The Voyage of the Morning Light

by Marina Endicott

  Thea’s hands moved to the polished arm-ends of her chair, but she said nothing.

  To Kay, Mr. Brimner’s face looked more definite and beautiful than usual. She found his argument convincing, too. But all the same, she was not happy to be lectured to.

  After a moment he said, “For me, there is no need for morbid introspection—the answer is the contemplation of the person of Jesus.”

  He smiled at Kay, long, creamy teeth emerging and emerging through his smile as they did when he was truly amused, or wished you to be comforted. “For others, perhaps like you, Miss Kay, it is the contemplation of the world, and the beauty therein.”

  He knew her very well. She saw it now, that was the way for her.

  7

  Port Elizabeth, South Africa

  The Morning Light breezed past Cape Town in a stiff easterly. Francis took full advantage of it, racing around to Port Elizabeth, where they had cargo to load for Auckland. That loading must be prefaced by unloading of Bahamian sugar, and the redistribution of material below decks—which Francis told Thea would take three or four days at the least. He thought she might wish to occupy the time in the company of some Nova Scotia ladies: Mrs. Hilton and her young daughter were moored along the Dom Pedro jetty, on the Abyssinia out of Yarmouth, and others as well—old Mrs. McGiverin, from the Restigouche, for one.

  Shy at the thought of other women’s experienced eyes somehow perceiving her recent loss, Thea felt unwilling to initiate visits with captains’ wives, as Francis pressed her to. But she was finally feeling well again, and longed for a chance to stretch her legs on land. On their first morning in port, she went to Kay’s cabin to rouse her, and found her bunk neatly made and clothes folded, for a wonder. Trying to lessen Lena Hubbard’s lot? Perhaps the tantrum had been a step to some maturity of mind. That would make life easier. Or perhaps Kay’s uneven temper was a sign of her body’s maturing, the changes of womanhood—and then life would not be easier. Casting her mind back, Thea thought she had been twelve herself, when her courses started. Or thirteen? She dreaded the pain Kay’s monthlies must produce if she was like Thea—which she would not suffer at all quietly. And more laundry, and extra disturbance for Francis, who had no experience of sisters growing up, or any womanly weakness. She would have to impress upon Kay a seemly discretion.

  That made her laugh at herself—the chance of Kay’s seemliness seeming slim. She tied a kerchief round her neck against the sun and went up to persuade her sister to a walk onshore.

  Under the awning, Kay and Mr. Brimner were bent over the First Greek Book. That had been providential, at least. Thea was filled again with gratitude that God had sent this peaceful scholar to them.

  “Will you come with us and walk up to the promontory?” she asked Mr. Brimner, on the theory that a bland assumption that Kay was coming might produce compliance.

  “No!” Kay screwed her eyes against the glare. “We are not finished work yet!”

  “Well, you are the first pupil ever to say so,” Mr. Brimner said. “This African sun calls us out from under the awning, and we will work better for a constitutional stroll. Unless you feel a need for solitude, Mrs. Grant?”

  “Oh no, but do not feel obliged, for Francis tells me Port Elizabeth is safe as houses now. He says there is a little stand just up the hill with fruit and ices, which I thought Kay would find refreshing.”

  Kay tied her hat on with no more grumbling, and they went over on the next harbour lighter. At the jetty she nipped down the ramp between trips by crew and longshoremen, a good deal faster than Thea or Mr. Brimner could manage on legs which had forgotten the knack of ordinary land, and stood laughing and boasting on the broad concrete.

  “We are strangers here,” Thea told her, “and must behave so that we do credit to Francis and the Morning Light.”

  A nudge being always better than a direct command, Kay curbed her spirits. The long seafront negotiated with decorum, they set off up the broad main street toward the tower visible in the distance above. Elegant stone shops and offices faded into plainer buildings as the street curved upward.

  Seeing a black-lettered sign ahead, and pointing it like a duck dog, Mr. Brimner paused, saying, “If you do not mind, Mrs. Grant, I will diverge from you and Miss Kay after all. It has been many months since I’ve taken a turn in a bookshop. An hour’s refreshment among the dust of ages will do me the world of good!”

  Thea thought Kay might pull to go with him, but the idea of ice had taken hold on such a sultry morning, and she only held her flat hand to help her hat make shade, peering up the rise to see where the fruit stand might be. Thea pulled out her little purse for the silver English shillings Francis had supplied, and they boarded a double-decker trolley to higher ground, where they would be able to look at all the ships and the town laid out below. The trolley was painted green, with always-open louvred windows below. Thea held Kay back from climbing to the open top level, since she could see only rough workingmen up there.

  As they rose, the louvres revealed an attractive city, much of it new-built. At supper last evening Francis had told them how the city had been so infected by bubonic plague brought in by Argentinian rats that there was nothing for it but to burn large sections to the ground. The affected communities were razed, and new buildings set upon sanitized ash. “While they were about it, they built a segregated suburb for the blacks, the Xhosa,” he said, making a strange clicking-sucking sound to start the word, “who were most affected by the destruction after the plague. New Brighton, it’s called. Now they can live with their own kind—and be happy together,” he’d added, seeing Kay look up at him, her mouth the straight line it made when she was considering. Thea had learned to dislike that line, which reminded her of Father. In Kay, thinking too often took a contrary stand, for no reason but the natural contradictory bend in her soul.

  There was the ice stand, bright with fruit and flowers, and a swivelling telescope on a pedestal to see the sights. While Kay ate her ice, Thea swung the scope down to the harbour to find the Morning Light, like a toy ship, brightwork gleaming in the sun. At her turn, Kay sent the telescope searching back into the hills to the east, to a shantytown huddled behind the opulence. At any rate, she told Thea, pointing, that dusty, dark place could not be New Brighton!

  She does not understand, Thea told herself, schooling her own impatience. She has seen nothing of the world. If some do not serve, others cannot have flowers and ices.

  Kay’s insides felt numb from taking in this strange world, Africa. Every person they saw was odd, and some were surprising. Going back down from the hill, she wanted to stare at the people with the click-sounding name—their tidy faces and limbs going about their work. The man selling ices had tiny black knobs of raised freckles or moles all over his brown face; the trolley driver had no fingers left but steered his machine with the L shape of his thumb and palm. The eyes of the woman seated across from them darted left and right unceasingly, in a terrible inexplicable worry. Not-staring, although of course correct, was irksome, and the effort of not letting her own eyes dart in sympathy made Kay anxious.

  When they stepped up onto Dom Pedro jetty to wait for the lighter, Kay could see Lena Hubbard’s busy rump roiling along ahead of them, and Hubbard in tow, pushing a barrow. They had gone past the lighter’s steps, though. Good, because she did not want to see Lena just now.

  Beside the steps, Mr. Brimner stood waiting for them. He presented Kay with a small package: a pocket Odyssey in cloth binding, much worn with thumbing but still perfectly legible, if one could λόγος it. λέγλιν, Kay corrected herself.

  “We cannot make real headway if you are stuck with Cyrus all the time,” he said.

  It was small and green, with thin gold lines picked out on the cover. She opened the book and saw that it was in Greek on the right-hand pages, with a literal translation on the facing pages. The paper was delicate, clean, and the Greek letters crystal clear.

  Kay’s eyes pricked and filled. She scowled into
the pages, hardly listening to Mr. Brimner telling Thea (who could not read Greek at all, poor thing), “We might call it our Second Greek Book.”

  Back at the ship, they found Francis at the top of the ramp, his face stiff and dark. He addressed Kay in a cold captain’s bell-clap: “Well, Miss! See what comes of rampaging behaviour!”

  “What is it, my dear?” Thea asked, putting a hand on his arm to gentle him, which Kay very much appreciated.

  “Only your greater discomfort, I’m afraid! Hubbard and Mrs. Hubbard have left us. They’ve moved over to the Easthaven, bag and baggage, to take service there for England rather than continue another day with us. Can you tell me why that might be, Miss Kay?”

  He hated her. Most likely he had always hated her—coldness in her limbs had foretold it when first she laid eyes on his accusing face, because she had kept Thea from him for ten years—and then she had been foisted on the voyage. He was right to hate such a bug, such an ugly girl, a devil, who could kick a poor fat woman for nothing at all, nothing but being in the way.

  Shame piercing through her chest, Kay cried, “It’s all my fault!” She raced past Francis and almost fell down the hatchway in her haste to attain her cabin. There she fumbled with the catch on the door, gulps of sobs tearing up out of her stomach to almost make her be sick with the force of them, her own stupidity and guilt nearly cleaving her in two until she could smash her head down into the cold, clean pillow and cry as quietly as she could into the pillowcase, which now Thea would have to wash because Lena had left them, and it was all her fault. She hated Lena even more now, while also darkly hating her own unbridled temper.

  But beneath the turmoil of her heart, clutched in her hand still, was her new green book. The Second Greek Book, the gate to the untravelled land.

  Because the Hubbards were gone, Thea made the supper for both crew and Aft. Kay emerged from her cabin to find nobody in the saloon, and went on silent feet, boots gentle on the boards, to peek into the galley. There was Thea cutting in lard for biscuits, flour on her violet dress where the makeshift apron had come loose. A great copper pot of stew on the cookstove sent up fragrant steam, an offering to the gods.

  Kay swallowed to keep down whatever might come spouting up, a shriek or a spume of bile and fruit-ice. She was hungry, but perhaps, since she had made Francis so angry, Thea would be even more angry with her than Francis was. She crept back to her cabin and climbed into the bunk again, the odour of disgrace clinging to her hands.

  Nobody came to knock on the door.

  After an eon, an eternity, came four bells, meaning six o’clock, the time for dinner in the Aft saloon. Soon after, she heard Mr. Brimner go swinging by, whistling.

  At last Kay got up and smoothed down her skirt, and for good measure changed into a clean middy blouse—only remembering when it was over her face and trapping her arms that, now the Hubbards were gone, the laundry would all have to be done by Thea too. Well then, Kay would help without complaining. Tears started to her eyes again at her own goodness, but she gave them a knuckling and patted her face with water from the ewer, which Lena Hubbard would not fill tonight.

  She opened her door without a sound, stole down the corridor, and peeped in the saloon door: Francis and Mr. Brimner sitting silent at table, no sign of Thea.

  Then a call came from the galley: “Kay! Come and help, please!” and Kay ran.

  Thea had no time to be cross. She was supervising as Mr. Best lifted the great stewpot and directed his underlings, Jacky Judge and Arthur, to manage a loaded tray of cutlery and a basket of biscuits.

  “My boys will take on kitchen duty directly after supper,” Mr. Best told Thea over his shoulder as the little procession made their way below. “They’ll leave everything spotless, or I’ll take the hide off them. Good hands with the china, don’t you worry about that.” He shouted ahead to warn the sailors of the stewpot, “Gangway, lady with a baby!”

  Thea turned to Kay, who had been worried that the whole of dinner had just gone down to the men, and took up a large dish, footed and lidded. “Here, I will take the tureen, and you look lively with the biscuits and the mustard.”

  A second tray was set out with a white cloth on it, and a mountain of risen biscuits like Thea used to make for Sundays in the old days. Kay followed, obedient and vestal as the Virgin Mary.

  Francis was in a temper, but it was the Boston seaman, John Cherry, who had provoked him, not Kay. Mr. Wright came in during supper to whisper in his ear, and Francis looked up to the skylight with dark eyes and a jumping mouth. He sent his first mate packing with a harsh command, “Make it so!” which they had not heard from him before.

  “When seamen are accustomed to the rule of violent mates—who in many cases could qualify as prizefighters, and are as eager to ply their fists—and happen to sail next in a ship where force is not so dominant, they are apt to be troublesome, Mr. Brimner,” Francis said, as if to the clergyman; but really he was speaking to Thea, in explanation of his temper. “The necessity of imposing discipline falls first on Mr. Wright, but in the last instance upon myself.” With that, he tore the napkin from his lap and banged out of the saloon and up the companionway. Because this was the third time, Francis would now whip him with the whole crew watching; that was what captains did. Because discipline must be kept.

  The crew were called up from their supper, and the man was strapped to the mast in irons and lashed again. They heard the commands, and the screams, quite perfectly through the closed skylight for a very long time. Thea stayed motionless at table, not eating. Mr. Brimner applied himself to his stew in silence. Kay saw that though he split a biscuit, the two halves remained on his plate.

  Time passed. The air in the saloon became thick and heated. No tea arrived—well, of course it did not, because Lena Hubbard and Hubbard were on the Easthaven, making tea for those people. Since the lashing was finished and the screams had stopped, Thea got up and opened the skylight again, and then they sat again in silence.

  After some length of time Arthur Wetmore and George Bayard appeared, with Mr. Best in charge. They picked up all the dishes very neatly and vanished again.

  Twenty minutes later, there came a knock at the saloon door.

  Mr. Brimner looked up, but Kay was closer, and she went to open it as Thea called, “Come in!”

  In the doorway stood a short, lean fellow in a brown tunic, his front hair shaved high and a black braid over his shoulder. Neither old nor young. “I, cook,” the man said, tapping his chest with one finger. “Liu Jiacheng. I bring tea.” He bowed, turned and—like sleight of hand—produced from a small cart behind him a tray with the silver teapot, and the best teacups. The tea smelled of flowers.

  “Oh dear,” said Thea, coming forward. “My husband—the captain does not like China tea, I’m so sorry—”

  “Nonsense!” came Francis’s voice thundering down through the skylight. “I am entirely indifferent to tea! I will drink any sort you have.”

  The man nodded to Thea. “India for captain, it is made.” He bowed and took his trolley up the stairs, lifting it without effort.

  The thin cups, so old that they had no handles, rather burnt Kay’s fingers, but the white flower floating and opening in her cup made her feel much better.

  That night she woke, sitting bolt upright, clawing her way out of a dream. She could not breathe. The whole of the world was full, a swirling vortex of multicoloured specks, from the ship out to the horizon as far as she could see. Broken china? But that would not float—this mass of sluggishly moving fragments rose and fell with the waves, seeming to tamp them down in a great whitish blanket . . . miles in every direction, thousands of miles. It choked her eyes and her mind and her throat. She drank the water left in her little jug and sat up in her bunk, afraid. In the dream it was all her fault. Somehow she had done this terrible thing to the world. It was an hour before her heart stopped pounding and she could lie still again.

  The Boston seaman, made an example of, was sent packing on t
he next lighter. He would find another berth, Francis told Thea—not that he himself gave a straw whether that was the case or not. “Any infection of spirit below decks must be rooted out like a bad tooth,” he said.

  They were lying in bed, beneath the last clean counterpane. But after supper Jiacheng had inspected the linen closet with Thea, and assured her that he would launder for Aft as well as Below. She assured him, in turn, that she and Kay were accustomed to helping on laundry day and would be happy to continue, and with slight but multiplying mutual bows they finished the first skirmish at a draw.

  Francis was in a strange mood, both elevated and despairing, tight-strung unhappiness combined with satisfaction. As if he had not been sure he would be able to deliver such a punishment—and at the same time, as if the act of beating someone into lawful submission had a kind of pleasure to it, the pleasure of physical prowess. As if men were made to, meant to, fight each other with their hands.

  Thea was wary of this mood. The woman in Eleuthera, Rhoda, had said she’d best hold off her husband for six weeks. “Till you are all healed up, all the body from the turmoil—if you don’t want infection or to make it so you have no other baby.” Thea had not told Francis this, but he had made no demands on her as yet. Only in this exalted, unhappy mood, it seemed that he wished to; he lay close behind her, pressing against her, wordlessly seeking entry. That thing that wants, wants, without thinking, that cannot tell what is seemly and what is rash. In truth she had a yearning herself, because the day had been fractured and the city was strange and then the man shouting above, and her darling Francis—who was both soft and hard, who kept the ship as he had to keep it, like it or not, though it was perhaps harder for him than for some, to do that. Let him revel in it, then. It had been five weeks, and at his blunt, unvoiced beseeching she felt an answer rising inside her after all, which she had thought she might never feel again.