The Kingdom on the Waves Read online

  Dr. Trefusis lay abed, staring into the darkness, the smell of his perspiration and urine thick in the chamber.

  No sooner had I made polite inquiry as to the disagreement below, than he asked me, “Do you recall what words I spake to you this morning?”

  I considered, and admitted that I did not recall any specific thing.

  “Yet those might have been my final words,” he said.

  “Your health, I trust, is not declining, sir.”

  “Oh, I am most sickly,” he said. “I must needs have blood let.”

  I remonstrated that we did not have funds sufficient to call doctor or surgeon.

  “Open my vein,” he said. He held out his arm. “We must flush the poison. I have been stirring helplessly all day.”

  “Mayhap, sir, you stir because you mend.”

  “Open my vein.”

  “That seems a perilous course, sir.”

  “I demand to be bled. My blood is hot.”

  “Sir, we have no skill in that art.”

  “My constitution is unbearably plethoric.”

  This debate went on for some minutes, me demurring, he requiring, until his demands became so violent I feared damage through apoplexy, and discerned that indeed, he perhaps would be aided by exsanguination; though it pleased me not at all to be administering that remedy myself, for I had never attempted it before, and so little was it a course I had considered, I trembled at my inexperience.

  Still, I querulously assented, and, upon his order, went to seek a knife.

  Sally was in the kitchen. “The Devil’s in him today,” she said. “I took him his broth and asked after his wellness, and he didna’ give me no answer, so I asks him again, and still no answer, so I asks a third time, and he starts to rail and shout.”

  I looked at her with quizzical eye.

  “Don’t be asking me. He was all up about Nothing and the Void.”

  I returned with the knife to Dr. Trefusis’s side. He raised himself up upon the bolster, and I slipped a pewter bowl beneath his arm. I lay the knife upon the skin.

  “I do not know how deep to make the incision,” I said. “We have no benefit of lancet or fleam.”

  “Light cuts,” he said. “The blood will come.”

  I pressed one hand to his chest to restrain him, should he start when I pierced him. My teeth grit, I cut my tutor.

  The blood flowed easily into the bowl. He groaned with relief at its exudation.

  As we waited for the blood to pool, he said, “I spake to you this morning of the Void. I made a pretty speech regarding how all of what we know is but a small light space in the theater of matter; and that space is unfurled around us like a set piece upon a stage. I opined that nothing exists without us to perceive it.”

  “I recall it now, sir,” said I.

  “With me to remind you. If I had passed? Would you be able to publish my final words?”

  “Those were not your final words, sir.”

  “Precisely!” he said, shaking the arm that bled. “Sally asked so many garrulous, probative questions that at ten this morning I was reduced to answering, ‘I am sufficiently well, madam.’ Which only a fool would offer as his last words.”

  “So, sir, you then repeated your original speech on matter.”

  “It was more exact in my memory at the time.”

  “Though she did not note it in detail.”

  He made a flat, dismissive noise. “One might sooner scrawl on granite with a lilac than impress rhetorical niceties upon that woman.”

  “You cannot anticipate your final removal in this way, sir.”

  “Bind up the vein, if you please,” he said. “I am done with bleeding.”

  I lay the knife in the bowl and slid a rag beneath his arm. The blood would not stop its flowing, though I tied the rag tightly about the incision. He did not watch the process, but surveyed the ceiling as my fingers, slippery now with his gore, worked to tighten the tourniquet.

  I grew fearful that we would not be able to staunch the flow. The blood now drenched the sheets; his elbow had tipped the bowl so that the blood I had already let also stained his side.

  I worked at the knot, but my fingers were too wet.

  Jogged by my exertions, he murmured, “We may so easily slip out of ourselves.”

  His looks were pallid and waxen.

  I scrambled to find something else which might provide a tighter bond. Full of alarms, I surveyed the room. A woolen stocking presented itself to me upon the floor, and I pounced upon it, snatched it where it lay, and brought it to the patient’s bed.

  I tied it so tight as I could, fearful also of empurpling the forearm.

  The new tourniquet complete, I surveyed my gory handiwork. He raised the hand and placed it on my head. He whispered, “‘Do not weep: Heaven fashioned us of nothing; and we strive to bring ourselves to nothing.’”

  With that, he removed the hand from my head, curled it against him, and closed his eyes.

  “You must not sleep,” said I, and called his name. “Dr. Trefusis,” I pled, “you must not sleep. I fear I bled you too extremely.”

  He who had been my benefactor within the College of Lucidity now lay in his sheets looking as vulnerable as a child, blinking at me suddenly in fear; yet he did not speak.

  “Are you alert?” said I.

  He nodded gradually. I chafed his arms and rushed below-stairs for a basin of water with which to shock him. Upon my returning, I slapped at his face with the wet cloth as he snorted protests and held up his hands.

  This I felt a sufficient proof of the continued activity of his vivid spirits. I was sensible in equal measure of relief at his delivery and shame at my incompetence. I wished to do or say something further, but he simply blinked and looked ruefully about the room.

  I sat by him and watched the throb of his pulse in the wrist of the marked arm. Darkness was falling, and we could hear the sentries firing far off to mark the end of day.

  Our hostess and Sally entered, and, seeing the blood upon the bed, were much disturbed, crying out to the good man upon the bed, urging his condition.

  “Sir,” said Mrs. Platt, “are you well?”

  He would not respond to them.

  “Would you wish some broth?” asked Sally.

  They plied him with more questions.

  He looked at me in supplication.

  “Speak a word to us, sir,” said Mrs. Platt.

  He reached up and locked his mouth with his fingers.

  “Oh, sweet mercy,” said Sally. “It will be your final words again, is it?”

  He shrugged and nodded.

  We got no more word out of him, he stubbornly avoiding all inquiries but those which might be satisfied with affirmative or negative; and after a time of this, I began to be aware that he enjoyed this peculiar pantomime; and Sally began to smile. Notwithstanding the displeasure of our hostess, who spake dismissively of old men who act the part of little boys, we even laughed, and the doctor was forced himself into merriment; and at length, he even nodded to an offer of solid bread, which delicacy we could not, as it transpired, provide him, having none in the house.

  That night, I listened with care to his breathing as he slept; and I thought on final words, and that he did not believe he had a soul that would survive his decease. It pained me beyond measure that this man, the most magnanimous of mentors, the shield and buckler of my childhood, should confront death as mere negation, and by so doing, perhaps forfeit his chance at eternal bliss.

  I considered his last sentences, his atheistic unction, and lamented that in his sight, the human character was itself little more than a sentence spoken, a succession of sounds that acquired meaning only with accretion; but which was only to be a succession, a train of one thing following another, rather than a thought entire and whole, as the soul should be, cohering beyond our breath; and looking at my tutor, I feared for that moment when the final word might be said and done.

  Those weeks in August were not eas
y ones for those of us besieged. The rebel blockade deprived the town of victuals. Rations among the Army were reduced to salt-pork, now rank with flies and greening. Hunger was become general in the city, and sickness too. There were few engagements with the enemy at that time — the rebels, we suspected, had little powder and less spirit — so the most numerous deaths were from distempers and disorders.

  Sally often came back from the market without meat or vegetable, and we all fell to eating Dr. Trefusis’s diet: biscuits and whatever broth could be won from the bone.

  Mrs. Platt’s circumnavigation of her supper table completed, she began to revolve around the parlor, the plates being lain on the mantelpiece or the gaming table. The fewer viands, the more dishes. Dr. Trefusis asked for daily reports on the progress of her table settings.

  “Today,” I would tell him heavily, “she ate upon her sewing table.”

  “I am impressed with her store of china,” said Dr. Trefusis. “Prodigious. Is it still Canton porcelain?”

  “She has passed out of the china, sir,” I informed him. “She has descended to common redware.”

  “Ye gods. Humility at last.”

  I had little stomach for Dr. Trefusis’s sparkishness. I feared for his life; I despaired that he should ever rise from his bed again; and I could not abide the hunger.

  Many in the city were taken with the smallpox, not so much among the soldiery as among the remaining citizens. Red cloths were hung up upon their doors to mark their festering and convalescence. I saw mothers issuing out of doorways behind small coffins, screaming at the pall-bearers to return the dear corpse.

  Though it was summer and the leaves heavy on the trees, people went about the streets coughing as if it were the catarrh season. The derelict bodies of the poor were found in abandoned houses, disfigured with disease’s scabs, swaddled in table-clothes and all the refinements of shattered luxury. Society matrons who had fled to the sanctuary of the city when riots had broke out in the countryside now caught their deaths of fever, their eyes ringed with spectacles of corruption, their mouths bearded with sores.

  The carts carried their bodies through the streets, finery stained with blood and the exudations of their scabbing.

  These unfortunates were buried in silence. General Gage had ordered that no bells were to be rung for funerals, for fear the rebels should know how sickly lay the city. All solemnity, therefore, was silent, the peals muffled; and bodies went unheralded to their final rest; and we shoveled dirt atop the dead and watched their wooden vessels sink beneath the earth without a cry.

  Mr. Turner had informed me of the pay per concert, which seemed adequate to my needs; but he had not disclosed that the concert season per se should not be well under way until the fall, when hostilities with the rebels were expected to taper off as both camps settled into siege and winter quarters — or by which season, as everyone buzzed and histled, the Redcoats should have issued forth from the city gates, laid waste to the countryside, dispersed the militia with a proud show of superior weaponry and tactics, reduced the pamphleteers to quivering, and hung high the few sneering Harvardians who had engineered the plot.

  The other musicians supplemented their pay through various individual engagements, most of which were arranged by Mr. Turner, he taking some portion of our pay for the privilege of our hire. Through him, a few of the orchestra played at small dances held by officers and Tories, or accompanied suppers with chamber music. At first, having little to recommend me, I was not chosen for these grander occasions; but was equally gratified to be chosen, with two of my fellows, to play a few nights of the week at the Weary Pilgrim, a tavern on Fish Street. We fiddled dances, rounds, and catches, and the soldiers were glad enough of our company. Some would demand songs of their homeland which we did not know; and they would sing them for us, thinking of their beloved moors or the charcoal-pits of their youth, the wolds, the village churches, green with mold, ancient as the kings of legend; and we would oblige them, playing these songs back to them as they drank New England rum and wept for a country far over the sea.

  Upon one day, the Negroes in the city were swept up into a general work-party, for which the pay was in no coin but stale dinner. It was our commission to clean the streets, so I spent some time in sweeping gutters, which was a profession too full of monotony and the despair of seeing one’s work undone even as one did it. The defecation of horses clotted my broom.

  The day after this Negro sweeping-bee, we were enjoined, such of us as wished employment, to lend our aid to the Army in erecting fortifications; which work I undertook with a fellow violinist from the orchestra — a fellow named Scipio and called Sip, a freeman and a father who spake always kindly to me in our rehearsals and observed my destitution was as great as his own.

  The Army offered us rations, which gettings Sip and I could not refuse; and so we repaired to the city gates, where our fiddlers’ fingers took to ruder labor.

  Such lowly offices as I had performed for the rebels, I was now commissioned to perform for the King’s Army: the work of mattock, spade, and shovel. ’Twas a curious reversal, and made no less singular by the fact that Bunker Hill, the rebel fortification to which I had lent my sinew some months previous, was now an Army outpost, stormed upon that fateful morning.

  Our work-party was peopled entirely by Negroes. As we labored that day, half-naked, in the sun, binding together stakes to enhance the fortifications near the city gates, we heard shouts of alarm above us — followed by the smart crack of volleys — and then the cries of battle; and we who labored regarded the walls and our brethren in consternation.

  “Steady, boys,” called our overseer. “Eyes and hands to the work.”

  Frowning, we bound the stakes, our knots loose with inattention. Across the saltmarshes of the Neck, the blinds and redoubts, the flanks and faces of the bastions, the gates near us, armed with their anxious picket-guards, the reports of the conflict grew more insistent in their clamor — the rattle of musketry, the calling of commands. Then commenced the thunder of the howitzers.

  Sip did not look at me as he spake; but low, he muttered to me, “Jesus God, them rebels crash through those gates, we’s in a sorry state. It’ll go mighty ill with us. They come through them gates, we is standing here tying together twigs without the least weapon. They take this city . . . Don’t bear thinking on. Jesus God. I ain’t going be taken for a slave and sold to the Indies. I got a wife and I got two babies. I ain’t —”

  “Back!” cried one of the overseers —“Back, back, back!” Disturbed by the man’s alarum, we looked up from our labor and found a detachment of Redcoats running in formation for the gates. We retreated from our work, leaving our frames half-bound and unmanned.

  We huddled in the shadow of one of the half-completed breastworks, crouched in a ditch; and there situated, we watched the light infantry, alert with their danger, pass through to the outer fortifications.

  While we stood, Sip muttered to the others, “News. News, boys.”

  “What’s news?” asked one.

  “News,” said Sip. “From the Sixty-fourth. Hautboy player — what’s they called? Hautboyiste, I reckon. This hautboyiste tells me that General Gage, he asks about whether slaves’ll join the King’s Army, gave the chance. It’s an idea he has. An army of Negroes.”

  “When?”

  “When he pleases.”

  “If he pleases,” said another. “All of them are too affrighted.” He spat and kicked at the spit with his heel.

  Sip turned to me, and seeking intelligence, demanded, “Augustus, I hear you dug ditches for the rebs. I hear you dug out Bunker Hill.”

  Little did I wish to become an object of disesteem among my new colleagues; and I hastened to say, “The conflict was then in a very different moment, and my circumstances would not allow of —”

  “How is they set for food and powder?”

  I began to recount that of food, there seemed ample provision, but that they husbanded their powder; in which recol
lection I was interrupted by a man who said, “You couldn’t serve with them, now. Couldn’t join them. Couldn’t carry arms.”

  I allowed I did not carry arms among the rebels, but dug among the artificers.

  “Well, the rebels says we can’t carry firelocks with their army. Heard this from a sutler. You hear this?”

  “I ain’t heard it,” said Sip.

  “Their general gets up here few weeks ago, gets to Cambridge —”

  “What general?”

  “The rebs’ general. The Virginia slave-driver general.”

  “Washington.”

  “That general. There’s a proclamation now, no Negroes can bear arms in the reb army. He don’t like Africans carrying muskets. It’s all . . .” The man held up his hand in a gesture I understood not.

  This was a circumstance which could not be other than galling; for I still harbored a hope that the rebels would at length resolve to comply with the firm dictates of humanity and the soft graces of benevolence.

  Without such a reprieve, we knew ourselves in constant danger if the city should be retaken. We many of us had escaped, and so, upon the town’s falling, we would be conveyed to our former masters — at which thought, my spirits froze, thinking upon Mr. Sharpe and his devices.

  The cannonade which had disturbed our labors being at an end, the corporal called to us to continue our binding of chevaux de frise, which labor we undertook again in silence.

  Later that afternoon, a detachment returned through the gates with two of their number dead, arms sprawling, the hair on one a ruddy sop. The rebels had annoyed them with fire from the Roxbury lines; some contretemps had begun amidst the warehouses of the Neck; and, no ground won or lost, two had died.

  We continued our solemn work of fortifying against invasion.

  So we exchanged intelligence, and watched each other as we held our own silent deliberations, and considered which side might favor us with liberty. We worked at our dusty tasks beneath the summer sun; later, we played for tavern dances.