“Humility!” he shouted, grabbing her by both arms. “Come on! We’re leaving!”
She dropped the clay pot and it smashed on the ground. “What are you talking about?” Her voice held more animation than he’d heard in a month.
“The Mayflower is at Plymouth, and you and Brewster will be on her when she sails in two days!”
“Oh!” That was all she said, but in the dim starlight, Gilbert could see an animation change the dead set that had fixed her features. She held a trembling hand against her cheek, and suddenly tears gathered in her eyes and trickled down her cheeks—silver tracks in the dim light.
He paused, then said, “You’ll get to your New World, Humility—I promise you!”
After collecting their meager belongings, they all piled onto the farm wagon drawn by two draft horses, and Gilbert took charge of the expedition, speaking crisply, “We’ll have to go through without stopping to rest the team. Gabriel, do you know any places where we can change teams on the way—maybe twice?”
“No trouble there,” Gabriel nodded. “I got relatives most counties from here to Plymouth. But they’ll be watching the roads pretty close.”
“Do you know where the most likely checkpoints will be?”
“ ’Course!”
“All right, here’s the way of it, then—we’ll ride in the wagon until we get close to a checkpoint. Then we get out and follow Gabriel. If he gets stopped, we go around and meet him on the far side.”
“A fine plan!” Brewster said. “I have faith in it.”
He had, perhaps, more faith in the plan than Gilbert, but it was the only hope. They left at once, and all night long they lurched along the narrow country road, striking the Great North Road at dawn.
Three times during the journey they had to abandon the wagon and they changed horses twice, with great difficulty the second time. It was close to dawn when they pulled up with footsore animals at the dock in Plymouth.
“She may have sailed!” Gabriel whispered.
“Let me have a look,” Gilbert said. “I got a look at her at Southampton.”
He began walking along the wharf, peering desperately into the dusky darkness. By the starlight and part of a moon, he could make out several ships anchored, but none of them seemed to be the Mayflower. He went to the end of the wharf and began the search in the other direction. He was about to give up hope when a cloud that had obscured the moon shredded and there she was—rising lightly at anchor not two hundred feet offshore—the Mayflower!
He hurried back to the wagon and said, “She’s still here—just off shore!”
“Praise God!” Brewster breathed, then asked, “But we must get aboard without being seen—and quickly!”
“There’s a dory that will serve,” Gilbert said. “Let’s get our things in it.”
Soon they were ready, and after bidding farewell with many thanks to Gabriel, they were underway, the dory sliding easily over the small swells as Gilbert rowed.
They were almost to the ship when Brewster exclaimed, “This boat, Gilbert—it will be missed!”
“No, I’ll bring it back as soon as you’re aboard.”
“But—how will you get aboard?”
Then Gilbert finally expressed what he had long since decided. “I won’t be coming with you, Mr. Brewster.” He saw Humility look at him with a strange expression, but he paid no heed. “The New World’s not for me. All I wanted was to make up a little for what I’d planned to do to you. Maybe getting you here will do that!”
Brewster was struck dumb for an instant. He had never considered but that Gilbert would go with them. He said then, “Why, my boy, there’s no need to speak of that! You must go! There’s no place for you in England!”
“I’ll be leaving,” Gilbert said, “perhaps I’ll go to France.”
The prow of the dory bumped into the hull of the ship, and there was no more time for talk. Gilbert stood up, grabbing the small steps on the side of the Mayflower and held the dory still while the other two climbed awkwardly out. “I’ll go aboard with you,” he whispered. “Maybe there’s no watch tonight. It would be good if you could get aboard without their knowledge. You won’t be safe until you’re underway.”
That would have been well, and indeed there was no watch. Humility made the long step that brought her to the top rail, and cleared it despite her skirt, but when Elder Brewster attempted it, he lost his footing and fell backward, driving into Gilbert, who was caught off balance.
They fell into the dory, and Gilbert’s bad leg took the full force of both their weights. The gunnel of the small boat struck his thigh a sharp blow, and Brewster’s body crashed down, striking exactly on the wound.
Gilbert felt the wound gape open, and the warm rush of blood confirmed his worst fears. He lay there struck dumb by pain and sick to the heart with despair.
“Gilbert—I’m so sorry! Are you hurt?”
“Yes—you’ll have to get some help to row me ashore!”
“Yes!”
Brewster scrambled up the ladder, and was gone so long that Gilbert feared the morning watch would come. Finally, however, he heard sounds, and then Edward’s voice said, “Gilbert! What’s the matter!”
He looked up in the growing light and gasped, “Edward, you’ve got to get me ashore!”
Edward looked down at the bloody trousers, shook his head, and said, “You’d be helpless with that wound, Gilbert. You must go with us.”
“No! I can’t!”
Edward paid no heed, but called out softly, “John? Lend me a hand—help me get him aboard!”
John Howland’s face appeared, and his strong arms plucked Gilbert up as if he were weightless.
The two men carried him aboard, and there was Bradford, who looked at Gilbert with a strange expression.
“The leg’s torn open,” Brewster said. “Can you hide us someplace where we can work on it, John?”
“Are you certain you want this man to go with us?” Bradford stood there, his face stern, and Gilbert would have given his hope of heaven to have been able to get off the boat.
“Let me go!” he cried out, thrashing wildly, but was held in the vise of Howland’s mighty arms.
“Gilbert, you have no choice,” Edward said. “We have to get that leg fixed now.”
Gilbert was half carried down to the main cargo deck. Bradford led the way with a candle. He led them past rows of wooden barrels carrying the water supply to the forward end of the cargo hole. “This is the sail locker, William,” he said, opening the door and holding the candle up to illuminate the interior.
Howland helped Gilbert inside, and put him down gently on a thick slab of folded canvas. “I’ll get Fuller to take care of the wound,” Bradford said, and Gilbert lay there gritting his teeth against the pain.
Brewster spoke a word of comfort once, and Edward pressed his shoulder, saying, “This will be a good place for you and William, Gilbert. The crew never comes here—except after a sail’s been damaged. We’ll not mention your presence to Captain Jones—not until we’re several days out of Plymouth.”
Fuller came quickly, his dark eyes burning. “Let me see . . .” he said brusquely. “Ah—need some restitching.” He set to work, but Gilbert saw that there was a difference in his manner. He had been a warm friendly man at Leyden; now there was a hardness in his attitude.
“Get it done, Fuller!” Gilbert gasped. “I won’t stay on this ship!”
Then Fuller put the needle through his flesh, and the pain was unbelievable. Halfway through the operation, Gilbert went limp.
When he woke up, Brewster was sitting beside him, reading from his Bible.
“We’ve left England!” Gilbert gasped.
“We’ll be out of port soon, Gilbert.” Brewster put the book down. “Lie still now. Fuller said the damage wasn’t as bad as it might have been—but you don’t want to pull the thread out again!”
“Oh, God!” Gilbert cried out, and the tears ran down his cheeks as he rolled his he
ad helplessly. “I can’t bear it! I must get off this ship!”
“Easy, son—rest easy!” Brewster said. His thin face was filled with compassion for the young man who writhed in agony of spirit before him, but he knew that for the present, there was little that anyone could do to comfort him. “There’s no turning back now. You’ll just have to cast in your lot with us psalm-singers.”
“But everyone on this ship knows me for a traitor!”
“Not so. There’s one who doesn’t—” Brewster struck his breast lightly, then pointed upward, adding, “And there’s another!”
“God? God doesn’t care about me!” Gilbert moaned. He had been braced for the danger that lay before him in England—but not for the prison of the New World!
“God cares, Gilbert,” Brewster said evenly. “We’re not wrong, you know. All of us leaving homes and friends to risk death in a strange land, why, God knows our names! And He cares, Gilbert, oh, how He cares!”
“I can’t believe that!”
“You must believe it.” A prophetic light appeared in the old man’s face, and he said in a soft cadence, “What’s happening in the world, Gilbert? Right now? How interested is anyone in a little group of ‘psalm-singers’ on a tiny ship headed for an obscure corner of the globe? In London, they’re talking about King James’s deplorable weakness in dealing with Spain; war has broken out in Bohemia, and Spain will send a terrible army rampaging across the Continent. The English court is in an uproar, with the king hysterically denouncing Spain and vowing that the long-talked-of marriage between the Spanish infanta and Charles, the Prince of Wales, is forever cancelled. Along the borders of Holland, Spain is ready to launch an attack on the Dutch.”
Brewster paused, and his beard moved lightly as he shook his head; then he looked at Gilbert and asked, “With Europe about to go up in flames, who will stop to notice a handful of tattered exiles sailing west in a weather-beaten freighter under the absurd delusion that God is interested in their endeavor and will protect them in their amateur assault on a wilderness that has swallowed thousands of tougher, better-equipped pioneers?”
Gilbert had risen on his elbow to stare at Brewster as he spoke these words. Now he thought of them, and in a voice filled with doubt, yet with a fragment of hope in his eyes, asked, “And you still say that God is in all this, William?”
Brewster’s lips moved silently; then he touched Gilbert’s hand and said, “God is in everything, son. He’s in your life and He will bring you to harbor. You’re tied to us now, and I’d like you to remember a phrase that was in Bradford’s letter, when he spoke of the saints that left Leyden—risking life and all for God in this voyage.”
“What did he say, Elder Brewster?”
Brewster quoted the lines softly: “They left Leyden, that goodly and pleasant city which had been their resting place for near twelve years—” and here the old man’s voice broke as he completed the sentence . . .”but they knew they were pilgrims!”
Gilbert Winslow, fugitive from the King’s justice, his life in ruins, every dream dead—gazed at the old man’s face. The flickering yellow flame of the candle that guttered in a flat dish highlighted Brewster’s features, forming a corona of golden light around his face. The wash of golden shadow threw his face into deep relief so that only the gleam of his black eyes was seen; and against the dusky gloom of the sailroom, his face seemed to be coated with thin gold foil, incised with tiny wrinkles etched by time.
Gilbert sat there listening to the creaking of the ship’s timbers as she strained from side to side in a slow roll. He felt the plunge as she nosed down, then the rise as she rose like a phoenix and crested the waves. He thought of England, of the wreckage of his career—and he thought with a keen, almost physical pain of Cecily.
He was a Winslow, and the men of his family had been molded by the hard life of the Middle Ages. They had died amidst the ring of sword on shield; they had enriched the soil of England with their blood, their sweat. Part of that blood, at least, went back to the golden-haired Vikings who came to plunder the land; part of it to the lowly Saxons, men of the soil, and some to the proud-eyed Normans who breached the land in 1066 under William.
None of them had been cowards as far as Gilbert had heard.
Slowly he set his jaw, pulled himself up to a sitting position, then looked at William Brewster with a fierce light in his light blue eyes—perhaps like that in the eyes of his forefather when with Drake he had boarded a mighty Spanish galleon with his dirk between his teeth and his cutlass cutting down his enemies like ripe grain.
“So be it then!” he said with a mixture of exaltation and sadness in his tone. Brewster looked up in surprise at the steely note in Gilbert’s voice.
“I’ll be a pilgrim, too!”
Brewster smiled, his eyes filling with tears, and he said in a voice not quite steady, “That’s wonderful, Gilbert! And God will be your guide!”
“No, Mr. Brewster, not God. I’ve tried God—and although I honor your faith, it’s not for me.”
Brewster raised a hand in shock, let it fall, then in a weary voice asked sadly, “No God for you, Gilbert? What will you trust, then?”
“This!”
With a cry, Gilbert reached down and unsheathed the sword made by the hand of a man long dead. The blade gleamed with reflected light, and there was a strange beauty in it, deadly as it was.
“This, Mr. Brewster,” Gilbert said intently, as he lifted the blade toward heaven. “This is where I put my faith!”
“Gilbert! I thought you’d chosen the pilgrim way!”
Gilbert Winslow gave a slight salute with the blade, then said in a voice as cold as the steel itself: “So I am—a pilgrim with a sword!”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE SWEET SHIP
The Mayflower was a “sweet ship,” her hold full of pleasant odors, in contrast to the foul fumes that rose from some ships. She had carried cargo rather than passengers for most of her fourteen years—taffeta and satins from Hamburg, hats and hemp to Norway, wine and cognac from France.
In the gray light of morning a crowd of Plymouth people gathered on the quay to bid farewell. The tide rose full and began to drop as the male passengers gathered on the waist deck. The heads of the families, along with Bradford, Carver, and Sam Fuller, watched the thin rays of morning cut through the haze that lay over the harbor, talking quietly in low voices.
After nearly an hour Captain Christopher Jones appeared on the high aft deck. His black figure climbed out of the poop hatch and turned abruptly before the mizzenmast; with his hands on his hips, he looked down on the ship. His face was pale in the morning light, and his stiff hair was plastered down with water. He put his hands to his mouth and sent his voice bellowing down the length of the ship: “Mr. Clarke, Mr. Coffin, Mr. Duff! Break out the anchor. We get underway.”
Six sailors in breeches, shirts open to the waist, and bare feet, trooped back through the hole; after working the ’tween-deck capstan to lift the forward anchor, the stairway was cleared for them to pass above.
Women and children awoke and began stumbling about as the heavy square doors of the ports, held up by chains on the outside, were dropped; they had been open day and night since anchoring; now they thudded down until darkness filled the first hold.
“Let fall your main!” Mr. Clark, the bosun, yelled.
Coffin gave William White a hard shove when the small man got in his way. White was driven forcefully against the broad chest of young John Alden who prevented him from falling, then said in a slow Yorkshire brogue, “ Ye needn’t be so rough, mon!”
Coffin whirled and appeared to consider giving the same rough treatment to Alden—but the immense shoulders and heavily corded arms of the young man gave him pause, as did the steady look he received from Alden’s deep-set blue eyes.
“Stay clear or get stomped!” Coffin sneered, then moved to the forward mast.
Susanna White had come to stand beside her husband, and as his thin body was racked
with an explosive series of coughs, she put her hand on his arm and said, “Don’t mind him, William. Go lie down for a while.”
“No,” White said when he got his breath. “This is my last look on England, Susanna. I’ll not miss that.”
Susanna shot a quick look at Edward Winslow who had moved toward the scene, and something in her husband’s word carried a foreboding of gloom. Winslow caught Susanna’s eyes, shrugged imperceptibly, then said, “We’ll be back, William, never fear.”
William White looked at Winslow, gave a small shake of his head, and said quietly, “No fear, Mr. Winslow. God is with us. But it’s the New World for me—I’ll not look on this old one again.”
The fore and main topsails were flown, as were the two big square sails and the lateen sails on the poop; the ship moved slowly down the water and the town diminished into the distance, a sharp black outline of rooftops against a cold sky.
As they came around, trimmed, into the wind so that a sudden gust filled the mainsail out with a resounding slam, William Bradford said to Dorothy, “We are free at last! Now the New World!”
“I’m afraid, William!” There was something pitiful in the small figure of Dorothy Bradford as she stood hunched over the rail, filling her eyes with the dim outlines of her homeland. “I’m so afraid!”
But an expression of exhilaration filled William Bradford’s craggy face as the Mayflower’s blunt cutwater rose and fell heavily, smashing through the dark frills of water. He was rejoicing that the thing was done at last. They were out on the open sea to live or die.
If he had taken his eyes from the horizon to look down at Dorothy’s face, he would have seen exactly the reverse—for she stared wild-eyed at the rolling ocean as if it were a demon out of hell. As it was, he did not notice at all when she wheeled and ran below, her hands over her face in a helpless gesture of futility.
The day proved bright and fresh, and the sun shed warmth upon the ship as it drove into the deep swells. After the crew had set the tackle and cleared the deck, the women and children began to come up, peering fearfully at the vast expanse that met their eyes. They had their first meal at sea at noon—biscuit-bread, smoked bacon, and mugs of beer served in the first hold by candlelight.
The Honorable Imposter (House of Winslow Book #1) Page 13
