June 1901
near Cape Farewell, Greenland Sea
A month had passed since Nicky woke up in the stinking hold of the Ormen. Her injured foot did not heal but seemed to grow infected, though Dr. O’Regan swore it was not. The infection was spreading up her leg, a dark bruise. He claimed he could not see it, but the evidence was there, and so she kept it bandaged.
The sea disappeared beneath a vast mosaic of ice. Thick slabs thudded against the ship, and Nicky feared they would breach the hold. The knocking of them, the blinding whiteness as far as the eye could see—she wondered how any boat could sail through such dense matter. But they did.
The weather calmed after the storm that took Collins, Ellis, and the lambs. The crew buried Collins at sea, despite misgivings. According to Daverley and several others, a sea burial resulted in a vexed and vengeful spirit, one that might haunt the ship. They had no choice but to lower him into his watery grave, a stitch at the nose to keep the soul inside the shroud. Ellis’s body was never recovered. Captain Willingham asked Nicky if she would write a letter to his wife, capturing Ellis’s labors on board before he died.
She wondered if she’d heard him correctly. Ellis had raped her, and now he was asking her to redeem him in writing? “I will do no such thing,” she said.
“You write that Ellis was a good whaleman,” Captain Willingham said, lacing his fingers together. “An elegant rendering of his part in the capture of whales and such like.”
She cocked an eyebrow. “How about I write it, and you turn the ship around and take me back to Dundee.”
Captain Willingham produced a jar of sweets from a secret store. Pear drops, Highland toffees, and apple sours. “That’s the best I can do,” he said.
In the end, she agreed.
They faced other problems, including the destruction of the sails. The mariners replaced and repaired where they could, but the ship would have to rely on its steam engines to power through heavy ice.
One by one, the mariners started making their way to her cabin. Gray, who walked with a limp; Wolfarth, who never spoke a word to her; McKenzie, who told her secrets about his wife; Stroud, who sometimes cried. They arrived at her door with sheepish looks, forewarned about her tendency to sing strange songs. She kept her eyes on the door as they grunted above her, melodies that Allan had played on their old piano in Faulkner Street spilling from her lips. Often the men begged her to stop, but she didn’t, not even when threats were made. Some of the men resorted to filling their ears with bits of rag.
The captain’s wedding ring glinted in the amber lamplight, an apology folded in his silences. She spied the man behind the title, a quivering thing, buckled by too many years at sea. His command was sloppy, his words liquefied. He smelled of rum and shame.
And still she sang.
She came to expect a knock on her door at dawn each morning, the captain’s early-morning visit, his silent apologies diminishing like arpeggios. She learned quickly that the key to survival—while she still believed in it—was to ram the fear that threatened to consume her right down into a tight box of hell deep in her heart, to lock it shut with a fake smile stretched across her face like a rictus.
There was a palpable dynamic at the heart of her role as selkie wife that cut through the fear. The men grew jealous of one another, and their jealousy spurred a bizarre protectiveness over her that she understood was no more than a sense of proprietorship. McIntyre in particular was a nasty and prolific drinker, given to picking fights with the younger men, such as Royle and Wolfarth. Her body was a territory, just like the ship, and each of them wanted to stake a claim.
She understood it was only this jealousy and proprietorship that spared her from violence. Lovejoy seemed to be the man in charge when it came to who ventured to her cabin; even McIntyre deferred to him. She considered it bitterly ironic that a man named Lovejoy was so utterly incapable of love and an antidote to joy. Some of the men were sympathetic, asking about the injury to her foot and the bruises on her face. The bruises had faded, but her foot had not healed, or rather it had healed with chimerical effect; like a limb transfigured by flame is often useless long after the bleeding has stopped, perhaps withered, so her foot was not the way it had been. It was no longer human. The gray pelt she had spied forming beneath the skin had continued up her ankle, fading at the calf. She asked Dr. O’Regan for fresh bandages, applying them herself so he would not see.
But it was only a matter of time. And Allan—what would he think? How could she ever return to him like this?
She thought of the day she went into labor, how her mother had wanted her to give birth in Larkbrae but the plans fell apart when it progressed too quickly.
“What should I do?” Allan said when she woke him with a yell. She had felt the pains earlier in the night but thought nothing of it. She wasn’t due for another month, and her mother told her to expect the last weeks to be painful. “The body prepares itself for labor by faking it,” she said.
But by the time she realized that this wasn’t fakery, her waters had broken.
“Get Dr. McGill,” she said through heavy breaths, and so Allan pulled on his trousers and raced off to the doctor’s home two miles away.
The relief of pain during childbirth was considered sacrilegious, and therefore forbidden, on account of the Old Testament pronouncement In sorrow shalt thou bring forth children. Even Dr. McGill, who had delivered her and her sister, held fast to this rule, worried that she and the child might be cursed if he disobeyed.
Allan occupied himself in a stupor, following the list of chores Nicky’s mother had provided—light the fire, open the windows, boil towels and blankets. Ready the crib, and the cabbage leaves, and the leeches. He completed his tasks and took to holding Nicky’s hand and dabbing her forehead as she screamed.
“You’re doing well,” he whispered by her head. “You’re a champion, Nicky. A champion.”
She felt as though her back were breaking, the child presenting with its spine against hers. Dr. McGill resorted at last to forceps, a fearsome contraption that drew a gasp of concern from Allan.
“Surely that will only hurt the bairn?” he asked.
“Better an injury than a corpse,” Dr. McGill grunted. “Or two corpses.” He threw a meaningful look at Allan, who turned pale. He gripped Nicky’s hand and nodded at Dr. McGill, who inserted the mechanism between Nicky’s legs.
A moment of tugging, then a shrill cry. The baby covered in chalky vernix, placed on Nicky’s belly. Its cone-shaped head, bruised and misshapen from the forceps. The placenta removed, and the leeches placed on her cervix to stem the bleeding.
She remembered the impossibly small fingernails, the lines on the palms. The delicate feet, identical to Allan’s.
The birdlike mouth, searching for milk. And against all odds, alive.
The pristine shores of Greenland pricked the horizon, towering jags, crisp as broken glass, mantled by feathery haar. The air glittered. Absinthe-green patches peeked up through the ice slabs on the surface of the ocean, and glassy lozenges bobbed against the hull, thick and solid as concrete. The combination of colors was striking—alabaster white against cornflower blue and polished silver.
A small pod of grampuses grew curious of the ship one morning, their slick black bodies plowing the sea. Longer and darker than dolphins, they huffed in a single file like a sea serpent weaving the waves. Dolphins traveled in pods of thirty, sometimes more. They liked to race the ship, the younger mariners tapping the side of the hull to encourage them. She spotted sea eagles flying overhead, their wingspan longer than a man. And on the sheet ice, walruses with fangs the length of her forearm barked at them, while smaller seals darted through the blue water.
She woke one morning to the blare of bagpipes. Harrow, one of the oldest of the crew, liked to stand on the poop deck on slower days playing Scottish tunes, waving a saltire and taking requests. In between tunes he’d announce that the bagpipes were weapons of war, hailing from the Battle of Culloden when Scottish pipers roused their troops against the redcoats, and banned thereafter by the British.
“Aye, we know,” McIntyre shouted back.
“We’re Scottish too, you dunderhead,” Gray shouted, flinging a becket at him.
Harrow was undeterred. “The Highland Clearances began with the silencing of the national instrument. When we play the pipes, we echo the voices of our ancestors, lads! We defy our oppressors!”
“We’re in the Arctic, you nugget,” Lovejoy bellowed back. “The only oppression here is the lack of whisky.”
Harrow asked Nicky what she’d like to hear, and she hesitated. She wasn’t keen to join in with the men’s play, certainly not in any way that might indicate her consent to being held captive like she was. And the bagpipes had marked almost every occasion of her life—her wedding ceremony and every Burns night her father employed a piper to address the haggis. The last thing she wanted to hear was a tune that might disturb a sacred memory.
After a while, she suggested “The Parting Glass,” a song she had never heard on the pipes.
Harrow gave a bow and played it with feeling. The call of the pipes amid the loneliness of the polar expanses brought the men to contemplative silence. “Play ‘Scotland the Brave’!” Lovejoy shouted after a while, and the plaintive mood that had settled across the ship was broken by a rousing melody.
The first whale they caught was a bowhead whale, female, forty feet long. It had seemed enormous in the water, almost the length of the boat. Nicky had heard the men shouting and headed up to the top deck. About thirty feet from the side of the boat she could see the line of a leviathan cutting through the waves. McKenzie and Gray were already lining up the harpoon cannon, but Lovejoy called out to them, ordering them to hold fire.
“We’ve not dunked a man,” he roared. He whistled at Cowie, then nodded at Reid. “Chuck him in, lads.”
Reid looked startled as the two men laid hands upon him, before heaving him over the side and into the dark water below.
“I’m not a strong swimmer!” Reid shouted from below. “It’s . . . it’s too cold!”
Daverley stood on the side of the rig glancing down, stricken at the sight of Reid thrashing in the dark water below. He pulled off his boots and hat before jumping feetfirst into the water near Reid, who was paddling frantically at the water with his hands.
“Why on earth did you do that?” Nicky asked Cowie as she watched Daverley drag Reid to the anchor rope, pulling them both up on deck again.
“Bad luck to start fishing without dunking a member of the crew,” Cowie said.
As the boat turned toward the whale, she saw another, smaller fish in the water next to it—a calf. She waved up to McKenzie, calling out for him to stop, but just then the harpoon shot out from the cannon with a force that she felt right through her feet up to her neck. Instantly, the dark water reddened, bubbles of it rising and turning the side of an iceberg pink.
The calf didn’t swim away, didn’t make a sound, but Nicky imagined the helplessness of it as it watched its mother bloat with air from the harpoon, floating to the surface like a hot air balloon. “The red flag’s flying!” Cowie shouted, as the water around it began to spew with blood.
The men hauled the whale alongside the hull for flensing, the tail held fast by a fluke-chain and the fins fixed with a fin-chain. Wolfarth fastened a blubber hook to a second fin-chain and pronged it on the upper lip, the lower jaw hanging open, the fringed baleen riffling in its enormous mouth like a lace curtain. Lastly, Arnott threaded a chain through the blowhole to stop the weight of the beast’s body from tearing it free.
Wolfarth, Royle, and McKenzie set to the carcass with long-handled axes, with Lovejoy overseeing the process of stripping the flanks and hacking at the blubber that lay like a hot mattress underneath. From a distance, it looked like they were stripping a tree of its bark. She made herself look at the parts of it that were mammal, the navy eye buried in bloated eyelids. The air around it steamed with the heat of its body releasing into the cool air.
The men were tiring and drenched in blood. Reid and Anderson’s job was to fetch fresh buckets of seawater to rinse the deck, while Stroud, Arnott, and Daverley stacked and hefted barrels filled with blubber into the bowels of the ship.
“Five and forty more!” Stroud shouted, meaning that the last piece of blubber had been swung inboard.
And then the boiling of the blubber in the try-works, the brick ovens abaft the forehatch containing try-pots, two enormous cauldrons, where oil was removed from the blubber for storing in casks. Feeling the heat beating from the ovens, Nicky moved closer to warm herself, one eye on the calf moving in the white foam ruffling at the ship’s side. To the distant east, she had spotted three black fins, though they slipped away as quickly as they reappeared, each time in a new position, as though they had sped up underwater.
“Orcas,” Daverley told her, appearing by her side, wrapping a length of rope between his palm and elbow. “They’ll come for the calf. Put it out of its misery.”
“Why didn’t you just kill the calf, then?” she said. “If it’s going to be killed anyway?”
“Not my call. Captain’s orders.”
She felt her feet grow wet and looked down to see that a tide of blood had swept across from the butchered whale while she was searching out its calf, drenching her feet and soaking the bandages.
Daverley was still there, making a serving with string and a mallet as he glanced over the side. Usually he was high up the ratlines, checking the ropes for frays, or slathering foul-smelling tar across the rig. She sensed he wanted to speak to her. Next to him, behind a row of barrels, was a rusted metal cage, too large for fish. A length of heavy chain was attached to the top, and inside she could see long spikes angling down.
“What is that?” she asked. She’d never seen it on board before.
He turned and glanced at it. “It’s a brig,” he said.
She searched her mind for the term. A brig was a whaler jail for rowdy crew, but it was usually a small cabin in the ship with a set of chains and a padlocked door.
“We use the ship’s brig for storing meat,” he said. “So the cage takes its place.”
She frowned at the spikes, long as her finger. “What’s the chain for?”
“If any of the men break Captain’s rules, they’re put in the cage, and then the cage is thrown in the water and dragged behind.”
“That’s barbaric.”
“Nothing warm and cozy on a whaling ship, as I’m sure you’ve found.”
“I suppose you’ll be visiting my cabin next,” she snapped, kicking the blood off her feet.
“I will not,” he said quietly, his eyes still on the water below. “And neither will Reid.”
She felt relieved. The sound of footsteps had started to make her heart race with fear. She had come to associate the sound with the first sign of a man outside her cabin door.
“But you’re content with what your crewmates are doing? Taking a woman prisoner?”
“Prisoner?” Daverley looked puzzled. “You’re getting paid, aren’t you?”
She laughed bitterly. “Paid? You call that vile slop ‘payment’?”
“Why did you come, then?” he said. “I mean, why come on board if you don’t like it?”
She was shocked. He thought she was a prostitute. That she was here by agreement. Her stomach dropped as she thought of Ellis, and the lewd comments the others had made. Lovejoy’s tale of the selkie wife. Surely the men had all known that she was taken, plucked off the street because of her father’s company? That she was collateral?
“I was kidnapped,” she said. “I’m not here because I want to be.”
He narrowed his eyes, processing her meaning. Wolfarth and Anderson were nearby, sweeping blood off the deck.
“Did you know about it?” she pressed, stepping closer to Daverley. “I mean, it must have been planned. Did the captain call a meeting with the crew? Why was I attacked like that?”
He lowered his eyes to the ground. “Whatever the situation is, I want no part of it. I work, I get my wages, and I go home to my wife.”
“Is that what the others think?” she said, feeling sick. “That I’m . . . a common prostitute?”
He lifted his eyes to her, and his look told her that they did. “I don’t care about your line of work,” he said simply. “A woman’s bad luck on a ship.”
“Rubbish,” she said. “And in any case, I didn’t choose to be here. So I can’t exactly bring bad luck.” She watched him look over at Reid, who gave him a wave.
Daverley tied the end of the rope in a knot, then slipped the hoop of it over his shoulder. “He’s my sister’s boy. She passed this last Christmas.”
She heard the catch in his voice. “I’m sorry.”
“I got him this job. He’s almost sixteen. He needs to make his own living now.”
Her own sister floated to her mind, Cat’s slim form at her usual spot in the round window on the landing at Larkbrae, holding her beloved dogs. A lump formed in Nicky’s throat. How could she tell Allan about what had happened? How would he look at her, knowing how many men had violated her?
“My father owns this ship,” she said. “George Abney.”
He nodded. “I know.”
“You honestly believe the daughter of George Abney is a common prostitute?”
Daverley crouched down to set a dozen grommets in a bucket.
“What did you hear?” she pressed, gritting her teeth.
“It’s not my place to say.”
“I swear on my life,” she said, a catch in her voice. “I was kidnapped. A man attacked me in Dawson Park. My husband will be worrying about me.”
A flicker of something passed across his face, and she tried to recall what she had said to spark it.
“Please,” she said. “Tell me what you know.”
“What does it matter?” he said hastily. “The captain has said you’re here for the remainder of the voyage. That’s all I know. Happy?”
Just then, a voice called “Daverley!” and she saw Lovejoy stomping across the deck, his face twisted in a scowl. Nicky shrank into herself, lowering her eyes, but not before she saw the way Lovejoy looked from her to Daverley.
“You two have something to chat about?”
“We weren’t chatting,” Daverley said.
“Not what it looked like to me,” Lovejoy said, raking his eyes over Daverley. “If you’re not interested in swyving you’ll stay well clear, aye?”
“Aye, sir,” Daverley muttered.
Lovejoy squared up to her, his eyes tracing the claret stain on her bandaged foot.
“Downstairs,” he said. “Now.”
As she moved toward the stairs, she risked a glance at Daverley, who flicked his eyes at her. Something had shifted during their conversation, she had felt it. Perhaps he believed her. Or perhaps he was no better than the other men. Even the most grandfatherly of the crew, like Harrow and McKenzie, the ones who had been tender with her, eventually found their desires overwhelming their decency. Harrow often offered the crook of his arm to help her when she struggled to limp across the upper deck, and McKenzie had been nothing but courteous and even sympathetic whenever she came across him. Even so, they arrived at her cabin, shame-eyed, only to leave with a flushed radiance that they’d somehow found beneath her skirts.
She would ask Daverley again. He knew something. She would persist until she found out the truth.
In her cabin, Lovejoy undid his belt in haste. She could read him now, the rush to take her emerging from the exchange he had witnessed between her and Daverley. She feared Lovejoy, but she well knew how pathetic he was, how much he needed to feel he owned her. The kind of man who would beat a cow for not producing the amount of milk he desired. Usually he ordered her to strip naked, but this time he threw her skirts over her head and thudded into her, blaring out like a stuck pig a handful of seconds later.
Afterward, she limped down to Dr. O’Regan’s cabin to have her bandage replaced before the blood from the culled whale infected her wound.
She lay down on the bed, wincing as he took off the old dressing and dabbed the wound with a clean linen soaked in alcohol. In the mirror opposite, she could see it—her foot was no longer human, but the fin of a cetacean, dark and slick as ink, bringing fresh revulsion every time she looked at it. If Dr. O’Regan saw it too, he said nothing, but then he wasn’t interested in her foot. He looked at her with heavy eyes, and before she could move from the bed, he had slipped his hand down her top.
“It’s been so long,” he whispered, cupping her breast. “So long.”