The Voyage of the Morning Light

by Marina Endicott

  Mr. Brimner looked up again, as if to be certain she was attending and allowing him to continue. Receiving no stop from her, he did so. “Saying, Ask and you shall have: seek and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. Give now unto us that ask—let us that seek, find. Open Thy gate unto us that knock, that this infant may enjoy the everlasting benediction of Thy heavenly washing, and may come to the eternal kingdom which thou hast promised, by Christ Our Lord, Amen.”

  At “heavenly washing,” Thea felt her eyes open and tears flood briefly out. She had a fresh hanky but could not find it in the unfamiliar pockets of the skirt Mrs. Judd had lent her. Mr. Brimner waved a large white one at her nose, and she caught it and turned away for a moment. Only a few tears, quietly shed. Like a deposit on her grief. It was not true release, it was not that she had forgiven God.

  Walking down the gravel path beside the church, Kay heard someone weeping. She stood on tiptoe to look in the window, but it was too high. Instead, she slipped into the vestry porch, silent in bare feet, shadowy against the white walls in her white dress, no longer spotless, softened by sun and salt water. Thea was praying and crying, a hanky pressed to her face. It must be hard to have a baby inside you and find that the baby died, and perhaps Francis would be angry.

  Mr. Brimner looked up and saw her standing there, and he smiled again at her as he had the first day, face creasing into an excess of kindness. He waved a hand at her as to a friend, an equal. She nodded back and went on cat feet, out again.

  There she was still, wandering in the graveyard, when he came out. She saw him casting about for a glimpse of her. He started over the grass, stepping over graves just as if a person was not rotted away to white sticks under each one.

  “Miss Kay,” he said, when near enough.

  “Mr. Brimner,” she said in turn, since he kept waiting for her to speak.

  “I have been—Well, do you know, Captain Grant was so kind as to suggest that I might take passage to Tonga on the Morning Light, and I wished to say—I have been accustomed to earn my keep. Your brother says your schooling has been neglected. He thought we might study together, as we go, to lessen the burden for your sister. And perhaps increase your skill in algebra.” At her grimace, he said, “Hm! Or we could study the English poets—Spenser, Donne, Milton? I am myself now engaged on a work of—But no, I see you are unmoved by poesy. The Latin tongue, then? I could benefit from polishing my Catullus.”

  Kay looked at him. Her father’s Hebrew Bible, thick and backwards, blackest ink on thinnest paper, lay in the bottom of her trunk. “Could you teach me Hebrew?”

  He smiled again, lesserly, without the creases. “Sadly, I am no hand at Hebrew. What would you think of Ancient Greek?”

  Her heart leapt.

  “Cyrus and Xerxes, the three hundred—I believe I saw a First Greek Book on Canon Judd’s shelves. We might persuade him to part with it . . .”

  Kay said, “Would I learn the other letters?”

  “The Greek alphabet? Necessarily.”

  “My father did not have time to teach me yet, and then he died.”

  “Well then, I believe it is a bargain.” Mr. Brimner put out his hand, and Kay took it. His smile as usual broke his head in two, this time the neck jutting out to add emphasis to his pleasure. Kay took her hand back, but she was pleased.

  Mrs. Judd gave them a sad fare-thee-well, sobbing into her lace-edged cuff; her tears lent Thea stoic resolve. She was grateful for the care that Mrs. Judd had given and caused to be given her, and thanked her as warmly as she was able to do—not very well.

  That morning Rhoda had brought her a small box, six inches long and three across. Inside, on a piece of satin, lay a wrapped clump of matter. Thea did not unwrap it. She pulled the white ribbon from the hem of her trousseau petticoat, from which the stains would never be got out, and tied it round and round, seven or eight times, with a tight knot and a careful bow. Making the bow became the only job she had.

  When Francis came, bringing Jacky Judge and Hubbard to carry her bandbox and Mr. Brimner’s trunk, she asked him to walk with her down the beach before they went aboard.

  They walked as far as Thea could manage, and at the end of the long pink spit, Francis dug a deep hole in the sand, where it would be some time before the beach wore away, and buried the box. No marker. Thea put a stone on the heap of sand and prayed for a moment, and then they left that place.

  4

  The Atlantic

  Mr. Brimner came aboard like a sailor, jumping handily over the lip at the top end of the gangplank, all courteous enthusiasm for such a shipshape vessel. He nodded to Kay but did not linger on deck—perhaps having been long enough at Eleuthera. He only clapped his hands together and went below to oversee the stowage of his trunks. She watched him go down the stairs, thin legs trotting cleverly below his portly body.

  Mr. Wright bellowed the order to cast off, long lines ran snaking back, and the ship slid from the wharf on the afternoon tide. Jaunty at the rails, the boys whipped ropes into neat coils and called fare-thee-well to Susannah and Sally, who stood waving from the jetty. Kay waved her own handkerchief, but could not look at them.

  Francis settled Thea into a deck chair on the shady port side with a fine white shawl, and she huddled in it as if she was cold, hands bunched together though it was a fine, hot day.

  Alone by the rail, Kay stood stiff and silent. This was no choice of hers. She must always do what other people decided; she was a prisoner, in fact. If she could, she would stay with Susannah and live on this island forever, swimming in the sea instead of sailing over it to some terrible place or other. The temporary world of Eleuthera was like heaven set down on the earth.

  And very likely there was no other heaven to wait for, it was all a lie; or if there was, Father would be waiting there for her, as if she had been sent to his study for a whipping. But her mother would be in heaven too, half-seen, a soft cheek and a wing of dark hair visible around an ivory pillar. So then Kay might best throw herself over the railing and drown or be eaten by a shark and get on with it. Except she did not think she could make herself die on purpose; she would fight it like the fish flying fiercely out of the maw of a shark.

  You cannot see from what they fly, Kay said in her top-mind, the one that pronounced.

  In the Pacific, Arthur Wetmore had told her, they would see whales. Their dark, curving tails and their spouting—perhaps that would be a consolation. Francis too had spoken of their vastness. Still in the turquoise-pale Caribbean transparency, the sea that she had swum in herself, Kay looked down into the water and through it. The dolphins coming companionably along were now quite ordinary, although her eyes searched for the particular notched fin of the one who had been with them at the shore.

  She did not mention swimming to Thea, who in her duty to Kay’s correct upbringing was like Aunt Lydia. In their ladies’ prison of propriety, they could not know how good the water was, how holy—how, after hours of tumbling in the sea, you felt washed bright again, a better, nobler person. In the same way that sailing in the ship, this little piece of world broken off from the main, made you feel braver. Like a voyager, an adventurer.

  The beauty of the filling sails filled her eyes; they were putting on sail now, white acres lifting and lifting into the giddy air. Not unhappy, Kay gripped the rail as the Morning Light swayed on a strong wave of moving sea and caught the wind to sweep round into the darker Atlantic blue, the true deep ocean.

  At the wheelhouse, Francis stood absorbed in charts, with Mr. Wright roaring an occasional command to hearten the crew after their three-day rest. Every shout rang in Kay’s ears because it must hurt Thea’s. Kay did not want to look at her, in case it hurt her to be observed in this condition. Thea’s face looked foreign. She could not truly be thinner in only three days, but the pale skin was drawn tight over her forehead and her eyes were blue-shadowed. But it would be worse if Thea had died, and Kay had to sail on alone with Francis forever, whom she hardly knew.


  Mr. Brimner trotted up from below, where Hubbard had been settling him in his cabin. He smacked his linen-jacketed chest with both hands and searched a moment in his pockets, then pulled out a pair of dark-glass spectacles and exhibited them to Kay.

  “Guard the eyes from strain!” He pulled each rounded crook carefully over his great ear-tops. “My physician’s strict orders,” he told her solemnly.

  A crackpot. She was stuck with him now.

  Thea tilted the brim of her straw hat to see him better. “Did you have them specially made?” she asked.

  “In Oxford,” he answered. “Ground and smoked to my eye’s idiosyncrasy. They answer very well. But some things shine strangely through them—” He looked about him as if to prove it. “Rainbows and glories. The sun itself. Some colours—reds, greens—glow with a ferocious beauty that tempts the eye.”

  Gazing out from his portable darkness, he looked like that villainous kidnapper, blind Mr. Mole of “Thumbelina,” in Kay’s childhood book of stories. It was strange to have another person now in the world of the ship.

  Mr. Brimner took the chair beside Thea, fidgeting for a moment with his glasses case before drawing out a small green book. Then he sat quite still, instantly absorbed; or perhaps only pretending, to be less of a bother.

  Setting her own book aside, Thea beckoned to Kay to come beside her chair, and leaned to interrupt his stillness with a frown of apology. “I cannot seem to find the gumption, Mr. Brimner, to get down to serious work while at sea—but my sister’s school work—I know Francis spoke to you, and I would be grateful. She is a clever pupil. Although not much interested in grammar or arithmetic, she has a great facility in Latin.” Thea smiled at Kay, who moved her own mouth in echo, slanting up very slightly.

  Mr. Brimner said sadly, “Great Latin, has she? She’ll outstrip me, very like. But Miss Kay and I have determined that our chief work is to be wrestling with the Attic language. We feel, with Scaliger, that not to know Greek is to know nothing.”

  Thea did not reply, and Kay could not, because she did not yet know Greek.

  Smiling anyhow, Mr. Brimner seemed to feel no reserve. “My intention is to do some serious study during the voyage. My Greek is rusty too, much in need of burnishment.”

  Burnishment was not even a word. Crackpot, oddball.

  Thea reached out, hand and wrist thin and white, to touch Kay’s black middy cuff. “You will like that, won’t you?” Her eyes were puddles of darkness.

  So Kay could not stay sullen. She nodded, eyes pricking with tears for no reason, except the reason she could not say: Thea weeping in the church. “Yes, thank you,” she muttered, bobbing her head in Mr. Brimner’s direction.

  “Our father,” Thea said to Mr. Brimner—how Kay disliked it when Thea said Our father, as if it was the beginning of the prayer—“was a scholar of ancient tongues, you know, and Kay has his keen mind. Greek and Aramaic, of course, and Hebrew too. But he had too little occasion to use his knowledge, his charges needing instruction in ordinary English, you know. It was very difficult to make them relinquish their childhood language, requiring the strictest discipline and watchfulness.”

  A familiar pinch of hatred cramped Kay’s chest. She screwed her eyes tight against Miss Ramsay’s stick crashing down on brown fingers.

  Mr. Brimner gave a slight cough, like a spinster might. “Last evening I persuaded Canon Judd to relinquish the language of his youth.” From another pocket he pulled out a book: bright red, holding the mystery of language. Gilt letters read First Greek Book.

  As Kay took it, Thea put a finger on the embossed cover—it was a lovely book, it made you want to touch it—saying, “Mind you do not let your Latin suffer . . .”

  Over the thick pages ran the beautiful code of new letters, dark black squiggles—almost known, almost readable. Greek was a thing Thea had never learned, so ha-ha, Kay laughed to herself, though that was childish. If continuing with Latin conjugations paid the toll for learning Greek, very well. Latin took no effort, it was just English tilted to the side. She had a facility.

  At the rail, Mr. Brimner said, “See! a school of dolphins gives us escort for the voyage! Plutarch tells us, To the dolphin alone, beyond all other, nature has granted what the best philosophers seek: friendship for no advantage.”

  There, a notched tail—was it? She could not see.

  “Perhaps you are a scholar of Plutarch already,” Mr. Brimner said. “With your facility.”

  Was he laughing at her? Working with Mr. Brimner would require facility of a different kind: the determination to be, to remain, herself. I am inside here, I am, I.

  The open Atlantic behaving tender as a lamb (Francis said when he walked down the deck), Kay and Mr. Brimner worked on deck for the rest of the afternoon, leaning together over the First Greek Book, leaving Latin and arithmetic for later. Thea left them to it and went down to the shadowy saloon. In the portside shade of the roundhouse Kay’s eye and hand moved over the familiar/unfamiliar Greek letters to learn the alphabet and understand the breath markings, beautifully gone into another world that was more real than this.

  But on the Morning Light no world seemed quite real. They travelled the changeless, ever-changing ocean between everywhere there ever was; it seemed so today in this peaceful sea, anyhow.

  When Mr. Brimner finally begged for rest and went down to his cabin for tobacco, Kay got up and went to the side, leaning into the railing until it cut her gut in two, till it threatened to halve her. She would go back to the book in a moment, to έφήμερα, ephemera, which was the dailiness of things and came straight into English as ephemeral, like a butterfly that lives only for a day: from ήμέρα, hemera, which meant day, and έπί, epi, which meant over or close upon; and to άγορά, agora, the marketplace or the open air.

  There was such a thing as agoraphobia, a fear of the open air, Mr. Brimner said when they were thinking of derivatives, English words that had been formed from Greek words, but she did not suffer from it herself. Openness was what she liked. He said there was another condition, claustrophobia, and he hoped she did not suffer from that either, because it could be horrific. But that was not a pure word—it came from Greek in the phobia, the fear part, but the first part was from Latin claustrum (a shut-in place), from claud (I shut, close; I imprison, confine). A coffin, a confining. That she did not like.

  The bell rang for dinner before Mr. Brimner came up, so Kay ran down. In the saloon, Hubbard had pulled the table leg out and added the extra leaf that they would have to use all the way to Fiji now, to accommodate Mr. Brimner. Lena was laying the silver and setting jars of relish and mustard on the white linen cloth—and a platter of beef, very rare, as Francis liked it. Kay thought the blood oozing from the meat might make Thea feel sick, but she got up from the daybed to sit at the foot of the table. A knot still stitched in her forehead, yet she smiled at Mr. Wright and Mr. Brimner as she arranged her skirt.

  Mr. Brimner said grace, gabbling slightly as one who is often called upon. “Benedic, Domine, nos et haec dona tua, quae de largitate tua sumus sumpturi, per Christum Dominum nostrum.” He paused, flicked his great eyes up at the company around the table and repeated in English, “Bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts, which we receive by Thy gracious bounty, through Christ Our Lord, Amen.”

  Francis nodded and Thea unclasped her hands. After a gargantuan slice of beef to tame his first appetite, Francis looked down the table, the benevolent captain. “You are fortunate, Mr. Brimner, you are fortunate! Normally we’d be no use to you, bound as we are to Hong Kong, because we’d nip up into the China Sea and then on eastward through the Banda Sea—but this trip we have a cargo of case oil for Auckland and Fiji, so we’ll tack south along Australia and come round New Zealand slow and safe.”

  “Oh!” Mr. Brimner was surprised. “I rather thought we would swing west around the Horn—is that not the shortest route?”

  Mr. Wright and Francis laughed, and Francis said, “No, no, we don’t do the Horn the
wrong way round! That is never lightly undertaken, and I’d be reluctant to put Thea through it. Prevailing winds and currents run west-to-easterly, you know—and the Horn is scarifying enough in that direction!”

  On the globe, Thea had shown Kay how the Morning Light would speed eastways round the bottom of the world—her narrow, blunt-tipped, needle-bitten finger resting lightly on the downward slope, sliding around the tip of Africa as she made the earth spin with her left hand. On a flat map it was harder to see the sense of the route.

  Mr. Brimner made noises of comprehension and horror that Kay thought were put on, but Francis reassured him: “Oh, the Morning Light’s a tea wagon, slow as a barge, but from time to time she can put on some speed, I promise you.”

  “I suppose there is some commercial reason not to use the Canal?”

  “No Suez for sail,” said Mr. Wright. “That’s what’s let us in for all this h’mmed steamer traffic. We still struggle around the Horn—or on the outward leg, round the Cape of Good Hope.” He bent to his beef again.

  Francis nodded. “September is an even-tempered month around the Cape. We’ll saunter along in the friendly forties over to New Zealand, and give my dear wife an easy voyage for her first time out. And Kay!” Francis added, as if he had clean forgotten her until his eye caught hers.

  “We ought to have stayed at home,” said his dear wife. “Kay and I both.”

  Francis looked down the table, silenced.

  “But every wish beckoned me on board,” Thea added, to show she had not meant to complain.