By Fickle Winds Blown

by Maryk Lewis

first taken out of the chests, and then tallied as she packed them away again.

  There was only one thing that failed to come out correctly, and she unpacked them, and counted again to make sure. There were sixteen packets of toffees instead of fifteen. She looked closely at the list. It was a five in the number, and not a badly-written six. The ship’s chandler had sent them one packet too many.

  She locked it carefully away in the chest with the rest, and took the lists and the keys down to the great cabin looking for Mrs Greeley.

  “There was a packet of toffee too many,” she reported when she found her.

  “Was there now?” said Mrs Greeley, and didn’t look in the least surprised. “Fancy that.”

  Dinnertime was close at hand, and Sarah had set the table in the great cabin before Jess arrived.

  “I haven’t seen you all afternoon,” Jess said.

  “I’ve been ashore with Mr Inkster,” Sarah replied. “We’ve been to Mr Smithers’ office to copy out the lists of the passengers again. The first lists are all wrong, because such a lot of people won’t be coming now, and they’re bringing in other people instead. It’s the influenza, of course.”

  Together, the sisters waited table for the officers, the surgeon, the matron, and Gil Inkster and his children. Afterwards they had their dinner, roast mutton, and heaps of vegetables, at the bench in the galley with Angus MacGillivray. Both ate far more than they were used to, but somehow they were ready for it, and found room.

  “And a little bit of treacle pudding to cap it off,” the cook offered.

  “Oo, I won’t be able to waddle back to my bed,” Jess pretended to moan, but reached for the piled up plate anyway.

  As they made their way, after dark, along the deck by lantern light, heading for the hospital flat once the dishes were finished, they heard a shrill squealing sound from up on the forecastle.

  “That sounds like pigs,” Jess suggested.

  “Yes, it does,” Sarah agreed. “Let’s have a look.”

  The pens on the forecastle were occupied. Some contained sheep, some geese, and others chickens. There were three pigs in number three port side.

  “Well, you won’t be lonely,” Andy’s voice came out of the darkness, and he joined them in the light of the lantern. “It’ll be nice and cosy for you in there.”

  “They can’t be going to put me in there with those pigs,” Jess gasped.

  “Of course not, muttonhead,” Andy laughed. “They’ve been teasing you. We always go to sea with livestock penned on the fo’c’sle. That’s our fresh meat for the voyage. You’ll have a bunk in the single women’s quarters with your sister.”

  “Oh, I do feel a giddy goat,” Jess groaned, glad the darkness was hiding her flaming cheeks. “Aren’t those men just awful!”

  “I suppose you fell for the trick with the extra packet of toffees too,” Andy suggested.

  “Yes, there was one too many,” Jess agreed suspiciously.

  “On purpose,” Andy nodded. “You were being tested to see if you were honest. I should have warned you.”

  “Certainly not,” Jess answered him with some asperity. “There’ll never be any need to give me such a warning.”

  “Oops,” said Andy. “I’m finishing the day as I started it...saying the wrong thing.”

  “What makes you think anything you’ve said in between has been any different?” she asked him.

  Later, as she settled down to sleep in the bunk next to Sarah’s, Jess whispered, “Did you notice? He called me a muttonhead.”

  Five

  After breakfast the next morning, Sarah went ashore with the surgeon and Mrs Greeley. Doctor Reade was responsible for inspecting all the provisions before they were put aboard. Sarah was to help him with that. There were also still many passengers and crew who had not had their medical inspections at the owners’ offices. Sarah’s job then would be to send in the people one by one, and keep records of the results when they came out.

  At the same time Gil Inkster went off with the second mate to arrange for carters to bring all the passengers’ heavy luggage down to the ship.

  Before they left Ken MacGovern asked Sarah where they could collect her stowage trunk.

  “Stowage trunk?” she repeated blankly. “What stowage trunk?”

  “Your heavy luggage, with the things that can be stored down in the hold.”

  “We don’t have any other luggage,” Sarah confessed. “All we have is what we’ve brought with us.”

  Captain Hedley happened to overhear that.

  “Quite a few of our younger passengers will have very little luggage,” he said. “They can’t afford any. That’s one of the reasons why they want to try living in a new land.”

  In a quiet moment, Jess whispered to her sister: “What would people put in their heavy luggage?”

  “Things for setting up a new home...tablecloths, sheets, towels, pillow slips; even whole dinner sets,” Sarah replied wistfully.

  “All the things we’d have in our glory boxes, if we could have afforded them,” Jess observed.

  “Exactly,” Sarah nodded.

  Both of them were close to tears at the thought.

  Passing through the drab London streets on their way to the owners’ office, Sarah and Mrs Greeley sat inside the hansom cab. Doctor Reade shared the driver’s seat outside.

  Taking the opportunity of a private word, the matron warned Sarah, “You must be careful of that young MacGovern. He has an eye for a pretty girl.”

  “He’s a charmer,” Sarah nodded, “but I think I can manage him.”

  “Just so long as you know that sailors generally make bad husbands, even in the few cases where they make husbands at all,” the matron sighed.

  “You would be in a position to know,” Sarah said.

  “To know only too well,” Mrs Greeley assured her. “I used to see Mr Greeley for about two months in a year, until I hit on the idea of signing on as matron on the same ship. Then he was washed overboard on the second trip we had together. Don’t marry a sailor, me dear.”

  “I’m destined to marry a sheep farmer I’ve never met,” Sarah told her.

  The matron squeezed her hand. There was a wealth of sympathy and understanding in her touch.

  After the others had gone, Jess, still depressed, took the Inkster children on a tour around the ship. Minding them would be her main responsibility for the morning, because their father could not take them with him as he had the day before. They had to be careful to stay out of the way of the workmen and sailors, who were still preparing the ship for sea.

  “Why have all the mooring lines got dustbin lids hanging on them?” little Laurie wanted to know, pointing to the ropes which tied the ship to the shore.

  Jess had no idea, and looked in puzzlement at the round metal shields, which had the ropes threaded through slots cut into the middle of them.

  Andy, working in the rigging, saw them there on the deck, and shinned down a line to join them.

  “Those are to stop the rats using the lines for tightropes, and walking up them to come onto the ship,” he explained seriously.

  “They are not, Andrew Davison!” Jess returned crossly. “You stop teasing me! Rats doing circus tricks? Whatever will you expect me to believe next?”

  “They are so,” Andy protested. “True dinks. You ask anybody.”

  “Anybody around here would tell me the same lies you do,” Jess snapped, and marched the children away in a huff.

  All morning horse-drawn wagons kept arriving at the ship’s side, and dock workers swung boxes, and bales, and cabin trunks aboard, and stowed them away in a walled-off section of the forward hold. The sailors, meantime, hauled huge canvas sails up the masts, and fixed them to the spars. Their work went slowly at first, but speeded up when some more sailors reported on board, and began to help them.

  Several times Mr Milburn went ashore, and walked around to the far side of the dock to look back at the ship from across the water. The more luggage b
rought on board, and the more people who joined the crew, the deeper the ship settled in the water. There was a stripe, called the water line, painted right around the hull of the ship, and the ship was not allowed to sail unless that line was above the water.

  Jess took the children around to see what Mr Milburn was looking at.

  “I meant to have young Andrew paint a new stripe on for us,” Mr Milburn said to Jess. “We sent him up to the chandlers to buy some striped paint, but he came back and said they didn’t have any.”

  “Striped paint” exclaimed Jess. “There’s no such thing. You can’t get stripes to stay in paint.”

  “No, that’s right,” Mr Milburn agreed with a smile. “So young Andrew discovered.”

  “You were teasing him,” Jess said.

  “Yes, of course. Sailors are terrible teasers,” Mr Milburn admitted.

  “So I’ve discovered,” Jess nodded. “Andrew has just tried to catch me with a story about rats walking up the mooring lines to get on the ship.”

  “That’s no story” Mr Milburn told her. “That’s true. Rats really do get on to a ship that way, if we forget to put the rat guards on the lines.”

  “Rat guards? Those round shield things like Chinamen’s hats?” Jess pointed to the one on the nearest line.

  “Yes, those things,” Mr Milburn affirmed.

  “Oh dear!” said Jess.

  When she came to take the children back on board again, she found Andy on duty at the gangway.

  “Andy, I’m sorry,” she apologised. “I’ve found out that rats really do walk up the mooring lines.”

  “That’s all right,” replied Andy generously. “I don’t mind if we kiss and make up.”

  “Andrew Davison! You’re awful,” Jess stormed, and marched past him.

  “Are you having problems with young Andy?” Angus MacGillivray asked, when Jess arrived flushed in the galley.

  “He’s very cheeky,” Jess answered.

  “Ah, well, if you get him while he’s young, he’ll train up good,” the cook suggested cheerfully.

  “You men!” Jess snorted, but at the same time wondered why she wasn’t truly annoyed.

  Sarah and Gil arrived back on board to find Jess in the great cabin feeding the little ones on cheese and fresh bread. There was also ginger beer for them, but Phyllis didn’t like it.

  “I hope you’ve been getting on better than I have,” Jess whispered to her sister. “Everybody’s been teasing me.”

  “That’s better than them all taking no notice of you,” Sarah replied. “The teasing shows that they like you. They wouldn’t bother otherwise.”

  “Perhaps they like Andy too then,” Jess said, and went on to tell Sarah about the joke with the striped paint.

  Lunch was not a set meal, but many people turned up to take a share of the fresh bread Angus MacGillivray had baked. The common sailors ate theirs out on the decks, or took it down to the forecastle. The officers ate in their cabins, or wherever they happened to be working.

  During the morning the dock workers and the carpenters had all finished on board, and had mostly taken themselves away to work on another ship in one of the other docks. A few were still waiting around on the quay. Two more sailors had signed on, but they were still short-handed, and there had been a disagreement between Captain Hedley and Mr Smithers about whether the ship should be allowed to sail.

  After lunch the sailors began to lay out new lines across the dock, long ropes sagging over the turbid water, while the dock gates, the caissons, were opened to let in the high tide.

  The gangway was brought aboard, and most of the sailors gathered around the capstan on the forecastle. Long wooden poles were brought up from below, and fitted into holes in the capstan to form spokes. When the sailors pushed on them, the capstan went round and round, winding in one or other of the spread-out mooring lines. In this way the ship was pulled away from the quay, and across the dock to the channel leading out to the London River.

  “Dear me!” Jess exclaimed. “Are we on our way already? What about the rest of the passengers?”

  “They’ll have to swim after us,” the boatswain said.

  “Oh, yes, I’m sure,” Jess agreed, and laughed.

  “He’s telling fibs again, isn’t he,” Laurie whispered in Jess’s ear.

  As the ship slid through the water, and some of the lines were finished with, the dock workers who had been left behind unhitched those lines from the bollards on the quays, and threw them into the dock. Sailors then pulled the lines on board, and coiled them, oozing water, on the deck. One after another the lines were released, until the ship was gliding free along the channel and out into the river.

  When they came clear of the buildings a triangular jib sail was hauled up in front of the foremast, and another sail was set on the mizzen. Between the two, they caught enough of the breeze down the river to push the ship out into the middle, well away from the shallows along near the banks.

  After a time they came to a place in the river where there were a number of posts standing high out of the water.

  Mr Milburn was up on the forecastle with the boatswain and some of the sailors. When Captain Hedley gave the order to drop anchor, there was a crash as a sailor with a sledge hammer knocked out a block, and a splash as the heavy anchor hit the water. Chain rattled deafeningly across the deck, and out through the hawsehole. At the same time other sailors took in the two sails, and the ship sagged around in the current, tugging on the anchor cable, until the bows were pointing back up the river.

  Andy was nearby, and Jess asked him “What are we going to do now?”

  “This is where we adjust the compasses,” Andy replied.

  “Why, what’s wrong with them?” Jess asked suspiciously.

  “They’re not pointing straight at the North Pole,” Andy explained, “and we have to find out just how wrong they are.”

  That sounded reasonable to Jess.

  “Captain Hedley is going to make them point straight then?” she checked.

  “No. They never do that. We always sail with them pointing to the wrong place.”

  “Oh, Andrew!” Jess sighed resignedly. The boy was impossible. Didn’t he know when enough was enough?

  A call from the boatswain sent Andy rushing away to take his place in one of the ship’s lifeboats, which was about to be launched. While he prepared to push the boat away from the ship’s side, so that it wouldn’t be damaged, a group of sailors took a hold of the falls, the lowering ropes, and lowered the boat to the water. Then the boatswain and several others climbed down a rope ladder, and joined Andy in the boat.

  The end of a mooring line was passed down to them, and they towed it over to one of the piles, the posts standing in the water. Another line was similarly fixed to a pile on the other side of the ship.

  While they were doing that, Jess put Phyllis down for her afternoon nap, and then went up to see what the captain was really doing to the compass on the poop deck. Both of the mates were up there with him, and they all seemed to think that their task was very important.

  Captain Hedley was peering over the top of the compass right along the whole length of the ship, and Mr Milburn was giving orders to some sailors about just how much they should pull on one of the mooring lines to get the ship lying exactly how the captain wanted it. The second mate, Ken MacGovern, was standing by with a sharp pencil and some note paper tied on to a board with tapes.

  “What is the captain looking at?” Jess whispered to Ken MacGovern.

  “See away up the river, there’s a white pile, a post with a seagull sitting on it?” Ken said, and Jess told him that she did.

  “Now this white pile just in front of us?” he went on, and again Jess acknowledged it. “Well, when we get the ship lined up with both of those piles, so that you could draw a straight line right through the middle of ship, along the keel, from one end to the other, and straight on through both of those piles, then we know that the ship is headed exactly west, true wes
t.”

  “Mmm,” Jess looked out over the front of the ship. “Then if we turn around and look over the stern, that will be true east,” she reasoned.

  “Quite,” Ken MacGovern agreed, and looked pleased with her.

  “So north is straight out from the side of the ship to starboard, to our right, and that is where the compass needle will be pointing,” Jess continued.

  “Not exactly,” Ken demurred. “The compass needle will be pointing roughly towards magnetic north, which is a bit to one side of true north. It always does that, and we know how much to allow for it.”

  But the compass needle isn’t quite pointing to that either?” Jess asked.

  “No, there’s other things make the compass needle go just a little bit wrong, and that’s what we’re working out now.”

  At that stage the captain called out some numbers with degrees and minutes in them. Ken wrote them down.

  “That’s how much the compass is wrong when we’re heading west,” Ken said. “The needle is magnetised, you see, and it responds a little bit to all sorts of metal things in the ship, the stove in the galley, the anchors in the bows, and especially some pig iron we’ve got in the cargo.”

  Dr Reade appeared in the deck housing companionway and called out some other numbers slightly different to those called by the captain.

  “Those are from the compass in the captain’s cabin,” Ken said, noting them on his pad also.

  The sailors meanwhile were hauling the ship around to point at an angle across the river. Captain Hedley was sighting on another post, and a mark on the shore. He called out some more numbers when he was satisfied. Ken wrote those down too.

  “There’s a different amount of wrongness in the compass according to which way the ship is heading?” Jess asked.

  “That’s right,” Ken nodded absently. “We have to know how much it’s wrong for every point of the compass.”

  “And you always sail with the compasses pointing to the wrong place then?” Jess concluded despondently.

  “Always,” the mate confirmed.

  “Oh dear,” said Jess. “I’ve done it again. Poor Andy.”

  Patiently, to Mr Milburn’s directions, the crew hauled the ship right around in a circle, stopping eight times altogether, with the ship pointing west, north-west, north, and so on right around the compass. They didn’t need to stop at all the points of the compass, as once they had those eight written down, they could work out what fitted in between.

  “There,” Ken announced when they had finished. “Now we’ve boxed the compass.”

  With the ship again sitting to its anchor, and pointing up the river, the boat’s crew were called back on board, though the boat was left in the water swinging from a painter, a little mooring line of its own.

  Again Jess had to tell Andy that she had been wrong not to believe him. His face broke into a delighted grin.

  “Well, as I said before...” he started.

  “Andrew Davison! Don’t you dare,” Jess interrupted, and had to laugh when he laughed.

  “Oh, well anyway...friends?” he asked.

  “Certainly,” she said.

  Six

  Andy had to go off to help to coil down the mooring lines, which would not be wanted again. They would be dried, and stowed away in