By Fickle Winds Blown

by Maryk Lewis

we’re facing backwards,” Jess replied, feeling guilty for having pushed the younger girl too hard. “Come along. You’ve been doing splendidly.”

  “Have I?” Samantha looked up wonderingly, her face tear-streaked. “I thought I was making a dreadful fist of it.”

  “No, no,” Jess assured her. “This is hard work. You mustn’t expect too much of yourself too soon. Come along. We’re nearly there.”

  From somewhere Samantha found the strength to help lug the basket the last few feet into the Rutherford’s cabin. Her brother looked on amazed. He was used to seeing his spoiled little sister lose her temper at the least sign of frustration. This young person, who worked like a horse, and still kept a civil tongue in her head, was a complete stranger to Charles.

  For that matter, Charles knew that he himself was not acting in character. Normally he would have stood back and left everything to the servants, verbally lambasting any who failed to move fast enough. Here, the cool blue gaze of the girl with the Scots/Irish accent was holding his ready temper in check. He was reluctant to look anything other than strong and manly while she was present, and he hauled his end of the portmanteau into the cabin, trying hard not to let Jess hear how distressed was his breathing.

  Behind him other passengers were dragging their luggage into their assigned cabins, with Mr Milburn and Sarah showing them where to go, and helping here and there. The great cabin rapidly filled with noisy, chattering people, all rather excited, and getting in each others’ way.

  In the tiny cabin there were top and bottom bunks on either side, and a narrow space between. Through a porthole in the bulkhead at the end they could see the lower legs of a seaman walking past on the deck outside, so the deck was almost level with the top bunks. Under each of the bottom bunks was a space for luggage. There was a cabinet under the porthole, with a board that could be folded down to make a narrow table between the bottom bunks. That was all, and the Rutherfords, all four of them, would have to live in there for the next three months and more.

  Charles and Samantha looked at each other appalled. It wasn’t half the size of the bedroom Samantha had had all to herself in the home they had left.

  Even so, they had much more room, and a greater degree of privacy, than Jess and Sarah would enjoy in the single women’s quarters.

  “Thank you Andrew,” Jess said, carefully not looking at Charles Rutherford. “Perhaps now you could help Master Rutherford bring down his parents’ baggage.”

  “Yes ma’am, right away,” Andy replied, straight-faced, and touched his forehead in salute. He turned and moved smartly out of the cabin, afraid that he would start to laugh is he looked at the other lad.

  Charles took him seriously, and obediently went after him, not questioning for a moment that they should both do Jess’s bidding.

  That made it Samantha’s turn to look with surprise after her retreating brother.

  “Perhaps you might like to freshen up before you come on deck again,” Jess suggested, and showed her the porcelain wash basin fitted into the cabinet between the heads of the bunks. A ewer of fresh water fitted into special slots in the cabinet, fixed so that it would not fall over or spill water when the ship was at sea.

  Samantha, red-eyed, and still flushed, was only too glad, and quickly unpacked her toilet bag from her luggage basket. Jess saw her started, and then closing the cabin door behind her, left the younger girl to it.

  Back on deck, after wriggling her way through and around all the people carting luggage in the opposite direction, she found a second hoy pulling in alongside with the rest of the cabin passengers. Then it all started again.

  “What a muddle!” Jess said to Ken MacGovern, who had finally finished correcting his charts, and had come out to help.

  “This is nothing,” he laughed. “You wait till all the steerage passengers come on board.”

  Again it was all hands to carry and stow until this second party too had been coaxed, guided, and gently manoeuvred into their cramped accommodation. The great cabin, and all the private cabins off it, were a seething mass of humanity, squalling babies, grizzling toddlers, and every age up to that of Mr Rutherford and Mr Verity, who were both about forty. None of the cabin passengers were any older. Few elderly people chose to uproot themselves, and seek a new life in a new land. The exceptions were one or two aged parents among the steerage passengers, still waiting on the quay, who were travelling out to New Zealand to be with grown children who had migrated on earlier voyages.

  “Is it going to be like this all the way to New Zealand?” Jess asked Ken MacGovern, as she helped him push a hamper under a bunk. The hamper’s owner, a young mother, had her hands full with an upset baby.

  “No, it will settle down before long,” he told her. “These people just need time to sort their things out, and pack them away. You’ll be surprised how everything and everybody fits in somewhere.”

  A last few items of small baggage were tossed over the gunwale, and the boatmen in the hoy prepared to cast off again.

  “Hold on! I’m coming with you,” Mr Smithers called down from the poop deck, where he had been again conferring with Captain Hedley. “Where’s Miss Gordon? Ah, there...” he acknowledged when Sarah waved to him from near the gangplank. “Come along, your sister too. You can come and play the shepherdess for the rest of the passengers.”

  “Ooh...May I go with them?” Samantha asked her father, when she saw Jess heading for the ship’s side.

  “If Mr Smithers allows it,” Mr Rutherford agreed, not sorry to have the girl out from under his feet, while he was so busy with trying to get his fellow passengers sorted out. Many of them thought that because he was one of the constables, he would be a mine of information about everything on the ship, but in fact he was very much a landsman, and just as new to it all as any of them.

  “We’ll find room for her,” Mr Smithers agreed, trying to be obliging to an important passenger. “We’ll make her work her passage.”

  “What does that mean?” Samantha whispered to Jess as they found a place for themselves in the stern of the hoy.

  “You’re only allowed to come if you work,” Jess answered.

  “What will we have to do?”

  “Anything that needs doing. I hope you can read.”

  “Yes. I’ve been to school,” Samantha said proudly. “Mrs Gainsborough’s Academy for Young Ladies.”

  Jess had never heard of it, but that was hardly surprising. Probably nobody else among the passengers had heard of it either.

  “We had a school in our village,” Jess said almost apologetically. “We had to pay a penny a week to go.”

  “Did you live at the school?” Samantha asked.

  “Oh no, not for a penny. That was just for the lessons,” Jess replied.

  “We did,” Samantha informed her. “We lived there all term.”

  Jess thought that she wouldn’t have liked that. Somehow she gained the impression that nor had Samantha.

  Gravesend Docks, when they got there, were crowded with people. This time there were a great many old folk in the crowd, but they were just there to say good-bye to the younger ones. It was a very sad time. Many were in tears. Parents and children were parting, and most would never ever see each other again.

  Jess and Sarah knew all about how that felt, but they had made their farewells almost a fortnight since. Theirs had been a more private parting. Just the two of them getting on the coach that drove through their village, and waving out the windows to their many relatives, while they were being carried away. They had wept, on and off, most of the way to Belfast, the one setting off the other again, just when they were thinking that they had got over it.

  “You know my office, Jessica,” Mr Smithers said, as the hoy rounded up off the jetty steps. “You came there the other night. You’ll find my secretary there, Mrs Jennings. Tell her you’ve come for the amendments.”

  “I don’t know the streets,” Jess protested. “What if I can’t find my way there and back in time?�
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  “You’ll find a hansom cab at the end of the dock. Mr Brown’s the driver. Here’s a shilling for him. He’ll take you there and back.”

  A shilling! A whole shilling just for short trip through the Thames-side streets...Jess could not earn so much in a week, but then, she supposed, the shilling was also paying for the cab, and feeding the horse, and waiting hour after hour in the cold between fares. Still...a shilling!

  “You could take two of us for a shilling,” Samantha told Mr Brown.

  “I could that,” he agreed, and smiled at the size of her dickering over the fare.

  “I couldn’t have said that,” Jess whispered, as the horse took them away, clip-clopping over the cobbles.

  “You must learn,” Samantha replied. “You’ll never be rich if you just give your money away to all who ask it. My father warned me about that.”

  “My father never had enough money to be worth a warning,” Jess said ruefully.

  The girls looked at each other in the gloom of the cab. Both knew that the beginnings of a friendship was there, but a friendship as unlikely as either could conceive. Jess had never had a friend who was rich. Samantha had never had a friend who wasn’t. Truth to tell, Samantha had very few friends at all.

  At Mr Smithers’ office they were given a package, which the secretary had ready for them.

  “Tell Mr Smithers that he is still short of a purser, two sailors, and eight passengers,” they were instructed.

  Back at the Gravesend Docks, after their last journey through grey and dreary British streets, they found a band playing, a brass band with cornets, and trumpets, and trombones. Drums thumped and rattled. The tune was called ‘The Girl I Left Behind Me.’

  “We’ll be the girls left behind if we don’t hurry,” Jess commented, as they raced down to the jetty steps.

  Nearly all the passengers were loaded onto Thames barges, a rowdy, tearful throng, perched on their luggage, and getting in the way of the watermen trying to take in the lines from a steam tug that was to tow them down river to the ship.

  On the quays were those being left behind, and not just girls; whole families, cousins, relatives, friends. They waved. They shouted. They tried to maintain contact with their loved ones until the last possible moment.

  Jess and Samantha pushed through.

  Mr Smithers was on the last barge still tied to the pilings. The gangplank was still in place, just for them.

  Together they stepped off the quay, picked their way carefully down to the deck, and watched as the gangplank was pulled in behind them.

  Somehow, that seemed very final.

  Nine

  For most of the way back down river Mr Smithers and Sarah had their heads together over the passenger lists. Together, they had checked everybody as they went onto the barges, Mr Smithers calling the names, while Sarah put a tick against each. Two more families had lost somebody to the influenza epidemic, one of the single men was in the debtors’ prison, and a family of five had simply failed to arrive on the docks by sailing time.

  Those who had arrived, two hundred and fifty five of them, were in the main a very unhappy and anxious-looking mob. The exceptions were the small children who thought it all a great lark, and scampered about among the legs of their elders, and generally made frightful nuisances of themselves. The rest were too aware of what they were leaving behind, and how uncertain their futures had become.

  In each little family, or group of friends, there was somebody, sometimes a woman, more often a man, who was determined to find a better life around the other side of the world. There they hoped to find opportunities that would never be open to them in poor, over-crowded Britain. The rest of that party, after that first member, were the people who had either been talked into coming, or else were those, like the children, who had no choice in the matter. Almost everybody, though, whether leaders or followers, was now filled with doubts. They were committed. It was too late to turn back.

  Husbands stood with comforting arms around weeping wives. Young people held the hands of older brothers and sisters. Friends clung to each other. Everywhere strained faces, red-rimmed eyes were fixed on the folk still waving from the dock, gradually becoming smaller and more indistinct, as drifts of fog and smoke closed in behind the string of barges.

  “And there was also Mr Inkster’s wife,” Sarah reminded Mr Smithers, as they tried to account for all those who had not reported for the voyage.

  “I’ve allowed for her,” the Dispatching Official nodded. “The owners have given her place to a passenger who was to go on the ‘Orari’. That will be the next emigrant ship loading out from here.”

  “Then there’s the sub-matron who won’t be sailing now,” Sarah went on.

  “A cabin passenger from the ‘Orari’ list,” Mr Smithers said. “I see they’ve put her in the sub-matron’s cabin. I notice that they haven’t offered that cabin to you, but I suppose that’s because there’s only room for one in there, and I’m sure you don’t want to be separated from your sister.”

  That was true. Sarah indeed had not even considered that she might be entitled to the sub-matron’s cabin, even though she would be doing the work. She was not so foolish, though, as not to realise that the owners would be gaining an extra fare by having a passenger in a crew member’s cabin. The owners were also getting that crew member’s work done by a fare-paying passenger. Plainly the Gordon sisters were being taken advantage of, but there was not much they could do about that, and Sarah was only too grateful for the opportunity to earn the extra money they so badly needed.

  Jess was happy just to have things to do, to have a place on the ship, and to be with her sister. The money didn’t concern her greatly. She had seldom had any to speak of, and was not inclined to worry about it. For the moment she was content to gawp at the busy tug towing them down river, smoke rolling away across the grime-laden water, at the barges following on like ducklings behind their mother, at all the motley river craft having to give way to them because they were under tow.

  “Come forward Jessica, Samantha,” Mr Smithers called. “I want you on board first. You, Samantha, can show the families to the main companionway, and you, Jessica, can go below and show them to their berths as they come down. Miss Gordon will deal with the single ladies, and Mr Inkster will be waiting on board for the single men.”

  When they drew near the ship, the tug edged far out across the river, and swung around below the ship, to come up alongside, with the barges now all down current on a long tow-line.

  “We’re not stopping!” Jess observed worriedly, with the tar-blackened side timbers of the ‘Haldia’ sliding backwards just a few feet away. Faces lined the gunwale, looking down at them. Above them the ship’s masts reared away up to the sky, impossibly tall, and up there, right up near the top, was Andy, a tiny bare-foot monkey, holding on with one hand, and waving to Jess with the other.

  “Look at that boy showing off,” Samantha hissed.

  “Yes, I know,” Jess agreed. “Don’t look at him.”

  “I don’t want to look at him,” Samantha replied. “He’s scaring me sick.”

  The tug came to a stop. There was a loud rumbling noise, and a splash as it dropped its anchor. The ‘Haldia’ was then several boats’ lengths behind them, but as the tug paid out its cable they dropped back, and back, still further back, until the current of the river brought them, on the last barge, level with the ship’s gangway.

  “Up you go,” said Mr Smithers, and the two younger girls bounded away to be first on board.

  A strange young man in a peaked cap, wearing a starched white collar with a thin black tie, was waiting for them at the head of the gangplank. He looked like a railway porter gone to sea by mistake.

  “Who’re you?” Jess questioned, after she’d stopped to salute the flag. She was somewhat put out to find that somehow this officious-looking personage had crept aboard her ship while she wasn’t looking.

  “I’m Midshipman Smettley,” he said stiffly, g
iving her a rather peculiar look. “I suppose you’re this Jess I’ve been hearing about.”

  She wasn’t sure how to answer that, but Samantha said promptly, her mouth full of fruit, “Yes, and I’m Samantha Rutherford. I’ll thank you to stand out of our way young man,” and he did.

  “We’re going to have trouble with that one,” she whispered to Jess, just before Jess disappeared into the main hold.

  Soon Jess was too busy to think about him anyway. As Samantha fed passengers into the main hatch from the top, Jess met them at the bottom, and showed them to whichever bunks they had been assigned.

  “Can’t we go over there?” some asked.

  “Not unless the captain allows it,” Jess answered politely every time. “You’ll have to go here for now, and talk to the captain later.”

  Few argued further. Mostly they were humble folk, and not accustomed to bothering people as important as ship’s captains.

  One man threw his kit on a bunk without waiting for Jess, and glared at her when she protested.

  “That’s a lady’s bunk,” she said anxiously. “The mate will be after you if you don’t move.”

  “You take notice of the lass, Charlie,” a nearby man spoke up. “She’s only doin’ her job.”

  By being polite, and careful of people’s feelings, and remembering to smile a lot, she managed to eventually get them all in the right places. After all, she was only showing them the way, not telling them where to go. Mr Smithers had already done that.

  “My palliasse is empty,” somebody complained.

  “There’ll be hay issued shortly.”

  “This porthole won’t open,” grizzled somebody else.

  “I should hope not. It’s too near the waterline.”

  When there were only five bunks left empty, Jess went back on deck to report. She found Mr Smithers on the poop deck in a heated discussion with Captain Hedley and another man she had not seen before. The first barge of the string was still alongside, held on a long towline from the tug. The other barges trailed down the river like strung beads, the one which Jess had travelled on now a cable’s length astern.

  “We’ll find another purser and two more seamen then,” the stranger was saying.

  “In that case I’ll clear you for Plymouth,” Mr Smithers replied firmly, “but no further. You’ll have to call on the Dispatching Official there.”

  “Who’s that?” Jess whispered to Sarah, who was standing nearby with a sheath of passenger lists.

  “That other man? The owners’ agent,” Sarah whispered back. “He wanted us to sail without a full crew, but Mr Smithers wouldn’t agree. Now we’re going to call in at Plymouth to complete our crew, and fill the empty passenger berths.”

  Agreement having been reached Sarah gave corrected passenger lists to each of the three men, and Gil Inkster followed her with the lists of ship’s stores that he had been working on. Then the captain took