by Pam Lewis
There! Her fingers felt an opening. A hall led down a narrow space, pitch dark. He fingers fluttered in terror everywhere. If they found her in here, she was lost. A rung? She felt with both hands. Yes. And another above it. A ladder barely wide enough for her, but she climbed and climbed. At the top was an open door only a few feet high, though large enough to squeeze through, and that gave onto cold storage. Sides of meat hung from hooks. A man appeared, wearing a bloodied apron. He looked her over. She was petrified and aware of how she looked, her red dress in this ghastly room. She found her voice. “The ship’s doctor?” she said. “Dr. Tredegar.” Why not ask for Sander? she wondered once her words were spoken.
“Sí.” He beckoned her inside. She only wanted to be told where to go, but she knew she wouldn’t have understood him even if he’d told her. She gathered her skirts to keep from soiling them as she passed among the sides of meat. Two men at butchering tables farther into the room watched without expression.
The butcher moved heavily on, the strings of his apron swaying, through a door to the kitchen, where more men worked with knives cutting vegetables at long fixed tables. In the dining room, young boys were setting tables. The butcher opened a door for her.
“Dankje,” she said, passing through the door before remembering to say gracias, but the butcher was gone.
She leaned against the wall, still scared but becoming quite pleased with herself. She’d done something. She’d had an adventure. She wished she could tell Fenna about it.
She took her bearings. She was in a fancy corridor like the one she and Sander were on. The numbers on the doors said five, then seven. Cassian, she knew, was nine, so she’d found him after all. She listened at his door. Low voices and muted laughter came from inside. She would love to laugh right now. She wanted to tell him about her adventure. She rapped on the door. The voices inside were silenced. “Cassian?” she called. “It’s me, Minke.”
At first no answer. Then the door opened. Cassian was in a white shirt open at the neck. He clapped his hands in delight and ushered her in. The same two waiters who had served breakfast that morning languished inside, one on the bed and the other, his eyes half open, in a hammock slung in one corner. Ill, she thought. They made no effort to rise. She must have been mistaken about the laughter; these men appeared too weak to laugh.
Cassian said something in Spanish. She recognized her name among the words. The one in the hammock rose and joined the other on the bed, moving in a dreamlike way. Cassian gestured to the hammock, and she sat carefully on its woven edge, trying to touch the floor with her toes for balance.
One of the boys said something in Spanish. Cassian translated, “He says red becomes you.”
“They are ill?” She was still trying to get purchase in the hammock.
“Tired. I let them rest here.” He sat on the edge of the bed and smiled. “What brings you to me, my dear?”
“I got lost.” The farther forward she shifted her weight, the more it felt like the whole hammock would swing up behind and dump her. “In steerage.”
“Whatever were you doing down there?”
“Looking for you at first,” she said.
“Why would you be looking down there for me?”
“I wasn’t looking for you there. I mean, I was looking for you when I got lost, and I found this little staircase.”
“It’s nothing but men between decks on this voyage.”
“Don’t tell Sander,” she said.
Cassian said nothing.
She had to stand or she would definitely fall off the hammock, and once she stood, she really had no choice but to leave. “Will I see you at dinner?” she asked.
“Of course.” Cassian made no effort to keep her. He walked her to the door and pointed down the corridor to the right. “It’s simple back to your cabin. Keep going down this corridor, through the glass door, and there you are.”
5
WHEN SHE REACHED the cabin, she found Sander fast asleep. He lay across the bed on his back, arms and legs loose as if he’d hit the bed fast asleep, fully clothed. She watched him sleep for several long moments—the rise of his great barrel chest and the flubbing release when he exhaled. One hand twitched where it lay, as if grasping for something in his dream.
She moved closer, expecting her presence or the sound of the door closing behind her to awaken him, but he was dead to the world. He’d been working since the day before, thirty hours straight. No wonder.
Staring at him felt wrong, but she couldn’t call it spying because there wasn’t anything to do other than wake him or leave, and where would she go? He was her husband, and it was an opportunity to take him in, to move around the bed and look at him from different angles. His leg alone, the one closest, was a fascination. The trouser leg was pulled up over his black elastic garter, and a smooth white inch of skin showed. She leaned over him, the better to see his face and study his scar, almost invisible, a thin pink line against the white of his cheek. She touched his silky hair and admired his smooth auburn eyebrows. His eyes were not tightly shut, but open the tiniest of slits to expose a moist glint. She studied his full lips carefully. They were parted a little, and there was a small vertical pucker at the center of the lower.
His black coat lay open, its forest-green lining exposed. His wrinkled white shirt had a row of mother-of-pearl buttons running the length of his barrel chest, over his sunken abdomen, and disappearing under the loose band of his trousers.
The trousers. A man’s trousers. She’d never seen such nice ones. Tan, and made of twill, she would say, but couldn’t be certain without touching the fabric. They had a button fly, angled to the right, no doubt having been pulled sideways when he lay down—or fell down on the bed, as it appeared. To the left, the fabric was pulled smooth except for a small but definite rise, as if there were a large thumb under the material.
Lightly, she ran her index finger across the cloth to feel the tiny ridges. Yes, it was definitely twill. Then, her hand still poised over him, she pressed the thumb shape. It gave slightly.
She pulled her hand away. Had she wakened him? No. There was no change; his breathing continued its sonorous in and out, and his eyes were shut. Well, then. Feeling like a naughty schoolgirl, she touched it again and this time lingered, pressing gently, and was sure, yes, absolutely sure that it moved. It grew almost imperceptibly at first, then more.
The next thing happened so quickly that she didn’t have time for a breath. Sander pulled her onto his chest and rolled on top of her, pressing her into the bed, cutting off her air so she could barely breathe. He pushed her legs apart with one knee and rocked against her hard, his phallus a piece of steel against her pelvic bone.
“Minke, Minke.” He panted her name like a groan.
She had no air. He was too big. Too heavy. She fought to get out from under him.
“You little devil in disguise,” he groaned into her ear.
“Let me go,” she said.
He laughed, a great bear of a roar.
“I can’t breathe,” she said.
He raised himself, rolling partly off her while pulling at her dress with his free hand and tearing down her underthings. She heard the metal clank of his belt buckle on the floor, and in the next moment he lay back on her, rocking, bruising her with himself, a searing pain as he entered, the sweat rolling from his face onto hers until at last he seemed to spasm from head to foot and rolled onto his back panting, red in the face. But not dead, she remembered Mama had said. He got to his feet and went behind the privacy curtain around the toilet.
She lay still on the bed, her heart beating rapidly, tears welling painfully behind her eyes. This could not be what Mama had meant. She could hear him washing, humming a little.
“Are you hungry?” he called out to her.
Hungry? That was all he had to say?
He was rummaging around back there and came out from behind the curtain carrying the pink dress over one arm. “I think this one for dinner,” he
said, but his smile vanished as soon as he saw her. “What is it, Minke? What’s the matter?”
“You don’t know?”
“Don’t pout like that. You can’t be a woman and become a child whenever it suits you.”
He was right. She undid the buttons down the right side of her dress and down the cuffs of her sleeves, each one slowly, and stepped out of it. She let him slip the new dress over her head.
“More slowly the next time, then, I promise.” He fastened the buttons up the back. “You’ll see.”
CAPTAIN ROEMER WAS a gaunt, rigid man, with one bad eye and a gray beard trimmed to a distractingly perfect triangle. He introduced his guests; they would be dinner companions for the duration of the voyage, and he was certain, he said, that they would find one another good company. Minke had the honored seat (or so Sander explained later) to Captain Roemer’s right at the large round table. To her right was Father Bahlow, an old priest from Antwerp. Then a fat, talkative woman named Tessa Dietz, her husband, Frederik, Dr. Tredegar, Sander, and finally, the Dietzes’ daughter, Astrid, who sat to Captain Roemer’s left. Minke judged Astrid to be about her own age.
“A thorn between two roses,” Captain Roemer said with a slight bow to Astrid and then to Minke.
“You’re a dog,” Meneer Dietz said with a rollicking laugh.
Captain Roemer turned to Minke. “Are you enjoying your trip so far, my dear?”
“Oh yes,” she said automatically. Sander had explained that it was customary for each man to devote his attention to the woman to his right. It was called protocol.
“We’re expecting good weather through the channel,” Captain Roemer said. “After that, nobody knows. It can be rough at this time of year.”
Astrid was smiling at something Sander had said to her. She had a twinkle in her eye, and Minke liked her but was envious that Sander had made her smile. She wished the captain would say something to make her smile.
A bowl of clear soup was set before her. She was hungry—starving, in fact—but she knew to wait for the head of the table to eat before she began. The others were served, but no one lifted a spoon. Finally, Captain Roemer leaned over and said, “It’s customary for the lady to my right to take the first spoonful.”
Well, they might have told her. She felt humiliated, especially when, after lifting her spoon and carefully sipping the delicious, salty broth, the others, clearly hungry, all began to eat heartily, and the level of talk rose. Captain Roemer was going on about what was in store on the voyage. The white cliffs of Dover somewhere, and the sky, which he referred to as “God’s canvas.”
A platter of meats and vegetables careened over her left shoulder, held by one of the waiters she’d seen in Cassian’s cabin. “Oh!” she said. “Hello again.”
“Señora,” the waiter said.
She reached up to take the platter from him. She thought he was offering it, but the waiter pulled the platter back.
“He’ll hold it for you. Just take what you want, my dear,” Captain Roemer said. She was mortified again. How would she ever learn all the rules of these fine people? She took a piece of the meat.
“What is your name?” she asked the waiter.
“Marcelo,” he said.
“I’m Minke.”
Tessa Dietz leaned over toward Minke and stage-whispered, “Don’t ask their names, dear. And certainly don’t introduce yourself so familiarly. Isn’t that right, Meneer DeVries?”
Sander gave Minke an indulgent smile. “My wife does as she pleases.”
“We must bring our European ways to South America,” Tessa Dietz snapped. “One is always formal with the servants.”
“I met him already through Dr. Tredegar, but I didn’t know his name. He seems very nice.”
Mevrouw Dietz gave her a sour look and called across the table to Astrid to eat her soup to keep her strength up, and she didn’t want to have to say it again. Astrid directed a quick conspiratorial roll of the eyes at Minke before spooning up the soup as instructed. Minke knew for sure she would like Astrid.
“And what is your purpose in traveling to Comodoro?” Father Bahlow asked Minke. He had small gray teeth. He was the oldest of the men at the table. She turned back to the captain, not wanting to abandon him, but he was in conversation with Astrid, Sander with Cassian, and so on. You apparently began dinner by talking to the man on your left but then gave way to the man on your right. Something else Sander had left out.
She considered Father Bahlow’s question. She wasn’t sure, but it wouldn’t do to appear stupid. Sander had said only that he had goods to sell, and since she’d seen those sumptuous things in the storeroom on the ground level of the house, she said, “My husband is to open an elegant store. And you, Father?”
He sighed. “I’m to build a church.”
“Good luck to you with that,” Meneer Dietz said, having overheard and, now that the discussion had shifted, having only his wife to talk to. He laughed raucously, something Minke would become only too familiar with over the course of the voyage; he expelled this laugh after almost every statement. “It’s oil for me,” he said to the whole table. “Rigs are in cargo. The latest. Only the very best, eh?”
“All alone?” Minke asked Father Bahlow, determined to keep up her part of the conversational bargain. “You’ll build your church alone?”
“Quite.”
“I saw some nuns boarding. Perhaps you know them?”
“They prefer to take meals in their cabin.”
He said no more. He had the habit of crossing himself, then taking a drink of wine before each bite, with the result that he was drunk after dinner.
Conversation was impossible after that because Dietz directed his loud voice at Sander and dominated the table with his talk of oil. He said he wished the Frisia were a rocket that could get them to Comodoro before anyone else got there to claim it. He had all his rigs in the hold. They’d cost him a fortune. “Only the very best,” he said again, with a wink at Minke. From the way he talked, it sounded as though the town might look like Enkhuizen except that crammed between the houses would be oil wells twice the height of any house. That picture changed when Dietz went on about how long he’d heard it took for things to get from one well to another. Hours, by horse-drawn pallets, so that quashed the notion of everything fitting tightly together, like at home. He said in places where the cliffs were eroded, the oil gushed into the sea. There weren’t enough workers there yet to tame and divert all the oil, barrel it, and ship it. He was sweating just talking about it, wiping his brow with his napkin.
“What about the beautiful estates, the estancias?”
He gave her a blank look and opened his hands in a gesture that said What about them? She studied Astrid, who was moving the food about with her fork while her father talked. Astrid, she decided, would look better in one of Minke’s new dresses. She shouldn’t wear gray; it made her face look ashen. Astrid must have felt Minke’s stare, as she looked up with an expression that said Isn’t this awful?
After dinner, Sander guided Minke among the other tables—there were five or six of them, each seating four men. He seemed to know some of the men, but mostly he handed out cards with his name on them. The men were rougher than those she had dined with, their clothing less fine, and their manners clumsy, although they rose and stayed standing when she was introduced. Throughout, Sander held tightly to her waist. When they left the dining room, he whispered in her ear, “Did you see how envious they are?”
The corridor stretched forever before them, overly lit and overly quiet. He went on, “I saw Dietz looking at you. And you were brilliant to ask the waiter his name.”
“I only wanted to know. I met him in Cassian’s cabin.” Which reminded her. “Cassian was very quiet at dinner.”
“And the captain. That priest, even! They were smitten with you.” Sander seemed so pleased with himself.
“Cassian was very quiet. Is he well?”
“He has moods.”
“A
strid seems nice,” she said.
“Dietz is a wealthy man. It’s in your best interest to befriend them.”
“Mevrouw Dietz didn’t find me so charming,” she said.
He pulled her to him and stopped walking. “Mevrouw Dietz is a cow,” he whispered into her ear, and she laughed because it tickled and because she agreed. “It’s Meneer who matters.”
“But Mevrouw will buy from us.”
“Repair the damage, then, if you want. I know you can.”
The cabin was hazy with light entering from the portholes. She reached behind her to undo the sash to her dress. “Wait, look at yourself.” He guided her to the mirror. “Little Minke van Aisma from Few Houses,” he said, giving the silly translation of Enkhuizen.
She hardly recognized her dim reflection in the glass in her ankle-length dress, cut low in front to show off the white skin of her chest and shoulders and narrow waist, the seed pearls catching the twilight, her halo of white-blond hair. He kissed her neck so gently, just the lightest, most delicious of air kisses, so unexpectedly sensual. She leaned toward him. He ran his fingertips along her shoulder to her throat, barely skimming the surface of her skin, so she ached for more of his lovely, sustaining touch. He let her hair loose, another incredibly delicious feeling, and in the darkening room, he helped her out of her dress.
SANDER MADE LOVE to her again very early the next morning, before the sun had filled their cabin, and as sweetly and gently as he had the night before. Still flushed and aroused, Minke felt as if she was floating as they made their way to the dining room for breakfast.
The table was spread with dishes of cheese and sliced meats, fruit, various breads and rolls, and boiled eggs still in their brown shells. Two new waiters hovered with pots of coffee and tea. Father Bahlow and Meneer Dietz were the only ones at the table. Minke said good morning, and Father Bahlow raised a large snifter of brandy to her. “For the digestion,” he explained.