o reach a certain point on that chart, seventeen hundred miles from Montego Bay, had taken five days and fourteen hours in September, driven by a strong southwesterly. To make good that distance in December seas, in rainy squalls and, occasionally, the fog of the Carolina coast, which streamed in rags on the bitter wind, had taken seven days, twenty hours. We had not yet experienced a true, killing cold, but conditions were unpleasant: the air between decks was humid, almost fetid with condensation; clothing, bedding, the canvas deck covering, the very leather of the chairs in the great cabin, were perpetually damp; the only source of heat was the galley fire, and the transient warmth of its meals.

British sloop-of-war
from watercolour by
Geoffrey Huband .

    We had kept Christmas together quietly, clearing the Windward Passage, with little change in the ship’s routine and nothing to distinguish the day from others in these latitudes, except for the benevolent mood among the men off watch, induced by the sun and an increased ration of rum. St. James and I gave no gifts to one another, except a brief, transcendant sweetness of lovemaking in the darkened cabin, on the bench seat, in utter silence, with a stain of sunset on the sea and the voices of the watchkeepers audible through thed skylight. I imagined our limbs, entwined, like glass, transparent, living sculpture, the beauty of his body within me, the act and its climax wholly revealed and visible to me, its rhythmic embrace, the spasm of completeness, body and spirit in utter communion. This he had given to me, the knowledge of beauty in the act of love.
    There was no more sweetness: the year of happiness was ending. The first of January was pitilessly cold, the light blinding; the breath smoked, the deck was slippery with ice; frost burned the fingers of those who worked swollen cordage through the stubborn blocks; the freezing sea, spilling into scuppers, burned their naked feet. Clothing, aired briefly in the galley, could not defend the chilled flesh, although Harris performed this small service faithfully for his captain, and sometimes for me.
    I walked on deck in the forenoon, where I was not an encumbrance; it was preferable to the clamminess below and the men ignored my presence, cursing the weather in robust language until rebuked by Eyre, who had succeeded the colonial, Simon. St. James was particularly silent and uncompanionable until the noon sights were taken; there was a netting of frost on the sextant. Then he told me he was going below.
    I remained for perhaps twenty minutes, and then went down also.
    I found him in the great cabin, sitting on the damp canvas of the deck covering, his back against the bulwark where the timbers ran with condensation, his knees drawn up, his arms clasped around his legs: his head was resting on his knees, his face hidden from me.
    “Pain,” he said. “Such pain.”
    Aware of the cyclical nature of malaria, I had brought with me from Ironshore cinchona and tincture of opium; but this was not malaria and he refused the opiate, perhaps fearful of its effect upon an enflamed bowel, or of insensibility. I had nothing else to give. I remained kneeling with him, in the cold; he did not move, or speak again.
    I stayed with him for perhaps an hour, then he rose in obvious anguish and closed himself into the quarter gallery. In the twenty minutes before he emerged I died, as every lover dies in the suffering of the beloved.
    For the next two hours he left me at intervals and returned, crouching again against the bulwark, unable to relieve himself either by vomiting or evacuation: the pain increased, until he wept. I sat close, not touching him, shivering. The cold was intense.
    “When we go back to Ironshore... will you see a surgeon?”
    His tears could not have hurt me more if they had been acid.
    “This is what surgeons did for me. Christ, they couldn’t let me die in peace.”
    Time passed, in this terrible intimacy. The skylight was hazed with frost, the light on the sea inclining toward dusk. I no longer knew the twilight hours of winter: it might have been half past three.
    Some one came to the door and spoke: Mark Ransom’s voice.
    He said, “Let him come in. He knows.”
    He made no attempt to rise.
    I seldom saw compassion between men; I saw it now in the windburned face, the clear English eyes. Winter and the sea clung to him. He crouched without effort near St. James.
    “Strange sail on the larboard quarter, Captain. Eight miles, maybe.”
    He said, “Alter course three points to starboard. Steer nor’ nor’ east.”
    “May be only curiosity, sir.”
    “Even so. No royals, no topsails. You perceive her from the sea, she views us from the land. Bear the difference in mind.”
    He left us. Evening came and shrouded us from any potential observer. We made a pretense of normality, and Harris served our meal; St. James and I went up, and walked a little, although he left me after speaking to the watchkeepers. I stood near the compass light, listening to the crack of canvas; the sea was black, the stars not the Caribbean’s paving of light but the remembered, bitter pinpoints of January, flashing prismed colours.
    I was aware of Mark Ransom’s presence although I could not see his face, nor he mine. He said, close to me, “Why don’t you enter into Christian marriage with the Captain?”
    “I am not free to marry him.”
    “Then he should renounce you. Adultery is a sin in the eyes of the Lord, and Christ loves a sinner who repents.”
    “What was vouchsafed by God is not for you to judge.”
    We never spoke of it again. If the sin was mine, I have paid for it.
    I remained with St. James throughout the night. I could do nothing for him. He lay on the deck on bedding from the cots, naked below the waist save, poignantly, for his shoes and stockings, and I massaged the cold, scarred flesh of his abdomen with a salve I kept for my hands; he would not allow me to speak of his condition to any one, so I could not summon Harris for coffee, nor would he take cognac or laudanum. The sea was very heavy; his body was rigid with anguish and tension, the anticipation of a summons. There was very little light; the night seemed savagely cold; the muffled bells marked our progress through hell.
    At eight bells, four in the morning, he dressed and attempted to lie in the chair, went again to the quarter gallery, returned after half an hour and drank the cognac, spilling a little of it.
    He said, “For God’s sake, don’t remember me like this. Remember me as your lover,” and then, “Christ, I’m so ashamed.”
    Perhaps an hour later, he could no longer sit, and walked ceaselessly, bending his head beneath the beams, as though oblivious to the heavy rise and fall of the deck. A faint greyness was visible through the salt-encrusted glass. He left me again, and returned.
    “Blood,” he said.
    At half past seven he drank a great quantity of undiluted purgative from the surgeon’s chest he kept in the sleeping cabin. Its effects on him throughout that afternoon and the night that followed were so severe that I believed he was dying: it is possible that he thought the same. The night was unspeakable. I lived it with him, sometimes in an intimacy he would not otherwise have permitted, cherishing his body in its spasms of bloody diarrhoea: he did not now speak of shame. On the morning of the third, he slept for the first time in forty hours, in the leather chair: I slept on the damp bedding on the deck beside him, as though on the breast of the sea. When I woke in early afternoon, he was not there. I did not see that the tarpaulin coat had been taken, and searched frantically, foolishly, for him,ng the louvred doors of the sleeping cabin, the quarter galleries, the chartroom, encountering only Harris.
    “Cap’n’s on deck,” he said.
    I returned to the great cabin, and fell asleep in his chair.
    The sound of the rudder woke me. The lantern overhead was burning; there was darkness on the sea, which might have been midnight, or evening, or early morning. He was seated at the desk as though he had been writing, the logbookd, and the pocketbook in which he kept his pencilled observations and alterations of course, but the entry was unfinished, the final line undrawn. Beneath it he had written, Thursday, January fourth, and his hand was resting on the dim expanse of the page, as though its blankness were legible.
    He said, “I shall not do this again... and it was very wrong of me to have expected you to endure it. My life has fallen into perspective. The night made some things very clear.” Then, “I want to love you tonight. I don’t think I can.”
    “There will be other nights.”
    “So I tell myself.” Silence, the sea’s silence and the ship’s, an impenetrable silence between us. “Give me something of yours, for tomorrow.”
    He would accept only a handkerchief, nondescript but for its perfume. In the night he asked for my love, which I was as incapable of giving as he of receiving. There was little sweetness, only desperation and futility; the spirit and the exhausted flesh failed. I did not bear his beloved weight again: the words of a lifetime were never spoken.

    I breakfasted at seven bells, half past seven. He came down and drank half a cup of coffee, standing, warming his hands around the cup, snow melting on the tarpaulin coat; he had been on deck since leaving me, at perhaps half past three. Pain remained in the lower right of his abdomen: he was, he said, otherwise well.
    At eight the log was hove. She was making good nine knots, driven by a southwesterly wind, steering northwest, close-hauled on the larboard tack. The sea was heavy but moderating. After a night of sleet, the glass had risen and the temperature dropped; the cordage had swollen in the sheaves, the deck was icy, the glazed ratlines offering a perilous foothold for those required aloft.
    At noon there were snow squalls, and the sea was obscured in a driving curtain of white, bitter, hard flakes cutting into eyes, the skin of the face, the ungloved hands of every man aboard, and the naked feet of topmen. The light was strange, opaque, the sextants useless: her position was calculated by dead reckoning alone. Now I knew his destination, although, on principle, he never mentioned it. We were some twenty miles off Newburyport, two hours away with, at best, four hours of daylight, and in these shoaling waters sometimes seventy and sometimes eighteen fathoms beneath the keel.
    Perhaps an hour passed. Axes chopped the ice from her washports; her scuppers ran with the sea; the spray froze in fantastic patterns; my lips were cracked and dried with salt. I wore the breeches I had had his tailor make, and two shirts, and a waistcoat and long riding coat, and was shrouded in a boat cloak, with a soft woollen shawl drawn over my head and shoulders: I was relatively warm, and had the advantage of gloves. My fingers, therefore, could more easily accommodate him when St. James asked for the time. It was nine minutes to two.
    “My watch has stopped,” he said, and returned to the weather side, leaving me in the comparative shelter of the companion near the wheel, although I would have preferred to have been with him. It was two o’clock precisely when the cry came from the masthead.
    “Sail on the larboard quarter!”
    There was a suggestion of light, before the darkness of the winter closed down; I saw how snow is grey like rain, like veils of rain on a clearing horizon, and then the light was lost again. The telescope came into my hands, although I do not remember him giving it to me, or how long either he or I had held it, only the silent miniature in the lens, a pyramid of tan sails emerging from the snow, no colours visible on this tack, her hull, throwing up an impressive spray from that sullen sea, shining black and buff. The glass was gently taken; the voices oddly detached. I did not hear his among them.
    I reckon she’s come around Cape Ann.
    Well, she ain’t no bloody invitation to the dance.
    He said, “Alter course. Let her fall off three points. Steer north by west.”
    The voices ceased their speculative murmuring, and I heard Ransom shouting for hands to the braces; men ran, heaving, slipping, ice falling like shards of glass from shrouds, stays, canvas. St. James stood, immobile in the tarpaulin coat, the snow in his hair, leaning to the angle of the deck, his eyes not upon me or the incoming vessel but on the sails. There were two men on the wheel, as always except in calm weather; they were both unfamiliar to me, and I did not know their names.
ne said, “Steady she goes, sir, nor’ by west.”
    I left the shelter of the companion again, felt for handholds. It was suddenly very necessary to be with him. He was gazing aft, the telescope resting on his shoulder, his face, although drawn, deeply composed: he seemed not to notice my presence, and I did not interrupt his thoughts.
    The lookout called, “She makes more sail, sir!”
    He observed it through the telescope, his breath a faint cloud whipped away by the wind.
    “She’s setting her t’ gallants, sir!”
    Ransom came up, and was standing in silence.
    “Setting her royals, sir!”
    The telescope did not waver, although its weight was considerable.
    He said, “You young fool.”
    Ransom said, “Shall we follow suit?”
    “No. Too visible.”
    She was lifting beneath us, smashing down in a cross current, answering to her helm with spirit, the wind right across her quarter. Spray cascaded over the beakhead; I imagined the gilded eyes and pure white face sheathed in the sea’s salt ice.
    “Time,” he said to me, and waited patiently as I took off my glove and fumbled for my watch.
    “Three— no, four minutes to three.”
    He looked at the sky.
    “Come, darkness,” he said.
    The brigd fire at approximately three, at extreme range, a single shot from her bowchaser, a thirty-two pounder; this signal to heave to was followed by another. The shots were barely visible, spouting spray like a dolphin, a deadly procession of waterspouts, well clear. A little snow was falling, twisting like sand across the deck. There was no jubilation around me, and no retaliation: every man was needed to work the ship; there was neither time nor leisure for loading or running out, only a deadly concentration on the next minute and the order it might bring. I prayed for darkness.
    The brig altered course, to due north, it was thought, although it was impossible to determine her position precisely. By this alteration she would overreach us, and had revealed her full length and presented her broadside; she was clearly, now, a ship of war, and her colours were visible, the scarlet ensign almost black in the fading light. He stood watching her, removed from me and from this hour, with no emotion in his face, directing his full attention upon her, his mind alive with the possibilities of the immediate future and the visions of the past. Through his eyes, I saw his ghosts.
    The second mate, Eyre, loitering by the wheel in a pretense of indifference, remarked, “He’s cutting it fine,” and then the tongues of fire flashed from the brig’s side: a single shot found its mark. Spray rose from the sea and fell heavily across the deck; the impact was muffled, and there was no indication of damage. The carpenter, Vetch, was below inspecting the hold when St. James said, “Oh—Jesus Christ,” and turned a little away, as though from the onslaught of the weather.
    The brig had struck, intent on her pursuit and under full canvas, heedless or ignorant of the danger of shoals and sandbars, although the chart was littered with them. Her foremast had carried away, taking with it jib, yards, rigging, men: from a living thing of vengeful beauty, she became a chaotic wreck, the seas bursting over her. Her mainmast fell with a distinct crack, like a careless shot. She had only minutes to live.
    He had turned back and was staring at her, with no apparent pity. His arm, beneath my fingers, was trembling.
    He said, “My blood is very thin these days,” and then, “What a waste.”
    Mark Ransom came up, ignoring me or, perhaps, what he had heard.
    “Shall we cast a boat adrift, or put a broadside into her?”
    He said, “That’s a damned strange sentiment for a Christian, Mark. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord.” Some one laughed nervously, anonymous in the dimness. “Leave her to the sea. That is justice enough.” He turned his back on the wreck, I thought deliberately. “Stand by to come about. Put your helm down.”
    “Helm a-lee, sir!”
    “Off tacks and sheets.”
    Forward, they were barefoot on the icy deck, letting go the headsail sheets to allow her to swing into the wind, all sails, topsails, jib, forecourse, driver, maincourse in confusion as she came round and further round, almost into the wind.
    “Mains’l haul!”
    Eyre, at the compass, rasping his hands, muttering, “Come around, you bitch, come around-- steady-- ”
    “Let go and haul!”
    Ransom said, “South-east by east, sir. As close as she’ll come.”
    She had crossed the wind’s eye; the men at the braces had hauled her yards round. As the sails were sheeted home she came steady, leaning into the wind, on the starboard tack, her sails taut and bulging, shrouds vibrating, water pouring over her lee side, men grasping for handholds, falling, cursing, the topmen still aloft, shivering witnesses to the advent of the night. My teeth were chattering so violently that I could not speak.
    He said, almost inaudibly, “And now, if it pleases my God, I will take you home.”
    Let her fly, lads— let her fly....
    Reckoned we’d never see they Caribbee girls again.
    Nor done I neither, by Jesus.
    The rasping hands again, like roughened leather. Eyre, jocular, almost impudent with relief.
    “I seen eternity a few times afore, but never that close, by Christ.”
    And his voice in the dimness, its elegance, now sought vainly in the speech of other men.
    “Then you haven’t lived.”
    Mark Ransom, near me at the binnacle, consulting the compass, was singing under his breath.
    Who would true valour see, let him come hither... one here will constant be, come wind, come weather....
    Let her fly, boys, let her fly....
    There’s no discouragement, shall make him once relent....
    Some one shouted then, and he was silent: all was silent, save the vibration of the rigging, the sluicing of the sea, the heavy fall of spray. The sail, two or three miles away, to the northwest, was visible to the naked eye.
    Eyre said, “She’s a frigate,” and a sigh seemed to pass through the men, not hauling, not working ship, but stilled; spectators, striving to hear the next words from their captain.
    He was staring through the telescope across the starboard quarter, beyond the tumult of sea and spindrift which was the dying brig. He seemed to stand badly, as though the pain of the forenoon had worsened.
    He said, “No. Sloop of war.”
    I was close to him; he gave the glass to me. The sloop was leaning steeply to larboard, pinned at that angle by the strength of the wind that drove her: shed fire with her bowchasers as I watched. Had the range been closed the shot would have smashed into our stern, destroying all below.
    He said, “Young,” not urgently, and stepped away from me, walking a pace or two with the gunner, steadying him as he slipped in the dry, gathering snow.
    The gunner left him, with a stiff-legged, delicate tread, like a man walking on ice; his mate detached himself from the others and followed him. There were no names called, no shouting, only a great economy of effort. The silence on deck was profound.
    I renounced him then, whom I loved, and gave him again to the life which had made him; this was no hour for me, for love, or the expression of my fears; love and dread and the future were here renounced. My claim upon him was finished.
    Two courses remainedto him. He could run to the northeast, which would present the full length of the ship as a target if the sloop luffed, or crowd on canvas and hope for darkness and thesea. His mind, always mercurial, did not linger upon its decision.
    “Get the t’ gallants on her.” And, perhaps at a mild question, “We have no bloody choice, man. She’ll overhaul us otherwise.”
    The topmen were still aloft, clinging with stiffened fingers; the effect of the increased canvas was felt immediately. Vetch, the carpenter, loomed out of the shadows; they conferred.
    He said, “Good,” and then, unexpectedly, came to me, with little expression either in his face, in the absence of light which was not yet darkness, or in his voice.
    “What time is it?”
    “..... four... I think.”
    “Destroy the log and the muster book. When you leave me, walk slowly. When you go below, don’t linger.”
    “And the sword?”
    “Bring the sword to me.”
    I prayed in the great cabin, which was undamaged and in darkness; his pistols had been taken and I knew that he wore them; my gloved hands fumbled, removing his sword from the bulkhead. I prayed for courage, that if we should die it should be together, that he should not suffer, that I should not see him die, nor he me. I knew why I should not linger in this place, which had been our sanctuary: I knew, upon leaving it, that I should not see it again.
    Harris met me in the cold darkness of the companionway. Beyond him I was aware of some one, perhaps Chatto, unlocking the arms chest. Overhead there were sounds which, as though borne in my blood, I recognized, although I could not have known them.
    My strange, whispered confrontation with Harris continued, he asking me for the sword, in more words than he had ever spoken, and I refusing to give it to him. Finally he said, “I was his coxswain at the Havana. Let me do him the honour.”
    St. James was walking slowly up and down the weather side, a few paces in either direction; he had taken off the tarpaulin coat, which some one had tossed by the binnacle. Beyond him, the sloop was crossing our quarter. He showed no surprise at Harris’s appearance on deck, and spoke to Ransom over his shoulder as he extended his arms for the sword belt.
    “Alter course three points to larboard. Steer due east.”
    Movement through the final minutes of light; sails flapping in confusion, and Ransom’s voice, far hoarser now than in the sweetness of his hymn.    “Another pull on the weather forebrace, there— now belay!”
    There was an abrupt, fragmented exchange with Eyre, who seemed to express the opinion, unsolicited, that the cargo should be discarded, the colours identifying this ship as British bent on and run up.
    St. James said, “There’s no damned time for that,” and then, “For Christ’s sake, man, do you think I’m a magician? They want our blood. What does a flag signify to them?”
    I heard Harris murmur, “... luffed...” and the sloopd fire, a full broadside, each gun in succession as was customary in failing light, the flames hideously vivid, illuminating the drifting snow... the noise and shock of impact were unspeakable. The foremast fell, snapped where it was lashed to the top, foremast, topgallant mast, yards, men, over the starboard side. She slewed, wounded although not yet fatally, wreckage clinging to the bulwarks, her rigging, miles of rigging, a killing net for those who were trapped on the forecastle beneath it. Some one was shouting for Hook to clear it, although Hook was dead; Chatto was stumbling forward with an axe, the sailor’s futile instinct; the weight of wreckage had already crippled her; the next broadside would pass through her unprotected stern.
    I heard St. James shouting, and the gunner’s reply, saw the slow-match burning. Only four or five guns would bear, and Young fired them himself, the rearmost, closest to us, first, with savage recoil. There was now no order, but insanity, obscenities of rage and defiance and encouragement... I was not among these men, I had no existence. In this, I knew the prelude and the aftermath... the substance of his life was in the sloop’s response.
    She fired, in succession, many guns, too many for me to remember, each gun inflicting a greater degree of devastation, each firing more precise, more distinctive, louder than her previous broadside, and I believe he knew by their very sound the nature of the charges before they shattered the stern, the boats, the taffrail, exploding in a whistling hail of grape, because some one, perhaps he himself, threw me face down, with an impact that injured me. I struggled to rise, winded, gasping: they were all dead around me at the wheel, Harris’s disembodied arm twitching, steaming at the stump, his fingers clenched around my wrist, his entrails spattered, viscous fragments clinging to my hair and sleeve. I tried to stand, crying out, trying to find St. James, and was thrown bodily across the deck. Braces, scythed cleanly and released from enormous tension, became instruments of decapitation. Mark Ransom was near me now, close enough for me to recognize by the compass light, which still burned, illuminating hell. He was dying: by his voice and his clothing alone, I knew him.
    There was no light then, only darkness, the sensation of falling snow, melting beneath my cheek, blood, viscerae, sea water. She was dying, we were all dying. There would be fire soon, or she would breach to and founder. I heard Mark Ransom say distinctly, “Jesus—Jesus.” Pinioned to the deck, I could not see who held the faceless head, and then he came to me, and Mark Ransom died.
    He was attempting to free me, free the hair torn from my scalp, which had been driven into the deck, and the means by which I was impaled; tears or blood were falling on my face from the darkness which was him; across my mouth the iron taste of blood. He was speaking to me but I could not answer, and other voices, cries, screams, terrible profanities, obscured the sound and the sense of his voice. My mind refused to identify the smells, spilled blood, torn intestines, excrement, the taste on my lips, the meaning of the hideous obscenities screamed at him by one who lay near me: I sensed that he left me and rose, with immense difficulty, as though he were wounded, although I could not know the nature of his injuries: there was a rasping intake of breath, and silence. Now Eyre, too, was dead.
    He returned to me, and lifted my head onto the folds of the tarpaulin coat; the movement caused me intense pain, and I could not free myself to look fully into his face; the hot substance was falling faster, a steady stream; he sensed it, and withdrew, and then wiped my face with something, perhaps the handkerchief I had given him. I called him my love, but he seemed unable to hear me: I felt him raise my hand and press it to his lips. Time passed; sensation had drained from my arm and I could not feel or respond to his fingers. It was intensely dark; there was no light. Some one came, staggering, and spoke to him, asking him what should be done; he kissed my hand once more, and left me. In his absence I seemed to sleep and surface again, brief, torn dreams, which distressed me: I woke alone among the dead, and drifted again. Perhaps twenty or twenty-five minutes passed before the sloop came alongside.
    He was with me then, seeming to sit beside me on the splintered deck. At the sound and the impact he bent down to me, and caressed my face, and said, “Now we shall die together.”
    He did not speak again to me: I never heard his voice again. He fought in silence, only the blades, the sparks, his laboured breathing close to me, and a young voice gasping, “For Christ’s sake— for Christ’s sake—” I closed my eyes and took him with me, into my darkness, my sleep of peace, where he lives still.

    Snow. Wood smoke. The sound of rain on the glass of an uncurtained window, a scarlet sleeve and a hideously scarred face, fragments of an opium dream. Boston was nothing more to me than these. A city besieged and under martial law, its civilian populace evacuated with nothing more than bedding and household effects, an army of twelve thousand trapped between the naked hills of winter and the freezing waters of the Mystic and the Charles, a rebel army of ten thousand encamped in the surrounding countryside. Both were decimated by sickness, deprivation and desertion. The lash, the army’s panacea for insubordination, failed to dissuade the opportunists within its ranks from looting and organized theft: foodstuffs were limited and exorbitantly priced, dysentery rife. There was a critical shortage of fuel. Two-thirds of Boston’s houses were of timber, and were demolished by order and burned.
    My life was saved by an army surgeon with some experience of splinter wounds, who did not mistake for gangrene the blackened contusion of my flesh or the bloody tumour that appeared on my breast, and so did not immediately consider the amputation of my left arm. He was assisted in the grisly business of healing by a Quaker woman in whose house I was lodged, who twice daily changed the dressings, with their immense quantities of blood and bloodied serum and granulating skin, cleansed my body of its menstrual flow, fed it, and conferred on it the prescribed doses of opiate, from which I prayed I would never wake.
    Throughout January my life remained a tenuous thing. I suffered delirium, in the throes of which I might have spoken names which would otherwise have died with me, and lockjaw: I did not believe my recovery was the will of God. This torture, this death of body and mind, was too demonic to have been inflicted by His divine hand.
    The snow gave way to icy rain, the precursor of a spring of war, and in the shadowed afternoons the distorted phantom of my drug-induced sleeps acquired reality, and became a senior officer, with a flat epaulette, gold fringed, on the shoulder nearest me: the broad cuff of his coat, laced discreetly with gold, seemed black but was the dark blue of a royal regiment. His presence was not insistent, but I ignored it, and was indifferent to it. He remained an hour, and then left me.
    There was very little in the room, apart from the bed with four turned posts, a fireplace, unlaid, a figured rug on the bare floorboards, and the straight-backed chair in which he sat, some twelve feet from me. On a subsequent afternoon, escorted by the woman Elizabeth, he moved the chair a few feet closer, and sat in the requisite silence for perhaps an hour. I was in great pain; the surgeon had that morning made multiple incisions in the muscles of my shoulder, to lessen the adhesive properties of the effused blood, and I did not respond to his presence.
    The room darkened: there was rain on the glass. I though he sighed, and the rush seat of the chair creaked.
    He said, “One cannot live in profile, even when ignored.”
    I turned my head, seeking coolness, or release from pain. The chair had been moved, so that his face was visible: his head was bent as though he examined his hands, his legs crossed in an attitude of negligence. The left side of his face had been melted by fire, and the eye was blind.
    He said, “Believe me, I share your disgust. This secondment was not of my choosing.” Then he looked up, fully into my eyes: I averted mine and stared at the rain.
    “I am required to put to you once more those questions which you have refused to answer, and to remind you that, should you maintain your silence, you may find yourself in contempt of court. That would have serious consequences for you.”
    “What more serious punishment could your court inflict upon me?”
    He said nothing.
    “Am I your prisoner?”
    “We are all prisoners in this hellish place.”
    “Am I under arrest?”
    “No. You are not a prisoner, and you are not under arrest.”
    “Then I have nothing to say to you.”
    “You do yourself no good by this intransigence. You cannot help one who, by his own activities, is already condemned.”
    He was still alive.
    “Then I commend him to God. He is nothing to me.”
    Forgive me... God forgive me.
    He said, after a silence, “Madam, if you have friends in Boston, let them be informed. Your position is precarious. If there are those who may persuade my superiors to look with clemency upon your case, I urge you to name them.”
    I moved my head, nothing else, and closed my eyes.
    “Consider it carefully. There is very little time.”
    I coughed then, blood and matter; he brought the woman Elizabeth, and left me to contemplation of my ghosts; toward midnight the surgeon, Dalkeith, was called, with his gift of oblivion. I asked him to let me die, and in the darkness of successive days and nights I sought death, I yearned for it; I no longer prayed, either for myself or for St. James; his name was a wound upon my consciousness, inflicting unbearable pain.
    All I should ever know of Boston was pain, and blood, and wounds; and the wet cobbles of a narrow street, seen at the end of February through the flawed glass of the window, to which I had walked. Rain falling; the acrid stench of wood smoke and wet ashes.
    He came in unexpectedly and found me at the window; I did not leave it, and he did not sit while I was standing. The hour of interrogation was upon me once more, and in this murky absence of time I had not noticed, not prepared myself for the defense and the silence.
    He said, “Have you given the matter of which we spoke your consideration?”
    “Yes. I have considered it.”
    “Do you wish me to convey a message to any one?”
    “No.”
    “Have you no connections? Here, or in Jamaica?”
    “There is no one who cares for me, either here or there.”
    He said nothing, did not move. The street remained deserted, veiled with smoke.
    He said, “Who are you?”
    “I am no one... only a lost soul.”
    “Forgive me, madam, but I have not a metaphysical mind. I am attempting only to establish an identity, and to serve your cause, if I may.”
    “Your gallantry is misplaced.”
    “Nonetheless, I am an officer, and I hope that is an honourable estate.”
    “What is your regiment?”
    “The Fourth... the King’s Own. Do you know it?”
    Yes. I knew it, and under what name it had fought, and who was its lieutenant-colonel at Culloden, and the name of one of its majors.
    I said, “What regiments are in Boston?”
    “I cannot tell you. I may say only what regiments are not.”
    “Is the Eighth here?”
    “No.”
    “It was in Halifax.”
    “It is transferred. Do you know this country?”
    “No.”
    “The Eighth departed Halifax for Quebec in November. I have had little news of it since then. Do you know some one in that regiment?”
    “.... The colonel.”
    “Bigoe Armstrong?”
    “No.”
    “He succeeded Mordaunt in the autumn of seventy-four.”
    “Why?”
    “He returned to England. You gave the impression that you knew him. You must have known that his wife had died.”
    So much rain... so much rain, like tears. How could a sky contain so many tears, a city so much grief?
    He would have pursued it, pinioned it, dissected the truth, as I had been pinioned, and probed, and cauterized, for my corporeal good: the cough and the blood delivered me from any further questions.
    On the night of Friday, the second of March, the rebel bombardment of Boston commenced, answered by mortars and cannons within the city. By Sunday night the continental army had occupied the disputed Dorchester heights, and every aspect of the city lay within the range of its guns. On that night the vibration of falling masonry could be felt throughout the house; fires burned in the timbered remains of those buildings not already pillaged, and dense smoke choked the empty streets: it was later known that the Americans had fired one hundred fifty-five round shot and thirteen mortars into Boston.
    Toward midnight, it was decided that the residents of the house should take refuge in the cellar, and the Quaker carried a candle up to my room and compelled me to leave it. There were others in the cellar, a black woman, perhaps a slave, a young white girl who had been redeemed from prostitution, and two or three neighbours, with small children who screamed continually. The woman led me in by the right arm, through falling plaster dust.
    I said, “I hope they pay you well for this,” and she gazed at me with colourless eyes.
    “I am a physician, and I gave thee refuge out of charity. Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of my brethren, ye have done it unto me’.”
    The bombardment continued, and the screams, and the palpable terror of those around me. I felt no fear; I felt nothing. After an hour I left the cellar and returned to the darkness upstairs, illuminated by moonlight and explosions. No one dissuaded or followed me.
    On the afternoon of Monday, March fifth, there were troop movements through the streets and toward the wharves, and a line of transports deployed for the embarkation of a force to attack the rebel positions on the Dorchester Heights. By evening, the rain which had been falling increased to a violent storm; the gale would continue throughout the night, fouling anchors, causing several of the ships to run aground, and destroying Howe’s final hope of retaining his grip upon Boston. The rebels were now entrenched in two hastily constructed forts on the heights, and no gun could be elevated to fire on their position; the harbour had been rendered unsafe for shipping. On March sixth, Howe conceded the inevitable, and announced that he would obey, at last, the orders received earlier in the year. The army and some thousand loyalist civilians would evacuate Boston.
    On the night of the sixth, I was visited once more by my interrogator. Although he had left his card propped on the mantel in my room I had neither touched nor read it, and his name remained unknown.
    I heard the murmur of voices in the corridor, muffled by the icy hiss of rain, then he carried a candle into the darkness, where I stood by the window; I remember the sleet glistening on the coarse wool of his greatcoat, and the burned skin of his hand. I said nothing, and turned my back on him. His reflection in the darkened glass became more distinct: he had lighted the candles on the mantel.
    He said, “Good evening, Mrs. Scott.”
    The bloodied, broken watch on the table, which I had not touched since it had been taken from my neck, might have revealed my Christian name. Only one in Boston could have told him my surname.
    His reflection approached me, and the prospect was unbearable. The scarred hand took my right hand gently, our first and last physical contact, and prisedthe closed fingers; the other, unblemished, placed something in my palm, which I did not recognize but, instinctively, knew. Later, for many years, I would wear it, with his emeralds, on my left hand.
    “I was asked to convey this to you.”
    “You saw him.”
    “Yes. Last night.”
    He said nothing else; did nothing; did not move.    
    “He spoke... of me.”
    “He confirmed certain suspicions of mine.”
    “Did you speak of me to him?”
    “I told him you were among friends. It seemed to comfort him.”
    “Please allow me to see him.”
    “I cannot.”
    “Please. Please. I beg of you.”
    He said, “He is dead. He was hanged at eight o’clock this morning.”

    The first transports from Boston arrived in Halifax on the second of April. Tenacious winter had not yet abandoned that last great bastion of naval power in North America, and deprivation was not exclusive to Boston. Howe’s army remained there throughout the spring, feeding off humiliation and the hope of an attack on New York.
    Halifax and Antigua remained in close communication; slow convoys departed with regularity, and frigates and smaller vessels sailing independently, carrying despatches, observing the manoeuvres of their American counterparts, as thirsty for the blood of the privateer as any who had hunted us.
    I sailed in one of these, a discreet arrangement which ended an embarrassing and insoluable problem: I carried papers that gave me the identity of a colonel’s daughter, and fifty guineas loaned to me in Halifax by Henry Stanhope Smallpiece, which was repaid by a draft on the Bank of England. He was killed in September of that year, in Howe’s costly victory at New York.
    I reached Jamaica on the second of June. It would have been St. James’s fifty-fourth birthday.

    His clothing and possessions and the shells, and my clothes, were as we had left them; when I slept, it was with one of his coats in my arms, or on the bed; when I returned to England I would sometimes wear them, too fearful of losing what little remained of him to have them laundered, or discarded.
    He had left a letter for me and a copy of his will at Ironshore... months passed before Id or could bear to read either. He had bequeathed to me the assets on deposit at Coutts’ bank in London, and Rosewynd. I never went to Rosewynd again.
    For the rest, there is no then; there is no afterwards ... only the unbearable grief, and his eternal absence, although he spoke to me, day and night; my mind was never free of his voice, nor would I have wanted so desolate a liberation.
    I was ill: the sun healed the body and dried the wound, and stilled the asthmatic cough; the hair grew where it had been torn from my scalp, and was white; I was given solitude in which to grieve and die, or recover. Coventry followed me to the beach one night, and into the sea, where I was standing with his pistol in my hand; I asked him to do for me what he had done for his lover. I could not speak St. James’s name, although he himself often said it, calling him Leslie, which hurt me unbearably; he told me that I insulted Leslie’s spirit by my behaviour; I affronted his ghost, and then he left me, with the responsibility for my life or my death in my hand. Even courage has its limits ... the body lived, though the spirit died.
    He drank with dedication, and smoked his South American weed: under the influence of both, in September, he gave me all the letters St. James had written to him in the course of their long friendship, and said that they were mine. Later that night, he said he would not offend the dead, whom he honoured, but he wanted to make love to me: he did not use those words. My last sanctuary was closed to me.
    I left Ironshore at the end of that week, having sold Rosewynd to him for forty thousand pounds. It remained a beautiful corpse, upon which the sun and rain worked a relentless decay until October third, 1780, when it was destroyed by the most devastating hurricane in Jamaica’s history.

    I wrote, following the peace of 1783, to the president of Congress; in London and in Paris, between this revolution and the terror of another, I met the American ambassadors. My requests were courteously received; letters were exchanged, and I believed them sincere. No records remained of his trial or execution, or any others during those weeks; if they had existed they had been lost or destroyed; the disposition of a criminal’s bones, in quicklime, signified nothing in the annals of a rebellious colony, or a new and blooded nation. He was not its hero, and his grave remains unknown.

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