The Voyage of the Morning Light

by Marina Endicott

  Francis stopped again. Kay thought he was going to weep, and she was afraid to watch. He sat silent, his thumb twisting around his finger, over and over, and then continued, still dry-eyed. “Best says that, twice, the water was up to the thwarts as the sea broke over them—had she filled, they all of them would be gone. He says the oil saved them, smoothing the water around them and keeping the sea from breaking.”

  Thea did not speak, but touched his hand where the thumb was coursing, coursing, tightening and releasing. The skin had gone white under the lamplight.

  “One man—it was Douglas, I think—saw an empty lifebuoy on the top of the sea. They went on, on, until they lost sight of the ship in the squall, and then started back. Poor Best, he said it was the hardest thing he ever had to do, to come back without him—and he did not think it possible then that they could save even themselves.”

  Francis bent his head so Kay could hardly see him in the shadow. He breathed slow, through his mouth, and then went on. “I must make a note. The last Jacky Judge saw him, Arthur was on the weather quarter. He did have the lifebuoy around him, but several seas had broken over him. He could not have lasted long, the water is ice-cold . . .”

  Francis wiped his face, which was all over wet with sudden tears Kay had not seen him shed. Thea knelt beside his chair, taking his wet hand in hers.

  “The men are exhausted, they were out there two hours. I will never risk a boat’s crew again in such a sea—only Providence saved them. We waited till nine thirty, in no occasion of hope, you know, but through my inability to form the order, and then wore ship.”

  Thea was weeping now. Kay did not know why she did not cry herself. Aren moved slightly in his sleep, and she tightened her arm about him.

  “I do not see how some people can call sailors dogs,” Thea said. “The sea those brave men started out into, to try to save Arthur—if they could see them starting out in that gig boat, I am sure they never would call them so again.”

  Francis nodded, and stood, and said, “I must go and make sure—I’ll write it up tomorrow, and we’ll put into Montevideo to report.”

  He mopped his face once more, and touched a hand to Thea’s shoulder where she still crouched, and started back up the companionway. “You will have to cable to poor Arthur’s mother,” Thea said after him, but he made no reply.

  Kay took Aren’s hand to wake him gently, and led him to his bed. As she tucked him into his blue blanket, he said, “A dolphin must come up out of the sea and carry him now, Kay,” and she nodded and kissed his cheek. His arm tightened around her neck and then it slackened, and he was asleep. He was very young still.

  So was Arthur young. Arthur, who had gone into the sea.

  Kay went to her own bed, expecting to dream of looking overboard into the grey scalloping waves, but did not dream at all.

  In the morning, Francis wrote it up in his logbook. Sitting beside him at the table in the saloon, her own books disregarded, Kay read the account:

  1 bag, 1 quilt, 1 pillow, 1 pannikin, 1 cup, 3 shirts, 3 prs. socks, 4 prs. dungarees, 2 pr. trousers, 1 coat, 1 pr. shoes, 1 suit oil clothes, 1 cap. In addition to personal belongings, Arthur was owed $56.47 in wages.

  Francis dusted the page with sand and closed the logbook. It was not much, to be all that was left of Arthur, who had showed her how to ballantine a rope.

  17

  Corcovado

  On Thursday they saw a raft with a man fishing; later in the day they could see detail on the coastline of Argentina. Three steamers passed by, going south, their engines untroubled by wind or tide. But Kay thought the passengers must feel the heavy seas, at any rate, even if the captains were not worried. A man standing by the rail of the third lifted his arm to Kay and Aren, and Kay felt a squashing fright that he might be washed overboard next, and how would a steamer stop in time? But the man stayed tight to the rail, and as he passed them, he turned and went inside. Safe for now.

  The Morning Light anchored at Montevideo to report the loss of Arthur Wetmore—the first port where Francis could send a cable to Arthur’s poor mother, a task he said took a sad toll on him “but would exact a sadder on the recipient”—and their departure was held up for a week by protocol concerning the death.

  It seemed to Thea that their voyage was cursed now. Two days after leaving Montevideo, they collided with a large sperm whale, a jarring bump that rattled the windowpanes and threw the books onto the floor in the saloon—and an hour later the duty man came up to report a stern leak. There was no word as to how the whale had fared in the encounter, and Kay mourned it in an excessive way until Thea almost boxed her ears for her.

  Francis went down to inspect and came up with brows like thunder, not willing to be coaxed out of his ill temper for a moment. He took his evening meal in the wheelhouse and did not come down to sleep at all, that Thea was aware of. The leak occupied every instant of his attention, and caused a great deal of extra work for the men, who were put in rotation at the pump.

  Then they had headwinds most of the week, and a storm on Friday—the cold wind the Brazilians call the pampero. “They do not last long,” Francis promised Thea, some of his equilibrium recovered by the exhilaration of dealing with the weather. “But the wind blows very hard, with thunder and lightning.”

  It was very rough. Aren loved it. He made a game in the saloon, sitting against one wall and sliding down the sudden slope of carpetless floor to the other wall. Thea laughed and caught him up before he banged into the baseboard with his boots, and he wriggled around in her arms and hid his face for a moment—perhaps he had been frightened after all?—before raising his head again to cough. His cough was back.

  She kept his hand and went along for the medicine chest, and called down to Jiacheng for some of his soothing tea.

  On Saturday, one of the sailors caught a big albacore, weighing about eighty pounds, and they all had an excellent dinner of it, Aft and sailors alike. Francis said it was all that kept the men from mutiny over the constant operation of the pump.

  The Morning Light entered the mouth of Rio harbour on Sunday morning, past the beautiful promenade, which would have been a delightful sight had not the weary crew been on their last legs, and had Francis yet been able to throw off his sorrow and anger over Arthur Wetmore. Here would be a cable waiting him from Arthur’s mother, and Thea knew how much he dreaded reading that.

  He came back from the cable office and down into the saloon with a grave face, which Thea at first attributed to grief—but it was not that, or not only that.

  “There’s yellow fever here,” he said. “Captains with families are being advised to send them to Corcovado, a resort high on the mountain. Gomes in the shipping office recommends that we comply, says he’s never seen an outbreak like it, even after all their attempts at greater sanitation in the city. I dislike sending you, but we cannot chance it with the fever. I met Hilton, from the Abyssinia, you’ll remember him from old Yarmouth days—he’s sent his wife and daughter up ahead, so they’ll be company for you, and there are one or two other women you may count on. Gomes has arranged a trap to come in an hour to convey you up to the railway.”

  Thea took his hand. “We’ll go,” she said. “What might it be—two weeks?—before you’ve finished the repairs? Too long to take the risk.” She was thinking of Aren’s cough.

  “They are taking it very seriously, these fellows. Their own wives and children are already gone from the city.”

  She’d meant to find Aren shoes, and he had gone right through his other pair of trousers; all that could wait. Thea turned to her cabin, calling for Kay and Aren to come at once and help her pack.

  After three or four hours by pony trap over a bone-rattling road, they transferred to a cable car to get up to the mountain refuge. Kay had never been on one before, and of course Aren had never even heard of such a thing as a cog-and-wheel railway. He sat against the red leather bench with a hand on Thea’s knee for safety, eyes intent on everything around them. His ears alm
ost moved, straining to catch the inflections of Portuguese. What an interesting life he was having, Kay thought. He would have liked the train around the beach at Piha, and she could hardly wait to show him the escalators at Filene’s in Boston! She was having a curious life, too, of course—full of sights and sounds one could not have imagined, in Blade Lake.

  They were comfortably settled in a long rear seat, with the window open onto the passing greenery, when partway up the cars suddenly stopped and ground their gears. Pilot’s head tensed under Kay’s hand, but he did not move or bark.

  A group of nuns, black, voluminous birds on their way to the monastery, fell noisily to their knees and prayed in unison, with astonishing vigour, until after a few moments the train shuddered into motion again. Not speaking or understanding Portuguese, Kay assumed they were passing some religious shrine, until they arrived and were met by Mrs. Hilton, the Yarmouth captain’s wife, who told them that a few weeks earlier a train had crashed down the mountainside when the brakes failed to hold. Kay was glad not to have known that before the trip.

  Outside the little station, signs in Portuguese (tantalizingly almost translatable, from its kinship to Latin) directed visitors to the zoo and a botanical gardens. Above the station, higher up the mountain, stood a large church and the small monastery, to which the line of nuns hurried in a straggling queue.

  Mrs. Hilton and her daughter had been at the retreat for a week already, and had learned the ropes. She took firm charge of Thea and the luggage, steering her into the reception area of the pousada to find the manageress, explaining the protocol and meals and so on. She spoke a little Portuguese, Captain Hilton having been many months in Rio over the years, and helped translate room rates and other details for Thea. She introduced her daughter Marion, saying, “She’s just your Kay’s age, and will look after her all right. You go explore the summit, girls, and see you’re back in time for supper.”

  Marion was shorter than Kay, and wearing a much fancier dress, tobacco-striped taffeta with blue ribbons daubed on it here and there. Her yellow hair shone in separate curling locks, and her pretty boots were blue Spanish leather. As her mother turned back to carry on helping Thea with the accommodation arrangements, Marion obediently led Kay out to walk around the square.

  Seeing Aren following along with Pilot, she asked, “Is that your boy?”

  Kay nodded, then realized what Marion meant. “He is my—” She had not had to explain him before. Nothing seemed exactly right. “He is Aren. My sister has adopted him. Come on, Aren!” She took his thin hand and drew him close, putting one arm round his shoulders.

  Marion laughed. “What an odd thing!”

  “It is not odd at all.” Kay was furious now. She did not know what to say without shouting or kicking, she did not know how to protect Aren from what this girl was going to say. “He is my brother.”

  Looking at Kay as if she was halfwitted, Marion laughed again. “Well, he’s a darky!”

  “He is my brother,” Kay said again, quickly, her words tumbling over Marion’s to mute them, and she turned in a different direction and pulled Aren along with her, walking as fast as she could away from Marion.

  Aren followed after, but she could feel him still turning back to look at Marion. “She waits,” he said, pulling her arm. “Slow . . . do not go . . .”

  “No.”

  “She wants us to talk!” He pulled harder, coughing.

  “She is a mean creature and we will pay no mind to her,” Kay told him.

  But she could not race on when he was coughing so. She found the handkerchief in his pocket and applied it to his mouth, which he could never remember to do, not having grown up with one always being thrust at him.

  Marion had followed after them and stood nearby, not coming too close. “Does he have the yellow fever?” she asked. It was the most cowardly thing Kay had ever heard.

  “No! He—we have both had a bad cold, we are still getting well, that is why Thea wanted to bring us up here.”

  “I didn’t mean it,” Marion said.

  “Mean what?”

  Marion did not seem to know what to say. “I mean, he is a nice little fellow—does he speak English and everything? I was only surprised, that’s all. That he was your brother.”

  They looked at each other, measuring how this would go.

  “I speak English,” Aren said. “And a little bit Chinese. Kay speak-es Greek and quite a lot of Latin.”

  Kay was not going to laugh. But then Aren did, so she could not help it, and laughing made him cough again. He said, “May I?” and reached for the hanky she had stuffed into the pocket of her serge skirt.

  Marion was quicker. She held a big pocket square out to Aren before the next cough took him. She gave him a grin, her podgy face becoming more interesting, and Kay decided to forgive her, for now.

  They climbed together to the next landing, where a little window of the monastery sold bread and pastry. Marion bought a paper bag of Benedictus, which she said was gingerbread stuffed with strawberry jam, and gave them each a piece.

  Up there above the clouds, the landscape was eerie—like a surrounding Yarmouth fog, but these trailing scraps were sky-cloud, not ground-mist. Marion said they could climb right up to the summit, where there was a lookout, so they went on, a little slowly, because once Aren had started coughing, he could not seem to stop.

  At the summit lay a tiled area and a stone railing where they might look down from the height onto the city and the sea surrounding it, like Christ looking down from the mountain where Satan took him to show him what he might have.

  It would be hard to refuse this. Far below, the city and the land streamed out from the base of the mountain like arms reaching out to the sea, the pot shape of the hills repeated and repeated, rich in the wet green jungle they had stuttered up through on the cog train. The ocean swept on outward from the end of the land until it melted into grey haze at the blurred edge of the horizon, the almost indiscernible border of water and sky, very far away. Where they themselves had come from, at early light this morning. Kay turned around and around, the world reshaping below her with each revolution, dream islands and a dream sea, and fine strands of mist still caught in air around them.

  Cora Hilton had brought her unmarried sister along on the voyage. Edna had been seeing a man of the wrong sort, Cora confided in Thea, and the family decided that the best cure was an extended course of “out of sight, out of mind” and the benefits of sea air.

  “I hope very much that she will not take fever,” Cora said, looking over to where her sister sat playing at Chinese checkers with Aren. That little travelling set was serving him well.

  Thea had briefly explained Aren’s presence, and Cora made no immediate comment, although Thea sensed a glimmer of “must write to Mama about this!” in her regard.

  Aren bent away from the game and reached one hand to Kay, sitting at the next table with Marion. Kay had her hanky ready. He coughed again, and coughed, distressingly, and bunched up the hanky.

  Thea saw, though. The bright-red splotch on it.

  She was up and moving before she understood what she knew. She took the hanky from Aren very gently, and laid a cool hand on his forehead. And then she went out to the lobby to seek the doctor who had been visiting the monastery earlier.

  It was tuberculosis, the doctor was certain of it. A lean, thoughtful Portuguese, a gentleman, with a sombre manner that inspired belief. Not that Thea had any hope of not believing. He listened to the chests and hearts of both Aren and Kay, and pronounced Kay perfectly recovered from a slight cold. Aren’s sputum test would have to be taken to the city, but he had no real doubt, and he saw that Thea had none either.

  “You will have to arrange for treatment,” he said. “There is nothing to be done at this hostelry here, but I might find a suitable place in the country, if you would like to leave the boy in my care . . .?”

  He had left the question of their exact relationship delicately unasked.

&nbs
p; “No,” Thea said. “We will—” She stopped and flicked a tiny drop from her right eye. Not a tear, precisely, but an irritation. “I have some experience of nursing. Sea air will be the best remedy, until we can get to New York.”

  “Of a certainty,” the doctor said. He did not bow, but gave off the sense that he would have, in the last century. “New York, indeed. They are making—strides, as I believe one must phrase it.”

  Language was a surmountable barrier, when people were educated—but it was still a barrier. “Can you tell me where I should take him?” she asked bluntly. “Which hospital?”

  “My true expertise is confined to yellow fever, at which we have strided far, and cholera and the like, which have also bedevilled our city. But I shall inquire. Let the name of your ship be sent to me and I will cable ahead and discover for you the best facility. In the meanwhile, let him not be confined in any low-lying, dark or humid place, and be certain that he is fed liberally.”

  Thea shook her head, unable to face the task of assuring the doctor that Aren was no slave or servant to be bundled into steerage.

  Across the room, Kay was watching them, her eyes strained. Thea let the doctor go out without further question and turned to comfort her.

  They spent ten days up in Corcovado. After the diagnosis, Thea kept close by Aren and left Kay to go off with Marion on expeditions of their own along the jungle paths. The girls spent long hours perched on the stone wall at the very peak of the mountain, looking down through strands of cloud upon all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, telling stories of high adventure in the South Seas (Kay) or the scandalous and apocryphal history of Aunt Edna (Marion), inventing dresses or (Marion again) imagining future husbands.