The dead whale’s empty eyes reflected the clambering limbs of the cabin boy who was being lifted up to the hole that had been cut in its head.
‘My God, no. It cannot be,’ said Abigail.
The hairy steward laughed.
‘Aye, it be true enough,’ he said. ‘Precious stuff left in there.’
The cabin boy was crying in terror, and some of the sailors shouted at him, shoving various blood-stained implements at his arse to force him upwards. There was blood and gore everywhere. The air stank of viscera.
The boy found himself standing on top of the decapitated whale’s head, his feet slipping on the slick wet surface, and a bucket was passed up to him.
‘In you go,’ shouted the captain.
The boy was sobbing, but he nodded and looked once at the heavens as if seeking divine protection. And then he climbed into the whale’s head.
Around the head were buckets and barrels containing the special oil – spermaceti, they called it – which had already been removed. Some of it was beginning to solidify in the outside air. Hanging off the larboard side of the Martha was the eviscerated carcass of the whale, now missing its head and most of its blubber.
Abigail had watched, awe-struck, as they stripped the blubber away. Two mates had cut a hole in the whale’s side, into which they had placed a huge, ugly metal hook. Half a dozen seamen had begun turning the windlass, pulling the ropes through winches and the hook up and away from the whale. A strip of blubber was ripped from the side of the animal. Round and round the windlass went the sailors, and the strip became longer and longer, until twenty feet of thick blubber dripping with blood was hanging over the side of the ship.
The flesh was lowered into the blubber room below deck – spraying blood onto the deck as it went – and another hole was torn in the whale’s skin. The same hook went in. The ugly process began again.
Finally, men had climbed onto the awful eviscerated thing carrying saws and knives, and severed the head.
Now the cabin boy was inside the head, while two seamen were poking a lance around inside the intestines of the skinned whale that still hung from the ship’s side.
‘Looking for ambergris,’ said the steward.
Abigail had known where ambergris came from, but now, watching two ignorant men manipulating an iron lance inside the guts of a dead giant, she wondered at the women of London spraying scent onto their smooth, pampered skins, the noses of gentlemen twitching with delight at the smell which came from this obscenity.
The cabin boy’s head reappeared, to her relief. The seamen barely noticed him as he clambered down with his bucket full of oil. Her heart went to him, as it did every time she saw him. He was only a little older than Rat had been.
Every day, when they woke into this lurching terror of water and whales, and Charles left the tiny cabin to fetch food to break their fast, she punched herself hard in the upper arm. There was a bruise there, a blue-black thing about the size of an oyster. Rat had put it there. She’d called out to him from the bedroom of the Lower Gun Alley apartment, and he’d come running in around the doorframe just as she’d been walking out, and his forehead had hit her square in the arm with the force of a swung cricket bat. The bruise had appeared the next day. Every day she punched it to make sure it did not go away. What would Dr Drysdale have made of that, she wondered?
This ship, the Martha, was profoundly ugly. It was festooned with elements which had no place on a ship. The steward’s cookhouse, for one, and the large iron pots held in brickwork for another – the things looked impossibly heavy and bizarre against the wooden-and-cloth world of the ship.
The resentment towards her was oppressive. Superstitions about women bringing bad luck were as old as navigation, but she saw their wellspring in the hours after they had left Gravesend behind. A different peace had descended, a male comfort which was interrupted by only one thing: herself. She had found this both fascinating and pathetic.
From Gravesend they sailed to Plymouth, then south-west into a veil of fog and rain which belied the growing summer. Two weeks of fresh winds and occasionally astonishing squalls filled with such danger that she had thought she would run mad with the horror of it, and they were passing Portugal on the lee bow, another week and they were sailing between the island of Madeira on their starboard and the islands of Porto Santo and Desertos on their larboard, then Palma (one of the Canaries) appeared off in the distant south-west. Yet another week, and there were the islands of Bravo and Fogo, where slavers lay at anchor.
She had felt the fresh salt air, and despite the fear and the nausea she had imagined her spirits lifting as the fog and rain lifted and the sun beat down upon them and in the water around them the impossible sight of flying fish accompanied their progress. Yet every morning she punched her arm, remembered Rat, and thought of her sessions with Dr Drysdale, as if the bruise on her arm and the bruise in her head were joined.
The female mind is a delicate instrument, yet one of remarkable power, he had once said in his attractive Yorkshire accent. At the time, she had wondered what he had meant by that, but then that awful final revelation: that he thought she had this power of moral projection, as he had termed it, that she had therefore been the wellspring of the events inside Brooke House the previous year, events of which she had only a blurred recollection. She watched the poor cabin boy climbing out of the whale’s head, and the comparison was obvious and disgusting, her head becoming the whale’s, the cabin boy the doctor poking around within.
She remembered the feeling of a lamp in her hand, a lamp she had used with which to read, a lamp she had placed on the little table by the window in Lower Gun Alley. She had read countless books at that table, with that lamp: books on natural philosophy, on history, novels and poetry, geography and astronomy, her learning growing under the light of the lamp, her understanding illuminated by print and the lamp. Illuminated by whale oil.
Men were lighting fires beneath the big iron pots on the deck. Blubber was brought up from below and put into the pots. Oil began to run out of the pots into copper coolers which stood at their side. As night fell, the lights of the fires beneath the tryworks grew bright and fierce, and Abigail imagined them a devil-boat, a destroyer of lives, crewed by demons with knives and saws, glowing with hell-fire as they pulled south.
She wondered how many other whalers were currently slipping through the waves, how many other whaleboats were chasing how many other schools, and she thought of that lamp and that light and those books, and finally she went back to her little cabin and failed to sleep at all, the bruise on her arm pumping with her own blood in the oil-stenched dark.