“Pray, did you call me?” Patience’s voice came into my room in the darkness, and for a moment I thought I was at home sharing my bed with her.
I asked Patience why we had not yet reached Kingston, and we talked about where we might be going if it were not Kingston. The Tortugas? Or the opposite direction and far worse, Barbados? “As far as Turks and Caicos,” one woman declared. I knew nothing of that place. I wanted my own fireside and bed and Ma and Pa and August and Patey. Allsy. Without sunrises and settings, every hour seemed eternal. I ached. My teeth hurt. On and on we sailed. Sometimes people got sick with the pitching, but I did not unless I could not hide my eyes and ears and nose from their seasickness.
Then one time, with night coming on after another day we could measure only by glimmers of light through the single porthole, men came down. Five of them came straight to our cell. Patey slept in a corner, being sick now as many were, with the beginnings of scurvy, but she roused upon hearing the lock clicking and the door open. One pirate held a lantern aloft and looked us over. Like fluttering doves all the women cowered away from his glare. His lips curled around his three off-centered teeth, and he reached straight for me, clutching a large handful of my gown. I screamed with force I hardly believed came from me. Patience wrapped her arms about me and pulled back mightily; I became a rag between two mad dogs.
Patience rolled me to the floor and flattened herself upon me, crushing the breath from my bones. She bellowed, she kicked, and she thrashed, and pulled other women off their feet. Our clamor rose and we writhed together, fighting for our lives, trying to get the hoard of women to hide us. His grizzly hands drew girls apart like baggage. Between the slime on the floor and the lengths of cloths that made up every skirt and petticoat, we made a knot of shrieking females that closed back as soon as he tore us asunder.
Men from the deck overhead began to yell and curse, too, cheering us on. On my feet for a moment, Patey banged me against one of the massive ribs of the hull, and though I did not lose consciousness, my eyes rolled upward. I could neither resist nor stand any longer. Patience grabbed an arm and shoved someone else before us, and the man’s claws let go of my clothes.
He dragged the girl from the cell and another closed the lock. It was the Irish girl. I remember the red hair, hanging down his back, with her upended on his shoulders. He pushed her at the ladder, but when she refused, he hoisted her like a sack and darted up the steps as if she weighed nothing at all. Her howling left an echo that hung in the air for a long time. They took one other woman from another cell who did not fight at all but climbed the ladder to her fate.
“Stop!” I cried out.
Patience clapped her filthy hand across my mouth. “Be still. I have saved you.”
We slumped to the floor, and others stood above us. A reeking stench came from every square inch of this place, as if the scuffle had awakened sulfurous demons. Someone made dry coughing sounds across the way.
Later, I said, “I hear her crying,” to Patience.
“No you do not. They’ve given her a nice dinner and comfits and sweets of every sort. Pies and puddings. Turtle soup. Ham and sprats and kingfish. She is not crying.”
“I hear her crying,” I said. “She was no bigger than me. Poor wee Irish mite.” Pa used that word for me sometimes. Mousy, mousy, wee mite, he called me. “Why would they give her food and not us?”
“Go to sleep.”
“I cannot. My head hurts. Were you trying to knock my brains out?”
“If that was what it took to save you.”
“La, Patey. You are hard.” I shoved her away from me. How could she hate me so? What had I done to be so abased and abused?
Three times that night we heard great splashes off the side of the ship. I thought and I thought. I knew people who died on a ship got buried in the sea. If they fed that girl and that woman a dinner, had their stomachs exploded and they died? And why were there three splashes? Who else had eaten with them? Maybe the food was poisoned, but I felt so hungry I would gladly eat poisoned food. I would.