One day we sailed into what looked like a great loss of downy feathers from a flock of geese. Cold and wet, the stuff vanished in my hands. The wonderment of snow caused me to stare without ceasing at the sky. Patience helped me that day to remove my quilted petticoat and wrap it over my shoulders as if it were a cape. What a marvelous thought she had, too, as that made me a great deal warmer.
Even though the English sent parties to shore and brought back fresh food, Patience began to be sick even when the ship was still, or at least when the rocking seemed a melancholic swing caught in a breeze, rather than the high gavotte of the stormy days. Nothing would calm her stomach, and if I tried to comfort her she shrieked at me so that I wondered if she had gone mad. After all those days aboard a ship, being a prisoner seemed inconvenient, rather than a hard punishment or captivity, for though we needed perhaps a doctor and rest and good broth for her, for me boredom had been my chiefest complaint other than hunger. Now it was cold.
These days there were no songs sung belowdecks. The earthy joy of African rhythm had frozen, too. When I was above and one or another of the sailors would take a rest from his work and pick up a flute or squeezebox, I clung to the notes of music as if they nestled in my innermost workings. One evening as an old squeezebox lent “If I Wast a Blackbird” the most elegant melancholia, I found privateers weeping in their cups. I gave myself to learning the tunes though some of the men spoke with the direst accents or mispronounced things entirely. I learned the words, too. Ma would have disapproved. “A coarse and lusty wench a-riding barebacked on a mare,” went one song, and another began with a chant of “Damn your eyes, Bos’n Bandy. Damn your eyes.” I had no idea what the song was about, but the tune was merry and anyone aboard deck might step out a few paces of a jig when they played it.
When I was made to clean, I was often cursed at in language of an art that would have made even my pa faint. I grew used to their words and soon realized there was less threat behind them than there was a natural tendency to venomous hissing, rather like a basketful of snakes afloat on the sea, so to even the reckoning, I began to pilfer. First a bit of thread or a button, sometimes a nail or a bit of rope, once, a hat. I tossed the things overboard soon as I got a chance, placing them on the gunwale and bumping them off with my elbow. It was rare I heard the splash, but I felt satisfied that their things were lost forever. One time I tossed over a belaying pin left loose in its notch. A sailor was cuffed and sent hunting the thing, and I smiled heartily at seeing his blackened eye.
Just when it seemed that the sea was to be my life, that nothing changed nor would it ever change, that dirty men and piteous women were to be my life’s companions and cold starvation my lot, the ship changed course and heeled the sails leeward. We began to move with the sun and toward its setting. I watched men furling sails and fitting out the canoe with its small sail and oars and three lanterns. When the sun went down, four men climbed into the boat and began to row for shore. The night closed around them just as I climbed down the ladder. I felt the ship moving in the night, yet, rather than the usual rhythm of calls and chatter above, we sailed in ghostly quiet. Before morning broke the ship had calmed in a way that I knew we had moored in a bay. Nary a lantern gleamed above. No moon cast a shadow, nor did stars prick the heavens. Save for the glow of sea foam, it was black as pitch when they led us to the ladders.
Against the coldest wind I had ever known, the English lined the women up and made us climb down the rigging again. This time they ferried us ten or so at a time, still under guard, to an empty beach of dull buff and stone. As I awaited my turn, I looked hastily for August. I spotted him below in the boat holding an oar, once I had both feet over the side and was about to take a step downward. “Brother!” I called out.
“Get on wi’ ye,” one of the sailors barked at me. I was afraid he would give me a shove over the side, so I scrambled down the ropes.
“Ho!” August called, and helped me settle my feet into the boat. He reached up for Patience and settled us in. I took a seat beside him. He took up his oar as the other men did, and one called out the strokes.
I asked him, “You will come with us, will you not?”
“Quiet. I am a sailor now, Resolute.”
“But August, we’ll be alone. You cannot stay. Oh, tell me you shall not stay with—these”—I looked about to see if anyone paid me heed—“men!”
“I must. I signed papers. I will only go around, though, Ressie, and then I will come for you. I promise.” An unsteady glow filled the sky, as if the sun hid behind a blanket of dense clouds.
At long last I asked, “How far around? How long will it take?”