February 1st, 1776
“Bono,” I pressed, “do we know absolutely that — the scene of my conception —?” (My mouth could not utter the words.) “Might she have been pregnant before she was taken upon the ship, as she always averred? Did she speak to you ever of my parentage? Whose child I am?”
He was not easy with this questioning. “Reckon I don’t know,” he said.
“She told me my father was a prince.”
It was shortly after the bell rang for the close of morning watch; we paraded the deck by company for the exercise of our limbs. The sky was dark: gray clouds above black ruin.
I owned, “For some years, growing sensible that some part or whole of her narration was not founded upon the firmest bedrock of veracity —”
“Ha,” said Bono.
“For some years, I feared I might be Mr. Gitney’s child.”
“Now, that is a fate worse than death. If that be true, you should consign yourself to the waves this same moment.” He gestured carelessly over the rails. “Especially if that nose come out late in life.” His jest made, he amended, “You ain’t Mr. Gitney’s child. Understand? Dr. Trefusis says she was big with child when she arrived.”
“Which signifies what? Six months following conception? Seven?”
He shrugged his shoulders, saying, “Don’t rightly know. She was a skinny little thing; could have been three months and she was already big with child for aught I know.”
“You calculate it could have been as little as three months?”
“But the College could’ve boughten her at any time after she showed: seven months, eight, nine. Any.”
“How long lasts a transit across the Atlantic?”
“Sweet mercy, Prince O., I pray you, don’t torment your own self. You ain’t going to find a father through numbers.”
“We know not what transpired while she was immured in the slave castle.”
“I reckon it takes like to two months across the Atlantic, but that’s from England, and no stopping. Your mother, she went to Jaimaica or Barbados or such and then up the coast. So longer. What does that tot up to? And then there’s winds. I can’t recall, but it’s faster going the one way than the other. Because of winds.”
“So I could be the child of a sailor.”
“Or a jailor. Or another captive. Or a prince. Or a king.” With a great look of sympathy, he pleaded, “Don’t worry your own self this way, Prince O. I am asking, because I will tell you, you ain’t ever going to know the answer. First moment you’ll know who made your body is when you leave it behind and can pose a few sharp questions in the avenues of Paradise.”
With an anger my companion little deserved, I replied, “I wish to know who I am.”
And with some irritation, he responded, “Then recall that you enjoy the fiddle and Scots tunes and them Italian trumperies and you enjoy treacle tarts and, when it rains, books where men in fine dresses throw spears at each other’s feet. Recall you got a friend you once called Pro Bono and you got companions you call Slant and Pomp and Will, and they call you Buckra, and in the enlistment rolls, you’re named Private Octavian Nothing. Because we ain’t anything more than a name and some likes and some distastes and a story we tell about ourselves.”
“And what others say about us.”
“If you want them stories heaped in, too, then you’re welcome to them. And we’re a body; and sometimes the stories and the name, they live on after the body — and sometimes the body lives longer than the name or the story, though that ain’t for aye, especially if”— and here he raised his voice —“a set of FOOLS confines you to a ship rotten with PLAGUES.”
We circumnavigated the deck in our rows.