by Ann Birch
It all sounded so reasonable, like something my Tolpuddle relatives might have said. In the household where I had grown up, reason seldom surfaced.
“I am short of money. I imagine that Mama had to part with a portion of the funds that Papa left her when he departed for England, and she could therefore not give me very much.”
“You are mistaken about your source of income for this venture, Anne. Your mother’s Boston aunt—the one who owned the millinery shop—left her a small annuity that she has spent to enable you to make this voyage. She disapproved of what you did, as you know, but she was determined to make this monetary sacrifice in spite of her disapproval.”
“I had no idea. I—”
“You have perhaps misunderstood your mother. She has always struggled to make your father understand the extent of his daughters’ and granddaughters’ needs, and when he refused to comply with her wishes, she has always stepped in—when she could—and spent her own small pittance.”
“It was she then, not Papa, who paid for my nieces’ education?”
“Yes.”
“Let us go back to your house now, Uncle George. I need to think about what you have told me.”
A sentence or two to the coachman, and we were on our way back to Pearl Street. I burrowed into the fur pelts, no longer noticing their smell, intent only on sorting out the information Uncle George had given me.
I had misjudged Mama. I had seen her as the dupe of my father. Instead she had been a brave and independent spirit—not always, it is true—but in moments when courage and selflessness mattered most.
As I dismounted from the sleigh and walked up the snowy path to my uncle’s house, I knew that I must somehow make whatever amends I could for my misjudgment. After all, four days’ delay in my departure made little difference in my plans for escape. As for revenge on the Robinsons, that seemed now to be mere pettiness.
Before we reached the front door, I turned to my uncle and said, “I am happy to stay with you and Aunt Elizabeth for several days and embark on the Albion when it comes into the harbour.”
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Early April, 1822
Uncle George took me to the New York quay this morning to board the Albion. There was what he called “a spanking wind” and he felt sure that the ship would sail in a few hours. He came on board with me and introduced me to Captain Williams, a tall man with blue eyes and a lined face, no doubt from confronting years of Atlantic winds.
Captain Williams showed us my cabin—which he called “a stateroom”—a tiny private space equipped with a narrow bunk, fresh linens, a washbasin, and a small chest of drawers. Uncle set my trunk in a corner, making sure that its lid was tightly closed and locked. “You may get some bad weather,” he said. The Captain laughed, and I shivered, remembering my voyage to England with Papa.
Since I had left home with nothing much but the clothes on my back, Uncle George and Aunt Elizabeth furnished me with a trunk they pulled down from the attic. Then my dear aunt put into it all the clothes she could spare from the huge walnut wardrobe in her bedchamber. She and I were about the same size, and I knew that her dresses, capes, hats, and shoes would fit me almost perfectly.
As we inspected my room, the adjoining saloon, and the upper deck, I was aware of the crew watching me and making comments to each other. I suspected that it was unusual for Captain Williams to give a private tour to one of his passengers. My generous uncle had paid for my voyage and now was making certain that I would be taken care of in my passage overseas. With the Captain’s supervision of my trip, I did not have to worry about the vicious gossip surrounding a woman who travelled alone.
All too soon, it was time for the dear man to depart. I hugged him. “Never shall I forget the kindness you and my Aunt Elizabeth have shown me,” I said, knowing that my face was wet with tears. I watched closely as he walked down the platform to the quay, a solitary figure facing a sea of oncoming passengers, most of whom seemed to be poor folk carrying bundles of provisions, mattresses, and bed coverings. As Uncle reached the bottom, he turned and waved for one last time. Though I was sad to leave him, I derived some comfort from knowing I had done the right thing in not departing on the Manhattan with the Robinsons.
The winds being favourable, we left the quay within three hours and were soon out of the harbour into the sea. It was a fine, agreeable spring day, and I had the pleasure of walking on the upper deck and watching the coastline fade out of view. In four weeks at most, I would be in Liverpool, alone and free.
Captain Williams was making a tour of the deck at the same time. “We shall be having a late dinner in a few minutes, Miss Powell,” he said. “You will join me at my end of the table, I hope.”
After hearing this news, I went back to my cabin, washed my face, and put my windblown hair in order. The door of my cabin opened directly into the saloon, a long narrow room with comfortable chairs for socializing and a mahogany table at one end for dining. Here sat Captain Williams and four passengers to whom he introduced me. “Mr. and Mrs. Samuel C. Ellis, and Mr. and Mrs. William Drayton Blackwell,” he proclaimed, no doubt expecting me to be bowled over by the grandeur of their names.
Truth be told, I had never heard of these people. They were elderly and richly dressed, and the wives, clearly adjuncts of their husbands, seemed to have no personal names. I nodded politely, though I believe I may have been expected to rise and curtsy. When they heard that I came from Upper Canada, they held forth on the glory of the victory of their country over ours in the War of 1812. Though I had my own views on this, I kept my mouth shut and made up my mind to limit my conversation to comments on the weather.
The food—curried chicken breasts with chutney—was excellent, and after several days of my relatives’ plentiful though sometimes strange meal offerings, I was hungry, but the smug certainties of my table companions invaded my enjoyment of the offerings, and I left the table early, pleading a severe headache.
Next morning, I rose early to walk about the upper deck and enjoy the sunrise over the calm seas. There were only two other people walking at the same time, a woman and a young boy. As we approached each other, there was a moment of mutual recognition.
“Oh, Miss Powell,” the woman cried, “I never thought I would meet you again!”
Who was she? I recognized her but could not remember where I had seen her. She was a plain woman wearing thick, sturdy boots and a wool dress covered with an apron. She was someone’s servant, no doubt. My immediate reaction was one of concern, for she was soaking wet and shivering. And as I was thinking of some way to help her, I remembered who she was.
“Maud,” I said, “it’s been ten years, hasn’t it?”
“Yes, ma’am, and I be always remembering how you helped me through the birth of my son Henry, and how you gave me a silver bracelet so that I would have brass enough to return to my father’s house.”
She introduced me to her son, a handsome, fair-haired boy dressed neatly in knickers, stockings, a shirt, and a jacket. He offered me his hand, making a small bow as he did so.
It all came back to me in a flood of memory. Maud had been one of our servants in York, a relative of Cook’s. She had lain in misery for hours in a tiny room off our belowstairs kitchen, and Mama had no idea what was wrong with her. I recalled that she summoned my idiot brother Grant who visited her and declared that she had dropsy. When I saw her, I knew immediately that she was in childbirth and did my best to help her through the ordeal. When it was over, Mama called her a slut and a slattern and turned her out of the house with her babe in her arms. The bracelet I gave her had apparently enabled her to survive, and I was happy about that.
“Please come back to my cabin and change your clothes,” I said. “You are cold and wet. What has happened?”
“Oh, ma’am, I be in steerage. Going home, I am, to England to start life over again. My father’s relations, they say Henry and me, we can stay with them in Yorkshire. But it be filthy in steerage, so up I come in
the early morning, and the sailors turn the water on me when they clean the deck. Please not to worry about me, ma’am.”
But I could not leave her shivering on that deck. I took her back to my cabin, gave her towels to dry herself and one of Aunt Elizabeth’s dresses to wear. Henry, seeing that it was to be a private moment, waited outside the cabin door.
From my earlier voyage with Papa, I had some idea of the wretched conditions in steerage, but Maud seemed cheerful. “The food be tasty,” she told me, giving me details of the fare, supplied apparently by the Captain: oatmeal, biscuits, rice, molasses, salted beef, and tea. They did their cooking in a communal space, and then, because of the crowd, took their plates back to their sleeping berths where they ate on their bunks.
There was a drawback, however. “Everybody be tipsy most of the time,” Maud said. “Captain sells grog, and he don’t care how tipsy we get. But I keep an eye on Henry, I do, and he be a good lad.”
Mother and son left then to prepare their breakfast, and we promised to meet again.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
April 21 and 22, 1822
We were nearing Ireland, and the voyage had been good, with a fair breeze and moderate waves that Captain Williams and the crew of the Albion found easy to handle. I saw Maud and her son daily and welcomed their company. I might have been lonely without them, since the Captain was busy with his duties, and Mr. and Mrs. William Drayton Blackwell and Mr. and Mrs. Samuel C. Ellis were insufferable with their puffed-up platitudes.
On cloudless, windy days, the Captain ordered the steerage passengers to bring up their clothes and air them, and I was happy to assist Maud in this task, finding for her an overturned lifeboat on which she could spread her belongings. At first, she seemed embarrassed at the damp, fetid stench of her clothes, but gradually my insouciance reassured her. On this day, as we were keeping guard over her possessions airing in the breeze, I noticed that she was wearing the gown my Aunt Elizabeth had given me and which I had passed on to her.
“How pretty you look in that costume,” I told her.
“Oh, ma’am, I want to look like a lady when I meet my English relations one of these days. In that land where me and Henry lived”—here she made a dismissive gesture towards the stern of the ship indicating, I guessed, the land from which we had come—“I be nothing but a slut in the opinion of those nobs I worked for. But in a new land, I be able to start again by telling everyone lies.”
“Lies?”
“Yes, ma’am. In the house of my relations, I intend to say that Henry’s Papa be dead.”
I understood her completely. I, too, intended to block out my past life in that gossipy society where I had lived for thirty-two years of my life. Like her, I intended to start again, far from the narrow strictures of marriage and child-rearing imposed on the upper classes. In truth, I looked forward to never hearing again the drone of Papa’s voice urging me to conform, to be proper. I knew I’d miss Eliza, Mary, Lucy, Jacques, and my generous New York relatives. And, since learning more of Mama’s true nature, I knew that I would miss her too. But all was behind me now. I turned my head in the direction of the ship’s prow and reflected for a moment on my good fortune.
Thinking of Papa served as a reminder of a decision I had made earlier in the day. Dear Uncle George had given me enough money to finance my trip to Tolpuddle and any emergencies along the way. But I knew that Maud and her son must be in need of what she called “brass.” At that moment I was wearing a cameo brooch given to me by Papa on my eighteenth birthday. Knowing Papa, I realized that the brooch was perhaps of no great value, but still it would be of some help to Maud in financing her new life. I took it from my bosom and gave it to her.
She immediately pinned it to the bodice of Aunt Elizabeth’s gown. “I be wearing this with my fine costume. Do I not now look like one of them city swells I see putting on airs on the deck?” She laughed, then burst into tears.
Her gratitude for this paltry gift embarrassed me, and I was grateful at that moment for a diversion. A hen came fluttering about the deck, cackling loudly, no doubt exulting in her escape from somewhere in the hold. Her noise attracted one of the crew, who attempted to catch her, at which point she flew overboard into the sea. We watched as she struggled upon the waves and disappeared from view. A failed attempt at freedom, alas
* * *
.
That evening, as I lay in my narrow bed reading a book Aunt Elizabeth had given me, I noticed that the ship had begun to heave from side to side. In a few minutes, there was a knock on my door, and Captain Williams called out to me from the saloon corridor where we had eaten our supper earlier.
“Storm coming up, Miss Powell,” he said. “I have ordered the crew to trim the sails. I think all will be well. Please do not worry.”
I had no idea what he meant by trimming the sails. But “storm coming up” was clear enough, and I could already feel a pain in my head, perhaps a precursor of the seasickness that had plagued me on my earlier trip to England with Papa. Happy I was that Lucy had stolen some of Mama’s laudanum for me on the night she freed me from my prison in York. I swallowed the contents of the bottle and soon fell asleep.
* * *
Next morning when the effects of the laudanum had worn off, I awoke to find that the situation had worsened. My trunk was moving across the room from side to side, banging against the small table and upsetting the washbasin and pitcher. They crashed to the floor and the pieces of pottery joined with the trunk in the procession across the room. I dressed hastily and ran out the door just in time to avoid a collision with the sliding debris.
On deck I became one of the reeling, staggering people observing the horror of the scene in front of us. The waves seemed mountains high, and their noise was deafening. I looked around for Maud and Henry, but one of the crew told me that the Captain had ordered the locking of the trap doors to steerage. My God, I thought, my friends will be unable to escape if we run aground.
A scream arose from one of the passengers who had slipped and fallen on the water-soaked deck. It was a woman. Her body came rolling towards me and the other passengers, all of us clinging to anything we could grab hold of. As she came closer, I saw that it was Mrs. William Drayton Blackwell. All of our best instincts immediately came to the fore, and we stopped the woman in her onward roll and hoisted her to her feet. She was red-faced and shaken and her stiff demeanour completely eroded. “Dear Miss Powell,” she said, “I thank you and these other kind people for saving my life.” For how long? For how long? These were my unspoken thoughts as the ship nosed its way into the mountains of water. If she didn’t make it, I could imagine the inscription on her tombstone: “Relic of William Drayton Blackwell.”
“Man the pumps!” It was a screamed order from Captain Williams, and I watched the sailors rush to obey.
“What is he talking about?” I was at the moment standing beside Mr. Samuel C. Ellis, and for once in the voyage, I found myself in urgent need of information from him.
“The ship has taken on too much water during the night, and the bilge must be pumped out or the excess water may sink the ship.” This information he delivered in his best noblesse oblige voice, but I was glad to receive it. Now I understood.
I ran up to the crew. “Let me help you!”
They welcomed me without preamble. In a moment I saw what I must do. The pulley was turned by hand with an implement I didn’t know the name of, not that it mattered. As I turned it, discs pulled water up one of the vertical tubes that ran down into the bilge. As each disc reached the top, the water spilled over into channels that directed it overboard.
It was work requiring supernatural strength that I somehow, in my desperation, summoned. The bilge water smelled foul, but I persevered, remembering for a fleeting moment my long-ago complaints to Mama about the mordanting of the dye on my gown with urine. How childishly trivial those complaints seemed now, when I thought about the pleasant garden and summer sunshine of those bygone days.
/> I toiled, hoping that we would survive. Then came a shuddering thud as the ship hit the rocks. The sails keeled over with an aching screech. I had a moment’s vision of people on shore watching, their faces contorted in horror. As the ship lurched to portside, the sailors and I left the pump, scrambled to the edge of the railing and, like the hen, flew into the sea.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
Upper Canada, May and June, 1822
Annie Powell had just read a letter from her brother George Murray. Though she had slumped into a chair in the parlour, holding it in her hands and dreading for an hour to open it, she eventually summoned courage to slit the seal and look at its contents. Halleluiah, it offers the consolation I so desperately need. She called out to Eliza who was banging away on the pianoforte.
“Your uncle has stopped your sister from boarding the ship with the Robinsons.” Annie burst into tears. “Oh, that dear man makes my life tolerable.”
“Am I to understand then that she is still in New York City?”
“No, she boarded the Albion some time ago and is now perhaps on her way to Tolpuddle. I cannot condone her conduct entirely, but at least George has been able to instill some common sense in the girl. Indeed, he speaks kindly of her and tells me that he enjoyed their visit of several days.”
“Oh, Mama, now we shall be able to speak openly of her departure. Surely no one needs to know all the circumstances of her escape from this house and her solitary journey to New York.”
Annie wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her dress and struggled up from the chair she had collapsed into. “I must go and rest now, Eliza. I have been unable to sleep for days. Now your uncle has once again delivered to me peace and tranquility. I can never thank him enough.”
