SHE WAS THE first woman I saw when we came into port and I knew at once that I was lost.
For a long time all I could do was stare, gripping the rail and wondering if, after all we’d heard, she could possibly be a dream. Some kind of wicked mirage.
She was tall, a large crimson hat slantwise on her head.
But it wasn’t that—it wasn’t her being tall, and it wasn’t the hat. It was the rest of her, the rest of her in her leaf-green dress, looking like nothing I’d ever seen before. Such a comfortable, unrestrained softness in the look of her body, such a loose, easy look—it turned my tongue fat and dry in my mouth, my knees to water.
I thought of Cass, waiting for me in the narrow doorway of our house, the children all clustered around her. Becky, with her sweet smile, reaching up with her little hands and asking me, what presents have I brought?
A cream sash clasped the woman just beneath her breasts; from there the green cloth flowed down in a slender waterfall, a few supple folds; pooled in a narrow circle around her feet, and when she began to stroll along the quayside on the arm of the smart straw-boatered gentleman who accompanied her, I could see the slow, comfortable sway of her waist. I could see the gentle curve of her long back; the softly rounded flare of her hips. I groaned aloud. I bit my lip and began to moan and beat the rail with my fists.
Behind me the crew had begun to gather with their sunburned faces and raggy beards, with their foul breath and their rotting teeth still loose in their spongy gums. Jostling to get a look at the woman in the leaf-green dress and at all the others like her—because there were more, lots more, walking past our poor worn-out vessel on their way to meet the passenger steamer. A whole sea of them, in reds and blues and greys and yellows. All with that same free, easy look.
Next to me, Mr. Mingus, the third mate, pressed a grimy kerchief to his broken lips. Two of the boatsteerers sank down onto the deck. The rest continued to look, spellbound and speechless. Poor goggle-eyed buggers. A whole crowd of Rip Van Winkles, gaping at the world to which we had returned. The women different, not the way we’d left them. Not the way we’d banked on them being when we came back.
Thirteen months of ice and wind and narrow frozen hammocks since we last saw them. Thirteen months of hard bread and salt meat and oatmeal since we saw them as they used to be.
In the hold, our precious cargo. Chased and harpooned and hauled up out of the icy waters. What we wanted, hacked out from inside the giant mouth, separated from the greasy blubbery flesh. Scraped and cleaned and dried. Over and over. A year’s work. Eighteen thousand pounds of whalebone. £25,000 at last year’s prices.
Now this. The nightmare rumours from the other ships—all true.
Not one single woman in a corset.
De-boned, all of them.
‘Mr. Mingus,’ I said, turning away from the rail and laying my hand upon his shoulder.
‘We are lost.’