Hester(11)
He had been good and gentle to me at the beginning, and I wanted to believe in him. But I was also practical, as my years in Glasgow had made necessary. Under the guise of decorating and mending I hid the four gold pieces from Pap in a petticoat hem, each in its own concealed pocket so that they wouldn’t clang when I moved. I took care not to let Edward know of them, for Pap had given them to me in secret, and they were all I had to make a new start in a new land where no one had heard of the witches hanged in Scotland.
By the time we reached Liverpool, Edward’s eyes were clear and he engaged himself as a ship’s medic in exchange for free passage across the Atlantic. The medic’s duties involved dispensing oranges for scurvy, echinacea for itchy throats, ginger and licorice or cocaine syrup for nausea or dropsy. The work would be “easy, even uninspiring,” Edward said.
I reminded him he didn’t have his herbs and remedies.
“All will be well,” he said. “The captain provides a medicine box with the ship.”
I heard the same assurance in his voice as on the day we met. But I knew there would be poppy in a medicine case and that it would be difficult for him to resist temptation.
“Don’t fret,” he said, as if reading my mind. “I learned my lesson the hard way. I won’t shame you again.”
* * *
THE NEW HARMONY was larger than I anticipated, a schooner with three sails; the captain was a sturdy man with a trim beard and hair bleached by the sun and brilliant blue eyes. He seemed so self-assured that I guessed he must be Edward’s age, and yet he moved with a spryness that suggested he was closer to my own.
Captain William Darling admired my red cape and the small bits of white needlework I’d put on the sleeves of my black dress, then put a roughened finger to the tip of his own jacket.
“Seashells and knotted ropes will make a good trim for my cuffs.” He spoke with an accent I’d never heard before, neither English nor Scottish.
“I’d be honored to stitch them for you.” My sewing box and every color in it had been taken from me the night of our eviction, but I wouldn’t let Edward stop me now. “If you don’t mind simple cotton thread.”
“You won’t have to use cotton.” The captain smiled. “Somewhere in my hold there are silk threads from China—they’ll be yours on our journey.”
At that, my fear of being the only woman aboard a merchant ship dimmed.
“You’ll have a cabin with a window,” Darling added. “And cups and saucers for your tea, Mrs. Gamble.”
He told me the ship was loaded with linens, soaps, flax and spices, old paintings bound for galleries in Boston, and cork enough for ten thousand bottles of rum.
“Do they drink so much rum in America?” I asked.
“They do.” His smile was kind. I wondered if he had a wife, perhaps children. It seemed that he would be a good family man, smart and dependable. I had a flash of my pap bending over his print trays, inking up the letters, folding me into his arms as he did when I was a girl.
“Cork, cotton, lumber, sugar, rum,” the captain added. “’Tis a triangle of fortune for some. The New Harmony is one of many schooners that keeps the money flowing. As long as I don’t trade in chains and human misery, I’m happy.”
I was young and had suffered my own losses. Although I knew about Africans in bondage, this was the first time a picture arose in my mind of men, women, and children taken into chains and torn from one another, and the shadow of it stayed with me as we prepared to depart.
* * *
THAT VERY MORNING we sailed onto the sea like skaters on a frozen pond, full of expectation, bent into the wind.
The land quickly faded into the mist behind us, and soon we were wrapped in a shroud of cold and wet. The rain slashed against the sails, the crew shouted into the void, and I became violently ill. Edward gave me dried ginger to chew, but the rolling waves and churning seas were stronger.
For two nights I groaned on my hard pallet, nerves and fears turned to spewing terror, lying in my own sick and wishing that I would die. All that kept me together was the iris tea towel that was once my mother’s, the place where she made the tiny red A that I pressed against me as I howled.
On the third night of our voyage, we heard the captain groaning for help. Edward pulled on his jacket and boots and soon came back to rifle in the locked box.
“For the captain,” he said when I gaped at him. “Something in Darling’s side is swollen to the size of a chicken’s egg—I’ll need a sharp blade.”
Somehow, I dragged myself off the pallet and found my tambour hook in the secret pocket of my cloak; we held the sharp end in a candle flame until it glowed red.
The first mate’s skin was black as night, his eyes sharp as the North Star. Ingo spoke to the captain in a soothing singsong while I wiped Darling’s brow with a warm cloth. Edward made an incision in his lower left side, then poked in a hollowed length of rye grass. The captain screamed like a wild animal, and with his shrieks came yellow pus that filled the straw and overflowed onto the bunk. Ingo eased a bottle of rum into Captain Darling’s mouth, and I used a needle and flax thread to sew him up. Then the captain spit up everything that he’d managed to swallow down.
“Let him rest,” Edward said, and we collapsed onto our bunks.