by Celia Rees
William was our leader, and his word was law. I was mate to his captain, and together we led a marauding crew all over the town.
My mind was made up. Even then. I had it all worked out.
My father had no plans for me, other than that I would be married. That's where I would prove myself helpful. He would not have to go to the bother of finding me a husband, because I would marry William. He would be a captain, like his father, and I would be his wife. Had we not already sworn a solemn oath to each other? Pricking our thumbs and bleeding them together? He would sail the seas, and I would go with him.
That much I had decided and, once my mind was made up, I seldom saw a reason to change it. If I willed it, then that is what would happen. It did not cross my mind that we would not always be together. A sailor's life would be my life, too.
We lived for each day, and each day was similar to the one before. We thought in the way of all children: life would go on much the same, with little change or difference, until one day we would arrive at the future that we saw.
3
I was ten, and William was twelve. It was springtime. I'd been hoping for a bright clear day, but when I awoke the sky was grey and heavy. Rain was spitting in my face as I went to our usual meeting place, a little courtyard behind Corn Street. I whistled our special whistle through my teeth as William had taught me. It was supposed to sound like a bo'sun's piping, but I had trouble getting it right. I expected to hear his answering shrill, but none came. William was not there. I tucked myself under the overhanging eaves, out of the rain, and waited for him. When the church clock struck one quarter hour and then another, I knew he would not be coming. I went in search of him at his mother's inn, The Seven Stars.
It was the middle of the morning, but the inn was busy enough, filled with sailors and women of the port. I peered through the blue drifts of tobacco smoke, trying to see if William were among the tables, collecting tankards and glasses. Sometimes he stayed behind to help when the inn was full, but I could see no sign of him, so I went to ask his mother.
'Upstairs,' Mari said, as she poured rum, running the bottle from one glass to another. When she looked up, her eyes were wary. I followed her glance. William's father, Jake Davies, was sitting in the corner with another man, a bottle on the table between them.
'I didn't know he was back.'
'Neither did we.' She sniffed, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. 'Arrived last night. Drunk ever since.'
William had inherited his mother's high colour, black hair and dark eyes, and smiling open face. She was not smiling that day. A fresh bruise showed under the edge of the kerchief she wore round her head; one eye was puffed and the left side of her face was swollen. When she saw me staring up at her, she gave a lopsided grin and winced.
'Been making his presence felt,' she said, gathering the glasses on to a tray. 'Now, shoo. This is no place for you. Your da would be angry if he knew you were here.'
I went up the narrow stairs behind the bar, worrying about William. His father liked to use his fists on his wife and his children. He usually started on Mari, then turned on William when he tried to protect her and the little ones. Everything they said, everything they did, seemed to enrage him. They lived their lives when he was not there; as soon as he returned they were silent and fearful, which only served to fuel his fury. They never saw a penny of his captain's share, and none of them would have shed a tear if the news had come back that his ship had gone down. But that never happened. He always came back without any mishap. Around the port he was thought of as lucky, although he was called Black Jake because of his moods, and few wanted to sail with him on account of his cruelty.
I found William in the room he shared with his smaller brothers, busy laying out his belongings on a square of canvas. He was wearing a sailor's clothes: a blue coat and wide trousers. The cloth was stiff and new. The clothes were too big and didn't look right on him. The sleeves of the jacket came over his hands and the wide trouser bottoms flapped round his narrow ankles. His neck stuck up from his collar, as thin and white as a stalk of celery. He looked as though he were masquerading, dressed up in clothes stolen from one of the sailors who lodged with his mother.
'I'm sorry, Nancy,' he said when I came into the room. 'I don't have time to play with you today. I have to get ready.'
'Ready?' I asked. 'Ready for what?' Even though I knew the answer.
He was not masquerading. He was leaving. Our ways were parting. I sensed, even then, that the next time we met things would not be the same. Things would never be the same between us again.
He was twelve years old. He sang with a boy's pure treble and the skin on his face had never felt the touch of a razor. His black hair fell on to his shoulders in soft silky curls and his big dark eyes and long lashes were the envy of many of the girls who came into his mother's inn. They used to tease him, saying he had skin as white as any milk and cheeks as red as roses just like in the ballads. They did it to make him embarrassed. He blushed as easily as any girl.
His skin was flushing slightly, but he was a man now. I could see it plainly in the way he held himself, shoulders square, arms folded, chin pointed towards the ceiling. He looked at me in the same way my brothers did. Down his nose, as if I didn't smell right to him. And perhaps I didn't. Being a girl.
'My father's found me a ship. The Amelia. Captain Thomas. I'm signed on as cabin boy. I have to leave right away. We anchor at Hungroad tonight to catch tomorrow's tide.'
The Amelia. I'd seen her name in my father's ledgers, but could not exactly recall the trade in which she was engaged.
'Where bound?' I asked him.
'Jamaica. Kingston.'
'Straight?'
He nodded. That was important. Any ship going by way of Africa was a slaver.
I should have wished him luck. Fair winds. A good voyage. Offered him something to remember me by. But I did not. I turned and ran down the stairs. The thought of saying goodbye to him made my eyes and nose sting with sudden tears. I did not want him to see me crying, and I wanted to get to my father as quickly as I could.
I went straight to his office, high up in the sugar house.
'He's of an age to go to sea,' he said with a shrug. 'It has nothing to do with me.'
'But it's your ship!'
'And it's his father's will. It doesn't do to interfere between father and son. Which ship is it, my dear?'
'The Amelia.'
My father looked surprised at that. He stuck out his lower lip, pinching it gently between finger and thumb in the way he did when he was thinking.
'What's the matter? What's wrong with it?'
'The ship? Nothing. All my ships are sound. Anything less would be false economy.'
'The captain, then. Is he cruel?'
'No more'n usual. He's lately been in the Navy and runs a tight ship. He's no dancing master, that's for sure, but he's not a tyrant, neither.'
'So what is it, then?'
"Tis an odd choice for the boy's first voyage, that's all. But I dare say he'll survive.' He laughed. 'The sea is a hard school. If it's going to be his life, it's better he learns while he's young.'
There was a falseness in his laughter and, although he smiled down at me, smoothing my hair away from my cheek, I knew that he was lying. I ran out and down to the docks. I had to warn William. The Amelia was a slaver, sure.
I was too late. The water was ebbing from the harbour. The Amelia's berth was empty. She had already sailed, going out on the afternoon tide.
I wandered the quayside, disconsolate. Other children called out to me, but I ignored them. Sailors waved from other ships of my father's, but I did not see them. I could not imagine my life without William. He was to be found nowhere in the city and tonight his bed in The Seven Stars would be empty. He had been taken on to work a slaver. I should have saved him. I felt that it was all my fault.
Robert found me sitting on a bollard, staring down at the stinking mud of the harbour. The tide was now f
ull out.
'Come, Miss Nancy. Eve been looking for you everywhere.' He looked down at my dirty, tear-streaked face. 'You've got to come home and get ready. The master's expecting an important guest and he wants you looking your best.'
4
My father's guest was Mrs Wilkes. She will always be that to me. I never called her mother, or even Mrs Kington. She was always Mrs Wilkes. I never liked her. She had a face like folded dough, a pursed little mouth and eyes like tarnished threepenny pieces. She sat opposite my father at dinner that night and it was clear she was to become his second wife. After my mother, it had taken him a decade to decide to take another, and I wondered at his choice, but this was no affair of the heart. Mrs Wilkes was a wealthy woman, the widow of Benjamin Wilkes, my father's former partner. When he had dropped dead, right in the middle of Corn Street, some had expressed no surprise, saying he'd been worn to a nub by his wife's constant nagging, but even if my father heard such comments, he was not a man to allow gossip to fog his commercial sense. To combine their assets was the most profitable course of action. Love played no part in the marriage, as far as I could tell.
She began to make changes even before they were married. I fared better than the dogs, which were immediately banished to the stables, and better than Robert. If he had been younger, and more handsome, she might have dressed him in a powdered wig and fancy livery and had him walking behind her, carrying her packages. But Robert was tall and strongly built, brown-skinned, with big amber eyes and scarifications on his broad cheeks. Mrs Wilkes declared him too big and hulking, with eyes like a hound and not nearly dark enough; ladies liked African servants to be coal-black. She could see no use for him and was all for having him returned to the plantation, or sold, which was what people did when they had no further need for a black slave. Except Robert was not a slave. He was free. My father told her that, and said he had no intention of getting rid of him, but he agreed to have him moved from the house, so Robert was sent to the stables to look after the horses and dogs. Not that he seemed to mind. Horses and dogs being preferable to the general run of people. His place was taken by a cook, a housekeeper and a couple of maids and footmen. Staff that Mrs Wilkes had brought with her.
Once she had the household running to her satisfaction, she turned her attention to me.
She looked me over as if I were a filly at a horse fair.
'She strides about as if she were breeched, and the way she talks is enough to make a carter blush. It won't do, Ned!' She shook her head at my father. 'She cannot sew, she cannot sing, play an instrument, or do any useful thing. I don't know what you were thinking of, letting her run wild like that. Such freedom is not good for a child, a girl in particular. It gives them the wrong idea. If it goes on much longer, you'll have the devil of a job getting anyone to marry her.'
My father grew alarmed at that. What if I came in at a loss, like overvalued stock, a cargo about to spoil, gimcrack goods on a glutted market? He looked at me askance.
'Perhaps there's no helping her,' he said doubtfully, pinching his bottom lip. 'Perhaps it's gone too far ... '
'No, no, no! There's always help!' Mrs Wilkes's eyes crinkled, the tarnished silver beginning to gleam. 'The size of her fortune will see to that. And she's not bad-looking. She's not got a squint, and her features are regular. Her mouth is a little too wide,' she pinched in my cheeks, making me gape like a fish, 'but her eyes could be fine, if they were to lose that sullenness. I've seen far worse prospects make very good matches. She'll never be pretty, I'll give you that, but she may have looks. Of a sort. But she wants refinement!' She held my chin between her squat forefinger and thumb, studying my face in the unblinking way she had, her small eyes as round as buttons. 'This mane of hair!' She pulled it away from my head. 'Like straw! And she's as tawny as a gypsy. As for her hands!' She looked down and shuddered. 'You leave her to me.' She took hold of my ear. 'I can make a silk purse from her.'
With that she called for her maid, Susan. A sharp-faced, dark-haired young woman came bustling into the room.
'Yes, Ma'am?'
'See what you can do with this,' said Mrs Wilkes, thrusting me forward.
'Yes, Ma'am.'
Susan bobbed a curtsey and took me away. I was not especially vain, but to be found so utterly wanting cut me to the core. I hid in my room and studied the mirror with my sullen green-eyed stare. Perhaps she was right. I could find no prettiness, either. My mouth was too full, and sulky besides, my nose too straight, jaw too wide, cheek bones too high. Perhaps if I tamed my mane and tied it back ... So I tried that, but I looked more like a handsome-faced boy than a dimple-cheeked girl.
'Who're you scowling at?' Susan came in followed by servants lugging a tub and water. 'Wind changes, you'll stick like that.' She looked at me, head on one side, her eyes bright and sharp like a bird sighting a worm. 'The name's Susan. Susan Smythe. I'm your maid.'
I don't need a maid!'
'That's not what the Missis says.' She looked around my room. 'She says you need seeing after. We don't always see eye to eye, but this time I'd say she be right.'
'Not in my opinion,' I countered.
'Your opinion don't count for much round here now, do it?'
I turned away from her, watching in the mirror as she emptied out drawers and presses. She gathered it all into her arms.
'Fit for rags, the lot of it. As for you ... ' She looked me over, head on one side again, but her birdlike stare had softened. 'You're a challenge, and no mistake. I'll tell the Missis we're starting from new. I dare say your pa can bear the expense.'
5
Susan dressed and groomed me until Mrs Wilkes could stand to look at me. I was inspected from every angle and made to walk up and down. Mrs Wilkes remained silent for a long time, then pronounced me 'not unsightly'. Susan's brows rose in two black bows and her eyes sparkled so that I was hard put not to laugh out loud.
I was still deemed too uncouth to join Mrs Wilkes's circle of ladies, but she no longer winced at my presence. She put me in the care of others who were employed to teach me the 'female arts', as she called them: a dancing master, a drawing master, a singing teacher, another for flute and harpsichord. I did not care to learn anything from any of them, apart from the dancing master. He also taught my brother Ned to fence. I persuaded him to teach me as well. When Ned was home from school we would fight in the grounds and up and down the servants' stairs. No mercy shown on either side.
Such acts of rebellion declined as Mrs Wilkes wore me down, breaking me like a horse to bridle and saddle. By the time I was fourteen, I could draw passably well, hold a tune, embroider a cushion cover, and dance a minuet. I was now allowed to wait on her visitors, handing round dainties as they sipped their glasses of Bristol Milk. I was even invited to stay and join in their conversation, discoursing on the weather, fashion, and what ribbons were best to trim bonnets.
We were living in a new house by this time. Mrs Wilkes had my father build one away from the centre of town. He had offered her Queen Anne's Square, but she had disdained to live there, declaring it common to live so close to the docks and that such low-lying ground would be prone to bad air and unhealthy miasmas. The new house was in Clifton, built from yellow stone brought from the quarries at Bath.
It was a fine house and, although my father grumbled at the expense and muttered that we'd rattle around it like peas in a drum, he was secretly pleased with the result. He would walk around, touching this, admiring that, commenting on the refinements that his wife had brought to the decorations and furnishings.
'A woman's touch,' he would declare, with an increasingly satisfied air. 'That's what was wanted.'
I would look up from my embroidery and know I was included in his judgement.
I'd had no word from William, and although he was often in my mind, I wras no longer so free to go down to the port to visit his mother at The Seven Stars to find out how he did. The last I'd heard was that he'd signed on for another voyage. I had been looking forward to his
returning and was puzzled by that, and more than a little disappointed. I had made my new life under Mrs Wilkes tolerable by thinking how I would describe it to him. I perfected commentaries on her friends and their doings and stored up stories to share with him, incidents carefully selected by me to demonstrate her vanity, greed and stupidity. I'd ever had a wicked tongue and had always been able to make him laugh, but in my mind we were still children together. I had not considered how time passing might have changed him, or me.
When I next saw him, we barely recognised each other.
He was sitting on the bench in the stableyard, talking to Robert. His face and arms were tanned brown and he wore the clothes of a common sailor, neatly mended and patched, but bleached by the sun and stiff with tar and salt.
Robert made space and I sat on the bench next to them. William explained that he had been sent out by the footman.
'My father's wife, Mrs Wilkes, has ideas about how things should be,' I said, by way of apology.
'About you, too,' he laughed as he looked at me, and some of the old spark showed in his eyes as he surveyed my silk and brocade. 'She's made you into quite the lady.'
'Only on the outside.' I smiled.
He smiled back and I could see the boy he used to be. I knew that, beneath the surface, things had not really changed between us.
'What happened?' I asked. 'Why were you so long away?'
He shook his head and the laughter died in his eyes. 'I was duped by my own father.' He sighed. 'He told me that the Amelia was an ordinary trader, but she was a slaver. They began to build the platforms as soon as we were clear of the Channel. At first, I wondered what the hammering and sawing was,' he laughed, this time without any humour at all. 'I was that green. Green as the water in the bilges. When I asked someone, they didn't even answer. I went to the captain, to ask him, and got a beating for my trouble. I felt all kinds of fool. Most of the others were desperate for a berth, or else they had been crimped and spirited on board. I'd gone voluntary. Put there by my own father.'