The Choir Boats

by Rabuzzi, Daniel

  Tom thought about this. Out on the flat sea, a flying fish splatted back into the weeds.

  “Look,” said Billy. “I won’t deny that you’ve gotten some rough handling and that’s to be sorry for. But it is a needed thing. To be as bold as a fox in a kennel, sir, we are poor and not used to the ways of rich folks like you. So sometimes we may seem, well, wrong, when we only mean what’s right.”

  Tom kept silent.

  “Back in London,” continued Billy, “we was all sinners but we didn’t want to be — only need drove us to the sins we did. I am ashamed of what I done but I am not at the same time because all I done was because I am poor and others is rich, and which is the greater sin? My mother was a hempen widow, my father hanged when I was a boy, and for naught more than culching meat from the butcher to feed his family. Nay, those what have lived in shoes like mine have not seen the Great forced to sing small.”

  Tom began to say something, but Billy gave him no entry.

  “All the same,” said Billy in a far-away voice, “we listened hard to the preachers, mind you, be they Muggletonians or Wesleyans or the con-geration of the prophet Southcott. But nothing really took with us until we heard his Grace, the Cretched Man, talk of this road, what we call Thieves’ Redemption. Now we are set right, and know that in this war, we are on the just side.”

  Billy’s face had not changed expression, but his arms were down at his sides with his hands in fists. Tom turned and spoke nearly in a whisper, “What war is that, Billy? I don’t think there are any Frenchmen in Yount.”

  “Not that war I am speaking about,” said Billy, but he said no more.

  Back in his cabin, Tom read by the light of the moon. He put aside Buskirk’s play and picked up a history of Wellesley’s campaigns in India. “‘How the Maratha prince Jaswant Rao Holkar of Indore did perfidiously and without just cause make war on his neighbours and did defy the law that the Honourable East India Company was sworn to uphold,’” he read.

  Tom put the history down. He looked up to the sky, thought he found the star Billy had called the Grail Star, and wondered.

  While Tom, Billy, and Jambres awaited the winter stars, the rest of the McDoons sailed into summer, having crossed the equator. Over two thousand nautical miles to the south and east of the Cretched Man’s weed-encircled vessel, the Essex sailed on.

  In the few moments when Sally did not think of Tom, she felt like Mrs. Thrale on the Grand Tour in Italy. Sapere aude, indeed! When her anxiety about Tom threatened to overwhelm her, Kidlington cheered her up. He seemed to have special words just for her. Searching her vocabulary, Sally called his verbal freshets a “gasconade,” though that might not have been exactly right, since Kidlington was not boastful or conceited, so much as colourful and self-assured. Or perhaps it was that he seemed to boast only to encourage the listener to challenge and deflate his claim. Gentle self-mockery laced his bravado.

  One afternoon, under the fraulein’s keen eye, Kidlington said, “Sally, that is a most lovely locket around your neck. May I be so forthright as to ask what it contains?”

  She opened the locket and showed it to Kidlington. “It holds a picture of me on one side, my mother on another. Uncle Barnabas had it made for me on my sixteenth birthday, using the sole portrait of my mother, this cameo. I prize it above even my books.”

  Kidlington remarked on the similarity between the two faces — Sally did look much like her mother. “But,” he added, “I should think the locket is at risk here, openly displayed onboard. Some thief or besonian might rob you.”

  Sally agreed. “That’s why I rarely go with it in public like this. Otherwise, I keep it safe in my room, where I can look at it without fear of loss.”

  “A sensible course,” said Kidlington and changed the subject.

  The Essex swung out almost to Brazil to avoid the doldrums off West Africa before angling back on the trade winds towards the Cape. They were fortunate with the wind but typhus spread among the regimentals, killing five in a fortnight. Nexius and the McDoons kept to their cabins for fear of contagion. Chamber pots went uncollected, lice got into everyone’s garments, the women suffered particularly from the lack of hygiene, and Barnabas lost his quizzing glass on a trip to “the necessary.” In short, everyone was miserable.

  Kidlington was their only inspiration. On they sailed, a little sodality at sea, guided now by Kidlington the gascon. Like his hero, Erasmus Darwin, Kidlington talked medicine and literature, he talked flora and fauna, he knew the Bible as well as he knew the broadsheets. “Hydrates of cubebene,” he’d say. “That’s the thing for gout.” Or “Oil of cassia for the dropsy, unless it’s a gravid woman who is the patient.” (Barnabas was relieved to hear that Bateman’s Pectoral Drops and his other favourite cures were held in high regard by Kidlington.) Kidlington would enthrall them with visions of future technologies, about steam-propelled chariots flying on “wide-waving wings” through “the field of air” and ships that would sail under water. Over endless rounds of piquet and ombre, they would debate everything from the Union with Ireland to the state of King George III’s health.

  Perhaps two weeks out from the Cape, Sally insisted on a walk around the ship.

  “I cannot stand being shut up in this horrid cabin any longer,” she cried, overcoming her uncle’s protestations. “James will come with me. I don’t fear disease with a medical student by my side.” Isaak trotted after her, happy to expand her hunting territory.

  Few people were about except for the crew. After a promenade on deck, Sally and Kidlington — and the ever-present fraulein — went below decks again to fetch fresh water from the aft stores. As they filled several jugs with water, they heard voices close behind them. Having become accustomed to close quarters, they thought nothing of it until they turned to go and found their way blocked by two men in canvas pants, one with a leather apron, both with short-brimmed hats.

  “Have we met?” asked Kidlington.

  “No,” said the man in the apron. “And we won’t make your acquaintance now.”

  “What do you want then?” said Kidlington.

  “You gournard,” said the apron-man. “It’s not you I’m a-speaking to. My message is for the females here. You just keep out of what is none of your concern.”

  Kidlington started forward, but Sally grabbed his shoulder.

  “She has more sense than you do, you lubbernowl,” said the intruders’ spokesman. He turned to Sally and the fraulein. “Listen, ’cause I won’t say this but one time. I am instructed to tell you that our business together is well looked after but that time is pressing on. His Grace urges you not to tarry on your road. The exchange must be completed.”

  Kidlington looked at Sally. “What is he talking about? Who is this man? How dare he threaten you!” Sally was about to reply, when Kidlington wheeled from her and Fraulein Reimer, and, without another sound, launched himself at the man in the apron. The two went down together. The next seconds were a blur. A knife flashed, and Kidlington lay on the floor. The man in the apron hauled himself to his feet, bleeding from his lip.

  “Fool,” he growled. “Thick gounard! Look what you did make me do! I said this was no quarrel of your’n.”

  The other man yelled, “Who’s the fool? Boss said no harmin’ ’em, now look what you’ve . . .”

  The assailants scrambled down the corridor out of sight.

  Kidlington was the talk of the ship. His arm had only been pricked and he recovered quickly. The soldiers’ wives cooed over him, the sailors applauded. Kidlington, in a position to boast, did not. Sally attended to Kidlington hourly. The fraulein praised him. Nexius and Sanford reversed their earlier doubts about the medical student. Barnabas was perplexed as well as angry, saying, “Poor Mr. Kidlington, attacked by sailmakers from the sound of it, stabbed with a sailmaker’s knife. Odd way to come at a man. Not dignified. Oh, I wish we had been there. We would have handled those — what did Sally say they called Mr. Kidlington? — those lubbernowls!”

 
The perpetrators could not be found. No one fitting the description was known at all, giving rise to stories of ghosts or demons stalking the ship. Kidlington’s stock rose still further. Kidlington was the most curious of all about the nature of the attackers. Sally resisted the temptation to bring Kidlington into her confidence. He asked repeatedly what the men had meant, only to have Sally deflect his queries. “I don’t know, James, really I don’t,” she would say. “It all happened so fast. As you said yourself, it might be unsafe to walk onboard — how I wish I had listened. Perhaps they saw my locket and wanted to rob me, after all.”

  Kidlington would look sceptical. “But they talked of delivering a message.”

  “Really, that can’t have been — how on earth could we ever have known such people? What sort of business would McDoon & Associates have with that sort? They must have thought the fraulein and I were someone else. Or perhaps your wound has caused a fever that has blurred your memory.”

  Interlude: Starved Mercies

  Maggie’s mother survived the winter cull in Wapping but only just. One of the Irish children was not so fortunate: Maggie watched as they took away her little coffin to the Latin rite chapel near Oil Wharf (the professional pallbearers complained because only two were needed, but, on the other hand, they had more opportunities for employment with the children). Others died in stranger ways: the Prime Minister was stabbed to death in the House of Commons, a woman in Limehouse was crushed by a falling wall, a man was gored when he fell into the bull-baiting ring behind The Hope and Anchor on Cinnamon Street (some said that the mastiffs gnawed off half his legs before the body could be retrieved). Maggie heard these and many other stories, prayed to keep her mother out of the stories and safely alive.

  Maggie’s mother was sick again in June. She coughed ceaselessly, and suffered what she called “the mullygrews,” aches and fevers so severe she could not get out of bed to go to work some days. Maggie stayed home two days to care for her mother. They both got sacked by the seamstress, who said that she had no need for lazy blackbirds when there were so many bodies who wanted the work. Maggie pleaded for piecework but the seamstress shut the door in Maggie’s face.

  “Women are as strong as elephants,” murmured her mother that night.

  “Yes, Mama,” said Maggie. She poured weak tea, made from “smouch,” which was what everyone in Wapping called used tealeaves. Maggie bartered short bits of thread (the tail-ends she had clipped with her teeth at work) for smouch with a maid servant at a nearby inn, The White Hart. Maggie had met the servant at a sermon preached in a field just outside London and occasionally the two had gone together to the Wednesday tabernacles in Great Eastcheap and in Moorfields. Best of all, the smouch came wrapped in old newspaper, so Maggie had something to read to her mother. “Mr. Joseph William Turner gives notice of his first lectures to the Public, to be given at Somerset House,” Maggie read. “The thirty-eight-gun frigate, HMS Pomone, was lost by The Needles off the Isle of Wight, but all crew rescued and the Shah of Persia’s gift of horses to his Royal Majesty King George III saved.” “A report from our correspondent in Whydah of the latest advances by the Sokoto Caliph Usman dan Fodio in Hausaland.” “The Maratha prince Jaswant Rao Holkar of Indore, who led the great uprising against the Honourable East India Company in the last decade, has died.” Even last year’s news helped keep hunger at bay, at least for a little while. But it did not stop Maggie’s mother from coughing.

  Maggie went the next morning — the feast day of St. Modwenna in early July — round the back of The White Hart and spoke with the maid servant there. Looking over her shoulder, the servant gave Maggie a half-eaten kidney pie.

  “But this is all I can do, see?” said the servant. “I can’t lose my situation, you understand, right? I wish I could help more but . . . Look here, I’ll ask around for you at Whitefield’s tabernacle, and I has a cousin who visits the congregation at Glover’s Hall in the Barbican. Maybe she can put out the word. I’ll scrape up whatever other acquaintances I has, and see if they knows of any work.”

  Maggie nodded her thanks.

  “But it’s hard right now, calamitous hard,” said the servant. “My mam back home in Lincolnshire, she says the men have no work, so they’re burnin’ hayricks and breakin’ the landlord’s machines.”

  From inside the tavern, someone called for the serving girl.

  “I must go!” said the servant, reaching out to take Maggie’s shoulder for one moment but hesitating to embrace her. “Be brave like Esther! May the Lord protect you!”

  Maggie went to every seamstress, mantua-maker and dressmaker between Holborn and Stepney. She got some piecework but nothing steady. She bought dubious concoctions from druggists who she was sure overcharged her. She sought help from cunning women who sprinkled rosewater on hymnal sheets and then told her to burn the sheets under her mother’s nose. She prayed every day, asked for special blessings at the revivals by the brick-kilns in Bethnal Green and near the bleacher’s fields of Mile End. She walked through the quadratic equations she’d incised in the alley wall and asked the ndichie for help. Nothing worked; her mother got worse. Some nights they shared a single boiled potato, counting themselves lucky if they had bacon drippings to go with it. They fell behind in rent. The rent-collector said he would give them one week before he evicted them. “Would be today,” he said. “But as I am a Christian man, and as your mum is sick, I will give you the additional time. But one week only, do you hear?”

  On the first day of August in 1812, the feast day of the rising against harmation, Maggie went for aid at the local parish: St. Macrina the Younger, known to all as “the Baby Macaroni.” She sat in an airless room just off the vestry and looked at the gravy stains on the overseer’s collar.

  “Let me see,” said the overseer, licking the fingers of his free hand, and waving a derelict pen in the other. “Maggie Collins. Collins, Collins. Do you have proof of your settlement here? We cannot have you unless you are chargeable to this parish.”

  Maggie handed the overseer a piece of paper that indicated her seven years at St. Macrina the Younger’s Female Charity School. The overseer looked at it with distaste.

  “Were they right then, I wonder, to let you in?” said the overseer, more to himself than to Maggie. “Your kind are mostly over at St. George-in-the East. St. George-in-the-East?! St. George-in-Africa is more like it.”

  He tossed the paper on the table in front of Maggie, who folded it carefully and put it in her pocket. The overseer thumbed through a large book, then looked up with a smile.

  “We can offer sixpence for your mother’s medicines and a shilling to help with rent,” he said. “Unless you and your mother wish to enter the workhouse, of course.”

  Maggie sat up so straight that the chair creaked. “We would rather die than go into the lump,” she said.

  “As you please,” shrugged the overseer. He opened a drawer and took out several copper coins. He wrote something in the book.

  “Make your mark here.” He indicated a place in the book.

  Maggie signed her name. The overseer looked at her signature — the fact of her signature — and had a minor epiphany.

  “Of course, of course,” he licked his fingers again. “You are a former student at our Female Charity School. Appears they actually taught you something. Can you write beyond your signature, girl? Oh yes, I think you can, I see it in your eyes. Now, why didn’t I think of that before? Here, just you wait one moment.”

  He opened the drawer again, fetched out a blank piece of paper and scribbled a name and address on it.

  “It’s your lucky hour, girl! Just yesterday one of the patronesses of the Female Charity School adverted for a charwoman, someone of good character and virtue, and the usual, with preference to go to an old girl of the school who might have fallen on hard times.” The overseer paused, smiled. “Well, by Mother Bryce, if that doesn’t describe you to an exactitude!”

  Maggie clutched the seat of the chair, thought of her
Mama, said nothing.

  “Offers a bob a day, which you collect here,” said the overseer, a trifle too hastily, so that Maggie knew the overseer was skimming. (The wage was actually one shilling sixpence daily but the overseer found that an outrageously high sum for a charwoman, a charitable whim of a soft-minded patroness; he felt sixpence was a fair charge for his time arranging the job and disbursing the wage.) Maggie nodded her head.

  “Look here, coffee-girl,” said the overseer. “You are lucky to be in this parish, where we take care of those in need. I am not entirely convinced of your settlement here, regardless of your history at the Female Charity School. You take my meaning?”

  Maggie nodded.

  “Fine,” purred the overseer. “Mind you work hard for your new mistress. She is important to us here. She is on the Board of Patronesses — do you understand? — the Board for the Female School. You can start with her tomorrow.”

  He slid the paper over to Maggie. Maggie read what he had scrawled there: “Mrs. Shawdelia Sedgewick, at corner Archer Street and Pineapple Court, by Austin Friars.”

  Chapter 7: The Moon Waits on the May-Star

  The Essex arrived at Table Bay, the roads for Cape Town, on Martinmas eve in November, just over four months out from London. The northwest gales that had propelled them so quickly had abated, as winter turned to spring in the southern hemisphere. Soon the prevailing wind would be out of the southeast, and in the Indian Ocean the monsoon winds were shifting sea-wise from India, meaning that sailing from the Cape to Bombay or Madras would be nearly impossible until late March or early April. Kidlington would therefore be staying the southern summer in Cape Town, a prospect that heartened the McDoons.

  McDoon & Associates “established their new headquarters” with gusto. Barnabas and Sanford were happy to get back to “clarification” as a way to contain their fears about Tom and their general desire to come to Yount. They had letters of credit drawn on the Rogers’ Bank and Praed’s Bank, and their connections were very good in that part of the world, Cape Town being the entrepôt for the maritime trade between India and the Far East and Europe. Sally had Kidlington for long conversations about everything under the sun. Only Nexius was as guarded as before, insisting that they were lucky onboard and that their enemies had more means here, so close to the roads to Yount.