What the Captain Wrote in the Dark

"A man may be silenced, but not a timber. A timber remembers everything that is done to it."

"We cannot take the boat," said Roderick.

"No."

"We cannot carry a keel up sixty steps."

"No. But we can take what is on it." Thalessa was already on her knees on the bottom boards with her chest open at her side. She took out a roll of tissue-paper, thin as an onion skin, a stick of drawing-charcoal, and a pair of small scissors. "The students use this for copying inscriptions. It is called a rubbing. One lays the paper over the carving, and rubs the charcoal across, very lightly, and the cuts show white."

"Have you ever done it on a ship?"

"I have never done it on anything so important."

"How long?"

"I do not know. The writing is perhaps eleven feet. If I work swiftly..." She stopped, and looked at the stone floor of the cave. "What does the tide do?"

Roderick turned his head. Behind them, beyond the ledge, the black water had crept a foot up the slip. Its small waves were slapping at the cradle. The light at the cave mouth had turned from gray to pink.

"It comes in about an inch a minute," he said. "At this hour. I'd say we have a quarter of an hour before the boat floats. Half an hour before the slip is awash."

"Then I have a quarter of an hour."

"Then I'll hold the lamp."

She worked as she had never worked in her life.

She cut the tissue into lengths of a yard and laid the first of them over the pale scratched timber, smoothing it flat with the heel of her hand. She held the charcoal on its side and drew it across the paper in long light strokes, hardly pressing, and as she watched, the letters rose out of the gray like fish rising to a lure: small, white, perfectly clear against the black.

I, Gabriel Haze

She lifted the sheet. She laid another.

Behind her, the old Duke stood with his hand on the gunwale and watched. He said nothing. His lips were blue. Once she heard him whisper, "Forgive me," and once, "Quickly, quickly, child," and once he began to say a prayer, a childish one, learned at some nursery knee, and could not finish it.

Roderick held the lantern steady. Beyond him the sea breathed. A slow cold swell came in through the mouth of the cave and lifted the stern of the boat a quarter-inch off the cradle and set it down.

A quarter of an hour, she thought. Not even.

She worked on.

…

They read it in the crypt among the lamps.

They had come out of the cave with the water at their ankles, Roderick supporting the Duke on his good arm, Thalessa behind them with the long roll of tissue clutched against her chest. At the iron door Roderick had barred it from the inside. The sea, thwarted, boomed against it once, and drew back. And in the golden stillness of the vault they spread the rubbings on the white cloth, among the burning jars, and weighted the corners with brandy flasks and candlesticks, and Thalessa read.

She read in a low even voice. She did not hurry. She did not raise or lower her tone. She read it as she read a post-mortem report, in the plain voice she used for things that could not be borne.

…

I, Gabriel Haze, Master of the brig St. Jude, of Port Calder, being of sound mind and in my right senses, do set down upon this timber, with a nail, in the dark, what was done to me by the persons named hereafter, in the hope that someone will come after, and read, and know.

The persons are these: Alastair Blackwood, Esquire, Ragnar Sterling, Malthus Malakor, Lady Aurelia Vance, Thorne Valerius. They were passengers on my ship. I gave them my table and my cabin. I shall not say that I loved them. But I wished them well.

On the night of the 9th of October, a little after midnight, in a strong gale from the south-west and a rising sea, I went down to the lower hold to see to the pumps, which the carpenter reported choked. I found Mr. Sterling and Mr. Blackwood and the surgeon at the second frame, with a lantern, and an auger, and a hole bored through the planking of my ship.

I said, "Gentlemen, you will want to put that down."

Mr. Blackwood put it down. Mr. Sterling picked it up, and struck me with the butt of it above the left eye, and I fell. When I rose, Dr Malakor had the cutlass from the rack, and Mr. Valerius, who had come down behind me, had my arms.

They did not wish to kill me. I understood that. They wished me to say, afterwards, in a court, that the ship had been lost in a gale. A captain's word is worth a hundred of a passenger's. They told me so. They told me that if I would sign, I should have a share of the money, and a clear name, and a ship of my own.

I said I would not.

I said that I had twenty men aboard.

Mr. Sterling said, "Then you had better see to them."

They drove me up the ladder at the point of the cutlass. They had already battened the main hatch. They had already chained it. Twenty men were below, asleep in their hammocks, who did not know that they were dead. I heard Abel Whitcombe's voice, through the planks, calling out to know who was on deck. I said, "It is Haze." He said, "Captain, the ship is taking water." I said, "I know it, Abel." He said, "Then open the hatch."

I could not. Mr. Valerius had his hand on my arm, and he was weeping.

I have been a master eleven years. I have lost men in storm, and in fire, and once to the plague at Batavia. I have never lost one by my own hand. I stood on the deck of the St. Jude with the hatch under my feet, and the men below me beginning to understand, and I listened to them beat on the planks, and I did nothing. I could do nothing. I record this here in the hope of God's forgiveness, and not in the hope of any other.

The ship went down at ten minutes past three, by my watch. She went quietly. They had cut the lifeboat free before I was brought off. They put me into it first.

It was a clear dawn. The wind had dropped. There was no sail.

We had bread for three days, and a breaker of water.

…

Thalessa stopped.

She laid the long strip of tissue flat on the cloth, among the lamps, and stood with her hands pressed to the edge of the table. Her face was white. She did not move.

"Go on," said Roderick, very low.

"I can't."

"Thalessa."

"I need a moment." She drew a shaking breath. "He wrote that with a nail. In the dark. In the bottom of a boat, with his hands tied, among the people who had done it. He wrote I record this here in the hope of God's forgiveness. He was hurt. He was frightened. He knew what they were. And he wrote as a man might write to a magistrate."

"Because he thought one day a magistrate would read it."

"Yes. And one has."

She straightened. She looked at the Duke.

He sat on his stool among the candles with his head bowed, a very old man in a stranger's coat, with the rubbing of his sin spread out on the table before him. He was weeping without a sound. The tears ran down the deep grooves of his face and fell on the white cloth.

"Is it true?" she said.

"All of it."

"The cutlass? The hatch?"

"It was Sterling's cutlass. Malthus held the lantern." The voice came out rusty. "I stood at the rail and was sick."

"And Mr. Valerius?"

"Thorne held his arms."

"Yes. And wept."

"He always wept." The old man lifted his head. "That was the thing about him. He did it, and he wept, and he went on weeping, and he could not stop. I think that was why the Captain forgave him first."

"Forgave?"

"Read on," said the Duke.

…

She read on. The rubbings went in order: the first yard, the second, the third.

The writing grew smaller as the keel narrowed toward the stern. The letters were crammed together, so close at the end that she had to hold the paper almost against the flame. But the hand did not change. It remained upright, patient, formal. The hand of a man who had kept a log for eleven years, and could not do otherwise.

Day 1. Calm. A light air from the SE. We have set the sail, but there is no course to steer. They have put a blanket over me, and have given me water. Mr. Valerius sits beside me and will not meet my eye.

Day 2. Calm. No sail. The surgeon proposes that we shall go on short allowance. The others agree. The bread is almost gone.

Day 3. Calm. Very hot. Mr. Sterling has begun to talk of the future. He says that when we are picked up, we are to say the ship struck a rock at night. He says that I am to say it. I say nothing.

Day 4. They have taken my book.

I had it in my coat. Mr. Blackwood put his hand in the pocket and took it out. He did not look at me. He read the last page. It was only the log of the wreck, in pencil, what I could remember. Mr. Sterling said, "He will hang us all." Dr Malakor said, "Throw it over." And Mr. Blackwood said, "No. We shall keep it. We shall need it, when we get ashore."

Mr. Valerius took it from him.

I do not know why.

The surgeon has made a proposal. It is very quiet in the boat. He made it in a low voice, among the four of them, while I was supposed to be asleep.

I heard it.

I have decided that I shall write it down.

…

The tissue slipped from her fingers.

She did not notice. She was staring at the last line, at the stub of charcoal in her hand, at the black smudge on her glove. The lamps burned round her, steady and golden, twenty small flames and one empty jar, and there was no sound in the vault but the slow boom of the sea against the door.

"That is the end of the first section," she said, in a voice she did not recognize. "The rest begins at the fifth day."

"Read it," said Roderick.

"No."

"Thalessa—"

"I will not read it aloud." She turned and looked at him, and her eyes were enormous. "I will read it. I will read every word. But I will not say it aloud, in this room, in front of him. It would be a kind of cruelty."

The Duke raised his head.

"Read it," he said.

"Your Grace—"

"Read it, child. I have heard it already, every night, for four years. I would sooner hear it in a voice that is not mine." His own voice was hoarse, steady, quite calm. "You are right that I cannot bear it. But I have borne it. I find I can bear it a little longer."

She looked at him for a long moment.

Then she knelt, and found the next strip of tissue, and bent over it in the lamplight, and for the first time in her life Thalessa Ashwood felt her hands begin to shake so that she could not hold the page.