“Your seed has been damaged,” his doctor told him.
“Children?” he had asked, his mouth dry.
“Possible, but not likely. You have deficiencies in your nature.”
Above everything Abigail wished she had a child. Now she watched the servant’s clumsy movements, the thickening in her body, and a plan was hatched. With all her might she called, “Emily! Come back!”
Emily turned, relieved at the change in her mistress, the sound of desperation in her voice. She looked down at her belly. “For you,” she said, and started to walk back.
Late one night Emily was summoned from her bed by Abigail and told to follow her into the drawing room out of the hearing of the other servants. She closed the doors. “We know your trouble, girl,” the mistress told her. “Is there any chance you’ll marry the father?”
Emily shook her bowed head.
The mistress smiled. “We’ll keep the child as ours. It will make me happy.”
“You have a big house and a handsome husband. Don’t that make you happy?” she asked.
Abigail’s eyes grew moist, her voice quavering. “I’d pay anything for that squirt of joy that allows people to laugh with ease. Sometimes I feel a quiver inside as if I’m foundering and there’s nothing to hold me together.”
“No one could tell by lookin’ at you.”
Abigail’s voice dropped to a whisper. “And I don’t want you to tell. This is my burden. I wouldn’t wish to bring sadness to my husband.”
“I thought you had the world,” Emily said.
“I have everything a woman needs. My illness is part of me. It can’t be cut out or lessened with time. A child will help. I know it will.”
“As long as this roof stays over me head,” Emily answered quickly. She’d be getting the best of care for her baby and seeing the child grow up.
“No doubt about that,” the mistress said. “You’ll stay.”
Adam opened the door and Abigail grabbed her husband’s hand. She pulled him inside and told him that Emily had agreed to their plan.
His face relaxed as if he had let go of a burden he’d been carrying. “It’s settled, then.” He didn’t look at Emily.
Emily had heard the other servants talking, saying the master had been damaged in the lower field and had no chance of producing a crop. He was letting his wife have something she wanted and he couldn’t give her. She knew different.
The mistress turned to Emily. “You can nurse the baby and meet the child’s needs but he’ll be mine and we’ll have no more talk.”
Emily nodded, unable to speak. She was having a baby by chance; it was her child’s destiny to be raised in a fine house with the baby’s very own father.
It was a comfort to be caught in the benevolent eye of her mistress who saw to it that Emily was given light duties and rested often. She even allowed her a key to the locked buffet so she could help herself to any food she might crave. That all changed one night when a storm seemed to brew in Emily’s belly. It caught her up in a whirlwind as she lay in bed unable to call out. She felt ripped from stem to stern as blood and her child burst out into the bed, a red blob slipping after the tiny, still creature. She crawled down the stairs leaving the baby behind, crying as she went, a bloody trail following her. The mistress found the baby dead and took it away. “Where?” she had asked but the mistress told her it didn’t matter where the child’s body was buried. God had taken the child’s soul to heaven where it would have a new body.
Soon Emily was back to heavy duties, her mind bursting with sorrow for the baby she would never hold.
Every year Simon Swartz showed up at the merchant’s door, the same peddler who made his rounds along the Southern Shore. This time he came with his bag holding a surprise, the sound Emily wished she could have heard on the night of her child’s stillbirth.
Emily was on her way to her attic bed when she heard the doorbell ring again and again, an urgent clapping, and then footsteps. She stepped back on the stairs and listened. She could hear only a murmur of voices so she made a stealthy climb down each flight of stairs from the servants’ side to the landing. The door to the kitchen was ajar and she got close enough to recognize the peddler she had seen in Foxtrap. “I’ve come with somethin’ your mistress would want if she saw it.”
“You won’t be waking the mistress this time of night,” Emily heard the cook say.
“But you will,” the usually mild peddler said. “Do it quick if you don’t want to be at the end of her tongue and a whip besides.”
The peddler seemed so sure of himself that the cook set up over the stairs with a hurried step.
The peddler’s face lifted as he heard the heavy creak of Merchant Dixon’s feet on the second landing. He stood at the top of the stairs pulling off his nightcap and calling down, “There better be a right good reason for this disturbance.”
“There is, sir, and you’ll be glad for it.”
“Aye, then, what is it?”
“Hasten down, sir. I’ve brought a bundle, a child who doesn’t need the breast, maybe a little pap.”
Abigail came out of her bedroom and stood on the landing. When she saw the baby she rushed down.
The peddler looked at her with a grin. “I’ve brought you a child, ma’am. There’s been a chance event and the mother is gone beyond help.”
He told Abigail how he had been walking back to his lodging along a path on the outside of a rock wall when he heard a weak cry. He dismissed it at first as the sound a cat might make. But then he stopped to investigate. He followed the cry growing fainter and came upon the sad scene, moonlight showing the figures of a woman and a child. He’d been to the house before and knew that Laura Rideout, with Lily, her daughter, was staying with her grandmother while she waited for the child’s father to come home from his sealing voyage on the Southern Cross. He had bent toward the mother feeling for her pulse. She lay dead, the child huddled beside her shivering uncontrollably. He lifted the coat from the mother and wrapped the baby in it. Then he sheltered her with his greatcoat. He didn’t go home that night. Instead he huddled in a shed with the child trying to soothe her with a lullaby:
“Cosey down, little one,
Sleep until the night is done.”
Her body shuddered then settled into sleep while he stayed awake wondering what to do with a treasure more valuable than anything else he had to peddle.
The peddler smiled at Abigail. “I thought of you and Mr. Dixon wanting a child and I knew what I had to do.”
The little girl opened her eyes and sobbed, “Ma-ma! Maaaaa!”
Abigail took in the child’s tiny face, the shiny, golden ringlets. “Poor baby,” she said softly holding out her arms. The little girl began to cry more earnestly.
“I’m going to take care of you until your mammy comes,” she said softly.
The child leaned away from her and she hurried to the pantry. She came back holding out a bright red apple. The little girl took it and put it to her lips.
“I’ll peel it for you,” the cook offered.
Abigail shook her head. “No, no. Leave it.” She watched as the child’s tiny teeth bit into the fruit. She smiled when the child’s shivering subsided. “You’ll be warm here,” she said.
The cook rushed to stir the fire. It leaped high in the fireplace and Abigail picked up the little girl, careful to face the fire so she could watch the flames and forget everything else.
The peddler went away, his guilt assuaged by the look on Abigail’s face. In time, he told himself, baubles and toys would take the little girl’s attention; her mother’s face would become vague—a dream she had long ago. She would cry less and less for her mother, finally giving Abigail what she wanted.
When Emily saw the child her heart fluttered. She pictured how her own child would hav
e looked. She would make sure this child would not take the brunt of the mistress’s low moods.
She crept back up the stairs feeling her loss all over again.
31
“Be yarry and get your gams in gear!” Captain Clarke’s voice boomed out firing instructions rapidly. “The swiles won’t lie waitin’ for yers. Over aboard you go with your gaff and gear. Jump from the rope leaning forward so you’ll fall flat on the pan. A misstep could put you under water. Ice doesn’t make for a comforting grip. Don’t get close to the seals unarmed.”
The captain made sure that each man had a gaff shod with iron, a bat, a coiled tow rope slung over his shoulder like a sash, and a sculping knife at his waist. Every man carried his knapsack holding food and supplies. A canteen of water was also belted at the waist.
Jamie had been warned that when the sun shimmers as if it is dipped in a bowl of crystal and there are mare’s tails in the sky bad weather is on its way. There were no mare’s tails today. He stared at the endless field of floating ice, its undersides reflecting the blue sea. He glanced beyond it to the clouds of ice in the distance and pinnacles of it reaching into the air, golden pillars under sunlight in the pure blue sky. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “This must be the crystal sea come down from heaven’s celestial city the reverend preaches about. A heavenly city not made with hands.”
A sealer behind him growled and gave him a push. “Over you go, greenhorn. Move. The day won’t last. The captain’ll call yer down for being a hangback.”
“Yeah,” said another sealer. “You could end up in the bowels of the ship stoking the fires.”
“And miss this view.” Jamie shook his head. “Never!” He hurried down following a skein of sealers. Shivers raced along his spine as he stepped on an ice pan. He was soon sweating trying to hold his balance on the cakes that danced on the churning sea. Far from land he felt as if he were floating in the sky.
Soon the dazzling white seascape was stained with bloody footprints and the bloody shadows of seals. A bed of whitecoats mewling on the ice was easily killed with a light blow from a gaff. Older harp seals, dark on the back and light on the belly, were killed with a bat or shot by gunners. The blue-grey splotched hood seal was scarce and prized. The captain warned the sealers to be careful of hoods. If they killed the mother and pup the male hood might kill them. Jamie was elated to have killed several male hoods.
Thomas could skin a seal in thirteen seconds without damaging the skin. It took most sealers a minute.
“I’ll learn to be that fast,” Alfred bragged, his young face freckled and burnished from ice glare.
“We’ll see,” said Noah. He raised an eyebrow. “Don’t make vows hard to keep.”
Seal skins were laced together three at a time and towed across the ice to the steamer or, if the men were far from the ship, to a collection point. By the end of each day sealers came off the ice with their faces and hands greasy and bloodied. Skin chafed or cut was treated with carron oil and wrapped in gauze.
There was much to weary a sealer as the days went by. Loose ice was easy to fall through. A sealer needed to keep his gaff handy to pull himself out. By the end of the day there were strained muscles, cold tremors, diarrhea, and dizziness from fluxing ice pans.
Firemen had it no easier. They hauled coal out of the pounds day and night carrying it in baskets to the stokehold and hauling ashes up on deck. Mittens blackened by coal dust were cleaned by rubbing them on the ice leaving marks that looked like shadows of black birds.
Each sealer received a ration of rum at eight o’clock to relax sore backs and shoulders from hauling pelts, weighing thirty to fifty pounds, some carried as far as a mile to the vessel. The sealers spent long hours trimming carcasses, stowing pelts, and chopping ice to cover the harvest once it was stored in the hold of the ship. They stowed and iced seal sculps until midnight and fell into their berths exhausted.
Jamie drifted into sleep murmuring, “If you could only see me, now, Maggie, you wouldn’t come anighst me.”
The men had little water for washing. It was needed for cooking and drinking. A galley was fixed to the deck just aft of the forecastle scuttle and near the scuttlebutt—a drinking fount on the ship. The kitchen had a forty-gallon puncheon filled with rocks used for wood fires to cook grub and boil tea on each watch for the crew and captain. The sealers mostly lived on molasses, porridge, hard bread, and bare-legged tea—raw without sugar and cream. Some ate salted fatback. On Friday, after a long week’s work, the sealers were given salt fish to boil or roast.
Captain Clarke had warned the sealers at the start of the voyage, “If there’s a stowaway among yers the scoundrel had better get off the ship now. If we find him he’ll go head over heels over the side. We’ll have no jinkers.”
When Eddie was discovered on board the ship the captain was beside himself, first berating the boy as a jinker and then taking pity on his looks. Beside his scars he had the bearings of an undernourished youngster. The captain put him to work as an unpaid helper for the men on board. Eddie was so busy inside the barque he hardly looked outside.
One evening the sealers came in out of the weather with faces like whitecoats. The snow had found every crease. “We’d’ve been done fer if we’d stayed longer,” one sealer muttered.
The sealers spent time in surly weather playing cards and checkers in their bunks with boots on in case they were called out. At night tales of ghosts were told and music played. The men danced to an accordion or mouth organ. A warning came from the captain: “You can fiddle and tap your toes but don’t let a whistle out of yers.”
Now and then a sealer glanced at Jamie, who was often seen sitting by candlelight sketching. “Sketching and writing letters to his coosie, I s’pose he is,” one sealer teased.
Jamie slipped his rolled paper and pencil into his bottle. He blew his breath into the container and sealed it. For you, Maggie, my breath off the icefields.
The deck, which had gleamed white with ice by the time the vessel had reached the icefields, was now covered with bloody seal pelts. Beyond the ship pans of ice floated like porcelain plates holding dark seal flesh, morsels for wild birds and fish.
As the last of the weary men climbed aboard the ship the sun carried dusty reflections.
“A sun hound—a bad sign!” Jamie exclaimed. He lifted his tongue to barbs of ice, his body moving awkwardly in clothes caked in hardened seal blood and fat crackling in the cold air.
Sealers cheered at Captain Clarke’s news that enough of the prized fur had been winched aboard the ship and stowed to meet the ship’s quota. The sealers were going home and the Southern Cross was expected to be the first ship to arrive in port. The captain’s announcement rang in Jamie’s ears as the men made a feast of seal meat. He was going home to sink into a tub of warm, soapy water. He was going home to keep his promise to his sweetheart. He’d have a little money in his pocket. Unlike some of the sealers who had paid three times the cost of their supplies on credit from the steamer owners he had brought most of his provisions. He lay down among the other men on seal pelts. He didn’t need drenches of liquor or a charm to dwall off.
Sleep was deep and waters calm when the barque left the icefields. Soon the ship’s boards began to creak and heave in seas gone wild.
* * * * *
32
The first morning after Jamie left for the icefields Maggie woke with a start. Night had fled, taking whatever strange dreams she’d had, leaving her unsettled. It lasted only a moment and then the day opened to what was real: a safe place for her to daydream about her life with Jamie. She ran her fingers through her hair feeling comfort in its long tresses, soft and silky from the shampoo Jamie had brought her from St. John’s. She slipped out of bed and pulled the corked stopper from a bottle of perfume. Last year Simon Swartz had agreed to take two pairs of her aunt’s knitted cuffs in exchange. She dabbed the swe
et scent on her wrists and neck and turned to look toward the shelf, at the white satin material that her aunt had bought from the peddler for her wedding undergarments. She had started to knit her wedding dress from worsted white wool. Elizabeth, who was looking forward to having Maggie as a sister-in-law, had promised to help make a grand stitch for the Victorian collar trimmed with something blue, a remnant from the blue cord Elizabeth had used for the collar of her wedding gown. Something old was a piece of purple heather now brown after many years lying alongside a shamrock between the pages of her mother’s Bible. Jamie’s tie clip would be something borrowed. She let out a lingering sigh thinking of Jamie and their wedding night. She gathered the satin against her soft breasts and felt her heart race. Her body longed for Jamie, ached for him. She no longer wondered how a couple got around to coming together. Now she knew that if there was love there was a passion that pulled a man and woman tight to each other without shame and regret.
She hurried downstairs and swept her young cousins Bea and Melanie around by their arms until they complained of giddiness. She fell back to the table bench breathless. All she had ever wanted in life was for someone to love her forever. Jamie was going to do that.
She shaved lye soap into a tub of hot water, washed her petticoats, and hung them out on the line, her glance straying as if she could see the lonely stretch of sea that had taken Jamie—as if to see the ship that would bring him back. Jamie wouldn’t be fit when he got home. She blushed to think of him lowering his naked body into a puncheon of soaped water in his father’s shed. “Sinful thoughts!” Aunt Liddie would say as if she’d never had such thoughts about men.
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