Kings of the Sea

by Van Every Frost, Joan

  “If she’d asked me, I would have given her the money,” Moshe said despairingly. “Why would she steal it and go off with never a goodbye?”

  I knew why, and it drove me wild that the little fool was going off hunting chimerical lords and earls and such, leaving me, her own true love, to break my heart. If I could only talk to her, I knew I could persuade her otherwise. For me it was as if what she had been trying to tell me in the cave did not exist. I would, I must, talk her into returning to me. I conveniently forgot that her father had betrothed her to someone else. I looked up to find Elisabeth watching me, pity in her eyes.

  “Christian,” she said, “would you be willing to go to Boston and look for her? I’m sure that’s where she’s gone, at least to begin with, and if something she has said leads you to her, try to persuade her to come back, will you?”

  “Of all the damned foolishness!” my father exploded. “How would he find her? If the girl is determined to run away, she’ll only do it again later. If she isn’t that determined, she’ll come back by herself when the money runs out.”

  “Gideon,” Elisabeth replied gently, “the boy will go looking for her whether we will or no. Let him at least go with our blessing.”

  My father looked at me then as if he had never seen me before. His face softened, and I wondered what he was thinking. “It’s like that, is it, lad? All right, go, but I have to tell you that for both your sakes I hope you don’t find her. You can take my Oberon — he’s faster and stronger than any other horse we have. Just please don’t run him into the ground, will you?”

  Moshe was wringing his hands. “I never should have betrothed her to the Rubenstein boy. I know that now, but he was handsome and bright and rich — what more did she want?”

  “I think she wanted someone she loved,” Elisabeth said.

  I found my voice at last. “No, that’s not what she wanted, either.” Even to myself I sounded hoarse and distraught. “She wanted — oh, hell, she wanted the earth and the heavens both, and she wouldn’t see that she could have had them all right here.”

  After I had closed the door on them, I dressed and threw some things into a saddlebag. By the time I was downstairs, my father had the horse saddled and Elisabeth was handing me a package of bread and cheese and meat.

  “If you find her, Christian,” my father said, “bring her back on the train. We can send for the horse.”

  What should I say of that darksome ride? I pushed Oberon until I came near to foundering him, and at five in the morning I was waiting impatiently at the Charlestown Ferry along with wagons of milk cans and produce. The sky was a clear pale turquoise in the east, shading off overhead to a transparent darkness in which there still shone stars. I clattered from inn to inn asking news of Arabella. A girl so beautiful and alone would surely have attracted attention. No one, I thought, who had ever seen my Arabella could forget her.

  The sun was well up when I came to the last place, situated so far out beyond the Neck that it was hardly in Boston at all.

  “Yes, a young lady of that description took a room here, but she’s gone now. Who be you?” The innkeeper rubbed his hand rasping over his unshaven jaw and peered at me through dirty spectacles.

  I thought he might tell me more if I said I was a relative, so I said I was her brother.

  “Brother, eh? You don’t look it.”

  “Her father wants her back, and he sent me after her,” I said desperately, not disputing his doubt as to my relationship. “Did she say anything of where she was going?”

  “What are you going to do with her if you find her?”

  “Take her home, of course,” I said impatiently. “Do you really think a young girl like that should be traipsing about by herself?”

  “Waal,” he drawled doubtfully, “I guess it don’t matter now. She’s sailing on the Swan’s Wing, due to leave right about now for Liverpool. I know ’cause the boy here carried her luggage for her.”

  A fat sullen youth of about fourteen shook his head gloomily in agreement. “Didn’t give me no more’n ten cents fer it, neither,” he complained.

  Arabella’s first mistake. If she had paid the lad handsomely, neither he nor his father would ever have let on where she had gone.

  I leaped into the tired Oberon’s saddle and pushed him blowing and stumbling to the very dockside. A stevedore pointed out toward the channel, where a clipper ship was wearing about to put her prow in a straight run for the open sea. I was in luck, for there was a little sloop ready to cast off, and I told her captain it was worth ten sovereigns to catch the clipper.

  He nodded. “She’ll have to let the pilot off, and we’ll ketch her then. She gets out in the open ocean and she’ll show her heels to anything afloat.”

  She was only ghosting along in the busy channel, and we began to close the distance between us significantly as we passed between Bird Island and Dorchester Neck. I was already rehearsing what I would say to Arabella when our sail suddenly slackened as the wind dropped where we were and we lost way. In an agony of impatience I saw the Swan’s Wing let off her pilot, seemingly without perceptibly slowing, and then spread one by one that fantastic suit of white sails that would prompt McKay to name one of her sister ships the Flying Cloud. Our wind shifted once again, and we too began to pick up speed.

  For a bit we crept up again, but it wasn’t long before we were hard put to it even to hold our own. As the long rollers of the open Atlantic rose up to meet us, the Swan’s Wing pulled away and at last left us as if we had been standing, her sails shining bravely in the bright morning sunlight.

  “It’s no use,” the captain said, his teeth clamped on the blackened stub of a pipe. “She’s gone and that’s a fact. If it hadn’ta been fer that shift of wind back there, we mighta caught her.”

  I wasn’t listening to him. With tears in my eyes that I hoped he would think were caused by the wind, I watched my hopes and my dreams and my love go bow down over the horizon until only the cloud of sails was still visible, gleaming tantalizingly against the blue summer sky.

  Chapter II

  At twenty-one I graduated from Harvard knowing that I was going to be more than just another engineer. I seldom thought of Arabella anymore except as an impossible vision of feminine splendor that no other woman could conceivably live up to. Possibly because of this, I had become quite a rake, bedding down any number of willing young things who worked in the bars and coffee houses and shops that catered to the university students. The trouble was that later I always felt sad, not good, and heartily wished that rampant animal between my legs would have done.

  As much to my surprise as to anyone else’s, I managed to graduate from Harvard without having been expelled and with the minimum work necessary to obtain an engineering degree. To me it was all a lark — the kind of engineering I wanted to do they didn’t teach — I was having the childhood I never had earlier. During the summer following graduation, however, I experienced a terrible letdown and took to drinking and helling around Evanston, which I never had done before. It was just that the prospect of working for years at the shipyard under my father seemed now an impossibly arid one, and yet without either capital or a respectable amount of age on me, there was no way that I would ever talk anyone into putting up the money for my first ship. I moped and sulked and misbehaved my way through the entire summer.

  “Christian,” Elisabeth said one morning as I forced a late breakfast down me in the forlorn hope that food would alleviate my throbbing hangover, “what’s wrong?”

  “Wrong? Nothing’s wrong,” I mumbled sullenly.

  “Nothing!” she exclaimed scornfully. “Nothing except that you’ve changed from a cheerful, bright, giving lad into a sullen, drunken, good-for-nothing lout. It’s still Miriam eating on you, isn’t it?”

  The hangover, not enough sleep, the justice of what she was saying, and the final mention of Miriam were too much, and I was startled to find tears standing in my eyes, I who hadn’t cried even in my cups since I helpl
essly watched the Swan’s Wing go hull down outside of Boston Harbor three years before. “I know it’s all wrong,” I admitted while I stared at the steak on my plate, hoping she wouldn’t look at my eyes. “It’s just that there doesn’t seem to be anything to catch hold of. The shipyard is my father’s, not mine, and even at that I might feel needed if he would try a steamship, but he can’t see beyond his blasted clippers. If I were gone tomorrow, the yard would run every bit as well.”

  “That’s not true and you know it,” Elisabeth disagreed. “Elam isn’t getting any younger, and one day even your father will have to give it up.”

  “Eyah,” I said, mimicking sarcastically the local sound of agreement, “and that will be twenty-five years from now.”

  “In the meantime,” she went on, ignoring my pessimistic interruption, “I wondered what you would think of your father’s sending you to England to learn something of marine engines. You’re certainly doing no one any good here, and if you managed to obtain a few commissions for the yard there, you’d be paying your way. When you’re in form, Christian, you can talk the stars down from the heavens, you know.”

  “Why are you proposing this and not my father?” I asked suspiciously.

  “Why, because he doesn’t know about it yet.” She smiled. “Oh, he agreed in principle a long time ago, but he thinks you’ve got to earn it, which you certainly haven’t set out to do lately, now have you?”

  England! Arabella was presumably somewhere in England. A quick vision crossed my mind in which she was poor and destitute, living in a slum. I would come riding by on a fine horse and recognize her in the midst of a shabby crowd even though for shame she would try to hide herself. I would lift her up on the horse and she would pledge me her undying love as we rode bravely through the streets of London town.

  “Well, no, I haven’t,” I admitted, “but I will. You’ll see, the yard will never have had such a worker.” As the idea of England took real shape in my mind, my hangover was forgotten and I felt a surge of enthusiasm and optimism such as I hadn’t experienced it seemed to me for years. “If you’ll get me to England, I’ll see the yard receives more orders than it will know what to do with, see if it doesn’t.”

  Elisabeth looked amused. “I want you gone in a month, by the end of September. Dick Poulson has generously offered to get you some letters of introduction that should help when it comes to working with a master designer. The longer you hang around here, the more likely you’ll get in trouble. I want your word that you’ll behave yourself for a month. I really don’t relish the idea of having to defend you to the father of some girl in trouble. I want the family to continue on in other generations, but not exactly in that manner.”

  I grinned at her then. “Done! Liquor shall not touch my lips until sailing day. Do you suppose I could go on the Great Western?”

  “Your father would have a fit, Christian, but I’ll see what I can do.”

  As it turned out, I sailed on the Medea instead, a happenchance that has always made me view sheer luck as having more than a little to do with a man’s fortune. I went to New York by myself after a very wet bachelor dinner with my father and Dick Poulson and his son Mark, determined to turn in early so as to be bright and eager for the morrow’s voyage. What can I say? I met two girls dining alone at the hotel and one thing led to another until I found myself happily in bed with both of them. I had up quite a head of steam after a month’s abstinence, and a grand time was had by all. Somewhere along the way I passed the cure, so to speak, and it was a very tottery and fragile young man who crept up the gangplank the next day, waved off by Cissy and Jeannie, who both seemed quite sad to see me go.

  I vowed pure virtue for the voyage, a vow immediately at least not difficult to keep, for the sea was rough right from the beginning and my hangover soon melted into the most excruciating case of seasickness, made the worse by my never before — or since, I may add — having experienced that peculiarly humiliating and agonizing malady. What made it all but unendurable was that I had a cabin mate who not only wasn’t seasick himself but who insisted on smoking cigars of the vilest tobacco I have ever had the misfortune of smelling. The simple act of his lighting up was enough to send me off into paroxysms of retching.

  Three days later I had my sea legs again, though the waves had not abated, and there was a fresh gale pushing up ever higher rough seas. Through the afternoon the gale worsened, and the Medea began to roll and plunge fearfully in the kind of mountainous seas that caused the City of Glasgow simply to disappear forever. Huge green waves crested with angry froth came charging down on us from behind, forcing the ship to make a sickening backward swoop up the steep water to the crest, where it corkscrewed agonizingly before plunging down the backside to wallow heavily in the trough before repeating the alarming maneuver all over again with the next wave. Occasionally those wallows at the bottom prolonged themselves sufficiently for the wave to break over the stern, submerging the entire deck and superstructure in a deluge of icy water. Everything leaked: the staterooms, the dining room, the smoking lounge, the grand saloon. Water squeezed through portholes, rushed down companionways, and gurgled out of ventilators.

  The Medea was a hermaphrodite forerunner of the Great Eastern, with paddlewheels as well as a propeller and sails, presumably on the theory that should one system fail, a remaining one would suffice. The first to go was the starboard paddle, which was ripped off housing and all when the Medea broached partially as a wave broke over her. From then on she had to rely on her screw, which whined ominously the numerous times that the stern was out of water entirely, but what finally silenced this means of propulsion was a monstrous wave that crashed into the ship stern on and broke free the stern post and rudder head, allowing the rudder to swing around upon the screw, entirely preventing the use of the propeller. This left us with the port paddlewheel as the only means of keeping her head in the direction of the following seas. The strain was too much, and the blades of the paddles gave one by one with sharp reports. As we wallowed helplessly in the trough of the seas, battered by every breaking wave, some intrepid seamen tried their best to set a few storm sails, but even staysails were burst loose by the shrieking gale, their torn streamers snapping angrily from the bare masts. When one of the sailors was lost entirely as a wave shoved the ship over on her scuppers, the crewmen were recalled.

  Although a heavy spar loaded with iron chain was cast overboard as a kind of sea anchor, helping somewhat, the Medea was at the sea’s mercy, drifting helplessly before the wind, bludgeoned cruelly by every wave. People and furniture were thrown in miscellaneous heaps about the grand saloon, but the passengers sought such comfort as they could find in the company of their fellow sufferers and refused to retire to their staterooms, where they might at least have held on to the bunk posts. The screaming of frightened and injured women and children and the shouts and curses of men echoed about the mirrored walls elaborately decorated in white and gold. The ship’s surgeon, several of the passengers, including me, and such of the stewards as were still on their feet carried the injured to their staterooms and lashed them into bunks until such time as conditions might abate enough for them to be treated. The laudanum flowed like water to relieve their pain for the time being, but bones had to remain unset and sprains and abrasions unmedicated.

  We all tried desperately to keep the fallen from the center of the saloon, but the violent pitching of the ship made this impossible, and it was with horror that we saw the Medea’s famous crystal chandelier, with candles still burning against the stormy gloom outside, finally break loose from its fastenings and descend with a great crash of breaking glass right on a newly tangled pile of passengers who had just been thrown to the floor beneath it. Not even in the war later did I see so much blood all at once, for the dead and wounded were being literally chopped to pieces by the lethal slivers of glass that ground back and forth over the fallen like some terrible harvesting machine as the ship rolled from side to side. We finally managed to haul mos
t of the stricken from under that dreadful scythe, but some perished from loss of blood before we could do anything for them.

  As we carried the bleeding survivors across the grand saloon on the way to their staterooms; the skylight crashed in with an explosion of glass shards to admit the head and forequarters of one of the cows that had been stabled on deck. She was obviously already dead, but the blood from her cut throat ran into great puddles that slid back and forth on the glass-strewn floor. Two turkeys squeezed through the smashed skylight past the cow and began frantically flying into the mirrored walls until at last they broke their own necks. Meanwhile, we led away the unharmed passengers, who pleaded with us to let them be despite the horrors they had just witnessed. They were like horses in a burning barn, panicked by the idea of leaving the known for the unknown, and afraid they might meet their deaths alone.

  Those of us who had played Good Samaritan were battered and in many cases bleeding ourselves by the time we had cleared the saloon. My hands were a mess from the small shards of glass that had cut me as I pulled bodies from beneath the chandelier. Since I was none too anxious to repair to the airless stink of my shared stateroom, I balanced and grabbed my way aft until I came to a cluster of ship’s officers, seamen, and the chief engineer glumly gathered at the stern discussing the broken rudder. I took the engineer aside.

  “Where did it break?”

  He looked at me warily, even his stringy mustache bristling. “What’s it to you?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Listen to me,” I explained patiently. “My father has a shipyard — perhaps you’ve heard of the Gideon Hand clippers — and I’ve worked there all my life. We’ve built ships with rudder systems similar to this.”

  He looked at me with a dawning interest that seemed to turn into a decision of some kind. “Come with me. Don’t say anything to him.” He jerked his thumb at the captain, a banty rooster little Scot with an uncertain temper.