Hell and High Water

by Tanya Landman

  “He was a showman. A puppeteer.”

  “Is that what’s in the sack? Let’s have a look.”

  If she’d asked him to remove his clothes and stand naked in the room Caleb couldn’t have felt more exposed. The idea of anyone but Pa touching the puppets appalled him. “No!” he snapped.

  “Suit yourself.”

  There was an awkward silence. Anne broke it, saying softly, “Perhaps it’s best if we don’t speak of Joseph again. The people here don’t know my brother’s history and I’d rather they remained in ignorance. The past should be left where it belongs.” Her voice cracked a little as though she was struggling to contain her feelings.

  For the remainder of the meal they ate without speaking. The stew was of vegetables with only a lump or two of meat so gristly it might as well have been leather and yet Caleb worked away at it relentlessly. He had barely eaten for days. When the last morsel was swallowed he looked up to find that Letty’s steady gaze was still fixed on him.

  He could control himself no longer. “Stop it.”

  “What?”

  “Why do you stare like that? Do you think me something from a freak show?”

  She blushed, bright scarlet to the roots of her red hair.

  Anne came quickly to her defence. “Letty has never seen a person of your complexion, that is all. You cannot blame her for her curiosity, Caleb.”

  “It’s not that!” Letty protested. “I’ve seen plenty. Men like him sail into Tawpuddle from time to time.”

  “Well?” demanded Caleb. He was being rude. Boorish. He knew that Pa would have told him to calm himself, to count to twenty before speaking again. But Pa – blast him! – was not here. The damned fool had picked up that wretched purse and abandoned him to this! “What is it then? What so troubles you about my looks?”

  “I…”

  Caleb waited for more, but it didn’t come. Flushing, Letty looked to Anne. Anne looked at the table. Dorcas whimpered a little, leaning away as if afraid of him. Sweet Jesus, he was scaring a baby!

  His temper evaporated. He was a simpleton! What was he thinking? He was on eggshells here. His aunt could ask him to leave at any second – he had no right to stay. The thought of being turned out onto the street was too much to bear and a great weariness overwhelmed him. Elbows resting on the table, he took his head in his palms. He would have apologized, but before he could arrange the words in his mouth he found that Anne’s small hands were cupped about his and she was saying, “You have suffered so much, but now you are home. You must rest, now. I think perhaps we all should. It is late. We will talk more in the morning.”

  * * *

  The house consisted of two rooms, one piled on top of the other, linked by a roughly hewn ladder. When Anne, Letty and Dorcas retired for the night Caleb was left to curl by the hearth like a dog, clutching the bundle of puppets to his chest for comfort. If he could have wrapped his heart in sacking to protect it, he’d have done so. Lying awake, listening to the strange sounds of wind and water, his thoughts turned to Pa.

  Joseph had rarely spoken of his past. What little Caleb had learned of it had come in fragments that he now attempted to piece together. He knew that Pa had been born a gentleman – the son and heir of Charles Chappell, the Earl of Gravesham – but the earl had been a drinker and a gambler who had frittered away his fortune. In a lunatic attempt to recoup it he had invested heavily in a ship that plied the golden triangle. The one time Pa had mentioned this it had been with utter revulsion. Cheap trinkets shipped from England to Africa. Slaves seized from there and sold in the Indies. Sugar and rum from Jamaica carried home to England. Vast profits to be made on each leg of the journey. That, at least, had been the plan. But the vessel had sunk in a storm and, ashamed to be reduced to beggary, the Right Honourable Earl of Gravesham had first shot his wife and then taken his own life. Pa had been left to fend for himself. All that was left of his father’s fortune had been the signet ring Pa wore on his third finger. The loss of a ship, the loss of a fortune, the loss of both parents – that was the sum of Caleb’s knowledge.

  And it seemed that Anne – the sister who presumably shared the selfsame history – had no intention whatsoever of adding to it.

  5.

  At first light, Caleb heard voices from the room above – Anne’s soft murmur, Letty’s deeper tones. Though unable to catch every word he heard his name often enough to know they were discussing him.

  Letty came down the ladder first. He felt the urge to apologize for his outburst the night before, but she didn’t look at him. Indeed, she seemed determined to pretend that he simply wasn’t there. Silently, she stirred up the fire’s embers and gave a little driftwood to feed the flames. Then she crossed to the window and threw open the shutter.

  For a moment sunlight filled the room. It brought no cheer, only highlighting its shabbiness. A gust of wind carried the tang of salt on the air.

  “Over the bar, come on now, let’s be having you,” Letty muttered, looking out through the window, her back to him.

  Caleb stood, awkward, not knowing what to say or do. He had no idea what her cryptic utterance meant. Was she talking to him or only to herself? He caught the merest glimpse of a dozen or more ships in full sail coming in from the sea and heading upriver before she thrust head and shoulders through the window and plunged the room into murky gloom.

  What Letty was looking for, why she scanned the vessels with such eagerness, Caleb didn’t know but evidently she found what she sought for after a few minutes she pulled head and shoulders back in and yelled up the ladder, “Mayfly’s crossing the bar. And the Bethany is following close on.”

  How she could tell one ship from another and why it should matter so much to her was mystifying.

  There was the noise of activity from the room above and Anne was calling her, “Letty! Letty! Not in the boat!”

  But Letty did not – or chose not to – hear. Without even stopping to pick up a shawl she was gone out through the door and around the side of the house. Through the window Caleb watched her stride along the creaking jetty, hitching her skirts up to her knees, revealing a glimpse of shapely, muscled calves, before she jumped into a tiny rowboat, cast away the rope that held it fast and hauled on the oars, heading in the same direction as the sailing vessels.

  And now Anne came down the ladder carrying Dorcas in her arms. With a rueful smile she sighed, “Time and again I have begged her to walk there! Rowing is hardly fitting for a young woman. I try to teach her to behave in a more decorous fashion but I waste my breath, I fear. She was too long without a mother’s care, poor thing.”

  “As was I,” said Caleb quietly.

  He had meant to follow the comment with an apology for his uncouthness yet before he could Anne asked him haltingly, “She died, did she not?”

  “Yes.” Pa had told him his own mother had died in childbirth but that was all he’d ever said on the subject.

  “Did you miss her? I mean, did you feel her absence?”

  Caleb shrugged. “I couldn’t miss what I never had. Pa was everything to me.” He felt tears were dangerously close and so he changed the subject. “Where’s Letty gone?”

  “To Tawpuddle.”

  “For what purpose?”

  “In pursuit of ships coming over the sandbar. Some will be returning from long voyages and their captains will be in need of new garments. She catches them on the quayside before they can make their way to the tailor. We are seamstresses, Letty and I. She will bring back work when the tide turns, I do not doubt. She is a good, hard-working girl, for all her manners are so rough.”

  After this brief exchange, silence descended.

  Anne Avery might have the voice of a lady, but she didn’t have the income of one. Caleb knew he couldn’t expect to be fed and housed without paying his way and yet in this bleak, alien landscape and without Pa how was he to earn his keep?

  He said, “Aunt, I don’t wish my presence to be a burden. I’ll work for whoever will have me.�
��

  She smiled once more, nodding, although her mouth was tense and tight as though she was nervous. “Well, then. Let us see what can be done.”

  Together they stepped into the village street, Anne carrying Dorcas on her hip. The smells, the sounds, the very taste of Fishpool’s air – all were strange and foreign to Caleb. He was used to a countryside where the sky was suspended between hills and tall trees like a sheet hung out to dry. Here it arched before and after and to either side in a great dome that dwarfed even the jagged cliffs that hemmed in the bay. If the sky was overwhelming, the sea was even more so: too vast, too deep, too large to comprehend. The island in the distance was a dot, a full stop on a blank page, nothing more. And on land there was no softness of vegetation, no gentle curve of hill or river, nothing but harsh starkness and a sense of nature’s brutal force.

  Caleb looked to the left along the jetty where Letty had gone. The water bubbled and popped as though the river itself had begun to boil. Noting his alarm, Anne explained that there were creatures – cockles, lugworms – that buried themselves deep in the sand and mud when the tide ebbed. The tunnels they made left pockets of air so that now, as the tide came flooding in, this unearthly effect occurred.

  “There was a time when it troubled me,” Anne said gently. “But it is astounding what a person can get used to if their circumstances change.”

  They walked along the street. Fishpool, Caleb discovered, was a village where folk turned their back on grassland and meadow, looking instead to that expanse of salt water to make their living.

  And a meagre living it was. As they went from sail-maker to chandler to fisherman, he saw hardened faces, wearied with daily struggle and pinched with want. These people had barely sufficient to cover their own family’s need. Despite his aunt’s entreaties no one could offer him a scrap of work.

  They didn’t say as much at first but it was the same everywhere they stopped. Anne would introduce her nephew, explaining that Caleb had fallen on hard times and that she’d taken him in. And then the questions began: always addressed to her, as though Caleb was both deaf and dumb.

  “Where’d he come from, then?”

  “What happened to his father?”

  “Who’s his mother?”

  “How old is he?”

  “Can he speak English?”

  The bolder amongst them asked, “Do it wash off in the rain?”

  And even, “Filthy thing! How can you bear to have him in the house?”

  Caleb passed an uncomfortable morning being subjected to looks ranging from the curious to the antagonistic. Some of them seemed to regard him as not quite human: a creature located somewhere in God’s creation halfway between mankind and the brute beasts.

  And yet he observed that Anne – who had lived amongst these people for many years – was no more at her ease with them than he was. Indeed, as the morning wore on he began to think she suffered more than he did. He was used to such barbs. He felt their sting but there was nothing novel or original in them. Yet Anne flinched at each foolish question and winced at each malicious one as if they gave her physical pain. As they neared the end of the village she suddenly put her hand on his arm and whispered, “Has it always been like this? Are people everywhere so thoughtless? So cruel?”

  Caleb shrugged. “I have heard nothing here that I have not heard ten score times before.”

  “I could weep at it!” she said, turning to face him, her eyes filling even as she spoke. “Joseph … how did he respond to such insults?”

  “He would turn them aside with a joke. Or sometimes he got angry and used his fists.”

  “And I can do neither.” She was struggling to control her tears.

  Caleb found himself apologizing to her. It was wrong to expose someone so gentle and mild-mannered to the crude roughness of these folk – he would have managed better looking for work on his own. He urged her to go back to the house but she refused to leave him.

  They walked on until they came to the last creaking jetty that jutted out over the water. In the town of Tawpuddle, a mile or so upriver from Fishpool, a bridge spanned its width allowing people and horses from one side to the other. Caleb had crossed it himself only the day before. But at the river’s mouth there was but one way over the water. Anne introduced Caleb to Harry, the ferryman, and a long exchange followed in which Harry asked the same questions that had been asked by every other person in the village. Only when it came to the matter of work did their conversation take a different turn.

  His back troubled him these days, Harry said. He could use a pair of strong arms and was willing to give the lad a try.

  Anne thanked him, her lip trembling. “And when should he begin?”

  “Right now. Come on boy, let’s see what you can do.”

  Caleb followed Harry to the jetty’s end. He had never been on the water in his life but had that morning watched Letty step lightly down into her rowing boat. Old and aching Harry might be, but he too made the transfer from jetty to boat look simple. When Caleb attempted the same thing the vessel rocked so violently he feared they would both be thrown overboard.

  “Keep your weight low, lad,” Harry snapped, steadying the boat. “That’s right. Bend your knees, sit here now. Take the oars, that’s it. Hold them like this, see? Pull them up and round towards you. Nice and easy does it.”

  But nice and easy Caleb certainly was not. He tried his utmost to follow Harry’s commands but the oars were unruly and untameable in his hands. Either he dug too deep and lifted himself clean off the bench, or he missed the water completely and fell backwards off it. It would have been comical had it not been so utterly humiliating.

  And all the time – with each failed attempt – they were moving further from the land. They were in the middle of the river by the time that Caleb realized that there was now a great depth of water beneath him containing God alone knows what kind of monstrous creatures. His stomach began to heave. Sweat beaded on his forehead and fear must have shown in his eyes because Harry said, “You all right, boy?”

  In answer Caleb emptied the contents of his belly over Harry’s feet.

  Without another word the ferryman turned the boat and rowed Caleb back to where his aunt was waiting with Dorcas.

  His stint as ferryman’s lad had lasted less than half an hour.

  Looking pained beyond endurance, Anne helped Caleb from the boat back onto solid land. She said nothing. Dorcas was fretful now, tired and hungry. Busying herself with her grizzling child, Anne turned for home and Caleb followed, cold and miserable. Harry had been his last chance of employment in Fishpool. There was no one else in the village to ask for work.

  Letty returned an hour later. Dorcas was sleeping in the room above. Anne and Caleb were sitting in a dejected silence when they heard the rowboat thump against the jetty. Then Letty was calling, “Captain Smith is asking for two new shirts. New coat and all. And I got some off the Mayfly needs mending.”

  A bundle of unwashed clothing – reeking of sweat – was dumped into the middle of the floor the moment Letty entered the house.

  “You find him anything?” she said to Anne, jerking her thumb at Caleb but avoiding his eyes.

  “No.” Anne sounded defeated. Despairing even.

  “Who’d you try?”

  Wearily Anne listed everyone they had gone to in the village.

  “Harry?”

  “He would have taken him on. But Caleb became ill from the motion of the boat.”

  Caleb waited for a contemptuous remark but none came. He looked up to see her green eyes were full of pity. Pity! He didn’t want pity! Contempt would have been easier to bear. Contempt was what he deserved. He was an oddity, a misfit, a dark-skinned bastard. A landlubber with a pitifully weak stomach. No one here would want him. All these ships! But not even a press gang would take him! Who’d have a lad who would spew his guts over the boots of the captain the moment he set foot on deck?

  He dropped his head into his hands. He was a millsto
ne about his aunt’s neck. Her husband was absent at sea and she and Letty were so obviously struggling to make ends meet, yet he was unable to do a thing. Dorcas whimpered in fear each time he went near her. He couldn’t even mind the baby!

  Leaving him to his misery, the two women began to sort through the clothes that Letty had brought from Tawpuddle.

  Anne was a seamstress: both fancy work and plain, linen sheets, damask tablecloths, ladies’ dresses, gentlemen’s shirts – whatever she could get she took. But it was Letty who did the heavy work. She now set the copper on the fire to boil and washed the shirts that were in need of repair before wringing them out and hanging them to dry on the line that stretched between the cottage and jetty. It was easier to believe that Letty was mistress of the house than Anne, thought Caleb as he watched them working. The two women were polite to each other. There even seemed to be some affection between them but there was little ease there. Indeed they were both excessively cautious, as if theirs was a relationship that might fracture and break with the slightest of knocks.

  He watched Letty with some envy. She was energetic. Competent. If he’d had her skill with the oars he’d be out earning his keep instead of having to sit here. Her every move made him feel more useless.

  Yet when the laundry was done and Letty sat down to the mending Caleb was surprised to discover that she was as much use with a needle as Pa had been last winter.

  When Joseph had decided to fashion a new set of puppets he’d carved heads and hands with ease. But when it came to the stitching of their glove bodies and costumes he was at a loss. It was Caleb who’d done all the sewing that was needed and he’d enjoyed it, crafting costumes that were bright enough to draw the eye but strong enough to withstand the energetic use to which Pa put them.

  He watched Letty as she threaded a needle and sat punching it crossly from one side of the cloth to the other. Her hands, calloused from rowing, were ill-suited to the task. The thread seemed to have a life of its own under her control. It snagged and tied itself into knots and when it finally broke Letty cursed loudly.