by Oak, B. B.
“If only you had gotten away from him forever,” Adam said bleakly. “If only we’d left Plumford and gone where Pelletier could never find you.”
“Our list of ‘if onlys’ is indeed a long one,” I said in just as forlorn a tone. “If only your grandmother had told us the truth, if only I hadn’t married Pelletier, if only I hadn’t come back and—”
“I thank God you came back, Julia!”
“But is it not ironic,” I said, “that I fled Plumford to prevent you from ruining your life by marrying me, and now that I’ve returned I have ruined your life because you cannot marry me?”
“You have ruined nothing, for I have no life without you,” Adam replied, taking me into his arms. “We are soul mates, Julia. Whatever else happens to us in this life, that will always remain true. And neither of us must utter the useless phrase if only again. Promise?”
I promised him with a kiss. The world fell away from us for a moment, and we existed within ourselves alone. But even soul mates have to eat, so I forced myself to withdraw from the comfort of Adam’s arms and go off to Daggett’s Market.
The usual loiterers were there, smoking their pipes and listening to Mr. Daggett read aloud from the Boston newspaper that is delivered by the mail coach three times a week. They paid me no mind whatsoever, so enthralled were they with the account of a thief who had managed to scale the side of the Tremont Hotel to its uppermost fourth floor and enter, through an unlocked window, the suite of a leading lady of the Boston stage and abscond with her jewelry. The steeplejack climbing skills of the thief suggested that he was none other than the infamous burglar known as Jack Steeple in New York City, where he has succeeded in similar hotel thefts.
I stood at the counter as I listened, waiting for Mr. Daggett’s wife to acknowledge me. She did not. Although there were no other customers in need of her attention, apparently the potatoes were, for she spent a great deal of time rearranging them in the bin. And then she walked right past me to the other side of the store and gave the same amount of attention to the doodads and thingamajigs displayed in a glass case on the other counter. I joined her there and said Good Day. She did not so much as look up at me. So that’s the way it was to be for me, I realized. I had become invisible to the good people of Plumford.
Edda Ruggles came bustling in with a basket hanging from her plump arm, and I expected her to snub me too. Instead she greeted me as usual, and when Mrs. Daggett offered to assist her, she suggested that I be waited on first. In fact, she insisted upon it. And so it was thanks to Mrs. Ruggles that I was able to purchase what I needed from Mrs. Daggett. And as I crossed the Green she caught up and fell into stride with me.
Because she was a newcomer in town, and a foreigner to boot, I thought I’d better set her straight. “Perhaps you do not realize that I am being shunned, Mrs. Ruggles.”
“Oh, I know all about shunning,” she said.
“Yet you dare be seen talking to me? Even after the vile things Pelletier said about me?”
“Worse has been said about m . . . many women,” Mrs. Ruggles said. “How come you married such a bad man?”
“He tricked me into thinking he was a good man.”
Mrs. Ruggles gave me a pitying look. “Not the first time that happened to a young woman.”
How understanding she was! It was good to know I had at least one friend left in town. “Your kindness is much appreciated, Mrs. Ruggles.” We stopped at my front gate. “Would you care to come in for a cup of tea?”
She shook her head. “That Frenchman would not be here but for you,” she said. “Make him go away before something bad happens.”
“If I could, I would,” I said.
“Maybe you should go away.”
“But that’s exactly what Pelletier wants me to do! He wants me to leave here in shame!” I said.
Mrs. Ruggles’s expression hardened. “If you go away, so will he. And there won’t be no more trouble.”
I realized Mrs. Ruggles had no intention of being a friend to me after all. She just wanted to make sure there were no more nasty scenes at the tavern.
“There won’t be any more trouble at the Sun,” I assured her. “Dr. Walker realizes that he fell right into Pelletier’s trap by seeking him out in a public place, and he will never do so again.”
“Go away,” Mrs. Ruggles said again. “The doctor too. This is good advice I am giving to you. Listen to it!” She turned her back to me and marched off to the Sun.
ADAM
Monday, May 22
Only one patient came to the office today, and not until late afternoon. He was a small farm boy brought into town by his father. The lad had been hitting two hammers together for no reason other than he liked the sound, and a shard had broken off from one of the heads and imbedded itself into the corner of his right eye. It was delicate work to tease out the steel splinter with my smallest forceps. The shard lay quite close to the rectus muscle controlling eye movement, and, to make matters worse, it was jagged. But with patience I was able to work it free and out. It took only four tiny stitches of my finest catgut to close the wound, and I expect a full recovery. I felt mighty good when I sent father and son on their way.
But the good feeling left me less than five minutes later, for I went back to turning over and over in my mind that Julia and I could no longer remain in Plumford. Henry bounded into my office and interrupted my morose ruminations.
“I have something of great interest to relate to you and Julia,” he declared. His large clear eyes were shining bright.
We went down the passageway and into the house and found Julia in her studio. She invited us to sit down at a large table strewn with sketch pads and artist paraphernalia.
“First off,” Henry said, “I think you would like to know that I just witnessed Pelletier being shat upon in the Sun taproom.”
“Figuratively or literally?” I said.
“Quite literally. The culprit was Mrs. Ruggles’s parrot Roos.”
“I am beginning to like that bird,” Julia said.
“Well, Pelletier most assuredly does not,” Henry said. “He was at his usual table at the back examining a sheaf of papers when Roos took a notion to fly off her perch near the bar and alight on his head. Startled, Pelletier stood up with such violence that he tipped over the table and sent all his papers flying in every direction. Roos too was startled by his sudden movement and fluttered overhead, squawking madly. Pelletier swatted at her most viciously and would have surely killed her if his flailing hands had made contact, but Roos managed to elude him. Before she flew off she also managed to decorate Pelletier’s forehead and the front of his coat with a long and thick streak of white, viscous guano flecked with nuts and seeds.”
Julia and I laughed most unsympathetically at her husband, no credit to us, but most understandable, I think.
“Pelletier was livid with anger and disgust at his condition,” Henry went on, “and Ruggles hurried over to him with a wet cloth to remove the offending ordure from flesh and fabric. As Ruggles attended to Pelletier’s person I made myself useful by scooping up the papers strewn about the floor. Of course I had no interest in being of service to Pelletier. My interest was in the papers themselves. I feared they might be legal documents that could be injurious to the two of you.”
“And were they?” I said.
“No. They were drawings.”
“Of lewd carnal acts?” Julia said.
Henry looked surprised. “Actually, they were technical drawings of a large ship,” he said. “One of them depicted the craft in profile, as if one side had been cut away to reveal the innards of the vessel. I committed it to memory before Pelletier even noticed me studying it. When I gathered up all the drawings and handed them back to him he did not even bother to acknowledge my helpfulness. I believe Pelletier thinks I am some sort of menial at the Sun, so of course he discounts me entirely.”
“Can you tell us more about this ship?” I asked him.
“I can show
you.” Henry took a pencil from the box on the table. “May I?” he asked Julia.
“Of course. That’s the box of Thoreau pencils you gave me after all.” She opened a sketchbook and set it before Henry.
“I have a most accurate recall of visual images,” he said as he started to draw. “It has been most useful in my studies of flora and fauna. Unfortunately, I lack your artistic talent, Julia. But I shall do my best to duplicate exactly the ship drawing I studied.”
As Henry drew he began to speak of a subject entirely different from the ship, and it seemed to me his hand and eye operated separately from his power of speech.
“Last night,” he said, “I was roused from sleep by a strange sound seeping through the wall from the next room, which is occupied by Mawuli. The sound began low like a growl and then went high like a keening wail and faded away and came back again, over and over.”
Julia caught her breath. “I too once heard such a sound emanate from the room Mawuli occupied in Cannes. I even knocked on his door and asked if he were ill. The sound stopped, and he told me to go away.”
“My impulse to go to his aid was the same as yours,” Henry continued. “I rose and crept out into the hall and stood before Mawuli’s door to listen, wondering if he were sick or mad. He must not have seated his door bolt properly, for when I gently pushed I heard the bolt slide away, and the door eased open. Now, I know it was surely not my business to peer into another man’s room. I would have stopped if the strange sound had not risen to a new intensity, not in volume but in energy so the very air vibrated as from a bass drum.
“I pushed the door open and saw a naked black man seated cross-legged on the floor, facing me. I could not at first even recognize him as Mawuli, as his face was painted with thick white circles around the eyes and red and white bands across the forehead and cheeks. The effect was rather terrifying. His eyes were wide as he stared unseeing or perhaps seeing into another world entirely. He chanted with such intensity that he seemed to be calling up Spirits from that world, and I sensed a dark malevolence around him. I suddenly realized I was spying on a man in a deep state of consciousness that it was not my affair to know, and so I went back to my room. His chanting came to an end perhaps fifteen minutes later.”
“I am glad I was spared such a sight of him as that!” Julia said. “And I have never sensed such a malevolence around Mawuli. Indeed, I have always felt safe around him. Pelletier is the one who exudes evil.”
Henry nodded. “Evil such as this?”
He showed us his drawing. It was a fair rendition of the innards of a lean and beautiful sailing ship with three very tall masts and a sharp narrow bow raked far forward for speed.
“It looks to be a clipper ship,” I said.
“The fastest ship there is,” Henry said. He pointed to long, narrow compartments, stacked one atop the other, from the bilge right up to the deck. Then he pointed to a large cargo space without compartments, lined around its perimeters with a bold, thick pencil line. “This area was lined thus in the drawing I saw, which indicates heavy caulking. Hence, I believe this area is a leak-proof tank large enough to hold ten or fifteen thousand gallons of water. There is only one reason a ship built for speed would have such a large water tank as that.” He pointed back to the tightly spaced compartments. “To keep the cargo stored in this other area alive.”
“Human cargo,” I said.
Julia looked appalled. “This is a depiction of a slave ship! Is it the one Pelletier owned twenty years ago?”
“I fear,” Henry said, “it is a depiction of a new ship. Here is what was printed beneath the drawing.” He picked up the pencil again and quickly wrote: Designed for J. Pelletier, to be launched May 26, 1848.
“But it’s now illegal to transport slaves across the Atlantic,” Julia said. “The waters along the African coast are patrolled by American and English navy squadrons to prevent it.”
“A clipper ship can outrun any naval patrol ship,” Henry said. “Especially a Boston clipper. They set new records every month.”
“And that’s why Pelletier had his ship built here,” I said.
“He can’t have openly commissioned it as a slave ship, though,” Henry said. “The building or outfitting of ships for that purpose has been illegal in America for decades.”
“Prove that Pelletier has broken the law,” Julia said, “and he will be arrested or deported.” She looked at me with hope in her eyes. “We would be free of him!”
I was willing to risk my very life to be free of Pelletier. I turned to Henry. “We must act now. The ship is near ready to sail.”
“I have a plan in mind already,” he replied in his calm, steadfast way. “We will begin by asking Cato Davis to help us. As a caulker he knows the docks.”
Off we raced to the Concord station once again and managed to catch the last train heading for Boston that day. We located Cato and Rose in the North Slope. They were both overjoyed to learn that Tansy was safe. Cato most willingly agreed to help us. He found a rowboat and just after sunset he rowed Henry and me across the harbor toward the East Boston shipyards. He weighed his oars as we approached the long line of wharves, where we could see the hulls of ships being laid or in various stages of completion.
“Let’s wait here for the cover of night,” he said. “If what you say is afoot, that clipper is sure to be guarded.”
Henry asked him how the building of a ship designed to transport slaves could be kept secret with so many men working on it.
“Shipbuilding ain’t no different from any other enterprise,” Cato replied. “A few men see the whole of it; most just see the parts. My part is caulking the hull inside a ship afore work gets started on laying out decks and such. Those caulking the outside hull never see the inside. There’s bound to be some that know more about what’s going on, but they can be paid off easy enough. Men need the work and don’t mind looking the other way if it profits them.”
Several ships eased out into the harbor, letting the outgoing tide slowly drift them out toward the sea. The sailors of one fat-bowed whaler waved to us and hollered they were headed to the South Pacific after sperm whales.
“They most likely be gone two, maybe three years,” Cato said, shaking his head. “I couldn’t do it. No sir. That’s way too long away from my Rose for me. Sometimes they don’t come back at all. You heard about that whale that stove in a whaler and sank her? Near all the men were lost, and the rest drifted about till they went near crazy. No, no, I’ll caulk ships but not sail off in them. Call me a landlubber if you care to, and I will not take offense. No sir.”
When it became dark enough to suit Cato, he rowed the boat closer to the wharves. “There are more than a few clippers being built out here,” he said.
“The one we want is ready to sail,” Henry said. “There cannot be so very many of those.”
We drifted by sloops, barks, brigs, cutters, ketches, and schooners. Then the first clipper hull came into view, the bow narrow and raked far out over the water.
“That one is being built for the China trade,” Cato said. “I got a friend working on it, and I know that she ain’t ready to sail.”
We passed three more clippers in various stages of construction. Henry told Cato to stop near the dark hull of another. “Why is the shore end of this ship’s wharf blocked off?” he asked Cato.
“Beats me. It’s not under repair, and that’s the only reason to block a wharf.”
“Another reason would be to keep people off it,” Henry said. “And it looks to me as if this ship is ready to sail.”
“It sure is,” Cato said. “The rigging’s set, and every sail’s furled and ready.”
The ship was as fine a sailing vessel as I ever set my eyes on, sharp-lined, with three uncommonly high masts supporting wide yardarms that could each carry enough sail to catch all the wind in the sky. As we eased closer I could smell fresh pine tar and varnish and new hemp rope.
“Avast, there!” a man bellowed at us from the
deck of the ship. He was no more than fifty feet away and pointed a musket at us. “Be off with you, or I’ll put a hole in the head of each of you.”
“Sorry, sorry,” Cato called. “Wrong ship. Got two gentlemen here looking for a brig that’s sailing on with this tide.”
“A brig! You blind as well as thick as pitch? We got three masts here, not two.” With that he leveled the gun and fired a shot that whistled just over our heads. “Away with you.”
Cato put his back to the oars and had us around the bow soon enough.
“That must be the one we’re looking for,” he said. “No reason to be so tetchy unless you got something to hide.”
“We must get aboard to find hard evidence this clipper is a slaver,” Henry said.
“Don’t include me,” Cato said. “If I got caught sneaking on board, I’d get banned from the shipyard.”
“No need to risk your livelihood,” Henry said. “Just row close in so Adam and I can get aboard.”
“That I will do,” Cato said. “But best to wait for clouds to block out the moonlight. Then we got a chance of not being seen if I come in right under the bow from dead ahead of the ship. The lookout can’t see to forward so easy with that high bowsprit.”
When clouds rolled in and covered the moon Cato sprang into action, silently and quickly rowing right under the bowsprit. “I’ll wait for you here,” he said in a low voice. “Eyes on deck can’t look this far over the side to see me. You take care now. Don’t get yourselves shot through like Swiss cheese.”
Cato boosted Henry and then me up onto the long and slippery bowsprit. We crawled onto the deck and saw it was deserted but for the man with the musket. He stood at the stern facing away. We quickly made our way to the main mast and crouched behind it.
I began to have doubts of the sanity of our venture and reminded myself that I was there for Julia, to free her from Pelletier, one way or another. I crawled on hands and knees and slid over the edge of a hatch, held onto its edge, let myself down my full length whilst holding on, then dropped down perhaps two feet onto the deck below. I heard no running feet or alarmed voices. Henry soon followed, and there we stood below decks in near pitch dark. Now what?