Not Yet Drown'd Read online

  “What, the name of this tune? You’ll need a lamp in here. Let me see…yes, yes, that is it. And he has it in English, below, too: ‘The MacLeans’ Gathering.’”

  “But Hector, look at the tune itself. That’s not right.”

  He hummed the first line of music, following along with his finger on the manuscript page. “No, that’s not right. That’s not ‘The MacLeans’ Gathering.’”

  “It’s ‘Black Donald’s March,’” said Catherine.

  “‘Piobaireachd Dhomhnuill Duibh,’” agreed Hector.

  “Certainly Sandy knew that,” said Catherine.

  “Well, he made a mistake then.”

  “How could he? The tunes are nothing alike.”

  “Even Homer nods; and heaven knows Sandy made a mistake or two in his time.”

  “I think it is very curious,” said Catherine. It seemed to her a familiar mistake, one that she had noticed before, elsewhere.

  Mr Sinclair came clattering down the passageway, bringing with him the distinctive scent of salt wind, and sporting a bright pink spot on each cheek. “Oh, there is my Leonardo!” he said, and tenderly gathered up his folio from the easel. His glance fell across Mrs Todd’s drawing, lying on the table. He raised his eyebrows, then after a moment turned over the sheet so that it lay facedown.

  “Pray, Mr Sinclair, let us have your opinion as a piper,” said Hector. “Do you know ‘The MacLeans’ Gathering’?”

  Mr Sinclair thought for a moment, an upward-and-backward remembering look on his brow, and then lightly sang the first phrase.

  “Yes, yes. Just so. Now look at this, sir, if you will.”

  As Hector had done, Mr Sinclair sang the music off the page, quietly. “Oh,” he said, “but that is ‘Black Donald of the Isles’ March to Inverlochy.’”

  “Of course it is. I am sure it is a simple error, Catherine,” said Hector. “You must correct it in your copy.”

  “Is this the manuscript you spoke of copying, Mrs MacDonald?” asked Mr Sinclair. “Interesting. But I cannot agree, Mr MacDonald, that your sister ought to correct mistakes. It is bad enough that errors of transcription will creep in of their own accord, no matter how careful one is; but if one is copying, one must not make any deliberate change of any kind, no matter how trivial it may seem and no matter how obvious the original error.”

  “I did not expect so scientific a rigour from you!” said Hector. “Perhaps she might write ‘sic’ in the margin?”

  “A reasonable compromise. May I ask, Mrs MacDonald, why you have undertaken so onerous a task?”

  “Because my maid tells me I must,” replied Catherine lightly. “I suppose she thinks I need some useful work to do.”

  “Checkmate!” rang out Anibaddh’s triumphant voice through the thin partition separating the main cabin from the adjoining cabin. “Checkmate at last! You led me all around the bush this time, child! You’re going to beat me one of these days, and it won’t be long.”

  ON A BRILLIANT day of mid-Atlantic autumn sunshine, just before dinner, most of Increase’s passengers were on the main deck enjoying the fine weather. A light but steady wind filled the topsails, but there was only a faint breeze down at deck level. The sea was smooth and the darkest blue except where the ship’s aqua wake stretched straight back to the northeast horizon. Catherine worked in the shade of a sail at a small makeshift table contrived from a board laid across two chair backs. Taking the piobaireachds in order, she had now arrived at the seventeenth—of a total of 126 piobaireachds. It was a surprisingly large number. How and when and where had Sandy learned so many?

  Nearby sat Mrs Todd, drawing with red chalk on paper. She worked on a small board on her lap, copying a picture from a book of Mr Sinclair’s. The book—a handsome collection of Italian engravings—stood on an easel also belonging to Mr Sinclair. Grace was trying her hand at drawing, too, copying the same picture as Mrs Todd.

  Mr Sinclair was walking his daily half mile, forty perimeters of the main deck, while reading a small book. He had done this so many times that by now he stepped automatically over the prisms set into the deck to bring light below. Each time he passed the steps leading up to the quarterdeck, where he had previously laid out forty large dried beans, he picked up one of them—without looking up from his book—and dropped it into the canvas bag that he had commissioned Grace to sew for him. By this system he was relieved of the necessity of counting his laps.

  Hector lay comfortably on his favorite coil of rope, gazing upward at the sails, pondering their shape.

  Dr Macpherson smoked his pipe—ruminating—downwind from the others but within earshot.

  Where was Mr Fleming? In his cabin, Catherine supposed, toiling over his translation.

  For once, no one was talking.

  Delicious smells wafted up from the galley, which vented just here: onions; cinnamon; garlic; the unmistakable aroma of roasting lamb or, more likely, mutton.

  “They are all gone, Mr Sinclair,” cried Mrs Todd, for Mr Sinclair was feeling blindly for yet another bean as he read, not realizing that he had completed his fortieth lap, and no beans remained.

  “Oh, so they are,” he said mildly, looking up from his book at last.

  “I have been waiting quietly these last three turns, knowing that you had nearly finished, and not liking to interrupt you. But do come see what I have done, sir, if you please. And you must be sure to praise me, for I am sure it is the best thing I have done yet.”

  Mr Sinclair came as summoned, tying up his bag of dried beans and tucking his book under his arm. He stood behind her, looking over her shoulder as she held up her work for him to see. After a moment, he said, “Well, really, Mrs Todd, that is not bad at all.”

  “Not bad at all!” she said. “Do hear him, Mrs MacDonald: ‘Not bad at all.’ And this is the highest praise I have ever been able to wring from him. Well, sir, pray go on: what is not bad about it? What will you single out as being particularly not-bad?”

  But Mr Sinclair did not smile. He said only, “The accuracy of your draftsmanship is improving. And you are discovering the uses and virtues of chalk at last. You are no longer attempting to use it as though it were merely a blunt quill.”

  “The virtues of chalk! I have got it all over my sleeves, the dirty stuff. My maid will have something to say about that. But what do you think of my elegant outline, here? And the convincing shadows? I have worked very hard on the shadows in particular.”

  “Yes, so I see. But do not be discouraged; more practice will give you ever greater ease and facility.”

  Mrs Todd’s response was a merry peal of laughter, to show that she was much amused and certainly not discouraged.

  Then Mr Sinclair went to see what Grace had produced. Grace sat drooping over her board so that her messy, windblown plaited hair lay across her work, like a pale broad stroke of red chalk. Mr Sinclair moved the long braid to one side and looked, without saying anything, for a long moment. Then he said, “That is remarkable. Quite remarkable.”

  “What? Let us see, Grace, do. Hold it up so we can all see, like a good girl,” said Mrs Todd. But Grace was too bashful for that, and leaned over her board again, sheltering it from view.

  “May I, please?” said Mr Sinclair gently, and coaxed her into giving it up to him. “Do you realise that you have drawn it in reverse? You have made a perfectly accurate mirror image. You would be worth a great deal in an engraver’s workshop, my lass.”

  “Whatever do you mean?” inquired Mrs Todd. “Why would such a trait be of any interest to an engraver?”

  “Images to be engraved must be drawn in reverse on the plate,” explained Mr Sinclair.

  “Let me see,” said Dr Macpherson, coming to look. “Aha! I have encountered this sort of phenomenon in the past, though it is fairly rare. And it tends to run in families, I suspect; a father and his son of my acquaintance, in Kingussie, wrote their names from right to left. Not only the order of the letters but the letters themselves were reversed, as though one
were seeing it in a looking glass. They were joiners, the both of them, very clever artificers, and nothing deficient in their intellect was to be observed in the ordinary course of things. Yet they shared this peculiarity. As for any other writing of theirs, whether it ran backward or forward I do not know; for they both avoided any occasion of writing to the extent that their trade and their way of living allowed, only sometimes being compelled to write out an account, I daresay. And then again, when I was studying medicine at Edinburgh, a distinguished faculty member described the case of a boy, an orphan, who was unable to distinguish right from left, or clockwise from counterclockwise, though his intellect was not only unimpaired but markedly superior in other respects. And the most interesting point was that this boy’s elder brother, and his two younger sisters, also orphans of course, and from infancy fostered and brought up in different towns where they never had seen one another since the first breaking up of the family after the death of the parents, also manifested just the same peculiarity. So it could not be supposed, as might be argued in the case of the joiner and his son in Kingussie, that the parent had simply taught his child his own peculiar way of writing their name. Instead one is led to the inescapable conclusion that there is something inherent in the familial organism which produces this result. It is most interesting, most suggestive. Pray, Mrs MacDonald, is there any degree of this reversion, as it might be called, of this tendency to reverse, in yourself or your other kin? Or does your daughter’s peculiarity derive perhaps from her father instead?”

  “But Mrs MacDonald is not actually Grace’s mother!” cried Mrs Todd. “No, no, indeed not, Dr Macpherson, did you not know? Bless us, sir! No, no, Mrs MacDonald is her stepmother, you see. They are in fact no flesh-and-blood kin at all, not in the least.”

  “Oh, I beg your pardon then, madam. I had naturally assumed that you were the child’s mother. I am sure that I was told you were her mother, and then there is a physical resemblance, both of complexion and of feature, which might certainly support the assumption. Well, well! So I suppose that this tendency to reversion might have come from either her father or her mother, but we must not expect to see it expressed in yourself. Well! It is a pity we are prevented from tracing the peculiarity any further.”

  “I do not like that man,” said Grace to Catherine in the dark that night.

  “Who?”

  “That Dr Macpherson.”

  “Oh, my dear, his is neither a genteel manner nor an admirable character. Your judgment is quite just. But I do not think he means any harm. It is only an unpolished manner, and an unfortunate temperament, I trust. And he has struggled with misfortunes all his life. Let us try to keep charitable hearts.”

  “Still, he is not a good man. If I were ill, I would not let him come near me.”

  “Let us hope then that you do not fall ill.”

  “CATHERINE? OH, HERE you are,” said Hector early one morning. “I awakened this morning with the most marvelous tune running in my head. Let me sing it for you, and you can tell me what it is.”

  “If you think I might recognise it,” she agreed; and he hummed it for her.

  “It is a pipe tune, I suppose,” she said.

  “I think it is. Yes, in my head I hear it as pipe music. It would fit on the pipes, I am sure. But what is it? Do you recognise it?”

  “No, not just precisely. I could not put a name to it. Here comes Mr Sinclair. Ask him.”

  “Good morning, sir,” said Hector. “Do you recognise this tune, this pipe tune? It goes like this…” Hector sang it again, and Mr Sinclair listened intently, with his head cocked to one side.

  “Hmmm. I cannot just say that I recognise it. Where did you learn it, then?”

  “I do not know. I awakened this morning with it running through my head, and it has been with me ever since. I have been trying to put a name to it.”

  “So, it might be your own. Perhaps you have made it yourself.”

  “So it might; but each time it runs through my head, it sounds more familiar, and then I doubt its being my own.”

  “Oh, aye. An image once appeared in my mind’s eye—complete, compelling, and, so far as I was able to determine, of the most complete novelty. I could not remember having ever laid eyes upon it, not in all my studies or travels. What was it? Oh, just the eyes, seen very close, the direct gaze of a stag. So I drew it, peering out from the foliage at the border of the title page decoration I was then engaged upon, a decoration for an edition of The Lady of the Lake. A very handsome and striking effect it had, peering from the oak leaves and the pine sprays of the border—you know that unblinking, direct gaze of the wild animal when it thinks it has not been seen?—and very proud I felt of my own original invention. It was not until a year or two later that I happened across what must have been my inspiration, from my earliest childhood. I was visiting my brother and his young family, and while reading to my little nephews from a book of old tales from the Black Forest—a book that had been in our own nursery before it passed to my brother—I came face-to-face with a woodcut print of the virtuous poor woodcutter who figured in the story. And in the bosky decorative border I saw a badger peering out from a tangled hedge—just his eyes, his face, and in the eye that same fierce, intent regard which I had succeeded in putting into the eye of my stag.”

  “Were you disappointed?”

  “Crestfallen. But I resolved then to guard against the false pride of originality. Of the thousands of drawings I have made, there are some whose sources even I do not know. But I try not to pride myself on having originated them, for it is far more likely that I have simply not yet remembered what previously seen images inspired them.”

  “Thus in science, too,” said Hector. “Even my spiral oar, you know, which first came to me in a dream I had about mining, and which I regarded at first as entirely my own invention—why, a very similar design was proposed by Mr Nasmyth, the eminent mechanic, and artist, too, you know, at just about the same time. Had I seen or heard of his proposal at one of the Mechanics Institute lectures perhaps? I do not know; I do not remember hearing of it, but perhaps I had. Yet ideas are free to us all.”

  “Nevertheless, this tune of yours—”

  “Which may not be mine at all—”

  “Nevertheless you must write it down, just as you have sung it for us. Too often tunes disappear without a trace, departing as they arrived. Sooner or later you may come across the original, or—if not—you may eventually feel confident that it might be your own, at least in part. Meanwhile, we are all the richer for the arrival, somehow or other, of a tune which is new to us, at least.”

  “Here is some paper, with staves already drawn,” said Catherine.

  An appalling sound issued from behind the thin wooden partition, from Mrs Todd’s little sleeping cabin—a sound which the three of them in the main cabin pretended not to hear. “Well, I shall go write it down while it remains fresh in my mind,” said Hector, and went away. A few moments later, Anibaddh came out from Mrs Todd’s little cabin, carefully drawing the door closed behind her. She was carrying a basin, with a towel draped across the top to cover its contents. Though she hastened quickly away, a faint smell of vomit lingered in the room. Catherine’s glance met Mr Sinclair’s for just a moment.

  “And the sea as flat as a billiard table this morning, too,” he said.

  JUST BEFORE BEDTIME, Catherine made her way to the main deck for a breath of fresh air; and for a brief and rare draught of solitude (or near solitude, for the helmsman was at his helm as always, the binnacle light glowing muted on the compass and on the spokes of the great, heavy wheel and its cables). Sheltered by the black night, she felt free to try out Hector’s favorite place, free to recline on the thick coil of hemp rope with its view of the full-bellied sails and the black fathomless sky beyond them. There was no moon, only starlight, and the stars were spilled in a great dizzy careless swath across the velvety deep blue-black sky.

  The pale sails faintly glowed. They reminded Catherine
somehow of strong horses leaning into their collars, powerful pulling shoulders and haunches of sail. And Catherine heard, issuing from somewhere deep in the ship itself, from the warm, steamy, spice-scented galley, a voice—a low, long, deep tone. Then another, and then song of incomprehensible words, pure voice—a strange song of most ardent longing, of endless, hopeless lament. It was Sharada’s voice—not (for once) modestly humming under her breath, barely audible or perhaps even unconscious, but actual song, the open-throated voice, the full voice with all the resonance and flesh-and-blood timbre of the chambers and bones in the skull, the throat, the chest.

  It went on for a long while; then a drum spoke, too (or, more likely, a big kettle, drummed upon perhaps by the cook whose kettle it was, and who was after all of the same district as Sharada, or so she had said, and who might be supposed to know the same music). The drumming, although regular and even, seemed to Catherine casual; of a pattern which remained unintelligible for a long time. Catherine lay back and let the plaintive song stream off behind her, streaming away and left behind forever like the ship’s wake, like the air they passed through and passed upon. Eventually she noticed that there was, after all, logic and meaning in the drum—such logic and meaning, and in the song it accompanied. The singer and the drummer knew what they were doing after all, it seemed.

  Catherine was borne along by their music, filled and moved by it, just as the ship was borne on the breast of the ocean by the wind pressing the sails into their amplest shape, and their wake streaming out behind like time itself. When the song stopped, it was as though the wind had died: Her spirit lay becalmed, slack.

  Yet Increase sailed on her course. Arising after a while, chilled, Catherine made her way down to her cabin, where Grace, she supposed, would have gone to bed some time ago.

  But the cabin was not dark; a shaded lamp still shone, and Grace was not in her bed. “What are you doing?” Catherine said. Grace was seated close before the little looking-glass fastened to the bulkhead. She held a book—it was The Life of Washington—open to the looking glass, its binding against her thin chest. Peering over her shoulder, her glance met Catherine’s. She was flushed, her translucent skin glowing and eyes glistening. Catherine shut the door carefully behind her.