“I shouldna have thought it an occupation requiring great skill.” For no reason he could name, Captain Bonnet raised the hairs on the back of his neck.
The green eyes sharpened.
“Perhaps more than ye think—but sure it’s nothing a willing man can’t learn. But what would it be, now, that makes a fellow of your sort crave the sea of a sudden?”
The eyes flickered in the tavern’s shadows, taking him in. Of your sort. What was it? Roger wondered. Not his speech—he had taken care to suppress any hint of the Oxford scholar, by taking on the “teuchter” cant of the Isles. Was he too well dressed for a would-be sailor? Or was it the singed collar and the burn mark on the breast of his coat?
“That will be none of your business, I am thinking,” he answered evenly. With a minor effort, he kept his hands relaxed at his sides.
The pale green eyes studied him dispassionately, unblinking. Like a leopard watching a passing wildebeest, Roger thought, wondering whether it would be worth the chase.
The heavy lids dropped; not worth it—for the moment.
“You’ll be aboard by sundown,” Bonnet said. “Five shillings the month, meat three days in the week, plum duff on Sundays. You’ll have a hammock, but find your own clothes. You will be free to leave the ship once the cargo is unloaded, not until that time. We are agreed, sir?”
“It is agreed,” Roger said, suddenly dry-mouthed. He would have given a lot for a pint, but not now, not here, under that pale green gaze.
“Ask for Mr. Dixon when yez come aboard. He’s paymaster.” Bonnet leaned back, took a small leather-bound book from his pocket and flipped it open. Audience concluded.
Roger turned smartly and went out, without a backward glance. There was a small cold spot at the base of his skull. If he looked back, he knew, he would see that lucent green gaze fixed unwaveringly over the edge of the unread book, taking note of every weakness.
The cold spot, he thought, was where the teeth would meet.
37
GLORIANA
Before shipping with the Gloriana, Roger had assumed himself to be in reasonably good condition. In fact, compared to most of the obviously malnourished and wizened specimens of humanity who constituted the rest of the crew, he considered himself well endowed, indeed. It took precisely fourteen hours—the length of one day’s work—to disabuse him of this notion.
Blisters he had bargained for, and sore muscles; heaving crates, lifting spars, and hauling ropes was familiar labor, though he hadn’t done it for some time.
What he had forgotten was the bone-deep fatigue that sprang as much from the constant chill of damp clothes as from the work. He welcomed the heavy labor in the cargo hold, because it warmed him temporarily, even though he knew the warmth would be succeeded by a fine, constant shiver as soon as he emerged on deck, where the wind could resume its icy probe of his sweat-soaked clothes.
Hands roughened and scraped by wet hemp were painful, but expected; by the end of his first day, his palms were black with tar, and the skin of his fingers cracked and bled at the joints, scraped raw. But the gnawing ache of hunger had been something of a surprise. He hadn’t thought it possible to be as hungry as he was.
The knobbled lump of humanity working beside him—one Duff by name—was similarly damp, but seemed unfazed by the condition. The long, pointed nose that quested, ferret-like, from the upturned collar of a ragged jacket was blue at the tip and dripped regularly as a stalactite, but the pale eyes were sharp and the mouth beneath grinned wide, displaying teeth the color of the water in the Firth.
“Take hairt, man. Grub in twa bells.” Duff gave him a companionable elbow in the ribs and disappeared nimbly down a hatchway, from whose cavernous recesses echoed blasphemous shouts and loud bangings.
Roger resumed his unloading of the cargo net, heartened indeed at the prospect of supper.
The after hold had already been half filled. The water casks were loaded; tier upon tier of wooden hogsheads, squatting in the shadowy gloom, each hundred-gallon cask weighing more than seven hundred pounds. But the forward hold still gaped empty, and a constant procession of loaders and quaymen streamed like ants across the dock, piling up such a heap of boxes and barrels, rolls and bundles, that it seemed inconceivable that the mass should ever be condensed sufficiently to fit within the ship.
* * *
It took two days to finish the loading: barrels of salt, bolts of cloth, huge crates of ironmongery that had to be lowered with rope slings because of their weight. It was here that Roger’s size proved of benefit. At the end of a rope belayed round the capstan, he leaned back against the weight of a crate suspended at the other end and, muscles popping with the strain, lowered it slowly enough that the two men below could catch and guide it into place in the increasingly crowded hold.
The passengers came aboard in the late afternoon, a straggling line of emigrants, burdened with bags, bundles, caged chickens, and children. These were the cargo of the steerage—a space created by erection of a bulk-head across the forward hold—and as profitable in their way as the harder goods aft.
“Bondsmen and redemptioners,” Duff had told him, looking over the incomers with a practiced eye. “Worth fifteen pund each on the hoof in the plantations, weans three or four. Bairns at the teat go free wi’ their mithers.”
The seaman coughed, a deep, rattling noise like an ancient motor starting up, and hawked a glob of phlegm, narrowly missing the side rail as he spat. He shook his head as he looked the shuffling line over.
“Happen some can pay their way, but no many in this lot. They’ll have had a job to come up wi’ twa pund a family for their feed on the voyage.”
“The Captain doesn’t feed them, then?”
“Oh, aye.” Duff rumbled in his chest again, coughed and spat. “For a price.” He grinned at Roger, wiped his mouth, and jerked his head toward the gangplank. “Go and lend a hand, laddie. We wouldna want the Captain’s profit to be fallin’ intae the water, now, would we?”
Surprised by the padded feel of a little girl as he swung her aboard, Roger looked closer and saw that the stout build of many of the women was illusion, occasioned by their wearing several layers of clothes; all they owned in the world, apparently, beyond small bundles of personal possessions, boxes of food put by for the journey—and the scrawny children for whose sake they took this desperate step.
Roger squatted, smiling at a reluctant toddler who clung to his mother’s skirts. He was no more than two, still in smocks, with a riot of soft blond curls, his fat little mouth drawn down in fearful disapproval of everything around him.
“Come on, man,” Roger said softly, putting out a hand in invitation. It was no longer an effort to control his accent; his usual clipped Oxbridge had elided to the gentler Highland speech with which he had grown up, and he used it now without conscious thought. “Your Mam can’t be pickin’ ye up now; you come with me.”
Grossly mistrustful, the boy snuffled and glowered at him, but suffered him to peel the grubby little fingers away from his mother’s skirts. Roger carried the little boy across the deck, the woman following him silently. She looked up at him as he handed her down the ladder, her eyes fixed on his; her face disappeared in the darkness like a white rock dropped down a well, and he turned away with a feeling of unease, as though he had abandoned someone to drowning.
As he turned back to his work, he saw a young woman, just coming down above the quay. She was the sort of girl called “bonny”—not beautiful, but lively and nicely made, with something about her that took the eye.
Perhaps it was only her posture; straight as a lily stem among the hunched and drooping backs around her. Or her face, which showed apprehension and uncertainty, but had still about it the brightness of curiosity. A darer, that one, he thought, and his heart—oppressed by so many downcast faces among the emigrants—lightened at the sight of her.
She hesitated at sight of the ship and the crowd around it. A tall fair-haired young man was with her, a baby in his arms. He to
uched her shoulder in reassurance, and she glanced up at him, an answering smile lighting her face like the striking of a match. Watching them, Roger felt a mild pang of something that might have been envy.
“You, MacKenzie!” The bosun’s shout pulled him from his contemplation. The bosun jerked his head aft. “There’s cargo a-waitin’—it’s no goin’ to walk aboard by itself!”
* * *
Once embarked and under sail, the voyage went smoothly for some weeks. The stormy weather that accompanied their exodus from Scotland quickly diminished into good winds and rolling seas, and while the immediate effect of this on the passengers was to make the majority of them seasick, this ailment also faded in time. The smell of vomit from the steerage subsided, becoming only a minor note in the symphony of stinks aboard the Gloriana.
Roger had been born with an acute sense of smell, an attribute he was finding a marked liability in close quarters. Still, even the keenest nose grew accustomed in time, and within a day or so he had ceased to note any but the most novel stenches.
He was fortunately not subject to seasickness himself, though his experiences with the herring fishers had been enough to give him a keen appreciation of the weather, with the sailor’s unsettling knowledge that his life might depend on whether the sun was shining that day.
His new shipmates were not friendly, but neither were they hostile. Whether it was his “teuchter” accent from the Isles—for most of the Gloriana’s hands were English-speakers from Dingwall or Peterhead—the occasional odd things that he said, or simply his size, they regarded him with a certain watchful distance. No overt antagonism—his size prevented that—but distance nonetheless.
Roger wasn’t disturbed by the coolness. He was pleased enough to be left to his thoughts, his mind ranging free while his body dealt with the daily round of shipboard duties. There was plenty to think about.
He had taken no heed to the reputation of the Gloriana or her captain before signing on; he would have sailed with Captain Ahab, provided only that that gentleman was bound for North Carolina. Still, from the talk he heard among the crew, he gathered that Stephen Bonnet was known as a good captain; hard but fair, and a man whose voyages always turned a profit. To the seamen, many of whom sailed on shares rather than wages, this latter quality plainly more than compensated for any small defects of character or address.
Not that Roger had seen open evidence of such defects. But he did see that Bonnet stood always as though an invisible circle had been drawn around him, a circle that few were bold enough to enter. Only the first mate and the bosun spoke directly to the Captain; the crewmen kept their heads down as he passed. Roger remembered the cool green leopard-eyes that had looked him over; little wonder that no one wanted to attract their notice.
He was more interested in the passengers, though, than in either crew or captain. Little was seen of them normally, but they were allowed on deck briefly twice each day, to take a bit of air, to empty their slop jars over the side—for the ship’s heads were woefully inadequate for so many—and to carry down again the small amounts of water carefully rationed to each family. Roger looked forward to these brief appearances, and tried to see to it that he was employed as often as possible near the end of the deck where they took their fleeting exercise.
His interest was both professional and personal; his historian’s instincts were roused by their presence, and his loneliness soothed by the homeliness of their talk. Here were the seeds of the new country, the legacy of the old. What these poor emigrants knew and valued, was what would endure to be passed on.
If one were handpicking the repository of Scottish culture, he thought, it might not contain such things as the recipe for warts about which an elderly woman was berating her long-suffering daughter-in-law (“I did tell ye, Katie Mac, and why ye chose tae leave my nice dried toadie behind, when ye could find room to bring all yon rubbish that we be squattin’ on and pickin’ oot from under our hurdies day and night …”), but that would last too, right along with the folksongs and prayers, with the woven wool and the Celtic patterns of their art.
He glanced at his own hand; he vividly remembered Mrs. Graham rubbing a large wart on his third finger with what she said was a dried toad. He grinned, rubbing a thumb across the spot. Must have worked; he’d never had another.
“Sir,” said a small voice by his side. “Sir, may we go and touch the iron?”
He glanced down and smiled at the tiny girl, holding two tinier brothers by their hands.
“Aye, a leannan,” he said. “Get on; yourself will be minding the men, though.”
She nodded and the three of them pattered off, looking anxiously up and down to be sure they were not in the way, before scrambling up to touch the horseshoe nailed to the mast for luck. Iron was protection and healing; the mothers often sent the little ones who were ailing to touch it.
They could have used iron to better effect internally, Roger thought, seeing the rash on the pasty white faces, and hearing the high-pitched complaints of itching boils, of loose teeth and fever. He resumed his job, measuring out water by the dipperful into the buckets and dishes the emigrants held out to him. They were living on oatmeal, the lot of them—that, with dried peas now and then and a bit of hard biscuit, was the sum total of the “provisions” supplied them for the voyage.
At that, he’d heard no complaint; the water was clean, the biscuit was not moldy, and if the allowance of “corn” was not generous, neither was it niggardly. The crew was fed better, but still on meat and starch, with only the occasional onion for relief. He ran his tongue round his teeth, testing, as he did every few days. The faint taste of iron was nearly always in his mouth now; his gums were beginning to bleed from the lack of fresh vegetables.
Still, his teeth were strongly rooted, and he had no sign of the swollen joints or bruised nails that several of the other crewmen showed. He’d looked it up, during his weeks of waiting; a normal adult male in good health should be able to endure from three to six months of prolonged vitamin deficiency before suffering any real symptoms. If the good weather held, they’d be across in only two.
“It will be good weather tomorrow, aye?” His attention recalled by this apparent reading of his thoughts, he looked down to find that it was the bonny brown-haired girl he’d admired on the quay in Inverness. Morag, her friends called her.
“I am hoping it may be,” he said, taking her bucket with an answering smile. “Why do ye say so?”
She nodded, pointing over his shoulder with a small sharp chin. “There’s the new moon in the arms o’ the old; if that means fine weather on the land, I should think it is the same on the sea, no?”
He glanced back to see the pale clean curve of a silver moon, holding a glowing orb in its cup. It rode high and perfect in an endless evening sky of pale violet, its reflection swallowed by the indigo sea.
“Dinna be wasting time chattering, lass—go on and ask him!” He turned back in time to hear this hissed over Morag’s shoulder by the middle-aged woman behind her. Morag glared back.
“Will ye hush?” she hissed back. “I’ll not, I said I won’t!”
“Ye’re a stubborn lass, Morag,” the older woman declared, stepping boldly forward, “and if ye willna be asking for yourself, I shall do it for ye!”
The good-lady laid a broad hand on Roger’s arm and gave him a charming smile.
“And what might your name be, lad?”
“MacKenzie, ma’am,” Roger said respectfully, holding back a smile.
“Ah, MacKenzie, is it! Well, there, ye see, Morag, and belike he’ll be some kinsman of your man’s, and happy to do ye a service, at that!” The woman turned triumphantly to the girl, then swung back to let Roger have the full force of her personality.
“She’s suckling a wean, and dyin’ o’ thirst in the doin’ of it. A woman needs to drink when she’s giving suck, or her milk dries; everyone kens that weel enough. But the silly lass cannae bring herself to ask ye for a bittie more water. There’s na
ne here grudge it to her—is there?” she demanded rhetorically, turning round to glare at the other women in line. Not surprisingly, all the heads shook back and forth like clockwork toys.
It was getting dark, but Morag’s face was visibly pink. Lips pressed tight together, she accepted the brimming bucket of water with a brief bob of her head.
“I thank ye, Mr. MacKenzie,” she murmured. She didn’t look up until she had reached the hatchway—but then she stopped, and looked back over her shoulder at him, with a smile of such gratitude that he felt himself grow warm, in spite of the sharp evening wind that blew through his shirt and jacket.
He was sorry to see the water line finish and the emigrants go below, the hatch battened down over them for the night watches. He knew they told stories and sang songs to pass the time, and would have given much to hear them. Not only from curiosity, but from longing—what moved him was neither pity for their poverty nor thought of their uncertain future; it was envy of the sense of connection among them.
But the Captain, the crew, the passengers, even the all-important weather, occupied no more than a fragment of Roger’s thoughts. What he thought about, day and night, wet or dry, hungry or fed, was Brianna.
He went down to the mess when the signal came for supper, and ate without much noticing the contents of his trencher. His was the second watch; he went to his hammock after eating, choosing solitude and rest over the possibility of companionship on the forecastle.
Solitude was an illusion, of course. Swinging gently in his hammock, he could feel each twitch and turn of the man next to him, the sweating heat of sleeping flesh clammy against his own through the thick cotton mesh. Each man had eighteen inches of sleeping space to call his own, and Roger was uncomfortably aware that when he lay upon his back, his shoulders exceeded that allowance by a good two inches on either side.
After two nights of sleep interrupted by the bumps and muttered insults of his shipmates, he had swapped places and ended in the space next the bulkhead, where he would have only one companion to discommode. He learned to lie on one side, his face an inch or two from the wooden partition, back turned to his companions, and tune his ears to the sounds of the ship, blocking out the noises of the men around him.
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