Synopsis
Book by Steffler John
Extrait
One
Nottinghamshire shimmers. Fragrant, dizzy with bees at the peak of May. Turning around in the saddle, George Cartwright squints at the scattered fields – no birds within range, no sign of another person. Never a sign of another person. He lets his horse carry him on at its own easy pace, following the Nottingham road out from Mansfield, the same route he’s taken every day since his death in 1819. His hawk, Kaumalak, is perched on his left fist. Sunlight pricks blue fire from the feathers of her wings, and
Cartwright smoothes her iridescence: this dainty mortar shell. Songs from invisible birds beckon him forward, stirring his appetite for the hunt. For the moment, his loneliness is nearly without pain. Sparrows splash in the puddled wagon tracks ahead, but he keeps his hawk hooded, scanning the pastures and groves, waiting for larks. Cartwright knows he’s dead, but death isn’t the way he expected – although after 170 years it isn’t something that troubles him very much anymore. In the last weeks of his life, riding this same well- known road, feeling his hawk unusually heavy on his glove, he had sensed the end coming and wondered what lay beyond. Not harps and angels, he suspected, but at least a brief audience with his Maker. Probably a reunion with family and old acquaintances who had already died – some he wasn’t so sure he wanted to face again, but even that he was curious about. Forgiveness and understanding would likely prevail. Maybe a new incarnation in a new world awaited him, something as unimaginable as Labrador. Certainly explanations and marvels, and a few rewards. He didn’t anticipate many punishments. God, he assumed, under his aura or robes or whatever, would be a manly gentleman who favoured a bit of push and gusto in his chaps on earth. But instead of any of that, he died in his room at The Turk’s Head in Mansfield and woke up there, and nothing had changed. Except time had stopped, at least in his immediate vicinity, and everyone was away somewhere. All he could think to do was go hawking.
This morning, for example, like every morning, he had sat on the edge of his bed in The Turk’s Head Inn – after a night of unspeakable dreams – and had thought about his unfinished affairs in Labrador, about Caubvick, the Inuit woman, and Mrs. Selby, his mistress, wondering how he might have kept them with him during his days alive. And as he sat picturing their beautiful, troubled faces, speaking to them in his mind, making them smile, and as he proved to himself once again that his bankrupt business might have been saved, his ruminations were mixed with a constant awareness of the smell of damp soot in the fireplace and of the soundlessness of the building around him, the deserted taproom downstairs, Mansfield’s deserted houses, deserted streets. And then, sitting hopelessly, he noticed Kaumalak on her perch. Her keen eyes and beak. Her economical movements. Her stern looks. And in his heart Cartwright felt, with a surge of gladness, the old desire to hunt, to feel the kick of his Hanoverian rifle or the push of his peregrine’s talons as she launched herself in a burst at the sight of doves. He looked out his window then at his horse, Thoroton, stabled across the courtyard, and began hurrying, whistling, getting into his boots.
Although time has stopped for Cartwright, he knows that just beneath the surface of what surrounds him it has been racing along at an insane speed. He’s discovered that time is like sound – that the past doesn’t vanish, but encircles us in layers like a continuous series of voices, with the closest, most recent voice drowning out those that have gone before. And just as it’s possible to sit on a bench in a city reading a book, oblivious to the complex racket all around, then to withdraw from the page and pick out from the cascade of noises the voice of one street vendor two blocks away, so for Cartwright it’s possible at times to tune in a detail from either the past or the ongoing course of time and, by concentrating on it, become witness to some event in the affairs of the dead or the living.
For the living, the past is always overlaid, made inaccessible by the present, but for Cartwright, both the past and the present are elusive background phenomena, subject to occasional capture. His experience as a hunter and his 170 years of practice have made him adept at nabbing rare moments by their whiskers or tails. He even stumbles into pockets of time unintentionally, the way he’s often stumbled into a rabbit hole during his rambles in search of game.
Right now while Thoroton plods and the saddle creaks, Cartwright’s eye is caught by a red glimmer ahead in the roadside grass. A ring dropped by some lady or gentleman? A berry? A beetle? The ruby gleam rapidly grows in size and hurtles toward him, pulling in its wake a black river of pavement and two wide wings of images: sharp- cornered brick buildings in rows on either side, poles and wires, smoke. The scarlet double- decker Trent Lines bus bearing down on him is a familiar sight. It rushes under or through him, at which point Cartwright sees it, feels its rush, but can’t see his horse or himself. Groups of cars plunge through him from both directions. He seems to whirl upward, enlarged on an eddy of turbulence, feeling a mixture of horror and admiration. To ride in one of those things! The inventor and sportsman in him are aroused. And yet he’s annoyed. He has spied enough on the present to know how small, how mechanical people there have become. Children of Edmund, he thinks, remembering his brother Edmund’s power- loom and gunpowder engine. This is where all that led. And then remembering his own attempted inventions, he admits to himself some blame for this state of affairs.
At certain periods Cartwright has been a fan of the present, though usually a rather grudging, critical fan, following it more out of idle curiosity than love. For a while the smell of the lichen on an oak tree in Averham Park was a reliable way of getting into the Robin Hood Tavern in Nottingham, and although the effort required to trace the smell into the tavern and keep himself there was extremely draining, Cartwright had spent many hours standing by The Robin Hood’s coat- rack watching television and reading the paper over the shoulder of a retired dry- cleaner who always sat nearby and whom Cartwright regarded as more dead than himself. He was actually quite interested in Nottingham Forest, the local football team, for a time – knew all the players and their statistics, laughed at the barbaric remarks of their manager, Brian Clough. But then the effort became too much, and he felt foolish, and went back to his hawk and the Nottingham road. It was lonely and predictable there on the whole, but at least it was his death, and there must be some purpose in it, he thought.
The red gleam, the Trent bus, had taken Cartwright by surprise. After a moment he recomposes himself and looks around from his elevated position over the countryside. He is out of the present again. The landscape he sees now is the familiar one, exactly as it was on the 19th of May in 1819, the day he died. To the east he sees the old family estate at Marnham and to the south, near Newark, his father’s famous bridge, far from any water, like a length of Roman aqueduct, the folly that had swallowed what little was left of the family fortune and had sent Cartwright into the army and to Labrador. Buttercups and grasses festoon its parapets. A small herd of cows enjoys the shade under one of its spans.
Perhaps he’s borrowing Kaumalak’s eyes. This ability of his to stretch up and scan the surface of the earth is getting stronger, he’s noticed. It works best, for some reason, on horseback from the top of a hill. He has seen as far east as Saxony, where he was injured by a boar for the sake of the ungrateful Marquis of Granby, and even to Minorca where he nearly died of fever. To the west he has seen Lizard Head and the Scilly Isles where more than once he came close to being shipwrecked returning from Labrador. He has seen as far as the mid- Atlantic, the same mountainous grey and yellow waves that had rolled clean over his leaking ships. But not yet as far as Newfoundland and the Labrador coast.
Cartwright rises slightly in his saddle and farts and searches the sky over the meadows for larks. No, the present causes him little envy. The past is what he can’t let alone.
He turns Thoroton to the left through an open gate onto a cattle track and immediately flushes a pair of pheasants from beyond a hedge. He deftly releases his hawk’s jesses and takes off her hood. She swivels her head once, unfolds her wings, and kicks back hard as he braces himself in the stirrups and throws up his arm, pushing with all his might against the amazing force.
Nottinghamshire slips from Cartwright’s lap like a quilt. He watches his hands shoot out far, fingers hooked for the pleasure of catching. For feeling the quick pulse burst into bloom, red petals scattering.
His centre melts, a current of hunger surging out of his throat and eyes in his hawk’s wake. His body forgotten on Thoroton’s back.
Diving into a pocket of blood in the sky. Pure fugitive treasure. The motherhood under everything, even rocks and ice.
Kaumalak has disappeared in the sun. Cartwright hangs suspended, waiting, hearing a pasture gate lazily striking its post in the light breeze, pausing, striking.
Like that knocking on board the Mary during his first voyage home from Labrador. The sound belonged to the part of his cargo he couldn’t understand; the most precious part, he now thinks, the most curious of all he carried from Labrador. The sound of beliefs fathered in people by icebergs and rocks.
Having l...
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