The Last Lines on the Keel

"Forgiveness is not a gift to the one who is forgiven. It is the last thing a dying man can do with his hands."

Day 8. I have had a long talk with Mr. Blackwood.

She read it in the flat voice she had set for herself, and the sound of it seemed to hang in the cold air of the vault long after the words had gone.

He came and sat beside me at noon, when the others were at the bow. He had a cup of water. He held it to my lips. He said nothing for some time, and I did not ask him to. I drank. Then he said, "Gabriel, do you know why I did this?"

I said that I supposed it was money.

He said that it was money. But not as I meant. He said that his father had left him a house and a name and a debt of three hundred thousand pounds, and that he had spent the whole of his life in the effort to be a man who paid. He said that he had paid, for thirty years, in small coin, a little here, a little there, and he had never once got any further. He said that the only money in the world that was ever enough was money that came all at once. He said that he had thought: one night, one hole in one hull, and I shall be free.

I said, "And the twenty men?"

He said, "I did not think of them."

He said it in a small voice, like a boy, and then he began to weep.

I have been thinking about that sentence ever since. I believe that it is perfectly true. I believe that he did not think of them. It is the only thing I know about evil that I did not know before: that it is very seldom a decision. It is a failure to think.

I told him that I forgave him.

I did not know that I was going to say it. I heard it come out of my mouth. He took my hand in both of his, and held it against his forehead, and the tears ran down my fingers. He said, "You can't." I said, "I find that I can." And he said, "Then God help me, because I can't forgive myself."

I said, "That is your business, and God's."

He laughed. It was the first time anyone had laughed in that boat.

…

"I did," said the Duke.

He had spoken so quietly that she did not at first understand. He was sitting very straight on his stool, with his hands on his knees and his eyes on the rubbing, and his lined face wore an expression she had not seen on it before. It was not misery. It was something calmer, and stranger. A kind of terrible gratitude.

"I laughed," he said. "I remember it. He said, that is your business, and God's. I laughed until I cried. And the others looked round at us, from the bow, as though we had gone mad." He turned his head. "You must understand. I did not want to be forgiven. I wanted to be hated. I wanted him to curse me. I wanted that more than anything in the world. And he would not do it."

"Because it would have been easier," said Thalessa, "for you."

"Yes." The old man's mouth twisted. "He knew that. He was cleverer than any of us."

"He was kind."

"They are not different things."

She looked down at the tissue, and did not answer.

…

Day 9. I asked Mr. Valerius for a favor.

He is the youngest of them and the weakest. He weeps a great deal. He sits with me in the afternoons, when the others sleep, and writes in a small black book which he calls his diary. I asked him this afternoon whether he would do me a service. I said that I should like my log to be kept safe. I said that I did not want it burned or thrown away, because it is the only record of the loss of the ship, and the men had a right to have it known.

He said that Mr. Blackwood had taken it. I said that I knew. I said that Mr. Blackwood would throw it away, the moment we were rescued, for he is a frightened man. I said, "Thorne, you will take it from him."

He said, "Gabriel, I can't."

I said, "You have taken it once already. I saw you. You took it from his hand on the fourth day. Why?"

He was silent. Then he said, "I don't know. I thought, someone ought to keep it."

I said, "Then keep it. And when the time comes, do not give it to anyone. Hide it. There is a hollow in the keel of this boat, under the floorboards, where the garboards meet. I have felt it with my hand. A man might lay a small book there, and the planking would close over it. And in the years to come, if the boat is ever broken up, or sold, or left to rot, someone will find it, and read what is there, and know."

He said, "They will see me do it."

I said, "Then do it in the dark."

He wept. He said, "I will try."

He has promised. I believe he will keep his promise. He is the one who has kept himself most separate from the others, even at the worst. He wrote in his diary this evening, and I saw him tear out the page, and put it in his pocket.

I hope very much that he does not do what I think he is going to do, which is carry it with him for the rest of his life.

…

Thalessa lowered the tissue.

She was looking at the middle distance with an expression of great stillness.

"I have his diary," she said. "In my chest. A page torn out of it. Hunger on the rescue boat. I thought he had meant to burn it." She laughed, faintly. "He kept it in his coat for four years. He was the man who could not bear to throw anything away."

"And the log?"

"He did as the Captain asked." She turned her head. "There is a hollow in the keel. The log is there. Or was there. Until the girl came to the boat and put her hand under the boards and found it."

"And began to read."

"And has not stopped." She looked at the long white strips of paper on the table, with their faint black tracery of letters. "She has a great deal to answer for, Roderick. But she has not made up a word of it."

…

Day 12. They are very good to me.

I want that written, as strange as it is. I do not know how else to put it. Dr Malakor dresses the places every morning, and washes them, and has given me the last of the carbolic from his bag. Mr. Sterling shares his water with me, a mouthful at a time, as if I were a sick child. Lady Aurelia sits with me in the afternoons and tells me stories. She has a son at school in Bath, who is eleven years old, and whom she has not seen in a year. She says that she did this for him. I do not know whether to believe it. But I let her tell me.

Mr. Blackwood has sung to me. He has a poor voice. It does not matter.

I have been thinking about my sister.

Her name is Vespera. She was born when I was seventeen, and our mother died of it, and I have more or less brought her up. She is sixteen now. She lives at Harrow's Reach, with our uncle, who keeps a boatyard. She has the sharpest eyes in the village and the stubbornest mouth, and she can tie any knot that I can tie. I taught her. She does not know that her brother is dead.

I have been trying to think what she will do.

I think she will sit on the quay. I think she will sit on it for three days, and wait. And then I think she will come looking.

I wish I could tell her not to.

…

Roderick took a short step forward.

"Read that again," he said.

"She has the sharpest eyes in the village." Thalessa's lips were bloodless. "And the stubbornest mouth."

"Sixteen."

"She would be twenty now."

"She told the Duke she was nineteen when she came here."

"She lied by three years, to look old enough for a housekeeper's place." Thalessa put her hand flat on the page. "He says she has sharp eyes, Roderick. In the present. In the writing of a dying man who had no reason on earth to deceive anyone. She is not blind. She never was. The fever, the quay, the three days of waiting, all of that came afterwards. She invented the blindness. She put on a pair of milk-white eyes and walked into the house of the men who had killed him."

"Why?"

"Because nobody watches a blind servant." She said it very quietly. "Nobody guards a secret from her. Nobody lowers their voice. She could stand at their elbows for four years and hear every word."

The Duke did not look up.

"She was in my study," he said, hoarsely, "while I wept. She was in the room when I told Ragnar, one night, of what I had seen in the mirror. I thought she was deaf as well. I said to him: I cannot sleep. I see his hands."

"And she remembered."

"She remembers everything."

…

Day 15. Calm, very hot. A light breeze from the east. I am not afraid.

I thought that I would be. I think there is a fear that comes before, and goes away at the moment when it becomes useless. I have been in great pain, and have passed through it, and come to a place on the other side of it, which is flat and rather beautiful. I can see the sky. It is very blue. The others are mostly asleep.

Today the surgeon told me that I am dying.

I said that I knew.

He said, "I would give my life to take it back." I said, "You would not. But I thank you for saying so." He sat beside me for a long time. He took my hand. He said, "Captain, I want you to know that I have never in my life been so ashamed." I said, "That is a very great thing to be." And he said nothing for a long while, and then he asked me, in a small voice, if I thought it would be possible, afterwards, to live with it.

I said, "I don't know, Malthus. I think you will have to learn."

He wept. He put his head on my chest. It is so strange. I have only the skin left, and the bone, and he lay there like a child.

…

Day 19. Calm.

I am writing this with the last of my hand. They have untied me. There is nothing more to be done. I have been lying on my back for two days looking at the boards of the thwart, and I do not feel any pain. I think this is the end.

They have been very good to me.

They have let me keep my eyes open. That was the last thing I asked of Dr Malakor. I said that I wished to see the sky until the end, and that I wished them to see me see it. I said that I did not wish them to be able to say they had not looked. He said, "Captain, I cannot promise." I said, "Then promise to try."

I am looking at them now. They are sitting in the bow, in a row, quite still. They are looking at me. I think they have not looked at me for some days, and now they cannot look away. I hope it is kind.

I have only a little time. I will write what I have to say.

To whoever finds this: I am Gabriel Haze. I was master of the brig St. Jude, of Port Calder. I was a plain man. I did my duty and I failed at it. There were twenty men in the hold, and I did not open the hatch.

I ask you to remember them. Their names are Whitcombe, Crewe, Pym, Marl, Dunn, Orr, Calloway, and thirteen more whom I shall not have breath to set down. They were good sailors. They did not deserve it.

As for the five who are with me in this boat, I ask you to judge them. I ask you to judge them justly, with the law, in open court. I do not ask you to forgive them. That is not for you. But I ask you not to hunt them. I ask you not to do to them what they have done to me. If you are a person who loves me, I ask you this most of all.

Do not make a monster of yourself on my account.

I have been, for nineteen days, loved by the men who killed me. I did not know that it was possible. I shall go to God with that on my heart, and I ask that you will not take it from me.

Vespera, if it is you who read this: I am sorry. I should have come home.

Day 20. Smoke on the horizon.

I shall be dead before.

G.H.

…

There was no sound in the crypt.

The lamps burned round the white cloth, twenty small steady flames. The sea had drawn away from the door. A great quiet hung over the vault, like the quiet of a church after the last hymn has died.

Thalessa Ashwood sat with the last strip of tissue in her lap. She did not weep. She did not move. She sat as one sits who has been struck by lightning and has not yet been told.

Roderick was the first to speak.

"He told her not to," he said. His voice was a ruin. "He told her."

"Yes."

"Do not make a monster of yourself on my account."

"Yes."

"And she read it. She put her fingers on those letters in the dark, and read every word. And she went on."

"She did." Thalessa lifted her head. "Perhaps she thought it was an instruction she could not follow. Perhaps she thought he did not know what he was asking. Perhaps she thought it was the last act of a man too good for the world, and that the world could not afford him." Her lips shook. "I do not know. I think I should have done the same."

"You would not."

"I should have wished to."

The Duke, on his stool, had bowed his head. His hands lay open on his knees. And as they watched, a long slow shudder went through his thin frame, from head to foot, and he said, in a voice of utter, childlike simplicity, "He was only a man. He was only a man, and we ate him."

Nobody answered.

"We ate him," said the Duke. "And he forgave us. And I have lived four years in a house with the sea at the bottom of the garden. And I have thought: what sort of creature am I, that I can be forgiven for that?"

He raised his face to the lamps. It was wet and calm and old.

"I think I should like to die," he said.