“I’d venture the Good Lord don’t spend much time up here in the North Water,” he says with a smile. “It’s most probable he don’t like the chill.”
When the ice opens up, they enter the bay, but the whaling is poor. There are scarcely any sightings, and on the few occasions the boats are lowered, the whales quickly disappear below the ice and there are no strikes. Brownlee begins to wonder whether Baxter might be right after all—perhaps they have killed too many whales. He finds it hard to believe that the vast and teeming oceans could be emptied out so quick, that such enormous beasts could prove so fucking fragile, but if the whales are still about, they are certainly learning to hide themselves well. After a week of these dispiriting failures, he accepts the inevitable, signals as agreed to Campbell, and announces to the men that they are leaving Pond’s Bay and turning north to seek for better luck elsewhere.
*
Even with the aid of laudanum, Sumner cannot sleep for more than an hour or two consecutively. Joseph Hannah’s death has aggravated and incited him in ways he doesn’t understand. He would like to forget it now. He would like to rest, as the others appear to rest, in the certainty of McKendrick’s guilt, and eventual and inevitable punishment, but he finds himself signally unable to do so. He is troubled by memories of the boy’s dead body laid out on the varnished tabletop, where every night they eat their dinner still, and of McKendrick standing naked—ashamed, passive, gazed upon—in the captain’s cabin. The two bodies should match, he thinks, should fit together like twin pieces of a puzzle, but whichever way he twists and turns them in his mind, he can’t make a whole.
Late one night about a fortnight after the carpenter’s arrest, as the ship moves north past looneries and icebergs, Sumner descends into the forehold. McKendrick in his slop suit is lying in the small space that has been cleared for him amidst the various boxes and bundles and casks. His legs have been chained together, one either side of the mast, but his hands are both free. There are some fragments of biscuit on a tin plate, and a cup of water and a lighted candle by his side. Sumner can smell the high tang of the slop bucket. The surgeon hesitates for a moment, then leans down and shakes him by the shoulder. McKendrick unfurls himself slowly, sits up with his back against a packing case, and gazes indifferently at his latest guest.
“How’s your health?” Sumner asks him. “Do you require anything from me?”
McKendrick shakes his head.
“I’m hale and hearty enough, considering,” he says. “I ’spect I will live until they choose to hang me.”
“If it comes to a trial, you know you will have a better chance to make your case. Nothing is decided yet.”
“A man like myself finds few friends in an English court of law, Mr. Sumner. I’m an honest fellow, but my life will not stand for too much peering into.”
“You’re not the only one who feels that way, I’d say.”
“We’re all sinners, right enough, but some sins are punished harder than others. I int a murderer and never was one, but I’m many other things, and it’s the other things they would wish to hang me for.”
“If you’re not the murderer, then someone else on this ship is. If Drax is lying, as you claim he is, it’s possible he either killed the boy himself or knows the man who did and is seeking to protect him. Have you thought of that?”
McKendrick shrugs. After two weeks in the hold, his skin has taken on a grayish tinge, and his blue eyes have turned murky and recessed. He scratches at his ear, and a piece of skin flakes off and flutters to the floor.
“I thought of it all right, but what good will it do me to accuse another man if I have no proof and no witnesses of my own?”
Sumner takes a pewter flask from his pocket, passes it over to McKendrick, then takes it back and has a sip himself.
“I am running short on baccy,” McKendrick says after a moment. “If you could spare a pinch, I’d be much obliged to you.”
Sumner passes him his tobacco pouch. McKendrick takes the pouch with his right hand after jamming the pipe between the middle two fingers of the left. With the pipe secured in this peculiar fashion, he fills the bowl and tamps it down with his right thumb.
“What’s the trouble with your hand?” Sumner asks him.
“It’s only the thumb,” he says. “Got crushed by a cock-eyed fellow with a lump hammer a year or two back and haven’t been able to move it even a quarter inch one way or the other since then. Makes some difficulties for a man in my trade, but I’ve learned to make the adjustment.”
“Show me.”
McKendrick leans forwards and holds out his left hand. The fingers are normal, but the joint of the thumb is badly misshapen and the thumb itself appears stiff and lifeless.
“So you cannot grip with this hand at all?”
“Only with the four fingers. ’Tis lucky it was my left one, I suppose.”
“Try to grip my wrist,” Sumner tells him, “like this.”
He rolls up his sleeve and holds out his bare arm. McKendrick grips it.
“Squeeze as hard as you can.”
“I’m squeezing now.”
Sumner feels the pressure of the four fingers digging into his arm flesh, but from the thumb, nothing at all.
“Is that the best you can do?” he says. “Don’t hold back.”
“I ain’t holding anything back,” he insists. “Man hit my thumb bone with a fucking great lump hammer two years ago aboard the Whitby, I tell you, when we were in dock repairing a hatch cover. Smashed it near to pieces. And I have plenty of witnesses to that occurrence—including the captain himself—who will happily swear on the Bible to his foolishness.”
Sumner tells him to let go, then tugs his shirtsleeve back down.
“Why didn’t you tell me about your injured hand when I examined you before?”
“You weren’t asking after my hand, if I recall.”
“If you can’t grip any better than that, how could you have strangled the boy? You saw the bruises on his neck.”
McKendrick pauses and then looks suddenly wary, as if the surgeon’s implications are too large and too hopeful to be easily or quickly absorbed.
“I saw them right enough,” he says. “He had a string of bruises all around his neck just so.”
“And there were two large bruises at the front. Do you remember those? One almost on top of the other. I thought at the time they must have been caused by the two thumbs pressing hard down on the gorge.”
“You remember them?”
“I remember them clearly,” Sumner says. “Two large bruises, one on top of the other one, like two smudges of ink.”
“But I don’t have two good thumbs no more,” McKendrick says slowly. “So how did I make them bruises?”
“That’s right,” Sumner says. “I need to talk to the captain now. It looks like the fellow with the lump hammer may have saved your neck.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Brownlee listens to the surgeon’s arguments, hoping keenly as he does so that they are wrong. He has no desire to release McKendrick. The carpenter is a convincing culprit, and if he is released (which is the end Sumner seems, for some mystifying reason of his own, to seek), there is no one else aboard the ship who can take his place without a deal of trouble and complication.
“A scrawny cunt like Hannah can be strangled with one hand easy enough, I’d say,” Brownlee argues, “thumb or no thumb. McKendrick isn’t tall, but he’s plenty strong enough for that.”
“Not with the bruises patterned as they were on Hannah’s neck, though. The twin thumb marks were as clear as day.”
“I don’t remember thumb marks. I remember a good many bruises, but there is no way on earth of knowing which particular fingers caused which particular marks.”