Chapter Text
So, therefore, about what I remember
And about what I have no memory of,
About what I know and what I knew,
About what I lost along the way
Among so many things lost,
About the dead who did not hear me
And who perhaps wanted to see me,
Better if you don’t ask me anything:
Touch here, on my vest,
And you’ll see throbbing inside me
A sack of dark stones.
Pablo Neruda, “No me pregunten” (“Do Not Ask Me”)
The door of the tavern is half open. It’s mid-morning, almost all the tables are empty. Silver goes to the table in the corner, sits on a chair, balances his crutch on a stool, and wipes sweat and dust from his face. The invisible sack of black stones stays on his back; it’s been there for over two years.
He looks around, at the bar, at the barrels stacked in the far corner, at the few plants in baskets hanging from the ceiling, at the scruffy, relaxed patrons, one of whom is stretched out on a bench, snoring. Not unlike Eleanor Guthrie’s tavern, in another life. Not unlike the tavern in Spitalfields where he ran errands and picked pockets, in yet another life.
“What’s your pleasure?”
Silver sighs and turns. A large middle-aged woman is standing beside him, close to the stool with his crutch.
Information. “Ale and some bread and cheese, if I may.” Food and drink arrive quickly, and the tankard and the plate are clean. Silver smiles thanks, putting a little extra warmth in the smile.
The woman smiles back, professionally helpful. “Do you need a room? You look tired.”
“I’m not sure,” Silver replies. He pauses for a moment. “I might be staying with two friends who live not far from town, in a cabin on Morgan Hill.” But I know that one of them left a few months ago, and hasn’t returned. He shifts on his chair, and his stump bumps against the end of the crutch, which clatters on the floor. Silver bends down to pick it up, with a few unnecessary stretches and small grunts.
“That’s right. Halfway up the hill.” She casts a concerned look at Silver’s stump, helps him retrieve his crutch and nods compassionately at his bashful smile of thanks.
“They’re known as McGraw,” he adds quietly.
She looks at him more closely, the compassion in her eyes beginning to be replaced by wariness. She turns her back on him and goes towards the bar; that’s all he’s going to get out of her. Silver takes a few sips of ale and chews on a bit of bread and cheese, it’s not bad but he finds it difficult to get down. He leaves most of the food on the plate, rubs his eyes and slouches in his chair: he’s tired, and the sack of stones gets heavier every day. Half of him wants to be in front of that cabin, knocking on that door, the other half wishes he were somewhere else, anywhere else.
“Please forgive me. I heard you asking about the McGraws,” a polite voice says behind him. Silver half-turns. The man is tall, spare, white-haired, probably sixty or older; he stretches out a hand. “Hendrik Daalmans. I live not far from here, a little way up Morgan Hill.”
Silver shakes the hand: “Solomon Little.” Daalmans’ clothes are not new, but they’re too good for a farmer, and his English is perfect, with just a slight foreign lilt to his voice. A retired scholar? A merchant? And why is he casting surreptitious glances at his crutch? Silver narrows his eyes, fully aware of the need for caution. On the other hand, they’re in the Blue Ridge Mountains, not in Nassau or Savannah, and in his previous life the worst enemies were not Dutch. He points to the chair opposite his and asks, “Do you know the McGraws?”
“Not well. They said they were cousins. Intelligent, educated men. But only one of them lives here now, the other one left.”
That’s why I’m here. Silver stares into space until Daalmans’ voice jolts him from his reflections.
“Would you like me to show you where they live?”
Silver shakes his head. The questions going round and round in his mind cannot be spoken out aloud, especially not to this foreigner, who probably knows more than he is letting on.
“Thank you. I’d better make my way there before it gets too dark.”
“It’s not a hard walk,” Daalmans says encouragingly, with another peep at Silver’s crutch. "Have a good night, Mr Little.”
Silver smiles, gets up as quickly as he can, leaves a couple of coins on the table and leaves.
It’s mid-March, it’s cold at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and grey clouds are gathering above the top of the trees, harbingers of rain to come. The path from the tavern to the top of the hill is narrow, steep but manageable. A few timid buds are beginning to show on tree branches, and the sides of the road are brightened by the pink of redbuds and the red splashes of dogwoods. The ground is only half-thawed, and farmers have just started breaking it up in preparation for planting. Silver doesn’t stop to admire the colours and the view: he has caught a glimpse of a roof among the treetops and keeps pushing himself towards it, sweat trickling down his sides and making his shirt stick to his back in spite of the cold.
His movements become heavier and slower as he gets closer to the log cabin, and he eventually stops a short distance from it. It’s a small place, neat, with a well-tended vegetable patch beside it and a wooden bench that faces away from the cabin, towards the top of the hill. Flint is sitting on the bench, hands lightly resting on either side of his hips, back very straight. His hair is longer, the once fiery red fading and streaked with grey. Silver takes another couple of steps forward and stops again, barely able to breathe.
“Your days of approaching unannounced are behind you,” Flint says without turning. His voice is flat, no tone or pitch to it. And yet, his first words to Silver are words each of them said to the other, once, when they were partners. Not much of a greeting, and what’s behind it is anybody’s guess; but still, it’s a greeting, not a curse or a threat or an order to fuck off.
What comes next is equally soft, equally flat, and inescapable. “Why are you here?”
There are several possible answers, all have some truth in them, none of them is right. And now it’s not the right time for any of them. “We make mistakes and we pay for them,” Silver says, knowing that it’s too fucking general and vague. “And we’re lonely, and then we die.”
Flint half turns, without getting up. The scars of past fights are there, on his forehead, on the bridge of his nose, under an eye. His eyes are still hooded, his cheeks are gaunt. There are more horizontal lines on his forehead, and deeper creases at the corners of his mouth. But his clothes are clean and mended, and his hair and beard are neatly trimmed. No bruises or traces of blood on his knuckles, and only one ring, on his right hand.
“Spare me,” he says coldly, without raising his voice.
Silver would prefer rage, shouting, threats, which were a daily occurrence in the time they were together, or even Flint hitting him, which never happened. Any of these would be better than this emptiness, this door that will probably remain closed. But it’s up to him to keep trying to open it.
“You start with a fact,” he says, and it’s still fucking general and vague, but it’s the best he can do for the moment. “And then you work it over, like you would with a piece of steel that’ll eventually become a knife, or a sword. You forge it.You hammer it. You file it. You grind it. You polish it. And you’ve got a story.”
He looks at the two deep vertical lines that seem to be permanently resident between Flint’s eyebrows, sees Flint’s unspoken expectation that he’ll either lie or deflect questions, like he had that day on the cliffs of Maroon Island: You know of me all I can bear to be known, all that is relevant to be known. He closes his eyes, reopens them, steels himself, and speaks.
“So. Fact. My mother’s name was Sara Milano.”
Flint starts, narrows his eyes, then stares into Silver’s face for a long time, and finally his body relaxes a little. “Go on.”
Silver lets out a slow breath. “Fact. Sephardi Jews passed through many towns and cities in France and Italy after they were expelled from Spain. They had to have last names, so many of them took their names from those places.”
Flint nods, without taking his eyes from Silver’s face.
“My mother and her family lived in Bologna, in the North. I don’t know how she met my father. He was a student of anatomy, the Jewish ghetto’s near the university. He was an Englishman, his name was Edward Little. When they eloped, her family mourned her for seven days, as if she was dead.” A pause. “That’s what my father told me anyway. Of my mother I hardly remember anything. When I was three years old, there was a typhoid epidemic in Bologna, and it took her.”
“Solomon Little. A foot in both camps. So at least that much was true,” Flint half-sighs, surveying him, frowning a little at the way he’s leaning heavily on his crutch. He shifts on the seat and jerks his head towards the empty space beside him. “Sit down.”
Silver complies, more awkwardly than he would have liked, but the day has been long and not all that easy. He looks at his hands, resting on his thighs, and does not speak for a while.
“You grew up in Italy,” Flint says slowly.
“No. After my mother died, my father tried to contact her family, but they didn’t want to see him, or me. Even though theoretically I was one of them. So my father took me back to London, to live with his family.” He keeps his eyes fixed on his hands. “ It … didn’t work out well. I didn’t fit in.” This is all Flint needs to know. “I ran away when I was thirteen.”
Flint keeps looking at him closely. Silver shrugs. “Not all that hard for a boy to survive in the East End. One way or another.” The details can stay in the sack of black stones. “And I met other Jews there, from the East. They were told that they had to have last names, so instead of names of towns, some of them chose names of jewels, precious things,” and transportable, like Max’s jewels. “Perlman. Goldschmied, you can guess.” A pause. “Silverstein.”
Flint gives him a small nod. “John Silver. A foot in both camps.”
“They didn’t like me all that much either, but I made myself useful. And I learned three things from them. One, you’re only safe with your own people. Which in my own case was something of a problem.” He half-grins. “Two, when your own people are outsiders, adapt as much as you can to the people you’re with. Become indispensable. And at the same time learn the languages and customs of the neighbouring countries, because you never know when the people you’re with will turn against you. Three, above all, always reveal as little of yourself as you can get away with.”
They are quiet for a while. There’s an arm’s length between them, but each of them can hear the other breathing.
Believe what I’ve given you. It isn’t much, but it’s what happened. Silver cannot say this, so instead he asks, “Is this a more believable story?”
The silence stretches. Flint is still half-turned towards Silver, and his voice is still flat.
“You came all the way here to tell it. After two years. So yes, I’ll choose to believe it.”
He doesn’t believe it. The sack of black stones suddenly becomes a weight that may crush Silver’s back. But Flint hasn’t said too late, and he has said that he chooses to believe it. Maybe he wants it to be true. More words are needed, but he can’t find any.
“Did you ever say any of this to Madi?”
Madi. The heaviest stone he must carry. He shakes his head and stares at the grass around his feet. Their last encounter, the words that had killed all his hopes for understanding and forgiveness.
“Leave this island.” Her voice had been firm although her eyes were brimming with tears. “We care for each other, but nothing can come out of it. I must answer to my people, and you no longer belong with us. Hoping otherwise will just break your heart, as it is breaking mine. Go. Find other hopes and other people, and find ways not to let them down.”
A long pause. Flint breaks it. “She didn’t forgive you.”
“No. She couldn’t.” He had done what he believed was right. But what a long wake of pain, betrayal and death he had left behind.
Of course Flint’s still his fucking unrelenting self. “You haven’t answered my question. Why did you come here?” His eyes follow every movement in Silver’s face and body, to catch any clues of untruth. “Did you know I was alone here?”
No point in obfuscating. “Yes.” He shifts on the hard seat. “I still have informants.” He picks up a stalk of grass, looks at it, then drops it. “But informants just report facts, not stories. Two men broke out of the Savannah prison farm. Two men bought a log cabin at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains. One of them left.” Words are beginning to come back to him slowly, a few at a time. “I came here because I want to ask what the relation is between those facts. The story.” The next words are the hardest to pull out, but he manages. “And because in my life there hasn’t been much of a story for two years.”
“Stories.” Flint’s old trick of repeating something someone said right back at them, to make them wonder whether they’d been caught lying, or whether they’d said something incredibly stupid.
“Yes,” Silver says. “I stopped having a story two years ago.” He remembers the forest on Skeleton Island, Flint’s ruthless smile, the cold fury in his eyes, the words meant to cut deep: When you’re casting about in the dark for some proof that you mattered and finding none, you’ll know that you gave it away in this moment, on this island. And now, here, there are two possibilities. Flint may tell him that he is not interested in discussing stories, and send him away. Or Flint may say that he no longer hates him, and talk to him. Silver has always been good at finding third possibilities, but this time he cannot see one anywhere.
He waits.
Without warning, small cold drops of rain start falling. Silver feels them on his shoulders, smells them sinking into the earth around them, and he would like to throw his head back and breathe deeply, but his body is stiff and his chest is tight.
Flint stands up, but remains next to the bench, one hand resting on the back. He’s grown stockier, his dark-green cotton shirt is tight across his stomach; Silver gives a fleeting thought to the lines on his own forehead and the grey hairs beginning to show in his own dark mane. The rain gets a little heavier. Neither speaks.
Silver shivers, gives in and breaks the silence, very quietly. “Want me to go?”
Flint is standing completely still, except for a twitch in the hand on the back of the bench. “Suit yourself.”
You fucking arsehole. Silver remains seated, without moving. It’s raining steadily now, they’re both drenched and chilled, the earth under Silver’s foot is turning to mud. Flint sighs deeply and moves towards the house, muttering “Come on” over his shoulder.
The inside of the cabin is neat and spare, two windows on opposite walls, a fireplace. No ornaments, a couple of skillets hanging on a wall, a pine bookcase packed with books and nautical charts (nautical charts? This place is two hundred miles from the ocean), a chaise-longue under one window. Opposite the main door there’s a small archway, and beyond it there’s a small kitchen with a narrow staircase which presumably leads to a bedroom.
They stand in the middle of the room, dripping on the floor, not looking at each other.
Flint stirs the embers of the fireplace back to life. “I didn’t ask you to come. But since you’re here, we’ve got things we have to say to each other. Then you can leave whenever you want to,” he says, without turning.
You taught me how to parry sword blows. And I taught you how to deflect questions. “All right. But tonight I’m dead on my feet.” He needs to be rested and self-possessed for what is to come. For a moment he considers playing up his leg, but it would be a cheap trick. Flint wouldn’t fall for it anyway. “I’ll go back to the tavern if that’s easier.”
“Don’t be an idiot.”
“Since …”
“Don’t be a fucking idiot.” A beat. “Want anything to eat?”
“I ate at the tavern.” It’s easy to lie about small things after getting a few true facts out. Silver takes a couple of steps towards the chaise longue. “All I need is a blanket. And directions to the outhouse.”
Flint gives him a short nod, goes upstairs, returns with a blanket and a pillow. “Back door’s by the stairs, outhouse is at the bottom of the yard.”
The blanket is soft wool; it doesn’t smell much of anything. Silver takes off his wet clothes, wraps the blanket around himself, and closes his eyes. He’ll never know which of them laid his head on that pillow, and what they said and did before they went to sleep.