The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor

by Sally Armstrong

  I wonder what Papa and Mama are thinking. They must suspect that I have run off with Pad. Papa has always liked Pad—had hopes for him to become something more than a butler—and perhaps thought a stern speech to me might prevent any “foolishness” as he called it. But while he lectured me, I felt as though the ceiling in his study had dropped to inches over my head.

  She flips back the pages of her diary to read the entry made that fateful night after her father had dismissed her and she’d bolted to her bedroom, then scribbles another line onto today’s entry … The pitched battle I’ve been in for as long as I can remember over the seemliness of my behaviour is behind me now … and closes the diary.

  As one week stretches into two, then to three, then a month, Charlotte is determined to insulate her exhilaration from Pad’s continuing illness, the monotony of the voyage, the worry about the future. The rations begin to diminish in the fifth week and ambitious weevils and fuzzy blue mould appear in the flour and biscuits. She feels as grimy and bedraggled as the gloomy men around her, but her joy is dimmed only a little sitting by the ships rail where, wind and water offering refreshing relief, she takes her diary from her pocket and glances through the entries.

  A BLACK HORIZON. They’d had squalls and days of grey skies and rain, but Charlotte had seen nothing like the storm clouds that lie ahead, as though the sky is disfigured by bruises, black, yellow and purple. Standing at her usual spot at the rail she’s astonished by the sudden change. The jagged edges of storm clouds ahead meet the white-capped water as though one could become the other at any moment.

  “Shorten sails!” the captain calls. “Stiggs, get below with three men and fasten loose cargo!”

  “Aye, sir,” the first mate shouts.

  “Have the passengers go below now!”

  “Aye, sir!”

  Salt spray stings her eyes and soaks her cloak as Charlotte struggles to the hatch and steps her way down the wet rungs. She hurries to Pad and is surprised to find him sitting up.

  “It must be the little waves that bother me,” he says with a smile. “I feel right enough now.”

  Charlotte stuffs their few possessions into her calico bag and ties it securely to the hook on the wall. The stomping of boots plays like a drumbeat on the deck overhead while the livestock squeal and mewl their terror. Anxiety is as thick as fog. She and Pad settle by the stovepipe in the centre of the double row of berths, rubbing their hands together for consoling warmth. She looks back to her berth as though there might be some comfort hanging there in the calico bag. Her keepsakes are so few—a volume of poetry, her well-worn copy of Clarissa, her diary, the combs she’d worn in her hair when she’d been presented to the county magistrate on her recent birthday, her sketch of the garden she could see from her childhood bedroom window—flotsam of a life far from the bowels of the creaking ship. A man vomits onto the floor beside her and the latrines tip as the ship rolls and their contents ease out accordingly. She gathers her skirts around her, trying to keep them out of the slop.

  Half the night passes. She may have dozed. She opens her eyes to find Pad crouched beside her, his eyes wide. She places a hand on his brow: he’s not right enough now. There is a fever there perhaps. Small wonder. Confined to his bunk since they came aboard, and, with the vomit and night soil sloshing about, contagion might well spread to everyone. She wipes his brow with her kerchief, he leans his head on her shoulder gratefully. Pad is not himself, she knows. When she’d fallen in love with him, she saw him as a man who knew what to do in any circumstance, who calmed the household by his very presence.

  The ship lurches forward. The wind grows louder. Tommy must have escaped his duty with the captain because he appears on the ladder, clutching at the rungs. At the bottom, he stumbles over and huddles on the other side of her for a time without speaking.

  “Will we die?” he finally whispers.

  “No, we will not.” Charlotte makes her voice sharp, impatient, but she is not entirely certain he is wrong. The permanent frown on Tommy’s brow reminds her of the stable boy, Jack, who helped with her father’s horses. Jack’s grimace disappeared when he was with the animals, and Charlotte would sometimes find him curled up against the haunches of a cow, asleep, his face as tranquil as that of a baby.

  “Let’s go and visit the livestock,” she proposes to Tommy, then whispers to Pad, “I’m going to go with the boy, to see the cows. It may calm him.”

  In the holding pen, they find trembling animals that look as if they might stampede into the raging sea if they weren’t confined by the barrier leading to the main deck. A sound comes from a heap of straw, hard to hear over the roar of water and the screech of the ship’s timbers—a litter of newborn kittens, meowing for their absent mother.

  “Where’s Lucifer?” Charlotte shouts. She had believed the ship’s black cat to be a male, but this was not the case.

  “She’s not here,” Tommy calls, kneeling beside the kittens.

  “Look!” Charlotte kneels beside him. “Look. They’re as frightened as we are.”

  She could imagine the captain would not look kindly on more cats. But here was a cause that could distract a frightened, lonely boy.

  “Help me, Tommy! We must hide these kittens or the captain will surely toss them overboard.”

  Together they carry the litter into a dark recess of the stalls, where their mother would easily find them later. Tommy would have to occupy his mind with finding a way to keep them out of the captain’s sight.

  Charlotte returns to her post by the stove, leaving Tommy to tend to the kittens. Save for the few men whose job is to steer the vessel through the storm, the rest of the passengers and crew have taken refuge in the living quarters—a euphemism for this collection of stacked wooden cots, she thinks.

  The rain is pounding the ship now, splashing into the lower deck through the leaky hatch and sending all the passengers to the centre where Charlotte has staked out her spot by the stove. The wind picks up, howling like nothing she had ever heard. Huddled by the stove with men she would rather not talk to, she takes her diary from her pocket, looks through her recent entries.

  May 25—I was awakened last night by the most awful noise. It sounded as though someone or something was crying for help outside the so-called living quarters. The wailing went on for several minutes. Then it was quiet, save the sound of a few men busy with a chore. When I got up this morning and went on deck, I found out it was the slaughter of a sheep—the poor thing bleated so pathetically. Pad thinks I’m being spoiled and dramatic.

  June 2—One can’t very well celebrate the halfway point when one doesn’t have a way of knowing where in the middle of all this water the ship is—but Captain Skinner says we’re moving very well.

  Suddenly, as if an explosion had ripped across the bow, the storm strikes the ship and the souls on board with such punishment Charlotte wonders if they will survive. She certainly cannot write in the diary now—it’s all she can do to stay upright. The fire goes out in the stove. The oil lamps in the hold dim and die, leaving them all in darkness. She clings to the pole the stove is lashed to and Pad clings to her. The ship heaves and pitches. Someone near her vomits. Someone else is crying. Most of them are praying. This is as close to hell as she can imagine. The waiting feels like an eternity—hovering in the dark, clinging to anything that is tied down. Waiting, waiting for the abatement.

  Then—silence, quickly followed by the sound of boots beating across the upper deck. The captain’s voice calls down into the lower deck: “We’re in the eye of the storm. Quickly, make tea, get the biscuits and jam. It may be a long time before you eat again.” Everyone rushes to comply. Pad manages to reignite the stove as well as the lamps, and Charlotte yanks the biscuits from the storeroom shelves and passes them around. Then she wraps a fistful of broken biscuits into the folds of her skirt, fills a vessel with water and goes to check on Tommy and the kittens who are, all of them, fast asleep. The rocking motion that terrified the others had soothed boy a
nd cats to a blessed slumber.

  The calm doesn’t last long. Once across the eye of the storm, the winds roar into action buffeting the ship again, sucking it up a monstrous wave and dropping it in free-fall until it pounds into the trough below. Charlotte listens to the people huddled around her at the stove who alternately plea for mercy and try to second-guess the captain. She nods off from time to time, they all do. No one moves. They are shivering, damp, frightened and thoroughly mesmerized until one by one, they give in to exhaustion.

  Charlotte isn’t sure whether she is dreaming or waking when she sees light streaming in around the hatch to the upper deck. All is quiet. They are at an odd collection of angles, leaning into one another, bent forward, lolling back against a plank. The light becomes brighter. Charlotte wonders whether they have sailed out of this purgatory. When she rises to see for herself, she upsets the pyramid of bodies gathered around her. They shake the long night’s damage from their aching backs and stand to follow Charlotte to the ladder. As she lifts her head above the hatch, she stops. The brilliance of the sky, the radiance of the morning, the sun already halfway to the zenith, the charged thrill of the fresh breeze—she can neither exclaim nor form any thought but steps on the deck and lets the pleasure of it wash over her.

  Captain Skinner beckons them to join him on deck and announces, with the flourish she’d come to expect of him, “By the grace of God and the skills of the good men who are my crew, we have weathered a mid-Atlantic storm.”

  Charlotte studies the man. She had thought him aloof, arrogant. But he had stood on the main deck while she and most others on board had huddled like frightened children in the dark. Who was to say what qualities made some good ship’s masters and some good butlers.

  Below, sailors are mopping up the filthy water and checking the hull for damage. Charlotte slips away to the stalls and finds Tommy rubbing the sleep from his eyes.

  “Get up,” she whispers. “No one has missed you yet.”

  BY MID-AFTERNOON, they are fed, dried out and gathered on the upper deck for a reckoning of the ship’s condition conducted by the purser, Watkins, a stout man of perhaps forty who looks to Charlotte as though he’d be better suited to minding a haberdasher in Whitechapel. Food supplies, cargo, health status and injuries are to be determined. The captain announces, “The storm has mercifully pushed us ahead. We have passed the halfway point in my considered judgment and will find the shore in four more weeks.” Then the inspection begins. They hadn’t seen anything resembling fresh fruit or vegetables since the end of the first week at sea. The oatmeal, although damp and sticky, is still in ample supply, so are the dried peas. The biscuits are spotted with mould, as is the quickly diminishing supply of cheese, but the barrels of thick, sweet molasses will suffice. Potatoes, so filling, so easy to prepare, are still in abundance, but it is only a matter of time before their softening skins will rot and the supply is lost to vermin. The head count of livestock has suffered more loss during the storm than anyone had counted on. Two of the remaining three sheep and a dozen chickens suffocated and one of the steers, bawling and sick, has to be shot and thrown overboard. It is the water they worry about most.

  Two sailors emerge from below decks to whisper to Watkins, who looks concerned. He hurries forward to where the captain has resumed conversation with the first mate. The crew members arch their necks as the officers speak together in low tones. Man whispers to man that the storm had breached the water barrels. Watkins comes back, clears his throat.

  “Water is to be rationed,” he says. He pokes nervously and repeatedly at the bridge of his spectacles with one finger. “Any fresh water lost or befouled will mean a shortage. Henceforth, the captain orders that there will be no use of water for any such purposes as washing.”

  “What about the passengers?” a young man in a battered felt hat calls out.

  Watkins sets his small face with determination.

  “No one is to use water for any purpose but that set out by the captain, which is drinking only and the boiling of potatoes and meat and such.”

  “You know what happens?” All eyes turned to a weathered sailor at the back. “You know what happens when a ship runs out of water in them south Caribbean waters? You know how they go, them aboard? Like animals, they do, fightin’ for each ladle.”

  There is a buzz of agreement from the crew, who turn ominous eyes on the twenty passengers, who meet their gaze with shrinking confidence.

  “Not before they been in terrible awful torments,” another sailor adds, wagging his head gravely.

  Charlotte thinks there is a certain malicious twinkle in the eyes of both men, but the truth of the warning is not lost on her.

  “Yates!” Watkins barks at the boy, who had edged near Charlotte. “Why ain’t you countin’ candles in the hold?”

  “Didn’t know to do it, sir.”

  “You did, Yates. You’re a lazy rascal, you are. Get below.”

  “Yes, sir,”

  Other men emerge from the hatch to report on the state of the cargo, the tallow, the ropes, the barrels of pitch and oakum and salt. During these proceedings, young Tommy emerges to report ten boxes of candles.

  “Ten?” Watkins frowns. “What’s become o’ the others?”

  “I ain’t counted them yet, sir.”

  “Why not, boy?” Watkins stabs at his spectacles.

  “I ain’t got but ten fingers, sir.”

  The crew roars with delight.

  “Count all those boxes, Yates, or you’ll have a finger less!”

  Tommy scampers down the hatch.

  “It’s not candles we want,” Charlotte whispers to Pad. “It’s water. Why did they not store it securely?”

  When the job is finished, every man and the one woman on board have to give an accounting of their own health and injuries. There isn’t one among them without scrapes and bruises from the beating they had taken during the storm. Life below decks has exacted a physical and spiritual toll they are all paying. Charlotte wants to tell Watkins that the fact they present themselves as reasonably healthy this day is a testament to their toughness or perhaps desperation, not to any care offered by the crew of this ship. But she remains silent.

  By now Charlotte has bits and pieces of the backgrounds of the passengers. Most of these men, she came to realize, were running away from something, some from the police or debt and others, she assumes from their grumbling at meals and cries in the night, from any manner of misfortune. Several bought their passage by agreeing to sling the ship’s cargo at one end or the other. Some were being delivered as workers to the islands. “Is that what ‘indentured’ means?” she asks Pad. She bets they have stories to tell, stories that for their own good are better kept secret. Like skeletons dangling on their backs, the unrevealed dramas sail along with the human cargo.

  The voyage is finally starting to sap Charlotte’s enthusiasm.

  On July 5, she writes in her diary:

  Will this voyage never end? The only excitement is when someone calls out “Portside” or “Starboard” and we get to see some huge fish swimming by the ship. At least there’s something out there other than the soggy people on this boring boat. When fair winds blow, everyone cheers our progress, but when the sails slacken and the ship is becalmed, we sit, sometimes for days at a time. That’s when the arguments begin. Every perceived slight threatens physical violence.

  The only pleasure I have is talking to Tommy. He has an odd way of talking, as though he’s trying to imitate a grand gentleman, when he greets me on the deck with a slight bow and says, “A fine day to yerself, Miss Charlotte.” I’m going to ask Pad if we can take him with us when we get off this boat. As for Pad, I’m beginning to wonder about the family ties he says he has in Jamaica. He feels I’m criticizing him when I ask questions about who it is we will meet once we land. But I can’t imagine walking onto the shore and asking for Willisams, just like that, which is I think what he has planned.

  THE SEA IS SPREAD around her, the
horizon as wide and featureless as it has remained for seven weeks. Tommy is scraping pots by the gunwale.

  “Are you well this morning, Tom?” He looks up. “Yes, madam. Well enough at least.” Later in the day she finds him feeding the livestock. Such a runt of a child, she thinks. Run ragged with chores from dawn to dusk.

  “Did you get your share of water to drink?” she asks. “Not ’til I’m done entirely.”

  Water is divvied up in portions so precise the passengers have begun to hoard what they can. But the boy seems to be every sailor’s scapegoat. His grimy face is flushed, but she for-bears to touch his brow for fear he is contagious. Even from six paces, she can sense fever.

  “I’ll fetch you some of mine,” she says and goes back to the bunks where Pad lies asleep. She fills a small cup from the vessel they keep beneath their bedding. On the way forward, she sees Captain Skinner and the bo’s’n emerge from a storeroom. She is surprised to encounter Skinner below decks. He is a man to delegate most tasks. The bo’s’n hurries off.

  “Mrs. Willisams.”

  Skinner is of moderate height and some forty years, impressively broad across the chest, his face permanently burnished by years of weather. His eyes are brown and intelligent, or penetrating at least, but a heavy chin and high-bridged nose give the impression of rather too much character.

  “Captain Skinner.”

  “How are you faring, Mrs. Willisams?”

  “Well enough, captain. We must all bear up as best we can.”

  “Yes. Well, you bear up well. Your husband”—and here he hesitates just a little too long for true civility—“seems … not as well.”

  “He may have a fever.”

  “Parsons is our man in charge of illnesses here.”

  “I’ve spoken to Mr. Parsons, captain, but he has nothing more to offer.”

  “If you should need to rest a little from your tasks, Mrs. Willisams, may I suggest you join me some evening at table. I find a change of setting a cheering thing.”