by Maryk Lewis
MacGillivray to you, young man,” the cook snapped, though with a twinkle in his eye. “If you people are looking for breakfast, you can carry it through into the great cabin for now. There’s nobody about. You won’t be able to go in there once we get under way, though. That’ll be strictly for officers and cabin passengers.”
He showed them where to find bowls, and slopped huge dollops of oatmeal porridge into them. Spoons were in a tray fixed to the bench.
“Is there any sugar?” Jess asked.
“Sugar?” the cook scoffed. “You won’t get sugar with your porridge on this ship, my dear. There’s salt there. That goes on your porridge now, and I want to see you back here when you’ve eaten it.”
In the great cabin there were benches on either side of a long central table. They sat at the far end, the three of them. The porridge wasn’t as bad as Jess thought it might be, and besides, she was hungry enough to eat anything put before her.
While they ate, the boatswain came in, followed by four tough-looking men in grimy woollen jerseys. They ate their breakfasts further along the table. The strangers looked at them under lowered brows, especially at Sarah, but said nothing. Not so the boatswain.
“You’ll help the cook for a start, Jessica,” he told her. “And you, Miss Gordon, I’ll find you a bucket and scrubbing brushes afterwards. You can make a start on scrubbing out the hospital flat.”
Back in the galley Jess found two enormous tubs of hot water waiting for her. Her task was to gather up all the dirty dishes, and wash them firstly in one tub, the soapy one, and then rinse them in the second. Nothing was dried afterwards. Everything simply got stacked still wet into special racks, designed to hold them firmly whenever the ship was rolling about at sea. Each kind of cup, bowl, or plate had its own rack, where it would fit, but nothing else would.
“Officers’ breakfasts now,” the cook said before she was finished. She could hear movements in the great cabin, which was how the cook knew that the officers were ready for their breakfasts. They too got porridge for their first course, but not so much, because they had second and third courses still to come; something which the Gordon sisters and the common sailors had not been offered.
Jess carried the plates in one at a time, and set them before first the captain, and then a new man, Mr Milburn, whom she learned was the first mate, and then before Ken MacGovern. Mr Milburn was a smoothly-shaven, very neatly dressed man, who said, “Thank you,” very carefully and precisely when she served him.
Gil Inkster was there too, by that time, spooning porridge into Phyllis perched at the end of the table. The cook must have given it to them, while Jess was otherwise engaged. Laurie was seated beside them, busily feeding himself.
The next course for them was bacon and eggs, followed by toast and marmalade. Jess looked at it all thoughtfully as she carried it in. She’d never known people have so much for breakfast. A large bowl of porridge, certainly. The Gordons had that at home. Perhaps some toast to follow, but not all the rest. Only rich people could afford so much.
“Here, big-eyes,” the cook said to her when she returned to the galley after the last load. “Get that into you.”
There was bacon, eggs, and toast for her too, but she had to eat them standing at a bench in the galley. She was still tucking in when the boatswain arrived.
“Hoy! Hoy! What’s this?” he queried. “We won’t get the work out of her, if she gets too fat.”
“You’ll soon work it off her again,” the cook spoke for her, and laughed.
“When you’ve finished in here,” the boatswain said to Jess, “you can go back and help your sister. The hospital flat has to be all scrubbed out before the carpenters move in.”
Daylight had come by the time she had stacked away the last of the dishes from the great cabin.
In the hospital flat, which was reeking of vinegar, Jess found Ken MacGovern talking to Sarah while she worked. He turned red, and left promptly when little sister walked in.
“What did he want?” Jess asked.
“Oh, he was only checking that we had everything,” Sarah replied airily.
“Oh yes, I’m sure,” Jess returned, and laughed.
Sarah, draped in an oilskin jacket several sizes too big for her, had been scrubbing the beams overhead, and the underside of the deck above. Lines of tar showed the caulking in the gaps between the planks. She was using a mixture of salt water and vinegar, drips of which were falling all over her.
“I hope that’s not the water out of the dock,” Jess commented.
“No, not that stinking stuff,” Sarah replied firmly. “This is from the ballast tanks. When the fresh drinking water is emptied out of them during a voyage, they let in clean sea water to stop the ship from getting top-heavy.”
Somebody had left an extra oilskin for Jess, and soon she was helping by scrubbing the bulkheads and the insides of the hull as high as she could reach. Scrubbing overhead was beyond her. The scrubbing brushes themselves, though, and how to use them, was nothing new to either of the sisters.
Three hours later the overhead, the hull, and the bulkheads were almost done, when two more people arrived, a dark, swarthy man with a thin moustache, and an older lady with her grey hair in a bun. Andy brought them.
“These are them, sir,” he said as he came in. “Miss Gordon, and her sister Jessica.”
“Ah, yes, good,” the man said, and coughed, looking severely at young Andy, who stood aside and smiled nervously at him. “That will be all, young man. This isn’t a peep show.”
Andy flushed scarlet, and fled.
“I’m Peter Reade, the ship’s surgeon,” the man said, “and this is our matron, Mrs Greeley. Now I trust that you understand that the captain has only signed you on for the three days until the ship sails. I’ll be appointing another sub-matron for the voyage, if the one I’ve already selected isn’t well enough in time. I have to have somebody with nursing experience.”
Sarah was quick to reassure him that she fully understood the position. All the time, the surgeon was talking only to her. He appeared to ignore the fact that Jess was also helping with the work, despite the fact that nobody had signed her on for anything. Her labours seemed to be just expected in return for her food and a place to sleep.
“The other thing,” he said, finally acknowledging Jess’s presence, “is that neither of you are supposed to be on board until I’ve examined you. The captain has rather stretched a point there, but I suppose he couldn’t really leave you ashore in the circumstances. If you’ll just come over here behind these bales, and disrobe down to your undershifts, we’ll put the matter right straight away.”
“Now we’ll really show a leg,” Jess said quietly to her sister.
“You watch your tongue, miss,” the matron snapped at her. “The doctor has his work to do.”
“Sorry, Ma’am,” Jess gulped, and quickly slipped out of her petticoats, to stand shivering beside her sister, both then in bloomers and slip.
“Those too,” the matron said severely, pointing to the bloomers.
Jess gulped again, and closed her eyes. She’d been warned that this would be necessary, but that still didn’t make her feel any better. Sarah took it all quite calmly. She’d been through it all before when her marriage was being arranged.
The doctor was quick and gentle, though, seeing what he had to see, and letting them get their clothes on again before they caught a chill.
“Fit and healthy, the pair of you. No diseases,” he commented, sounding pleased. “Now have you had the influenza yet?”
“We both had it last winter, but not this time yet,” Sarah answered.
“Last winter might be enough,” Dr Reade nodded. “You might get away with it this time. What else have you had?”
“The cow pox, and the brown measles,” Sarah said.
“I had the mumps when I was little,” Jess added.
That seemed to satisfy him. Mrs Greeley wrote something in a little book she carried in her reticule.
&n
bsp; Before he left them, Dr Reade told them how he wanted the deck in the hospital scrubbed with sand and lye. The lye, he warned them, would burn if they got it on their skin, which was why they hadn’t been scrubbing with it already.
Noon had come and gone before they finished scrubbing and mopping out. The work was slow, because there were so many nooks and crannies, which had to be thoroughly cleaned out. When they came out on deck, the number of people working on the ship had grown considerably. They hadn’t known that so much needed to be done before a ship could put to sea.
Andy was climbing up a mast, pulling behind him a cord like a fishing line. Up near the top, he worked his way out along a spar, where he threaded the cord through a wooden block which had several small wheels inside it. When the cord came out the other side, he caught it, and then pulled the end down to the deck again.
“This is how we get the sheets up to the spars,” he said proudly. “This is what I do today.”
Jess couldn’t see any sheets. There was only a big coil of thick rope on the deck, and Andy was making a strange knot with the end of his cord to fix it to the end of the rope.
“Leader’s bent on, sir,” he reported to the boatswain, at which one of the sailors was sent over to help Andy pull on the other end of the cord. By pulling down on the cord on one side of the block, the heavy rope was pulled up on the other, until it followed through the block and came out the other side.
“Now I go up and fix the end to the spar,