The Guineaman by Richard Woodman

Author:Richard Woodman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781788632171
Publisher: Canelo
Published: 2018-08-06T16:00:00+00:00

Part Three

War

Chapter Ten

The Schooner

During the next year and a half, Kite and the Spitfire enjoyed a varied existence. For the first quarter of that period, the schooner acted as Mulgrave’s yacht as he coasted slowly towards New York, spending weeks at a time visiting business associates and acquaintances among the merchants and trading houses of Savannah, Charleston, Norfolk, Williamsburg, Annapolis and Philadelphia. Before their arrival in the Savannah River, Spitfire had passed the bastions of the Morro Castle and called at Havana before dropping her anchor in Jamaican waters off Kingston. But her visits to these ports had been brief, for Mulgrave had come down with fever, a sweating and shuddering illness accompanied by delerium that reminded Kite and Puella of the terrible plague aboard the Enterprize.

The cramped conditions aboard Spitfire, where the stern cabin had been neatly but not spaciously divided for the two establishments of Mulgrave and Kite, forced a greater intimacy between the two men. The latter learned that like Lorimoor, Mulgrave had long suffered recurrent bouts of this sweating sickness, for it was not the bloody yellow-jack that laid Mulgrave low. Moreover, the affliction was one of the reasons he had maintained such a private life in St John’s and that its incurable nature had persuaded Mulgrave to effectively adopt Wentworth as his heir. Fear of the disease explained Mulgrave’s apparent parsimony as a host, his abstemiousness and his avoidance of the sun, when he conceived he was at most danger from suffering a feverish attack. Mulgrave confided that he believed that if he returned to England, he would throw off the disease, claiming, to Kite’s considerable surprise, that he believed the malady to be spread by the bites of mosquitoes.

‘If the little demons bite me and bite you, they will be biting every poxed rascal in St John’s,’ Mulgrave gasped in a lucid moment as Kite visited him one morning. ‘God knows what contagions they spread between us.’ He gestured at the net that was tented above his bed and that he had ordered Kite to sleep under while in St John’s. Kite had assumed the kindness to simply enable him to sleep undisturbed by the irritation of insects, whether mosquitoes or ants, or to avoid the more serious attentions of snakes and lizards. ‘You must always cover yourself with such a bed-tent, Kite, while in these warm and humid latitudes,’ Mulgrave had insisted.

Kite stared astern through the windows at the brilliant sunlight dancing upon the blue sea. The schooner lifted easily to the waves and the coast of Cuba fell astern, misty in the heat haze. He watched a bird dip into the wake, which drew out as a thin attenuated roil of disturbed water marking the passage of Spitfire’s hull, gradually fading as the greater power of the wind-blown waves over-rode the schooner’s temporary influence. Surely it was a kind of allegory of their own tiny existences, Kite thought, as Mulgrave closed his eyes; this small disturbance of the world, to be smoothed over after their passing.

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