WE MET THE MISSISSIPPI THE FOLLOWING DAY – OR SO THEY TOLD me. So far as I could see, it met us, for from my vantage it looked little different to any of the other myriad tributaries which joined and fed the Ohio. It sometimes seemed a miracle there was any space to inhabit this nation at all, so plentiful were its rivers. Nonetheless, the helmsman assured me that we now sailed the true Mississippi, mightiest of the western waters and artery of an entire continent.
For myself, I had preferred the Ohio. Though wet and freezing for most of our journey it had contained a picturesque elegance which seemed, somehow, as a wilderness ought to be. Though I had found it sinister at first, the slope of the valley and the changing landscapes had formed a pleasing prospect. The Mississippi, by contrast, offered no such proportion or variety. Whatever hills or elevations had once lined its course had long since been ground down and swept away by the all-devouring river. Now, the banks stretched away flat as a marsh, the trees so thick that they became wooden walls hemming us in on our sunken road. Untrammelled by any physical constraint, the river was left to spread itself as wide as it chose. The current broadened, and slowed, so that our progress seemed still more excruciating.
The monotony was unyielding. Even the arrival of the new year, 1807, occasioned nothing more than an additional tot of whiskey. Burr’s boat might keep us drier and warmer, but it was not a comfortable place to be. At first I made sure to keep to the cabin, following Catherine like a forlorn hound lest Burr attempt any indiscretion. Yet I could not sustain the endeavour. Sitting in that cabin hour after hour, playing backgammon without stakes or enduring inane conversations in my fledgling French, proved more exhausting than any labour. After two days of it I insisted I must join the watch, and thereafter spent my time either looking out for sawyers (the barely submerged tree-trunks which could break open a boat) or seeking a restless sleep on the benches in the cabin.
The long hours which I spent perched on the roof, staring out into the muddy stream and pulling my coat close about me, at least afforded time for reflection. Since I had learned of Burr’s plan on Blennerhassett Island, and been dragged down the forsaken river, one solitary question prevailed unanswered in my thoughts. How was I to stop this business? For once, Nevell’s interests, Britain’s and my own were all in perfect harmony. Nevell had been right. If Burr carried out his designs, if it became known that a consortium of Englishmen had conspired to forge a new empire on America’s border, then whether he succeeded or failed there would surely be a ruinous war between England and America. Whose casualties, I did not doubt, would include the unfortunate Lieutenant Martin Jerrold. Whether I was killed in battle by the Spaniards, executed for my complicity by the Americans, or murdered by Burr’s men when they discovered my treachery, it did not matter. Yet even if I did somehow manage to leave the conspiracy stillborn, its failure would still leave me stranded far from home and deep among enemies.
A murmur from behind me broke into my thoughts, and I turned to see who had spoken. There was no-one save the steersman, and he was ignoring me as he concentrated on maintaining our course against the swirling cross-current. Perhaps it had been a creak in the timbers.
As my gaze slipped back up the river behind us, I stiffened. Near the horizon, where the water and the trees and the sky all came together in a mottle of greys and browns, something was moving. I almost did not see it, for its wooden hull blended into the grain of the background, and the flat-roofed cabin barely rose high enough to break the line of the bank, yet something in its angularity, its artifice, stood out like a mis-stitched thread on a sampler. If I squinted to see it clearer it only faded from view, yet I could not quite convince myself I imagined it.
I took the spyglass which I kept by my side, and trained it behind me. The far stretches of the river leaped closer, and I could see what my naked eye had only guessed at: a flatboat, floating lazily in mid-stream, with only a solitary figure visible on its deck. Even in the glass he was little more than a silhouette at that distance.
I suppose it should not have been remarkable. Every month, hundreds of boats made the same journey we did, and there were few vessels in the world so uniformly characterless as the flatboats. Yet in this depth of winter the waterways were almost deserted: outside our own flotilla, I had not seen a single other boat since Shawneetown. It was probably innocent, I told myself – a trader hoping to profit by the lack of competition, or an immigrant family who had misjudged the season.
The noise which had first drawn my attention aft sounded again. It had come from the rear skylight, I realized, propped open above Burr’s sleeping cabin. It might have been the creak of wood, or the groan of a cask being dragged across the deck, but I did not think so. There was a vital, carnal quality to the sound which implied a more human origin. By the leer on the helmsman’s face, I guessed he thought the same.
All my suspicions and jealousies ignited as if touched by a match. Propelled forward, I ran along the roof of the cabin. In that moment I was absolutely certain that Catherine had betrayed me to Burr; even before I reached the skylight, I could picture the two of them entwined in each other’s arms, naked, the blankets cast aside and the cabin echoing with the shameless voice of their coupling. So vivid was the image that I almost wanted it to be true.
I never found out. Before I could reach the skylight a vast shudder swept through the boat, flinging me forward onto my knees. The wedge which had held the skylight open fell away and it slammed shut. Yet that was forgotten, driven out by a new and more urgent question. What had happened? Looking forward again I could see the two men by the bow frantically heaving on their poles, while behind me the helmsman splashed away with the steering oar. Belatedly, I became aware of having heard a loud thud accompanying the blow.
More of the men were on deck now, rushing out of the cabin and snatching poles or paddles from where they had lain. I heard shouts and curses, calls for a carpenter and caulking. I could see that the bow had been knocked off course, almost upstream, so that we drifted beam-on to the current.
‘Shoals ahead!’ shouted one of the crew. ‘Get those oars stuck in before she breaks her back open!’
A great commotion of running feet and knocking wood answered his call. Above it all I heard a familiar voice asking, ‘What the hell is going on?’
‘Sawyer,’ came the terse reply. ‘Didn’t see it coming. But there’s worse ahead if we don’t turn our bow forward again.’
I crawled to the end of the roof and looked down. Burr was standing there, his shirt untucked and his grey hair matted to a thatch. He did not appear to be wearing shoes or stockings.
Before I could be suspicious, he turned and looked up at me. ‘Where were you when this happened, Lieutenant? You were meant to be keeping watch for these hazards.’
Cowering under the scorching gaze of those eyes, I mumbled something about not having noticed it.
‘You’ll notice it presently, I’d wager.’ Burr pointed to a dark ridge snaking through the water a few hundred feet downstream. ‘If we strike that we’ll be rolled keel-side up in no time – if the impact doesn’t snap us in two.’
Helpless impotence welled inside me, mingled with the taint of Burr’s scorn and a lingering jealousy. I jumped down onto the foredeck and took hold of the pole which was thrust into my hands. It barely made a sound as it slid into the water, sinking deeper and deeper as I probed for the riverbed. It must have measured fifteen feet or more, yet it sank to its tip without ever touching the bottom.
‘Let it go,’ said Burr. ‘By the time you feel anything it’ll be too late to save us. Take an oar.’
I did as he said. The current, which minutes earlier had felt so sluggish, now seemed to be a raging torrent hurtling us forward onto the shoal. I snatched an oar and plunged the blade into the river, driving it backwards and carving thin whirlpools in the water. For what seemed an eternity there was nothing but the rise and fall and heave of oars, the sluice of gallons of water being dug out of the current. Slowly, I felt our bow begin to turn, though I could not look up from my work to see it.
‘Ready with the pole,’ shouted Burr. ‘It’ll shave us close.’
For the second time that afternoon, vibrations rippled through the hull. The whole boat tipped to starboard, and a rasping noise like wind through a tree sounded below. We put down our oars and hurled ourselves to the starboard side, heeling the boat over away from the shoal. Still the rasping continued; still the boat slid forward. The bow was swinging back again as we pivoted around like a compass needle, slowing every second with the drag on her hull. The river and the mud vied to grasp us; for a moment I thought we might yet slip off.
With a slithering hiss, the boat ground to a halt. Limbs and bodies tangled together as the jolt threw the crew forward on top of one another. A sharp elbow dug into my spine.
Rubbing our bruises, we got to our feet. The boat had come to rest on the very tip of the shoal, rocking gently in the current – another yard or two and we would have been clear. It listed to starboard, though that was slowly correcting itself as the larboard side oozed down into the mud. Under the hull the diverted waters were already beginning to chew away at the point, changing the shape of the ever-shifting river once more.
One by one, I felt the eyes of the crew fix on me. Burr, standing in the cabin doorway, spoke for them all. ‘Next time, Mr Jerrold, I hope you will not be so easily distracted.’
We got off that shoal, though it was a damnable effort. The other boats in the flotilla had seen us, and sent men back upstream in canoes to aid us. We threw wooden boards onto the shoal and then stood on them, digging out the mud with the makeshift spades we had made of our oars. It was precarious work, particularly with the water forever undermining the ground beneath us, and several times I was pitched forward on my face; once I was almost dragged away by the current and had to snatch at the end of an outstretched pole to haul myself in. By the end of it, I had grown a second skin of mud, black as Burr’s negro slave. I remembered a scufflehunter I had once encountered on the Thames at low water, a man I had thought carved from the river clay itself. Even he might now disdain to shake my hand.
At last, with a great heave of poles and a slurp of mud, we worked the boat free. Those of us still on the shoal had to leap for the side and haul ourselves inboard, for the river was in urgent mood; several oars were abandoned behind us. I took off my shirt and trawled it in the water, trying to wring the worst of the mud out of it. As I did so, I looked back.
It was almost dark. The sun, never much in evidence that day, now only touched the tips of the forest, and a thunderhead of black clouds hung low over the river behind us. Yet even in the twilight, I could have sworn I still saw the solitary flatboat I had noticed earlier.
We had spent over two hours beached on that shoal, more than enough time for the current to carry the other boat past us. Yet even now, after so much time, it still floated at exactly the same distance as before, almost out of sight but never quite beyond the horizon.