It’s just an hour after dawn on the first Monday in May 1775 when the Anton lurches its bulk away from the docks at Bristol and sets sail for the West Indies. Charlotte Taylor is at the rail, rivetted to the huge square sails puffing out like bullies in the wind and bucking the ship into the open sea. A tall woman with flame-red hair tied in a knot at her neck, she keeps her eye to the bow as if setting her own course and her back to the land she has left behind. Standing beside her at the rail is Pad Willisams, her lover and co-conspirator in the hurried exit from Charlotte’s family, Pad’s job as butler in the Taylor household and a truth they each had only a part of.
A hastily packed trunk is stowed with the cargo. The calico sack she’d prepared for the voyage, and now realizes is pathetically inadequate since the trunk cannot be opened again until they reach shore six to eight weeks from now, is slung over her back.
A scrofulous man of indiscriminate age eyes her repeatedly from his place by the forward capstan. He’s one of the woebegone collection of humanity she’s travelling with—mostly men in their twenties and thirties and one young boy with freckles on his nose who seems to be in the employ of the haughty Captain Skinner. They all stare shamelessly at the white woman and the black man by her side. Pad has pulled together all the stiff dignity of the butler he had been just days earlier, but she can feel the anxiety that thrums through him. She is somewhat surprised to realize that she isn’t daunted by the stares, the days ahead or the consequences of leaving her family’s country home outside of London. Standing in the brisk wind on the deck of a sailing ship just a week after her twentieth birthday, Charlotte Taylor is unafraid—maybe even elated.
She’s still leaning on the portside, watching the water, letting the wind blow on her face when she allows herself to cast her thoughts to what she has run away from. The terrible row with her father when he learned she’d been “consorting,” as he called it, with Pad. The endless rounds of tea, the suffocating rules and her mother’s predictable attacks of the vapours whenever there was a hint of excitement in the household. She smiles in anticipation of the life ahead. A marriage to the dashing Pad, a home in the tropics. She’s grinning at the prospects when Pad interrupts her reverie to suggest they go below and secure their living quarters.
The quarters are cramped; the ceiling is so low they have to duck their heads. The bunks are arranged in two rows, one on each side of the dreary lower deck with damp curtains hanging between them to lend an illusion of privacy. There are hooks on which to hang their possessions and a lopsided stove in the centre. The only light and fresh air is from the hatch to the upper deck; the quarters smell of mildew and rotten wood. Indeed, the black streaks of rot crawling up the legs of the cots speak of the months at sea, the flourishing business of carrying human and other cargo across the ocean as many times as the weather will allow between May and October, never stopping long enough to refit or repair.
They pick a bunk at the end of the row and tie their sacks to the hooks before exploring the rest of the lower deck. There are stalls toward the stern filled with animals—two steers, four sheep, a ragged flock of chickens and three fat pigs. Charlotte looks at each and lingers on the soft, uncomprehending eyes of the steers that will become meals for the passengers and crew. Tucked under the bow in a wedge-shaped hold are the ship’s stores—burlap sacks of flour, sugar and grain, cases of biscuits, salt and limes. Charlotte and Pad walk back to midship, where a wide hatch is battened shut on the deck.
“What’s down there?” Charlotte asks a stocky sailor who is hurrying aft.
“Cargo, madam,” he says. “Plenty a’ cotton cloth and wool. That’s what makes ’em rich, madam, shippin’ the likes a’ that.”
My trunk is down there too, Charlotte thinks ruefully.
THE YOUNG LAD who’d caught her eye when they left the dock is friendly, puppyish and not too shy to tell her his name is Tommy Yates when she finds him exploring the lower deck.
“Me dad was the one who got me on board,” the boy confides gravely. “He brought me to the dock and hired me out to the captain. He told him I was sixteen, an’ I’m but thirteen.”
“Thirteen?” Charlotte looks at him closely. “Are you even that?”
“Oh yes, madam. Honest, I am.”
She had thought him no more than a scrawny eleven.
When he is not scrambling up the rigging at the captain’s orders or crawling through the hold below the sleeping quarters to fetch something the captain needs from the cargo, Tommy finds his way to Charlotte’s side. In the first week at sea, she heard about his fourteen brothers and sisters, the drink that made his father what he was and the mother who was so sickly she could hardly manage to stagger from her bed.
Charlotte shares her own story with him—putting a more varnished spin on her departure than is the case. She tells Tommy that she and Pad are married and that her father, General Taylor, doesn’t approve of the relationship so they decided to leave home for the West Indies and start a new life.
She entertains the winsome boy with details of the world she left behind, imitating her nanny’s priggish etiquette. “She insisted I sit like this all day long,” says Charlotte, perching herself on a bench and exaggerating the pose—her back ramrod straight, her legs bent at the knee and turned slightly sideways and her hands folded together in her lap. She makes him laugh when she describes her antics in the straitlaced household—refusing to marry the man her mother had chosen for her, looking contrite when her father admonished her, galloping around the estate on her horse and lingering at the stable with Pad. Tommy thinks it’s a blissful life she’s left, but even this boy can see the rebel in the woman he has befriended.
Throughout those days Pad often lies marooned in his cot. The seasickness is terrible for him, while Charlotte hardly feels the transition from land to water. Sometimes she wonders if Pad’s real sickness is the knowledge of what he has done, leaving all he knew behind, and worry about what might lie ahead.
“They’re such little waves,” she pleads, but he only turns his head and is silent. At night, by a guttering candle, she makes entries in her diary with her best quill, dipping ink from the biggest bottle she’d dared carry.
I wonder what Papa and Mama are thinking. They must suspect that I have run off with Pad. Papa has always liked Pad—had hopes for him to become something more than a butler—and perhaps thought a stern speech to me might prevent any “foolishness” as he called it. But while he lectured me, I felt as though the ceiling in his study had dropped to inches over my head.
She flips back the pages of her diary to read the entry made that fateful night after her father had dismissed her and she’d bolted to her bedroom, then scribbles another line onto today’s entry … The pitched battle I’ve been in for as long as I can remember over the seemliness of my behaviour is behind me now … and closes the diary.
As one week stretches into two, then to three, then a month, Charlotte is determined to insulate her exhilaration from Pad’s continuing illness, the monotony of the voyage, the worry about the future. The rations begin to diminish in the fifth week and ambitious weevils and fuzzy blue mould appear in the flour and biscuits. She feels as grimy and bedraggled as the gloomy men around her, but her joy is dimmed only a little sitting by the ships rail where, wind and water offering refreshing relief, she takes her diary from her pocket and glances through the entries.
A BLACK HORIZON. They’d had squalls and days of grey skies and rain, but Charlotte had seen nothing like the storm clouds that lie ahead, as though the sky is disfigured by bruises, black, yellow and purple. Standing at her usual spot at the rail she’s astonished by the sudden change. The jagged edges of storm clouds ahead meet the white-capped water as though one could become the other at any moment.
“Shorten sails!” the captain calls. “Stiggs, get below with three men and fasten loose cargo!”
“Aye, sir,” the first mate shouts.
“Have the passengers go below now!”
“Aye, sir!”
Salt spray stings her eyes and soaks her cloak as Charlotte struggles to the hatch and steps her way down the wet rungs. She hurries to Pad and is surprised to find him sitting up.
“It must be the little waves that bother me,” he says with a smile. “I feel right enough now.”
Charlotte stuffs their few possessions into her calico bag and ties it securely to the hook on the wall. The stomping of boots plays like a drumbeat on the deck overhead while the livestock squeal and mewl their terror. Anxiety is as thick as fog. She and Pad settle by the stovepipe in the centre of the double row of berths, rubbing their hands together for consoling warmth. She looks back to her berth as though there might be some comfort hanging there in the calico bag. Her keepsakes are so few—a volume of poetry, her well-worn copy of Clarissa, her diary, the combs she’d worn in her hair when she’d been presented to the county magistrate on her recent birthday, her sketch of the garden she could see from her childhood bedroom window—flotsam of a life far from the bowels of the creaking ship. A man vomits onto the floor beside her and the latrines tip as the ship rolls and their contents ease out accordingly. She gathers her skirts around her, trying to keep them out of the slop.
Half the night passes. She may have dozed. She opens her eyes to find Pad crouched beside her, his eyes wide. She places a hand on his brow: he’s not right enough now. There is a fever there perhaps. Small wonder. Confined to his bunk since they came aboard, and, with the vomit and night soil sloshing about, contagion might well spread to everyone. She wipes his brow with her kerchief, he leans his head on her shoulder gratefully. Pad is not himself, she knows. When she’d fallen in love with him, she saw him as a man who knew what to do in any circumstance, who calmed the household by his very presence.
The ship lurches forward. The wind grows louder. Tommy must have escaped his duty with the captain because he appears on the ladder, clutching at the rungs. At the bottom, he stumbles over and huddles on the other side of her for a time without speaking.
“Will we die?” he finally whispers.
“No, we will not.” Charlotte makes her voice sharp, impatient, but she is not entirely certain he is wrong. The permanent frown on Tommy’s brow reminds her of the stable boy, Jack, who helped with her father’s horses. Jack’s grimace disappeared when he was with the animals, and Charlotte would sometimes find him curled up against the haunches of a cow, asleep, his face as tranquil as that of a baby.
“Let’s go and visit the livestock,” she proposes to Tommy, then whispers to Pad, “I’m going to go with the boy, to see the cows. It may calm him.”
In the holding pen, they find trembling animals that look as if they might stampede into the raging sea if they weren’t confined by the barrier leading to the main deck. A sound comes from a heap of straw, hard to hear over the roar of water and the screech of the ship’s timbers—a litter of newborn kittens, meowing for their absent mother.
“Where’s Lucifer?” Charlotte shouts. She had believed the ship’s black cat to be a male, but this was not the case.
“She’s not here,” Tommy calls, kneeling beside the kittens.
“Look!” Charlotte kneels beside him. “Look. They’re as frightened as we are.”
She could imagine the captain would not look kindly on more cats. But here was a cause that could distract a frightened, lonely boy.
“Help me, Tommy! We must hide these kittens or the captain will surely toss them overboard.”
Together they carry the litter into a dark recess of the stalls, where their mother would easily find them later. Tommy would have to occupy his mind with finding a way to keep them out of the captain’s sight.
Charlotte returns to her post by the stove, leaving Tommy to tend to the kittens. Save for the few men whose job is to steer the vessel through the storm, the rest of the passengers and crew have taken refuge in the living quarters—a euphemism for this collection of stacked wooden cots, she thinks.
The rain is pounding the ship now, splashing into the lower deck through the leaky hatch and sending all the passengers to the centre where Charlotte has staked out her spot by the stove. The wind picks up, howling like nothing she had ever heard. Huddled by the stove with men she would rather not talk to, she takes her diary from her pocket, looks through her recent entries.
May 25—I was awakened last night by the most awful noise. It sounded as though someone or something was crying for help outside the so-called living quarters. The wailing went on for several minutes. Then it was quiet, save the sound of a few men busy with a chore. When I got up this morning and went on deck, I found out it was the slaughter of a sheep—the poor thing bleated so pathetically. Pad thinks I’m being spoiled and dramatic.
June 2—One can’t very well celebrate the halfway point when one doesn’t have a way of knowing where in the middle of all this water the ship is—but Captain Skinner says we’re moving very well.
Suddenly, as if an explosion had ripped across the bow, the storm strikes the ship and the souls on board with such punishment Charlotte wonders if they will survive. She certainly cannot write in the diary now—it’s all she can do to stay upright. The fire goes out in the stove. The oil lamps in the hold dim and die, leaving them all in darkness. She clings to the pole the stove is lashed to and Pad clings to her. The ship heaves and pitches. Someone near her vomits. Someone else is crying. Most of them are praying. This is as close to hell as she can imagine. The waiting feels like an eternity—hovering in the dark, clinging to anything that is tied down. Waiting, waiting for the abatement.
Then—silence, quickly followed by the sound of boots beating across the upper deck. The captain’s voice calls down into the lower deck: “We’re in the eye of the storm. Quickly, make tea, get the biscuits and jam. It may be a long time before you eat again.” Everyone rushes to comply. Pad manages to reignite the stove as well as the lamps, and Charlotte yanks the biscuits from the storeroom shelves and passes them around. Then she wraps a fistful of broken biscuits into the folds of her skirt, fills a vessel with water and goes to check on Tommy and the kittens who are, all of them, fast asleep. The rocking motion that terrified the others had soothed boy and cats to a blessed slumber.
The calm doesn’t last long. Once across the eye of the storm, the winds roar into action buffeting the ship again, sucking it up a monstrous wave and dropping it in free-fall until it pounds into the trough below. Charlotte listens to the people huddled around her at the stove who alternately plea for mercy and try to second-guess the captain. She nods off from time to time, they all do. No one moves. They are shivering, damp, frightened and thoroughly mesmerized until one by one, they give in to exhaustion.
Charlotte isn’t sure whether she is dreaming or waking when she sees light streaming in around the hatch to the upper deck. All is quiet. They are at an odd collection of angles, leaning into one another, bent forward, lolling back against a plank. The light becomes brighter. Charlotte wonders whether they have sailed out of this purgatory. When she rises to see for herself, she upsets the pyramid of bodies gathered around her. They shake the long night’s damage from their aching backs and stand to follow Charlotte to the ladder. As she lifts her head above the hatch, she stops. The brilliance of the sky, the radiance of the morning, the sun already halfway to the zenith, the charged thrill of the fresh breeze—she can neither exclaim nor form any thought but steps on the deck and lets the pleasure of it wash over her.
Captain Skinner beckons them to join him on deck and announces, with the flourish she’d come to expect of him, “By the grace of God and the skills of the good men who are my crew, we have weathered a mid-Atlantic storm.”
Charlotte studies the man. She had thought him aloof, arrogant. But he had stood on the main deck while she and most others on board had huddled like frightened children in the dark. Who was to say what qualities made some good ship’s masters and some good butlers.
Below, sailors are mopping up the filthy water and checking the hull for damage. Charlotte slips away to the stalls and finds Tommy rubbing the sleep from his eyes.
“Get up,” she whispers. “No one has missed you yet.”
BY MID-AFTERNOON, they are fed, dried out and gathered on the upper deck for a reckoning of the ship’s condition conducted by the purser, Watkins, a stout man of perhaps forty who looks to Charlotte as though he’d be better suited to minding a haberdasher in Whitechapel. Food supplies, cargo, health status and injuries are to be determined. The captain announces, “The storm has mercifully pushed us ahead. We have passed the halfway point in my considered judgment and will find the shore in four more weeks.” Then the inspection begins. They hadn’t seen anything resembling fresh fruit or vegetables since the end of the first week at sea. The oatmeal, although damp and sticky, is still in ample supply, so are the dried peas. The biscuits are spotted with mould, as is the quickly diminishing supply of cheese, but the barrels of thick, sweet molasses will suffice. Potatoes, so filling, so easy to prepare, are still in abundance, but it is only a matter of time before their softening skins will rot and the supply is lost to vermin. The head count of livestock has suffered more loss during the storm than anyone had counted on. Two of the remaining three sheep and a dozen chickens suffocated and one of the steers, bawling and sick, has to be shot and thrown overboard. It is the water they worry about most.
Two sailors emerge from below decks to whisper to Watkins, who looks concerned. He hurries forward to where the captain has resumed conversation with the first mate. The crew members arch their necks as the officers speak together in low tones. Man whispers to man that the storm had breached the water barrels. Watkins comes back, clears his throat.
“Water is to be rationed,” he says. He pokes nervously and repeatedly at the bridge of his spectacles with one finger. “Any fresh water lost or befouled will mean a shortage. Henceforth, the captain orders that there will be no use of water for any such purposes as washing.”
“What about the passengers?” a young man in a battered felt hat calls out.
Watkins sets his small face with determination.
“No one is to use water for any purpose but that set out by the captain, which is drinking only and the boiling of potatoes and meat and such.”
“You know what happens?” All eyes turned to a weathered sailor at the back. “You know what happens when a ship runs out of water in them south Caribbean waters? You know how they go, them aboard? Like animals, they do, fightin’ for each ladle.”
There is a buzz of agreement from the crew, who turn ominous eyes on the twenty passengers, who meet their gaze with shrinking confidence.
“Not before they been in terrible awful torments,” another sailor adds, wagging his head gravely.
Charlotte thinks there is a certain malicious twinkle in the eyes of both men, but the truth of the warning is not lost on her.
“Yates!” Watkins barks at the boy, who had edged near Charlotte. “Why ain’t you countin’ candles in the hold?”
“Didn’t know to do it, sir.”
“You did, Yates. You’re a lazy rascal, you are. Get below.”
“Yes, sir,”
Other men emerge from the hatch to report on the state of the cargo, the tallow, the ropes, the barrels of pitch and oakum and salt. During these proceedings, young Tommy emerges to report ten boxes of candles.
“Ten?” Watkins frowns. “What’s become o’ the others?”
“I ain’t counted them yet, sir.”
“Why not, boy?” Watkins stabs at his spectacles.
“I ain’t got but ten fingers, sir.”
The crew roars with delight.
“Count all those boxes, Yates, or you’ll have a finger less!”
Tommy scampers down the hatch.
“It’s not candles we want,” Charlotte whispers to Pad. “It’s water. Why did they not store it securely?”
When the job is finished, every man and the one woman on board have to give an accounting of their own health and injuries. There isn’t one among them without scrapes and bruises from the beating they had taken during the storm. Life below decks has exacted a physical and spiritual toll they are all paying. Charlotte wants to tell Watkins that the fact they present themselves as reasonably healthy this day is a testament to their toughness or perhaps desperation, not to any care offered by the crew of this ship. But she remains silent.
By now Charlotte has bits and pieces of the backgrounds of the passengers. Most of these men, she came to realize, were running away from something, some from the police or debt and others, she assumes from their grumbling at meals and cries in the night, from any manner of misfortune. Several bought their passage by agreeing to sling the ship’s cargo at one end or the other. Some were being delivered as workers to the islands. “Is that what ‘indentured’ means?” she asks Pad. She bets they have stories to tell, stories that for their own good are better kept secret. Like skeletons dangling on their backs, the unrevealed dramas sail along with the human cargo.
The voyage is finally starting to sap Charlotte’s enthusiasm.
On July 5, she writes in her diary:
Will this voyage never end? The only excitement is when someone calls out “Portside” or “Starboard” and we get to see some huge fish swimming by the ship. At least there’s something out there other than the soggy people on this boring boat. When fair winds blow, everyone cheers our progress, but when the sails slacken and the ship is becalmed, we sit, sometimes for days at a time. That’s when the arguments begin. Every perceived slight threatens physical violence.
The only pleasure I have is talking to Tommy. He has an odd way of talking, as though he’s trying to imitate a grand gentleman, when he greets me on the deck with a slight bow and says, “A fine day to yerself, Miss Charlotte.” I’m going to ask Pad if we can take him with us when we get off this boat. As for Pad, I’m beginning to wonder about the family ties he says he has in Jamaica. He feels I’m criticizing him when I ask questions about who it is we will meet once we land. But I can’t imagine walking onto the shore and asking for Willisams, just like that, which is I think what he has planned.
THE SEA IS SPREAD around her, the horizon as wide and featureless as it has remained for seven weeks. Tommy is scraping pots by the gunwale.
“Are you well this morning, Tom?” He looks up. “Yes, madam. Well enough at least.” Later in the day she finds him feeding the livestock. Such a runt of a child, she thinks. Run ragged with chores from dawn to dusk.
“Did you get your share of water to drink?” she asks. “Not ’til I’m done entirely.”
Water is divvied up in portions so precise the passengers have begun to hoard what they can. But the boy seems to be every sailor’s scapegoat. His grimy face is flushed, but she for-bears to touch his brow for fear he is contagious. Even from six paces, she can sense fever.
“I’ll fetch you some of mine,” she says and goes back to the bunks where Pad lies asleep. She fills a small cup from the vessel they keep beneath their bedding. On the way forward, she sees Captain Skinner and the bo’s’n emerge from a storeroom. She is surprised to encounter Skinner below decks. He is a man to delegate most tasks. The bo’s’n hurries off.
“Mrs. Willisams.”
Skinner is of moderate height and some forty years, impressively broad across the chest, his face permanently burnished by years of weather. His eyes are brown and intelligent, or penetrating at least, but a heavy chin and high-bridged nose give the impression of rather too much character.
“Captain Skinner.”
“How are you faring, Mrs. Willisams?”
“Well enough, captain. We must all bear up as best we can.”
“Yes. Well, you bear up well. Your husband”—and here he hesitates just a little too long for true civility—“seems … not as well.”
“He may have a fever.”
“Parsons is our man in charge of illnesses here.”
“I’ve spoken to Mr. Parsons, captain, but he has nothing more to offer.”
“If you should need to rest a little from your tasks, Mrs. Willisams, may I suggest you join me some evening at table. I find a change of setting a cheering thing.”
“Thank you, captain. But I must attend my husband.”
“Of course you must. But should he be sleeping well and you would perhaps enjoy some conversation, please speak to me.”
The flicker of a glance the captain tosses her way tells Charlotte that she will not soon be joining this man for supper.
She brings the water back to Tommy. He guzzles it, wiping his mouth and licking the drops from his fingers. Then he shivers, though the hold is stifling. She takes the scarf she’s wearing and wraps it around his neck. “Try to rest some,” she tells him and heads back to the sleeping quarters.
To pass the time, the men often gather on the upper deck to listen to the captain tell stories about crossings past. On the evening of July 6, Charlotte joins them, staying well back of the men. She wants to hear the chronicle but also hopes to avoid Skinner’s glance. She knows he thinks she’s fair game for the suggestive attention he pays to her. She finds a secluded spot behind the rigging and listens to his description of the shipping business and the islands in the Caribbean. She learns that hundreds of ships cross these waters every year from May to October, some to the West Indies, others to British North America. Those that are late arriving have to winter over; if it’s in the West Indies, soft summer breezes, fruit falling out of the trees and palm trees laden with coconuts make the stay a pleasure. But those who get stuck in British North America are as likely as not to perish in the dreadful winter months. She’d heard about the ice and snow from the men who met with her father to discuss shipping routes and cargo. She’d listened to tales of the savagery of the Indians and the ferocity of the beasts that roamed the forests. Her father had told her about the French Acadians—traitors, he said, who plotted against England and were a constant threat to the good British settlers who struggled to make shelters and find enough food to stay alive. The West Indies, in contrast, sounds like paradise.
“There’s where you’ll shape your future, boys,” Captain Skinner is saying. “For women, of course, it’s a different story.” Charlotte leans closer. “Concubines are commonplace on Jamaica.” Murmurs of assent all round. “Marriage—well, marriage is hardly heard of—and there’s some here aboard who’ll be glad of that, gentlemen, I tell you.”
General laughter. Charlotte’s face reddens. There could be no mistaking it: he is speaking to her.
“There’s little monogamy there,” says Captain Skinner, warming rapidly to his topic. “Every man may have several wives and several children with each one. Their real families are back in England—where they belong!” Laughter. “A man may buy himself a whore for what he pays to fill his pipe!”
Loud and sustained laughter.
Several men turn to look back to where Charlotte stands. She struggles for her dignity but cannot tolerate such raillery. She turns and strides to the hatch.
“Though a pipe may often give as much pleasure!” Captain Skinner calls after her and the men roar.
The moment her feet touch the passengers’ deck, she feels a surge of anger. She pushes past two men lounging in the dim passageway and hurries to the bunk she shares with Pad. He’s on his back, staring at the ceiling.
“You’ve not told me the truth, Pad! You’ve lied to me.”
He sits upright, looks puzzled.
“How do you mean?”
“You’ve deceived me and taken me for a fool.”
“I’ve done no such thing. What do you mean, Charlotte?”
Old Hutchins, who bunks across from them, looks over with mild curiosity, but drops his eyes when Charlotte gives him a look.
“You’ve told me you were taking me to a paradise, where we’d live and be free. But as far as the captain says, it seems to be a paradise only for men. Women there are nothing more than goods to be bought and sold in the market, like the poor Africans.”
“It’s not so, Charlotte.”
“Is it not? The captain’s been there a few times more often than you have, Pad Willisams!”
“We won’t be anybody’s slaves, Charlotte, I know that much.”
“You mean you won’t!”
“No, I won’t. The slaves are Africans. The native blacks they call the coloureds. We’re regarded altogether different.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“What is it then?”
Charlotte takes a long breath.
“Pad,” she says, “will we be living with the English and the other whites? Tell me the truth.”
“I … I don’t know, Charlotte. Not with perfect certainty. But I do know we’ll have nothing to fear from slave masters.”
“Who told you that?”
“Friends.”
“Friends who?”
“Friends I have—I had—in service.”
“And what did they know?”
“They knew.”
“Pad, did they know that Jamaica is a godless place where women are concubines? That marriage has no meaning?”
“The captain must be a liar, Charlotte.”
“A white woman has nothing to fear,” a raspy voice says. Charlotte turns to see Hutchins propped on one elbow. “They respect a white person, never mind man or woman.”
“What do you know?” Charlotte demands.
“Lived there fourteen years,” Hutchins says. He fades back onto his mattress, as though he’d spoken his last words.
Charlotte makes a short sound, not quite a laugh.
“Did you? And did you have a wife there too?”
“Three,” Hutchins says without opening his eyes. Charlotte rolls hers. “But none of ’em was white,” the old man adds.
Charlotte looks back to see Pad’s reaction, but his eyes are closed, shutting her out.
ON THE MORNING of July 7, she comes on deck to find the sails full and the spirits of every person on board lifted. She can’t find young Tommy. Her affection for the boy has grown so much, she worries about him constantly. The kittens are having their way all over the ship with the captain’s grudging approval. Lucifer is back on the prowl, hardly noticing the brood she’d birthed on board. The stalls are bare, the animals consumed. But Tommy is nowhere to be found. She knows his ailment is getting worse. He seems to be even smaller and his cough sounds like glass breaking in his lungs. When she finds him at last, he is lying on a heap of straw at the bottom of the ladder down to the storage hold, shaking with fever and talking gibberish. “Tommy, it’s me, Charlotte.” The boy moans, slurring words rapidly one into the other. She can’t make out his meaning, but it seems he is being chased. As hard as he runs with his words, his lungs cannot catch up. His breathing is ragged, noisy, his chest caving in with every heaving breath. She’s certain now that he is contagious, that touching him could bring about her own demise, but the pathetic sight of this blameless child overwhelms her. She gathers his puny frame into her arms, wraps her skirts and shawl around him and strokes his brow while whispering soothing thoughts in his ear. “You’ll stay in the islands with me. I’ll need a good boy like you to help me. You’ll see, Tommy, this voyage will end and there will be a new beginning.”
She stays there for hours, trying to will him to live. He sleeps a little, stirs as if in another nightmare and slips into suspended consciousness again. Then he wakens and begins to cough, to choke, she fears. She can feel his ribs against her arms as the cough tears through his emaciated body. The light around the ladder to the stalls turns to dusk, then dark. Pad finds her where she cradles Tommy; he brings them biscuits spread with molasses and strong tea. He warns her of the danger to herself, and suggests she leave the boy where he lies. The kittens, and Lucifer too, have found the heap of woman and boy and taken their places around them, burrowing into the warm, damp folds of Charlotte’s skirts. She wets Tommy’s lips with the tea, tries to dribble some liquid into his mouth. Pad returns with his own great coat. “I’ll tuck it under him. It might give some warmth to Tommy and protect you as well.” Charlotte knows Tommy needs more than a coat, more than her own ministration. “He needs decent food, a doctor.” Pad just shrugs—there is no one onboard except the incompetent Parsons.
The ship sails into the night. A brisk wind means they’ll change hands on deck and take advantage of the blow. The only sound is the snapping of the sails, the voices of the men above her head. Charlotte naps, wakening when Tommy’s coughing wrenches through both of them. Then suddenly he sits up, looks straight at her and in his peculiar way of speaking says, “Yer fair of face, Miss Charlotte. Yer eyes take the colour of the sea. Yer scent is fragrant, like the cattle.”
“Like the cattle!” she replies with mock horror, delighted to be teasing him. She thinks it must be a turning point, that the boy has gained his senses. But as quickly as he’d risen, he collapses again like a wicker basket suddenly disassembled. Then his eyes close and he becomes so still she finally realizes he has stopped breathing.
“You poor small boy,” she croons to the little body in her arms. “You never managed to find the shore.” She’s never seen anyone die before, much less held a lifeless body. She rocks the bundle in her arms and tries to reckon what will happen next.
A LOUD CLAMOUR of bells and the captain’s voice shouting words she can’t hear. Charlotte leaves Tommy’s body with Watkins, who had appeared with first light, and hurries onto the deck.
“Get below!” he commands her. “Get below this instant!”
She retreats in confusion. Several men jump through the hatch to the lower deck. Others push her toward it, then pass her down what seems like a moving platform of hands.
“Hasten now!” calls a sailor at the bottom of the ladder and points her toward her bunk.
“What’s happening?” Charlotte demands.
“Pirates,” the sailor shouts as he runs toward the stern. Charlotte feels the frisson of fear. Had they come so far and suffered such discomforts to die now? She hurries to her lover.
“Pad! There’s pirates!”
He jumps to his feet, grabbing Charlotte and pushing her behind him.
“You best get yourself down in the hold, mistress.” Hutchins lies on his filthy mattress, his face betraying no alarm. “You’ll be prize booty for ’em, that’s sure. They’d kill us all to have you. Not that I’d fight ’em. I’m too old for that. Get down in the hold, I say.”
Charlotte turns to Pad. “There’s hardly strength enough left on this ship to take on boys, much less bandits.”
Pad takes her hand and keeps her close while the other passengers huddle in silence. But she detests this, waiting like cattle in the hold for slaughter. She lets go of Pad’s hand and crosses through to the aft passageway. There is no one there and she wonders where she might best hide. Ten yards along, she sees light overhead. The second aft hatch is open. She hears distant voices and can’t resist the mad impulse to see for herself and climbs the ladder just far enough to peek above the level of the deck. A hundred yards to port is another ship, a large single-masted sloop on a parallel course. It is the first evidence of humanity beyond this ship they have encountered since they had left Bristol, and it has come to devour them.
She looks up and is surprised to see that the Anton carries only light sail, although the breeze is strong.
“Surely we must try,” she thinks. She looks along the deck to where Skinner and two officers stand at the rail. They face the approaching sloop and are waving their arms. The sloop draws close, its enormous mainsail billowing. Charlotte feels her throat constrict with anxiety so palpable she can hardly draw breath.
Men stand along the rail of the sloop with drawn blades and muskets. What chance has she to hide from these pitiless bandits? They have only to put a few of the Anton’s men to torture or the sword and her presence will soon be revealed. A voice rises above the sound of the rushing water.
“Heave to! Heave to now!”
It is spoken by a tall man who stands a head above the other pirates.
“Heave to! We’re boarding. Lay down your weapons and you’ll every one have mercy from us! Heave to!”
Captain Skinner waves again and calls out.
“Help! Help! We need water! Help!”
“Heave to, skipper!” calls the pirate captain. His hair is black and unbound, as Charlotte had always imagined a pirate’s hair would be. It is clear that fear had unmanned Skinner entirely. Her mind races. What can she do? What can she say?
“Help us!” calls Skinner.
“What’d ya say?” calls the pirate.
“Help! Hasten! The pox has struck and we’re desperate for water. Take what you will but give us water, we beg of you! Help!”
Charlotte sees four of the Anton’s crew appear from beneath the quarter deck. They bear a plank bound with a body wrapped for burial. Charlotte is torn between fear and grief. Another body follows the first. They are tipped overboard with awful slowness and when they are gone, one of the sailors who had carried them slumps to the deck and lies motionless. The others back away from him and turn to the rail.
“Water!” they call out. “Water!”
“What have you aboard?” calls the pirate leader.
“Good cotton!” Skinner replies. “You may have it all, what we have not wrapped the dead with.”
For some time the two ships sail on in parallel, not fifteen yards of sea between them, as the pirates talk among themselves. Another of the Anton’s crew crumples to his knees; the others give him wide berth.
“How many have you lost?” the pirate calls.
At that moment two sailors appear with yet another bound body. The pirates gather at their rail again.
“What’s in that there?” calls their captain.
“A lad who has just died,” says Skinner.
The pirate ship veers a little off, then closes again.
“Let’s see ’im, then!” calls the pirate.
Skinner looks pointedly at his men, and with great care the two sailors expose Tommy’s face to the sun.
“We’re short o’ water ourselves!” shouts the pirate captain. “Steer straight on! You’re not far now!”
The pirate sloop heels to starboard and veers across the wind. Within ten minutes, she is well off.
It is an old trick, as Charlotte later learned, but done well, it always stood a chance. No sailor wanted smallpox aboard. Coming on deck, Charlotte looks at Skinner’s leather face and feels an unexpected admiration for him. He makes his living on a dangerous sea and he has the gumption to see danger through. They owe their lives to him, and to the special instrument of their salvation, Tommy Yates.
At noon they stand at the rail as Skinner mumbles from the Book of Prayer. They bind a ballast stone to the boy for weight, his frail corpse not heavy enough to sink. They tip the plank forward and he is gone. Charlotte rushes to the side and looks. The scarf she had put around his thin neck trails behind as he plunges into the deep.
THEY SAIL ON under a strong wind. Danger, Charlotte thinks, is a matter of perspective. The captain’s audacity gulled the pirates, but his failure to make a timely landfall or reckon the proper provisions has primed them for death of another sort. The water is nearly gone and their false pleas to the pirates echo in all their ears. Charlotte uses some of the last of the cloudy liquid rationed to her and Pad to make two cups of tea. She crushes a few biscuits under a piece of planking and mixes the crumbs with dregs of molasses she has scraped from the side of the barrel.
“Here’s to our good health,” she proposes to Pad, who grins back at the strong-willed woman he loves. It had been nine miserable weeks. “If pirates came to us from land, land cannot be distant now,” she says.
That evening a young sailor named Jake approaches her. She had found his leering most distasteful when they had first come aboard, but she feels obliged to hear him out.
“I see ye can read words. Can ye tell me the meaning of this?”
He thrusts a bit of paper into her hand. She reads: “Yorkshire Plantation, Jamaica, The West Indies. Courtesy, Master John Frye.”
“What does that mean to you?” she asks.
“I’ll not be worked to death by some friend to the damned captain who brings men to load ships at the docks. I know Master Frye and I mean to find himself when we reaches the land.”
THE NEXT AFTERNOON, Charlotte and Pad lie listlessly on their bunk, bored, testy and tired of the interminable voyage.
“Land ho!”
It sounds distant and for a moment she wonders if this is indeed the call. Then again.
“Land off port bow!”
Charlotte looks along the passage. No one moves. Has every passenger been struck dumb by the news? She and Pad climb from their bunks. Others still sit like statues, though some are smiling. Perhaps the notion of salvation is percolating into their souls, thinks Charlotte, but she for one is going on deck. Abruptly they rise together, clamber to the ladder and crawl up its greasy rungs.
Green masses of land bumping up out of the sea make islands of every shape. Most have rugged mountains that fall into forests the colour of emeralds. Others are hilly with flat plains dotted with palm trees. The islands are surrounded by exquisite turquoise water and edged with white sandy beaches. They can see military forts and battlements on the hills and columns of smoke swirling skyward, a sign of civilized life here in the New World. The softest breeze she’s ever felt blows in Charlotte’s face.
While the captain negotiates the tricky channel toward the harbour in Jamaica, Charlotte stands at the rail chattering like a child about the wise decision they’d made. For Pad, it is a relief beyond measure. He’d used all the bravado he could muster in telling Charlotte of this place, which in truth he knew almost nothing about. But it was the only place he could think of where he and Charlotte could have a life together. From their vantage point, the island looks indeed like the Garden of Eden. As they get closer they can see the town of Kingston and beyond to great mansions perched on the surrounding hillsides. The plantations she’d heard about spill out of these estates and roll out to what looks like a bustling centre of commerce. Imposing buildings with commanding columns, presumably government houses, are decked in flags and smaller ones, perhaps trading establishments, fill in the rest of what appears to be the main thoroughfare. Between that orderly looking town centre and the dock is another reality. Crowded shanties lean against one another like broken clay pots. Every alleyway produces another angle of huts teeming with mothers and babies, hawkers selling their wares, a scene so colourful—brown skin, vibrant orange, red, green and blue clothing, trays of pink and purple fruit—the scene is like a mural that hangs in the great hall at the governor’s mansion in Sussex, back home. The port in front of them is layered with row upon row of warehouses. Soon, she thinks, they’ll quit this horrible ship and begin their lives anew.
The arrival at the dock is similar to their departure from England, save the temperature. There are dock masters shouting orders and a collection of vagabonds looking for wayward parcels that may fall into their hands. Charlotte is amused by the activity and not in the least concerned about the safekeeping of the trunk she packed clandestinely so many weeks ago. All she can focus on now is the solid land that will soon be under her feet, the glorious bath in hot water in which she can scrub the grime from her body and the fresh clothes carefully folded in the trunk that will replace the grimy ones she wears.
THE SHIP is secured, the gangplank is lowered and without a backward glance Charlotte steps her way to the land she has imagined during the long weeks at sea. The passengers on board are rounded up for a tally in the passengers’ shed. Jake sends a pleading look to Charlotte as if to say, “Find me Master Frye and get me away from these men.” She can’t help him. In fact, her legs are wobbling on the terra firma so much she can hardly help herself. They move to the cargo shed and wait for their belongings, trusting the Captain Skinner to fulfill his final duty. Even though personal possessions are to be off-loaded before the cargo, they wait for hours. The sun that had been so welcome when they first got off the ship is unbearably hot. The shredded roof of the shed where they wait provides no relief. The sweat now mixing with the soiled bodice and skirts she wears is making her garments stink. She can hardly wait to cast them off.
Pad strikes up a conversation with the overseer in the shed.
“Is the Willisams family known to you?”
The overseer, a bearded man of fifty, looks at him without expression. “There are many such families here,” he says. “Which do you seek?”
Pad hadn’t considered the possibility of a choice.
“Hire a coach to take you to the governor’s office at the centre of the town,” the overseer finally volunteers. “Ask for Camilla Willisams. She’s acquainted with most persons here.”
The road to the governor’s office passes no shanties. Charlotte cranes her neck at majestic palms, coconuts gathered overhead like string bags of giant marbles. Crimson bougainvillea bracts burst out of the bushes along the trail and mix their sweet scent with the sea air. As the distance between the couple and the Anton increases, so do their spirits.
The governor’s office is about to close when they arrive and ask to speak with Camilla Willisams. The woman at the front desk, whose skin is the colour of milky coffee and who projects a bland, detached air, says flatly, “Yes.” Presuming she is Camilla, Pad steps forward.
“Good day, madam. My wife and I have just arrived from England on the Anton.”
“Sa ki non’w?” Camilla says. Pad looks perplexed.
“I think she is asking for our names,” Charlotte says.
“Willisams, ma’am. You and I share the same family name.”
“Ki sa ou vlé?” she asks, in a stern tone of voice.
Captain Skinner had said most people here spoke English as well as Creole, a mixture of English, French and Portuguese, but the woman in front of them doesn’t seem to be speaking any language they can understand. Charlotte wonders if it is possible that she wants nothing to do with them? After several more failed exchanges, it becomes clear that the Willisams name is not the ticket to welcome they had hoped for. Camilla finally condescends to use English, and dispatches them to a village at the edge of town where she says they can find shelter with others who are unsettled.
The waiting coachman, who seems more inclined to English, suggests that the nearby village really is their best hope for accommodation. With no one to advise them otherwise, Pad and Charlotte agree.
Fields stretch out on either side of the track. The sun is dropping out of the sky and into the sea with that alarming rapidity they had observed as they’d sailed into tropical waters. It is an orange ball of flame that lights the clutches of families walking arm in arm through the fields toward home and burnishes the smoke that curls from their small houses.
“We’re likely going to a way station,” Charlotte says. “Some place where arriving passengers stay until they can make proper arrangements.” The land around them becomes brown bog, almost undefined in the fading light.
“Ow!” Charlotte swats at her neck. A moment later Pad, too, begins swatting. The air is suddenly full of flying insects that bite at every exposed bit of flesh.
“Mosquitoes,” says the driver. “Better you should cover yourselves.”
Charlotte pulls her soiled shawl from her bag and Pad lifts the collar of his shirt.
“Whoever heard of mosquitoes this big?” Charlotte wants to know.
It is pitch dark when they pull into the village, a crush of thatched shanties, fires burning in pits in front of the huts. The driver stops at what appears to be the only proper dwelling and disembarks. A European man with a drooping moustache and oversized belly stands on the doorstep and the two speak briefly. Charlotte can see the man looking over the driver’s shoulder at her.
The driver unloads the trunk and accepts his payment in silence, then is gone.
“Welcome to Jamaica.” The man stifles a yawn. “Hurry in now, before the mossies carry you away.”
Pad drags the trunk inside and the door closes behind them. Straw mats are strewn about the floor of the main room, and are separated by curtains of cotton that hang from pegs on the beams above them, just like the dreary curtains that hung between bunks on the ship. It seems a dozen others have found their way to this house, though Charlotte recognizes none from the ship. A fire burns in the centre of the room, some smoke escaping through a hole in the roof while the rest fills the room.
“I’m Lutz,” says the man. “What is it I might do for you?”
“Sir,” says Pad, “my wife and I have just disembarked from the Anton, out of England.”
“England? You don’t say. Fancy that then.” Lutz gives them a broad smile that reveals two prominently absent teeth.
“We need fresh water, baths, food,” Charlotte interrupts.
“Food.” Lutz rubs the stubble on his chin. “Yes. We have food. And water. But baths”—he lets out a rolling chuckle—“We don’t see too many baths here on the plantation.”
“Would you be so kind, sir, as to tell us where we are?” asks Pad.
Lutz frowns. “In what sense do you mean, sir?”
“We’re entirely new to the island, sir.”
“Them’s sent you told you, did they not? The Raleigh Plantation is famous enough,” Lutz says. “I’m its manager and this village serves its needs. You’ll find we ain’t got much here, but I can offer you shelter.”
“Thank you, sir,” says Pad, and he indeed feels a gratitude that almost equals his weariness.
“We get a lot come from the ships, seeking work and a life on the island. And we get many that are running from another life, one they choose to leave behind.” His eyes convey a knowing twinkle. Charlotte feels a sizzle of indignation.
“You spoke of food, sir,” she reminds him.
Lutz produces slices of bread and mugs of tea from a table by the window and suggests they sit on the bench against the wall. When they have eaten he shows them to their straw mats. Charlotte’s heart sinks now, as it had sunk a score of times in the course of that day.
“Never fear, love,” Pad whispers. “We’re only weary. Tomorrow will be a good day.”
“What did he mean, ‘those who sent us’?” Charlotte wants to know.
“In the morning, love. In the morning.”
They drag their trunk near their pallets and collapse exhausted on the straw.
THE SKY IS BARELY LIGHT when Lutz begins shouting to waken the household. There is a lineup for the basin of water on the sideboard, but tea is brewing, fresh bread is baking in an outdoor oven and, mercifully, there are heaping plates of mangoes for the house full of refugees. When the others have eaten and left, Lutz takes Charlotte and Pad outside into the yard. “You can stay here if you want to work,” he says. “I need a man to help the overseer of the plantation. There is a cottage nearby. You can earn your keep with work.” He says he also needs a person to do the accounts and inquires whether either of them can read. A huffy Charlotte tells him, “Of course I can read.” For that, he says he is willing to pay five shillings a month. Both faces must register their dismay, for Lutz tells them flatly, “Your options are not better than this. If you don’t want to stay here, you must go back to town on the cart this morning.”
With diminishing enthusiasm for the idyllic life they’d envisioned in these islands, they decide to stay at least until they can get their bearings. The pair move into the dingy one-room cottage at the edge of a field of sugar cane. Charlotte opens the trunk that contains their only possessions to find linens for their straw palette. It’s while they are settling into the cottage that Pad first complains of the swell left by the mosquitoes the night before. “They must like your taste,” Charlotte teases, relieved that her own bites are small and few. There isn’t even time to fully unpack the trunk before Lutz returns and directs Pad to the office of the overseer and tells Charlotte to come to his house to work on the account books.
The next few days are a blur of work, sleep and beating off the pests that crawl over everything in the cottage. There is no possibility to make another plan, much less unpack their belongings. Charlotte pulls a clean frock from the trunk each day and washes the one she’s worn, spreading it to dry on a bush behind the cottage. As for the clothes she sailed away in, she tossed them on the fire the very first night, creating a smudge that she hoped would at least keep the mosquitoes away.
EACH NIGHT BEFORE DUSK, though the air is stifling, they stoke the fire to ward off the mosquitoes. Mattie Higgs who stays in the hut next door has told them a smoky fire works best. Each morning, they go to their respective jobs. Lutz informs them that the harvest in the far field must be done by week’s end. Agents will collect the cane for export and the ship will depart directly. There is no time to rest.
ON THEIR FIFTH DAY, another morning where rain streams down ceaselessly, Pad complains that his joints are aching.
“It’s the working, I should think,” says Charlotte. “We have laid like lumps on that ship these months.”
Pad’s joints continue to torment him and two days later, he develops a fever. Charlotte presses cold cloths to his head at night. One of the women who lives with Lutz—a concubine, Charlotte assumes—advises her to pack mud on the swollen bites.
Charlotte’s worry grows to a gnawing fear. Rain continues to fall.
“No surprise, that,” one of the other women explains. “It’s the rainy season, my girl. It’s gonna rain and rain these five months.”
The deluge that had soaked the plantation that first day had seemed a welcome relief from the oppressive heat and a good wash for a dirty world. But now every single morning, the rain pelts down on the cottage for an hour or so and turns the fields into swamps and the tropical air into clouds of steam.
Pad grows worse by the hour. That night he groans in his sleep and then he vomits into the vessel beside the bed. On the ninth morning, his eyes roll in his head and he begins to shake violently. Charlotte runs to the main house.
“Mr. Lutz! Mr. Lutz!” she calls. “Please come! Pad is sick! You must help me!”
Lutz sends for a woman who, he assures Charlotte, is known for her cures, a local witch who gathers her medicines in the woods. While they wait for the woman to arrive, he looks at Charlotte with an undertaker’s face.
“We got yellow fever here,” he says.
“What is that, sir?”
“Bad.”
“Where do you have it?”
“On this island.”
“It’s a big island with many people.”
“Indeed, Mrs. Willisams. And many dying.” He fills his pipe, regarding her as he does so. “Many widows, alone and grieving, are grateful for the support of a proper man.”
THE MEDICINE WOMAN is remarkably old, wrinkly, toothless and not as high as Charlotte’s shoulder. Her name is Mrs. Sue. When she arrives at the cottage, she ties a kerchief over her face and indicates that Charlotte should do the same. Pad’s fever is raging. Charlotte spends her time running back and forth between the office where she is supposed to be working and the cottage where her man lies close to death.
She asks the woman if Pad’s sickness is contagious. “It’s the yellow,” Mrs. Sue tells her. “Mosquito.”
Charlotte lies beside Pad and tries to sooth his delirious mutterings. He’d been her lover for more than a year. She’d turned her back on her own family to run away with him. The voyage had been tough on the pair—instead of being the handsome, affable man who ran the household, he’d been nervous, easily defeated by judgmental glares from the other passengers. But once on shore, she’d assumed his confidence would return and with it, the emotionally powerful bond of their illicit relationship.
Desperate, she lifts her head to his ear and whispers, “Don’t leave me, Pad. I’m carrying your child.” She watches his face for a response, but there is no sign.
The medicine woman returns with a concoction of juices and tells a frantic Charlotte to wait outside in the soaking rain and the suffocating heat. There’s no sound from the cottage. The morning rain lets up, the men in the field cleave the cane, the women tend to their children and Charlotte waits and waits. Then the door to the cottage opens; the old woman pulls the kerchief from her face and says, “I regrets to inform ye miss, your man is dead.”