Coffins (24 page)

“Here!” I cried. “This way! Quickly!”

Nathaniel heard me and veered to where I knelt. I held out the length of wood, and with it we managed to hold his wife up while he pulled himself into the braceworks under the pier. He was quite blue, but never once faltered. With one hand he pulled himself clear of the water, with the other he lifted poor Sarah. Her head lolled back, revealing lips as black as the water that had swallowed her, and when I took her weight into my own arms, pulling her up onto the pier, I could detect no life in her sleek, icy cold body.

With a soggy
thump!
Nathaniel levered himself onto the pier. Although he was shivering so violently his shirt buttons popped, his first thought was to cover Sarah with the garments she'd flung away. “She's so c-c-cold!” he stuttered. “We m-m-must warm her.”

This, as it turned out, was very sensible, although at the time my concern was for Nathaniel, who was so obviously suffering from the ill effects of exposure. My first glimmer of hope was the discovery that Sarah's lungs were not filled with water. Indeed, her mouth appeared to have locked shut, as if the sudden shock of the unbearable cold had contracted the muscles of her jaw the moment she hit the water.

I searched frantically for a pulse, finding none, and then realized that my own fingers were so cold as to be insensible. Shoving Nathaniel out of the way—actually, he moved willingly enough—I forced my ear to her chest and detected—was it possible, or was I imagining it?—one very faint thump that might have been a heartbeat.

“Quickly, man! Rub her arms and leg! Force the blood to move! No, don't worry about hurting her, just do it! Rub fast, man! Faster!” Meanwhile I flexed her limbs and prodded her abdomen, where the blood would naturally pool. When I felt a quivering under the icy skin of her belly, I again clamped my ear to her chest and yes, it was there, sluggish and slow.

Sarah's heart was beating. She was alive.

At the boardinghouse Mrs. Merriman brought heated bricks from the stove. These we wrapped in towels and laid upon Sarah's body. Nathaniel, who would see nothing done for himself until his wife was taken care of, urged me to cover her with blankets, but I was convinced we must keep moving her limbs to circulate and warm the blood, and I prevailed.

“Nathaniel! Look at me!” I commanded. When his eyes met mine I said, brooking no argument, “You must see to yourself, man. It will be no good saving Sarah if you expire from the cold.”

The big man nodded dumbly, conceding the point. Without so much as a glance at our hostess, who quite properly averted her eyes, Nathaniel stripped off his clothing, wrapped himself in a wool blanket, and got as close to the wood stove as he could without setting himself on fire.

“Stay right there until you raise a sweat!” I called out. “Mrs. Merriman and I will see to your wife.”

It was a near thing. A beating heart is not a guarantor of long-term survival in such cases. It is well known that the heart may beat for a time after the soul has left the body. During that wretched year when I made the hospital rounds, a man was carried in with most of his temple shot away in an argument over gambling debts. More than half his brain was destroyed and yet his heart continued to beat for three days. I very much feared that Sarah's revival was a similar exercise in futility, and when her eyes fluttered open I was speechless with relief.

“Cold,” she said in a small, childish voice.

“You'll be warm soon,” I said, and hastily covered her with a blanket.

Nathaniel overheard us and rushed to her side before I could warn him off. But rather than regard him with the horror that had driven her into the dark waters, she gazed at him blankly, as if she'd never seen him before.

“Sarah?” he whispered huskily, and then wept with joy.

“Sarah cold,” she said.

It was there in her childlike voice, in her petulant, needy expression. The woman who had returned was not the wife and grieving mother who had thrown herself into the harbor, but a little girl who remembered nothing of her grief, or of the husband who loved her.

“Where's Poppa?”

“Poppa will be here soon,” he said, shooting me a look that said Sarah's father was long gone from this earth.

“You're a funny man!” she said, and averted her face, almost playfully.

“It doesn't matter, darling,” he said. “Only that you're alive.”

I believed Nathaniel when he said that. It was enough for him that any part of his beloved wife had survived, even if it meant she did not remember him.

When I left to call on Captain Sweeney, they seemed to be making friends.

I found the door to his chamber open, as I'd left it. Captain Sweeney had not stirred from his chair by the window. His hand lay in his lap, cradling his cold pipe, and his leathery, weather-beaten face was relaxed in sleep. Strangely, the sleep made him young again, and with the ragged eye patch he looked like a boy disguised as a pirate, exhausted after a children's party. Or maybe it was that Sarah had put me in mind of children, and the child who lives within each of us. In any event, I would not have disturbed such a profound and rejuvenating sleep had I not been desperate to learn more of his adventures in the slave trade, and what it might have to do with the present horrors.

“Jack?” I said, as gently as I knew how. “Captain Sweeney?”

Then I touched him and knew it was another kind of sleep.

7. The Goblins Inside

A strange thing happens to a man when he is surrounded by death. He very quickly gets used to it. Death becomes for him the more natural state, and life the exception. That Nathaniel and his wife survived immersion into killing waters was a shock. That Captain Sweeney passed away in his chair was to be expected. Was he not ancient for a sailor, had he not been grievously ill? Was his heart not strained by sickness and fear and, I sensed, more than a little regret? Of course he died. Death was the norm. The miracle was that I'd managed to speak with him at all, although what little I learned was merely tantalizing. Monbasu was no devil or demon, he was simply a man in the same evil trade as Cash Coffin. Upon hearing the name, Sweeney had evidenced no particular fear—quite the reverse.
He's as rum a character as you ever wished to meet
. I was willing to wager that Captain Sweeney had much the same to say about numerous men from his colorful past. Monbasu was another, no more, no less.

Thus I comforted myself. The truth was, Black Jack Sweeney was such a lively, engaging sort of fellow that I would miss him greatly, though we'd been acquainted for only a short while. Mrs. Merriman, sensing my distress, kindly informed me not to trouble myself, that she'd handle the arrangements. It seems that Sweeney was an old friend, and had left a sum of money in her care that was more than sufficient to cover the cost of his burial. “Like all of the sailormen Jack was very superstitious,” she told me. “It put his mind at ease to have planned for his own arrangements. He always told me that he'd probably die at sea, and be buried there, but just in case he made me his guardian in such matters.”

This was a great relief, as I dreaded having any more contact with the Jasper Caswells, who as it happened were the only undertakers in the village. It was enough that they'd swept Tom Coffin's remains, such as they were, into a casket, and delivered it to the family crypt, and swore never to divulge what they'd witnessed.

“Had he family at all?” I asked.

Mrs. Merriman shook her steely gray head. “None living. Never took a wife, unless you count that schooner. How he loved that ship!”

With that she wept quietly. Our grief was somewhat tempered by the sight of his body in repose. It was obvious at a glance that Captain Sweeney had died at peace with himself, and with the life he'd lived, and for that I was grateful. Such a tranquil death had become a rarity in White Harbor, and was to become rarer still.

Jebediah asked for me that evening. I found him propped on his pillows, looking wan and disturbingly cadaverous. A number of sperm-oil lamps had been lit and placed around his chamber, adding to the funereal effect. The stench of illness, the dank odors of physical melancholia, overwhelmed the sweet perfume of the lamps.

“I hope you are feeling better,” I said, feigning cheerfulness.

“No better, no worse,” he responded morosely. “What does it matter?”

“But, Jebediah, old friend, surely—”

“Surely nothing,” he said, cutting me off. “May we speak plainly, Davis? As friends?”

“Of course. But we always speak plainly, and as friends. That's why I'm here.”

“Then you mustn't argue when I ask you to leave.”

It was obvious that he wasn't jesting. “Jeb, if I've done something to offend you, please accept my—”

“Don't!” he said, grasping my hands and indicating that I sit on the bed beside him. “We've covered this ground before. My dear Davis, you don't have it in you to offend me, or anyone, I think. You are the least offensive man in the world, and the dearest to me, and that is why I insist that you leave this house and never look back.”

“But, Jeb—”

“Hush now! Hush! Terrible things have happened. Terrible things! They will not cease until we are destroyed, and there is nothing you or anyone can do to stop it.”

I decided the best tactic was to ignore his order to leave and keep him talking. That he remained in the grip of a profound melancholy, there was no doubt, but his mind was otherwise clear, and I had need of his memories, and his perceptions of the past.

“What do you know about how your father made his fortune?” I asked him gently, but bluntly. “Do you know anything at all?”

My little friend seemed to shrink even more inside himself, averting his eyes as if ashamed. “Of course I do,” he said. “How could I live in this house, this village, without knowing? But I wished you never to know. I wished you to think well of us, Davis, but now, obviously, you've stumbled on the awful truth.”

“Jebediah, listen to me.” I took his chin in my hand and forced him to meet my eyes. “You are not to be blamed for whatever your father did in his youth. Original sin does not apply in this instance. The sin was neither original, nor was your father the first to commit it. In his favor, I know of no other man who made his fortune slave trading who then donated so much of it to the cause of banishing slavery from this earth.”

“You don't understand,” he said plaintively.

“Tell me then. What don't I understand?”

“My father doesn't finance abolitionists out of sincere belief. He gives to them out of fear.”

I patted his hands. “Now we're getting somewhere. What exactly does he fear?”

Jebediah shrugged, and I saw how thin he'd become, and how his growing weakness made his large head wobble upon his frail shoulders. “I never knew until this all began.
This
is what he feared. That his family and his fortune would be destroyed.”

“You spoke with him about this notion, this belief, that he had brought a curse upon you and your brothers?”

“No. Never. But I knew. Each time I went to him for funds for the cause he gave too eagerly. At no other time was he generous with his money. They used to say you needed a crowbar to pry a penny from Cash Coffin's hand, and they weren't exaggerating by much. And when he first invited abolitionists to the house, and encouraged me to hear them, I knew that he did not share their passion. Even as a child I knew that. Later I assumed it was shame that made him encourage me.”

“You felt he was ashamed of you?”

“No, never that!” he said, almost eagerly. “The Captain was never ashamed of me, and that's why I still love him, despite the terrible things I suppose he must have done. No, what shamed him was that he believed his being a slaver had somehow made me a dwarf.”

“The deformity is quite common,” I insisted. “Dwarfs are born to the best of families, and to the worst. No one knows why.”

“They say it is an affliction of the evil eye.”

At first I was stunned to think that my educated friend might give credence to such ignorant superstitions, and that he had secretly harbored his fearful guilt for all these years. But then I saw that, given what had transpired, it was only natural that he seize upon any possible explanation for his wretched condition.

“Listen to me,” I said, gently but firmly. “The notion of an ‘evil eye' is an old wives tale. I take, as you know, the more enlightened view, and all of modern science supports me.”

“Science? Bah.”

“You may ‘bah' all you like, but this is the age of reason, and reason tells me this: we don't know what causes physical deformities such as yours, but whatever may be the cause, it does not lie with you, or with anything like ‘evil eyes,' or curses upon your family. Deformity is somehow an accident of the birth process, and is in that sense quite natural, even expected. It occurs in all life forms, not only human beings. Do we assume that a deformed calf is the result of some sin its parents committed? The very idea is ridiculous. So it is with human deformity. There is no possible connection to sin, or family curses, or the punishment of evil.”

Jeb looked at me with grave curiosity. “Are you so certain?” he asked.

“Absolutely certain,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “Now enough of that, do you hear? It solves nothing to keep blaming yourself for events beyond your control. We must get at this somehow. What really happened, long ago? Where did this all begin?”

“Before I was born, I suppose. Father sold his slave ships the day my mother died, or soon after. But he carried the weight of it always. I saw it each time he looked upon me.”

“He never hinted what it might be?”

Jeb shook his head.

“Do you think he would tell me, if I asked?”

The thought made him cringe. “I suppose he might. But he might just as easily shoot you. You've seen his state of mind. He's capable of anything, Davis, you mustn't risk it.”