The Embarkation of St Ursula

      THE EMBARKATION OF ST URSULA

The water hustled round the quay plashing at the walls of customs houses and the apartments of sea captains. On the opposite side of the bay trees caught the lingering summer sun. There was a sense of concentrated magic. Kinsen soaked up the atmosphere willing it to remain. Somewhere a door creaked. The nurse entered a room with walls of dirty beige. They were bare save only for one picture. Her own linen too was ragged and stained. There was no quay now.

Today’s the day”, she said “You still planning to ride down to Mexico?”

He didn’t answer. Somehow he couldn’t any more. Men make plans promising themselves implementation. But things get left.

She was packing a bag for him. He failed to notice what went in the bag. He followed her outside being somehow already fully dressed. There was a white horse waiting. There was no clue as to who had brought it, and he spent no time puzzling over that fact. She offered to help him aboard but he mounted on his own. He admired the shiny pommel of the saddle, and his feet were in the stirrups.

“May you prosper, Bonington Kinsen”, she said “You that they call Bon. They say whole Yankee regiments would cross deep gorges for the avoidance of you; such tales were told to the children by Dixie’s nannies”.

He still made no response. Her words seemed unreal, and said too late and pointlessly. He had already fought in two wars and to no avail. He had meted out death to those like Jennison’s raiders who had butchered his tribe, riding in from Kansas foaming with blood lust. And then the War Between The States, the other states seemingly interfering in the private business of Missouri and Jennison’s place. There was no pride in that he felt, no anything. His life had become memory, nothing but memory.

He rode away from her. He seemed still to be in Missouri, as he had presumably been since Westport. What a crushing of hope. Of limbs too. After the battle, the fateful battle, the end of something, many things, they had amputated a leg before he could protest stuffing a dirty chloroform soaked rag into his face. But his fierceness even then made them put it back on again. And ever since he had been in that field hospital. Others had already left, some by simple dying. He was the last. Now he kept a pallid sun to his right and rode a straight line into the Nations.

Brachiopods and sea horses and other ichtyioid clusters pass above. Grey, nimboid creatures swimming before the wind. Their shapes are permeable, illusory, clumps of water that play like finger shadows in candled rooms. They will extinguish the last star until there is only eternity gaping through their Protean contours. Then the rain drenched him. It splashed the ground like a thousand stallions pissing. The trees gathered in their crannies surfeits of water that the wind dislodged in torrents. An old Cherokee passed; he was ten foot high The Captain allowed himself one backward glance. He saw the Indian stagger, and mud cloying.

At dawn the rain ceased. There was a pink sheen in the east and a mist that hung on the trees in horizontal swathes making ghosts of them. He leant forward into the new day uncertain of his tenancy in the world.  Through woodlands of elm and hickory soaked by recent rain. The Cherokee now rode behind him and sang songs of lamentation for the South’s defeat.

More riding, more changes of scenery. The trees grew thinner. Somehow he got to Mexico. The Cherokee like the quay was gone. He reckoned he must have crossed that same river that Shelby had. That was the point of the journey though mostly even that passed him by. Shelby’s Iron Brigade, the finest of cavalry, refused to surrender at Appomattox and decamped to Mexico. Journeys need points. But points can be excuses. He seemed to no longer know what or why; indeed hadn’t since Westport.. He felt weaker; the old wound maybe.  

Days slipped by; he rode past acacia and sotol rather than elm, and cottonwoods rattling their leaves by thin streams. He passed the sculpture-like bones of long dead cattle at an abandoned hacienda. How tired he felt. But ahead lay a church sparkling white in the setting sun, and the sky around and above it was divided in the horizontal into the three primary colours, blue, yellow and red. And outside the church was a shimmering lake and at its edge the nurse was smiling and waving to him. He threw off his jacket; despite his wound he leapt from his horse and dived into the lake.

Into the mud. For that was all it was. He stood up and looked at the mess he had become. He looked at the church which was a dark burned ruin without glass or even for the most part roof. Of the nurse there was no sign. He knew she had never been there.

Yet more riding. Now the rigid boundaries of the primary colours of the sky were smudging. The blue, growing ever darker, fell headlong into the yellow, which satisfied itself by providing a small halo for the red which was now nothing but a tiny aureole of fire on the distant horizon.

He undid the saddlehorn strapped to the horse and he noticed that the beast was no longer white. He took out the bag packed by the nurse and unbuttoned it. Inside there were some clothes, a cigar, a couple of lucifers and that picture.

He could barely see it in the dying light so he struck one of the lucifers on the heel of his boot. Then he could see the quay, the customs houses, the trees.

“What have we here?”

He spun round and saw a carriage. An amazing sight in the twilight, its door gleaming with painted flowers, and candles visible from inside and a woman’s face. But it was a man who had spoken and he was standing on the stony ground with his hands on his hips considering Kinsen.

“A wild Americano is it not”, and he laughed.

He spoke in English but the way Mexicans do.

“Are you one of the bandits who fled across the Bravo. I know their names”.

So did Kinsen. There was John Thrailkill out of Missouri and Ben Thompson with his pistols. And other desperate men whose deeds would be emblazoned into legend. It all started at Appomattox. And there was Bon Kinsen with Jennison’s men on his tail. Was this man sent to kill him?

“That will not be necessary”. The man spoke obliquely but to Kinsen it was as if he was a mind reader full of sorcery and guile. How he struggled to speak and how thin his voice had become.

“Nothing is real. All is illusion” he gasped.

The man nodded and stepped forward. Gently he took hold of the picture and studied it in the near-dark.

“This is the Lorrainer if I am not mistaken. Claude of Lorraine. And indeed there never was such a place as this. But without this man there may never been the Romantics a hundred years or more after. You are perhaps the last of the Romantics”

Kinsen said nothing. He felt the dark was darker to him than for this man of light.

“You are right. All is illusion. I am an architect and I have visited the greatest edifice in Europe. That is the Parthenon. Its columns pretend. Pretence at straightness, pretence at verticality, pretence of symmetry. Quite extraordinary.  Illusion there that makes things seem more real. But romantic illusion makes life bearable. No, more than bearable. It makes it wonderful.”

Kinsen could now barely see or even hear the architect. Some dim final words reached him. “That picture- it’s called “The Embarkation of St Ursula”.

Back in Westport on that lost Missouri frontier two-month-old weeds were growing over a grave on which Jo Shelby had personally engraved the epitaph “Captain Bonington Kinsen. Most valiant of men. Most true a friend”