A tempest howls through the western Azores. The Madeleine grapples with the onslaught of wind and water but ultimately she succumbs. Her sails catch the weight of the sea and her great masts crack and splinter. After that, there is a roiling torment for the thirty-nine souls aboard, the ship and all her contents becoming flotsam, the bodies of men and beast seeking mercy on sand, rock and the ocean floor . Jacques-Louis, clutching within his jacket a solitary remnant of the voyage, meets a coral reef which shatters his leg, rends his clothes and much of his skin, and then by some miracle or curse he washes ashore. Dawn breaks and for many hours the sun sears him. Salt encrusts his wounds. With the returning tide, he stirs and is relieved to find the singular talisman still within the remains of his jacket. He hauls himself, in an agony of exquisite proportions, across the beach until he reaches the refuge of trees. Struggling now to lift his head, he scans the sea behind him and calls Quill’s name. His voice is a desperate shred barely recognisable . The world around him is unresponsive and he passes back into oblivion. Awakening, he sees a full moon rising over a blackcurrant sea, the ribbon of light travelling across the water appearing to be an invitation to a mighty gatherin g of the drowned. Come, join the kindred spirits of sailors and sirens, heroes and thieves offering you their lyric thoughts on music and jubilation, miracle and persuasion, remorse and desolation. He has survived voyages before; perhaps he will yet rally. But he is deluding himself, his wounds remind him. His once-useful right leg is a mass of lacerate d flesh. A shattered spear of bone is protrudi ng from his thigh. He might have met his end some years before with a well-tied noose or from myriad blades and fists beyond. The grim truth, he knows, is that a man co-exists with men more and less violent than his own inclinations; he learns to adapt, or he perishes more quickly than he anticipated.
Caroline would manage it. She may appear gentle and sweet, well schooled by her mother, but he knows her. She would have a sharpened blade to his leg, a hacksaw for the bone, and it would be done. ‘Who needs a leg if you will live, Papa?’ He closes his eyes and sees the morning light across the valley. A scythe awaiting its purpose by the barn, dawn’s motes hanging in the air. Candlelight flickers in the cellar where root vegetables slumber in beds of soft sand. He imagines walking amidst the dusty bottles. The leaves are blazing golden and red upon the vines. Is it autumn so soon? The mountain is a shade of lavender hung to dry. He envisions uncorking a bottle filled with the sparkling afternoon of the day it was harvested. Raising it to her mouth, Carolin e drinks. ‘It is good,’ she says, being his daughter , with the natural understanding. ‘This dying is not all seriousness,’ he says. ‘It seems a little serious,’ she r eplies, her eyes twinkling. Wit is a perilous thing when you are in chains and a hard man wields a lash. Wit is a treacherous thing for a woman, too, especially when she employs it to influence through intrigue. They both have secrets, Jacques- Louis and Caroline, but she will carry them far longer than him. He could blame the storm, the gods of ocean and sky, the captain, the ship builders, the British government, indeed the presumptuousness of nature and the mysterium of the soul, but he sees it now. Voltaire had been right. Optimism was unfaithful, as insubstantial as any philosophy or doctrine, for what was man but the great inventor of his own justifications, sometimes through the voice of a god, or whatever vessel best served his certainties and eliminated his doubts? Perhaps only those who had done the greatest harm— fools like him—contemplated notions of an abiding goodness, despite all evidence to the contrary . The vineyard is receding. He wakes to the crash of waves upon the shore, his broken leg swollen now to twice its normal size, the fire of infection running through his veins. There is something he has forgotten, something he does not wish to recall. And on the pedestal, these wor ds appear: ‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my W orks, ye Mighty , and despair!’ Nothing beside r emains. Round the decay Of that colossal W reck, boundless and bar e
The lone and level sands str etch far away . His life has come to this, the lone and level sand stretching away, his wreckage complete. He had a mission. But he has failed. Who has he failed? Oh, yes, he feels it anew . He has failed everyone. A gull is pecking at the maggots burrowing into his leg. His mouth is sorely parched. One eye is closed shut. Has he lived another day? The sun is sinking into the sea. The day is cooler and the uncertain r eprieve of night is descending. Where is the bottle he had gripped as if it were life itself? He feels about in the sand. Even this small movement exhausts him. Surely it cannot be lost. The Madeleine had been just beyond the Tropic of Cancer. Europe had felt close. Sh epherd, the captain, was discussing the approaching lunar event. ‘This is no time for medieval superstition,’ he had said. ‘We are modern men. The crew will follow my lead. We will stand upon the deck and fashion our viewing implements and take in this great moment that will not come again, so we are told, for another hundred years or more.’ He had a bent for the morbid, Captain Sh epherd. He had survived the battle of the Nile and the guns of Copenhagen, serving under Nelson as a cabin boy at seven years of age. He had witnessed Napoleon’ s defeat at Cape Trafalgar and been imprisoned twice. Back in England he had seventeen grandchildren, all girls. His home, he had told Jacques-Louis, stood upon the clif fs of Dover . ‘I was born for the sea,’ he said. ‘I hope to spend my last day with a wind in the sails and a bright sea beneath.’ Sh epherd’ s wish had been fulfilled. The tempest came after the eclipse. The light was the eerie green that portends a hurricane. Soon came the ferocity of the wind, the magnitude of ocean rising and breaking, the waves that required the ship to climb an impossible wall or be sw ept aside. It had numbed all senses but terror. The good captain had roped himself to the wheel, insisting Jacques-Louis and Quill get below, shouting to his crew to tie themselves to whatever they could. Quill had insisted on going first to check the wine. When Jacques-Louis wakes, there is a pounding that feels as if his heart is trying to leave his body. He is shivering cold and raging hot. He had
dreamed that he and Henriette were together on the banks of a quiet river, the mirrored surface mesmerising. His fingers find a vestige of the day’s warmth under the leaf matter that spills about. The pain of his injuries is unceasing. The fronds above him make a pretty sound when the wind moves them. The sea exhales. The sky is stabbed with stars. He cannot be sure how long it is since the Madeleine sank and he washed ashore. His father is seated beside him, dressed as the duc who walks the fields and tends the vines with his workers. He takes in his ill-kempt son, his shredded clothes and fevered skin, his leg a hideous purple. Jacques-Louis feels his father is sure to suggest there will be a late rescue. Some boat that rides in over the reef. Someone who happens along the shore. But instead of rallying him with hope, his father says gently, ‘Nature, Jacques-Louis, is the faithful administrator of a glorious enterprise. She cares nothing for nations that rise and fall or matters of international dispute. She welcomes to the afterlife both king and commoner , babe and mother, the girl and the soldier. All the fallen who decay upon the fields or die in their beds. The good, the bad, the uniforms of blue or red, the woollen hose and pantaloons, the silk, the lace, the canvas, hemp and linen —a hundred years on it is all the same under the ground.’ ‘Papa,’ Jacques-Louis says, feeling the sand running through his fingertips, ‘I am se eping into the ground. How long since I was a boy and you and Maman were filled with life?’ He is so thirsty. Where is the bottle? He feels about, but there is nothing to grasp, no promise of relief. He must not be deluded. There will be no rescue from this. There are many days for living that pass as if they are winged, and then just one that comes for the earthly labour of dying. He closes his eyes. His mind begins to leave his body, seeking better places. Above him, planets wheel overhead. One star is a strange blue, another a fiery green. His father bends and kisses him upon his brow . ‘Jacques-Louis,’ he says, ‘ So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan, that moves To that mysterious r ealm, wher e each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon, but sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, appr oach thy grave, Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dr eams.’
Jacques-Louis’ breath is shallow, his body explored by ants, s epsis damaging his lungs, his liver , his kidneys. Mosquitoes bite and buzz. ‘Hush,’ he tells them. ‘Have you no respect for a man’ s final hours?’ But what wisdom might he impart on the subject of mortality to an insect that dies in a day , while he has witnessed decades? The gulls know it is only a matter of time, assuring him that death is close enough to kiss his cheek. They will all outlive him. They will feast on the maggots in his leg, the eyes in his head. They will pick clean the cage of his ribs, the bones of his hands. All of him will be washed away by the next full-moon tide. The sea and the sand will house his last remains but what will house his soul? There it is again, damn the demand of it. The eternal does not fool me, he wants to shout. You gods promise a lot and deliver very little. The earth delivers. The earth has fed me. The earth has given me hope. The trance of life will abate. The rest is foolery. But still he has been known to be wrong, and admitted it. Ah, Hannah. Will you be there for me? Will you wait for me on the path of dissolution? He wants to see her, he yearns to see her. He whispers, ‘I humbly , devotedly , request an audience with my beloved wife.’ Her skin, the smell of her. The laughter on her lips, the music of her voice, the sound of her singing as she tended the garden. No man was luckier than he in loving her. In undressing her. In discovering the softness of her skin. Her breasts, oh, her breasts. Right nipple. Left nipple. Her stomach, her hips, oh, the softness of her thighs. The sweetness of her ankles and tiny feet. If on any day he had glimpsed them beneath the hem of her gown, his thoughts were drawn away to pleasures he wished to enact upon her . Let me trace the symmetry of your jaw, he thinks, your small straight nose. Let me see once more the lashes that give such shape to your eyes. I want to smell your fragrance as you roll towards me in the bed. I want to
smell the scent in the pit of your arm, in your tender terrain of shores and hills and wetland. I will whisper your name for eternity if it will help me find you again. I was madness without you, and sometimes I was madness with you, and I will never r epay the debt of kindness you extended to me. I wanted anything but to feel the emptiness of my soul after your death. I was a man on his knees, begging for r eprieve, and when a hand was offered I took it, knowing, knowing it was its own form of madness. Forgive me. Please for give me. He is watching the sun rise across the fields of the world. There is one valley, one vignette of human life, his mind settles on. A cock calls. The cows are lowing. Pigeons murmur in the eaves. Sparrows and finches discuss the day ahead. Jacques-Louis, the boy, leaps from his bed and, once dressed, runs downstairs to the dining room. Finding it empty, he diverts to the kitchens, where Mathilde awaits with a small warm loaf she fills with butter and cherry jam. She hands it to him with a wedge of cheese and an apple for his pocket. Soon enough he is out the door, running to catch up to his father in his long boots, who swings Jacques-Louis into the saddle before him. At the vineyard his father gives Jacques-Louis a small sheathed knife, a gift for this vintage. ‘Very few people who grow grapes make fine wine,’ his father says, ‘let alone champagne. But for now, while you are yet young, to learn the art of the growing is all that matters.’ Jacques-Louis fixes the new knife to the belt around his waist. His seven-year -old size is perfect for crawling along the rows and cutting down the fruit the adults have missed. A luncheon is assembled under the beech trees. Even Jacques-Louis is permitted a little champagne, although he is jostled affectionately by Philippe when he yawns as they return to the harvest. The last sacks of grapes are loaded onto the wagons. Beneath a thousand-year -old sunset, Jacques-Louis falls asle ep against Philippe on the way to the press. Oh sle ep, it is a gentle thing. Beloved fr om pole to pole ... My lips wer e wet, my thr oat was cold, My garments all wer e dank;
Sure I had drunken in my dr eams, And still my body drank. He does not want Coleridge’ s damned poem, but still it bites. He touches his forehead, running his fingers along the old scar. He reaches for the wound where the bone in his thigh protrudes. He lifts his head and sees the bloated flesh has turned black. His stomach heaves but there is nothing left in him, not sea water or bile. Oh, for a cool breeze. His lips are serrated, his tongue large and furred in his mouth. There is nothing to drink. There might never be anything to drink again. He shivers. A breeze blows up, sprinkling his eyelids, showering him with particles of gold, pink and silver, dusting his suppurating wounds. There is a smell that he knows all too well. I am rotting, he thinks. What is a man? he wonders. An accumulation of acts and memories? A sort of agreement between facts and inclinations? He takes a grape offered by an outstretched hand and presses it to his lips, pushing the fruit in, holding back the skin with his teeth, welcoming the sweet burst of berry followed by a tart note of apple. Aah. Energy existed everywhere, all theophany , a mystical poetry by which the unknown revealed itself. Why had he never seen that before? Death is dispersing itself, dissolving men and women, children born and unborn. Every being is encroached upon by tiny creatures as enterprising as any re volutionary or counter -re volutionary , Girondin or Jacobin, Whig or Tory, royalist or r epublican, pacifist or rebel, all drawn into an underworld of purpose more complex than any bureaucracy . Constellati ons of tiny creatures are upon him, beneath him and also inside him, scavenging the flesh on his bones, touring his veins, amassing in his lungs. He can hear them, a transcendence at the umbilicus of the spinning world. In the night a storm reaches into the dreaming sky, a cavalcad e of watery battalions drumming on rock and sand, lightning and thunder , the palm trees bracing in the wind and rain dripping, running, pooling. Every splash upon his broken flesh is a knif epoint and every drip upon his face a balm, and every drop that falls into his mouth is as a grain of rice to a starving village.
Caroline has brought a fan and the breeze of it is welcome on this ringing evening when cicadas and every other creature that can rub its legs or wings together or use its throat for amplification is making a mockery of peace. ‘If you could have heard them, all those other vignerons gathere d in Paris disparaging the judges’ decision,’ Jacques-Louis says to her . ‘“You cannot call it champagne !” Moët declared. “We will not allow it. What is it? It is Van Diemen something! It cannot be champagne if it does not come from the earth of Champagne.” ‘“The new world may yet best the old,” Madame Clicquot r eplied. ‘I had failed to anticipate her. I bowed de eply, humbled to be in her presence. ‘“Madame,” I said, you will change the world. ‘“I made the world turn in my direction,” she said, with a droll lift of her eyes. ‘“My daughter did that too,” I told her, but she gave me such a look that I dared not elaborate. ‘Still, the prize! The Grand Prize in Paris for our colonial vintage, Caroline! It would never have been so if they had not tasted it blind, for their minds cannot conceive of such a thing. Alas that the trophy makes a pretty bauble on the seabed. But still, we won! We won! ‘Perhaps,’ he says, ‘this will go some small way towards expunging the terrible record of my life. I have one bottle from the ship. It was all I could hold onto in the moment when our demise was evident. I took it when I went in search of Quill, who had gone below, determined to do what he could to save our cargo. But the strength of the water was unimaginable, and I was sw ept out into that terrible churning sea. I held to the bottle as if it was life itself. Do you see it about? ‘You, Caroline, and your sisters, your mother, Quill, Cornelius and the wine we made together at Everlea—these have been the greatest parts of my life.’
But Caroline has disappeared. The heat is ferocious without her cooling fan, the pain rattling his brain. Quill kneels beside Jacques-Lou is. He pops the cork, bringing the bottle to Jacques-Louis’ lips. The relief is so intense, Jacques-Louis coughs and gasps, ‘I thought I had lost you.’ Quill holds his head and tenderly wipes his cheek and chin. When breath is restored, he brings the bottle to Jacques-Louis’ lips once more. The champagne swells in his mouth. The towering edifice of mountain. The silvered sea. The moss-filled forest. The cries of the black cockatoos as they head north. The scudding rain and howling wind. Currawongs calling in a breathless vermilion dawn and moonless skies where he has looked into nebulae and felt the pull of a grandeur beyond his human life. Quill has disappeared into the cast gathered about him on the shore. They are conversing, the horde, dressed in finery. There is baby Isobel before the fever took her. She is holding her rabbit with the velvet ears. There is his father ready for the Royal Court in hose and wig. And Maman in a summer gown with a matching parasol. Thank goodness she has her head. And there is Hannah, her eyes sparkling, as beautiful as the day he married her . ‘Will you take my hand?’ he asks her . But before Hannah reaches him, a woman in a dress of blood-red silk passes before him with a glittering bauble about her neck. Her hair is carefully coiled and decorated with a butterfly clasp above one ear. As she turns to the company, he sees the wound in her throat. She lifts her arm and points to him. ‘ J’accuse ,’ she says. He watches as every person falls away, disintegrates, disappearing into the etheric one by one. He calls as they go, calls the names of all his dead, and we eps as he loses them all again. Only the one he murdered stands before him. Her expression conveys no malice, only a galling truthfulness. He hears the rushing blade of the guillotine above him. And finds it a relief to be done with it all at last.