“Stay in school, Charity,” her mother had pleaded on her deathbed, her eyes fever-bright with the consumption that wracked her now emaciated body. “It’s all paid for through the term. Soon, you’ll be a fine finished young lady, as the countess promised me, and you’ll end up marrying some titled lord.”
Charity had nodded through her tears. A fine finished young lady she might become, but marrying a titled lord was far above her reach. Her foolish, ambitious mother, dreaming wild dreams, had never understood that. Moll naively believed that the countess's expensive school would bring Charity everything other wealthier girls had.
It had brought her nothing but a surface polish and a deep unease about her future.
Snubbed at school, she’d never been able to bring herself to tell her mother that the “grand young ladies” receiving their education at Stéphanie’s house in Bath didn’t consider her their equal, that they looked down on her background. One of them, Margaret Yorking, had an aunt who wintered in Torquay (where they had moved after Increase’s death) and the aunt had told her that Charity and her mother lived in a hut! There had been general titters all around when the girls learned that, and Charity, standing rooted in the doorway behind them, had flushed bright with shame. She realized that, by comparison with Margaret Yorking’s turreted castle in Kent or Jane Millwood’s vast manor house in Sussex, she did indeed live in a hut. Her mother called their home “Cheltenham House,” which looked good on letters, but it was only a tiny house ablaze with flowers and warmth and love. What did it matter that she lived simply, she asked herself violently. Wasn’t she as bright, as pretty, as well educated as her schoolmates?
So she held her head high and faced them down, ignoring the two truly wealthy girls who set the pace—and being in turn ignored by them.
But her true position in life was brought home to her most forcefully when her carefree roommate, Priscilla Walsingford, whose guardian was a country squire in Hampshire, invited her home for the Christmas holidays. Priscilla’s brother, home on holiday from Oxford, fell head over heels in love with Charity in a happy puppy-dog way and asked her to marry him. His guardian had got wind of the proposal and the lad was promptly whisked back to Oxford. When they returned to Stéphanie’s house in Bath, Charity had found herself with a new roommate.
It was all very well for Priscilla to laugh and gossip with Charity, but not for her brother to consider marrying such a girl.
Charity fell back on the company of her new roommate, the school’s other “outcast,” a Spanish girl named Mercedes Ramirez, whose uncle was in the English court. Due to the bad relations between England and Spain, the uncle found his Spanish niece an embarrassment to him and had placed her with the obliging Countess Stéphanie de la Croix, to be educated.
Unhappy Mercedes, homesick for the sunny lands of Spain, insisted on speaking Spanish. Trying to think in this new language helped Charity forget the sting of condescension she must live with. So, she bent her efforts to learn the language under Mercedes’ tutelage. Charity's Spanish became fluent, and she grew very fond of her. Mercedes would never be a beauty, for she was much too thin, her nose too sharply pointed, but her black hair coiled thick and lustrous, and her big eyes flashed darkly as she spoke with the controlled emotion that was so distinctively Castilian.
The two of them grew very close and Charity would have invited Mercedes to visit her in Torquay, but her mother rejected that. “Let those girls think you live in a palace,” she said flatly.
Charity sighed. The girls at school already knew she didn’t live in a palace.
But her mother mustn’t know that, her sweet, foolish, doting mother, growing frailer day by day, dreaming happily of that good marriage that would never come to pass. . . .
Charity buried her mother and, as a memorial to her, forced herself to endure her last year of schooling.
She had no clear picture of what would happen to her after that. Too well educated to go into service; too pretty, she’d been told, to get a job as a governess; from too low a class to marry well. . . what did a young woman in her position do?
Stéphanie had delicately mentioned she might find a “protector,” but Charity shrank from that, sincerely believing such a course was wrong. She had been brought up to look forward to marriage, as had the other girls at Stéphanie’s, and she felt she would somehow be letting her dead mother down if she accepted less. So Stéphanie had shrugged her delicate French shoulders and dropped the subject.
It was all solved for her by the letter from America informing her that Uncle Jason, whom she’d never met, had died in America and left her everything he owned.
Her path was clear. After Charity sold the house in Torquay and her mother’s few small possessions, she returned briefly for a last consultation with her mentor, Stéphanie, whose advice centered mainly on clothes. Then she journeyed across the Salisbury Plain to Southampton and purchased passage on the good ship Bonaventure, a merchantman bound for Boston, stowing aboard two trunks full of stylish dresses that couldn’t have been more unsuited to Puritan life in Massachusetts.
The Bonaventure was slow in leaving port. Charity chafed at the delay that kept her in the bustling port town and obliged her to spend most of the remainder of her little store of funds. Sometimes she went down to the docks, and standing amid the screaming seagulls, watched the men loading, their big muscles bulging as they stowed salted pork and beef and fish and bacon and boxes of cheese and biscuits into the hold of the sturdy oaken ship. Wine casks and hogsheads of fresh water and beer were snugly fitted in, and at the last minute fresh vegetables and fruits to ward off the dreaded scurvy. She was surprised to discover that, while food was to be severely rationed, there was a plentiful supply of beer for each adult. The sailors explained, eyeing her handsome young female body, its curves hardly to be hidden under her trim broadcloth dress, that beer would help ward off fatigue and make damp nights on the ocean more bearable.
At last the great day came and Charity, hardly able to suppress her excitement, boarded the ship.
She picked her way daintily through the live chickens and pigs and goats lashed down in crates on the piled-up deck, feeling pity for the sad frightened animals which would supplement the monotonous diet of biscuit and salt meat on the voyage.
She found herself squeezed with the other women and children into tiny cabins between decks. The men passengers shared a large common cabin. The forecastle housed the crew, while the ship’s officers boasted tiny cabins on the quarterdeck.
Packed to the gunwales, the Bonventure, with her sister ship the Archangel (for it was considered safer to travel in pairs), sailed down the Solent River to the Channel. The two overloaded merchantmen, crowded with goods and people eager to try their luck in a new land, pointed their stubby prows toward America.
The voyage was rough. From the choppy Channel, the two tall ships sailed out into the broad sweep of the Atlantic. Life aboard was dismal. Rats scuttled about, running over people, nipping ears in the night, and there was always the overpowering stench of bilge. In good weather the passengers cooked at an open fire on deck, the smoke billowing up to sully the white sails, and in bad weather they ate cold food and lay about retching from seasickness. Charity spent all the time she could on deck breathing in the fresh salt air because the air below decks was so foul.
On deck she became a favorite with the seamen because she took their rough admiring glances and words in the spirit given. She enjoyed watching the crew play cards on the planking, between watches, though she kept her distance from their rough-and-tumble wrestling matches. They told her that she had “got her sea legs,” which most of these lubbardly landlubbers had not, for passengers were sprawled out over the decks, hanging over the rail, seasick from the steady rocking-horse roll of the little ship.
Charity shared her crowded little cabin with a fat old woman going out to join her son in Boston, and a young pregnant wife who, with her husband—he slept in the common quarters with the other men—w
as going out to the Colonies in hopes of rising above the hand-to-mouth existence that had been theirs in Scotland and later as servants in England. The wife’s name was Janet MacTavish; she was a grave, pleasant woman of medium height, who looked at Charity in surprise when she learned the girl was traveling alone and asked candidly in her soft Scots brogue, “Is it a husband you’re looking for then, lass? Sure, there must have been men aplenty who would want such a face as yours to gaze at over their morning porridge.”
When Charity explained she was going to Massachusetts to claim her inheritance, Janet looked impressed.
They grew friendly, exchanging confidences. Janet and her husband were fleeing religious persecution. They had had a terrible time in Scotland, and Charity seethed to think how this gentle creature had been subjected to public humiliation. In England they had nearly starved. Charity hoped Janet and her Ian would find happiness in the new world to which they were going. But when a round of fever swept the ship, the luckless Ian died of it. Charity grieved with Janet and felt almost as if she too had lost a husband.
“And what’s to become of me? And of the bairn when it’s born?” asked Janet bleakly, standing by the rail with the strong east wind blowing her much-mended dress (one of two she owned). “It’s a strange land. I’ve no kin to take me. To be bound out is all that’s left—that or the streets.”
“That won’t happen to you,” said Charity quickly. “You’re to come with me to Dynestown. My uncle’s farm can support us all and your baby will grow rosy in the country.”
“Woudst really do that, lass?” asked Janet wistfully. “And me no better than a stranger?”
“You’re much better than a stranger,” corrected Charity, squeezing Janet’s hand encouragingly. “And I’ve still some limes left that I bought on the dock when we left. You’re to eat some—we can’t have you getting sick, with a baby coming!”
Janet smiled gratefully through her tears, her heart too full to allow her to speak.
The long, slow journey began to seem endless. Charity stood with the other passengers, one day, and watched as a sailor was punished with the ferula, that flat stick that ship’s officers used to discipline their crews. The man had made a bawdy remark to one of the women passengers and she had complained to the captain. The captain—a dour Cornishman—had decided to make an example of him. Charity felt sick as she saw the man slip, unconscious, to the deck.
When, a week later, a sailor, who had broken into a barrel of wine and was reeling from the effects, slipped up behind her and suddenly ran his hand up under her modish long skirts and pinched her bare bottom so hard that she cried out, she turned and slapped him in the face. He reeled drunkenly away, laughing, but she did not complain to the captain. A passenger who had witnessed the incident said indignantly that if she complained the sailor would doubtless be “keel-hauled.” Charity turned away with a shudder. She had no desire to have a man dragged, cut and torn, around the sharp-toothed barnacled hull because of her.
After that she kept her distance from the dice games on deck and the lingering eyes of the crew. For as the days went by, the sailors had taken to watching hungrily when the women came up out of the foulness below for a breath of fresh sea air.
Though some passengers kept diaries recounting each detail of the voyage, Charity did not, but instead brooded on the new life that lay ahead of her in a raw new land.
She was sure she had done the right thing. Would she not now be a woman of property, able to determine her own future? And in England what would have become of her with nothing to recommend her except a knowledge of French and Spanish and good manners, and a handsome wardrobe. . . . She told herself stoutly that she would never have accepted Stéphanie’s hesitant suggestion of a protector, nor would she have allowed herself to be forced into marriage merely for security. But she might very well have been forced into service. And life as chambermaid, or at best a housekeeper, after living as a counterfeit young lady in Bath, would have been galling.
The Atlantic crossing was a voyage to test one’s courage, for they endured not only two minor squalls, but a sudden violent storm that boiled up out of the south and threw them off course. How the gallant little wooden ship rocked and pitched in the gale, cresting enormous waves in violent gusts of rain that darkened the sky, sliding down into seemingly bottomless troughs of giant waves, heaving in heavy seas that crashed green and foaming over the deck. Penned down below, the passengers rode out the storm in darkness, to the accompaniment of crying children and low-voiced oaths and howls of pain as goods and heavy items of furniture careened about, causing many a bruise and at least one broken leg. Charity often braced her own body to protect Janet who was near her time. When leaks sprung and the women rallied to stuff the openings with bits of clothing, most of Charity’s cherished petticoats and chemises went into the breach.
At the height of that storm, Janet went into labor. Charity assisted at the birth, grimly bracing Janet’s straining body with her own, and muttering soothingly as the frightened midwife did what she could. In spite of their exhausting efforts, the baby died and Janet weakened and slumped back in Charity’s arms. Shaken with sobs, Charity held Janet’s frail body for a long time in the darkness before she knew for certain that her friend was dead.
There, weeping in the darkness of that plunging ship, Charity promised herself—as one might when waking from a nightmare—that in New England everything would be better, in Massachusetts everything would be all right.
CHAPTER 3
When the storm cleared away, the tired passengers who crowded up to the decks of the battered Bonaventure discovered that they were alone on an open ocean. Their sister ship the Archangel had foundered and sunk. They found but one exhausted survivor, lashed to a floating spar, who gasped out the terrible tale of the ship breaking up, of screaming women and children trapped in the cabins below, tales of heroism and tragedy.
The stunned passengers listened and knelt down on the decks and gave thanks for their own salvation. Miraculously, the Bonaventure had endured only some damage to the sails, a repairable number of leaks, and a cracked mast that had now been securely lashed together.
In a sad little ritual, which was very painful to Charity, the shrouded corpses of Janet and her baby were consigned to the deep amid muted sobs.
They sailed on.
Charity felt she had lived a full lifetime before a roar of joy and the cry of “Land! Land!” was heard aboard ship. She arrived on deck in a tumbling struggle with the other passengers to watch as the mysterious shores of Massachusetts stretched out before them.
The ship docked in bustling Boston harbor on a beautiful windswept day, while seabirds cried raucously as they swooped among the white billowing sails and over the busy crowds at the dockside. Charity, as excited as the other passengers, stared curiously at the jumble of buildings, the fields and woods and the distinctive triple peaks of the Trimountain. She disembarked amid a hail of farewells, and was able to find a cart and driver for hire at the dockside. She bought an apple and munched on it happily as the jogging cart, with her two trunks sitting in the back, took her through narrow winding streets to an inn. From there, she sent a message to the gentleman who had written to her about her inheritance.
The attorney came around later in the day, a big florid man dressed rather too conspicuously for a Puritan. When Charity greeted him in the inn’s public room, he looked startled indeed to see her. Refreshed and dressed modishly in a sweeping dress of fine twilled sarcenet, deep green and trimmed in black ribbons, she was an appealing sight to behold.
“You are Mistress Woodstock?” he stammered.
Ignorant of Puritan ways, Charity mistakenly ascribed his surprise to her youth and, remembering her instruction in deportment at Bath, tried her best to charm him. This met with such success that his blue eyes took on a kind of glaze, and he took her out and gallantly showed her Boston. He informed her that much of the city had burned in 1679, but rebuilding was moving apace. He showed
her Fort Hill, the South Battery, a remarkable Triangular Warehouse, each corner topped by three-story hexagonal towers topped by pyramids and further surmounted by stone balls. To cap their tour, he proudly pointed out handsome Province House, a dormered brick laid in English bond, its weather vane an Indian archer standing proudly atop tin octagonal cupola.
Although she was interested in the guided tour, Charity was impatient and bursting with questions about Dynestown and the property her uncle had left her.
A good farmhouse, she was told gravely, on small but productive acreage, lying somewhat outside the village of Dynestown, and now the residence of the widowed Goodwife Arden and her two children, Matthew and Patience.
Goodwife Arden? Ah, that would be Aunt Temperance, her father and Jason’s widowed older sister who had lived with Jason as his pensioner. Matthew and Patience would be her children. Charity expressed her eagerness to know them and said she hoped they would like her.
The attorney bit his full lower lip and his eyes rested somberly again on her fashionable hairstyle (although Charity herself considered it quite plain and suitable only for travel) and her deep green sarcenet dress. He cleared his throat and told her in a dry voice that her relatives were country people, rather staid in their ways. Charity took note of that and determined to dress her hair even more plainly and to wear her simplest dress on arrival. She had no wish to appear to preen in the eyes of less fortunate relatives, and she desperately wanted them to like her.
He sighed when she admitted she had brought to America only her clothing and toilet articles, no plows or seeds or useful tools or items of immediate salability. Then looking down into her fresh face he suddenly bestirred himself and remembered that he had a wife who would scold him if he was late getting home. And, so, after promising Charity that he would find her a guide and packhorses to transport her and her goods to Dynestown, he took his leave.
This Loving Torment Page 4
