The Voyage of the Morning Light

by Marina Endicott

  She nodded, not knowing what to say.

  “Fellow down there is my first lieutenant, Mr. Johns, and that’s his wife, of course.”

  Mr. and Mrs. Johns gave Kay a nod, and both would have spoken except that they were interrupted by the arrival of the two girls from the embarkation shed, who were introduced by Mr. Johns as Elizabeth Spiers and Julia Speedwell.

  Elsie, as she said to call her, was writing an article about travelling by tramp steamer; Julia was sailing along as her companion and support. Julia was engaged to be married. Elsie said this was her last hurrah as a free woman. That was a joke, but they both looked very well off, and likely the rest of their lives would be taken up with clothes and children and ministering to their husbands, helping them in their careers by entertaining well in large, high-ceilinged rooms. Marion Hilton would be in their club. They were both very pretty and their shoes were simply beautiful.

  Elsie and Julia pretended to be over-awed by Captain Bathurst, but Kay had met men of his ilk in various harbours, and did not find him such a stern example of the genus. He struck her as having a sense of humour—and if he knew anything about Aren’s origin, he had some kindness as well.

  The first lieutenant, Mr. Johns, was an accommodating man who clearly liked the ladies; his wife was along on the voyage for the third time. Julia asked if Mr. Johns needed minding, and Mrs. Johns did not find that amusing. She told the girls many interesting things over supper. Kay recognized this desire to inform, and resolved to squelch it in herself.

  Mrs. Johns had never been squelched—her mild colouring was deceptive. “You’d be astonished to know, Miss Spiers, Miss Speedwell, how much has crept into our language from the seafaring man! For instance, you know that by means into the wind, while large means with the wind—therefore, by and large includes all possible situations—as in, the Constellation handles well both by and large. Is that not just fascinating?” Mrs. Johns waved her vichyssoise spoon to indicate that she had more bons mots to impart and would continue.

  Her husband leapt in before her: “Or groggy—that’s referring to having drunk too much grog, you know!”

  The captain suddenly commanded his first lieutenant to splice the main brace! Kay laughed, knowing what that meant: it was the order to send out an extra issue of grog. Mr. Johns passed the wine bottle down the table, but Captain Bathurst had already hailed a waiter.

  Mrs. Johns did not pause in her lecture. “When we say hand over fist, you know, that’s as a sailor climbs the shrouds, hand over hand, steadily upwards.”

  Elsie had taken out a notebook and was scribbling on the narrow pages.

  “And here’s another: when you do a thing handsomely, although we don’t use that as we once did, that’s slowly, you know, as if you was hauling in a line. Hand by hand, do you see? Steady and even.”

  Dinner was four courses. With Mrs. Johns, it was not unlike an evening with the Krito-sophians.

  Aren came to her cabin door at midnight and gave their secret knock: pompholugo paphlasma. She had not yet settled for the night—she had only reorganized her clothes in the locker and the fitted drawers, and rearranged her books on the shelf, and plumped the cushion on the bunk two or three times. Then she sat at peace in the loved sensation of smooth motion over yielding, buoying, deep, eternally swaying ocean. How did anyone ever live on land?

  Aren was black with oil already and would not sit on the bed—he’d brought a scrap of matting that he set on the carpet and sat upon cross-legged. “I’m a freezer-greaser,” he told her, boasting. “Oiling the engines for the refrigerators, not a bad gig.”

  “I will feed you extras from the dining room.” She drew out her dinner haul, shanghaied in a napkin: a soft bun filled with chicken salad and two lemon cakes.

  “I’ve got the run of the refrigerators—I’ll be living on ice cream,” he said, but he ate the bun and one of the cakes, to please her. He left the other on her bedside table. “Save this one for your night lunch.”

  She told him about Elsie and Julia from the embarkation shed, and what the captain had said, and the first lieutenant’s prosy wife’s pronouncements; he told her nothing at all, except that he had a comfortable bunk and trim arrangements. “The crew’s all right, so far,” he said. “Nobody we know, but many who knew the Morning Light, and Francis. I’m in solid on the strength of my connexions.”

  “Do you have anything to read down there?”

  He laughed at that. “Whenever there’s light, I’ll be working, and when it’s dark, I’ll sleep, and if the engineer ever gives me a moment off, I’ll find a lifeboat, like Seaton.”

  Kay felt sick that she was in this cozy room and he stuck below in the black heat of the engines.

  Seeing her frown, he laughed again. “I don’t like to laze about,” he said. “Anyway, it’s no more than most people do every day all over the world, and I can think, can’t I?”

  “Does the engineer know—” No, she could not ask that, whether he’d mentioned that he had a weak chest.

  Aren frowned. “You’re not going to be boring, are you?”

  She shook her head.

  He jumped to his feet. “All right, let me wash my face and I’ll find my bunk, and see you when I can,” he said. He splashed some water into the steel bowl from the little tap. “All the modern conveniences!”

  She had a towel ready, but he wiped his sleeve across his face.

  “Mustn’t be too dainty down below, or the fellows will rag me,” he said, like Roddy would, and was out the door and gone.

  The engine noise was audible, here in the cabin, a constant burr to rest your mind against. And Aren would be down there keeping the long screw going through the swell. Or at least, keeping the refrigerators cool. She had never been on a ship with a refrigeration room. Maybe sometime he could take her down to see. She’d been awake for such a long time, it seemed like a very great effort to take off her dress and hang it up and find her nightdress, and she did not even bother to wash her face but lay down and wept for her dear dog Pilot, who had died so short a time ago and whom she missed especially here at sea. Then she ate her midnight cake.

  At first light, Aren found her at the railing of the promenade deck, and motioned her to follow. He led her up a narrow stair to the weather deck, and gave a quick yank on one of the ropes holding the canvas cover on the second starboard lifeboat, so that it folded back halfway. He handed her up and jumped in after, and there they sat, playing Seaton, enjoying the salt wind and the air.

  “Passenger boats are strange,” Aren said. “The work is all done hole-and-corner, in the hope that no one will see how hard they work, below.”

  “It makes me uncomfortable,” Kay said. “Though I know that is absurd—I’ve been a passenger all my life.”

  “Now you have reached the acme of your profession.” He settled into the curve of the prow and bit into one of the apples she’d brought from her cabin, stored up from dinner.

  She wondered if he was glad to be going on this journey, but did not want to ask. “I am glad to be here,” she said instead.

  “I am sorry for Merissa Peck,” he said.

  Kay had almost managed to forget her. Hungry again, she took a bite of the other apple.

  “But it would not have been kind to take her so far away, in uncertain circumstances,” Aren said, when he was halfway through his apple.

  “I did not see her at her best.”

  “If you’d met her in Tonga or in Fiji, you would think her very fine and strong-minded. She’s like you, except poor.”

  Kay supposed she was to take that as a compliment.

  Below them, the stewards moved along, setting up the deck chairs for the passengers.

  “Go down and put dibs on a chair,” Aren said, pushing her with his foot. “I’m going to nap here for a while—the man next to me snored fearfully all night.”

  Kay slid gingerly out onto the metal foot of the lifeboat launcher, jumped down and took the stairs to Promenade deck as if she had
simply been enjoying the sunshine above.

  “Chair for you, Miss? You’re up early!” said the steward, a wiry man of little height with a bright eye.

  “May I?”

  “Miss Ward, ain’t it, if you’ll pardon me? Got you listed as Cabin 6, which means this chair here, if that suits?”

  She sat, and swivelled to let her feet fall on the slanting footrest.

  “Blanket?”

  The air was brisk still, so she took the blanket.

  “I’m Handy, Miss.”

  She nodded, thinking he certainly was, then realized it was his name. “Thank you, Mr. Handy.”

  “Breakfast at eight, Miss,” Handy said, and went on down the line of chairs.

  Kay sat staring out into the far distance, that prospect only available at sea, or (her practical mind inserted) sometimes from a balcony looking out to sea. Like the view out across the prairie from the upper windows at Blade Lake. The long view, the only view she wanted.

  Up and down deck, other passengers appeared, in cruise wear or overcoats, depending on their experience and expectation and hardiness. One lady wore furs, although it was only rabbit fur dressed to look like muskrat. Some seemed to be in summer kit. Kay was glad she’d sold her coat. She thought warmly of the little roll of dollars in her brown purse.

  The girls from dinner came along to find their chairs, Julia very correct in a navy steamer coat, Elsie more frivolous in a cardigan, a red wool scarf tucked around her neck against the wind.

  “Aren’t the mornings beautifully fresh?” she called to Kay.

  Kay nodded, and pulled the rug up around the cheek that faced them. She wished she’d brought her book. Now those girls would think they had to speak to her.

  At the noon bell, Julia stood and stretched, and asked Kay if she would walk in to luncheon with them. This was a strange life, this passenger business. Being with a large set of people all day long, people you did not know or particularly like, involved multiple courtesies that Kay had not bargained for. She had thought she would just read all the time, yet here she was foisted into social occasions, over and over.

  Seeing tape pasted down the middle of the passageway, Kay kept to the left, the dry side. Julia and Elsie walked all over until Kay put out a hand and tugged gently at Elsie’s sleeve to nudge her over. The seaman on his knees swabbing ahead looked up and gave them a grateful grin.

  “If there’s tape, they’re waxing,” Kay said, trying not to sound like Mrs. Johns. “They work one side all the way down and then do the other, so we can still walk along.”

  “Clever!”

  It was only practical, but Elsie demanded to know how Kay knew so much about “shipboard culture,” left her no time to answer, and then talked all through lunch about the exigencies and cleverness of life at sea. Mrs. Johns having come down with seasickness, there was no one to compete with her.

  The Constellation, a British-India cargo steamer of four thousand tons, had been a coast-to-coaster for forty years, and a beauty in her time, Lieutenant Johns assured Kay. Even now, sagging after the war and firmly into middle age, Elsie called her “a capital ship for an ocean trip, with everything trim about her.”

  Not quite trim, to Kay’s cooler eye. A good old ship, battered but sturdy. The passengers were undemanding, many of them British and American missionaries coming from or heading back to India and points along the way, and a sprinkling of other travellers: people with a little money, but not enough for a liner passage. The Constellation also carried cargo, ferrying silk and spice to the west, and everything from typewriters to trucks back to New Zealand and Australia.

  Sheep grazed in pens on the main deck. Elsie mourned them extravagantly. “Look at them, poor things. Doomed to die, one by one, to feed the native crew. And looking as if they knew it.” Kay doubted the mutton was only for the crew. Aren did not like it, so she hoped it was not their only food. She pointed out the ducks on the poop deck, and they were a great hit with Elsie and Julia.

  Besides the livestock, between decks, and wherever there was a nook or cranny, coal for the engines was piled—tons of it, the heaps covered with tarpaulin. Francis had said that the journey of a steamer was a constant tug-of-war between coal and time: will there be enough coal to get the ship to shore, or will the woodwork have to be fed into the furnace? Once in a while shipmasters had had to pull up and burn the floorboards to get to harbour.

  When the telegram broke the news that Kay had gone, and where, Thea quarrelled with Francis for the first time in their married life.

  Dropping the telegram on the dining table as if it burned her, she mowed into the drawing room, where Francis was sitting with the morning paper. She was already shouting incoherently.

  Francis, pointing at Roddy’s brown foot deep in the window seat, motioned to her to temper her voice, but she could suffer no restraint, telling herself in a lightning flare that Roddy ought to know what had happened—in fact she was sure he did know, for he and Kay were always hand in glove, always running away into the orchard to keep secrets—

  But what did that matter, it was Francis who must have made this wild goose chase possible, must have funded it, and encouraged Kay, and—

  Had he seen Aren? Had he gone to Halifax behind her back and—

  Thea stood still, her legs shaking with rage and despair. She could not remember ever being so angry. In a wild rush that felt like freedom after chains, she flew out at Francis hammer and tongs, at last, about why Aren had not been happy and what had happened to make everything so difficult. At first it was a flood of mixed-up words, all no and why and how could you and what gave you the right—but once that first spate slowed, she shook her head sharply and found her sense again, and stopped Francis when he made to answer.

  “Don’t you dare say that we should not have taken him from that island, as Kay believes. He would have starved—you know those men were at the breaking point. Even so, he was never strong, because of that early deprivation—that is to blame for his TB, and perhaps he had already been exposed to the bacillus, and would have died of it all unknowing in that backward place. And if we had not taken him? Who else might they have sold him to next, for ship’s boy or worse!”

  He said nothing.

  “Answer me!” she demanded. Her voice was unrecognizable to herself.

  But Francis would not fight. He stood on the drawing room carpet like a schoolboy called to account, and refused to quarrel.

  She battered herself on the blank wall of his refusal, crying, “He was happy with us—do you question that? On all our voyages, he was the happiest boy, until the war—It all went wrong when you left us to go to France.”

  That was something she had never said before. She had not questioned Francis’s decision at the time. But it was a decision—he had enlisted, he had chosen to go, although at an age when most men would have stayed to support their family. Leaving her and Kay to manage everything alone, without word or letter for months at a time, not knowing if he ever would come back, and all for some idea of glory.

  “No, not that,” Francis said. “Don’t go blaming the war. The trouble was there before I left. I myself sorted out a few things at the school, if you recall.”

  “Between voyages!”

  Because he was never there, not there to help her, or to guide his sons. Roddy was all right, would be all right because he was one of them, a Grant, and a Wetmore. It was Aren who had needed a father.

  But it was she who had insisted that he go to school, had made him go when he’d asked to please stay home. He had to finish his education properly, and learn to be with other boys. Then Roddy’s failing health had claimed her attention, and his weak leg, and the brace for all that time, the worry over whether he would ever walk. Aren was always so patient and good with him, was one of the reasons Roddy was stronger now—was Roddy to lose his brother, too?

  Francis did not answer her. He did not speak at all, letting her run her anger out.

  Bile rose again in the back of
her throat. This anger business was horrible, she wished she was free of it. But Kay’s telegram rose in her mind again, and her head went up in flames again, so that it was all she could do to stand still and not lash out in every direction. How much anger had she been swallowing all this time?

  She shuddered again under the onslaught of old time, old fears, and flung at Francis, desiring to spear him in place on Aunt Lydia’s Turkey carpet, “Anyone could see he was unhappy, yet you have not lifted a hand to help him, except by sending him away to Halifax and helping him to a life of hardship and suffering.”

  He did not waver at her attack, but stood solid and calm, as if her madness gave him stability. “Apprenticeship is hardly that!” he said. “It is a straight path to a good career, for a lad who knows the ropes.”

  In her fury, Thea did not address the instigating incident—the reprehensible behaviour of the King family over boy-and-girl foolishness, or any of the miseries she knew Aren had suffered at school, the Acadian boys throwing stones at him and calling names that first year, or the bad business of Ernest Bain and the stolen books—but skipped back to earlier wrongs.

  “You wanted to take him for a cabin boy—” That first day, she meant, the day they bought him. Found him.

  “Yes, and it might have been the better for him.”

  “There was no reason to separate him from us, from his family—” She bit her lip until it bled, thinking of having separated Aren from his original family. As maybe Francis was thinking now.

  “There is always reason to separate a boy from his family,” Francis said. Comforting her, even in this whirlwind. “I was ten when I went to sea, and I did very well.”

  “You were a sturdy boy. His lungs were compromised, and he could not thrive. As well take Roddy!”

  “Aren was—is—much sturdier than you believe. A wild child, and a man now, fitted to survive. So is Roddy—he’d do very well in a ship’s company. You underrate his strength.”

  Her hands had made themselves into fists, sharp-knuckled weapons. She locked them into a hand clasp so they would not fly out at him. “If you do it, if you work hole-and-corner with Roddy, knowing what he suffers—”