The Difference

by Marina Endicott

  She drew the alphabet, which had been of some assistance in training the Indian children, and got him to trace the letters on scrap paper and erase them until they were perfect. In Shanghai she would try to find a child’s primer; she missed her old books.

  “Ship,” she said, and waved her arms around them and at the little boat she’d drawn.

  “Shit,” he said, and Kay bent farther over her books to hide her laughter. Thea kicked her ankle beneath the table; mockery would not help the pupil. She said the word again, drawing his attention to the difference in the making of the t sound and the p sound. Both were present in Polynesian languages, and he learned quickly.

  When he’d had enough of schooling, Aaron helped Seaton mend sail, followed Jacky Judge up into the rigging or sat with Kay, feet through the railing, watching the crew scuttle around the ship. In the afternoon they had another session, and Thea drew more pictures of ladies and houses and bears and cats to illustrate the words she was teaching him. He had a quick mind and a good ear, and he liked to please her. He loved to play this is the church and this is the steeple, especially when her hands turned inside out to show all of the people inside them, or twisted into the parson going upstairs.

  The days grew longer and warmer, and even slower. Francis said they would be out of sight of land now for some weeks, and out of danger from marauding canoes. Seeing that they were also out of chickens, and had not been able to barter for more, Thea decreed it was time to butcher Mr. Dennis. The pig was always called that, it being considered unlucky to mention the word pig on board ship—Thea still did not know why.

  Liu Jiacheng managed the butchery before she came up in the morning; but a great harvest of blood had been saved in buckets lined up along the deck, for making blood sausage and headcheese. Shuddering at the smell, Kay declared she would do her work in the saloon. Not being so dainty in his sensibilities, Aaron stayed on deck watching interestedly while Thea and Jiacheng portioned and dressed the meat and Mr. Best, bustling in, set up the smoker at the rear of the House for smoking sausage.

  A long, busy day. After a good dinner of roast pork, Thea found herself genuinely tired by evening. So was Aaron, it seemed. While she played lingering Chopin nocturnes in the twilit saloon, the boy crouched to watch her feet go up and down, pressing on them gently as she pressed the pedals, before rising when she paused in the music to climb up into her arms like a baby. Kay had not done such a thing for many years.

  His skin was warm and clean, his bones light as air. Thea reminded herself that he was very young. Francis had settled on eight years old, given the small stature of his people, and had given him the day of his acquisition, December 1, for a birthday. The birthday of his new life. His head, pressed into her shoulder, was all over soft and sweet-smelling. Eyes still hidden, he reached up and stroked her cheek with one hand. She held him tighter, glad that Francis had gone up to speak to Mr. Wright.

  What his life must have been like, she could scarcely imagine. Poor, certainly, and hungry, but he was a loving child, and that is learned from loving parents. She tried to turn her mind away from thinking of his mother. Life on these islands could not be easy. Perhaps Aaron’s mother had too many children to feed, and would not notice—well, hardly that, but perhaps be glad that one was well taken care of now. Perhaps she had died, as women so easily did in these cultures. The father had had no qualms in selling him, after all!

  A benevolent God had given her the chance to save this one soul at least from poverty and starvation—to bring him up as a Christian, in love and kindness, and as part payment for the deaths of all those poor Blade Lake children—and she would do her best.

  12

  China

  The Morning Light docked in Shanghai, and the discharging of her case oil cargo began. The harbour smell hammered into Kay’s nose: intoxicating, almost suffocating—she put her hat over her face for respite. The land wind carried spinning odours of sherry wine or Hollands gin, fruit-laden as it came in old fruitcake, with a following assault of fish paste and fetid meat. The cleaner snap of mace was left behind in the islands; complicated, darkening rot now crawled in at every breath. The harbour was clogged with putrid things; little catamarans and push-boats picked their way through the watery mess even while adding to it; every boat had on it someone tossing a basin of slops or night soil over the side. Kay shivered to think of falling into that dark-moving murk.

  While Aren helped Jiacheng and Arthur Wetmore turn out the kitchen and restock, Kay and Thea spent a whole day housecleaning the cabin: taking screws out of tables and chairs so they might move about the room again, rolling out the carpet, finding summer slipcovers for the settee, et cetera—all the dainty things that make life comfortable in port. Since they would stay in Shanghai for a month, pictures and photographs came out of the lazaret, old china Kay had never seen, and all the other treasures Francis had picked up in various places, including the famous Hundred Faces fan that had been given to his father by their Shanghai partner, Mr. Yen, in 1880. On the fifty two-foot ivory sticks of one side, fifty faces were carved, and on the other side, forty-nine; the face of the one holding the fan became the hundredth face. With these things set up in their accustomed positions, the Aft cabin looked fully dressed, quite different from when the Morning Light was at sea.

  When he came back from the market, Aren roamed the room, touching every new thing with a careful finger. Inspecting it with his skin, Kay thought. Once he had made the place his own again, he surveyed the whole room and, with a conscious look at Thea, nodded his head in the English way of agreement, saying carefully, “Very nice, shipshape!”

  But he could not keep his eyebrows from lifting, lifting to Kay, as they did when he wished to say yes.

  The harbour water still moved and shifted and moved as the sun set, but the night sounds of little boats rowing and people chatting to each other were almost soothing. Lying in her bunk, almost asleep, Kay pressed one hand against the wood. Outside that wooden barrier, the China Sea pressed back.

  * * *

  —

  Francis spent the thirty days in Shanghai on business arrangements, working the local shippers to find charters for this trip and the next several projected voyages. Between company visits, the city was a splendid place for shopping, with streets and streets of little shops, each for one purpose and one purpose only. Still wearing hand-me-downs, Aren was left on the ship, happily learning knots and ropes and carving with Seaton; Kay went along or did not, as the mood took her. More often she stayed with her books, especially after Thea presented her with the Middle Liddell, found in a crowded bookshop with spectacularly packed shelves stretching up thirty feet, and a spindly ladder to reach the highest, as high as a crow’s nest.

  Kay found the city strange and a little frightening. So civilized, the apex of humanity and learning, but so crowded, all dirt and cacophony. And backward, as Thea pointed out, in very many ways. A hodgepodge of the possibilities. Jiacheng, knowing the lie of the land, had advised them where to find the book, and escorted them to the very street. At home here, he absented himself from the ship at strange hours, and might be seen slipping up the gangplank from shore like a wraith in the pre-dawn, emerging from the crowd of other Chinese people to enter the ship’s world as himself, known among all these unknown.

  * * *

  —

  One day they travelled by cart to the famous Yuyuan Garden, which had been damaged in the Opium Wars but was still worth seeing, Francis said. He had been visiting this place since he was a little boy, with his own sea captain father. Many of the statues were broken, and the little pavilions had sad holes knocked in their walls, but the vegetation had recovered from that long-ago assault. After walking, they sat to rest on a litter of gold beneath an ancient ginkgo tree, said to be three hundred years old, whose autumn drift of fan-shaped yellow leaves was the most beautiful thing Kay saw in China. “The earth repairs itself,” Thea said; Kay w
ondered how much damage it would take to be irreparable.

  During their long stay in harbour, Thea and Francis walked every afternoon, dipping into various promenades, Jiujiang Road and others. Francis believed in acquiring nice things—investments that might grow in value, Kay supposed he meant, china and ornaments and curiosities. But Thea was interested in the ordinary things of daily life, pipes and shoes and games. Kay liked both. She was sadly materialistic, as long as somebody else fetched the things; then she was happy to look at them in peace, in the cool-shaded saloon.

  Like Aren, Kay was happiest aboard the Morning Light. She did like to stravaig along the first stretch of the Bund, where all the great ships lay moored, but only in daylight, and only if Aren went with her. He was a good companion, and they could tell Thea and Francis they had been practising English, even if all they did was jabber hello how are you I am very well I thank you what a nice day is it not back and forth and point out oddities to each other.

  She had a dream, several nights running, of a port—not here at the Bund, and not the Morning Light, but quite another ship, made of iron. She dreamed of falling from a high wharf or pier into low-tide water, falling between the pier and the great black ship tied up there, into oily black water far, far below. The water sucked and churned at the pilings and the ship swayed in its chains, and she knew she would be crushed before she could drown. The dream ship went out to sea then and was attacked, or sometimes it blew up in harbour, leaving her clinging to the dark, rotted wood of the pilings.

  Because Thea did not mention it, she thought she must not have cried out with the dreams. The only respite was work; but Cyrus was now too familiar, and the Odyssey still too difficult for her skills. It frustrated her to be without Mr. Brimner, whose casual guidance she had not appreciated enough while she had it. Then, breaking out of scholarship, she would hie up Pilot for a race down the deck, or go below to find Aren where he sat listening to Jiacheng.

  Jiacheng was teaching Aren rudimentary Chinese phrases, to the comforting sound of his elegant and efficient knife working its way through whatever was to be for dinner. Aren was allowed to chop too. Kay was not; the first time she was let, she managed to snick her finger and bled a little. Although she swore it was no matter, Jiacheng did not give her the knife again.

  Listening to Jiacheng and Aren speaking Chinese made her think of Blade Lake. There was no pleasure for Kay in listening to language, she liked to see it written down—that seemed to be the only gate that opened for her. But she kept seeking meaning in what they said. ‘I don’t like foreigners,’ she had heard Miss Ramsay tell Father once. ‘One cannot grasp the nuance, the thoughts behind words. The cues, you know, are missing.’ It was unpleasant to feel that same dislike, listening to Jiacheng talking rapidly and confidentially to Aren. She would not be like Miss Ramsay.

  Kay shook her mind and went back to Ancient Greek, which was always text, and never spoken aloud anymore unless one was learning. Next, she would like to study Sanskrit. She was beginning a list of words repeating in Homer. Often they were long, with rolling syllables: πολυφλοίσβοιο θάλασσης, polyphloisboio thalasses, the loud-resounding sea, or ῥοδοδάκτυλος ως, rhododactylos heos, rosy-fingered dawn—she had heard Father say that, standing at the morning room window on a red-sky winter morning in Blade Lake.

  It was Aeschylus, not from Homer—found in a footnote in the Middle Liddell—but she liked the sound of κὐμάτων ἀνάριθμον γέλασμα kumaton anarithmon gelasma, ‘the innumerable laughter of the rain.’ And best of all the lovely one Mr. Brimner had given her long ago: πομφολυπάφλασμα, pompholugopaphlasma, the sound of bubbles rising from the sea. She remembered leaning on the rail with him. She would never forget that day, and the sea sound of that bubbling word.

  * * *

  —

  No cargo charter materialized for the Morning Light. Francis said the advent of steam had made things so bad for sail in this city that it might be some time before they received one. He looked frustrated, but still went about the city finding walks that might deliver some beauty. They all went a second time to the Yuyuan Garden and sat beneath the giant ginkgo trees overlacing the pavements, their golden leaves now falling in a slow-descending rain. Kay and Aren gathered them up in handfuls, small fans flared on a tender stalk, their delicate vein lines satisfying to Kay’s fingertips.

  A week later Francis did receive orders to proceed to Manila within thirty-two days to load sugar and hemp for New York. In the meantime, he had secured a half load of hand-reeled silk for Singapore, and told Thea they would set out as soon as the silk arrived and the required ballast had been got in, more a matter of hours than of days.

  13

  A Cough

  They celebrated Christmas in Singapore: an unseasonable feast. Singapore was hot as Hades, Kay said to herself, as Mr. Brimner was not there to understand her—Thea would rebuke her for using that word. To go with Aunty Bob’s plum pudding (kept wrapped up since Yarmouth), Thea made roast chicken with raisin bread stuffing. The pudding was dense and sticky but satisfied nostalgia in Francis, its prime purpose.

  He was fond of Christmas, and delighted in giving presents. On his excursions he had found toys for Aren—ivory tangram puzzles, a travelling set of Chinese checkers, and a climbing-man toy; and for Thea, a treasure: a famille rose platter depicting an emperor’s hunt. She scolded him terrifically for buying it, weeping a little with pleasure, and said she would keep it wrapped in lambswool whenever the ship was not in dock. Although Kay expected a book, Francis gave her a length of creamy silk to be made into a long dress “for parties in New York,” and a pearl pin like a new moon.

  Kay knew that pin; it was the one he had bought in Boston many months ago, when he let slip that Thea was going to have a baby. He had never given it to Thea. He must have decided that it was not bad luck to give it to Kay, since she had no need for a child.

  The day after Christmas they went out into the country on a train, to give Aren the pleasure of the great machine. They stopped at the Woodlands railway station for luncheon and Francis hired a guide who took them on a long ramble into a forest park, too groomed and tamed to be real jungle. But there were still monkeys in the trees and wild-calling birds, and one had to watch out for lizards. Aren enjoyed the train very much. He could not be persuaded to sit for a moment, preferring to hang his head out the window and watch the landscape rushing past. Francis took him to the engine car to see how the thing was run, and they came back covered with smuts, so filthy that Thea would not kiss them.

  But after their excursion to the Woodlands, Aren developed a cold that settled into the lungs, and began coughing in a very distressing fashion. Kay took it from him, and soon they were both bundled in their bunks and subjected to alternating doses from Jiacheng’s and Thea’s medicine cabinets. For a few days fever gripped them. Aren went very quiet and slept most of the time, hot and dry to the touch, his mouth slack.

  Kay took it in delirium—she felt herself to be a whale calf descending under the sea, the fever an almost pleasurable sensation of letting go and submerging into another element. She had ferocious dreams, too many and too confusing to think about. One bad night the dreams were all of rows, long rows of naked bodies, pale on dark ground; rows of dead trees in mud. Then of children in rows and rows of cots, of walking through the ward with her hand clenched on the back of Thea’s pinafore. By that, she understood it must be the first tuberculosis epidemic, not the last one.

  She woke with tears washing her face, remembering for the first time in a long while Mary’s body hanging from the doorway, and Thea’s frantic efforts to save her, the worst thing Kay had ever seen in her life. Thea lifting, straining, stronger than she really was, to unhook Mary and bring her down onto the white-sheeted bed and labour over her. Annie came and huddled with her at the foot of the bed while Thea pushed a great needle into Mary’s arm or chest—the drea
m would not let her remember which, but the needle did no good. Thea standing quiet at last, nothing more to be done. The great quiet in the room when it happened, and Annie silent beside her on the floor.

  Kay got out of her bunk, crept along the corridor to Aren’s cabin and climbed in beside him. Without waking, he shifted to accommodate her, one arm over her middle. It comforted her to be with him, though the dry heat that radiated from him was strange.

  * * *

  —

  Another plague, from the general filthy conditions in Shanghai harbour: the ship was overrun with rats. Before leaving Singapore, Jiacheng found two cats to hold them down, but both died—he thought from eating too many rats. He would get a better cat at Manila. Kay protested she was afraid to go to sleep at all now, having a dread of one running over her chest. One night two large rats fought inside the piano! Kay shrieked, feeling them writhe over and under her feet, until Mr. Best flew down like an avenging demon and killed them both.

  Having heard that cayenne pepper scattered around would keep them away, Thea tried that, but the drafts swept the pepper into the air. It acted on the humans like the very best snuff, and they were all seized with violent sequential sneezing and strangled coughing until she gave up, opened all the skylight vents and damp-dusted the room.

  Loading in Manila was very quick, less than a day. Properly baled, sugar and hemp had little tendency to shift, making the organization of the hold less particular than for case oil. Jiacheng went ashore and brought three great ugly mousers to live below decks as a scourge to the rats. He also installed piglets in the big pen: two to eat soon as roast suckling, one to fatten into the new Mr. Dennis.