Quintspinner (4 page)

“Wha–what is this place? I don’t understand what’s happened–”

Smith turned and looked at him. “How old are ya’ anyway?” He peered closer. William could see a faint scar running across Smith’s cheek from his ear to the corner of his mouth. “You’ve not even many whiskers, do ya’?”

Pride forced the truth from William. “I’m sixteen. Nearly seventeen.”

“Sixteen? Hah!” Smith snorted, “Not a boy anymore, but a helluva’ long ways out from being the eighteen that the friggin’ Navy Proclamation states we must be before volunteerin’….”

The Navy? What the hell?
“But I didn’t volunteer!” William protested, “I–”

“Ya’ did as far as the Navy’s concerned.”

“But I didn’t! I’m not doing this!” William hissed, “I’ll leave–”

The sting of Smith’s sharp slap across William’s mouth caught him in mid sentence. “See here, now,” Smith whispered menacingly, “there is no leavin’ this hell hole, ‘cept overboard in a tarp with a stitch through yer nose. Ya’ hear? Leaving alive is
not
a choice ya’ have. We’re already near a day out to sea.”

William took in this new information in stunned silence. Feeling was beginning to return to his feet and he stumbled painfully along as though walking in oversize wooden clogs.

So I’m on a ship! And in its belly at that.
He followed behind Smith, as they made their way through a narrow pathway lined on each side with boxes and barrels of all sizes piled to shoulder height. By now William’s eyes had adjusted to the low light and he caught a brief glance of a small flash of movement at the base of a barrel.
Rat! And judging from the smell, more than one.
He shuddered to think that the sniff and brush of something soft against his face that had awoken him a few minutes earlier had likely been one of its cousins.

Filthy damn creatures.

A rat bite almost always brought on the fevers, William knew. Problem was, most rats snuck up on a lad when he was lying down, asleep. He had not suffered a bite from one himself, but had heard of the livery owner and all who worked there routinely getting bitten. One of the livery boys had even died of the fevers last winter. William had not known the boy personally, but he had seen him once, when William had accompanied his Da’ into town for supplies. He remembered the lad, a scrawny, shy boy, small even for his age of ten, forking old bedding out of the stalls into a wagon. Talk had been last winter that he had died a fitful death, his vision clouded with demons, such as the fevers often brought on, and him yelling out till his last hours.

Would the demons have followed the boy into the afterlife?
William hoped that when it was his time, his death would be quick, and not drawn out in the unseen horrors that seemed to afflict all who died a feverish end.

Smith stopped at a long narrow wooden table. “Sit. Cook’ll get us some chowder.” He planted himself on a low wooden bench and motioned for William to do the same. “So, you’ll work as yer told, ya’ see,” he continued, “or you’ll die.” It was a simple statement. Smith shrugged as though to emphasize such inevitability.

William stared at Smith in frank astonishment.
Has he been reading my thoughts?

William’s eyes, wide in surprise, did not escape Smith’s notice, and the corner of his scar-licked mouth pulled into a thin, sad smile. “Ya’ survived the pressin’, didn’cha? Many don’t.”

Pressing? Christ! So that’s what happened!
William had heard that press gangs roamed the countryside near every port in Great Britain, physically abducting nearly all men and older boys that they came across, to be recruits for His Majesty’s Royal Navy. Physical force was almost always used by the “gangers”, as no man who neither had a family nor made his living on land went voluntarily. Being “pressed” into service meant suddenly disappearing, leaving family behind with a good chance of never returning to see them again.

William thought again of John. Of his father’s cap ground into the bloodied grass. Of his mother and Abbey begging at the neighbors’
door–Stop it! You can’t help them now!

“So, who are ya’?” Smith peered at William, holding him in his gaze.

“William.”

Smith continued to stare, waiting for William to go on.

“William Taylor,” William added. “Me Da’s a farmer ….” William’s voice trailed away.
Da’s dead. John’s dead. And somebody’s gonna’ pay ….
William could feel his chest tighten and his cheeks grew hot. He clenched his teeth and pinched his thigh, focusing on the pain.
Don’t cry! Don’t you dare cry, you milksop! Stay hard. Keep your wits about you,
he scolded himself.

Smith leaned in on his elbows and announced, “Well, Mr. Taylor, glad to have ya’ on board.” He extended his hand and shook William’s. “Samuel Smith, makin’ yer acquaintance.” Glancing over his shoulder, he squinted into the ship’s murky semi-darkness and cocking a thumb back towards the other sailors, he continued in a low whisper. “And I’ll tell ya’ now, they don’t see no point in feedin’ a body what won’t haul and scrub, ya’ see,” he explained quietly.

“Work, or die, Mr. Taylor,” he sat back and nodded. “That’s yer only choice now.”

The child would live. At least for now. The fate of his newly postpartum wife was not so certain, but in his experience, the doctor knew that she stood a chance if the bleeding could be controlled.

In tending to his wife’s hemorrhage, Dr. Willoughby immediately demanded that Tess and Cassie chew copious amounts of tobacco leaves, spitting the soggy cuds out into a bowl, while the bulk of the noxious stuff simmered in a cauldron over the room’s fire. Mixing the tobacco with fresh cotton, he packed the bundle into his wife’s birth canal, and added more steeped tobacco juice and leaves as they cooled, to the vaginal poultice.

“Broken tobacco slows the bleed and the cotton clots any blood that does escape,” he explained. Both girls felt nauseous and in an effort to ward off the impending headache that would surely follow their own absorption of the tobacco juices, they sipped a warm cup of tea laced with laudanum. Light headed then, and full of silliness, they took to their beds early, each giggling at the other’s brown stained teeth and lips.

“We look like the old corner Crone!” Cassie exclaimed, smirking at her reflection in a silver-backed looking glass. Tess smiled too, although the mention of the old woman gave her the shivers.

The corner Crone was a beggar woman renowned for her eerily accurate prophesies and gift of second sight. It was said that she had not been burned as a witch because her advice was frequently but confidentially sought by high ranking city officials and men of power. Dr. Willoughby, however, had only open contempt for the woman and her herbal potions.

“Have you actually seen her, Cassie?” Tess asked.

“Oh yes, I was on an errand and had to go almost down to the waterfront, when I turned a corner and there she was, all dressed in a shabby brown robe, her hood all up and around her head and face,” Cassie recalled and pulled her nightshirt up over her head, clasping it under her chin, to simulate just such a hood. “Her hand was all knarled and fingers all curled, but there was a ring on one of her fingers. It caught my eye because it sparkled as though it had some gems or the like in it catching the sun.”

Cassie’s eyes widened as she recalled the details, then her eyebrows knitted together in a frown. “Come to think of it, that ring actually didn’t sparkle so much as it
glowed,
just like the glow of a fire’s ember, only it was as pure a blue as I’ve ever seen. I remember wondering how a beggar would come to have such a thing, let alone keep it from being stolen off her ….”

“Did she say anything?” Tess pressed.

“No. Mind, I’d not gotten close to her, but I knew when I saw her, who she was.”

“Let’s seek her out one day. Soon.”

Cassie turned to look at Tess in amazement. “Are you mad? Why would you want to?”

“I don’t know. I just want to. Maybe she’ll tell our fortunes. Wouldn’t that be exciting?” Tess flopped back onto her soft mattress.

“Tess, your father would whip you if he ever found out you went to her, let alone to that part of town. It wouldn’t be good for his reputation as a doctor and respectable citizen to have his daughter consorting with the like.”

“Well then,” Tess retorted with a conspiratorial smile, “he mustn’t ever know.”

A faint high pitched squeal that ricocheted off the walls and echoed down the hallway abruptly interrupted their conversation.

“Charles the Third bellows, Madam, and I must go” Cassie groaned and gave a tired smile.

Tess held up a hand towards Cassie. “You go to bed.” The squeal was more insistent. Tess rolled her eyes and sighed. “I’ll tend to the little monster.”

“No, it’s my duty,” Cassie responded and wrapped herself in her dressing gown.

“This one time, I’ll go,” Tess countered, “he’s
my
brother, after all–” As soon as her words were out, a flicker of hurt flared in Cassie’s eyes.

“No. I’ll go,” Cassie affirmed, the smile fading from her face, and she hastily left the bedroom, padding noiselessly down to the nursery.

Cassie was Tess’s unofficial adopted sister. Cassie was also one of the family’s servants. She was neither full kin nor indentured servant. She had been received as a young child, in partial payment for medical services that Tess’s father had provided to a nobleman’s family during an outbreak of fever.

The deadly fever and sickness had spread like wild fire through the man’s house servant and serf populations, decimating both, including Cassie’s parents, before ripping through the nobleman’s own family. Cassie, spared but orphaned by the plague of disease, had been brought into the household by Dr. Willoughby himself. Not a supporter of slaves in his own household, the doctor nevertheless felt pity for the youngster and all other possible destinations for her seemed filled with only certain hardships.

Accurate birth records on servants and slaves were seldom kept, but by an estimation of his own making, based on the number and size of the child’s teeth, Cassie had been perhaps only two years older than his six year old daughter, Tess. Dr. Willoughby had accepted his patient’s desperate payment scheme, knowing that the man’s fortune, like so many of the fever’s victims, had nearly disappeared in less than a fortnight.

Now, at nearly eighteen, Cassie had grown into an attractive young woman. Her hair curled, rather than kinked, in loose waves reaching past her shoulders and nearly to her waist, onto golden brown skin.

Like a man’s morning coffee with a dollop of sweet cream stirred in,
was how Tess’s mother had once described the color. Cassie’s teeth, no longer gapping with the smile of a shy eight year old, were straight and white. This in itself made her stand out from most people, as darkly stained or missing teeth were the norm by adulthood. Elizabeth Willoughby, however, would not abide poor oral care within her household, demanding that everyone, servants included, polish their teeth and gums with a spit-rag before retiring each evening.

Although Cassie had grown up officially as her house servant, most times Tess considered Cassie to be a sister, a replacement for the blood sibling she’d never had. As children, the girls had been inseparable. Tess herself was blossoming into womanhood, and she and Cassie were often compared, her creamy complexion and own head full of thick, soft, copper colored ringlets to Cassie’s darker palette.

“You two are like the sunrise, all gold and red, and the sunset, all soft shadows and tawny dark,” Mrs. Hanley, the family’s corpulent cook, had declared. “One’s always sure to be followin’ the other, too,” she noted, nodding with a smile of satisfaction on her face, pleased with her philosophical observation. Mrs. Hanley often made such pronouncements about the goings-on around her, although Tess was quite certain that the jolly woman had never had real education of any kind, and was, in fact, like most of the household help, perfectly illiterate, not being able to read a single printed word.

She was, however, a treasure house of folk wisdom and often shared bits and pieces with the girls, of the folklore and mystic chronicles that were firmly entrenched in her beliefs. Many blustery winter nights had been spent with the three of them cuddled in front of the roaring kitchen fireplace, sipping on hot broths brewed from the various vegetations that the girls had helped to collect during the growing season.