Far more dreadful were the sufferers from Black Vomit. This affliction attacked the nervous system and brain. Those so infected took on a yellowish tinge. Fell comatose. Their pulses sank almost too low to feel, and then came fits of delirium. Screams that kept the rest of the crew on edge or near nervous exhaustion, because the victims of Black Vomit went from apparent health to rot in a period of two days. In addition to this, and to crown it all, a handful among us showed signs of tetanus from wounds we had received during the fight. Squibb made heavy water helping them, and remarked sadly, “We’ll be quarantined afore any port lets us put to. Yuh know that, don’t yuh? This bloody ship smells like a pesthouse.”
That stench, I noticed, was on Cringle. When not at the helm, navigating by guess and by God, he lay in Falcon’s cabin, poring over maps and pulling his hair, his skin rucked and sagging, burned down to half his weight. His body jumped with fever. His head was full of bald patches, the remaining tufts of brown hair being starched, bleached, and brittle. Squibb diagnosed his affliction first as typhus, then scabies, and finally as sea scurvy. Actually, it was all three. His legs were swollen. Two wisdom teeth were loose in his head, wobbling in gums going putrid, but he would not stop riffling the skipper’s cabin for sea briefs and old logbooks, or clues — anything! — that would show us the best route back home. “ ’Twas that storm,” he speculated, his topsail-yard voice tightened to a throaty rasp. “I’ve not seen the like of it. Grayback waves over the gunwale. Lightning in the sails. Sky and sea were torn for a spell, or that was what I felt from the bridge.” Leaning back in a busted three-legged chair, nearly tipping it, he pushed away his maps so as to ease his eyes. “You should never have gone for a sailor, lad. If you’d stayed home, you and that lady’d be spliced by now.”
I did not wish to think of Isadora. I rose, felt the sea fall, then my belly, and sat back down. “Have you no running fix on our position?”
“None. Could be near Martinique or São Miguel, for all the bloody charts tell me. We’ve strayed off course, left the sea whose ways I know, and come into a rogue sea I know not.”
“Forget the charts, then. The stars—”
“The heavens are all wrong. That’s what baffles me. They’ve not been in the right place since that gale gave us a dusting. We should never have taken on Allmuseri. They’re foul-weather Jacks. The world tilted because of it, or someone switched the sky on us. You tell me what happened. I’m a simple sailor, Rutherford. All I know is Castor and Pollux aren’t where they should be for another thousand years, or maybe where they were when Copernicus was watching the sky.” He gave a sigh. “Maybe it’s me. .”
“Then we are lost?”
He cleared his throat, but nothing came out. Cringle pinched the bridge of his nose to relieve pressure on his eyes, hesitant to answer me now, and as he rested I remembered the tales spun by old tarpots barely able to hobble up and down the wharves in New Orleans, about cursed ships that sailed forever and were damned never to touch shore. All were created by some catastrophe, they said. After a captain poisoned his crew. Or a high-seas riot. Or when the mates slit a master’s throat in his sleep. Sometimes she was seen off ports struck by plague. Had we become such a phantom ship? As one throws out a net, I pitched him a question, hoping to break his silence and bring something back:
“Why did you sign on?”
He started. “What?”
“Why did you sign aboard the Republic?”
“It wasn’t my decision.” Now he was rubbing his forehead. “My father is a very influential man, as people remind me often — a father to be proud of, I suppose. When he was fifteen he came to America from a poor fishing village near Dorset, came in the belly of a steamer, like the blacks, with two shilling and a half crown in his pocket, and in twelve years he turned it into a fortune that’d buy his family’s village twice over. And people love him, yes, they do, because he is charitable and helps anyone who started out with nothing, as he did. He holds contempt only for the privileged, but ironically that is precisely what his fortune has produced.” Cringle laughed brokenly, his pipebowl bobbing from his mouth like a buoy. “McGaffin was right. I don’t belong here. Like my other appointments, this one was. . arranged.”
“For what purpose?”
“Not mine, I assure you. If I understand his reasoning, it’s because I’ve made a bad show of everything else. He’s arranged many jobs for me, you know. I’ve been a bookkeeper for his company. Papa’s heir secretly despised by the employees who smile because he’s the boss’s son, then whisper behind his back about how unfair ’tis he’s standing in the way of someone who’s been there forty years. That sort of thing — do you see?”
I didn’t, but I didn’t admit it.
“I tried, of course; I wanted to prove to him that I could make a go of things on shore, as he did, but men like him or Falcon have always made me feel contrary. Sooner or later I find myself disagreeing with them, or doing something to defy their smugness, or saying, ’No! Your way of doing things is not the only way.’ Before this I was a clerk, a customs inspector, a higgler, an apprentice to a tailor, then a cabinetmaker, and twice engaged to women he thought suitable for me and, well. .” The mate smothered a belch. “None of them panned out. He was disappointed. I was disappointed.” He squinted at me. “D’you know what it’s like having a father such as this?”
“Hardly.” I tried to laugh to lighten his spirits. “I don’t even know who my father is. Mine was never there to expect anything of me, or to make me expect much from myself. I have no family traditions to maintain. In a way, I have no past, Peter. At least that’s how I’ve often felt. When I look behind me, for my father, there is only emptiness. . ”
“Then you’re luckier — and freer — than you know. You can never make a man like my father accept you on your own terms. Nor can you argue other alternatives with him, because material success is a pretty tyrannical proof for one’s point of view. Truth is what works, pragmatically, in the sphere of commerce. You can’t surpass him, because he’s done everything, been everywhere before you got there, knows everyone, judges everything in terms of profit and how wide an impression it makes in the world, and hasn’t left you any room to do anything except join his legion of admirers. And, worst of all, you must admire such awesome success as his, even though he feels, of course, that your mother corrupted you too much with books and crafts when you were young — it’s always the mother he blames, you know, for spoiling you with poetry, or. .” He lost track of his thought and rubbed his bladelike nose. “I’m here, Rutherford, because if he can’t have a son who’s a captain of industry, like himself, or a forceful personality like Falcon — they were old friends — or his favorite aide in his company, one William Jenson by name, who is really his son in spirit, I believe, one of those orphans who fashioned himself by his own hand, as my father says he did, and don’t even ask me to tell you how it feels to see him grooming this lad, who looked at me with such self-satisfied smirks that I could have strangled him. . if he can have none of these, then he wants, I suppose, a ship’s captain. Should I fail at this, there’s nothing else, because I shall not go crawling back to work in his company.”