Chapter 14

Sea Coffins

The news was unkind. Part of the foremast had shattered and although the ship was not crippled, it would travel at a slower pace. The vessel was too far across waters to turn around, they were told, which meant rations would be halved in order to last the remainder of the journey.

But there was a greater tragedy. Ship fever had struck and nearly a third of the steerage passengers had already perished.

“Come now. Give her to me, will you?” Seamus looked at Clare with a somberness rarely seen on his face. He drew the tiny, limp body from Clare’s arms and handed it to Pierce, whose eyes were crimson and moist.

Seamus put his arms around her trembling body and rested his head on her shoulder. “There was nothing you could do, Clare.”

His words barely saturated her consciousness as her mind blurred over the past two weeks. The time Clare first noticed the gurgle in the girl’s lungs was as she consoled her shortly after her grandmother’s coffin plummeted into the sea. The two had become quickly bonded, as Lala represented those Clare had left behind.

Since then, the ship had long exhausted its supply of coffins, and instead bodies were merely wrapped in blankets. The long-winded ceremonies were shorter, blunted, and fewer had the strength to come above deck to even honor the deceased.

Death had become just another passenger.

The spread of typhus caused a further quarantine of the steerage passengers. Yet it also sapped the mind and spirit from foments of rebellion. They had grown dependent entirely upon the miserly mercies of their caretakers.

As she sobbed against Seamus’s chest, Clare felt a tiredness deep within her soul. Her hands gripped onto her brother as if he was all that was keeping her from slipping into the depths of hades.

“We’ve got to take care of you now, Clare.” His words reverberated through her pulsations of nausea.

When Clare opened her eyes, she felt the cool sea air against her body, and chills streamed through the core of her bones. Seamus’s arms propped her, and the first mate’s voice drifted in and out, “. . . ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

He signaled and then the tiny body was dropped over the side of the ship.

Lala was gone.

The imagery repeated over and over again and Clare couldn’t escape it.

“She looks weak,” she heard Pierce say, and then she awoke again in her cot as Seamus wiped a cool towel across her forehead.

“Shhh . . .” He brushed his hands across her cheeks.

Clare felt the toes of her feet curling into the moist grass of the fields at home and she was but a child and her ma chased behind laughing, gaining on her with every step. Clare turned and saw Ma’s legs churning, her face spilling with joy.

“Don’t leave us,” she heard Pierce say and saw him holding a candle as he leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. She felt his lips, soft and tender, and Clare blacked out.

This time she relived the banished sounds of hysteria and instinctively she knew what had happened. She dropped the basket of elderberries and the tiny black orbs tumbled to the ground as she ran, pulse pounding as she summited the hill. Then stopped. She found Seamus bent over Kevan’s lifeless body and Pierce’s shouts frozen in horror.

“I took my eyes from the boy, no more than a blink,” Seamus’s shoulders shook as sobs ripped through him.

In a purity of thought beyond reason, in that moment of tragedy Clare could see the spirit sapping from her brother, and she knew with certainty what must be done.

She brought Kevan’s cold, blue-lipped corpse to the house and watched as Ma glanced first with a smile, which transposed to terror as she sprinted toward Clare, screaming and clasping her hands to her ears.

When Clare looked down again, this time Lala, still and limp, was in her arms.

Clare choked on the pungent liquid in her mouth and opened her eyes. Muriel pulled a spoon from her mouth as her husband, Mack, leaned over her shoulder.

“Is she going to make it?” he asked.

“What if she hears you, you old fool?” Muriel replied.

The spinning and nausea returned, and it gyrated faster and faster and she fell deeper into the chasm.

And then it stopped.

Clare lay in the grass and, lifting her head, saw Caitlin, Ronan, and Davin just turning to leave.

Davin spun and looked back, his face red with anger.

“Come on.” Caitlin put her arm around her brother’s shoulders. “She’s never coming back. She’s never coming back.”

Clare could only watch as they drifted away.