Kings of the Sea

by Van Every Frost, Joan

  “We’ll move to Boston. There’s plenty of intellectual life there, if that’s what you want.”

  “Boston!” she exclaimed disgustedly. “The people in Boston are almost as narrow and stuffy as they are in Evanston. How much have you ever seen of London? Surely you can understand that next to London, Boston is an awful little backwater with pretension and nothing else.”

  “All right then, we’ll live in London,” I said desperately. “Black Jack Carr will let me work with him as long as I want to, and one day it will be my ships he’s building.”

  She looked at me sorrowfully and shook her head. “It won’t do, Christian. I’m greedy, and you could never give me all I want. Geoff can. He may be in his sixties, but he’s suave and charming and knowledgeable and generous. He wants me because I make him feel young again. I want him because like the fairy godmother, he can make me a princess instead of the daughter of a ship chandler named Moshe.”

  I dropped my hands from her shoulders. “Do you really think you’ll be happy as a princess?”

  “If I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t do it. I’m tired of being taunted for what I am, I’m tired of having to scrimp for money. I had to use the last of Papa’s money to make my own debut, and I was wondering how I was going to eat when Geoff proposed.”

  “Arabella Fotheringay…” I mused. “You actually made it, didn’t you? I thought all that play-acting in the cave was fun, but it wasn’t, was it?”

  “I tried to tell you,” she said gently. “I tried and tried, but I couldn’t get through.”

  I felt as if my heart would burst and drown me in its blood. I would feel the loss of this might-have-been all the days of my life. I would never be able to look at another woman without comparing her to her detriment with my Arabella. For she was still my Arabella and would always be.

  Though it nearly killed me, I smiled at her. “Well, you can’t blame me for trying, can you, my dear? I wish you the best luck — you’ve earned it.”

  “Oh, Christian, I wish things could have been different, that I had been different. You’re a dear, sweet man who will make someone very happy. Forget me, Christian, I’m not worth your while.”

  I almost pulled her to me again, but instead wheeled and walked out.

  “Where’s your samples?” the butler asked.

  “She wants to keep them to look over,” I replied, “but for all that I’m afraid she’s made her choice.”

  His eyebrows raised at my use of the word “afraid,” but he said nothing, and before I knew it I was outside on the pavement looking at that ugly house through the black wrought-iron fence palings. It was like a second death, standing there as I had stood on the deck of the sloop watching the Swan’s Wing disappear over the horizon. What scarring there had been over the four years was now ripped open once more, and I felt raw and lacerated as if flayed from the inside.

  The following week I stood outside the church in quite a sizable crowd and watched Arabella come out on the arm of a strikingly handsome gray-haired man with a mustache. They were both laughing and hunching their shoulders under the rain of rice thrown at them as they made their way to a large black fashionable carriage drawn by matched black horses.

  “Looks more like they be going to a funeral, don’t it?” a little man beside me observed.

  I told him and meant it that I reckoned it did.

  Before the Cassiopeia sailed, there was a grand party aboard her given by the shipowners. The champagne flowed copiously as the passengers and their well-wishers put themselves in a holiday mood for the passage to Halifax, Boston, and New York, not one seemingly giving a thought to all of the discomforts and dangers of even an early-summer voyage on the Great Circle route. Because of the curvature of the earth, the shortest way from London or Liverpool to Halifax and New York was what looked on a flat map like a great circle curving northward almost to the Arctic Circle at its apex. Just as the sailing packets had laid on all sail and be damned to the danger, so now the steamships followed the same course, for speed was the greatest advertisement a ship could have. The paddlewheels and propellers made a fearful racket, and the smoke from the funnels brought with it clouds of soot that rained down on hapless passengers on deck.

  “Dammit, I wish you weren’t leaving, cock,” Jack was saying. “I’d like to see what you’d make of this new commission we have for a tea clipper. The Americans have had it all their own way for years, but I think we can lick them now on their own ground.”

  “I think you ought to put an iron hull on her.”

  “Not as long as everyone is convinced that an iron hull spoils the tea’s aroma.”

  “You know that’s poppycock.”

  “Ah, but I’m not the one as is putting up the bloody money. Anyway, I like working with wood. The wood has a life and a smell to it that iron will never touch.”

  The Cassiopeia trembled then with a fierce blast of her whistle. The well-wishers all gulped the last of their champagne and made a concerted rush for the lighters waiting in the Mersey to take them off. Jack shook hands with me.

  “Come back, Christian. We’d make a bloody fine pair. Revolutionize the shipping industry, we would.” He laughed.

  I looked at him seriously. “I will come back, Jack — with a commission for the first ship of the Blue Hand Fleet. The fastest steamship in the world it’ll be, too.”

  He grinned. “Good for you, laddie. I’ll be waiting for you.” He made his way toward the waiting lighter, and I realized that I was going to miss him more than I thought possible. Irascible, profane, impatient, he had given me a vision of what ships driven by engines might one day do, and I was sorry to leave him.

  Our only stop before Halifax was Queenstown, near Cork, where we would pick up a number of Irish emigrants for the steerage. Oddly, it wasn’t the first-class passengers who made the difference between financial success and failure on the Atlantic run, it was the emigrants. For thirty pounds they would be deposited in New York, and even taking into account what they were fed, that meant a clear gain of twenty pounds apiece. Thus four hundred steerage passengers represented eight thousand pounds pure profit with very little overhead. There was no need for stewards, the cooking was minimal, and the steerage people were expected to wash their own utensils and keep their own quarters clean. The only real problem occurred when shipboard fever — typhus — broke out, in which case the captain was fined ten pounds for every dead body that reached New York.

  The Queenstown docks were a lively scene, for they were jammed with hundreds and hundreds of would-be emigrants fleeing starvation in Ireland. For those willing to work on the railroads, there was firm promise of jobs, while textile factories and other sweatshops of all miserable descriptions swallowed those newly arrived like a great insatiable maw. New York must have more immigrants now than natives, and Boston will soon be overwhelmingly Irish, lace-curtain and shanty Irish both. Already they have had to build up land fill to accommodate them all, and one day I suppose the original area of Boston will be multiplied many times until there is no water left.

  As I leaned on the rail looking down at that seething swarm of humanity, a man beside me said, “Look at the poor devils, fighting to get aboard so they can starve and live in filth, with nothing but long hours at little pay at the other end.”

  I found myself standing next to a minister of some kind with dark clothes and a white clerical collar. “You paint a gloomy picture,” I said.

  “Not as gloomy as the reality. Most of the Irish are Catholics, but in the north they are Protestant, and it’s them I’ve been serving. You see that shipping office over there? They are weeding out those without the price of a ticket, plus the lunatic, deaf, dumb, blind, infirm, ill, those over the age of sixty, and any woman without a husband but with a child or children. All those must remain and starve.”

  As I leaned over watching them, I began to pick faces out of the multitude. My eyes were caught by the face of a child of perhaps four, a little girl of such heart-stopping
beauty that I caught my breath. She had black hair pulled back primly in neat braids and a rosy complexion that made you want to reach out and touch it as you might an exotic fruit with a velvety bloom. She was holding her mother’s hand and gazing solemnly up at the ship, her rapt stillness arresting. To me it seemed as if she were looking right at me. I glanced then at the mother, nowhere near the beauty her daughter was but a good-looking woman with what was obviously ordinarily an expression of great humor, her face now however marked with such despair that I found myself agonizing for her.

  “Do you mean to say,” I asked carefully, “that if a woman has a child they don’t let her come?”

  “No, they don’t. You see, they are turned back at Ellis Island if the ship brings them, and then the shipping company has to return them to Ireland at no cost. Consequently the shippers do the weeding out before taking them on board. A woman alone with a child, they’ve found, does badly at the other end. She has to go to work, and the child either dies of neglect or of overwork in a sweatshop. Nice, isn’t it? Man’s inhumanity to man never ceases to astound me.”

  I was still staring at the pair below. Somehow there must be a way to get them on board and see to it that they flourished when they arrived in America. Simply paying for their passage in first class wouldn’t really help, because they would still have to go through immigration on the other end. I looked at the little girl and then at the mother, and a wild idea suddenly grew and blossomed in my head. In any conventional manner I would never be any good to a woman; Arabella had made sure of that. Why not then be useful in a very real way? I knew that those faces would haunt me for years to come if I didn’t do something about them.

  Not twenty minutes later I shouldered my way down the gangplank followed by the minister, whose name I didn’t even know. As if in a dream I walked up to the woman and her child.

  “You’ve been turned down?” I asked.

  The woman turned her despairing eyes toward me and nodded miserably, tears for the first time now overflowing her eyes and running down her cheeks.

  Two hours later as the ship cleared harbor and headed out to the open sea, Doreen and I were married by the captain, who obviously thought I was mad but went along because I had helped to build his ship.

  Chapter V

  When I think of Dorrie now, I always see her smiling, though she had precious little to smile about before she walked up that gangplank. When I told her what I proposed, her jaw dropped and she gawked at me like a fish taken from water.

  “You’re mad!” She acted almost afraid of me. The little girl huddled timidly against her mother.

  “It would be a marriage in name only,” I hastily assured her. “If you wanted your freedom later, I’d arrange for a divorce.”

  “And if I didn’t?” she asked shrewdly. “Would you be sorry?”

  “No,” I answered, rather smugly I’m afraid, “I wouldn’t be at all sorry. I would give your child the advantage of a good education and in the end her pick of suitors.”

  “Well, I’ve not got much to lose. I don’t know who you are nor what you want, but we couldn’t be any worse off than we are.”

  She was even then obviously no simpleminded downtrodden country girl. Despite minor slips in grammar now and then, she was surprisingly well-spoken. I regarded her with interest, this completely strange woman who would willy-nilly be so important a part of my life. If I thought of the future at all in regard to them, I had a kind of fond vision of their being parked in a pretty rustic cottage somewhere with me helping out on the rent, and eventually the mother coming to me with tears of humble gratitude in her eyes asking me if I would give her her freedom because she had found a good kind man to marry. It really never occurred to me that I would ever live with them as husband and father. Never.

  July was a slow month for shipping, but there were a number of maiden voyages because of its being a good time to shake down without too large an audience. A maiden voyage sounds glamorous but was usually far from that. Every ship has imperfections to be ironed out, and it is generally on the maiden voyage that those imperfections manifest themselves.

  Our Cassiopeia was no exception. Almost immediately something went wrong with the propeller system, and for the beginning of the voyage we were all treated to a mind-shattering thudding and banging that set up a jarring in your very teeth. This was even worse because from time immemorial the pick of accommodations on a ship were located high in the stern, so that we received the full benefit of the maddening noise. It was then that I determined that on my ships at least the first-class passengers would be cabined and entertained amidships.

  The other problem involved the showers, of which Jack had been so proud. The women complained because the nozzles were set so high that their hair was automatically drenched, and some quirk of airlocking made the water turn on and off infuriatingly. Even when on, it switched from cold to boiling in temperature as the ship rolled from side to side. Besides that, no one had thought to put bars in the stalls to hold onto, so that most of us long before the voyage was over bore bruises on diverse parts of our anatomy.

  Because of the propeller racket, the captain took to using sail power at night whenever the wind allowed it, and even in the daytime when the breezes were particularly favorable. Between the noise and the slowing of our passage, he wisely chose the delay in arrival. Just as well he did, because on the third day out a blade snapped off the propeller, leaving us nothing but the sails to go on anyway.

  I for one wasn’t sorry that the voyage was prolonged, for I could foresee only too well what my father’s and Elisabeth’s reaction to my hasty marriage would be, and I was in no hurry to face them. Dorrie seemed much calmer than I about the future, as if she knew something I didn’t, and often in those first days I would catch her watching me with an enigmatic smile on her face. Ordinarily I would have been seated near the captain as having had an important hand in the building of the ship and fitting her for sea, but he could not forget or condone my impulsive nuptials, especially since the few dresses Dorrie had brought with her proved to have a kind of tawdry splendor that made nearly every woman in the grand saloon look at her askance.

  I thought then that Deirdre was a perfect name for that fey little creature who put her hand so trustingly in mine. It sounded like a fairy name, just as Dorrie’s Deirdre was a fairy child. She was very solemn, and it took getting used to that she would watch you, gravely and unwaveringly, sometimes for minutes on end, as if she could unlock the secrets of your inmost being. At times she would ask a question that mirrored what I had been thinking, and it used to give me a start. Poor thing, she had never had other children around, and she literally didn’t know what it was to play. I think it was because I had grown up so alone myself except for Arabella that Deirdre and I recognized the aloneness in each other and were drawn together.

  Dorrie was a different kettle of fish. She was as good-humored and practical and down-to-earth as Deirdre was fey. She was also a surprisingly shrewd observer with a delightful talent for mimicry, and I found myself looking forward to her perceptive assessments of the characters of our fellow passengers.

  “See that couple ahead of us?” she would say as we took our turn around the spacious deck in the intervals when the rain of soot from the funnel was not littering the entire upper structure of the ship. “I’ll wager you that she drinks and he cheats on her with other women.”

  “Oh come now, Dorrie, how could you possibly know that?”

  “Well, she isn’t an old woman, hardly forty, and yet look how she’s clinging to him as if any moment she’s going to lose her footing. He’s probably got her out here to try to walk it off. As for him, he’s been eyeing every bosom and ankle that’s gone by.”

  I laughed. “Caught you out that time, Dorrie. Every man does that. I’ve been doing it myself.”

  “Ah, but not the way he does. You can almost see him licking his lips. Would be interesting to know, wouldn’t it, if he cheats because she drinks or sh
e drinks because he cheats.”

  “Dorrie, you’re incorrigible!” I found I was enjoying her company immensely and would be sorry to part with her when we reached our destination.

  That night the lady in question swooned — passed out was how Dorrie put it, grinning at me — at the dinner table and had to be carried to her stateroom. Not long afterward her husband reappeared and was soon deep in conversation with the handsomest unattached woman there.

  Dorrie had a way of listening that made you say more than you had planned, and it wasn’t too long before she knew an uncomfortable amount about my past life without my knowing damn-all about hers. I might have pressed her more, but I thought that as long as we would be parting company so soon, perhaps the less I knew the better. Since the other women in first class didn’t seem to take to Dorrie, nor she to them if the truth be known, we were thrown together a great deal, and I found her to be unfailingly an amiable traveling companion.

  We probably would have continued to drift along that way for the entire eighteen days it took us to New York if it hadn’t been for the iceberg night. We had separate staterooms, and I was awakened in the middle of the night first by several shouts from above and then by a gentle lurch, followed by a grinding, scraping noise along the ship’s side and bottom. Hurriedly I threw on some clothes and went up on deck to be met with a sight I shall never forget as long as I live.

  There was a bright moon that laved the ship with a pale luminescence and glittered within touching distance of the ship’s side across a mountain of ice that seemed as big as the whole world, larger even than that wave that had borne down on me when I was dangling over the Medea’s stern. The shimmering mass loomed up over us, literally dwarfing us, as we passed like a small ghost alongside it. To the right was a far less awesome hunk of ice that nonetheless cleared the ship’s rail in height, the ship slipping between them as a mouse slips between the closing clawed paws of a cat. After we had passed, I looked back and saw the two icebergs meet and seemingly bump ever so gently, though I knew that had we still been between them, we should have been crushed into twisted pieces of debris.