Not Dead

They tore Jack McPherson limb from limb. Maybe they opened his belly before they killed him, or cut out his tongue or sliced off his cock. I always hoped not. I hoped those were exaggerations, flourishes born in the retelling. I hoped his death had been quick if not clean. But every word that made its way back to us from London was the same, in essence: they had killed him in the square, in a manner befitting traitors. They tied him to a pair of horses and those horses tore him apart.

“That poor man,” the widow Smith said to me late one night as we did the washing up. Then she looked guilty. “Could he really have tried to kill the king?”

I had to say that no, Jack was a good man, he wouldn’t do a thing like that. What else could I say? Turn to her over the soapy bowls and spoons, lower my voice so as not to wake her grand-babies, and tell her I was with him the morning it happened. That a group of us hid in the woods beside the king’s road. Tell her how I watched him sharpen the knife, and then sharpen it some more, sharpen it well after the thing needed doing, and then stand and take the blade in hand and walk out into the road to die.

I couldn’t tell her how he shone in that last moment before he disappeared among the trees. I couldn’t say that I heard how close he came to success.

Everyone said that Jack McPherson was dead. We never heard a soul tell it any other way. So it was strange, four years later, to walk into a roadside inn a few miles outside Brussels and see Jack sitting in the corner with a drink in his hand.

I was across the room before any thought could enter my head. I stared like a fool.

“Jack?”

He looked up. He looked at me as if he didn’t know me. But he was the spit and image of himself: the same dark hair and red beard, the same pale scar across the bridge of his nose. (He never told me where he got that scar. I’d wept, late at night, over the thought that I had lost my chance to ask.)

“Jack?” I was trembling. “Is it you?”

“Sit down, girl,” he said. “Have a drink. I’ll tell you all there is to tell.”

The story was short, simple, and strange. It began on the banks of the Thames.

He awoke in the shallows of the riverbed. He said “woke” because that was how it felt. As if he’d been only sleeping. His hands were whole, and where they ought to be. His legs were whole. His arms and shoulders were whole. And as he confirmed these facts, drenched in the wet and filth, he was gasping and shaking like a drowned man. Perhaps he thought that was what had happened to him, in those first moments. That he had gone into the river and drowned.

“You don’t remember?” I said hopefully. “You don’t remember what happened before?”

“Don’t ask me that,” he said, which was answer enough.

He thought, also, that he was covered in blood, before he realized that it was only the stinking black mud of the riverbed. He wandered down the banks, speaking to no one, he said, though he also said he was befriended by a sailor and brought aboard a merchant ship. He didn’t seem to notice the contradiction.

No matter how he got there. He found himself aboard a ship. When the sun set he was looking back on England with lungs full of salt, and it was only then that he could really breathe again. He didn’t have a plan. He didn’t think what he would do when the ship next reached land. He wanted to be away from London, that was all. He wanted to be away from anything he’d ever seen before.

“But could you not have sent a message?” The words burst from me. “I can understand—of course—you wanted to be away from London. But once you were safe. Could you not have sent a letter? Some word? Any hint that you were safe?”

He looked at me like a hound. The same baleful, uncomprehending expression. “Why?” he said.

“Why? Because we though you dead,” I hissed. I had not known I was angry until I heard my own voice. “Horribly dead. We mourned you. I had dreams—awful dreams.”

“I have bad dreams,” he said. “Shall I go on?”

I examined his face. I was searching for guilt, for any sign of regret. A painful knot began to drawn tight in my stomach. “Yes,” I said. “Yes, go on.”

He stumbled off the ship in Brussels. He’d gotten clean on the journey. He’d gotten into sailors’ clothes. Perhaps he’d done a sailor’s job, he didn’t know. At port he slunk away into the streets of the strange city, and walked until he reached the outskirts, and kept walking. When he was too hungry to go on, he stopped at an inn, tended by a widow and her daughter. The daughter took a liking to him, and so he stayed, and here he was. That was all.

“There she is.” Jack nodded to a plump yellow-haired girl weaving between the tables. “Pretty, eh?”

I stared at him. I felt hollowed out.

“What do you tell her? About your past?”

He shrugged. “My dad beat me as a kid. I was jumped by a pack of soldiers during the war. I tell her whatever I can to explain myself.”

I didn’t know what he meant. My mind was churning. “But you’re unharmed. You’re—you’re whole.” I looked at his hands. What did I expect? For them to disappear? Turn to wood? Turn to dust? They were just hands. Scarred and creased like any working man’s.

“It’s a miracle,” I said. “This is the work of God.”

I was shaking again. Jack was very still. “Or the devil,” he said. “One’s as likely as the other.”

“Jack.” I leaned forward and lowered my voice. “Jack, the king of England lies now on his deathbed. Within days—maybe hours—they will crown his nephew. Remember what you told me? That they say the boy is gentle-tempered? That blood will no longer run through the streets of English towns?”

Why wouldn’t he look at me? Why wouldn’t his expression change? Didn’t he understand?

“It’s done, Jack,” I whispered.

He was silent for a long moment. Then he raised his cup and drank. “I don’t care about that,” he said. “I don’t have it in me to care.”

Those were his words. I can hear their echo, even now.

I sat as if struck by a blow. I wanted to be angry. I wanted to call him a liar. But I watched him sit back in his chair and drink again and I saw that he was telling the truth. Whether the king lived or died. Whether the streets ran with blood or they didn’t. He did not care.

I can’t describe the terror that seized me then. More like fury than like any fear I’d felt before. My breath froze in my lungs. An icy hand closed around my throat. It wasn’t fear of death. Or fear of pain. I conquered both of those before I began, before my first day as a fresh-faced scullery maid in the palace kitchen. And besides: I would never be stripped and gutted and pulled apart. I was a woman. If I were caught, I would be burnt.

I looked across the table, and the man before me no longer looked so much like my old friend. This was only a stranger, deceiving me, amusing himself at my expense. I had seen Jack in his face because I missed Jack terribly. Because I had thought of him so often on the long lonely ship ride away from England. Because I had wanted him to be alive.

I waited until I could be sure my voice would not tremble. “You are a liar,” I said. “You aren’t Jack McPherson at all.”

I had forgotten there were twenty other men and women in the room, eating and drinking, chattering in Dutch, in French, in scattered snatches of English. I shrunk in my seat. Had I kept my voice low enough? I wanted to jump to my feet and run from the room, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was too afraid.

“Alright,” said the stranger I’d mistaken for Jack. He smiled for the first time. It was a familiar smile. “Alright, girl, settle down. You’re right. I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

“Anne,” I said, and then remembered I didn’t know him. “Miss Smith.”

“Miss Smith,” he said agreeably. He finished his drink to the last swallow and pushed himself up from the table with a wince. He looked me over slowly, carefully, as if he knew he would never see me again. I remember these moments very well, for I have turned them over in my head on many a sleepless night since. His face. His eyes. The words he spoke. On nights I feel close to madness, I convince myself it was a dream, or a phantasm, or a ghost. But other nights I know he sat across from me, flesh and blood, and this was what he said:

“Have another drink. At no cost, for your trouble.” He was smiling again. Before he turned and walked away he bent his head to my ear. “Safe travels, Miss Smith. Don’t get caught.”