Song of the Silent Harp

by BJ Hoff

  Leary glared at Evan for another full minute. At last, he hauled himself up from the berth, teetering wildly as he stood. He grabbed at the corner of the desk to break his fall. After another moment, he yanked his bag off the desk and pitched toward Evan. “Let’s go, then.”

  Fighting back his revulsion, Evan put a hand to the man’s arm to help steady him, but the surgeon shook him off with a grunt of protest.

  “C’mon, Englishman, show me your corpses. And don’t be getting so rattled about it.” He stopped long enough to wag a finger in Evan’s face. “You’ll be seeing plenty more of them before this crossing is done.”

  The surgeon laughed, then lurched through the open doorway. “That’s the truth, you know. There’ll be plenty of corpses for the greedy old Atlantic on this voyage. She’ll claim those she wants—she always does!”

  The doctor looked back over his shoulder, squinting at Evan with a peculiar grimace of a smile. “And who can say but what they all would not be better off in the bosom of the sea than where they’re going, eh?”

  Less than an hour later, Leary, white-faced and suddenly sober, faced the captain in his quarters.

  “I tell you it’s the Black Fever!” the surgeon exploded, ducking his head beneath the low rough-beamed ceiling. A big man, he felt more confined in Schell’s cabin than in his own, though the captain’s room was far more spacious. Schell’s Spartan quarters were oddly inhibiting, like a foreign laboratory. Sterile, cold, and restricted.

  “Typhus?” Schell sat calmly, his smooth hands folded on his desk.

  As always, the desk top was uncluttered and bare, except for the ship’s log and a sextant.

  “Call it what you will,” Leary spat out, “it’s certain doom! This is disaster aboard a ship, and well you know it!”

  Frigid blue eyes fixed the physician in place like a bug on a pin. Even in the somber lantern glow, the red scar on Schell’s face blazed its anger. “How many?”

  “Dead, do you mean? Two so far; at least half a dozen down with it, though. It can take the lot of them before it’s done—but, then, I don’t have to tell you that, now do I? You’ve seen it all before.”

  The captain’s thin mouth pulled down only enough to cause a faint break in the marble mask of his face. “Tell no one but the bosun and First Mate Clewes. They will confine steerage below decks.”

  “All of them?”

  Schell lifted his eyes to regard Leary with a cold, exaggerated patience. “Of course, all of them,” he said, still not raising his voice. “It would hardly make sense to isolate only a few, now would it?”

  “They’ll have no chance, none at all, locked in there together like rats in a barrel!”

  Schell remained silent, watchful. Leary could hear the man’s shallow breathing, saw the cold eyes freeze over, but just enough of the whiskey remained to dull his normal sense of caution. “I should think you’d want to deliver most of your cargo alive, Captain, if you’re to earn your fee.”

  “Our cargo,” Schell said smoothly, his accent thickening somewhat, “has already been paid for, the fee collected—from your countrymen. The only thing left for us to do is to put them ashore in New York. After that, it’s entirely the problem of the…what do you call them? The runners.”

  Leary glared at the man across from him. Schell was an unfeeling, cold-blooded monster. The man had no soul. No soul at all.

  “Send Clewes and the bosun to me,” said the captain, turning his back. “And stay sober.”

  Leary stared at the back of Schell’s head, debating whether his surgeon’s knife would penetrate that granite-hewn skull. At last he turned and lunged out of the room, in a mad race for his bottle.

  Fiabhras dubh…

  The Black Fever. Typhus. The fearful malediction began to circulate steerage within hours, bouncing from berth to berth, striking raw terror into the hearts of all who heard it whispered or moaned.

  No disease was more dreaded, none more horrifying than the prolonged, agonizing terrors of typhus. No swift, merciful death, this, but days of suffering and slow destruction, a lingering agony that transcended every other known form of human misery. Even to speak its name aloud was to unleash a blast of hell’s wrath.

  Black Fever aboard ship meant unavoidable epidemic and unimaginable suffering. Tonight, aboard the Green Flag, it meant sorrow upon sorrow.

  In the Castlebar gaol, Morgan Fitzgerald thought about Nora aboard the ship to America and Daniel John at her side. He thought about his fine horse, Pilgrim, wondering what had become of him. He even thought about Whittaker, the Englishman. Then, despite his intentions to avoid the subject, he turned his thoughts to his approaching death.

  There had been no trial—not that he had expected one. He knew well enough how things would be. One night soon, his cell would open. Hooded men would lead him out and put him onto a horse. He would be taken outside the town, to a deserted stand of trees—convenient for a hanging—and that, as they say, would be that. The end of him.

  It had happened before, and it would happen again, was going to happen, to him this time. He had no hopes of a surprise or a last-minute miracle. He doubted that God was of a mind to perform miracles for an outlaw. And that was what he was, all right—an outlaw.

  To the magistrates, he was the worst kind of outlaw—an Irish rebel who happened to have a passing good education, who could write a fair essay that might stir Gaelic blood and heat nationalist passions. He had robbed and raided. He had insulted the authorities and embarrassed their superiors. Of course, he might have survived all that if he had been ignorant—ignorant and entirely lacking in political interests.

  Oh, he was a dead man, and that was the truth.

  He should pray for his soul, Joseph Mahon had said, and Morgan knew the priest had it right. The thing was, he didn’t know how—where to begin, what to say. He had gone too far. Over the years the stains of his sins had run together, eventually draining into the sea of a past from which he could no longer draw the slightest hope of a future.

  Besides, only a penitent should pray for his own soul, one who sorrowed for his sin and wished it gone. Morgan supposed he was sorry for whatever wrongs he had committed in his lifetime, was deeply sorry for any that might have brought hurt or harm to his fellowman. But, in truth, the greatest sorrows in his soul were mostly self-centered: He grieved the loss of his loved ones, and he grieved the desolation of his country.

  Had he known a way to create remorse within himself, he would have done so. But there was a terrible deadness in his spirit that seemed beyond reach. And so he waited, strangely impassive, knowing he would swing. Other than wondering when it would come, he was not as overwhelmed by the thought as he probably should have been.

  Joseph Mahon, the priest, felt swept under by a great wave of defeat as he prepared to pray for the neck—and the soul—of Morgan Fitzgerald.

  Joseph Mahon, the man, felt despair and anger as he knelt beside the bed in his room behind the chapel and considered the kind of death the brash young poet would endure.

  Joseph had seen men hang, had rubbed his own neck at the snap of the noose, beheld the final agony of their last moments. He could not bear the thought of Morgan Fitzgerald facing such an end. The man was an outlaw, a renegade, a rogue. But, oh, what God could do with such a man, with such a valiant heart and mighty spirit!

  Yet only a fool could not anticipate Fitzgerald’s end. There would be no trial; the rumor was all over the village and the county, and Joseph had not been at all surprised to hear of it.

  He had tried to stop this mad rush to the gallows, had spent days pounding on the door of every magistrate in the area who might have helped to stay the hangman’s rope. But everywhere he went, he heard the same sound: the toll of doom for Morgan Fitzgerald.

  And yet he knew that somehow it must be stopped. The man waiting in the Castlebar gaol, waiting to die, must be saved, spared from the noose at all costs. The country was in dire need of this man, would be in even greater need of him in
the days to come.

  The priest had a single hope—only one—to save Morgan from the gallows. Aidan Fitzgerald, Morgan’s father, had given him that hope with his final confession, before he died of the drink.

  But how could he salvage that hope, how could he use it in Morgan’s behalf, without violating both Aidan’s confession and his wishes for his son? How, Lord?

  There was a man. One man, in Dublin, who could turn the tide. If he would.

  Joseph prayed. Prayed for light, for a word of wisdom, for a work of power that would save a man’s life—and his soul as well.

  32

  Secrets Aboard the Green Flag

  Abandoned, forsaken,

  To grief and to care,

  Will the sea ever waken

  Relief from Despair?

  (ANONYMOUS—NINETEENTH CENTURY)

  Daniel and his mother fought their way up the ladder to the hatch, gripping the splintery rungs with fierce determination. Behind them, hands grasped and shoved in an effort to push upward and free themselves from the stench of illness and death that now permeated steerage.

  At the first clang of the morning bell just after daybreak, the ladder became a prize sought by every able-bodied person in steerage. Reaching the foredeck first didn’t necessarily guarantee an early place at the stove; that boon was reserved for those holding bargaining power with the deck cook, such as bribe money or flattery from a pretty lass. Still, there was a mad rush every morning to reach the caboose, the fireplace that served as a cooking stove for steerage passengers.

  The race for the hatch was even more frantic than usual this morning. All were in a fever to flee the misery of their quarters—not so much to gain the advantage at the caboose, but to escape the common dread of being confined with dead bodies.

  Two had died late in the night, an elderly grandmother and a wee lass. Not long after, wild rumors had begun to sweep the entire deck.

  There was even talk of the Black Fever, though nobody seemed willing to say for certain as yet.

  The victims had been left to lie in their bunks after the surgeon’s cursory examinations. Dr. Leary had been in a fierce hurry to leave, ignoring the questions and pleas of the frightened passengers trying to crowd him.

  With the surgeon himself in such a bother, Daniel thought bitterly, is there any wonder the passengers are eager to flee?

  Despite the pall of death and the ominous rumors, his own heart felt lighter this morning than it had in days. For the first time since boarding the Green Flag, his mother seemed to be her old self again. Oh, her sadness was still painfully apparent, but at least she had eaten her meals two days in a row.

  Today she had come for him before the morning bell, not long after he awakened. He’d seen at once that she had combed her hair and scrubbed her face.

  Smiling at him, she handed him one of the two cooking pots she was carrying. “You must have a warm breakfast this day, Daniel John,” she said, much as she might have had they still been at home in the village. “It’s important to eat and build our strength, so we can ward off the fever.”

  “Then you believe that’s what it is, the Black Fever?”

  Averting her eyes, she nodded, then answered in a strained voice. “I have seen it before, several years ago in the village. From what they’re saying about the bodies, I’ve no doubt it’s the typhus.”

  Instead of the fear Daniel would have expected, she seemed surprisingly steady and matter-of-fact.

  Now, as they clung to the ladder, waiting for the hatch to open, she still appeared resolute and in control. Glancing back over her shoulder, she said, “We’ll bring breakfast back for Katie and Johanna. They’re minding Little Tom so I can go above decks. And we’ll fix enough for Mr. Whittaker as well, though if he’s as ill as you say, I doubt he’ll be able to eat.”

  The Englishman had grown worse all through the night, flush-faced and hollow-eyed with the fever, going on like a crazy man in his sleep. “I’ll have a look at him as soon as we come back,” his mother went on. “Oh—and Daniel John, I’ll need the medicine box. Katie is some fevered, too.”

  “It’s under my bunk,” Daniel John said, his spirits plummeting with her comment about Katie. Uneasily, he remembered how pale his friend had looked the day before, how listless and weak she appeared every time they were together. “Mother, you don’t think Katie—”

  He broke off when the hatch suddenly opened, letting in a thin veil of light from early dawn. Behind him, the big-bellied, peevish man from a neighboring bunk prodded his back, and Daniel instinctively kicked out a leg to keep from being knocked off the ladder.

  Only five or six people were in front of him and his mother, so he had no trouble hearing the sailor who now stood in the hatchway, staring down at them with hard black eyes. “Go back to your quarters, all of you! No one is allowed above decks this day! You’re under quarantine until further notice from the captain!”

  “Quarantine? For what?” A redheaded man at the very top of the ladder blasted out the question.

  “There’s two of you dead of the Black Fever, that’s for what!” the sailor retorted, his mouth screwing up with contempt.

  “By whose say-so are we quarantined?” called out another man, this one halfway down the ladder.

  “The surgeon’s! Now get below, the lot of you!”

  “But how long will you be keeping us down here?” cried out the man at the top.

  “I wasn’t told.” The crewman started to close the hatch, then stopped when a thin, gray-faced woman standing near the bottom of the ladder cried out. “You can’t just be keeping us locked up down here, in this—pit! Why, we won’t be able to cook our food! We can’t even get to the privies!”

  Her outrage caught fire and set off a round of furious protests. People began to fight their way higher up the ladder, toward the hatch. Those still on the floor now started to move, until soon a swarm of hands was clawing at the ladder, threatening to topple everybody on it.

  “You’ll stay below deck until you’re told otherwise!” shouted the sailor, shaking his fist through the opening of the hatch. “Now get down to your hole where you belong!”

  With two meaty hands, he gave the redheaded man at the top of the ladder a hard shove, enough to cause him to reel backward. The man shouted as he swayed, then toppled helplessly from the ladder, causing the woman and little girl at his back to lose their balance. The ladder itself creaked and shook.

  Daniel grabbed his mother around the waist with one hand, bracing the two of them against the hull with his other arm as their cooking pots went clanging to the floor. The burly man at his back let go an oath. Daniel shot him a look over his shoulder, shouting, “Get down! Get off the ladder!”

  The man cursed him again, but turned and yelled the same warning to those behind him. Finally, one by one, they lowered themselves to the floor. After a moment, Daniel and his mother followed.

  While some went to help those who had fallen, others clustered at the foot of the ladder, murmuring and looking about in fear and anger.

  An elderly hawk-nosed man on a cane yelled up at the sailor, who still stood in the hatchway, scowling down at them. “God have mercy, man, you must at least help us to get the corpses out of here! We can’t be leaving dead bodies lying about!”

  The sailor glared at him, cursed, then heaved the door shut with a bang.

  Within seconds, the angry murmurs of the crowd swelled to enraged threats and invective. Daniel could smell the fear in the air. Questions flew among the bunks, met by dread predictions and cries of alarm. Soon a general wailing went up. Women wept, children whined, and the men cursed and raged among themselves.

  Suddenly, from across the room came a high-pitched shout of terror. “Fiabhras dubh! Fiabhras dubh! It is the Black Fever!”

  Careful not to crack his head against the low ceiling—which was actually the underside of the main deck—Daniel stretched, craning his neck forward to see where the cry was coming from. At the opposite end of the
men’s quarters, a fair-haired boy who looked to be about his own age was hunched over a lower bunk, wide-eyed with fear. “Their faces! Oh, God, have mercy, their faces—they’re almost black!”

  Daniel lunged forward, but his mother grabbed his arm, holding him back. “No! Stay away!” He froze, staring at her.

  “Let only those who have had the fever and survived it go near the bodies,” she said, clutching his arm. “It’s not as dangerous for them. The rest of us must do whatever we can to slow its spread!” Her eyes bored into his. “We have too many people depending on us to come down with the fever, Daniel John. We must stay well!”

  Daniel looked from his mother to the bunk across the room. A number of men had gathered near the frightened boy and now stood staring at the occupants of the berth. “But what can we do? How can we possibly not come down with it, locked up in this…dungeon!”

  He broke off, dismayed at how easily he had surrendered to his fear. Even in his own ears, he sounded like a panicky child.

  “We will do what we must,” said his mother, her voice unexpectedly gentle. Still clasping his arm, she added, “And you can be sure there will be much to do. But, first, we must see to Mr. Whittaker. Now, hurry and get the medicine box for me.”

  Daniel looked at her, confused as much by this new, unsettling show of strength as by the chaos surrounding them.

  “Daniel John, please. I’m frightened, too. But we must do what we can while we’re still strong!”

  He saw the look in her eyes, a plea for him to be a man, at least for the moment.

  The panic rising in his throat threatened to reduce him to blubbering, but, catching a deep breath, he nodded and followed her down the aisle.