By Fickle Winds Blown

by Maryk Lewis

dixie, a large covered vessel in which he would take back some of the breakfast for the watch below.

  “Why did you come to sea, Andy?” Jess asked him.

  “Because my master beat me,” he replied simply.

  “Master?”

  “I was apprenticed to a blacksmith, but I wasn’t big enough to strike for him, and I could never hold the iron right for him to strike, so he beat me.”

  “A blacksmith would be able to hand out quite a beating,” the cook noted.

  “I think I’ve still got some of the bruises,” Andy agreed. “Anyway, I ran away, and here I am.”

  “And how long will you stay at sea?”

  “Until I can save enough to do something else, but that will be a long time. Ship’s boys don’t get paid much.”

  “You wouldn’t try to find a job ashore?”

  “Who’d have me now? I’m too old for another apprenticeship, and I don’t want to be just a labourer. I want, one day, to be my own master.”

  “What doing?”

  “I don’t know yet. I’ll find something.”

  While they were talking, the cook had filled Andy’s dixie with porridge, and had turned back to his stove where sausages were sizzling in a huge pan. Andy winked at Jess and Sarah, and lugged his now heavy dixie away.

  The cook broke two eggs into the pan, and spooned boiling fat over them.

  “The captain will have finished his porridge,” he said to Jess a moment or two later. “You can take these in to him, please, and bring back his empty porridge plate.”

  He lifted the eggs on to a warmed plate, added three sausages, and a slice of toast, and put the plate on a tray.

  “Wait a moment,” he said as Jess left the remains of her porridge, and picked up the tray. He put a metal cover, like a saucepan lid, over the hot plate. “Now you’re ready.”

  She found Captain Hedley sitting at the head of the long table in the great cabin. Griddles had been fixed over the table, a framework of squares with low wooden edges to stop the crockery from sliding about, or falling completely off the table with the rolling and pitching of the ship. Ken MacGovern was sitting on one side of the captain, and Mr Rutherford on the other. Midshipman Smettley was next to Ken.

  “Ah, we’ll have to keep you,” Captain Hedley smiled when she set the tray before him, and whipped off the metal cover.

  “I didn’t know you had waitresses at sea,” Mr Rutherford said, sounding disapproving.

  “Jessica is just helping out,” the captain replied. “Both of the cabin stewards are still prostrate, and more likely to put my breakfast in my lap than on the table.”

  “Anybody for more tea, gentlemen?” Jess asked, seeing their empty cups, and not wanting to slight the others by just asking the captain. On their assent, she collected their cups on to the captain’s empty tray, and on her way back down the length of the table stopped also to take one from Gil Inkster, who was busy spooning porridge into little Phyllis. Laurie was hoeing into his own plate of porridge beside them.

  “Those two aren’t bothered by the motion,” Jess observed.

  “No, they’re used to it,” Gil said. “How’s your sister? Is she not feeling up to breakfast?”

  “She’s already started it,” Jess told him, “out in the galley.”

  “She should be in here,” Captain Hedley spoke up, not being able to avoid overhearing them. “She has a position to maintain in front of the passengers. Please tell her so from me.”

  Ken MacGovern was nodding approvingly beside him. Jess hurried back to the galley.

  “Oh, oh,” said Sarah in the galley. “I heard that from out here. Now I’ve put my foot in it.”

  “Not too badly,” Angus MacGillivray sympathised. “Here, take this, and go through.” He took her empty porridge plate from her hands, and gave her a plate of sausages and eggs with toast.

  When Jess went back into the great cabin with the tea, Sarah was sitting with the Inksters, sharing her sausages and eggs with Laurie. The captain was smiling approvingly, but Mr Rutherford was not. For a different reason, neither was Ken MacGovern.

  Jess cleaned up the cold remnants of her porridge, and ate a hot sausage speared on a fork. There was not time to deal with a plateful. A few more cabin passengers had been lured from their bunks by the smell of breakfast, and Mr MacGillivray needed help in getting their first course to the table. For the next half-hour she was kept running back and forth with plates and trays, getting only occasional mouthfuls of the sausage she kept in a warmed tin mug that sat on the side of the stove.

  One of those she served was Charles Rutherford, rather pasty-faced, but determined to overcome his nausea when he discovered what Jess was doing.

  “Is Samantha all right?” Jess asked him.

  “She and mother are still indisposed,” he replied stiffly.

  “Perhaps they might manage some tea?” Jess offered undeterred.

  “Perhaps,” he answered ungraciously.

  Jess took a tray into their cabin, hot tea in the cups, with milk, sugar, and more water separately.

  “Oh, you dear child,” Mrs Rutherford exclaimed. “How nice. Surely you aren’t employed to do this? I thought you were a passenger.”

  “I am,” Jess smiled, “but somebody has to help out. The ship is still short-handed. Besides, I like to be busy.”

  Samantha poked a wan face out of the blankets. “Oh, I feel dreadful,” she complained. “How do you manage to look so cheerful?”

  “I don’t think I did when I felt seasick,” Jess admitted, “but it isn’t bothering me now. You get over it after a while.”

  She left them sipping tea, and back in the galley found that Auld Maggie was up to her elbows in suds dealing with the dirty breakfast dishes. Both stewards were there trying to help, but were so unsteady on their feet, Jess took pity on them, and began stacking the hot wet dishes into their drying racks.

  She was pleased to help, pleased that she was able to help.

  Fourteen

  After helping in the galley, Jess wandered out on deck looking for what might occupy her time next. The day had brightened, but clouds and waves were still rushing towards them down the channel. Spray was flying high over the weather bow with every new wave they met, and splattering the sailors who were spread along the heaving decks, sorting out all the various ropes which were hanging down from the spars. Mr Milburn was up on the poop deck with a speaking trumpet in his hands.

  “Stand by to go about!” he bellowed through the trumpet, his voice fighting against the wind. “Man the weather braces!”

  Several sailors crossed to the upwind side of the deck, and joined others who were already taking a grip on certain of the dangling ropes. Mr Milburn was also on that side, studying the pattern of the waves coming toward them. He said something to the man on the wheel.

  Jess wondered if she could help pull on one of the ropes, but then decided that perhaps it would be better for her to just keep out of the way. She wouldn’t want to trip somebody up at the wrong moment.

  “Lee-oh!” the mate called sharply.

  The helmsman spun the wheel, the sailors hauled on their ropes, and suddenly everything seemed to be happening at once.

  Away up the front of the ship the bowsprit swept a great finger across the racing clouds. The ship ploughed into a larger wave than usual, tilting up as the wave slid underneath her, seeming to hold her course as she went up the face of the wave. At the top of the wave the ship was more obviously turning. Overhead the spars were creaking against the masts, protesting at the sailors pulling the sails around to catch the wind at a different angle. Then the ship, on her new course, plunged gleefully down the back of that wave, to catch the one following on her other bow.

  None of the sailors were waiting to watch that. While one stayed to finish tying the rope they had just dealt with, the others went straight to different ropes, and began hauling again. Only some of the sails, the biggest ones, had been braced around to catch the wind properly. The res
t banged and slatted, wrongly set now, and useless until pulled into the new alignment. The ship slowed, untidy, much of her beauty gone. Up front, the triangular jib sails attached to the bowsprit hung flapping. Quite plainly, the ship was sagging away from her course, sailing across the wind, and not beating at an angle into it as she was meant to do...had to do if they were to make any headway down the English Channel.

  Sail by sail up the three square-rigged masts, the crew rapidly brought matters aloft into balance, the spars into line with those next below. The jibs were caught and fixed down to leeward. Each move brought an increase in speed, an easing of the rolling from side to side, and gradually the bowsprit came round to point closer and closer to the wind...closer to where the wind was coming from. The tension Jess sensed in the crew grew less with each improvement. Men were catching their breath again, easing off, and beginning to potter and fuss with the ropes, hauling a little tighter here, shifting a rope to a different cleat there, each time making a slight adjustment to a sail so that it would draw just a little better.

  Seldom did any of them cease fiddling with the set of the sails. If they did, Mr Milburn was there to start them going again. Land showed on the horizons to either side; England, a line of white cliffs to the north; France, low, blue and smoky to the south. Everybody seemed keen to get as far away from both of them as they could. There would be no rest for the watch on duty as long as they were held in the confines of the channel.

  Jess looked around for Andy. He wasn’t there, of course.