by Carla Kelly
Any old shirt would do and he had plenty of those. He scrawled a quick note to Meri to let her know where he was going. He was setting it on the hall table downstairs when the door opened.
Merciful heaven, could his wife look any more beautiful than she did right now? The breeze had strengthened, and her cheeks were red. She looked right pleased with herself, so he knew the shopping expedition had gone as planned.
Taking Meri’s basket from her, he kissed her cheek. “I don’t even know where the markets are in Portsmouth,” he said.
“Mrs. Perry does,” Meri said. “She knows everything.” She took Able’s arm. “And when a sailor thought to get cheeky, she gave him such a backhand. Knocked him right into a turnip bin.”
“He got the message,” Mrs. Perry said as she came inside with two baskets. “Master Six, there is a man coming later today with a haunch of venison and a ham. We’ll be eating well.”
He surprised the cook by kissing her cheek, too. “I neither know nor care,” he said quietly as Meri removed her bonnet and fluffed her hair. “All I ever want is for you to keep my wife safe.”
“No fears, master. I’ll take this to the kitchen.”
“It’s a rough town, Able, just as you said,” Meri told him as she turned around. She stared at him, obviously not having paid much attention to what he wore when she came inside. “Husband, those trousers are so tight I don’t know where to look,” she said.
“Of course you do,” he teased, which made her blush, his sole object. “Little boys don’t care. We’re starting the cleanup of the stone basin, and I’m not risking my one good uniform.”
“It’s too cold. They’ll be uncomfortable,” she said, ready to defend lads she didn’t really know yet, which touched his heart.
“Dearest, you have no concept of uncomfortable,” he told her as she gave him a fishy look. “I’ll know when to stop.”
He could tell she wasn’t convinced. She had a way of raising her head and looking at him down the length of her nose that might have been intimidating, were she taller. The expression did call for compromise; he was no fool.
“You and Mrs. Perry show up in two hours with a monster pot of tea and mugs. If no one comes to help me, I’ll drink it all. Ta, love.”
“The boys will be there,” she said.
“Will they?” he asked the closed door. He tried to convince himself he did not care how many showed up. His fraught conversation with Sir B—Good God, had he really shouted at his former captain?—made him wish for solitude to sort out his feelings. Physical labor was one way.
Soon he was staring down at the stone basin, with its full complement of leaves, twigs, papers, and God-knew-what-all. The depth was eight feet, maybe a little more. He had discarded measuring tapes years ago because his mind didn’t need them. He went carefully down narrow, steep steps, slippery with matted vegetation.
The debris came about mid-calf, but his first order of business was removing the leaves from the steps. When Meri showed up in a few hours, the last thing he wanted was for her to fall.
Someone thoughtful, probably Headmaster Croker, had leaned six shovels and a smaller trowel inside the basin, plus two round bins. He took the trowel and scraped away at the steps until they were passable. The smell of rotten vegetation made him wrinkle his nose, but it was not unpleasant. With a smile, he recalled the Amazon where it flowed into the Atlantic at filthy old Belém. All I need are monkey sounds, he thought. He waited; there they were, monkey sounds from his brain that never forgot a thing.
When the steps were cleared and the monkeys retreated, he looked up to see David Ten and Jamie MacGregor pushing a handcart close to the basin. Neither wore St. Brendan’s neat and sober uniform, but ragged trousers and sweaters with holes.
“Come to lend a hand?” he asked. “I cleared the steps. Come on in, the water’s fine.”
Jamie laughed, but David looked as sober as ever.
“Aye, Master Six,” Jamie said. “Headmaster Croker said to bring over this cart. We can dump the trash in the bay.”
“Fair enough, Mr. MacGregor.”
There was no mistaking Jamie’s startled expression. “Lad?” Able asked.
“No one ever called me Mister anything, sir,” the boy said.
“Get used to it then,” Able said. “I’ve decided to call the lot of you mister.”
“You can do that?” Jamie asked.
“I can do whatever I want in my classes, Mr. MacGregor,” Able assured him. “Eventually you will be a sailing master, and the crew will address you as Master MacGregor.”
“You believe that, don’t you, sir?” Jamie asked as he shoveled.
“It is more than mere belief, Mr. MacGregor. It is utter conviction.”
“Well then,” Jamie said, and applied himself.
David Ten worked silently beside the older boy, giving Able darting glances and hunching one shoulder, as if wondering when the first blow would fall, and wanting to prepare. You need time in my house, Able thought. You need Meridee Six’s gentle ministry. We all do.
Soon other lads showed up, quietly taking shovels and scooping great wads of gunk into the bins. Able noted that Jamie directed two of the younger boys to carry the first half-full bin up the steps to the cart.
Well done, Able thought. You know a full bin would be too heavy for little fellows. I think we have a born leader here.
Two more boys joined them, and then three. Able knew he could give orders, but he decided to see what Jamie would do. They had run out of shovels. He watched as Jamie MacGregor spoke to two lads, who ran up the stone steps and came back a few minutes later with pails. On his own initiative, one of the older boys left and came back with rakes. Some quiet words directed the younger boys to follow in the wake of the shovelers, and rake the remaining debris into small piles, while others filled the buckets with their bare hands.
After an hour’s silent labor, trained in the workhouse to be seen but never heard, Able called a halt. He put his hand to his back, which felt fine. “I’m getting old,” he said. “If I take a break and you do not, I’ll feel guilty.”
The lads grinned and stopped to lean on shovels and rakes. He squatted on his haunches and they did the same, forming a rough half circle around him.
“Aren’t we a picturesque mob?” he said, and heard some laughter. “I know you sing, for I heard you at breakfast. Do you know ‘Spanish Ladies’?”
The boys looked at each other, then back at him, as if singing was just for breakfast. “Aye, well, you can’t sing at work on a Royal Navy vessel, but there are times when no one minds. I’ll teach you.”
He had a good voice. He sang, “ ‘Farewell and adieu to you, Spanish ladies, Farewell and adieu to you, ladies of Spain; for we have received orders for to sail to old England, but we hope in a short time to see you again.’ ”
He sang it once more, as his mind’s picture of death ships sailing from Portsmouth retreated into a corner of his brain, to lie in wait.
“You try it,” he said. “I’ll give you the note and sing slowly.”
He gave the note, started off alone, and soon heard his lads humming. They were all humming by the time the verse ended. He gave the note again, and they sang, to his heart’s delight.
The next time was even better, almost good enough to overlook it when the rain, which had threatened all day, finally began to fall. He saw smiles this time, smiles through the rain, and the debris they shoveled, and the general stench of a stone basin neglected for years, much as these boys had been ignored.
“Wonderful!” he said when they ended with something approaching a flourish. “There’s a chorus—I’ll sing that tomorrow—and then lots of verses, some of them pretty vulgar. Should we stop for the day?”
He knew what they would do—look at each other as if wondering why anyone would let rain interfere with work. Right down to the stink, Able remembered workhouse sewers he had mucked out, paint he had scraped, and ground he had tilled, with never a suggest
ion from his task masters that he stop, no matter the weather.
“We’ll do a little more then,” he said and stood up. “I like ‘Spanish ladies.’ I barely know who my mother was, and I could be wrong about her, but I think my father might have been a Spanish sailor.” He shrugged and fingered his sopping curls. “Or an Italian. Or a Portugee. You know, the blokes with curly hair and skin not quite as pasty-white as yours.” He smiled at them. “You’ll burn red on a quarterdeck, and I just get darker. Whoever my father was, maybe that was a kind blessing.”
Some of the boys laughed. Others with skin the color of his seemed to turn inward. One of the lads raised his hand slowly.
“Aye, Mister … Mister … John Mark, is it?” He remembered the boy from the list of future lodgers at chez Six. His skin was a pleasant tan. “You’re free to speak up. That’s one of my classroom rules, by the way.”
The boy hesitated. Able watched his mind turning and weighing consequences of asking a question, let alone giving voice to it. John Mark’s chin went up then, and resolve took over. “Don’t you wish you knew who your father was?”
All the boys were listening. “I thought it mattered once,” Able said. “Thought if I were not a bastard, people would treat me fair.”
Nods again. Able, this is no time for tears, he sternly reminded himself. “It doesn’t matter now. I am who I am.” He stood straighter, willing them to understand. “If you don’t feel that is enough, you will by the time you are ready to go to sea.”
“Will someone care about us?”
“Nick, is it?” Able asked, remembering the boy with no last name on the list.
“Aye, Master Six.”
“Someone cares about you right now,” he said quietly. “I do.”
Nick smiled at him, a lovely smile, one any mother or father would give the world to see. “Thank’ee, master,” he said with that peculiar dignity of workhouse children.
He looked at the others, solemn and wet now, but not minding it because they were used to adversity. “I care about all of you. I truly do.”
Chapter Eighteen
On a top shelf in the pantry, Mrs. Perry found a larger than average tea kettle. “We can make tea in this.”
“Is there anything else on that shelf?” Meridee asked, knowing she could never see that shelf without a ladder. “Dead mice? Pirates?”
Mrs. Perry ran her hand over the shelf. She pulled out a tin box and handed it to Meridee. “Just a tin of Maltby’s Finest.”
Luncheon was dried sardines, ship’s biscuits, and gunpowder tea. Mrs. Perry still objected when Meridee insisted on eating with her in the kitchen, but Meridee ignored her protests.
She ate and admired the tall, dark woman seated across from her, so black that her skin shone. Impressive in her girth, Mrs. Perry still had a delicacy to her face, with high cheekbones and a straight nose. Meridee knew she could search her own face forever and never locate any cheekbones.
Thank goodness Able appeared inclined to overlook her lack of classical beauty. Heaven knows he had enough classical beauty of his own, inclining her more and more to the belief that his in absentia father must have been a mariner from the Aegean. Whoever he was, mere minutes with a Scottish drab had produced someone remarkable to look at, of which she, Meridee Six, was the grateful beneficiary.
“My mother has been gone for years now. I wish she could have known Able Six,” Meridee said.
“I wish my mother could have known Mr. Perry.”
“Does she yet live?”
Mrs. Perry shrugged. “Who knows? I was captured by Portuguese slavers, put on a ship in chains, and taken to Jamaica.”
“God forgive me, but I used to feel sorry for myself because I had no dowry and no man would marry me,” Meridee said. “How did … why did—”
“Mr. Perry happen along?”
The subject seemed to be too large for the cook. She returned to shelving the victuals.
“There I was in the Kingston slave auction, wearing not a stitch, tears running down my face because the buyers kept touching me between my legs, on my breasts …” she said when she could speak.
She turned away. Meridee leaped to her feet and grabbed the big woman around the waist. Mrs. Perry tucked her close.
“He was a little Welshman, not a great deal taller than you, but … I don’t know …. How does a woman just know?”
Holding fast to Mrs. Perry, Meridee asked herself the same question. She had just known too, after a short time in Able’s presence.
“I’ll admit I was attracted to Master Six’s undeniably handsome visage,” Meridee said with a laugh. “Then I watched his eyes scanning book titles so rapidly in my brother-in-law’s study, and I knew he was different. I kept looking at him, and then I couldn’t look away. What did Mr. Perry do?”
“It’s what I did,” the cook said. She relaxed her grip on Meridee. “Mrs. Six, I was much thinner then, but certainly no shorter. I stepped forward, shook someone’s hand off my thigh, looked that little man right in the eyes, and said, ‘Buy me.’ He did.”
“My goodness. It sounds like he knew, too,” Meridee said.
Mrs. Perry laughed, her melancholy either dismissed or shoved back into a recess in her mind. “He told me later he wanted me because I looked strong and could help him aboard ship.”
“I didn’t know women ever sailed on Royal Navy ships,” Meridee said. She sat down, planting her elbows in the table and resting her chin in her hands.
“It happens. As a carpenter, Owen was a warranted officer. He made arrangements for me and I proved useful,” Mrs. Perry said. “He never freed me and he never married me, but I was Mrs. Perry. I miss him to this day.”
What can I say to that? Meridee asked herself, wondering deep in her heart and soul how any woman made her way in a world ruled by men. I was lucky. She looked at the kind lady across from her, the woman who had frightened her only yesterday evening. So was Mrs. Perry lucky, each of us in our own way.
“You frightened me at first, Mrs. Perry,” she admitted.
“I could tell,” Mrs. Perry said. “You practically tried to crawl inside Master Six.”
They laughed together. “That was foolish of me,” Meridee confessed. “I didn’t know you yet. I know you now.”
They decided on brown bread and jam sandwiches for, hopefully, the crowd of students who were helping Able Six. This meant a quick trip back to the baker’s, who sold Meridee two more loaves of his crusty bread.
He scolded Meridee for coming without her powerful escort, but agreed reluctantly that the middle of the day was safe enough. Even then, he insisted on walking her back to the house, telling her about his two sons at sea and his daughter in Plymouth, married to her own sailor, a foretopman in the East India trade.
“No one wants to run a bakery?” she asked him, after thanking him prettily on her doorstep.
“It’s too slow for lads seeking adventure,” he said. He gave her a little bow, awkwardly done. Meridee suspected he seldom waited on ladies of quality in this corner of Pompey. “Ezekiel Bartleby, at your service, Mrs. Six.”
“You’ll have all of our business, Mr. Bartleby,” she told him, and dipped her own small curtsy, because he was older, if not of her class.
When rain started to patter against the window, Meridee looked up from the loaf she was slicing. “They’ll probably stop working,” she said to Mrs. Perry, who was slathering the bread with plum jam. “Should we continue?”
“They won’t stop, not workhouse lads,” Mrs. Perry assured her. “Two hours, did the master tell you?”
“He did.” Meridee looked around. A basket for the sandwiches would never do, not in this rain.
Still, she had her standards. She picked up the Maltby’s Finest tin, lifted off the lid, and sniffed inside. “Smells like tobacco,” she told Mrs. Perry.
The tin held all the sandwiches, with dried apple slices to pack the layers. Mrs. Perry pronounced the tea ready. She strung their six tin cups on twine, ti
ed the ends together, and slung the rattling chorus over her shoulder. Meridee found several towels in the laundry room off the kitchen and added them to her own pile. Maltby’s Finest sandwiches fit easily against her hip, so she had a hand free for the front door, while Mrs. Perry managed the teapot.
In the rain, they walked around St. Brendan’s to the basin that faced the water. Mrs. Perry was right; the boys still shoveled and raked.
“My goodness, Mrs. Perry, only count them,” she whispered. “We don’t have enough sandwiches. I count fifteen lads and I made twelve sandwiches.”
She stood at the edge of the basin, which had been half-cleared of leaves and whatever had lurked underneath. A cluster of small boys stood around a little mound. Able sat on his heels, staring down.
“What do you think they have uncovered?” she asked Mrs. Perry.
“Remains,” the cook said, then chuckled. “Remains to be seen.”
Able stood up, and gestured her toward a set of steep stone sets. He came to help her, trailed by little boys.
He was soaked to the skin, his curly hair plastered against his face. “We made quite a find,” he told her as he helped her down the steps. He waved his arm. “Gentlemen, victuals! Mr. MacGregor, lend a hand to Mrs. Perry.”
The boy she remembered as Jamie MacGregor took the teapot from the cook. David Ten took the cups, after a cautious approach. Meridee doubted he had ever seen anyone quite like the cook.
“Lads, we have a dilemma,” Able said. “There are fifteen of you and twelve sandwiches. Three of you must go hungry, alas.”
Her heart suffered a pang of startling proportions when the three smallest boys stepped aside. The littlest started back to the piles of leaves he had been raking and her heart broke.
“As you were, men,” Able said in a loud voice. He cleared his throat. “That means, everyone back here.” He looked around the circle. “Do Royal Navy men allow any of their number to go without?”
“They probably shouldn’t,” Jamie said, but he sounded uncertain.
