16

True happiness consists not in the multitude of friends, but in the worth and choice.

Ben Jonson

As the hated manacles fell noisily from her wrists, Lark looked over the ship’s rail to where Magnus stood beside an important-looking gentleman on the crowded quay. Her heart turned over. He’d looked no less stunned than she on seeing him in such plain clothes. Gone was his handsome Scots garb with its heather blues and grays, his sporran and sgian dubh, the kilt hose and brogues. What had been done to them? Why was he allowed out of the master’s side of the tolbooth? Could it be because he’d been freed? Or was it simply because he had powerful friends?

The lack of details added to her angst. She might never see him again. ’Twas so undeserved, his gaoling. Banished for being clad in the garb of their people. Or did it have more to do with his untimely defense of her?

From the very beginning she’d tried not to rail at God. But as fear became commonplace and hope was lost, the future loomed large enough to entertain black doubts. She was innocent, not a convict to be condemned to a wild, unwanted land. All she held dear was on Kerrera. ’Twas the worst sort of sentence to leave all that was beloved. Why did the Lord allow such things? Had she not prayed hard enough? Trusted God enough? Was He punishing her?

The wailing at her side ended her painful ponderings. A baby, as bonny as his mother was sallow and frail, reached out to Lark with bare, plump arms. Lark took the wee fingers in her own, unsure of his mother’s reaction. His damp smile was her reward, a welcome reprieve from his tears.

His mother turned dull eyes on Lark. “Ye’ve no babe o’ yer own?”

“Nay.”

“He favors ye, wee Larkin does.”

Larkin, was it? Lark tried to smile despite the moment’s misery, gazing over the babe’s thatch of ginger hair to Magnus on the quay. He’d turned his back on her, and his stance, however unintended, rent her heart.

“Ye can hold him if ye like.” Frail arms offered the babe to Lark.

She took the infant, going wide-eyed at his weight. A ruadh-headed handful he was. He gave a chortle of delight, and the knot of women looked relieved, spared of his fretfulness. His dimpled hand brushed Lark’s flushed cheek, his bright eyes on her face.

“Yer a braw laddie,” Lark crooned near his ear, nostrils stung with the smell of urine and soured milk.

She longed to give him a bath. Dress him in a clean shift. Amuse him somehow. Both he and his mother were missing a single plaything. How he’d love the coral beads. They’d fallen from her pocket when she’d readied to bathe, but the kindly gaol matron simply looked the other way, letting her keep them.

As she lost sight of Magnus on shore, her thoughts veered to the captain. What had become of him? By now he might’ve hanged. The hollowness inside her widened as rain began spattering down, causing even the babe to look up.

Her gaze roamed the strange ship. The quarterdeck was raised, a railing enclosing the officers. Far below was the cargo hold, the befouled orlop deck a horror. Long ago the captain had explained the parts of a ship to her when he’d procured the Merry Lass. Remembering, Lark bounced the babe on her hip as the women were led to a locked hatch and then farther below to a place where wide sleeping shelves hung from both sides of the hull.

She breathed in the sharp scent of wood shavings, refreshing after the rancid straw of the gaol cell. The stores in the hold on either side of their quarters was plain enough. Coffee and spices and tobacco mingled in the damp air. But she knew, too, that during their two or more months at sea the fresh newness would quickly wear off, the stink of the bilge unbearable.

For the moment, she felt sharp concern for the babe’s mother. Droplets of sweat beaded the woman’s brow, and when she reached for the ladder that led them past the hatch, a shaft of light called out a dull red rash splotching her neck and the tanned skin above her fraying bodice.

Gaol fever?

Granny believed such was spread by the bites of lice and fleas. Lark’s own skin was nigh eaten up before her recent bath, and no hartshorn was to be had.

“Ye look bound for the sick berth, ye do,” one of the women murmured to the babe’s mother, taking a step back.

“She canna leave her bairn,” another said, looking to wee Larkin who contentedly chewed on one of Lark’s bonnet strings.

“He isna mine but my sister’s,” the woman confessed, wiping the sweat from her face with a begrimed sleeve. “She died in childbed. I’m his only kin.”

“Who’s his da?”

A shrug. “Some say he’s a man o’ some standing in Edinburgh. But she was one of them disorderly girls.”

A dismayed murmur overshadowed them. “How’ve ye gotten nourishment for ’im?”

“He’s right fond o’ goat’s milk.”

“There’s no goats here,” clucked the oldest among them.

Lark sighed, knowing he’d soon need feeding. Chin shiny with drool, he smiled up at her, his pink gums sporting one pristine tooth. Her heart squeezed. Here he was, blooming like the heather in their soiled, sordid world, unaware of their grim circumstances.

He’d surely not live long in such brutish conditions. The pecking order soon came clear. With over one hundred women bound for the hold, a few vied for first place. Trinkets smuggled aboard were demanded or threatened or stolen by day’s end. Never before had Lark heard such curses or bullying.

Coral beads secreted in her pocket, Lark kept to her shadowed corner, the babe with her while his ailing aunt slept. But Lark was still privy to the women’s thieving and threats, their insults and abuses. Bett, deprived of a blanket by Nance, complained to the officers, only to be set upon in the darkness and beaten nearly senseless at midnight.

The next day the most troublesome of the convict women broke into the bulkhead and guzzled several bottles of port before they were discovered. This earned a dozen stripes from a cat-o’-nine-tails, and the voyage had not yet begun.

Lark looked on, dazed. Fighting the urge to scream, she weighed jumping overboard as fear gained another foothold. Would death not be preferable to this ongoing agony? This terrible wonder of what would befall them next?

Lord, what will become of us all after two months at sea?

She resisted a shudder, her homesickness fierce, her questions mounting. How was Granny? What about Magnus? Would he be released from the tolbooth and returned to Kerrera? What of the captain? She’d lost all track of time. When was it she’d last seen him?

The present pressed in, the frenzied preparations on deck at a peak. Sailing was imminent. Lark waited for the telltale lurch of the ship, her last hope for a petition of clemency dissolving. The sick berth filled, and two women died of gaol fever by the third day. Braziers of herbs burned between decks, and even gunpowder was charged to dispel the miasma.

Would Larkin’s aunt survive? The listless woman lay on her bunk, refusing so much as a sip of water. Though one of the other older women had offered to help tend Larkin, his aunt refused all but Lark.

Did she believe Lark a Quaker in her plain garb? A worthy guardian for her wee nephew?

The babe sat on Lark’s lap, rosy cheeked and often babbling. His simplicity and innocence tugged at her. How content he was to just be held and sung to, satisfied with her portion of gruel or sips of water. She herself felt ravenous, starved for sunlight and clean air and solid ground. Her stillroom and croft. Granny’s quiet company. A place not sullied by coarse talk and curses.

Bereft of even the smallest trunk, all she had were the borrowed Quaker clothes and the captain’s coral beads. And a baby.

But even these could be taken, snatched away in the blink of an eye.

She fixed her eye on a roach crawling across a floorboard. Her whole being recoiled. How would she survive?

Lord, all I have is Ye. Make that enough.

A few well-placed words. More than a few gold guineas. Magnus knew something had been accomplished by Osbourne’s glad expression as he faced him in his transport cell the next morn, iron bars between them.

“The appeal’s gone through. Miss MacDougall is to be transferred to the Bonaventure as an indenture.”

Magnus leaned into the bars, almost light-headed with relief. “When will it happen?”

“In the forenoon. She’s to leave the Neptune by lighter no later than ten o’clock. They’re to sail soon after so the exchange must be quick.”

His prayers had been answered—again. Few appeals were granted by the Scottish judiciary. At a time when women were still burned at the stake for petty theft, Lark’s deliverance seemed nothing short of miraculous. Still, the tight timeline, the imminent sailing, begged further worry. More praying. But if it all came off . . .

“I owe ye,” Magnus said.

“Nary a ha’pence I’ll take, especially if she’s as skilled as you say she is.” Osbourne took a vial from his pocket and waved the smelling salts beneath his nose, then passed the vial to Magnus. “You’ll have need of it till your own transfer tomorrow afternoon. The turnkey will deliver you to the docks no later than three o’clock.”

“When do we sail?”

“Once the livestock pens on the foredeck are finished and stocked and the ship’s watered.” He reached for his pocket watch, a flash of ornate silver in the gloom. “I expect the ship shall depart Glasgow two days hence.”

Even a crowded ship seemed preferable to gaol. In just a day their number increased, though a few female prisoners, like Larkin’s aunt, were removed to the infirmary. Lark cajoled, bounced, sang, and begged milk from a steward, her back aching from toting the babe.

The next morn, a harried ship’s surgeon faced her, expression doleful. “The wee laddie’s kin is dead.”

Lark sat on the edge of a sleeping platform as a hush descended on what now numbered nearly one hundred twenty convict women.

“God rest her soul,” one said.

“Amen.” Benumbed, Lark looked to the sleeping lad in her arms. “A prison ship is no place for a babe.”

“Nay, but the law is all those six years and under be aboard whilst those older remain in their native land,” the surgeon said.

“So yer saying the babe’s banished too.”

He wiped his hands on a rag dangling from his waist. “The woman’s dying words were meant for ye. Said she bequeathed ye the babe and no other.”

Larkin awoke and howled. Lark rearranged him, tucking his perspiring head beneath her trembling chin. ’Twas all she could do not to fall to pieces. However would she manage a needy bairn?

“Ye look every inch the laddie’s mother,” the woman nearest her said in consoling tones. “Yer hair’s the same. Even has a dimple same as ye.”

“Hoot!” another said. “She doesna have any milk—”

“Neither did his auntie. A milch goat’ll do.”

An argument erupted over the best nourishment, how to rear him and keep him clean and content. But all agreed Lark was the answer.

That night she huddled in her bunk, praying more than sleeping. Larkin’s plump body curled into hers, a nugget of warmth in the bowels of a ship that seemed to lose every speck of heat once the sun set and take on the cold of the sea. He slept fitfully, having wet himself. She would have to beg some cloth.

The steward roused her at break of day with news she’d never in a hundred years thought to hear. Even he seemed flummoxed when he said, “Yer to come on deck for transfer to the Bonaventure.”

Transfer? “Why?”

He looked annoyed. “Orders.”

Felons asked few questions, especially female ones. She carried a still-sleeping Larkin in a sort of sling about her back and shoulders, compliments of the ship’s surgeon who’d seen West Indies mothers do the same. It eased her back and Larkin seemed to like it.

Without further explanation, into a lighter they went in the damp dawn, rowing across the harbor crowded with prison hulks, private merchant vessels, his majesty’s warships, pilot boats, and the local fishing fleet.

Soon Larkin would awake and want to be fed. ’Twas a routine she dreaded, not knowing how the next batch of milk would be had. Her own stomach cramped with emptiness. The convict ship they’d just left seemed a child’s toy compared to the behemoth looming ahead with its bow bearing the nautical figurehead of a mermaid.

Half a dozen men stared down at her from the gunwale. Soon she was raised in a boatswain’s chair, reminding her of distressed livestock forced into canvas slings and hoisted on board. She felt just as ungainly with Larkin clutched to her bodice—a cow and a calf, truly.

“Ah, a Quaker miss,” the mate said, handing her over the ship’s side.

“I wasna told of a bairn,” another said.

Would they send her back to the Neptune then? Heaven forbid. Glad of her modest garb, she was aware of the scrutiny of a great many men. Where were the female criminals? All she saw were sailors. Alarm spiked through her. Had there been some mistake? Nay, they’d called her by name.

She was led below to what she feared was the orlop, through an open hatch, past closed doors to a berth—all her own? One she’d share with wee Larkin. Once the door was closed, not locked, she took in her new surroundings.

Bethankit, Lord.

Her sense that she’d narrowly been delivered of something terrible swelled. Yet a tendril of anxiety took root. Why was she here aboard the Bonaventure instead?

Here, at the moment, consisted of four wooden walls, both a bunk and a hammock, a small table and chair, and a blessed porthole open to a breeze. No scent of bilge. No signs of cockroaches or rats. No one fighting for a sleeping platform or crust of bread. No one threatening to stick you with a straight pin in your sleep.

Silence. But for the sound of footsteps and creak of ropes above. And the babe’s gentle breathing.

In minutes, a knock sounded and breakfast was brought. Porridge, still steaming. Toast with blackened crust. Tea.

She blinked as the tray was set down. It seemed ungrateful to ask for milk for the babe in the face of such bounty. Mightn’t she spoon him some porridge and tea?

Larkin saved her the difficulty. Flushed and still perspiring from sleep, he awoke and stared at the strange steward and squawked.

“Sounds a bit like the captain’s parrot, ye do.” The man grinned. “But I ken ’tis milk yer wanting.” He moved toward the open door. “And a private corner.”

“Please—I’m not his mother. I canna nurse . . .”

He swung back around, looking baffled. Truly, at first glance, their resemblance was uncanny.

“I’ve no experience with bairns, miss. What d’ye suggest?”

“Goat’s milk?”

His eyes lit with satisfaction. “The bairn willna starve then. The last o’ the livestock was loaded this morn. I did spy a nannie and kid among the bucks.”

“I’ll need a supply of cloth for clouts to keep him clean and dry.”

This he might manage. A nod reassured her. “He’s a braw lad, even if he’s not yer own.”

She smiled her thanks and stared at the tray. The porridge had ceased steaming. The tea was likely tepid. Best withhold any more questions or requests. She sat down at the tiny table, Larkin still close in his sling, and left nary a crumb, spooning her charge a tiny taste of tea now and again, his perplexed expression comical.

Time ticked on. Had the goat’s milk been forgotten? The cloths? She’d used her apron as a last resort. Laying him down on the sleeping platform, she changed him, her cap now a clout.

He began to whimper and kick his feet, not one to be distracted ere long.

“I left my baby lying here, lying here, lying here. I left my baby lying here to go and gather blueberries . . .” The Scots lullaby failed to soothe, and she was grateful for another knock. A piggin of goat’s milk, still warm, brought by a red-faced cabin boy. He presented a horn spoon and scampered off quick as a squirrel.

“So, wee one, angels watch over ye.” ’Twas something Granny had said to her in years gone by and now rolled easily from her tongue. But the ache the lullaby wrought remained, and she finished his feeding damp-eyed.

As she set him on the bunk, he gave a satisfied belch, bringing a needed chuckle from her. She took the coral beads from her pocket and dangled them before his snapping blue eyes, weighing the wisdom of using them as a plaything. Brittle, even fragile, they might succumb to the tiniest tooth.

He grabbed at the colorful beads and she drew back, expecting a scowl but gaining a gurgling laugh. Like sunshine he was to her merriment-starved soul.

They played the game till another knock sounded. The same cabin boy. But this time a sober summons.