“And what, sir, if they don’t let us pass? Men on short rations—”
“Strike sails, Aloysius.”
Aloysius was disappointed, but kept his face pinned so that no one could have claimed he had disagreed with the captain. I caught it, though. How a stern visage could make even a dull person of good use. A great bustling ensued about us as everything aboard this ship, whose purpose in creation was meant for movement through water, was brought to halt. The stoppage was so abrupt that even the towed canoe, the shallop from which they had boarded the Castellón, bumped nose first into the aft hull. The Castellón languished far to the rear. It had been unable to keep time with the Falls Greenway and was not even a concern at the moment.
Night was falling and a French ship of the line was approaching. These were two facts on every tongue, and though they meant little to me, I feared they made all about us so wary that we keened our eyes toward the far horizon, trying to see what fate that could bring us. Perhaps, I thought, this meant a vessel large enough to take down these English rogues. We had gone from the hands of Saracens to these men, and rough though they might be, we were far better off. What would French sailors be like? And would they return us to Jamaica or take us to France? The English struck the colors and shrouded all the sails, sending men to man the guns but wait with the hatches shut.
“Strike that lamp!” someone called, and the single lantern on board was doused.
The Irish prisoner who had asked me for the salt water shoved us aside and poured my bucket of salt water on the brazier, sending a plume of smoke into our faces. Hallcroft himself shouted, “Damned fool! The smoke will be seen!”
“Aye, sir. I should have put a plank on it. My apologies!”
I watched him with open mouth. The man was lying! He had done it for a signal, I would swear on a Bible.
Dinmitty turned to another sailor and said, “Get the prisoners below and lock them up. Take that little one,” he said, pointing to me. “One sound from any one of them and cut out her heart and feed it to the sharks.”
“Aye, sir,” the sailor said. “Move!” he shouted in my ear.
I moved without sound, bare feet on wood planks, to the place he chose for me to stand. I chanced to look beyond the rail to the dark form that approached us out of the rust-colored sky. Everyone held quiet. Even the sea stilled and the wind paused as the hulk came within hailing distance and crossed our bow. I heard a loose sail flap on the ship across the waves.
Captain Hallcroft took his chin in his hand and frowned. “Not a light. Not a sound. She’s dead in the water.”
A lone seagull begged exception from above. Then, no doubt at the same moment the others saw it, I perceived a swarm of gulls on the deck, circling, quarreling, chasing up and down the rigging. The great, lumbering ship of the line was adrift. A voice just audible above the screeching gulls floated on the wind, saying, “Ohé, ohé. La peste! Sauvez-vous! La peste!”
I watched Hallcroft sneer and turn to Dinmitty, whose mouth opened wider than his eyes. “They have the plague, sir. Make sail immediately.”
“Ask him how many are alive.”
Dinmitty went to the railing and called out, “Combien en vie?”
“Aucun,” came the answer. “La peste.”
“None, sir,” Dinmitty said. “Even the warning man must be afflicted.”
The sailor prodded me in the side and I began the descent into the hold, but I heard Hallcroft say, “Burn it to the waterline.”
From my peephole I could not see the death ship but I heard the call for archers to ready their oil pots and bows. I put together the whole story from the springing sound of the arrows’ flight, the roiling sound of angry, hungry gulls, the crackling of burning timber, falling rigging, and great exploding powder kegs. I smelled the reek of broiling flesh burned too long. From my wee hole I saw that the sky again turned orange and bright for many minutes before darkness fell around us.
Another call sounded from above. “Rats! Rats!” men shouted. Hundreds of desperate, swimming rats came this way after leaving the death ship.
Cora said, “Rats will bring plague to us all, then,” and she rolled over and said no more. I heard hissing, as if gravel fell from the sky, and though it was dark outside, I stood and put my eye to the hole again. I could not make out the calls overhead. I pictured the pelting sound on the water being the feet of hoards of black rodents running across the surface of the sea clambering over each other toward this ship. I kept my face away from the wood itself, afraid the rats might see me and scurry right into the peephole. After more shouting, the crew spread a path of oil and tar around us. I watched an arc of fire go across the sky; sizzling, it vanished into the water. Another dot of fire soared off the top deck and this time it hit something in the water and flames spread across the waves and came to life.
The rats swam into the flames. Their other choice was to drown. I saw a fin. A shark had come to dine. I smiled, wondering how he would enjoy roasted rat instead of raw fish. All that mattered was that the rats did not make it onto the ship. Whether a shark took the plague and died I cared not at all.
The waves kept on, but at length the heavy splashing and the frantic small splattering sound ceased. The flames died at last. Darkness covered the deep, and there was naught to see or hear. I sat, my back against the hull, and stared into the emptiness in my soul. “We shall get home, again,” I said. “I know we shall.” I curled up next to Patience.
Cora lay on Patey’s other side and said a single word and nothing more. It was enough. “Plague.”
* * *
Full seven hungry days came and went without further events except one. Patience had gone above the night before, then woke me one morning, and asked, “Did you move my shoes?” She called out, “My shoes are gone. Who has taken my shoes? I will tear your hair out and chop you into shark bait.”
“Patience,” I said, raising my voice to the level of hers, “what a threat to make. Ma would be ashamed.” Had she learned such glorious villainy from dancing with the sailors on those nights when she went above? I had never heard such abuse from a female and I enjoyed the power of it. She was filled with venom and I wanted to remember the words for the sheer strength they implied.
“I want my shoes.”
No one made a sound. My own slippers were long gone. They would not have fit her anyway, but there was nothing I could offer. “Maybe someone borrowed the shoes.” I turned toward the other women. “Some person has borrowed Miss Talbot’s shoes. They should hand them back and no trouble will come to them.”
“La. Be shushed, Resolute,” Patey said. “No use. There is a thief’s heart amongst us and it is colder than stone already.”
The ship moved, and I had gotten so used to its sounds, that I knew we made way with great speed. I believed they never struck sail but kept at it day and night. I could not imagine how far north we had come, though the sun no longer climbed straight overhead but rose off the stern and set off the stern. It felt to me as if we were bound to sail off the top of the world and into an abyss the likes of which God alone would fathom. Patience continued to go above about every three or four days, but in all those nights she had not found a way to scavenge us another loaf or even a small egg. Even the sailors were going hungry, and naught to drink but poor rum. I was thankful she had not come back with so many bruises. No one returned her shoes.
After a few more days’ hard sailing we lay at anchor two nights, not moving until the third day. During those days they sent the canoe ashore to bring back food. I wondered if August, the ship’s venerable new coxswain, had rowed it.
They brought back water and dried beef, casks of oranges for the sailors. For the prisoners, though, they put hardtack in the pot and added water and fish heads. Sometimes our stew was naught but fish heads. Often it had vegetables I knew nothing of, nor would I have sought those save that my stomach was so unaccustomed to being full by then that I would have eaten a bedpost had it been well steamed. Once in a
while Hallcroft took a look at the captives’ cooking pot, wrinkled his nose, and walked on.
On a day like all the others, I hauled my bucket of water to the deck and sat upon a coil of rope. I began to shake and stared for some moments at my feet, missing both slippers and stockings, covered with a scum of dull black. The nails had grown some and the bottoms had become callused. I feared I had taken ill, but felt no pain, nor did I faint or have any vagary other than a swimming in my brain. It was the scurvy, I feared. I sat for several moments and had just found my feet when I heard a cry from across the deck and rose on tiptoe to see.
One of the Saracen sailors joined another captive in argument with one of the English and without warning he bolted for the side of the ship. He lunged fast and sailed forward in a jump overboard but his foot snagged part of a net. Like a great bass they pulled him aboard, fighting and straining. They clapped hands upon him and dragged him to a post where they made his hands fast with knots. The sailors brought Dinmitty there and the captain came, too. Men gathered around so I could not see, but I heard the men make charges against the Saracen. Dinmitty ordered the man who’d caught him to deliver forty lashes with a cat. A voice I knew as well as my own came through the din, and August’s voice said, “Sir, you can hardly blame them,” though it stopped short. I thought that August had been murdered, and began to cry over my saltwater bucket, turning my face to the wind.
I was glad I could not see then, for I heard enough. Each fall of the cat snagged through the air like a wind-whipped thorn bush, making me shudder, the sound pricking my skin as if I felt each blow. I could not know who was being lashed but a man roared in agony. Was that the prisoner or my brother’s newfound deep voice? After twenty-eight lashes he ceased crying out. At thirty-nine lashes, Dinmitty’s voice called a halt and someone said, “Dead, Cap’n.”
Naught but silence followed. A few mumbled words I could not make out flitted across the deck like so many dead birds blown to the boards. I gave full way to my tears then, staring hard toward the crowd of sailors. When the men moved away at long last, there was August, standing at attention next to the gory body of the beaten man. He stared over the waves across the beastly remains, glancing neither left nor right, as if pinioned in place. August was not dead, that I knew. I dipped the rag into the bucket. Little by little, keeping my eyes away from the dead man hanging from his pillar, I found brass bits all the way across the deck and rubbed middlingly until I reached his side. “What are you doing, August?” I whispered.
“Toeing a line.” He tapped his toe against the deck, and I saw August’s boots were on the line of pitch between the beams. He hissed out the words through stiff lips, “Have mercy. Do not speak to me.”
I moved on, cleaning, if whisking a wet sop across anything in my path could be called cleaning. I made quick time away from my brother, to make myself appear as if I were carrying out my task. I was hurt that he should think my talk was some offense. Perhaps if he was seen in conversation his punishment could be far worse. There was that hideous corpse in his face to remind him. I rubbed my saltwater rag across nails on the pinnacle. It left shredded thread behind. My throat hurt from the tears running down inside it, though I felt relieved.
In the afternoon, August stood there while we were served our noggins of soup. He stood until the last dogwatch was called. He was still standing there when they herded us below like the oxen whose stalls we had replaced. I lay awake for hours. I might wish to say that dread about my brother’s welfare filled my mind; what kept me awake was a lost feeling that rather than them tormenting him to death, he would, by dint of all this rough treatment, become one of them, the tormentors.
And, while Patience had endured beatings, and August was standing stiff under the hot sun, I had suffered nothing more than famine. They had threatened to tear out my heart, I reminded myself, but that had not happened nor was there a sign that it was probable at that moment. Surely they would not have carried it out, one part of my mind said, while at once another part argued back that these were men who had thrashed a starving prisoner to death for trying to escape. He would have drowned anyway. Why not let the fool go? I thought, might I also prefer a quiet sleep in the sea with my pa, than to have the skin flayed from me until I bled away? These thoughts stayed fastened in my mind as if they made a pitch line against which I, too, held my dirty toes.
When they called the morning watch and a few of the women went up to start chores, I asked them to inquire for us about August’s welfare but no one spoke of him. By noon, they were sent down and I expected that I would be among those called to replace them, but we were kept below and the hatch above pinned fast and locked. The seas had grown during the morning, and hit the ship from the opposite side as it had the days before.
“Patey?” I asked. “What is happening?”
She shrugged lifelessly. “It might be a storm we have sailed into. A hurricane. I pray we shall all drown and they will lose their profits.”
“La, Patience. I do not want to die.”
The ship rose at a perilous angle then rocked back into place. She said, “I do.”
I stared into her eyes and what she said terrified me no less than the death I saw in her already. “I shall pray against you, then,” I whispered.
“You pray anything you choose. Pray to the wind, the sky, or the filth in the bilge. No god waits to either hear you or do your bidding. Pray to him or curse him, no matter. No saint arrives to save any girl from violence no matter the number of prayers. The saints are naught but shriveled skins and piles of bone. Fools all. What do I care if you pray? You may as well dance a jig or curse heaven. It does the same good.”
“La,” was all I could get out. I pulled away from her.
A sound assailed us much like the hundreds of rats swimming across the sea. The wind unleashed the wrath of the ages upon us. Sails whipped about with a great shearing sound; one of them tore asunder. The ship rose and fell across great swells as if it were crossing mountains. Some of the women grew sick from the pitching, though I stayed whole, proud now of my sea legs though I shuddered constantly. Beams all around gave out with great groaning and cracking as if the belly of the ship were coming undone and the Falls Greenway were as sick as the people aboard her. The malaise I felt was fear of Patience’s words. My sister, cursing God, brought this storm.
Yet, morning came. We crept up the ladder with something near jubilation into fresh air. August was near his post, exhausted and drenched, pale gray and drear as a heap of rope; he had tangled himself in heavy lines to save being washed overboard.
“On your feet, boy!” Aloysius said to him. August struggled but righted himself and stepped from a loop of rigging. I feared that the fool boatswain would deliver my brother a sound cuffing or worse, but all he said was, “That was a right williwaw if I ever seen one. Go below and sleep for the first watch and let that be a lesson. Never speak back to the officers of this ship.” As August passed Aloysius, the man slid something into August’s hand. It was a carrot-sized slice of dried beef. My throat went dry for the want of that beef, though glad I was that August had food. Had I known the man was capable of that sort of tenderness, I would have taken all his words differently.
On we went, forever it seemed, heading so that the sun rose at my right hand and set at the left as I faced the bow of the ship. As we moved, we found ourselves wont to huddle together at night for warmth. During the day my tattered gown did little to keep me warm, save for the heaviness of Ma’s quilted petticoat.
One day we sailed into what looked like a great loss of downy feathers from a flock of geese. Cold and wet, the stuff vanished in my hands. The wonderment of snow caused me to stare without ceasing at the sky. Patience helped me that day to remove my quilted petticoat and wrap it over my shoulders as if it were a cape. What a marvelous thought she had, too, as that made me a great deal warmer.
Even though the English sent parties to shore and brought back fresh food, Patience began to be sick even when
the ship was still, or at least when the rocking seemed a melancholic swing caught in a breeze, rather than the high gavotte of the stormy days. Nothing would calm her stomach, and if I tried to comfort her she shrieked at me so that I wondered if she had gone mad. After all those days aboard a ship, being a prisoner seemed inconvenient, rather than a hard punishment or captivity, for though we needed perhaps a doctor and rest and good broth for her, for me boredom had been my chiefest complaint other than hunger. Now it was cold.
These days there were no songs sung belowdecks. The earthy joy of African rhythm had frozen, too. When I was above and one or another of the sailors would take a rest from his work and pick up a flute or squeezebox, I clung to the notes of music as if they nestled in my innermost workings. One evening as an old squeezebox lent “If I Wast a Blackbird” the most elegant melancholia, I found privateers weeping in their cups. I gave myself to learning the tunes though some of the men spoke with the direst accents or mispronounced things entirely. I learned the words, too. Ma would have disapproved. “A coarse and lusty wench a-riding barebacked on a mare,” went one song, and another began with a chant of “Damn your eyes, Bos’n Bandy. Damn your eyes.” I had no idea what the song was about, but the tune was merry and anyone aboard deck might step out a few paces of a jig when they played it.
When I was made to clean, I was often cursed at in language of an art that would have made even my pa faint. I grew used to their words and soon realized there was less threat behind them than there was a natural tendency to venomous hissing, rather like a basketful of snakes afloat on the sea, so to even the reckoning, I began to pilfer. First a bit of thread or a button, sometimes a nail or a bit of rope, once, a hat. I tossed the things overboard soon as I got a chance, placing them on the gunwale and bumping them off with my elbow. It was rare I heard the splash, but I felt satisfied that their things were lost forever. One time I tossed over a belaying pin left loose in its notch. A sailor was cuffed and sent hunting the thing, and I smiled heartily at seeing his blackened eye.