JoAnn Wendt (9 page)

Mab was weeping openly now. Great huge tears rolled down her thin cheeks, carving clean channels in the permanent grime of her face. She swiped at the tears, then grabbed her husband’s hand. She flashed a fierce look at Flavia.

“You be talkin’ pig shit, Obadiah Collins! Now you git well or y’ll git the back o’ my tongue, the likes you never heard afore, nor want to!”

At her familiar scolding, a fleeting half-smile played over the big man’s face. He seemed to drift into peaceful sleep. But only seconds later, he resumed his restless tossing.

“Be we halfway?” he demanded, and then, “Mother, read t’ me!”

Mab shivered violently. With visible effort, she pulled herself together.

“Y’know I can’t read, y’ big stupid ox.” Her voice softened. “Jane be here. Jane, she kin read good.” She nodded at Flavia, and Flavia drew Obadiah’s Bible from beneath his pillow where he always kept it. She knelt beside the bunk, close to the big man’s head. The dim light of the captain’s begrudged “sick” lantern flickered upon his flushed skin.

Softly she whispered, “Obadiah? What will you have me read?”

For a long time he made no answer. Then, just as Mab and Flavia nodded to each other, acknowledging his sleep, Obadiah’s mouth twitched.

“Isaiah,” he whispered weakly, “the twenty-fifth chapter.”

Flavia thumbed through the worn Bible, seeking her place. She began to read, softly and without haste. As she read, the big man’s breathing grew more and more labored. When the ominous wheeze began to accompany each whistling breath, Mab seized her husband’s hand and thrust it to her heart, holding it there as though to will him the strength of her own sound young body.

Flavia choked. She stopped reading, but Mab gave her a fierce nod. Swallowing the anguish she felt for these two good people, Flavia blinked back tears and found her place in the text.

“He will swallow up death in victory,” she read quietly, “and the
LORD
GOD
will wipe away tears from off all faces; and the rebuke of his people shall he take away from off all the earth; for the
LORD
hath spoken it.”

* * * *

“I’m glad he didn’t live t’ see this day.”

Mab’s voice was dull and lifeless, like her empty eyes. She sat defeated on the far end of the bunk, her shoulders hunched, her arms listlessly holding her stomach.

Flavia could find no word of comfort to offer. So she said nothing. She went on with her sewing. She was embroidering a small cross on the pillowcase. If time permitted before the brief service on the stern deck, she would embroider birds and flowers too. She stitched steadily, oblivious by now to the continuous hubbub in the indentured hold. Women whined, men harangued one another or gambled for buttons at cards, children played games, the sick moaned. Flavia heard none of it.

The death of Mab’s baby had been inevitable, she reflected. When Obadiah died, Mab had gone into shock. Her breast milk dried up. Flavia had scoured the hold for a willing wet nurse and, for a time, she found one. But the Collins infant was a difficult charge. No nursing mother was strong enough or willing enough to put up with its demands. For a time, Flavia sustained the baby on boiled barley water and molasses that she begged from a crew member. But the baby developed fever.

“Mab?” she said gently. “Would you like to look at her one last time? Before I sew the pillow shut?”

The young mother’s shoulders convulsed.

“No!”

However, Mab instantly negated her answer by swinging around to stare at the tiny body lying clean and tidy at the bottom of the bunk. A slow smile came to her lips and lingered.

“Purty, weren’t she, Jane?” She looked from the infant to Flavia and back to the infant. “‘N’ smart she were, too. Like her Pa.”

“Oh, yes,” Flavia agreed quickly.

It was a merciful lie. In truth, Flavia had suspected the baby was not quite right. Its muscles had been flaccid. Its splayed, flattened nose resembled the children who were beaten into begging outside the theaters on Drury Lane. Flavia had tossed them shillings whenever the duke had taken her to the theater.

Mab’s baby had cried day and night. In no way had the infant reminded her of her own precious son, Robert, with his bright-eyed intelligence, his eagerness to reach out for the world and capture it. Yet she’d fought for the baby’s life. When it died she felt a deep grief. Her hands grew still in her lap.

“Shall you want to sew the pillow shut yourself, Mab?”

Mab swallowed.

“No!”

But instantly she snatched the threaded needle from Flavia’s hand and set to work. When she was done she picked up the small bundle and held it tightly to her bosom, rocking back and forth on the bunk to a dirge that only she herself heard.

At last the Methodist preacher summoned them. Together—hatless, shawlless—they climbed up into the cutting winds of winter.

If life had been hard with Obadiah Collins alive and offering protection, it became harder now. Stripped of the good man’s shelter, Flavia felt thrown to the wolves.

Again she found herself the target of taunts, the recipient of lustful suggestions. The decent folk did not torment her, but the riffraff did. She managed to stay clear of the male Newgate convicts with whom the Dutchman had filled up his shipload of bondslaves. But the women were impossible to escape. The more slatternly the woman, the more Flavia’s beauty and daintiness seemed to rankle. The crones took umbrage at everything she did. They jeered at her attempts to wash and cleanse herself. They hooted whenever she scrubbed lice from her thick coppery hair in a bucket of icy seawater. They delighted in tripping her on the stairway whenever she hauled bedding up into the sunshine. They made fun of her when winter swells gave her seasickness and she lay in her bunk, green with misery.

Her few belongings were quickly stolen. She learned never to leave her bunk without taking shawl and cloak with her. Mab had made her a gift of Obadiah’s Bible. This she kept safe, deep in a pocket of her serge apron. For safety and for warmth on the frigid ship, she and Mab shared a bunk. Mab’s five-year-old Sarah Bess slept tucked between.

The voyage was an endless hell, each day a greater torture than the day preceding. For the first time in her life Flavia knew hunger. Often she found herself praying for the release of death, but in the next breath she’d fervently cancel that prayer. The world might be a desolate place, but it was still the world Garth McNeil inhabited. And her baby, Robert. While her beloved ones lived, she too would cling to life with all the tenacity she could muster. She would never give up. In this she recognized a surprising new strength and will. No longer was she the meek girl who’d gone dutifully to Tewksbury Hall, a bride of barter. She was changing.

As the hellish voyage went on, measles broke out below deck and grief-maddened mothers lost more children to the sea. Conditions above deck deteriorated, too. When the captain was not about, the hangdog crew exhibited a new surliness. The English crewmen fought with the Dutch. Both grumbled at the captain’s choice of route and cursed the ship’s food, though they fared ten times better than the indentured. At least crewmen got ale to drink and a belly-warming ration of rum each night to help ease the cold and pain. Fearing the captain and his awesome power to punish with the cat-o’-nine, the crew restricted their complaints to muttering in their beards.

The long voyage stirred in the crew a randy fever. The sailors hungered for a woman. When bondservants took air and exercise upon deck, the crew’s salacious eyes raped even the ugliest crone. Alarmed, bondmen kept a watchful eye on their womenfolk. Flavia no longer went on deck except in the company of a kind Dorsetshire farmer and his family.

Despite precautions, the worst did occur.

Grieving for Obadiah and the lost baby, Mab had tossed and turned in her bunk one night, unable to find sleep. So she’d taken her cloak, crept up out of the dark pitching hold and lurched along the safety rope to the indentureds’ deck. There, she leaned over the railing, shivering in the biting wind, searching the cold glittering stars for solace. In her grief, she’d not been aware of the big tar until he grabbed her from behind.

She screamed, but the scream died in the winter wail of the rigging. The tar clapped a paw over her mouth and dragged her off her feet, pulling her into a candle-lit cubbyhole where three others waited, their eyes twitching, their tongues darting along weather-split lips. Mab knew. She went into a frenzy. She fought, but they were upon her at once, gagging her mouth with her own stocking. They took her, passing her from one to another until the last gleam of lust faded from the wolfish eyes. Then they beat her. Calling her Newgate trash, they warned that the captain would not give a moment’s ear to a slut’s accusations. They thrust her, brutalized and dazed, out onto the deck.

Flavia woke just as Mab fell against the bunk. In the dim light, Mab’s face was gray. Blood flecked the corners of her mouth. She was shaking. She worked her lips, but no words came out.

Flavia knew instantly.

“Mab!” she cried, then choked off her outcry at Mab’s shaking, mute hysteria. Throwing back the filthy blankets, she flung out her arms. Mab fell into them.

“Oh, no, no,” she crooned, clutching Mab’s icy shaking body. Not knowing what to do, what to say, she could only rock her in her arms.

Mab began to sob against her breast. But the sobs were thin, keening squeals, like the cry of some small tortured animal. Terrified, at a loss to know how to help, Flavia held her tight, rocking her back and forth until at last the hysteria was spent and Mab collapsed, exhausted in her arms.

It was a full hour before Mab could speak of it. Then, she poured out her rape in a gusher of long angry whispers and longer, deadly silences. She told her story over and over, her thin body turning to ice as she recounted each violence. Flavia held her, listening in horror, her rage increasing with every word she heard.

At last, Flavia was able to persuade Mab to lie down. Shaking with fury, Flavia covered her with all of their blankets, cloaks, and even shawls. She tucked the soundly sleeping Sarah Bess close to Mab’s back. She fetched water. Mab sipped it, then gagged it up into the apron Flavia yanked from her own waist.

“Rest, Mab. I’m going to the captain. The sailors must be caught and punished.”

Mab reared up, eyes large with fright. She caught Flavia’s hand, and Flavia was jolted by the iciness of it.

“No!” she whispered. “‘Twill do no good. The cap’n won’t care a flea. Y’see, ‘tis true—I be— I—”

She lost heart. Sinking back upon the dirty mattress, Mab turned her face to the bulkhead.

“‘Tis true, Jane, what the men say. I be Newgate trash. Obadiah, he found me in jail when he come t’preach. He bought me out and wed me proper.”

Flavia’s heart rushed out to her. Helpless to help, she squeezed Mab’s hand. Mab turned her head and looked at her. In the dim light of the sick-lantern, Mab’s eyes begged for understanding.

“It ain’t like I never was took afore. I was. Ever since I come ten year old. My mother’s man, he... things as that, they goes on reg’lar where I was birthed. It’s jist that since Obadiah— since my Obie wed me, things been different.”

Flavia swallowed hard, her rage choking her. Did no one care that humanity was so brutish? Did not even
God
care?

Her throat tightened. “Hush, dear. Sleep. Try to sleep, Mab.”

Again, Flavia tucked the coverings around Mab, gently stroking Mab’s bruised cheek as she waited for the bounding ship to do its cradle work.

Mab’s eyes flickered open one last time.

“You’ll stay close, Jane?”

“I will stay close. I promise.”

Flavia knelt on the bunk, keeping watch as Mab descended into jerky, fitful sleep. She knelt there, listening to the night sounds in the stinking hold—night sounds that would have shocked Flavia Rochambeau, duchess of Tewksbury, but that were now commonplace to Jane Brown, indentured bondslave. A baby whined in fever. A child begged for water. A woman sobbed, and two men snarled in argument over a vanished pewter shoe buckle. In a distant part of the room, there came the labored groan of a woman delivering. The midwife’s whine tangled in the patternless whine of the feverish tot. “Push harder, luv. Ye’ll not be rid of your trouble until ye push harder.”

Daylight seemed an eternity in coming. Finally, gray light began to filter through the sailcloth that had been nailed over the ceiling grate to keep out the winter wind. Mab awoke. She lay there, hard-eyed, unblinking, staring at nothing. The hardness in her face frightened Flavia.

“Mab? Are you all right?”

Nothing.

“Mab?” Flavia waited. “Please, Mab. Speak to me.”

It was several more minutes before Mab shifted up on one elbow, patted Sarah Bess’s dingy yellow curls, then turned flinty eyes on Flavia.

“Jane, I want you t’learn me t’read and cipher,” she began, her voice shaking with vengeance. “You got lady ways, Jane. I want to learn ‘em, too. I want t’ learn everything. I want t’ make my
own
way in the world. I don’t never want another man near me. And not near Sarah Bess, neither. I spit on ‘em. I spit on
all the men in the world.”

* * * *

“Land! Land ho! Blessed Providence has brought us through—the journey is ended—land—”

At the bondman’s shout, Flavia sprang up from her bunk where she’d been mending a stocking. She flew toward the ladder as the hold exploded in happy hysteria. Stinking bodies surged forward, clamoring and clawing to be first on deck. Flavia found herself thrust aside by two women. She pushed back, clawing her way to the deck, too.

Heedless of the captain’s rule restricting the number of bondslaves on deck, the indentured exploded out of the hold. Even the desperately ill spent their last iota of energy to drag themselves topside.

Flavia pushed her way across the packed deck to Mab, screaming, “We did it! We survived!” But Mab was silent. She stared westward at the hazy indistinct landmass, her face wet with tears.

“There it is, Jane,” she said. “The land o’ milk and honey. My Obadiah’s dream.”