was so exhausted and addled by all he’d been through he hardly remembered the journey from the village to the quiet oasis that was the monastery of the Servants.

  But he got there somehow, and was stripped of his clothes, the welt on his face and the deep wound in his forearm cleaned and dressed before he was placed upon a narrow bed, where he slept without a break through the next forty-eight hours of his life.

  7

  A BODY FOR THE BODY SWEEPERS

  WALCHEREN PENINSULA, HOLLAND 1798

  The waves rolled in, tall and grey, big with the wind of the last two days following the storm, but regular now and long, spindrift blowing up the beach from their breakers like dirty, sand-edged snow.

  Wading through the knee-deep spume came George Gwilt, heading for the tide-line, picking his way with care, not wanting to stumble over any hidden rocks or boulders kicked in unexpectedly by last night’s tide. The gales had brought the water much further up the beach than was usual, throwing stones and detritus right up and over the thin path that nipped and tucked its way along the tops of the low dunes, putting down a layer of stones at their feet maybe six inches deep and five yards wide.

  Stranded below the dunes were great heaps of shiny brown seaweed – oarweed and kelp for the most part – ripped from their off-shore moorings. It had been swooshed upon the sand mostly by that last great tide, many still attached to the stones that had previously been their anchors, welded to their roots by white clumps of crustacean-drilled cement.

  George stood for a few moments, the spindrift bobbing about his gaiters, its tops blowing off every now and then, taken away by the wind, cartwheeling up the wet sand towards the dunes like living things. He looked off towards the horizon, taking a quiet delight to witness the short moment needed for the sun to rise up from nowhere into day, a quick sharp burn of pink and gold upon the horizon as its herald before sun and colour were swallowed up by the overwhelming grey of the on-coming day.

  He looked to his right, along the line of the bay, seeing all the other men from his village jumping down from the dune path onto sand and stone. They scattered themselves out across its length, kelp-forks slung over their shoulders, the hard metal tines of which were secured by lattices of twine-bound twigs, shafts strong and long, worn smooth by many years of being worked as they were about to be worked now.

  A Godsend were these storms: all that kelp and oarweed ousted from the sea-bed, lying there heaped up for the taking – essential for fertilising their vegetable plots, more valuable still when they dried the surplus down, got it piled into charcoal pits and burned into potash, some of which they’d use, the rest they could sell on to the potteries and buy such stuff the village needed that they could not make for themselves.

  George looked about him, going towards the place he’d allotted for himself, barging through the spindrift now, turning his back to the sea and the sun rising above it, his own fork upon his shoulder, ready to be deployed. Once at his spot he set to with his rake, dragging the stranded seaweed away from the stones and onto the sand from where it could be more easily hoiked up and loaded onto the donkey carts the women would soon bring down onto the bay. He slashed off the stone anchors with his bill-hook, pulling away the carcasses of birds and fish, separating those that might still be fit for eating, the rest chucked back into the weeds to enrich the fertiliser that would soon ensue.

  Every now and then he stood back, looked along the line of the bay at his fellow villagers. He saw them setting to or leaning away as he was, hands put to the arch of their backs to ease the ache of the work, not that any of them rested too long. This seaweed was a gift, a bounty that might not be here at all after the next tide was in, taken away as easily as it had been given. There was an added hope too: the possibility they might find something useful buried in these tawny heaps; some unusual flotsam or jetsam from a boat upturned out there in the channel, always a few caught unawares every time a storm blew out of nowhere, as this last one had done. A couple of years back they’d found a chest filled with quills and parchments, inks and blocks of sealing wax of all colours. Not much use to a village that boasted only a few literate men, George one of the few. But wax was always useful for sealing cheeses, plugging holes in this or that, and the rest of the haul they’d sold off in dribs and drabs at markets all along the coast, bringing in a bit of extra geld. They’d found other things too: a couple of partly stoved-in barrels of what they’d taken to be fruit of some kind that the women had peeled, boiled up and pickled – you could never be too careful. It had tasted well enough afterwards, though they’d never learned the name of whatever fruit it was.

  This latent thrill of discovery was always present whenever the villagers raked at the piled-up storm-weed; and trepidation too, for they might also find a few soft carcasses of sheep or goats wrapped in those wild wide strands of weed. Animals swept off the cliffs or dunes were always a loss, the meat usually spoiled and rotten by the time it was found and of no use anymore for eating, though sometimes it could be saved by salting and drying. And then there was that other kind of discovery: the bodies of sailors or fishermen – sometimes men they knew – who’d been tangled in their nets, or not quick enough back to harbour, broken up with their boats at the bases of the cliffs further
down the coast.

  Worst of all was when they found one of those skinny-limbed boys the big ships needed to go a hundred yards or more up into their rigging to release a sail or tie it fast. These boys were wasp-thin, plucked from their slender foot-holds on masts and ropes by winds that had already blown down full-grown trees, winds which this time had wrecked the roof of George’s village’s communal barn; winds so strong they took only seconds to tug up those rigging boys and send them out upon the cold water of the sea like seeds strewn on a field.

  For all these reasons George Gwilt took his time when his fork hit something hidden within the weeds – something too large to be a fish, unless it might be a porpoise, whose stories were always written out upon their dulling hides: the soft, blank paleness of the very young; the pocks and scars of harpoons or disease on those who’d survived longer. So there was a hard scratching in George’s throat and at the ends of his fingers as they gripped the shaft of his rake when he felt their tines hit something larger. He withdrew his rake immediately and studied the suspect area of seaweed.

  He could see nothing immediately untoward but his gut tightened, and he used the toe of his right boot to delve gingerly into the mass, kicking it gently, trying to dislodge some of the seaweed, moving along the line a foot or so and repeating this manoeuvre several times. Whatever was there behind the curtain of weeds was at least five foot long and fairly pliant, and George knew this was no length of wood or hidden barrel. He took a deep breath before poking gently with his rake at the mass of seaweed, hearing a gentle tearing sound as its spokes caught at some material that had parted from its seams.

  A body, then.

  George knew it. A waterlogged sack of skin that must have been buffeting through the last couple of nights before it hit the breakwater, limbs tangling in the kelp until it was wrapped so tight it came in with the weed, rolling in with the tide. George sent up a silent prayer to the God that he rather doubted inhabited the great welkin of the sky above him. Deities held little sway in the belief schemes of men like George Gwilt. They served only to provide them with the faint possibility that there was an unknown order to the otherwise random piling up of disasters that framed their everyday lives, giving them a little hope that being alive was not just a measure of years to be got through and endured, that all they had gone through and suffered had not been done in vain.

  It was a hard philosophy George lived by, and squeamishness was not in its remit, and soon he was pulling away the last vestiges of seaweed that were hiding the body he already knew lay within. He could see in his mind’s eye the corner of the cemetery in which this new corpse would be buried, one of the many he and his villagers had raked out of the sea over the years. They were men and boys, for the most part, and sometimes women too, mostly gravid, the load within their bellies too heavy for them to bear.

  Most of these unfortunates went unclaimed, buried without names, packed as close together as scones upon a skillet with all the others who had gone before them. Sea-bought souls, such people were called around these parts: sea-bought, village-buried, consigned to a communal pit with the scantest of blessings. Unless they were proven suicides, who had not even the grace of being placed in consecrated ground.

  George Gwilt lay down his rake, got to his knees, started at the pile of seaweed with his hands. He wanted, by doing so, to be gentle and respectful and give this dead person some kind of normal human response when his face was brought into the light. It didn’t take long – two minutes to uncover the most length of the corpse – enough to show George which end was which, and only a couple minutes more to pull the weeds from the dead man’s face.

  And it was a man, square-jawed, stubble popping from his chin, neck and cheeks, the small growth of it exaggerated by the bloating of his skin; a man advanced in years, well dressed. These facts gave George an odd relief, for here must be someone who had already lived the most part of his days. He must surely have had the chance to take his best shot at life, done whatever he needed to get done. He was of an age to have not only children but maybe grandchildren too, and could be considered, therefore, to have passed the greatest milestones every lifetime hankered after, assured of some kind of hereafter if only in the children he had left behind.

  And there was something else George noticed pretty much straight off, which was that this man had more flesh on his bones than any of the villagers he knew, a man obviously well nourished, well cared for. So, not a local man, and far more likely washed off one of the big ships that passed out there in the straits, a merchant maybe, or perhaps an ex-soldier. He was certainly someone who had lived a far longer, more prosperous life than any that was to be had around here.

  Armed with this knowledge George pulled away the last of the seaweed with more curiosity than dread, hoping to find an obvious coat pocket that might reveal a wallet or papers, anything that would give this man a name or some sort of provenance. On closer inspection the man’s clothes, bedraggled as they were, were of a far finer quality than George had ever seen in his life. And grand clothes meant grand lives, and grand lives meant money. If George could be the mechanism by which this grand man got home, if in name only, then so much the better would it be for George and his village, who might even reap some reward from it.

  And so he worked at the seaweed and managed to uncover the elbow to an arm that was crooked across the man’s chest, hiding him, holding him and his waistcoat down. George paused. There was something not quite right here. He couldn’t pin it down, but the feeling was strong in him just the same. He wondered if he should stop, go fetch the priest, let the man do his usual mutterings, deliver his last rites and unction.

  He felt peculiarly sullied by such close contact to this sea-bought soul and would have liked to have lit up his pipe and stand there leaning on his rake for a while, thinking things over. But he’d already caught a glance at the men working over on the bay to his left, and saw how they’d noticed his own rhythm pause and change. He knew that it was only a matter of minutes before they came crashing through the gates of his only chance at a pass to a better life than he and his boys lived now. If there was anything to be found on this body then by God George meant to find it before the rest of the snafflers got their noses in the trough.

  And so he didn’t baulk, but took hold of the arm of the man in the seaweed, its stiffness apparent even through the richness of its cloth, and he tugged at it hard until it came free from its shoulder. The snap was audible as the arm broke rigour and came back at George with such force it almost knocked him over. George swallowed down the bile and took a pinch of the sleeve between his fingers, moved the arm so he could study it with more ease. It was a big hand, George thought, with fingers puffed and hard as white puddings. The hand had the look of having been squeezed through the lacy cuff that was secured about his wrist, a stricture held in place by a small gold pin. George hadn’t seen much gold in the course of his life but he knew it for what it was and, with fumbling fingers, he managed to turn the cuff so as to reveal the workings of the link, released the catch, fiddled it from its button hole.

  He might have hoped for a fine gold fob watch, but he didn’t have time to look, not now. Possibly the ring though, which was in-turned towards the man’s palm on his signet finger, puffed as it was. And a large ring, probably for pressing a seal into wax. But it was protected by the ungiving curl of the man’s fingers that rounded about it like a sea urchin denuded of its spines. George had his knife with him but could not bring himself to severe the swollen finger in order to secure it. Pocketing a single gold cufflink was one thing – it could have fallen off anywhere on this man’s journey from sea to shore – but cutting off a finger was something else entirely. It was something that spoke of greedy intent, and that was an ignominy he would not have his fellows cast on him for the rest of his life.

  He could have wished for more time to explore the strange country that was this rich man’s body but he was a pragmatic man and was happy enough with a cufflink. Instead
he rocked back upon his heels and waved to the men who were only twenty odd yards away from him now, eager for their take. He shouted out for one of them to run for the Body Sweepers, the Servants of the Sick, to whom this kind of laying out of the dead was meat and drink.

  He stayed close by in the meantime to make sure that none of the others did what he had not been able to do, to treat this body like any other salvage from a shipwreck, to roll it out of its temporary grave and ransack it for all it was worth.

  8

  A CORPSE CAN BE A HEAVY LOAD

  The Body Sweepers arrived within an hour of George sending for them. He had a passing familiarity with one of them, Brother Joachim, for Brother Joachim periodically visited all the villages hereabouts: lancing boils, setting broken limbs, pulling rotten or broken teeth, excising haemorrhoids, handing out ointments to alleviate men’s most private ailments. He treated the ailments that men would prefer to suffer and allow to superate rather than go to one of the women in the village who would normally be able to treat such minor ailments, if they were asked.

  Brother Joachim greeted George warmly, asking after his family, if his youngest son had found the going easier on his mismatched legs with the specially elevated shoe Joachim had provided George with last spring.

  ‘He’s going a regular treat, thank you,’ George replied. ‘Went at the fields last harvest so’s yous could hardly see the scythe blade, so quick was he.’

  Joachim beamed, his pleasure evident and genuine.

  ‘I’m very pleased for it, Mr Gwilt. No need for his life to be hampered by being shorter on the one side than the other. We’ve all shortcomings, whether you can see them or no. But what have we here today?’

  George didn’t reply, merely cast his glance down at the dead man still half encased in his seaweed tomb.