The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (3 page)

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.”

B
Y 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:

T
HE 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.