by Anya Seton
“Freedom, milady—and—” her lips parted in her rare smile, “and—I believe—fish.”
“Fish! Is he then a fisherman by trade?”
“No, milady, a clothier, but he hates it. He has been much influenced by the clergyman, Master White, at Dorchester, who believes that in fishing New England will; find great fortune. Mark is drawn to the sea, he ever loved the docks and boats at Weymouth.”
“But you—mistress—” said Arbella frowning. “You’re bred to gentler ways, I cannot see you as a fishwife.”
Phebe hesitated, fearing to seem forward. “I think, milady, there will be no gentle ways for anyone out there in the wilderness, no matter what we be.”
A darkness deepened the lady’s blue eyes. She rose from the stone. Phebe saw that the long pale hand which drew together her fur cloak wavered, but her answer was firm. “You’re right. I pray that I may have the strength.”
As they stood there, they heard the far-off boom of a cannon.
“The signal—” said Arbella, turning toward the water. “We must get back to the ships. With God’s mercy we shall meet again at Naumkeag. God keep you, mistress.”
“And you, milady—” said Phebe softly. She watched the tall figure walk down the beach, and she felt again the glow of pride she had tried to voice earlier. The Lady Arbella Johnson was the daughter and sister of an earl, the most noble Earls of Lincoln. What if many of the malcontents did now sneer at title, what if the new dissenting creeds averred that all are equal in the sight of God, was there not special courage required of such a one as the Lady Arbella, sheltered, delicate, and accustomed to delicacy. The first noblewoman to venture toward the New England. For conscience’ sake, thought Phebe, docilely echoing the Puritan lady’s own words. But from deep within her a surer voice spoke. Not only for conscience’ sake, she goes for love of her husband—even as I.
As if in answer she saw Mark racing down the beach towards her, waving his Monmouth cap, his curly dark hair disordered, his eyes alight. “Phebe—Phebe—make haste—the shallop’s leaving. I couldn’t find you.”
Warmth and gladness at the sight of him rushed through her body; she held out her arms and he caught her hard against him, kissing her on the mouth. “A fair welcome, sweetheart. But hurry.” She ran with him down the beach, his arm around her waist. Those already waiting in the shallop eyed them sourly as they arrived laughing, their cheeks flushed, and about them the glow of warm love.
Mistress Bagby, the midwife from London, made grudging room for Phebe on the after seat. “You pleasured yourself in Yarmouth?” she sniffed. “At a pothouse maybe?”
Phebe shrugged, indifferent in this moment of new courage to the spiteful fat face beside her. “Nay, mistress. I only walked up the Yar a way, and there I met the Lady Arbella.”
Mrs. Bagby stared, then masked her envy with another sniff. “And being noticed by quality has gone to your head, I see. I’ve heard she’s but a meaching, mincing thing.”
“She is very fair, and winsome and brave,” said Phebe, and turning her back looked over the other heads to the bow where Mark pulled on a larboard oar. He caught her eye and they smiled at each other.
This sureness and warmth between them sustained her that night through their first quarrel. As they lay cramped together in their bunk, she tried to tell of her meeting with the Lady Arbella, and he would not listen, speaking to her roughly and telling her that she was fool indeed to think that the daughter of an earl had shown true good will. It was then that she remembered that he had cause to hate the lady’s class. Once as a boy of eight he had snared a rabbit on lands belonging to the Earl of Dorset. He had been caught and punished by the Earl’s order, cruelly beaten, and his left ear cropped. Of this he had never spoken but once. His abundant hair hid the jagged wedge space cut from his ear, and she had forgotten.
She soothed him with soft murmurs and the tenderness of her body, but their disagreement was not yet ended. Mark too had something to tell of their stay in Yarmouth, and she felt sharp dismay when she found that he had spent some of their small horde of silver for a strange purchase.
He pulled his prize from under the straw at their feet and made her feel sundry bumpy objects in the darkness.
“What are they?” she whispered, though the snoring of their cabin mates, the creaking of the ship, and the rush of water made secrecy needless.
“Lemons,” he answered triumphantly, stuffing them back beneath the straw.
“Whatever for?” she cried. She had hoped at least for sugar plums to vary the dreadful sameness of their food.
“I met an old sailor in Yarmouth, he’s been fifty years at sea, to Cathay and back. He says if we suck one every day we’ll not get ship fever. He sold them to me for eleven shillings.”
“Oh Mark—and you believed him! He was but diddling you to get the profit.”
He drew his arm from under her. “They’ve come from Spain,” he said with anger. “Lemons are always dear. You must not question my judgment, Phebe.”
“No, Mark, I won’t—” she said after a minute, hurt that he had turned from her again. “Forgive me.”
And she hid her worry. For it seemed to her ordered mind that his buying of the lemons touched things in him that her love would rather forget, a recklessness and improvidence.
But after they had at last bade final farewell to England, and the journey became a plodding, ever recurrent nightmare of storm and sickness, it did seem that she and Mark were stronger than many of the others.
All over the ship the passengers complained of sharp pains in their bones, of swollen mouths and tongues, and teeth so weak they could not chew upon the hard salt meat the cabin boy flung into the wooden trenchers. She and Mark had none of this, and now that her young body had become accustomed to the pitching and tossing of the ship, even seasickness no longer bothered her.
On May Day, during a great storm and cold, Phebe helped a frantic mother tend her sick child in the great cabin, and while she wiped the little girl’s swollen blue lips, she mentioned hesitantly the lemons. “I don’t know if they do good, but Mark thinks so and we have kept well.”
Mrs. Bagby had also been tending the child, and now she hooked her fat arm around the upright of a bunk to keep her feet on the lurching floor, and said scornfully, “Lemons, forsooth! You think the child doesn’t suffer enough already, Mistress Honeywood, that you must parch her poor mouth. Give her beer, Goody Carson, beer and wormwood. That’ll help her.”
And Goody Carson listened to the midwife who was a determined woman of reputed skill, for Goody Carson was big with child, and near to term, and she feared that she would need Mrs. Bagby’s good will before the journey was over.
Phebe said nothing more. She was unsure herself if those shriveling little fruits were contributing to their health, but each morning before they pulled themselves out of the damp, moldering bunk straw, Mark split two lemons with his hunting knife, and they sucked and swallowed the bitter pulp.
The journey went on, and the weeks went by. Long since, the memory of home had faded to a haze as unreal as the impossible visioning of the future scene. Nobody thought of either. The ship life alone was true, and its incidents the only interest. Bad food, increasingly scanty, bad weather, bad smells, bad air and bitter cold. These made the dun thread on which the days slid by, but now and then it seemed to knot itself and pause for a more vivid pattern. There was the Sabbath service, held on deck if the weather permitted or, as it usually did not, in the great cabin, smoky from the cook fire and stinking from some fifty unwashed bodies. On the Jewell there was no ordained minister, but a godly little clerk, Master Wenn, from Norwich, made shift to read the Bible, lead the prayers, and even preach. Mark always escaped the services, being welcomed by the sailors where he listened to sea lore instead. But Phebe perforce listened with the other passengers, and was much irritated by the canting nasal voice. She missed the candles and the rituals and prayers to which she was accustomed, and found Master Wenn’s bald
manner of exhorting God shocking in its crudeness. But this and many other matters she kept to herself.
In mid-Atlantic a sailor died, one who had been incessantly drunk and blasphemous, and many thought it a judgment on him and were pleased.
It was a matter of comfort, too, that usually they were in sight of the other ships, the Arbella and the Ambrose, though the Talbot had disappeared after they left the Scillys. Phebe would sometimes push her way to one of the square portholes in the great cabin, and gaze across the heaving gray waters to the Arbella, thinking of the beautiful lady for whom the ship was named and wondering how she endured the hardships. It seemed that the ships made no progress, gales and storms followed each other; the passengers, forbidden the deck for fear of the pounding waves, became some quarrelsome, some apathetic.
On Thursday the twenty-seventh of May came a day of special trial. They had been seven weeks in the open sea; all night a stiff gale had harried them. The little Jewell climbed the mountainous waves, shivering as if in fear at the summit, then pitching down to drive her prow a fathom through green water. All night Phebe had clung to Mark, while his long legs braced against the sides of their bunk, and at dawn they dragged themselves to the great cabin for food, both bruised and dizzy. The glum faces of the few passengers who were on their feet announced a new disaster. The beer had given out. Nothing to drink but the slimy, fetid water which all knew was unwholesome. “We must ask Captain Hurlston to broach us a cask of spirits,” said Mark. “That alone can make the water safe.”
The others nodded and murmured. The sailors had beer, but their supplies too were running low, and to stint them had caused mutiny at sea before this.
The gale had continued and now the rain sliced like silver knives at the rigging. By noon the cold in the cabin was bitter as winter. Teeth chattered and faces turned blue and pinched. Many coughed from the smoke of the cook fire which could not escape through the closed portholes.
For dinner there was the watery pease porridge in which floated chunks of salt beef. Most had no appetite, and Phebe gave her portion to one of the young boys.
In midafternoon Mark came in with news. Since the sailor’s death he and another passenger had been pressed into filling some seaman duties. The Arbella had managed to send over a skiff to borrow a hogshead of meal, and in return had sent back brandy. There was a feeble cheer, and anxious faces lightened a little.
By dusk all had forgotten themselves in pity and a new fear. Goodwife Carson suddenly started into active labor. Mrs. Bagby kept her head and habit of firm command, but even the children knew that matters were not going right. The laboring woman’s shrieks tore through the main cabin, until Phebe, horrified by the public exposure of the poor woman’s ordeal, had helped to carry her to the Honeywood bunk in the small cabin. Two of the older women followed, crowding close in the cold, airless space, trying to help the midwife. Anguish and death crowded with them. Helpless, they watched the agonized body wracked not only by labor pains, but by the violent wracking of the ship too. Between pains the woman lifted her head, the hair matted and wet, the eyes like an animal’s. “Can ye not make it still an instant?” she wailed. “An it were quiet an instant, I might—” But a wave so big hit the ship that her body was flung against the bulkhead, and again that thin animal scream splintered the air.
Phebe, repulsed by the midwife, stumbled into the great cabin and going to the latrine bucket vomited a little. I must get out, she thought. I must. And running to the ladder, she climbed it and pushed with all her strength against the hatch above. She pounded on it frantically. It would not move. She crouched on the upper step, clinging to the rail. The dreadful screams were growing weaker.
“She can’t endure,” thought Phebe. In the great cabin a steady murmuring had begun. She lifted her head and listened. Master Wenn was reading from the Bible.
Above the hissing of the waves, the creaking of the joists, and the groans from the cabin, she heard the dry nasal voice intoning—
“Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband—”
THAT will not help her, thought Phebe, with a sudden hot anger. She ran down the ladder, and burst in on them, the little group of women and children and a few shamefaced men who listened.
“Can you do nothing for her besides pray!” she cried.
They stared at her. Mistress Honeywood had seemed always so composed and aloof.
Mr. Wenn rested the ponderous Bible on his lap, his tight little face with its peaked gray beard seemed to consider her. His eyes were unexpectedly kindly. He did not rebuke her for interrupting the word of God, even though he disapproved of the Honeywoods as irreligious, careless conformists.
“And what can we do for her but pray, mistress?” he asked quietly.
The anger left Phebe and she bowed her head.
“I don’t know,” she whispered. “Forgive me.” She shivered and drawing her cloak tight around her sank on the edge of a bench.
Master Wenn bent his head again to the Bible, screwing up his eyes to see the text by the flickering light of the iron lanthorn. Phebe tried to fix her mind on the droning voice, but she could not. From the small cabin now, there came at times a long choking moan. Phebe’s hands gripped each other and she floundered through the black wash of fear. Fear for Goody Carson, that stupid but well-tempered woman reduced now to a thing less than human—and that other fear which she had not dared face. I too, next February maybe—like that creature in there—no!—it is but the hardships have delayed me. I cannot have conceived in that bunk where she lies now, conceived in the moldy straw—the lice—the ignoble stealthiness, watchful even in the unguarded ecstasy because the Brents might hear.
The ship lurched onward through the falling night, though the howling of the wind had abated, and the motion. On the deck above her head heavy footsteps passed. She heard the muffled shout of orders.
Around Master Wenn a group still listened, their heads bowed. Phebe looked down at her wedding ring, and into the confusion of fear there came the thought of the Lady Arbella. She would not give way like this, possessed of inner panic, resentful that her husband did not somehow divine a need and fly from man’s work to comfort her. The Lady Arbella was strong and invincible.
Phebe moistened her dry lips, got off the bench, and went to the fire. No one had thought to replenish it, and the logs had fallen apart to smoldering ash. Yet food must be cooked for the children.
Her head throbbed as she bent over, but she shoveled the ashes into a heap, careful not to disturb the thick coating of dirt and brick dust which protected the wooden planking under the fire. She studied to lay each stick of pitchy kindling fair and square. As she finished and the flames aided by wind from the bellows crackled upward to the oak logs, a new sound came from the small cabin which had long been quiet. The acrid cry of the new-born.
Master Wenn closed his Bible. They all pressed through the door. Mrs. Bagby met them triumphantly. Her falling band was stained with blood, her fat face haggard, her hair in wisps. She held a swaddled bundle. “A girl. Never have I so needed my skill.”
“But the mother—” cried Phebe, staring at the still mound.
“She’ll do.” Mrs. Bagby shrugged, put the baby at the foot of the bunk. “Fair lot o’ trouble she gave me. Has the strongwater been broached?”
A sigh ran over them all. The moment of unity passed; they fell apart into their separate groups. Master Wenn and the two old men went to find the brandy. The children fell to quarreling beneath the ladder.
Most of the women gathered around, asking the midwife eager questions, while she cleansed herself a little in a cask of sea water.
Phebe had no taste for spirits, but when the brandy came she helped the others to mix it with the river water they had taken on at Yarmouth, and like them drank thirstily from the dipper.
Later when Mark appeared at last, bringing with him the freshness o
f damp sea air, she had hidden all trace of her fears.
Mark was in high spirits and full of the day’s happenings on deck. The skiff from the Arbella had nearly foundered on her perilous trips between the two ships, but the wind nad turned in the nick of time. They kept fairly well on board there, though many were dying on the Ambrose.
“And the Lady Arbella herself?” asked Phebe, braving Mark’s displeasure. But he was in an indulgent mood. “I daresay she bears up like the rest—” he said carelessly. “I heard nothing contrary. Is that woman and her brat to have our bunk?” he looked toward their cabin.
Phebe nodded. “We can’t turn them out tonight.”
“Well. Then I must have me another noggin, and you too; ’twill soften our couch.”
Phebe was grateful for the brandy haze as they lay down on the planking wedged into a space between a hogshead of dried pease and the forward bulkhead. The stink of the bilges was stronger here, and a rat scuttled about their feet. Mark put his arm close around her, and she lay with her head on his shoulder, trying to doze. But she could not.
The brandy and the stench brought back the seasickness she had thought conquered.
“Why must the ship forever roll so—” she whispered plaintively, trying to control her twitching stomach, and thinking Mark asleep.
“Why, it’s your thrice damned fire-dogs, poppet—” he answered, chuckling. “No doubt they overbalance the ship; didn’t you know that?”
She forgot her stomach, happy that he should tease her, glad that she had forborne to trouble him with the panic and forebodings she had suffered.
Ah we will endure, she thought, and all be well. It can’t be for much longer. And she closed her eyes.
But the journey went on. Another week of cold and sudden gales and calms passed by. There was more sickness; not only the frequent purging and gripes in the belly from which all suffered at times, but an epidemic of feverish colds that left its victims with a strangling cough and a purulent discharge from the nose. The daily food rations shrank, but few cared, for the pork had spoiled, the stringy hunks of beef induced a thirst which there was no beer to quench, and the hard biscuits were coated with blue mold. They lived on pease porridge and water gruel.
