Irregularity Read online

  “Will you take a turn clockwise or widdershins?” I said. “I’m to play half-crosswise, old No-Conscience here goes whichever way suits her.” Salt-Beef Peg in the meantime moved a small pawn across a continent of her choice; and rolled a dice to confirm the co-ordinates of her new cyclone.

  I do hope you are paying attention to the rules, by the way.

  I’ll say this for our man William Dampier. We played rings around him, and at our every roll of the dice the currents and the tides and the winds played havoc with themselves over the open ocean, swooping around an erratic course like a child’s spinning-top. But through it all he did seem to be trying his best. And also he kept on talking, the rat. Twas all small-talk — none smaller — until just before the seventh round.

  “Tis a risky game for a man who travels the ocean,” he said, “to seek new lands, and chart them. But a greater danger, as I see it, is to seek to know the course of the winds.” His eyes twinkled at mine and I leaned forward to look into them more close-like. It was curious, what I saw.

  Now I don’t know where the man William Dampier got his information. Don’t think us omniscient. We aren’t. How he knew what we were, and, further to that, how he knew what our game was about, truly about, is a mystery to me.

  My corset was heaving against the edge of the playing board — I’d pushed it there as a test — but Dampier’s eyes didn’t flicker there once; in point of fact, Dampier was smiling but not really at my body, nor even at my face. He was looking at the ravaging storms and the swirling currents that swelled beneath the façade of wench I went by in those days. Somehow, he knew me for what I really was. When he looked at me, he saw the winds.

  It made me daring. “If only a man had arrows,” I said, “to shew him a course along those general and coasting winds, for they’re pernicious things indeed, or so I hear.” I’ll punish you for knowing, I thought; and you can watch. I dealt him a card and the final round was begun.

  Dampier lost. Bored of tracking his personal travels, Buttock-de-Clink Jenny took a wider approach and sunk a naval brigade in a vicious typhoon that wasn’t to strike for a century. No-Conscience Nan asserted it so Dampier’s Roebuck wouldn’t sink — she was too fond of his lovely dark hair for that, I could see her thinking it — but she did snarl his journeys enough that it would be a decade before he got home. Salt-Beef Peg whipped up some currents that would get him court-marshalled for cruelty. Twas he and I who were really at chess. I chased his play a whole three times around the world.

  Seek to know the course of the winds, indeed. Nobody had known the course of us yet. So I shook his hand at the end of it all, and I told him thus; “the winds might not be forever at your back, sir, as the old blessing goes — but you’ve earned yourself a curious stare or two.” And then we four departed about our usual fair and foul business across Port Royal. Ah, what more to tell?

  It was sixteen-ninety-nine when the Discourse was published, to great acclaim, of course, you’ll know this; and a jack sailing into Port Royal brought the newly-published map into our company. Nan stole it from him during a tryst, brought it screaming to the rest of us.

  A diary of journeys and travels, descriptions of fauna and beasts — not news to us, nothing of interest. No, ‘twas one of the charts made us tremble:

  A Discourse of Trade-Winds, Breezes, Storms, Tides and Currents

  A map of the world. Much like our playing board without the grid and the counters. Without the cards and the cribbage sticks, without the dice. But with — oh, what the map did have. All demarcated, set down, drawn on, made official, there in permanent pen and ink and etching.

  William Dampier, I thought. You absolute cock of a bugger.

  “He’s mapped us,” said Jenny, in a tone that meant murdered us. It wasn’t necessary to say so; we all knew. In truth we’d sensed it a long time afore Dampier’s damned publication. Somehow, after the game he’d played with us, the game I now consider our last, our dice hadn’t rolled the higher numbers, and our cards were dealt into bad hands, and our darts had missed their marks.

  “Look there,” said Jenny, pointing to the map’s southern edge. In an illuminated strip writ to look like a scroll, Dampier’s own spidery writing suggested that navigators “Note, that the Arrows among the Lines shew Course of those General & Coasting winds.” I went to the board, none of my sisters stopped me, and I smashed the counters to pieces. Even as I did so, I knew I hadn’t powers to sink. Not now.

  Stupid myself, I thought. Fool of a — I’d let our vanity get ahead of us. We’d mocked him for daring to play us at currents and storms, and of course we were the better players and of course he hadn’t won. But that had never been the intention. He’d seen us playing, and that was enough. The game — the true game, the game his challenge to us represented — that game had been lost as soon as I’d put the dice into his hands.

  For a brief while we continued to meet, playing for matchsticks. But it wasn’t the same now our power was pretence. Our monthly games fizzled out like damp dynamite to nothing. Like Dampier intended when he mapped us. We left Port Royal, one by one, not long after.

  How do you map the winds? Did you think the answer was to play dice with them? Shipwrecks determined by chess? Cribbage for controlling currents, poker to pinpoint a tempest, trictrac for typhoons — backgammon, darts, beggar-thy-trade tides? That’s how Dampier did it. He didn’t have to win, you see. Not in those days. He only had to get a look at the board. Pay attention quietly, note what he saw, then go away and write it up with accuracy, vigour and vim. “A Discourse of Trade-winds”, published sixteen-ninety-nine. To this day it makes my very breath itch. I’ll give you a discourse of trade-winds, my darlings.

  I am brought to my main purpose. I say it here. This is my reason for telling you, for finally getting it down into words, what Dampier did, truly did. I have told this story in order to announce that I, I, yes I indeed, I myself, the very I — I say that I challenge you — yes you, my dear of dears — I challenge you to a rematch.

  I will play with any he, she or they who wishes to take me up on the game. There ought to be enough information in these preceding words for you to divine the rules; and this time, of course, the mere sight of play won’t be enough. You will be required to win. Now, do not consider me unfair. In the case of your victory I promise you more knowledge, for there is much more you can know; there are many things that can yet be prevented. In return, we will play for double the stakes — I’ll take it all away, I say, and everything will change.

  If you don’t turn up, I might play on my own and mess things about in any case. It’s in your interest, then, yes? Wait until the moon is full, and find me.

  I do hope you are paying attention to the rules.

  The Spiders of Stockholm

  E. J. Swift

  Before there were the spiders there was the emptiness. The emptiness made its home in the space beneath Eva’s bed, a narrow and dusty cavity but large enough to accommodate the body of a small, nimble girl. There were times when it was necessary to hide inside the emptiness. Times such as when Eva’s mother could be heard roaming from room to room and weeping, a process which might go on for hours, the sound ebbing and falling like a music box which plays its course and is wound again.

  Ever since the news of Eva’s father, Eva’s mother had divided her time between weeping and cursing Axel von Fersen. Without his Pomeranian ambitions, Eva’s father would undoubtedly not have been posted to Straslund, nor killed there in such ignominious circumstances. Now they were alone in the world, and so was Sweden. At first Eva had cried too. It was expected. But a year had passed, and her life went on as it had. When she thought about her father she felt mostly a sense of bewilderment, that this man in his meticulous uniform — a man she had only limited memories of, whose military boots and epaulettes seemed ill-suited to his quiet, reserved demeanour and passion for butterfly collecting — had occupied a space and now was gone.

  Like the emptiness, Captain Lindberg was
an absence. A before. But he had always been an absence. In death, he had somehow become more prominent than in life. That was the confusing thing.

  Eva liked to imagine herself in places where emptiness did not matter, where emptiness was in fact the norm. The sea, for example. Before last year, the sea had been a regular feature in the Lindberg household, a source of pride and delight, related as it was to the shininess of buttons and the deeds (noble, Eva’s mother said) performed by Eva’s father when he was not at home in Stockholm — which was most of the time. But the sea was no longer safe. The sea was an accomplice, the thing which, along with the Prussians, had snatched away Eva’s father and committed his body to the deeps.

  Eva did not realize the full repercussions of this taboo until it affected her daily expeditions. Birgitte always took her to the waterfront, where they would look at the sea and the seagulls and the great tall ships of the Swedish East India Company, and conjure up heroic acts enacted upon faraway seas. At least, Eva would think of heroic acts, and Birgitte would fuss, about her skirts, or her eating habits. Eva, although she loved Birgitte very much (perhaps even more than her mother, whose love was a perilous and unpredictable thing) would wish Birgitte a thousand miles away, while she remained free to scale rigging and spy though telescopes. On a good day, Birgitte permitted her to speak to the sailors and ask questions. Eva liked to know the words for all the different parts of the ship. Topsail, they told her, as she pointed. Bowsprit. Foremast. Stern. This was how their afternoons went.

  Until after Captain Lindberg.

  Suddenly, Eva and Birgitte were taking different routes — carefully engineered routes which avoided so much as a glimpse of the sea.

  “What about the ships?” Eva asked, when it had become clear that their new regime was not an accident of time and Birgitte’s bad memory, as Birgitte claimed. “When are we seeing the ships?”

  Birgitte said they would not be going to the harbour any more.

  “But why not?”

  “Your mother doesn’t like it.”

  The emptiness, Eva thought. It had expanded out of the house, seeping into the streets. She felt a tug of resentment towards her mother, whose indiscriminate weeping had the power to consume even the smallest of pleasures.

  It took time to convince Birgitte that this was a secret they could keep between them. Even after she agreed, the maid did not look comfortable. Birgitte would huff and shiver and complain about the bitterness of the sea air, in an effort to move them on quickly. The gulls, she said, flew too low. They might swipe at Eva’s hair, or drop something unmentionable upon her dress. There was a certain look when her eyes fell upon Eva, which Eva did not at first understand. Birgitte felt sorry for her.

  The look shocked Eva; Birgitte was not meant to be sorry about anything. You don’t have to be sad, she wanted to say. I don’t miss Father. Her mother missed him, of course, but even this Eva struggled to comprehend. How could you miss a person who had never been present, the sudden permanence of whose absence was less of a surprise than an inevitable conclusion? But she knew that Birgitte would be horrified by this sentiment. Adults had ways of talking, roundabout ways which seemed to thrive by ignoring the exact matter of the conversation. So she said nothing. She looked at the ships and set her imagination loose upon the nearest one. All at once she found herself sailing to distant, undiscovered continents.

  Eva had mentioned this sailing desire to Birgitte only once. The maid looked scandalized and said such notions were not suitable for a young lady.

  There were many things, Eva was learning, which might not be spoken aloud. They lived in the emptiness, unstated, and so unfixed.

  The first spider appeared with no warning. Eva woke, curled and cold one chill autumn morning, and there it was. A large-bodied, lightly-furred one crouched in the corner of the ceiling. Her first instinct was to shout in fright, but before she could utter a word, the spider moved. Its motion was not fast and scuttling, as she expected. It was slow and careful and deliberate. As she watched, it released a single, shimmering thread of web. Eva was transfixed.

  All through the morning — whilst Birgitte helped her to dress, the maid’s fingers deftly working buttons and frills, whilst Eva’s mother came to stand in the doorway and gaze at them and opened her mouth as if to say something and then did not, and went away, whilst Eva dutifully ate her breakfast, whilst Birgitte opened some books and asked questions about the Kings and Queens of Sweden without really expecting a response — Eva had one eye on the spider. There it was, moving delicately from strand to strand, expanding and perfecting its web.

  And she knew the spider had one eye following her.

  She sensed it.

  When Eva and Birgitte returned from their afternoon walk the spider was gone. Eva waited impatiently for Birgitte to take her outdoor clothes, and as soon as Birgitte was in the next room she climbed onto the bed and peered up into the corner of the ceiling. A thread of web fluttered listlessly against the wall.

  The disappointment was crushing.

  It was clear what had happened. The housemaid had come to clean the room. Sweeping and dusting, poking into corners, she must have destroyed the web. Eva did not doubt that the spider had been killed.

  It was stupid to cry, but she couldn’t stop herself.

  That night Eva had the most vivid dream of her life. A storm raged over the ocean, black and churning. Buffeted every which way by the winds was a ship, its sails torn to shreds, the crewmen running about the decks like ants as the ship rolled first to port, then to starboard, its masts almost touching the water with every violent list. As Eva watched (from a distance — she was flying, she thought) a bolt of lightning smote the ship and it exploded, masts splintering and toppling, bows wrenching apart. From its exposed interior streamed gold. Threads of gold, wriggling through the black sea. Veils of gold, settling upon the surface of the waves. Airborne gold rising in feathery plumes, scooped up by the many legs of spiders, who suspended their webs from the clouds to catch the gold, and devour it.

  Eva.

  Someone was calling her name.

  Eva.

  She opened her eyes and gasped. The spider was directly over her head, dangling from a slender thread. She could see the individual hairs on its segmented body and its many, twitching legs.

  “Spider,” she whispered.

  The spider moved quickly then, scurrying up the thread, across the ceiling and down the wall too quickly for Eva to follow.

  It was the same spider, she was certain of it. Somehow, it had survived.

  The discovery filled her with delight, until Birgitte arrived. Her appearance presented a fresh dilemma. The spider would spin another web. That was what spiders did. The housemaid would return, the room would be cleaned, and the spider’s home would be lost once more. Unless Eva could find a way to save it, the spider’s fate remained uncertain.

  An idea came to Eva. Over breakfast, she brushed some crumbs into a napkin, and when Birgitte’s head was turned, shook the napkin quickly under the bed.

  Eva’s mother sidled around the door. At her breast she was wearing a pin given to her by Captain Lindberg. Her fingertips brushed over the surface of the pin in a constant repetitive gesture.

  “Birgitte,” she said. Although her eyes were on Eva. Such anxious eyes!

  “Yes, Fru?”

  Eva’s mother looked confused and slid from the room. She moved like water, seeming to pour herself from perch to perch, never letting go one handhold until she had grasped the next. Birgitte closed the door. Her mouth set in a pinched expression which Eva knew meant trouble, curtailed walks or a sudden enthusiasm for embroidery, but today it did not matter. Today, she had a secret.

  It was a fresh, damp day for their expedition. Birgitte said there had been a storm last night. Between the wind and the thunder, she had not slept a wink.

  “A storm?” Eva was surprised. “I didn’t hear it.”

  “Fröken must sleep like the dead,” said Birgitte. “God
rest their souls.”

  They were nearing the waterfront. Birgitte peered ahead.

  “What’s going on here, then?”

  The harbour was all commotion. Too many people, decided Birgitte, and began to lead Eva away, but the girl tugged in the other direction, and between the two of them straining and the press of the crowds they found themselves moving closer to the harbour rather than further away.

  Birgitte asked the questions. It was a ship, they were told. An East India ship, almost at the completion of its journey home, capsized in the night by the storm. Its cargo had been set upon by rogue vessels.

  “Pirates?” asked Birgitte in a low voice, as though by shielding Eva from the word she could protect her from their very existence. Eva listened intently.

  Pirates, yes, but everyone had prospered, beggars and thieves alike. The loot must be all over Stockholm.

  Eva remembered the sinuous threads of gold from her dream and grew horribly afraid. What did it mean, that she had dreamed this thing? Who wanted her to know? Now the roles were reversed; it was Birgitte who was curious to see the damage, and Eva who wanted to leave, overcome by a sick, dread feeling in her stomach.

  By the end of their walk, the feeling had shifted its shape, settling into something quite different. She had known about the ship, before anybody else in Stockholm. The spider had told her.