Mister Christian

By William Kinsolving

Mister Christian

The Diplomat’s Daughter

Bred to Win

Raven

Born with the Century

SIMON & SCHUSTER

Rockefeller Center

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 1996 by The Kinsolving Company and William Kinsolving

All rights reserved,

including the right of reproduction

in whole or in part in any form.

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of

Simon & Schuster Inc.

Designed by Irving Perkins Associates

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Mister Christian : a novel: / William Kinsolving

p. cm.

1. Christian, Fletcher, 1764-1793—Fiction. 2. Sailors—Great Britain—

Fiction. 3. Bounty Mutiny, 1789—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3561.I58M57 1996

813'.54—dc20 95-33683 CIP

ISBN: 1-41-659904-5 ISBN: 978-1-41-659904-3

eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-8462-9

For Carol

Contents

Author’s Note

Introduction

Part One Escape

Pitcairn

Pitcairn

The South Pacific

Netherlands Antilles

Islas Los Roques

Cádiz

Gulf of Saint-Malo

Part Two Home

From Sir Jeremy Learned’s Journal

Doualas, Isle of Man

Cumberland

Windy Brow

London

Derwent Water

London

Part Three Able-bodied Seaman

From Sir Jeremy Learned’s Journal

With the Royal Navy

The Nore

The North Sea

Alfoxden

Part Four Fugitive

From Sir Jeremy Learned’s Journal

London

Algiers

Derwent Water

1801-1805

London

Conclusion

From Sir Jeremy Learned’s Journal

Bedlam

A Chronology

Acknowledgments

Author’s Note

In the South Pacific on 28 April 1789, a mutiny took place aboard HMS Bounty.

The captain of the ship, Lieutenant William Bligh, was forced overboard with eighteen other men into an open launch. Dangerously crowded, they were left in the small boat to fend for themselves upon the wide ocean.

The leader of the mutiny, Acting-Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, then sailed the Bounty in search of a haven, safe from the long arm of the Royal Navy.

After an heroic voyage of 3600 nautical miles, Bligh and his men reached Coupang in the Dutch East Indies.

Sixteen of those left aboard the Bounty eventually chose to return to Tahiti, where they subsequently were captured by the Royal Navy. Ten of them survived their return to England, where three were hanged.

Fletcher Christian finally found a mischarted island called Pitcairn where he, a group of eighteen Polynesians, and the remaining eight mutineers established a community.

These tales are true and often told, though endlessly debated. Their usual conclusions are William Bligh’s triumph of survival, and Fletcher Christian’s escape to Pitcairn.

What follows includes the rest of the history.

Introduction

While crossing the South Pacific in February of 1808, Captain Mayhew Folger, of the American sealer Topaz, spotted a rocky island that should not have been there. Checking his navigational charts, the captain concluded that the island was Pitcairn. It had been mischarted by more than two hundred miles. Having sold his cargo of gin and rum in Australia, Folger was eager to find seals in order to fill his hold with skins for his return to Boston.

With that hope, the captain set his course for the reportedly uninhabited island. But on his approach, he was surprised to see smoke rising tranquilly through the lush verdure growing above the high stone cliffs that loomed from the sea. He was even more startled when a Polynesian-style canoe approached his ship and he was hailed in fluent, if strangely accented, English by its three native paddlers.

I went on shore and found there an Englishman by the name of Alexander Smith, the only person remaining out of the nine that escaped [in 1789] on board the ship Bounty, under the command of the archmutineer Christian. . . . After they had remained about four years on the island, their men servants rose upon and killed six of them, leaving only Smith. . . . However, he and the widows of the deceased men arose and put all the servants to death which left him the only surviving man on the island with eight or nine women and several small children. . . .

The community of which Captain Folger wrote in his ship’s log was populated by the descendants of the mutineers and the native women they brought with them to Pitcairn in January of 1790, eight months after the mutiny. Included in the curious group who welcomed the captain were three children of Fletcher Christian.

Because there were no seals on the island, Folger was eager to return to the Topaz. He stayed only a few hours, during which time he tried to find out more details about the fate of the mutineers, in particular their leader. Smith, whose legal name turned out to be John Adams, was reluctant to discuss the past; as a mutineer, the man faced hanging if ever found by a British ship. His stories were vague, contradictory, and, to his listeners, they seemed purposely misleading. Of Fletcher Christian’s death and burial, he gave a garbled story, one he changed with each telling. Captain Folger recorded that Christian was shot in the back by the native men during their massacre of the mutineers. The location of his grave was not entered in the log.

For his part, Smith/Adams begged for report of the world, about which he had not heard in the nearly twenty years since the mutiny. Folger told him of the French Revolution, Napoleon’s inexorable rise to power, and how the seemingly endless European war against France was spilling over the oceans of the world. After hearing of the great British victory at Trafalgar, the old mutineer rose and swung his hat over his head, calling out Old England forever!

Captain Folger told of his amazing discovery when the Topaz called at Valparaiso, Chile. An official report was forwarded to the British Admiralty, where it arrived on 14 May 1809. The news received scant attention, the war against Napoleon taking precedence with both the Royal Navy and the public. As mutinies go, the Bounty’s had been a minor example when compared to that aboard HMS Hermione, where ten officers were hacked to death, or the subsequent great Nore Mutiny of 1797, involving 50,000 seamen and 113 ships.

What happened aboard the Bounty had been, after all, bloodless. Those mutineers who had been captured were court-martialed; those found guilty were hanged. The hard-core band under Fletcher Christian had disappeared. The mutiny itself was memorable mainly due to the survival of the Bounty’s captain, Bligh, who, with eighteen of the crew, piloted the ship’s dangerously overcrowded launch on an astonishing 3600-mile voyage to Timor. The Admiralty was content to neglect Captain Folger’s report, and the survival of any of the Bounty’s mutineers was officially ignored.

Coincidentally, in that same spring of 1809, there were persistent rumors in Cumberland, where Fletcher Christian was born and raised, that he had been seen there often and made frequent visits to an aunt. Soon after, Captain Peter Heywood, who as a young midshipman had been kept aboard the Bounty during the mutiny and who, in spite of his friendship with Fletcher Christian, was subsequently pardoned by the King after his court-martial, reported that he glimpsed Christian in Fore Street, Plymouth Dock. When Heywood approached, whomever he’d seen fled and disappeared.

A year and a half later, in November of 1810, King George III began to slip permanently into madness and the final Regency crisis began. The war against France was at a critical point. Napoleon had reached his zenith. Having married Marie-Louise of Austria and annexed Holland, he was also reigning as Emperor and King over Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Prussia. England and the Duke of Wellington were the only obstacles to the Emperor’s domination of Europe, and the only hope against his ambition, which was turning fatefully toward Russia.

During the British governmental crisis, when royal authority was edging its way toward the willing but profligate Prince of Wales, one of the mad King’s doctors was Sir Jeremy Learned. A renowned physician specializing in brain disorders and lunacy, he shuttled between Windsor Castle and the hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem in hopes of gaining insight to his royal patient’s desperate condition. Popularly known as Bedlam, the hospital was the second oldest in Europe for the chronically insane. It was notorious for the extreme cruelty of its treatment and care, a tradition with which Sir Jeremy, according to his journal, was familiar and which he instinctively abhorred. As his mental condition worsened into violence, the King became the object of intense political and medical bickering. Thus Sir Jeremy had less time for visits to Bedlam, and less tolerance for the appalling practices he found there.

The King’s repeated bouts of mental illness had brought the attention of reformers and Parliamentarians to the antediluvian methods of care for mad people. During his own investigations into alternative treatment, not only for his royal patient but for the cause of reform, Sir Jeremy discovered a private clinic in York, run by a Quaker father and sons, who were treating their patients without the time-honored physical restraints of manacles, whipping, strait-waistcoats, or chains. Sir Jeremy had recently suggested this new moral therapy at Windsor to his colleagues and to Queen Charlotte, only to be roundly ridiculed by the former and silenced by the latter.

According to his journal, on 10 December 1810, in the course of a late-night Bedlam visit, the doctor visited the solitary cell of a patient whose wrists were bolted into iron manacles imbedded in the center of the stone floor. This had been done to prevent him doing harm to himself and others. The manacles prevented the man from standing, allowing him only to kneel or lie on the floor, positions which necessitated his eating directly from a bowl as well as defecating where he lay.

The doctor had observed the man a number of times. Offering no other authority than his firm command, Sir Jeremy ordered the patient released. When the resident apothecary and his staff refused because of the man’s past violence, the doctor ordered them out of the cell. In the light of a lantern, he knocked the bolts free himself. Instead of making a savage response, the patient crawled painfully into a corner and, watching the doctor, rubbed his scabbed and festering wrists.

Like many patients in Bedlam, little was known of him, certainly not his name. He had lost an eye; from the tattoos on his chest and buttocks, the doctor deduced that he had been a sailor. From the scar on his back, it was clear he once had been shot. A long scar above his ribs indicated a stabbing wound. Seven months before, he had been pulled from the Thames after jumping off London Bridge. When he regained his senses, he attacked his rescuers with such raging madness he was delivered to Bedlam. After he made many frenzied attempts to kill himself and anyone who came close to him, his wrists were bolted to the floor. He had lived to such fashion, eating like a dog, sleeping in his own filth, and being hosed once each fortnight, or whenever his rages took control of him.

Standing across the cell from his patient, the doctor asked a number of simple questions, which were answered with a nod or shake of the head. The man seemed calm and lucid, so Sir Jeremy chanced a careful intimacy, explaining his urgency to learn, not of the patient’s identity, which he seemed so loath to reveal, but of his madness. In exchange, he offered the man greater comforts. Approaching him, the doctor asked, What is it that you want? He meant the question to apply generally to the broad spectrum of his patient’s needs.

The man’s reply was specific: Foolscap, a quill and inkhorn . . . not to mention a large batter pudding, if you’ve a mind.

The doctor automatically regarded the quill as a potential weapon. He smiled, attempting to conceal his suspicion. No pudding, I’m afraid, but why . . . ?

I’ll use them for naught but writing, the patient said sarcastically, his voice a rough whisper, his accent difficult to place.

What is it you wish to write?

A story, that’s all.

Why suddenly now?

The patient stared at the lantern’s flickering light. I have my hands now, he said angrily, and perhaps even my mind as well—a thrilling combination, don’t you think? You can read every word I write if you’ve an inclination. I’ll not bother to write about the crime itself; too many others have told their versions of the same tale, so believe what you like. But now, since they’ve found them out there on that ‘island paradise’—he laughed, though the sound was a groan—the story could become some pitiable romance, a shallow parable of mankind’s evil. But sir, there’s something more to it than that! His voice rose against his own doubt, then he covered his eyes with one hand.

Later that night, Sir Jeremy noted the conversation in his journal, and that the man’s left wrist was suppurating. With his habitual precision, the doctor listed the medications he had prescribed for Bedlam’s apothecary to supply. Then he concluded:

What the patient was saying seemed humourously frantic, yes, a definite though perhaps malign sense of humour; better than reading Blake, which is the same kind of aberrant illusion. The man illustrates my theory that creative production is often a disciplined expression of one’s madness and should be encouraged. The true artist obviously has an ineffable force beyond craft to create sublimity, a process unique to each artist and, needless to say, beyond anyone else’s understanding, and probably beyond the artist’s as well. Blake is my primary example—a contained madness energising genius—as well as Turner, Coleridge, and of course Paganini. This patient has no such genius, but he wants to write a story; certainly that is better than destruction, no matter if what he composes is blather.

When I assured him that be would have his paper, quill, and ink, he offered no thanks. Instead, be took his hand away from his eyes and stared into the dark as if confronting his damnation.

PART ONE

Escape

Pitcairn

September 1793

That day; there was no before, there was no after. I dared not think, but tried in my wisdom to concentrate only on the row of yams I was planting. The light seemed blinding; the green of the coconut palms seared my brain, and the blue sea, glasslike that day, mirrored a glare that cut through whatever it was I thought to be my soul. But I could not stop my mind. I considered in explicit detail how a seed might grow in the rich red soil of Pitcairn. Yet every time I opened the earth with my wooden spade, I saw blood there, glistening. I accepted that on that lost island there was more blood for me than there was earth to cover it, so much blood that it surely would drown me if I did not give such privilege to the sea. That day, my straight, orderly furrow of seed and blood very neatly cut my life in twain. I could no longer endure my past, and the possible future offered me nothing but madness and death.

I planned to kill myself that day. My determination was to sow a crop for my family and, once done, to rid them of what most surely would destroy any chance of their happiness. By then I could no longer bear the island to which I had brought them. If I remained I would begin to disdain my woman and our children and finally detest them as part of my prison. In my growing madness, I also believed that I would have abused them, harmed them, even destroyed them. Such degradation of mind and spirit made certain my purpose to end my life. I was five days short of twenty-nine years. When the row of yams was done, I would turn and walk to the cliff, The Edge, as we so appropriately called it. The tide was in; I would hurl myself into the sea, which by then was Heaven and Hell, and for me the only God that existed.

Then I heard people coming. I turned my back to them, thinking that my face would give away what I saw in the ground or what I intended to do. I heard them stop and I dug harder, hoping to avoid conversation. The shot rang out. I felt the ball’s impact in my back and was knocked forward, falling on my face, senseless.

I lay unmoving on the ground for hours, into the night. Thinking me dead, no one touched me. Then, something ran over my neck. I tried to raise my right arm, thereby causing pain beyond anything I’d ever experienced. Whatever the thing was darted away, a spider perhaps, leaving me lying, I realised, in the dark as I tried to breathe. My nose and throat were clogged; my cheek was stuck to the rock on which I’d fallen, sealed there with dried blood. I coughed and gasped with more pain; my face felt shattered. For a time, I did not try to move again, but my mind began its utterly contradictory work. Without a thought of my former suicidal intention, I began to consider what I had to do in order to survive. Brought forth in that same instant was what had long remained stillborn in me, the decision to escape the island.

Tentatively, I moved the fingers of my right hand, then the wrist. When I tried to bend the elbow, the pain started to intensify, but it was not the stabbing hurt of shattered bone. Instead, I felt the tear of flesh and nerves, and I dared to hope that there was less damage than I’d feared. Suddenly despair gave way to anticipation, futility to expectation, surrender to determination, all whilst I lay on the ground unsure of how or whether to move.

I conjectured whoever had loaded the musket that had inflicted my wound had done so with too little gunpowder, otherwise the ball would have accomplished its purpose. That led me to the conclusion that my murderer had to be one of the natives whom we had instructed on the use of our weapons for our ease. It was they whom we sent out to hunt the descendants of the Bounty’s pigs, which lived wild on the island. To the native hunters, the powder was magic; a little more or less made no difference to them. My white colleagues would have been more exacting in their measurement, and my right side would have been torn through.

I rolled my face off the rock where it was stuck. The intensity of my new resolve was so strong, I felt my heart begin to pump whatever blood was left into my eyes and mouth so that I not only saw but tasted my purpose. I spat the blood and squinted into the black sky, remembering with a sailor’s care that there would be no moon. With excruciating toil, I rolled onto my left side. Using arm and leg as a crab would do, I began a steady crawl toward the cliff line.

Agony is best left undescribed, for in reports it often tends toward bluster. I had my agony that night; others have suffered worse. Here, at least, the caprice of memory serves us well, allowing pain to numb itself into our little monuments of scars and sore old wounds. I was surprised to bear such torment, but I remember too, in that dragging time, I saw the path, not only toward survival, but also for escape, as clearly as if guided by the stars on which I had so long depended for direction.

Earlier, I had planned to seek a place on the cliff face where I could hurl myself directly into the sea. During that first hour of inching, I indeed headed to the same precipice. Twenty feet below it was an outcropping wide enough to hold my bloody blouse for all to see. I did not know just how I’d remove it, neither did I know how I would contrive to reach the Other Side, the name we called the western part of the island, which was all steep gullies and forbidding slopes. It was difficult enough to walk there, much more to crawl. Nevertheless, that was where I had to go. I knew of springs and streams, of places to hide, of plantain and coconut trees.

I thought of my cave but rejected it as a hiding place. If my blouse was not found right away, the cave would be the first place anyone would look for me. And I doubted I had strength to climb the sheer path up and around Lookout Point, the high jutting pinnacle of rock that rose up at the northern end of our settlement where the cave was. Rainwater was collected there, as well as muskets and a brace of pistols that I’d taken up years before when the place was my fort against potential seizure.

At the cliff face, I rested for a time; then, still prone, I unbuttoned my tapa blouse with my left hand. A single Royal Navy button, saved carefully over the years, was left from my old dress tunic. I bit it off and held it in my mouth. The other fasteners were carved stubs of ironwood, more difficult to manage. I struggled with one a good quarter hour before the blouse was loose. To get it off, I had to sit, which I knew might be impossible. I was halfway there before fainting, from pain or lack of blood in the brain, I know not.

Nor do I know how long I lay there, or what awakened me. It was still dark, and this time I managed to sit upright. My teeth chattered from a cold I had never felt before in the South Pacific. The button was still in my cheek, drawing saliva, which cleared my mouth of blood. With my good arm, I peeled off the blouse. Reaching for a stone nearby, I wrapped it in the bloodied cloth, made so painstakingly by the women from the bark of the mulberry tree, then let myself fall to the ground again and crawled to the very edge. Leaning over so that the blood rushed to my head and started my nose bleeding again, I pushed the weighted blouse over and watched it fall into the dark.

Through the ever-pounding roar and hiss of surf to which we had long grown deaf, I barely heard the stone crack against the rock below me. As if the sound were a starting gun, I began my crawling race against sunrise, cold, and a sudden thirst so intense I felt it in my teeth. Sucking on the button in my mouth, I dared to hope that the blouse would be found, free of its weight, close enough to the edge to create the impression that my body had fallen farther, into the sea.

Pitcairn is a lush but forbidding rock of an island, bound up from the ocean by its high cliffs, traversed by spiky ridges, the main one, Gannet’s Ridge, running the island’s length from east to west. I had to cross that ridge to reach the Other Side, with my hopes of hiding and recovery. The sun was good to me, staying for some hours behind low clouds, allowing me to reach the top of the ridge as its namesake birds were awakening. I managed to slide down most of the incline, landing finally in a stream where I gently washed my face and drank my fill. Then as carefully as I could, I laid my back across the stream to let the water cleanse my wound.

My nose was broken, there was no doubt. The bullet was still in my back, but several times in my progress over Gannet’s Ridge, I had involuntarily and painfully been forced to use my right arm, which made me even more certain no bones were broken. I could probably live if I wanted to, and strange it was to know I did. Once accepted, curiosity was first upon my mind—who shot me? Who was left alive? I remembered hearing several at my back before the shot was fired. Was it a native rebellion? Were all the mutineers dead? Had my woman, Isabella, known of it and this time not told me? Had she delivered yet, and would revenge include the white men’s children?

I cared again, too much for what I planned to do. Threading the button onto the leather thong around my waist, I tried to think of how I could manage my escape, alone, in a canoe, one of those we’d made in native fashion, with its outrigger float, running out against the wild and never-ending surf that rolled across a thousand miles of open ocean to pound into the cove we called the Landing Place. There the Bounty lay, fired and sunk within a week of our arrival for fear of her discovery by other passing ships, as well as against the chance of someone having a change of heart and quitting the island, thus betraying our existence.

If any of the mutineers were still alive, they would oppose my escape for this very reason. Even though my discovery anywhere in the world would mean my own capture and death, my fellow mutineers could only fear it would mean theirs as well. For no matter if I swore upon my children’s lives never to reveal this place, they could never be sure that when facing the noose, I would not bargain for my life with their discovery. My escape would have to be in spite of everything that they could do to prevent it—if any were alive. If none were, I would have to escape from those who already had tried to murder me.

Holding those pleasant prospects in mind, I dared to stand. Even if I managed to escape the island, fought through the crashing surf to open water, what did I expect? There was no scheduled pacquet! From my cave, I once had seen two ships on opposite horizons within a single month, but the ordinary time between such sightings was a season, more often half a year. And if one chanced by when I was out there, would a lookout ever spy a twig in the endless ocean? And what of storms, and food, and water?

In the same moment, I vomited. After so many years on an island, I feared the sea just as any landsman. Over the days that followed, of hiding, fever, nausea, and never-ending pain, I refused reason, consuming only water and fruit, while I convinced myself to trust the sea again.

Often only half conscious, I saw my visage reflected in a pool and could not recognize myself. A beard was growing. My face was deeply bruised from my having fallen on it, my broken nose spread flatly over my tanned but hollow cheeks. At one point, I tried to set the bone with sticks in either nostril, but my hands were far from steady, and the pain coursed through my head like chain shot. The black around my eyes and cheeks gave me the look of a rabid bat. I thought that whoever had survived on the island might well be terrified into obeisance by my mere appearance.

The wound in my back was far more serious. I could not see it or reach it. I attacked it too with sticks, hoping to prod the ball out and let infectious fluids flow. I may have been successful in the latter, but the ball stayed lodged, a little sun of burning torment between the bone and sinew. The effect on my right arm was great, leaving it dangling, nearly useless. . . . I spent the days sleeping, the nights searching for food and building my strength. The infection in my back came and went, worsened, then became a dull throb, thick scab, and itching. I lived on wild yams and raw taro root, with shaddock and mango. If I died, it could not be from starvation on Pitcairn. On the sixth night, I had the strength to crack open a coconut and feasted on its milk-soaked meat. By the end of the second week, I made my way to the water’s edge, the Other Side being the only place on the island where the cliff line broke, providing a more gradual descent to the rocky shore. There I searched for crabs and mussels, eating them hungrily and filling what finally had become a firm stomach.

In all this time I had seen no one, and I presumed no one had seen me, awake or sleeping. It was time for me to find out who my unsuspecting allies would be, for I was sure I could not escape alone. My strength was sufficient for me to commence observing what remained of our community. I waited to approach until it was dark and then, only when there was no moon. Climbing the ridge, I crept down the other side without disturbing a pebble. Not knowing whom I might find or where they might be—it surely was possible others might be hiding and wandering at night—I made every move as if someone were close enough to see or hear me.

I spent three nights moving about from mutineers’ houses to gardens to footpaths. Finally I chanced to stay into a morning, thus better to judge from my concealment who was still living, and, yes, if I had another child. The latter question was answered when I saw my woman, Isabella, stride from our house with the two boys on their way to bathe, she still belly full under her shift, still strong backed, still beautiful in spite of the grim tension shrouding her face. They passed by, not ten yards from where I hid deep in a thick hedge of hibiscus. For a moment, everything else I knew dropped from my mind, leaving a sad stump of love for them. But the hard look on Isabella’s face halted my urge to call out, rush to them, and hold them. I heard a noise and looked back at the house.

Stepping out onto our porch from the front door was Ned Young, holding a musket. He called and smiled at her with an intimacy that couldn’t be mistaken. She returned his smile, though sadly, before she disappeared on a turn in the path.

Pitcairn

October 1793

Ned Young was the only officer of the Bounty who had stayed with me from mutiny to Pitcairn. I know not why he did. I suspect he realised that, as a mulatto, he had no great future in the Royal Navy. From the West Indies, St. Kitt’s as I remember, he was a nephew of Sir George Young and with such status had been well schooled. The Tahitians adored him as one of their dark-skinned own.

When he arrived on Pitcairn, Young had already chosen Ter-aura as his consort from the dozen women who came with us from Tahiti. The two of them lived together the entire time, but they had no children. All of us knew that he was tiring of her, and that he was a favourite of the other women. I also knew that he lusted for my woman, Mauatua, or Mainmast as the mutineers called her for her height, straight back, and strong stance. I believe she, too, had an inclination for Young, although I never knew if they had done the bush dance. I could not blame her if she had, for I was going mad, and she needed joy.

I’d called her Isabella for a distant cousin by marriage, the subject of a boyish fantasy from my past life, a life I would never see again. My island Isabella was everything a man could wish while thinking to forget his own civilisation. Her skin, the colour of dark honey, seemed always warmed by the sun. When she swam, her long black hair formed a thick veil down her back to her rounded buttocks, giving her the sleek look of a wild wet sable. Her legs were long, thin but muscled so that even when her knees touched, there was a space between her thighs that was crowned by her smooth, naked womanhood. It was the Tahitian custom to pluck out pubic hair, as some civilised women, in the past, had plucked eyebrows or shaved back their hairlines. She wrapped a piece of cloth around her narrow waist, never for modesty, which did not exist, but for comfort. Her breasts were full, and she carried them proudly. Even after childbirth, her body recovered these attributes with astonishing rapidity. She told me it was because of her desire to attract me again.

I chose to believe her, for I had come to torture myself with how close I had been to a successful life when, for a few hours, I gave in to rage and madness, and put the captain of a Royal Navy ship over the side. I had been twenty-four, already with six years of experience. Good seamen were always in demand by an island nation, and the possibility of reward and glory, particularly in a war where spoils could amount to thousands of pounds, were multitude. As war with France was a constant cloud in the British sky, I believed the timing of my career was fortunate. By my thirtieth year, I might have made post-captain.

But imprisoned on Pitcairn, I would never even sail a ship again or feel the pitch of wood against water as the wind filled the soul of her and drove me toward a future of surely something more than rotting on an island.

I thought all of this as I watched my island Isabella smile sadly at her new mate. I do not boast when I say that jealousy did not reach down my throat and grab at my heart. My first reaction was that Ned would help me off the island, the second that he would care for my family. That he was there so soon after my supposed demise was no surprise in our tight civilisation. The musket, in fact, implied his protective role. He stood for a moment, watching, listening, his lips parted, revealing his teeth, rotted from sucking sugarcane as a boy, his bare chest glistening from the humidity, the dark olive skin of his breeding made strangely golden by the years in the tropical sun.

He and I had been known as the two gentlemen by the mutineers, a social status that was respected by them for ten minutes. Ever after, it was the subject of ridicule and laughter to which neither Ned nor I objected, so eager were we to find a new life without such social distinctions. Before anyone, he realised I was looking back on my life and warned me of the danger. And longer than anyone he stayed my friend, even as I went mad, even as he grew increasingly