Not Yet Drown'd Read online

  “I can read,” whispered Grace. “Again. After all. In the looking glass, I can make it out, ever so slowly.”

  12

  an ackward Pitiful, Clownish Fellow

  Dr Macpherson was consulted; he called upon Mrs Todd, interviewed her privately, examined her still more privately. Then within a very short time the nature of Mrs Todd’s sudden illness was known to all aboard Increase. There was certainly no cause for alarm; all was well in train.

  “Ha ha! Increase indeed!” said Captain Mainwaring, and sent in an offering of his cook’s daintiest and most wholesome custard flavoured with saffron and rosewater, using the last of the milk from the failing cow. The captain also promised Mr Todd that his steward would seek out a freshened cow as soon as they should drop anchor at Porto Praya in the Cape Verde Islands, a landfall expected within a fortnight’s good sailing if the wind remained favorable.

  Mr Todd had to eat the custard himself, however; Mrs Todd could not bear the sight of it, and called it a nasty quivering thing. She had Anibaddh bring her plain biscuit, and washed it down with plain water. Upon this diet her nausea abated, though she lay weak, pale and petulant, and complaining of a headache, which compounded itself with each passing day.

  “The headache keep her abed, not her stomach,” Anibaddh confided to Sharada.

  “Headache, is it? And what is saying the doctor to that?”

  “He say she must eat a egg each morning, well boiled. The cook, he boil a egg for her breakfast each day, and I carry it to her soon as Mr Todd has got dressed and gone out. And she eat it. I coax her to eat it, though it smell of fire and brimstone. But the headache still is bad as ever.”

  “Hmmm,” said Sharada. “And she is drinking her tea?”

  “Oh, no, that doctor don’t allow no tea,” said Anibaddh.

  “No tea?” said Sharada. “Why is that?”

  “He say no tea until she take regular exercise again.”

  “But that she will be unable to do; the headache must go first. Well then. I will be curing her headache, Anibaddh, this very hour. Come, let us ask the cook to boil us some sweet water for a strong tea. You will be seeing.”

  “But I am not permitted to drink tea,” objected Mrs Todd twenty minutes later as Anibaddh helped her to sit up in her bed.

  “You will relish it so much the more then, ma’am, for being not permitted,” said Sharada, pouring out the first steaming cupful from the pot.

  “But this is green tea,” said Mrs Todd. “I always have black.”

  “This will be so very healthful, ma’am, in your condition,” replied Sharada. “Just tiny sips, one sip following the other.”

  “Is there no milk for it? “said Mrs Todd.

  “No, ma’am, no milk,” said Sharada. “The poor cow has gone dry. Cows are not happy going over the black water. But there is sugar.”

  Mrs Todd drank a cupful, slowly. Then Sharada refilled the cup.

  “It tastes very odd,” objected Mrs Todd. “And smells odd. What is that smell?”

  “There are three slices of the root of adrak in the pot too,” said Sharada. “It is very healthful, the gingerroot, for it has properties of soothing the stomach and settling the digestion.”

  Mrs Todd drank the second cupful. “Anibaddh, I want another pillow behind my shoulders,” she said. “And do open the shutter so I can see out. Why, it is a brilliant day, a sparkling day.”

  Once more Sharada refilled the cup, and Mrs Todd, sitting now quite upright against her pillows, drank her third cup without complaint. The brilliant equatorial light glancing in the little window no longer hurt her eyes. She rolled her head forward, left, right, back; and her neck no longer felt as though she had been hanged. Her skull felt big enough to hold her brain, at last. Her spine, which had felt as though it were dissolving into her blood, had stopped aching and seemed to have reconstructed itself properly. She pressed her palms to her forehead. “Where is Mr Todd?” she asked.

  “Up on the deck with the other gentlemen, ma’am,” said Anibaddh.

  “What time is it? So late as that? Why, it will soon be dinnertime. Perhaps I could manage to eat a few mouthfuls today. I do believe I am feeling quite rejuvenated. I will get dressed and go up for a few turns on the deck in the sea air at least. And later, Anibaddh, I shall want freshwater to wash my hair.”

  They dressed her and sent her up the hatch to the main deck. When she had gone, Sharada explained to Anibaddh about the tea-sickness. “You must make her drink a cup or two of strong tea every day or the headache will be returning,” said Sharada. “The sahibs and memsahibs are addicted to tea, every one of them. They must be having it, as any opium smoker must be having his opium, or they suffer from headache and ill temper. I have known of some babus in Patna who took up feringee ways and adopted the feringee habit of drinking tea; they also were afflicted by headache when their fortunes changed and they could no longer be buying the expensive leaves from Canton. Yet as it is otherwise harmless, except as sometimes making them excessively excitable and unable to sleep—and making a great deal of water, so inconvenient!—so it is well worth the trouble of making sure there is always tea, a sufficiency of tea. But I would not drink it myself, no.”

  “NOW, MRS MACDONALD, what is all this about Ossian?” inquired Mrs Todd confidentially one afternoon some days later when the two of them sat together on the main deck using up paper. “Pray, just refresh my memory a little about Ossian, for if I ever learned about it—or him?—I seem to have forgotten the details. Wasn’t Ossian an ancient poem, or perhaps a poet, like Homer?”

  “Oh dear. I am not so very clear on the details myself,” admitted Catherine, leaning back and gazing up at the sails. “But the gist of the matter is this, I think. Back in the ’sixties there was a young Mr James Macpherson, from Kingussie, who astonished the world by publishing his translation—from the ancient Gaelic—of an epic poem which he had recorded in our Highlands, a remnant of the old tradition. The poem—or I suppose it must be called a collection of fragments—commemorated the wars and loves of the great Celtic heroes Fingal and Oscar, who lived in—oh, the second or third century. And this epic was said to have been composed by their contemporary, the great bard Ossian. So it made a great splash, this epic poem of Ossian’s, but not everyone quite believed in it. Some said it was a fabrication of Mr Macpherson’s—a forgery, in short. And the world—or the part of it which reads books and has opinions about them—divided into two camps over the authenticity of Mr Macpherson’s Ossian.”

  “Have you read it yourself?” asked Mrs Todd.

  “I made a brave dash at it when I was a girl. But even my young romantic taste found it heavy going. Forlorn hills, howling storms, shrieking torrents, bloody battles, too—a great deal of that—and silent, sorrowful ghosts drifting about. In truth I did not succeed in appreciating it.”

  “But was it authentic, or was it a forgery?”

  “I cannot say. If only he had published his Gaelic sources with his translation! He might easily have done so—if any such sources existed—but he never did.”

  “How dreadful it must have been for the poor man if it was authentic!” said Mrs Todd. “How painful to come under attack as a forger!”

  “Dreadful, too, if it was a forgery,” said Catherine. “How unbearable to hear his Ossian lauded! How jealous he must have felt to hear the rude native genius praised to the high heavens and be unable to claim any of that undeserved glory for himself.”

  “Oh! Jealous of his own success!”

  “But worst of all must have been to hear its authenticity asserted on the grounds that he, Nobody Macpherson, was certainly incapable of producing such a masterpiece himself.”

  “Poor man! Whatever became of him?” said Mrs Todd.

  “You need not pity him overmuch. Ossian made him famous—as famous as he’d made Ossian—and so he met all the great men and got himself into politics and died rich.”

  “It is wonderful that so much fuss can arise about a mere b
ook, and after all these years,” observed Mrs Todd, shaking her head. She rubbed out a mistaken chalk line with her finger, then said, “I wonder if Mr Todd would agree to name it Oscar if it is a boy? Oscar Todd…it has a grand ring to it, has it not? Or even Oscar Fingal Todd? But perhaps that might be a bit much.”

  “HECTOR, DO COME and look at this,” said Catherine one evening between dinner and tea.

  “At what, my dear?” said Hector, who was feeling mellow, for he had just been adding another installment to his serial letter home to Mary.

  “Come and look at this tune in Sandy’s collection.”

  “This one? ‘The Aged Warrior’s Sorrow’? Never heard of it.”

  “No; you must sing it.”

  He sang the first line.

  “Go on,” said Catherine. “The second line.”

  He sang it, quietly. “Hmm,” he said. Then he sang the third line. “You found it, then. And I’d hoped the tune was my own! I was beginning to think of a name for it. But do you know, Catherine, I like my version better, with dari here, not barludh, as he has it. I wonder where I ever heard this. We never played it. I can only have heard it played somewhere, by someone. How odd that it stuck in my head—to emerge now, of all times! And I always had such difficulties learning by heart. The harder I tried, the less able I was to memorise any tune. Yet Sandy could memorise anything, having heard it only once or twice. You, too.”

  “Anything but multiplication tables.”

  “Merely a question of diligence. But have you progressed so far as this? More than one-third done? That is good progress. You are simply working straight through, copying them in order? Is there any particular order?”

  “Not alphabetical, nor geographical, nor chronological. By what other principle might they be arranged? Hector, I have been thinking, but I have hesitated to mention it to you. You are such a scoffer.”

  “I, a scoffer? I preserve a nice skepticism, that is all.”

  “Hmmm…Well, do you remember that curious mistake I showed you where ‘Black Donald’s March’ was miscalled ‘The MacLeans’ Gathering’? Aye; well, it is not the first time we have seen that particular mistake. It was thus in Joseph MacDonald’s Compleat Theory, too. Don’t you remember, from Sandy’s copy of that book, his prize copy? Only one brief phrase from the tune is given as an example of something or other, I cannot remember what, but that phrase is wrongly named.”

  “No, I don’t remember anything of the sort. But if so, it was most likely a printer’s error.”

  “No, it was not, for when Mr Clerk showed us the original manuscript itself that night, and was all agloat over his newest prize, I noticed it there, too, as I looked over your shoulder. If it was a mistake, it was made by Joseph MacDonald himself, not the printer.”

  “Mmm. Well, I will own that it is a curious coincidence. But this is undeniably Sandy’s hand. Who could ever mistake that?”

  “Yes, it is certainly his writing. But Hector, might he not have copied some other collection?”

  “What collection would that be? Oh, Catherine! Are you imagining that sixty years after it went missing, Sandy found the collection of the Great Music that Joseph MacDonald was supposed to have compiled in India? And where is this precious manuscript now, pray? Why did he not send that along home, if ever he had got his hands on such a thing? Catherine, you of all people should know better than that. You know what Sandy was like, his taste for tricks. And his own tune tucked into it, too—a cuckoo in the nest! How delighted he would have been, at having put this one over on you! It is a sad weakness you have, my dear, for fantastic imaginings.”

  “How do you account for it then, Mr Clear-sighted? How do you account for these one hundred and twenty-six tunes, and so many of them tunes that we never learned? And then this mistake, so very like that little slip in MacDonald’s Compleat Theory?”

  “I do not pretend to account for anything Sandy ever did. For all I know, he made up these tunes himself, with just the prettiest touch here and there of pretended mistakes, for verisimilitude, so as to take in the credulous, such as yourself. It would have been just like him.”

  “If Sandy made up these tunes himself, his genius far surpasses anything we ever suspected,” retorted Catherine. “You may flatter yourself upon ‘a nice skepticism,’ but I call it scoffing.” Then she did not speak to him again for an entire day, which he did not notice.

  THEIR FAIR WIND continued, and the Cape Verde Islands materialised during the very night when Captain Mainwaring had predicted they would. The first sight at dawn of the distant smouldering peak of del Fuego caused a sensation among the passengers. It pierced the sky impossibly high and sharp, suspended above a low bank of haze. Far off to the east of them, another ship was beating its way northward, homeward, too far off to hail or to recognise, but the first vessel they had seen in the four weeks since leaving the heavily trafficked Bay of Biscay.

  Increase threaded her stately way past craggy guano-frosted desert islets, to the big island of Saint Jago, and anchored near the watering place at Porto Praya. Then all the passengers, who had been leaning their elbows on her rails since dawn, tore themselves away from the sight of land (feeling so thirsty for the mere sight of it!) and hurried below to their cabins to prepare to go ashore (for if the mere sight of land was so gratifying, what pleasures might it not afford beneath their feet?). They changed their clothes, chose their hats, and finished and sealed their fat letters to be sent home—distracted all the while by thunderings, rumblings, and crashings below their feet, for the water butts were being rolled out of their places in the hold and raised, one by one, to be sent ashore and refilled.

  Catherine and Grace and Hector came up on deck, ready to board the pinnace and be carried ashore on its next return from ferrying water butts to the watering place. Mr and Mrs Todd were there before them, waiting at the rail. Mrs Todd wore her wide-brimmed hat, the one her husband had bought for her in Antwerp. She had it tied with a broad ribbon under her chin.

  “You look ridiculous in that hat,” said Mr Todd, not quietly. “Do you make a spectacle of yourself on purpose, pray? Or is it merely the effect of ignorance and faulty taste?”

  “My hat, a spectacle? But why did you not tell me sooner? I shall go and change it if you do not like it,” said Mrs Todd.

  “You take an interminable time to dress,” he said. “Look, and here is the pinnace already. The MacDonalds are ready to go ashore. Dressed in a seemly manner, too. I shan’t wait for you. And I won’t be seen with that hat.”

  “I shall fly!” promised Mrs Todd, and ran off to change her hat, untying the ribbon under her chin as she went.

  The pinnace tied up alongside, and one by one the passengers wanting to go ashore were lowered briskly to its deck in the bosun’s chair. Mr Todd went last, but Mrs Todd still had not returned. “You may cast off,” Mr Todd said to the second mate in charge of the pinnace as soon as he was safely aboard.

  “No, by no means; we will wait a moment or two,” said Hector. “We have no objection to waiting for Mrs Todd. There is no hurry.”

  Mr Todd scowled but did not reply. The sailors rested on their oars, and the mate, a Mr Griffiths, dried off the seats for his passengers. Within two minutes—an awkward, silent two minutes—Mrs Todd came sailing over the rail in the bosun’s chair, and was let down next to her husband. Mr Griffiths steadied her by the arm, extricated her from the bosun’s chair and handed her to a seat next to her husband. She wore a neat close bonnet now. The sailors leaned to their oars, and as the little boat skimmed toward the shore, Mr Griffiths politely pointed out various landmarks of interest: the governor’s house, the jail, the main watering place, and the principal inn.

  But the Todds were inattentive. Mr Todd, still frowning, muttered something sharp to his wife, and Catherine could not help hearing her reply, for Mrs Todd never could achieve a discreet tone: “Oh, a glimpse of my stockings! But it is out of my power to prevent it, you know, my dear, if I am hoisted aloft in that frightfu
l machine. I’m sure no one thought anything of it. Only you, dearest. My jealous one! Still jealous!” and she made a private little move, a wiggle, closer to his arm, tried to slip her arm under his own as she sat next to him, tried to hold it to her plump bosom. But he would not suffer his arm to be taken. He shifted away from her, made some space between them, and turned his back to her as much as the narrow boat allowed, turning away to have a good look at the little town looming closer now on the shore.

  The landing place was a wide beach of loose rounded pebbles. The crew of the little boat rowed them right up until the keel ground on the beach. Then four sailors leapt over the gunnels and hauled the little boat up onto the shingle, beyond the reach of the little licking waves. Mr Griffiths helped his passengers out, high and dry, and told them when he would be back to take them aboard again. Then the sailors pushed the little boat back out until she floated once more, pivoted neatly, and was rowed smartly away.

  “But I have forgotten how to walk!” said Mrs Todd, laughing while attempting to keep her balance as she toiled up the steep bank of shifting pebbles. Grace was light enough to skip easily up the long slope of loose rock, but Catherine found that she and Hector did better if she took his arm. Even so, their progress was slow. “Oh, do wait for me, Mr Todd!” cried Mrs Todd, last of all. “I cannot go so fast as you do. I am ever so out of breath!” He stopped where he was, ten yards ahead of her, and stood; but he did not offer to go back to help her. Instead, Hector reached out, offering his free arm for her to lean on; and at last they all made their way laboriously up to the top of the slope, where Grace awaited them.