By Fickle Winds Blown

by Maryk Lewis

white, but with a few red and a few green, all being reflected by the intervening waves, with sparkles and flicking lines of light pointing their way. Further back more lights, fixed ones, marked the shore. One light, going on and off to a pattern, was from a lighthouse.

  Ken looked at that lighthouse over the top of the ship’s compass, and called, “Mark! North Foreland, two six three degrees thirty.”

  The midshipman was looking at the chronometer when Ken called ‘mark’, and he wrote down the exact time, and then Ken’s figures.

  “There you are,” Ken said with a pleased smile. “At that exact time we were somewhere on a line drawn at eighty three degrees thirty from the lighthouse.”

  “I see,” Sarah nodded. “Eighty three degrees thirty is on the other side of the compass from the numbers you said the first time. The lighthouse is nearly west of us, so we have to be just as nearly east of the lighthouse.”

  “Quite,” Ken agreed.

  “So a moment ago we crossed a line drawn out from the lighthouse. Can you tell whereabouts on the line we were?”

  “The easiest way would be if I could see another lighthouse. Then I could get another line out from that lighthouse, and where the two lines crossed over each other is where we were on the map.”

  “But we can’t see another lighthouse from here.”

  “No. Later, when we’re off the Downs, we’ll be able to see two at once, but for now I’ll have to make use of that bright star over there. That’s Sirius, the Dog Star. I’ve got a book of tables that will let me work out just where I would have to be to be right underneath it. With the sextant I can get a measure of how far away I am from right underneath it, and that will give me a line on the map to cross over the line I’ve already got.”

  “But now we’ve sailed away from the place where the lines crossed.”

  “True, but I know how fast we’re going, and which way, so I can make little marks on the map to show where we should be at any particular time.”

  “Should be?”

  “Yes, well we seldom get it quite right. There are all sorts of little errors creeping in, because the wind doesn’t blow quite straight, and waves and currents in the sea push us off course, and all that sort of thing. We have to keep measuring our position again and again all through the voyage, or else we’ll just keep getting further and further away from where we should be.”

  “It all seems very clever to me,” Sarah observed.

  “That’s what they pay us for,” Ken replied, almost purring at her interest.

  “It’s a little cold up here,” Sarah said, stepping away when she found him coming closer. Captain Hedley was looking disapproving in the background. “I think I’ll go back for that tea now.”

  “I’ll have to finish the bearings,” Ken said regretfully, and watched her go back down the ladder to the crowded mizzen deck.

  “You won’t get far with that one,” Captain Hedley said to him after she had disappeared. “She’s already promised to some lucky cow-cocky in New Zealand.”

  “There’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip,” Ken quoted the proverb. “We’ve seen these arranged marriages come unstuck before, and it’s a long way to New Zealand yet.”

  Thirteen

  Sarah and Jess were on deck long before daylight for their first day at sea. There wasn’t a passenger in sight. The ship was beating up the English Channel into the teeth of a half-gale, and spray was flying up over the bows, and dowsing all the livestock pens on the forecastle.

  Jess, of course, had to go up there, dragging Sarah with her, to see how the poor creatures were faring, though she needn’t have worried. Each pen had a tarpaulin rigged over it, and the inhabitants were snug, if not dry. Captain Hedley was up there on the same mission.

  “Come to see to our pets, eh?” he greeted them. “Just making sure that there’s at least some meat on board that hasn’t been salted?”

  “I don’t know how we’ll ever eat them when the time comes,” Sarah commented.

  “What, farmer’s daughters who can’t eat the animals?” he joshed. “You must have gone awfully hungry at home.”

  “We did,” Sarah admitted,” but not for that reason. If we had any animals we were too fond of, we swapped them with other farmers for animals we didn’t know.”

  “Well, we can’t do that at sea. Even if we meet another ship, transferring animals is too difficult, as well as being too dangerous. What we have to do is keep people off the forecastle during the voyage, especially the children. Otherwise we get ructions when we come to take some of these critters for the pot.”

  “Then I’d better not come up here again,” Jess said.

  “Well, perhaps we’ve come to regard you as a special case, but I would appreciate it if you stayed away. It sets an example for the other young folk on board.”

  “We’re already somewhat set apart from the other passengers,” Sarah mentioned. “I don’t want them to think we’re receiving any special consideration.”

  “You’ll have to be to some extent,” Captain Hedley demurred. “I was talking about that with Mr Milburn. He pointed out that as sub-matron you should be dining with the officers. If you’re going to be assisting in the school as well, you won’t have time to cook for yourself.”

  “Oh, but I can’t leave Jessica to fend for herself,” Sarah protested.

  “No need,” the captain replied. “I’m sure Angus wouldn’t let her starve. She can eat in the pantry with Angus and the stewards.”

  “Then, thank you,” Sarah replied for them both. “I’ll go and change the cooking roster I’ve drawn up. One of the parties in the single women’s quarters will now have six members instead of the eight I’d planned.”

  Back in the ‘tween decks aft a few of the women were just stirring. Sarah lit some of the candle lanthorns from the night light, and went around the bunks to see in what state their occupants might be. There were still some very sick people, and not many at all interested in leaving the shelter of their blankets. Auld Maggie’s bunk was empty.

  “She’s gone up to the galley for boiling water to make tea,” said a nearby woman sitting on the edge of a bunk. “A good stiff brew will just about get me on my feet.”

  “Getting over it, are you?” Sarah asked.

  “I feel washed out, but not queasy any more.”

  Half-a-dozen others felt much the same way. All the rest chose to stay in their bunks and forget about breakfast, although perhaps half of them accepted the offer of tea when Sarah, Jess, Auld Maggie, and a couple of other women brought it around to them.

  After that Sarah and Jess left the fit ones to make up a temporary cooking party for themselves, while they went down to the galley to see what Angus MacGillivray might be offering. The watch was just changing, and those who had just spent four hours on duty, were coming in for their breakfasts, while the other watch, who had had theirs, took over the handling of the ship.

  “Ready for the day then,” the cook greeted the Gordon sisters. “We’ll make sailors of you yet.”

  “I didn’t know you could have women sailors,” Jess said.

  “Except for the matrons on passenger ships, you can’t,” he told her, as he slopped porridge into plates for them, “though some captains take their wives to sea with them.”

  “What about ordinary sailors?” Jess asked.

  “No wives at sea for them. No wives at all for most of them. What sensible woman wants a husband who’s at sea for eight or nine months at a time?”

  “Most sailors don’t get married then?”

  “They can’t. Few women will have them, and they’ve no money anyway. The captain and Mr Milburn are married. They’re the only ones on this ship.”

  “Will you never marry then?” Jess was quite concerned, and the cook smiled.

  “Perhaps one day I’ll meet somebody nice,” he said thoughtfully. “Two more voyages, and I’ll have enough money saved to swallow the anchor.”

  “Swallow the anchor?”

>   “Give up the sea. Go ashore, and buy myself a public house near a busy road, where I’ll make my fortune cooking dainty meals for the travelling folk.”

  “You’d like that?”

  “Aye. Fresh meat to cook, fresh vegetables straight from the fields, and cakes that don’t go flat because the oven’s bouncing about in a seaway.”

  “We all have our dreams,” Sarah observed, holding her plate steady on a kitchen shelf while she ate. “Are others saving too?”

  “The Bo’s’n has land in New Zealand. He’s still paying it off. Then he’ll need another voyage or two to buy stock to put on it, and to get enough money to live on until he has a wool clip to sell.”

  “He’s worked himself up to be a Bo’s’n,” Sarah said, “ and then he’s going to just abandon his career at sea, and go and be a farmer?”

  “There’s no future at sea for a man, unless he can become a captain. Ones like the Bo’s’n and me, we can’t. We haven’t the education for it.”

  “What happens to sailors who get too old to work any more?” Jess asked.

  “The poor house. It’s a terrible, lonely old age. I’d not wish it on me worst enemy. Most of us plan to be doing something else before we get to that stage.”

  “Then why come to sea in the first place?” Jess persisted.

  “For some its adventure,” he shrugged. “For some it’s the only work we can get.”

  “For some it’s a way of getting away from something,” Andy’s voice broke in, and Jess turned to find that the young sailor had come into the galley unnoticed behind her. He was carrying a