By Fickle Winds Blown

by Maryk Lewis

being rolled up against the partition boards.

  Folk with a grip held others where they could, and when the ship came up again, rising to the first of a growing series of waves, they set them back on their feet.

  “Doctor! Doctor!” came a cry from the main hold, where a boy had broken his arm in the crush.

  Aloft sailors were clinging for their lives. One on the end of the main yard was wet to the waist by a wave top passing beneath him. When the recovery lifted him clear, that same wave sent water sluicing down the decks to hit the combings, and slop over into both the main hold and the single women’s quarters. From both places came the screams of those who thought the ship was going to the bottom.

  In the hospital flat Sarah pressed David to his bunk, holding him there by spreading herself over him, and clutching the pipes to either side.

  “Och,” said David. “This is so sudden, an’ me no able to oblige ye.”

  “You’ll oblige me by keeping a civil tongue in your head,” Sarah tried to reply severely, but rather spoiled the effect by giggling as the ship rolled her back the other way. “Oh dear, I hope I haven’t hurt your ribs.”

  “I’ll take the pain any day,” he answered gallantly. “You just carry on enjoyin’ yersel’.”

  “Cheeky devil,” she laughed, beginning to recover herself as the ship responded to the storm sails, and the rolling lessened.

  Her patient was still not secure in his bunk though. The higher waves they were meeting had increased the fore and aft pitching of the ship, so that in the hospital flat they seemed to be travelling around the coils of a corkscrew. She needed some way to tie him down, and was puzzling over how to do it without hurting either his ribs or his broken leg, when White Eye arrived with some lengths of whipping cord, the cord used to stop the cut ends of ropes from fraying.

  “We tie his splints down to the cot frame, and let the bandaging spread the pulling and tugging on him,” White Eye explained. “We’ll get some fellows in here shortly, and swing his cot from the deck beams. The crew’s a mite busy to do it just at the moment.”

  They both looked up at the baby Matilda’s little cot swinging in a circle under its supporting hook. She at least was coming to no harm from the violent motion; was probably hardly aware of it apart from the noise.

  “I’ll be all right, eh,” David suggested, once his splints were fixed to the cot frames. “That all feels comfy enough. You’ll be needed elsewhere.”

  “I will that,” Sarah agreed.

  Twenty

  When Honora Mabon and Bridget Earnshaw arrived in the hospital flat, concerned for the baby, Sarah took the opportunity to also leave David to their tender care.

  On deck she found it was two hands for herself to make her way along the slippery, bucking deck, with the wind plucking at her, and trying to lift her over the side. The crew might have one hand for themselves, and one for the ship, but she had need of both of hers. Salt spray showered over her, and she felt cold in patches where the wetness soaked through to her skin.

  In the ‘tween decks the single women were sorting themselves out to Auld Maggie’s instructions. A storm at sea was nothing new to her. She had some people going around fixing down anything loose, and others picking up the larger pieces of broken glass and crockery. One young woman had been dispatched to the galley to beg a loaf of bread. Auld Maggie had unpacked a knife to slice it with.

  “What a time to feel hungry,” Sarah commented, when she saw her slicing the bread.

  “It’s nae fer da eatin’,” Auld Maggie cackled. “Watch ye noo.”

  She patted a slice of bread down over some tiny shards of broken glass. When she picked it up again, the glass was embedded in the bread, lifted from the floor without anybody getting it in their fingers.

  “Noo, o’er da sides wi’ dat,” she said with a wink.

  In the main hold Sarah found the doctor and the matron putting a splint on the broken arm. It was a simple fracture, and her help was not needed.”

  “You might check on the forehold,” Doctor Reade requested.

  At the fore companionway Sarah did not descend, but instead called down, “Is everything all right down there?”

  “I need your attentions,” one young man called back.

  “What’s your problem?” Sarah asked, not impressed with a certain lightness in his tone.

  “He’s lonely,” another voice answered for him, and there was a roar of male laughter from the background.

  “As I thought,” Sarah retorted. “I’ll ask Matron Greeley to attend to you.”

  “I feel better already,” came a panic-stricken reply, accompanied by further gusts of laughter.

  Sarah decided that there was not much to be worried about down there.

  In the great cabin she found Phyllis nursing bruises from having fallen from the top bunk. Laurie was trying to comfort her, but willingly gave his place to Sarah, who picked her up and cuddled her on her knee. Gil was bandaging a cut hand for a lady who had tried to save her precious mirror when the storm hit.

  In the galley Jess was surprised to find that Angus intended to cook as usual, despite all the violent pitching and tossing of his pots and pans. Everything was clipped down, or held in place with brackets and griddles. Half-filled pots were clamped to the stove, except over the holes where coal was shovelled in from the top. Stuff sloshed around in the pots, but not sufficiently to spill out over the lip.

  “Folk would rather half a mug of tea, than no tea at all,” he told her.

  “The captain’s on the poop,” Jess said. “Shall I take him some tea now? It’s past his time.”

  “You leave that to the stewards today, lassie,” Angus replied. “The deck will be no place for you. You can take some around to the folk in the great cabin.”

  There was no more school that day. Even when the storm abated after an hour or so, leaving them as quickly as it arrived, the sea remained too rough for hours afterward, and only eased when they got back into the steady trade winds once more, at the approach of evening.

  During the night the wind died away again, and morning found them rolling over long, oily-seeming swells. The air hung hot and listless. Sails slapped against the masts.

  “Is this the doldrums?” Sarah asked Ken MacGovern.

  “Not yet,” he replied. “We’re nowhere near where they should lie, but this is what they’re like. We get odd days like this as we near the tropics. The trades are usually reliable at this latitude, and grow more fickle as we approach the line.”

  Schoolwork was tackled with a marked lack of enthusiasm. Mistakes were frequent. Little patience was shown by those who were supposed to be helping, so that little ones in tears became a common sight.

  “This is doing nobody any good,” Gil said to Sarah, when they came together for a mug of tea at mid-morning.

  Doctor Reade, sitting near them, writing up his journal, overheard and leaned across. “It’s time we had a concert,” he said. “That’s a good way to break the gloom. We’ll have a fire drill in about half-an-hour, and then you could give them the rest of the day to prepare items.”

  “Goodness me, how many items would we have?” Gil queried. “There’s three hundred of us, and if we each gave an item...”

  “There’d be enough for a dozen or fifteen concerts,” Doctor Reade nodded. “Some folk would be ready to perform right away, but others will take weeks to get ready. We could have a concert every five or six days for the rest of the voyage.”

  “But what about the ones who don’t know how to do anything?” Sarah objected.

  “They’ll have time to learn a recitation, or a part in a play. Any who’re reluctant will find that I’ve some nasty little deck games up my sleeve, and once they see what might happen to them in those, I think they’ll prefer to find an item for the concert.”

  As he had said he would, the doctor called for a fire drill after everybody had finished their mugs of tea. Later in the voyage he would call for the drill without any warning, but this
first time people needed to be shown what to do.

  Everybody, passengers and crew, had to report to some special person in a particular place. Sarah had charge of the single women, and marshalled them in lines on the after deck below the poop. Anybody in the hospital flat could stay there, but Jess had to go in and take their names, which she relayed to Mr Milburn on the poop. All the other children on board had to be with their parents on the main deck, from where, in the case of a real fire, they and their mothers would be loaded into the ships boats, and towed astern if the weather would allow it. Otherwise they were sent to the safest end of the ship.

  All the men passengers were set to work in relays on the ship’s pumps, which the crew set up. Those crewmen not needed to man the boats, or keep working the ship, handled the hoses, and were expected to fight the fire under the direction of Mr Milburn. Captain Hedley took command of the ship, and oversaw everything that happened.

  “Dreadfully slow,” he commented at the end of the drill. “I expect it all to be done in half that time next time, and faster still the time after.”

  Free to start organising their concert items, the Gordon sisters put their heads together, and decided that they would do an Irish jig, if they could find somebody to play the music for them. Among the luggage coming aboard they had seen several violin cases, as well as a variety of other instruments, sufficient probably to form an orchestra. One of the violins had been carried by a man with a notably Irish accent, and when