Daughter of Destiny

by Erica Brown

  ‘That’s not the sea. It’s the river, you stupid boy,’ said Horatia. ‘It’s just wider than usual.’

  ‘I’m hungry. Can we go now?’ her brother Nelson whined, tugging at her sleeve.

  Leah, Jasper’s youngest sister, was jumping in and out of a puddle. One of her older sisters, Ruth, pulled her out. ‘Come on, Leah. We have to get back to the house before Patience and the others eat all the cake.’

  Rachel, the last of the three sisters to accompany Jasper, Horatia and Nelson into the water meadow, began bounding back up over the grass.

  ‘Are you coming, Jasper?’ she shouted over her shoulder.

  ‘No,’ he shouted back. ‘I’m going to run away to sea.’

  ‘He’s always telling Father that,’ said Rachel in a weary tone.

  Horatia folded her arms and looked up at him. ‘You wouldn’t dare go away to sea. Besides, you’ve got a bad chest.’

  ‘I would,’ he replied. ‘I shall climb masts every day. I’m a good climber. Just watch me.’

  Nelson and Horatia strained their necks looking up, as Jasper climbed higher and higher.

  Without taking her eyes off him, Horatia shook her head. ‘You are so stupid, Jasper. I hope Boney the Bogeyman gets you! Come on, everyone! Back to the house.’

  Jasper took no notice. His gaze was fixed on the flooded river as it wound its way towards the Avon Gorge and the sea beyond. ‘I’m going to run away to sea,’ he said softly, as a stray log bumped into the trunk of the tree before the water tugged it away.

  By the time he got down, the others were gone and the light was dying. He ran back up the water meadow alone, jumping hillocks of coarse grass and reaching out for mayflies before they darted out of his way.

  As he re-entered the park, he looked round for the herd of red deer that had been there earlier but was disappointed. The girls had scared them away, he decided. They were probably giggling too loud and should know better.

  Light from Marstone Court fell out in great oblongs upon the terrace that ran along between the main entrance and the orangery.

  Cupping his hands, Jasper pressed his face against the windows of the ballroom where his red-faced Uncle Emmanuel was standing next to a painting, pointing at it with one hand, and waving a full glass in the other. His mouth was opening and shutting, but Jasper couldn’t hear what he was saying. The room was packed. It seemed as though the whole household, right down to the scullery maids and the stable lads, had been summoned.

  Everyone inside seemed to be listening, even the children, which seemed stupid to him as the feast was in the other room. Avoiding having to listen to his uncle seemed a good idea. He would creep in and sample the cakes and jellies before anyone else. He decided to sneak out through the stable yard and into the dining room through the passageway that the servants sometimes used when they were leaving for their day off.

  Running as swiftly and silently as possible, he darted across the swept cobbles. The door was heavy, but he managed to heave it open. It was dark inside and smelt of dampness, leather and cabbage. And it was so quiet and far blacker than he’d expected, and he’d never liked the dark. Heart beating fast, he tiptoed along the passageway. Halfway along he stopped. A muffled but regular thudding sounded off to his left. The shy glimmer of a candle or lantern ebbed from beneath a door. Curious to discover the source of the light, he opened it, looked down a flight of cold stone steps and froze to the spot.

  A man, a very ugly man, looked up at him. The body of a red deer lay on the steps. Its eyes were glassy and staring, and its tongue lolled from its mouth.

  Jasper remembered what Horatia had said.

  Boney the Bogeyman! Boney who’d fought the Russians, Boney who’d marched over half the world, fighting and killing men, women and children. He’d heard stories about him, read of his crimes in cheap penny sheets. Though they said he was dead now, the penny sheets thought otherwise. And here he was, having killed a deer! And Jasper was smaller than a deer…

  Before Boney could grab him, Jasper turned and ran. The ballroom where everyone was gathered perhaps? Or the kitchens? Someone must be around! He ran towards the dining room where he had meant to sample the birthday cake and all the other delights and tugged at the door that divided the old passageway from the new one that led into the main house. It didn’t budge.

  Jasper ran back towards Boney – who was coming at him with a knife. Terrified, he side-stepped and ran up the narrow staircase that led to the top of the house and the servants’ quarters.

  By the time he’d climbed to the top, he was breathless and his chest pained, enough to bend him double. He’d seen no one since leaving the stable yard except the man in the cellar. Although everyone had been summoned to the ballroom, he’d still expected to bump into a maid or a boot boy.

  His pursuer’s earthy sweatiness followed him like a rancid fog. He could hear his breathing, almost as loud as his own, which now came in short, sharp gasps.

  ‘Stay there, boy. I won’t ’urt you.’ The voice was accompanied by the tramp of heavy boots. The man was tiring, but so was Jasper.

  He ran as swiftly and silently as he could along the top corridor, trying each door he passed, but each of them was locked. Eventually he found one that wasn’t and pushed it open. It looked as if it hadn’t been entered in years. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling and dust covered the floor.

  He’d thought to find a cupboard to hide in, or perhaps even someone to save him from the man with the knife. Frantic with fear, his gaze travelled to the fireplace. It was bigger than most in this part of the house and hadn’t been used in a long while. Bits of dry mortar and soot littered the grate. The iron flap that was bolted across the flue when it wasn’t in use, hung down, unbolted at the back.

  Jasper bent under the mantelpiece and looked up. He could see no light at the top, but could make out gaps in the mortar where he could easily get a foothold. After closing the heavy metal flue plate behind him, he climbed up into the darkness. The pain in his chest increased as he breathed in the sooty, stale air. To make matters worse, smoke seeped from the main chimney through gaps in the brickwork. Breath rasping in his ever-tightening chest, he climbed higher into the narrower part of the flue and jammed himself there, safe from Boney, warm and steadily sinking into unconsciousness.

  * * *

  ‘The last time we saw him, he was sitting up a tree.’

  Horatia’s words echoed in Jeb’s mind as he stared at the swirling waters, his arm lying protectively around his wife’s back.

  ‘She told him Boney the Bogeyman would get him,’ whimpered Rachel, her eyes red from crying. ‘He’s frightened of Boney.’

  Horatia was too frightened to glare, but felt she had to justify herself. ‘He knows Boney’s dead. He knows we beat him at Waterloo. He must do! That’s why he wasn’t frightened. That’s why he stayed.’

  On seeing her words made no difference to what people were doing, she burst into tears.

  Emmanuel patted his brother’s back. ‘There’s nothing you can do here, Jeb. The tide’s high, the river’s swollen. He’s gone.’

  The men from the estate had spent two days wading through the floodwater, probing with sticks, diving into the deeper and more dangerous waters, but had found nothing. There was normally a forty-foot difference between high and low tide. Following the heavy rain, the tidal range had increased, the ebbing waters sucking trees, carts and animals from swollen eddies.

  Jeb felt colder than he ever had in his life. He squeezed his eyes shut, but the tears still came. He’d promised himself that, for Miriam’s sake, he would not cry. But he couldn’t help it. They cried together.

  At last he threw his head back and looked up at the sky. ‘Why did this happen, God?’

  It was Miriam who comforted him. ‘There must be a reason,’ she said to him. ‘God does everything for a reason.’

  They still had six daughters and each other. They were still a family.

  * * *

  Miriam never pres
ented Jeb with any more children. They both consoled themselves feeding the street urchins they found along Bristol’s waterfront and enrolling some in their training ship moored next to the Hole in the Wall tavern in the centre of the city.

  He wasn’t sure when the dreams started. There was a blue-eyed boy, thin and ragged and shiny with sugar. In his dream he took hold of his hand, turned away, then turned back and the boy was a man. He told Miriam about it.

  ‘Perhaps he’s a replacement for the one we lost,’ she said. ‘A gift from God.’

  Sugar from the Strong plantations was landed at Redcliffe Wharf and from there was taken by barge to one of the many sugar refineries in the city. Starving people were attracted by the sugar, though only the most desperate got past Reuben Trout, the night watchman.

  ‘There’s one out there,’ Trout whispered when Jeb arrived at the warehouse around nine one night.

  ‘Good work,’ Jeb whispered back.

  His breath turned to steam as he peered through the darkness, the light from his lantern flickering over piled casks and sweet-smelling hogsheads. Suddenly, he saw movement, a shadow still, then running.

  ‘Trout! Get him, man!’

  Trout lumbered after the shadow and pounced. ‘Got ya!’ Grabbing the boy by his filthy rags, he sneered as he spat through the gap in his teeth and slammed the boy against a bank of barrels hard enough to break bones. ‘Now, what you bin up to?’

  ‘Nothing!’ The boy’s tone was defiant.

  Jeb Strong held his lantern a little higher to see what manner of street urchin it was. The light picked out eyes sunk deeply into dark sockets and cheekbones that looked in danger of piercing the skin. Jeb gritted his teeth. Almost dead, he thought, and swallowed back the lump that rose like bile in his chest. There were plenty of skinny children in Bristol. Scrawny ragamuffins were almost as numerous as the rats that gnawed the barrels and sucked the molasses out through the thinned wood. Starvation had made most of them thieves. With sugar at more than £2 per hogshead on the open market, it paid to roll a barrel away when no one was looking, smash it in some dark corner and half fill a sack before running off. Rogues looking to turn a profit thronged the dockside taverns from the Hole in the Wall to the Shakespeare, from the Welsh Back to Redcliffe Wharf; there was always a market for contraband.

  Something shone around the boy’s mouth and Jeb knew it wasn’t frost. It was cold enough, but not late enough. By the time the frost formed, well before the clocks and bells of the city’s many churches struck twelve, he’d be off home, in the bosom of his family and sitting snugly before a roaring fire with a plate of muffins on his lap and a glass of toddy warmed with a red hot poker.

  Self-consciously, the boy licked his lips.

  Jeb Strong was not a hard man and prided himself on being fair. He kept an open mind as he asked, ‘What’s that around your mouth, boy?’

  Trout shook the boy as vigorously as he might shake the dust from a dirt-laden mat and the boy flopped like one, his thin white arms hanging like bare sticks from torn sleeves. ‘Go on. Answer the Reverend gentleman.’

  The boy’s eyes rolled in his head as though they, like him, would escape if they could. Lively eyes, thought Jeb, the only bit of life in his skin-stretched face.

  ‘Sugar,’ said the boy.

  ‘Bin stealing the sugar, you little toe-rag?’ shouted Trout, pulling the boy up by his ragged clothes so that his bare, dirty toes hardly touched the ground.

  ‘Easy on the boy, Trout.’ Jeb shot him a warning look. The man was a bully but the docks and dark alleys of the city were no place for those of a more temperate disposition and his knowledge of the grimmer side of the city mostly paid dividends. Reuben Trout was sometimes employed to keep rough seamen in order, and that certainly took some doing. But this was no sailor full of rum and stinking of the confines of a sea-going barque. Shaking the lad too roughly was likely to kill him or at least send his bones bursting through his skin. There was no flesh to stop it, that was for sure.

  ‘I licked the outside of the barrels,’ the boy said, his tone still defiant despite the fact that Trout was almost strangling him. ‘See? Got the splinters to prove it.’ He poked out his tongue. Jeb winced. It was speckled with blood.

  Trout cuffed his ear. ‘Less of your cheek, lad.’

  ‘Whoa!’ Jeb raised a warning hand. He had half a mind to slap it against Trout’s dumb, ugly head. ‘The lad’s telling the truth.’ He raised the lantern so that its meagre glow picked out the shining traces of raw muscavado that had crystallized on the outside of the stout hogshead barrels.

  He traced the light back on the boy’s pathetically thin face and thought of his own six daughters all safely tucked up in bed at home. His heart lurched in his chest as the light from the lantern fell on the boy’s face. The sugar made it shine, just like the boy in his dreams.

  ‘Where do you live, son?’

  The boy shrugged and cocked his head. ‘Wherever.’

  ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Tom.’

  ‘Tom what?’

  There was a blank look on the boy’s face.

  Jeb tried again. ‘What was your father’s name?’

  The boy shrugged again.

  Jeb sighed. ‘Have you got a mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where does she live?’

  The boy wiped his nose on what was left of his sleeve. ‘Anywhere.’

  ‘She must live somewhere. Where does she sleep?’

  ‘In doorways.’

  ‘What about food? What does she live on?’

  ‘Gin.’

  Jeb sighed. He’d heard it all before. ‘How does she get the money for that?’

  The boy paused as if afraid or unwilling to tell. At last he shivered, rubbed at his freezing arms and glared defiantly, as though his intention was to spit in Jeb’s face or gob on his shiny black shoes.

  ‘Men give it to her after she bin with them in the dark for a bit.’ He said it almost accusingly and not without a trace of bitterness.

  Jeb sighed and nodded at Reuben Trout. ‘Let’s give this lad a bit of leg up in life, shall we, Trout?’

  The night watchman’s dark, bushy eyebrows almost obliterated his eyes as he frowned. ‘If that’s what you want, squire, though if you ask me, he’d be best chucked in the river. I could do it if you wanted me to.’

  ‘No frightening the lad, Trout,’ said Jeb Strong in a calm and careful voice. After placing the lamp on a handy capstan, he took his arms out of his coat, pulled the sleeves into order, and patted the black wool almost lovingly before draping it over the boy’s shoulders. ‘Come along, lad. Let’s see what we can do for you. Do you like ships?’

  Defiance was replaced by a wariness borne of both curiosity and fear. The boy, Tom, huddled into the warm coat and looked up at the one and only benefactor ever to have entered his life. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ever thought about going away to sea, Tom?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘Right. Then it’s off to the Merchant Seamen’s Apprenticeship School. Ever heard of it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s fine. They haven’t heard of you either. It’s time you both met.’

  * * *

  Tom was apprehensive and his feet ached to run, but the man called Trout had a firm grip on his collar. The other man, obviously a gentleman and some kind of clergyman judging by his clothes, held the lantern as they traversed the dark lanes around the city docks where there were no decent streetlights and the air was filled with the reek of the river and the dampness of unused cellars.

  The cobbles were icy cold and slippery underfoot. The men’s shoes slid occasionally, but Tom and his bare feet were hardened to it, his toes curling over the uneven surface with careless efficiency. Once the temperature had dropped to the point where the frost formed dazzling patterns on windows, he wouldn’t feel them at all.

  Tom was used to discomfort, to being hungry and cold. He was used to being neglected and cursed. Kindnes
s was therefore alien and although he instinctively felt this man was genuine, he’d heard nasty stories from other boys with no one to look after them and no one to care. He had to be sure.

  ‘Sir? Where we going?’

  The man was stout, but his stride was long. He still held the lantern, the flickering flame lighting their way.

  ‘To my house, Tom, the house of Jebediah Strong, for that is who I am.’

  Tom couldn’t remember the last time he’d had a roof of any kind over his head, but he was wary. The street stories about the bad habits of wealthy men kept popping into his mind. Wriggling free was not an option; Trout held him too tightly.

  They left the ships and the river behind them. The temperature rose a little and the winter wind swung round to the north. Snow began to fall. By the time they came to a brick-built house, flakes the size of sparrow’s wings beat on their backs as Jeb Strong fumbled the key into the lock. Tom looked up in amazement at the imposing building. A whole street full of people could live in a house like this. Surely it couldn’t be the home of just one man? It was almost like a castle, though castles didn’t have a canopy above the door like this house – at least he didn’t think so. It was shaped like a seashell, and captured Tom’s imagination.

  Jeb Strong pushed him gently but firmly into the house, then turned to the man called Trout and thrust a coin into his hand.

  ‘For your trouble, Trout. I’ll bid you goodnight.’

  The door closed on the bitter cold darkness, and Tom found himself in a world he had only seen through windows when the night was dark and candles and burning coals glowed from within. Just looking through those windows had made him feel warmer, which was more than the meagre rags that clothed his body could do.

  As Jeb Strong shook the snow from his hat, Tom took in his surroundings. Black and white floor tiles made him think of playing hopscotch. A staircase wound upwards from a lion’s head newel post to a galleried landing where the light from a candelabrum shone on mahogany doors.