Thea pulled the shawl closer about her neck and left Henriette sucking her teeth over the bedsheet. I followed her to the gunwale. Her face was sprung with bones I had never noticed before, edges she did not used to have. She looked older. At the same time, I was reminded again of the beauty I had always seen in her, the way it lay in the hidden details of her body. The small lines in her lips and the sudden, thrilling sharpness of her teeth when she smiled, and the white-lightness of her eyelashes that gave her an ethereality, a start ling difference. So much of her beauty, I realised, is adulteration. I watched her as she looked at the circling birds, a small smile emerging at the corner of her lips as they suddenly dived and emerged, all wing-flap and outrage, fighting over some fishy prize. I felt hungry for her imperfections. I lifted my hand and placed a fingertip on the scar under her ear, traced it with my nail.
A plume of water suddenly burst through the surface of the sea. As others exclaimed and came running to port, Thea leaned out over the side of the ship, eyes gleaming. I leaned out with her. I could hear an upswell of music, a keening, louder than anything I had heard in life. I felt my body tremble with it, the pleasure of it.
A whale swam in clear view. Another gust of water erupted from its blowhole as it briefly rose to the surface.
‘Henriette,’ Thea said, eyes not leaving the cutting water, ‘Henriette, come and see.’
‘I saw.’ Henriette got to her feet and backed away a little.
Thea turned. ‘You can’t see it from there.’
‘Do you think it might upset the ship?’
‘No.’
Henriette stepped forwards and peered out to the ocean, eyebrows lowered.
‘Here, stand where I am. Can you see it?’
‘It’s so big.’
Thea grinned at her and jealousy spiked through me. Water from the whale had blown over the ship: a fine mist hung in her hair and her face was damp and beautiful. ‘Isn’t it wonderful?’
‘I don’t like to see them so close.’ Henriette returned to her sewing.
I noticed Thea’s face fall, just a little, and there was satisfaction in that. I knew that she was thinking of me, that I would have loved the whale too. And so I stayed beside her and told her that I was with her, that the whale was all song, weightless mass and gentle power. Its music reverberated through my blood.
The humpback remained within sight of the Kristi all morning. Henriette dropped her needle, losing it between the boards, and soon tired. She tried to convince Thea to return downstairs and then, annoyed, left without her. Thea hardly noticed. She stood watching the whale breach again and again, the sight of it filling her like air, like colour.
I leaned into Thea’s side. ‘This is a blessing.’ When she smiled, I pretended it was in answer to my voice, and then I saw her hand reach into her skirt pocket and pull out the pillow overcover I had left unfinished. I had not known she’d been carrying it with her.
Thea ran her hands over the cloth until she found my completed initial amongst the white. She traced the stitches of it with a fingertip, and I tried to remember what it had been like to be touched by her, the pressure of her hands. It seemed miraculous that they had ever held my own.
Such a thing happened to me, I thought. Those hands hold a memory of me.
Thea quickly, furtively brought the initial to her lips and kissed it, and then, leaning over the side of the gunwale, dangled the cloth as though to cast it into the sea.
She waited. The whale breached again, tail slapping the water. I watched the embroidery flap as the wind tried to snatch it from her fingers. Still, Thea did not let go. She began to cry. She cried in a way I had never seen, all at once, as though she could not breathe, as though she was being pulled apart. She brought the whitework back over the side and pressed it to her face, clinging to my initial as though it were a buoy that might keep her afloat.
The whale lifted to the surface. Joyful cluster of barnacle. Steadying. Full of grace.
After the whale, Thea spent more and more time above deck. The sea air swept an appetite back into her stomach, and the roundness returned to her face. Still, I felt compelled to keep watch over Thea in the shifting hours. Every night I sprawled my limbs next to her body until I felt her rest in sleep. Her breathing seemed to fall in harmony with the creaking of the ship, until it seemed as though the boat were lifting and falling by her lungs alone. At dawn, too, I made sure I was by her side so that I was there as she woke. I listened to the sound of her voice as she prayed, her lips puckering over God’s name.
It was only in the hours when the lamps were out and Thea’s breathing steady, her limbs heavy against my own, that I left her to find my brother above deck.
It was a rare and curious thing to suddenly be able to listen to the conversations of men. As soon as Gottlob died, Matthias had been pulled into the fields and I had been swept into the house. Men were for the outside world of tillage and labour and politics and society, and women were for Kinder, Küche und Kirche. Women stood to one side at church, men at the other. I knew as well as any farmer’s child what occurred between animals. I knew what was done in order to beget stock and I knew what Gottfried Fr?hlich meant when he complained about Samuel Radtke’s bull being a ‘dry blower’. I also knew that this act was the preserve of marriage, and that the separation of the unmarried was to ensure this remained so.
All of this had made me apprehensive about men. I imagined that they were a little dangerous and, while I could not reconcile this with Matthias, or with Hans, it was partly a desire to see if this was true that kept me coming above deck to sleep amongst them. Fear that I might be found out did not dissipate for weeks. I imagined Mutter Scheck appearing, red-faced and breathless, her little glasses fogged with fear at finding me in their company. I expected alarming discoveries: low language and lower behaviour.
In truth, I warmed to the men above deck in a way I had not expected. Rudolph lay awake each night examining the sky for shooting stars, smoking his brother’s pipe and noting the altered constellations in a notebook with a pencil stub. Hans tried endlessly to coax the kitten to his side, leaving little trails of meat and rubbing her skinny belly until she purred herself into sleep. If Matthias ever wept at night, Hans would wake and start wondering aloud about the life that awaited them in the colony. I believed he hoped to distract my brother from his grief, to give him something to look forwards to.
As Maria and the Johannes, Christiana and Henriette had spoken endlessly about weddings and the life that marriage would bring (‘nine children,’ Christiana had said, ‘if God would so bless me’), so Matthias and Hans began to fill their nights talking about rain and soil and when they might strike out on their own. Sometimes they lay awake until the early hours of morning, imagining themselves men of independent means.
‘I would like a large farm,’ Matthias said one night. ‘My own farm.’
‘At least you will inherit your father’s,’ Hans replied. ‘Hermann will get Papa’s land if Rosina has no sons.’
Matthias shook his head. ‘I can’t wait that long. I want to work for myself. I want to be the man of my own house. To do things my own way.’
‘Then you shall have to marry a widow, perhaps.’
Matthias pulled a face and Hans laughed. ‘What? There is no shame in a marriage of convenience.’
‘What about you?’ my brother asked. ‘Will you marry for land?’
Hans was silent. I had expected a smirk or a shove to Matthias’s ribs, but Hans lay there, eyes fixed on the firmament, hands behind his head.
Matthias smiled. ‘Oh. You have someone in mind.’
Hans turned to my brother. ‘I did. But no. Not really. Not now.’
There was a long moment of silence.
‘Hanne?’