34

AUGUSTA

Saturday, June 16, 1838

Sometime during the third night, Augusta had taken Thomas and moved near Mauma, a slave woman whose master and mistress had perished. Mauma was shorter than any woman Augusta had ever known and she’d seen her often in the market, laughing and conversing with everyone and anyone who crossed her path. Her accent had a singsong quality that Augusta hadn’t heard before or since; the straw basket had swung from her arm, roped with muscle. Now, just like the rest of the shipwrecked, she appeared exhausted in body, her forehead dripping sweat over her hooded eyes as she rocked back and forth. Her hair damp and clinging to her neck. Did she know she was singing?

Augusta crawled near Mauma, set her back against the woman and took her hand. Mauma squeezed Augusta’s hand in return and her singing paused for a moment. “The waters took my baby,” she said softly as a breeze.

“Today?” Augusta asked, misery tempering her voice.

“Not today. Years ago. She walked right into the Savannah River, and it wasn’t on no accident. And I wonder now if she’s here, wandering these waters with us.”

“Oh, Mauma. I don’t . . . know. I am so terribly sorry.”

Mauma offered a sound between a grunt and a sigh and again began her song, as if singing to that daughter who walked into the waters, the daughter to whom she probably sang this song all her early years. Such devastation humanity bore. Augusta didn’t know, wasn’t sure at all, that if she survived this she would survive feeling the anguish that would be part of her life, that would reach into her soul over and over. And then again and again.

Mauma continued to chant and sing. The language wasn’t Augusta’s but the pain expressed was everyone’s. Augusta rocked back and forth to the rhythm.

Henry was hard at work with several other men to make the yawl seaworthy—they would die if someone didn’t go find help. No one had come looking for them—two days without salvation in sight.

Augusta’s battered mind wandered to a woman named Fannie Kemble, whom she had met a few years before, a woman married to a friend of her father’s. She’d come to the Longstreet house in Savannah for a visit. Over the tea table, her eyes had flamed with righteous anger that Augusta hadn’t understood. Didn’t this woman from England with the beautiful lyrical accent have everything any woman could want? A handsome husband. A downtown house and a plantation on the Altamaha River that provoked jealousy in others. Yet she had burned with a critical assessment of the South: “Your devotion to conformity is like nothing I’ve ever seen. Despite being the most politically free people in the world, you are the least socially free I’ve ever encountered.”

Augusta had both bristled and been enchanted by this woman who had traveled by ship and train and buggy to be with the man she loved. Of the slaves, Fannie had said they were in perpetual degradation. “All this ‘massa’ and ‘missus’ is quite disturbing.”

Now floating in the godforsaken sea, her back against Mauma’s, Augusta saw her life through a lens that had been clouded with creature comforts and willful blindness. Only despair could allow her to hear what Fannie had said—owning another human being was inhumane.

A cry interrupted the chanting and Augusta looked up to see what the men were hollering about—white sails on the horizon.

“A ship!” Lamar cried out. “There.”

Thomas lolled against Augusta’s chest. “Thomas, darling. We are saved,” she murmured into his ear. He stirred but did not open his eyes. Soon they would be in warm homes, drinking cold water, their feet out of the salt water and their bodies out of the sun. Their cramped stomachs would be filled with food; their parched tongues quenched by water.

Voices that had been silent now ceaselessly and desperately called out to the white sails. The men stood and waved white shirts over their heads; the women wailed. But the sounds were swallowed by the sea. The sails moved away, incrementally, taking hope with them.

What now? If there was to be no salvation by another, were they to wither under the sun? Die of thirst? Augusta believed this the cruelest fate she could imagine. She was briefly envious of those who had died quickly, sucking sea into their lungs and drifting to the bottom. At least they were at peace.

A desperate silence fell over the deck. If that ship hadn’t been looking for them, was anyone at all? Had the outside world given up on them? Were they to die this way without even a soul searching for them? Were they already being mourned?

The hours passed. Twice Henry stopped by to check on Augusta, smoothing the hair from her cheek, murmuring reassurance. His touch was as tender as she’d imagined and yet there was nothing for them now.

“Did you see any of Melody’s children when you were floating?” she asked him when he sat beside her for a moment.

He touched Thomas’s cheek. “I didn’t. The last I saw any of you until the moment I arrived here was when you climbed onto the yawl that took on water and tipped you into the sea. I thought all of you were gone. I grieved for you. I chastised myself for waiting to tell you how I felt, for trying my own patience by coming near to you without declaring myself. Of what use was that to me? What did propriety matter? It seemed all nonsense as I floated on the waves and imagined you gone.”

“Henry . . .”

He touched her cheek and she leaned into his hand, and then shivered with the memory. “I did see Charles for a moment but then he was gone again,” she said. “The waves—they obliterate everything. And Melody . . .” Augusta paused at the horror. “Was gone. I saw her floating facedown, her gown around her like a ghost . . . and then sinking. And Eliza—I tried to save her, but it would have meant letting go of Thomas. I prayed to God. I chose, but not on purpose. I realized it afterward: I chose Thomas, God save my soul.”

“You did the best you could. You cannot save everyone. You could barely save the two of you. Do not chide yourself, Augusta. This is a watery hell and we must cling to hope.”

Augusta nodded and touched Henry’s bruised forearm. “We can try.”

The day slipped by in unremitting thirst and half consciousness as she dozed, then was jolted back to awareness. Once when she was almost asleep—blessed absence from the horrors—she was awakened by a man hollering.

“Look there.” Wearing a torn evening shirt and pants, a scrap of sail tied around his head to protect it from the sun, Mr. Henderson from Charleston stumbled toward a bit of flotsam that floated near the deck. Augusta focused until she could make out what it was—a wicker basket riding the waves as pleasurably as a child in a lake. Several others rushed to help drag the basket to the deck. Mr. Henderson raised the lid so slowly that Augusta almost screamed at him to hurry.

He lifted the contents one by one and identified them as if they were passengers he’d saved.

“Two bottles of wine. Two vials—one of peppermint and one of laudanum for pain.”

“Oh, mercy,” another man cried out. Augusta recognized him—Pastor Woart from Savannah. His wife, still dressed in an evening gown, lay next to him, blinking at the wide blue sky without a sound. “Put our trust in the Almighty to do what is best for us.”

“Best for us?” a man screamed from the edge of the timber. An engineer, his watch cap still on his head, his face blistered with boils from the steam that had exploded from the engine. “Put our trust in the Almighty for what is best for us?” He approached the pastor with fire in his eyes, anger burning red as his face.

“Yes,” Pastor Woart said in the assurance Augusta could not understand. The simple answer sent the engineer to his knees and he began to weep, holding his hands over the injuries to protect them from the glaring sun.

Augusta felt that the air around her was like mud; she moved so slowly, fading and then becoming bright again. Behind the basket another piece of large, splintered wood floated into view, and she wondered if she was dreaming, events not so much happening one after the other as overlapping in time.

On this wreckage, two men sat waving their arms like flags. The flotage listed and a hoarse voice called out, “We’ve been rowing all day and night. We won’t hold together much longer. Please say you have room for us.”

“Swim to us. We’ll save you,” Lamar shouted.

One man jumped into the sea, swimming with the strong strokes of one trying to save his own life. A rope was thrown, Augusta couldn’t see by whom, and the man was dragged onto the wreckage.

“Your name?” Lamar asked.

“Mr. Robert Worthington.”

“Mrs. Worthington!” Lamar shouted with a strength Augusta didn’t believe he still possessed. “Your husband is saved.”

The man, muscled and broad, had so little energy that he crawled across the watery deck until he fell into his wife’s lap and together they wept.

Lamar tossed the rope to the man who remained on the sinking flotage and pulled him to the edge of the decking. Augusta had never seen him before, but his ripped and burned uniform indicated he was a sailor from the ship. She could not move her gaze from his pink face and swollen eyes. His hands bled and his bare feet were raw. A gash about six inches long was open on his arm, exposing the underbelly of the muscle. She turned away.

Lamar pointed toward the men who were attempting to repair the wrecked yawl and explained, “Over there is a leaking boat. We are attempting to fix it and go row for help.”

The sailor’s accent told of his Danish roots as he took a few shaky steps toward it. “I can help.”

How could she help? Augusta wondered, looking at her own clothing. Could she rip off any more to stuff into the holes of the yawl? No, none that wouldn’t sacrifice the covering for poor Thomas. Salvation, she thought slowly, becoming more muddled by the moment, wouldn’t come with a parting of the clouds and a great trumpet call, but from the flotsam that floated all around them, and from the men and women who worked for their survival.

By evening, the sun had blistered all their exposed skin. Their gazes weren’t so much on each other as on the waves; each crest and fall brought new hope of more survivors, loved ones or protection.

And still all along, Mauma sang, her chants providing the only solace. Lamar, now shed of all but his undergarments, helped string cables and ropes to hold the yawl together; he found a tablecloth to lift as a sail.

Augusta rocked the nearly unconscious Thomas and looked to her brother. “I have lost hope for the rest of the family. It is only you, Thomas and me, the last of us. Oh, God, Lamar. Have you thought of the fact that the very boat you are trying to mend is the boat that tossed us into the waves—the boat that could not hold your family? It is the same one . . .”

Lamar closed his eyes and bent at the waist as if he might be sick and then stood with fierce determination and gritted teeth, his lips blistered and raw. “I had not thought of that. My God, sister. My God, what horrors. How do we survive this?”

“We will.” Augusta took Lamar’s hand and placed it on Thomas’s cheek. “For your son.”

As that second day dragged toward night, some sank into unconsciousness. Talk focused on finishing repairs to the yawl so it could hold a few men who would row to shore and seek help. The vessel, some argued, wouldn’t hold. Others lamented that it would flip in the breakers off North Carolina’s notorious shoals—only the strongest rowers and swimmers should go.

Lamar refused to leave his family, believing they would die without him, as the talk grew more adamant about who should stay and who must attempt deliverance for them all.

The discussion reached a crescendo just as someone sighted another piece of wreckage with two people on it, the waves pushing it toward the deck, hands waving. As the flotsam drew near, the man and a woman upon it seemed to melt into the sea mist like a mirage.

Lamar threw a rope toward them, and as he hauled them in, he cried out in a strong voice. “My son! My son!”

Augusta lifted her gaze. Oh, God, she prayed in her wild thoughts, don’t let it be a mirage. Grant us this small mercy.

“Father!”

It was Charles, ragged, frightfully sunburned, his lips swollen and his eyes crusted, but he was alive.

“Oh, God’s mercy,” Augusta cried out. “Charles lives,” she told Thomas in his seashell ear. But he didn’t stir, his pink sunburn swelling his cheeks as if he had stuffed them with cotton. “It is a miracle, Thomas. Stay with me . . .”

With Charles was a woman still fully dressed, her hair matted to her head and her pale skin pink. They both stumbled onto the wreckage, the woman falling on her back in the six inches of water, and staring up, mumbling thanks to no one and everyone.

Charles was immediately in his father’s arms. “Mother? The children?” He was a young man of fourteen, yet still a child.

Lamar pointed at Augusta and Thomas. “So far only . . .” His voice trailed off and Charles dropped his chin, defeated. He slumped into the seawater that flooded the deck.

Augusta lifted her face to her nephew and reached for his hand. “You are a miracle.”

Charles’s face, crusted with salt and sunburn, wrinkled against emotions Augusta couldn’t read. “This is not a miracle, Auntie. This is hell, a desert made of water. And I saw you—I saw you save Thomas while Eliza drowned.” His voice was deeper, no longer that of the child who had just cried out to his father. He fell against the wooden box and closed his eyes.

Augusta took in a sharp breath and looked up to her brother. “I tried, Lamar. I tried . . .”

“My sister. You did everything you knew how.” Lamar stood over his son. “Rise up, Charles. We must help the others.”

Relief and grief braided together inside Augusta’s heart. Where was her beloved Lilly? The thought of her drowning, of her lungs filling, of her life departing, was more than Augusta could bear. She must imagine Lilly and Madeline on the sturdy quarterboat or another piece of wreckage, imagine her on one of the boats whose sails they’d seen in the distance.

Charles stood tall, the water lapping against his bare shins where he’d folded up the hems of his pants. Augusta turned her attention to the woman who’d arrived with him and collapsed. Charles bent and touched her hand. “She’s twenty-five and from Charleston. Her name is Olivia Barnsby. We survived together. We saved each other.”

“The peppermint,” Augusta called out. “For Olivia!”

Mr. Henderson brought the basket over. “Augusta, here. You must be in charge of giving out dosages of wine, peppermint and laudanum.”

Charles shuddered for a moment and then he spoke: “What can I do now to help?”

Lamar took his son’s face in his hands and then hugged him close. “Help us fix this lifeboat so we may go for help.”

Charles dropped to his knees and began to stuff the holes with the other men.

Augusta kept watch over the found wine, peppermint and laudanum. It was agreed that the wine would be kept for the children; it was at least some kind of hydration to keep death slightly at bay. Augusta reached into the basket and withdrew the vial of peppermint, placed a few drops upon Olivia Barnsby’s lips. She revived and opened her glazed eyes, mumbled, “Thank you.”

“Water, Auntie,” Thomas whispered with his eyes closed.

Augusta took a drop of wine on her finger and touched it to Thomas’s lips before he closed his eyes again.

God, do not allow him to die. Please. No.

The thought of his expiring here, in this hell, was so abhorrent, so horrific, she could barely lift her gaze from his face. She would have to remember the contours of his countenance by heart.

Passengers began to huddle together, to form a circle in the middle of the wreckage while several men moved the bodies of those who had recently perished to the far end, where the waves would wash them away without anyone having to watch. It was then that Pastor Woart screamed out in a wordless and animalistic sound, and they all knew that his wife, too, had passed. She’d been saved only to say good-bye to her beloved.

Augusta handed Thomas to Charles and stumbled toward the pastor and his wife lying deceased in his lap, pale and still. Augusta lifted her hand to see the blue beneath her nail beds. “I’m so sorry,” she said, the vial of peppermint now useless in her hand.

As she bent down, she noticed that no one had undone the woman’s corset; it dug into her ribs and bound her waist. If Mrs. Woart could have taken in a deep breath, would she have endured for a few more minutes? Should Augusta herself have done it for her? The thoughts circled like wolves stalking prey.

She turned away from the sight just as a wave larger than any before raised the wreckage with a sickening lurch and then plunged it to a stomach-dropping depth. People cried out and grabbed on to cables and ropes to stay aboard. Augusta dropped to a crouch, her legs wide, and allowed the water to wash over her while using what little strength she still had to keep her footing. Her hands found no purchase, but her legs held firm.

Others in the circle clung to each other, allowed the cold water to engulf them. Charles held on to a rope and tight to his brother. With dull eyes Augusta watched the pastor, still clinging to his wife, allow the wave to take them both out to sea. His eyes were closed as they both vanished.

He would not live without her.

Augusta let out a cry, reaching for what was already gone, and then stumbled back to Thomas and Charles. Would they soon all return to the sea? Would it be as simple as letting go?

A woman on the far end of the raft who had been lying listless against a box now stood and began to wail, ripping at her hair and nightdress. “Our gold. All our gold was on this ship. It’s gone. Where is my husband? Where is my silver? My gowns?” She glanced about the disaster and her eyes rolled back in her head; she slumped forward to land on the wreckage, her head smashing against the corner of the box where she’d sat. Blood ran from the side of her face and she lay facedown in the water.

Lamar ran to her and lifted her from the water, brushed back her hair and then looked up with such despair that Augusta believed this might be the final death that would render him incapable. But he closed her eyes and uttered a prayer that no one but God could hear. Augusta turned away, not wanting to watch the woman’s interment. She had seen enough.

Augusta took Thomas from Charles’s arms and sat to cradle him. His body shook now, his every muscle convulsed in spasms until he cried out and then collapsed—again and again this was repeated. Night crept over them and Augusta faded in and out while sitting upright, her arms burning from holding the child’s weight.

Henry arrived at her side and knelt next to her. “Your nephew. He lives,” he reminded her.

“Yes.” Augusta felt the deep need to weep but she couldn’t cry—there seemed nothing in her that would ever do so again, so dry and cracked was she. But she touched Henry’s dear sunburned face with tenderness. “There is hope for others. For my dear friend Lilly. For baby Madeline.” She paused and stared at the place where the woman had just slumped in her death. “Did you hear her, Henry? Did you hear what she lamented as she died before us?”

“Yes. Her gold.”

“We will lose ours also, but what does that matter now?” She leaned down and kissed Thomas’s cheek, felt a fear so vivid she shook. “He cannot die. Not Thomas.”

Henry held her close and then whispered low, “Just as you do not want to live in a world without Thomas, I do not want to think of never seeing you again. Why do any of us wait to say what matters? I will not waste another moment. I want to be near you. It is all I have thought about for months. I will not let you die, Augusta Winthrop.”

Augusta smiled sadly. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep, dear Henry.”

“This is a promise I can keep.”

She leaned against his body, feeling his strong chest and shoulders that in their previous life had been hidden beneath suits and stiff shirts. “Do you think the other lifeboats made it to shore?”

“I don’t know. I can only hope.”

“Please let that be true.” Augusta closed her eyes. “Lord God, see us,” she prayed as the night fell dark around them.