by kc dyer
“So it was cheaper to get rid of the problem people by sending them away?”
“Look around,” he said. “What do you think?”
Darby peeked out from under the sailcloth, but all the crew members had gone somewhere else. To eat, maybe. The sky was a deep indigo blue—and the stars! She had no idea there were so many stars in the sky. She climbed out from under the cloth to stand against the railing and take a few deep breaths of the night air. With every second, the deep shades of blue drained out of the sky, leaving it black and star-filled. It was a wonder to see.
Most of the passengers had finished eating, and had curled up right on the deck to go to sleep. As the ship sailed on in the dark, the waves off to each side glowed a weird sparkling green against the black ocean. Darby felt Gabe come stand beside her.
“The radiance in the water is from the algae,” he said in a low voice. “When they are disturbed by the passage of the ship, each tiny creature shines a light and together they make the ocean glow.” He touched her arm and pointed her back to the spot under the sailcloth.
“We are better to stay under there,” whispered Gabe. “Voices carry more in the night over water, and the captain has been setting a watch to make sure we don’t get secretly boarded.”
“Secretly boarded?” Darby pulled the cloth back over her head. It was no warmer underneath. She still couldn’t get used to feeling so cold all the time. “Who is going to board a ship in the middle of the ocean?”
He shrugged. “I know it sounds unlikely, but the captain wants nothing to get in the way of completing his passage to Montreal. He pocketed the price for each passenger upon boarding, and he doesn’t get extra for delivery. He wants to be quit of them and pick up whatever cargo awaits him there. And though you may not have seen any other ships today, there are many of them out there. Some are rife with diseases like smallpox and typhoid. If a ship’s company runs out of food, who knows what they will try to do in desperation.”
“Smallpox,” Darby said slowly. “That must be what the baby has.”
Gabe nodded. “Fifteen souls were lost mid-voyage before the crew of the Elizabeth managed to stem the outbreak. But perhaps one or two passengers concealed their symptoms, or perhaps the disease passed through clothes not burned when they should have been.”
“They burn the clothes?”
Gabe sighed and sat up a bit. “The crew are deathly afraid of the pox. It is worse even than typhus. It can spread throughout a ship like wildfire, killing everyone aboard in a matter of a few days. So the captain has the crew throw anyone with symptoms of the disease over the side, some even before they have succumbed to the illness. Or, if he is feeling very generous, he will lock them in a room for the duration of the passage. Those who survive are released at the end of the journey. But usually none survive. The clothes of the dead are supposed to be tossed over the side or burned. But as you can see, these people are so poor, they sometimes hide the clothes and douse them in seawater hoping to kill the pox.”
“Does that work?”
“No, of course not. And so the disease might stay dormant for a while before flaring up again. My guess is that is what has happened here.”
Darby was quiet a moment. How many lives had been lost on this ship? And how many ships like this one had sailed away from Ireland?
Just as she opened her mouth to ask, Gabe disappeared. Or more accurately, a pile of sailcloth was unceremoniously dumped on her head and someone yanked Gabe out by the arm.
“ ’Ere’s the little rat, then! It’s yer turn on watch, bog boy. Mind you don’t fall asleep on the job. Shirkers make good fish food.”
Darby waited a moment or two before sliding out from under the cloth. In the moonlight, she could see Gabe climbing the rigging. He must have to do his watch in the crow’s nest—the tiny platform at the top of one of the masts. It was so high, she lost sight of him when the dark seemed to swallow him halfway up the mast. Darby turned away and made a bed in the sailcloth, tucked tightly into one corner of the deck. Since there didn’t appear to be any immediate chance to make her way home, she at least wanted to ensure no one would step on the Elizabeth’s newest resident ghost while she caught a few hours of sleep.
Darby awoke with the sun on her face and the strange feeling that she had forgotten to help Nan with something. Am I late for dinner? In this strange, timeless world it was hard to tell where she should be, or when she should be there. What about Gabe? How could the guy be in two places at once? And why was he the only person who could see her?
But since what she could do about this was exactly nothing, she decided to worry about it later. Suddenly she was not so sleepy anymore. The sun was shining and it was another beautiful day, but she was still cold. Sleeping under the sailcloth all night had done nothing to keep her warm, and the sun just wasn’t doing its job now, either. She looked down at her fingers and noticed that the tips were stark, yellow-white.
Kinda like the fingers of a dead person.
Or a ghost.
She gave herself a little shake. Dark-side Darby thinking the worst again. She decided to go find Gabe.
She spotted him immediately after standing up. He was surrounded by passengers and other crewmen down on the main deck. It looked like there was a problem. Darby started down the ladder, but halted in her tracks as she took her first look at the ocean.
It seemed that overnight the Elizabeth had pulled further into an enormous river. She could see shoreline on both sides of the ship, but it was the front view that caught her eye. At least four ships lined up in the river, each anchored only a few hundred yards behind the one ahead. She scampered over to the rear part of the rail surrounding the upper deck. Sure enough, at least one ship was pulled in behind the Elizabeth, its deckhands scrambling to drop an anchor into the sea. There may have been more in the misty distance.
Darby decided the shoreline she could see on either side of the ship had to be Canada. Or whatever Canada was before it was a country. From the ship, the land looked like an endless, unbroken line of trees—dark and impenetrable. She thought of Mirkwood from Lord of the Rings and shivered a little. She couldn’t see any sign of a city or even a docking place. This land looked nothing like the friendly place Darby called home. It looked dark and strange and dangerous.
She turned her gaze back to the ship, but there was no one to be seen on the open part of the main deck. This was odd because there seemed to be so many people on board; usually every open space was filled. Whatever was happening in front must be drawing a standing-room-only crowd.
With all the people missing, Darby watched as a rat made his leisurely way along the wooden handrail. He must have crawled out of one of the open hatches leading to the storage area under the ship. He was not a skinny rat. Darby guessed Gabe wasn’t the only food thief on board.
Heading back to the foredeck, it took a minute or two to climb down the ladder. Darby had a little trouble getting around Alec’s large feet without stepping on them. She managed to work her way up close to the front of the group. Gabe stood to one side of the captain, arms full of scraps of wood and brick. He raised his eyebrows in her direction.
The captain was in conversation with a man she didn’t recognize. Of course, the Elizabeth was filled with men Darby didn’t recognize, but this man was different. For one thing, he was clean. He wore grey pants that had sharp creases down the front and a matching vest and coat. Even the cloth tied around his neck looked like it had been freshly ironed.
She couldn’t really see his face, as he was wearing thin, grey gloves and holding an enormous handkerchief over his nose and mouth. This also made it quite difficult to understand what he was saying. The captain’s face was bright red from bellowing at the man. From the part of his face Darby could see, the man looked pretty exasperated as well. Finally he stepped away from the captain, so that he was practically leaning backwards over the rail, and pulled the cloth from his face.
“My good man,” he said in a voice th
at carried far more clearly, “there is simply no reason to shout at me. I am merely delivering the news as it was relayed to me by the doctor at the quarantine station on Grosse-Île. If you trouble yourself to gaze both fore and aft, you will see that yours is not an isolated problem. Two days ago I marked the number of ships awaiting inspection at more than forty. Today there are probably three times that number.”
The captain stepped forward and brandished something in the man’s face. It looked like some kind of spyglass. “Now you need to listen to me, Mr. Driscoll, or whatever it is that you call y’self. What you don’t understand, sir, is that I ’ave a full complement of raw lumber awaiting me in Quebec City. Every day that I am late to pick up that shipment, I pay a penalty to me agent in Liverpool.”
He gestured around at the silent group of people listening to the exchange. “These passengers are just cargo I took on so as not to travel across the Atlantic with an empty ’old. They is not me principle occupation, nor me concern once we make land.”
Oh, nice, thought Darby. The passengers were less valuable than a bunch of wood? The captain’s reputation wasn’t going up in her opinion.
One of the women stepped forward and plucked at Driscoll’s sleeve.
“If there is illness on board, sir, will it slow our passage into the colonies?”
Driscoll stepped hastily away from the woman, almost tripping himself in his hurry. He put the handkerchief back up over his mouth, and his voice muffled again. “Indeed, madam. There is a quarantine of a minimum of fifteen days if the doctor confirms illness is present.”
He removed the cloth from his mouth for a moment and looked sharply at the captain. “Surely your complement of passengers includes more than just Irish?”
The captain shook his head. “Not that it is any concern of yours, but I took this whole load on in Sligo. Passage west fully paid. What ’appens to them in the colonies is nobody’s business but their own.”
Driscoll looked across the group of silent faces and then back at the captain. “I hope you will convey to these poor souls that unless they have a trained skill, the Irish are as welcome in the colonies as stray dogs.” He sniffed a little. “Have you any evidence of typhus or the pox aboard, sir?”
The captain shook his head firmly. “None, sir. Ye can be sure of that.” His eyes took on a crafty look that reminded Darby of little Ellen. “P’raps it is simply a matter of a financial incentive to speed our progress past the quarantine regulations? If ye would just accompany me down to my cabin, I’m sure we can come to an agreeable arrangement.”
Driscoll swung one leg over the handrail and perched precariously on the side of the ship. For the first time, Darby noticed a smaller craft—not much bigger than a large rowboat—was tied up, bobbing in the waves alongside the Elizabeth. He tucked his handkerchief into his pocket.
“Captain Cameron,” he said severely, “I will do you the honour of not reporting your words. In these terrible days, bribery is a treasonous offence. And I most certainly will not descend to your reeking cabin, but will immediately take my leave. I have several more ships to board this day, and as I have no further business here, I bid you adieu.”
With those words, he swung his other leg over the side and half-slid down a rough rope ladder that the men in his boat below must have rigged up earlier. The passengers and crew watched in silence as six men on the small craft took up oars and began paddling for all they were worth in the choppy ocean. It looked like they were aiming for the ship that was anchored behind the Elizabeth.
The woman who had stepped forward before turned to the captain. “What are your plans now, Cameron? Ye may be more than a few days late to pick up yer precious cargo.”
Other voices began to call out, including shouts of “Give us food!” and “Tell those below that no sickness is aboard!” The passengers began to push each other in an effort to get close enough to the captain so he would hear their complaints.
Gabe caught Darby’s eye and gestured toward a nearby doorway, so she shoved through the jostling crowd and followed him in the door.
The area was little more than a storage closet and, crammed full of assorted bits of sail and rope, it felt about as roomy as the inside of Darby’s locker at school. Gabe managed to cram the door shut against the crowd outside, and they faced each other practically nose to nose with some kind of a rusty block-and-tackle arrangement jammed between them.
“Okay, look,” Darby said as soon as he got the door closed. “Just exactly what did you mean when you said this place isn’t safe? You’ve been punched out at least once since I’ve been here. And the last thing I want to do is arrive back in your garden carrying some kind of horrible disease that no one has ever heard of. I mean, what the heck is typhus? And how about smallpox—is it just a smaller version of chicken pox?”
Gabe shook his head. “I’m afraid not,” he said, almost yelling over what sounded like some kind of a riot going on outside the door.
“Well, I’m worried,” Darby yelled back. “I want to find out what happened to these people—to Alice and Pádraig and little Ellen. But I also don’t want to make my grandparents sick, and I don’t particularly like the sound of any of these conditions for myself, either.”
“You needn’t worry about the illness,” he said. “Being a traveller such as yourself means that you are at risk, no doubt. While your presence has very little impact on the solid objects of this era, you can still be hurt. If an iron bar came crashing down on your head or you if fell into a pit of tigers, you would have trouble on your hands, make no mistake. Animals are a particular risk; they don’t rely on vision as much as people do, and your presence is more evident to them. This is why I stay with you, to keep you safe from iron bars and tiger pits and to make sure you get back home in one piece. No one knows you are here. You are as much a part of the room as the furniture—no more.”
Darby’s exasperation rose up. “So, I should think of myself as a couch or maybe a toilet?” she snapped.
“A toilet?” he said.
She stared at him a minute and then they both laughed.
“It’s just so hard to know what to do when you won’t give me all the information,” she said.
He shrugged. “I don’t have time for a long explanation here. Just know that disease and such is no danger to you, for while you are in this time, you are not of it.”
Great. Like that made a lot of sense. But compared to the fact that this ghost-from-another-time affliction wouldn’t have protected her from that polar bear, it was at least on the good news side of the spectrum.
Suddenly, there was a tremendous explosion right outside the door. Darby grabbed Gabe’s arm in terror. “What was that?”
“I believe it was a gunshot,” he said calmly.
“A gunshot? It sounded more like a cannon going off to me,” she said. As soon as her ears stopped ringing, she pushed past Gabe and tried to peek outside through a crack in the door. She could feel him craning over her shoulder to look.
“You smell like apples,” he whispered.
“It’s my shampoo,” she hissed back, thinking of Alice. “Do you think they can …?”
But the captain started to shout and his voice drowned her out.
As they peeked through, they could see Captain Cameron stood with his back to the door and beside him was one of his crewmen. Gabe had been right—he held some kind of a shotgun. A little smoke was still coming out of the gun, both the barrel and the back near where he must have lit a fuse or something.
“This section of the afterdeck be for the crew ONLY,” he roared. “The penalty for crossing the line I have drawn will be the loss of a day’s ration of water. A full inspection of all the passengers will commence immediately. Mr. Damian, if you please.”
Gabe’s tormentor, Alec, stepped forward. “He’s Mr. Damian?” Darby whispered.
Gabe nodded. “Believe it or not, he’s the ship’s dentist. I think he got the job because he was the strongest man on board
for pulling out bad teeth.”
“Either that or he enjoyed it the most,” she muttered. “That was one big shotgun.”
Gabe slid the door shut again as the passengers began to disperse. “It is a musket, actually. A flintlock musket.”
Darby knew that. She remembered seeing one in a movie her social studies teacher had shown on the Civil War.
“What do you think they are going to do now?”
Gabe actually looked a little worried. “This is a tenuous time,” he said in a low voice. “I think perhaps you have seen enough.”
“What does that mean?” Darby asked, feeling her exasperation rise again. She had hardly seen anything, and her questions outnumbered any answers by at least ten to one.
“It means I need to show you the way home,” he said firmly. He took Darby’s shoulders and pushed her out through the door. Most of the people were gone from this part of the deck, and she could see the line the captain had drawn on the dirty surface of the boards with a piece of chalk.
Gabe hauled her around to the foredeck. There were a few passengers scattered about, but most had disappeared. “Where is everybody?” she hissed.
They stopped in front of the first fireplace. It was full of cinders and burnt wood, but was not in use. Gabe leaned against the wooden frame that supported the rickety oven.
“Everyone has gone below. We must move quickly before they return. This stone hearth is your portal. Just crawl …”
But before he was able to finish, there was a desperate scream from the stairwell beside them.
Gabe took a step toward the stairwell and tripped a little as the stone from the hearth shifted and caught the toe of his boot. “Wait here,” he whispered, and ran for the top of the stairs. Darby tried to shove the rock back into place, but it broke and a piece came off in her hand. She stuffed it into her pocket, making a mental note to replace it as soon as she had a chance.
A moment later, Gabe was backing away from the stairs, his arms raised high over his head. Out of the stairwell emerged the scary end of the musket, and it was pointing straight at Gabe. Soon enough, the other end of the musket showed up, clutched in the hands of Gabe’s buddy, Mr. Damian. Behind him, a crew member was struggling up the stairs with a bundle in his arms. The reason he was struggling was that he also had a woman clawing at him—his arms, his clothes, whatever she could reach. She clearly was trying to get her property back.