The Bastard: The Kent Family Chronicles Page 26

  With a gentle whoosh, Hoskins settled his lips together, thunked his head against the high back of the bench and began to snore.

  Phillipe had already made up his mind to accept the invitation. He would indeed dog Hoskins’ every step when he called at the port to arrange his shipment.

  Encouraged again, Phillipe slid off the bench. He bent over Marie, slipped an arm around her slumped shoulders, said softly:

  “Mama?”

  “What?”

  “Are you tired now? Do you want to go up to the room and sleep?”

  Still gazing at the mug of heated ale, she didn’t answer.

  A minute went by. Another.

  Heartbroken, Phillipe pried her fingers loose one by one. He helped her stand up, all the while speaking to her in a low voice, soothing her as he would a child. She shuffled her feet as she walked, accepting physical direction of her body in a docile way. The parsons watched. Even the driver and his guard stopped their rowdy laughter, to stare with strangely sober expressions.

  CHAPTER VII

  To an Unknown Shore

  i

  EIGHT MILES UP THE River Avon from the Bristol Channel, along the brawling, noisy Bristol docks, Phillipe Charboneau discovered that Hoskins was as good as his tipsy word. Under the brilliant blue of a May morning, Phillipe dodged among burly handlers loading and unloading cargo as he followed the portly ironmaker along the tar-reeking pier.

  A thicket of masts stood against the sky. Great hulls creaked in their berths. Ropes and pulleys racketed, offloading a bewildering array of goods from the newest arrivals in port.

  They passed men bent beneath the weight of huge sacks of fragrant African cocoa beans. Phillipe saw a factor’s agent slash open a canvas bale to inspect a bundle of light brown leaves the size of elephants’ ears. Hoskins informed him that was tobacco in its native state, fresh from the tidewater plantations in America’s southern colonies.

  Hailing another factor of his acquaintance, Hoskins got permission to pluck a sample from a small mountain of stalks, each of which bore dozens of tubular and slightly curved yellow fruits. He handed the sweet-smelling sample to Phillipe, who immediately picked up Hoskins’ cue that it was “passing tasty,” and started to bite into it.

  Hoskins puffed up with shock. “Wait, you must skin it first! Have you never seen a West Indies banana?”

  “Banana? No. I’ve never even heard the word.”

  “Well, then, Hoskins is giving you a liberal education in world commerce, damme if he isn’t.”

  To which Phillipe could only nod enthusiastic agreement, though it was well nigh impossible for him to assimilate every detail of the busy wharf scene.

  Strutting along, Hoskins made inquiries of several clerks and seamen. He seemed to be on familiar terms with many of them. At last he informed Phillipe:

  “Excellent luck! One of the more reliable captains docked two days ago. Will Caleb out of Boston. I’ve shipped goods with him before. A God-fearing man who can be relied upon not to be grogged to the eyeballs during a squall. Profit is too precious a commodity to be risked with a sot. Come on, sir, a little more lively! That’s Caleb’s vessel second one down. We’ll see whether I can strike a bargain.”

  Bustling ahead with a step surprisingly brisk for one of his girth, Hoskins led the way to the foot of the gangplank running up to the ship. She was three-masted, some eighty feet long and perhaps a quarter of that across. She bore the gilt-painted name Eclipse.

  At the rail, watching a line of handlers loading large canvas-covered chests aboard, was a hawkish, white-haired man of fifty or so. He had thin lips and a face tanned and roughened by exposure to the elements. He wore a plain coat of dark blue wool.

  Hoskins hailed him: “Good morning, Captain Caleb! Are you bound back for Boston?”

  “Good morning, Hoskins,” answered the sea captain, with a compression of his lips that passed for a smile. “I am that—when the hold’s full.”

  “What are you carrying, sir?”

  Captain Caleb replied that he had so far negotiated to freight fifty chests of green Hyson tea and a quantity of Lancashire fustian in assorted colors. He added:

  “But I’ve room for more.”

  “Then by all means let’s discuss an arrangement.”

  As he waved Hoskins aboard, the master of Eclipse glanced at Phillipe with a flash of curiosity. “Step to one side for Mr. Hoskins!” he shouted to the handlers. “Any man dropping a chest in the harbor will discover that a peace-loving captain can still use the cat!”

  Hoskins bobbed his head to indicate that Phillipe should follow, which he did, causing Captain Caleb’s white brows to shoot upward in puzzlement. Caleb shook the fat man’s hand as the latter stepped on deck.

  “You’ve lost Lucas, then? Replaced him with this young man since last I saw you?”

  Hoskins shook his head. “No, sir, Lucas is presently at the Flagon, attending this young man’s mother. She was not in proper spirits to come knocking about these piers.”

  Phillipe wondered how Marie was surviving the wait at the inn. Though listless, she’d seemed a little more herself when they arrived in Bristol.

  “On the coach trip from London,” Hoskins went on, “this chap, Mr. Phillipe Charboneau, provided handsome service—as did Lucas—in defending myself and other passengers from three infernal highwaymen. Since Mr. Charboneau has small funds, but a great desire to start a new life in the Americas, I brought him along in the hope of finding an available berth.”

  Captain Caleb’s eyes displayed innumerable wrinkles at the corners as he scrutinized Phillipe again. “Well, my mess boy’s felled with a flux. I should leave him behind—which I won’t, since I know the plight of his widowed mother back in Marblehead. The boy may be up and about soon or he may not. I might be able to use a hand and I might not.” His glance grew sharper. “However, I want no hands who are fleeing from the law or the debtor’s prison.”

  “I’m fleeing from nothing like that, sir,” Phillipe said as Caleb continued to evaluate his size and probable strength. The half-truth came easily because of the circumstances. “I’m only going toward something—starting with a passage.”

  Caleb thumbed his wind-roughened chin. “You don’t speak pure English. What are you, French?”

  Phillipe wanted to reply that the captain didn’t speak pure English either, but rather, a strange, nasal version of it. Was that how colonials of Boston talked? Prudence made him simply nod instead.

  “How much money can you pay?” Caleb asked.

  “I have five pounds.”

  “For himself and his mother,” Hoskins emphasized. “As I mentioned, Lucas is keeping watch over the lady right this moment. She is not herself. Certain problems of health—”

  At this, Captain Caleb looked even more skeptical. “I’m not taken with sailing a sick woman to Boston. We make a hard crossing. Six, eight weeks, depending on storms and adverse winds.”

  “She can manage, Captain,” Phillipe said. “She’s as anxious to be away from England as I am.”

  “Well, five pounds is hardly sufficient—even if I used you in the mess, helping that Dutch devil Gropius with his so-called cooking.”

  Hoskins cleared his throat self-importantly. “Captain Caleb, I indicated that Mr. Charboneau performed a brave service, and saved me considerable expense. If you’re averse to passengers such as he and his mother, perhaps I should pass along the wharf and seek another vessel for my shipment.”

  Standing on the gently rolling deck with the shadows of noisy gulls falling through the tangle of spars and lines above, Phillipe felt a tightening in his throat, an emotional response to Hoskins’ bluff. He didn’t want to lose this chance, even though he was more than a little intimidated by the immense unknown lying to the west along the glitter of the Avon.

  “I was planning to ship a deal of kettles,” Hoskins sighed. “Yes, a deal. But I want to assist the boy as part of the bargain.” He turned to Phillipe. “We’d best make inquiries
elsewhere.”

  “Here, not so hasty!” Caleb exclaimed, seizing Hoskins’ arm.

  Neither man smiled. But each had a glitter in his eye that signaled the enjoyment of hard bargaining. Caleb said to Phillipe, “You go aft, lad.” He was required to point out the direction to the nautical novice. “So you don’t interrupt those dock rats doing the loading. Hoskins and I will drop down to my cabin, where I keep a bit of Providence rum for special visitors.”

  And, slipping an arm around Hoskins’ shoulder, he led him away, murmuring, “Now, sir, indicate to me the quantity of iron on which we’ll open the discussion—”

  They vanished below, leaving Phillipe to pace nervously for almost an hour.

  When the two men reappeared, Hoskins was smiling.

  “You and your mother are aboard, Mr. Charboneau. In a single, very small and airless cabin, I’m afraid. I couldn’t wheedle two from a hard-headed Yankee like Caleb. But I filled his hold for him. We’ll load tonight and the pilot will take Eclipse down the river on the tide tomorrow. Shall we fetch your mother?”

  “Yes, sir, certainly. How can I ever thank you?”

  “It’s I who have a debt to pay,” Hoskins answered as they dodged their way down the plank again. “Thanks to you, I’m less poor than I might have been. Turning over a pound is all in life that matters. Keep that as your maxim in the colonies. Indeed, if you stick to commerce and avoid politics, you’ll end up rich instead of hanged.”

  Thus maintaining his pose of total unconcern for others—a pose his actions of the morning belied —Hoskins strutted away up the wharf. He assumed Phillipe would follow; he did not glance back. Phillipe smiled and tagged after him.

  ii

  Gray weather greeted the one-hundred-fifty-ton schooner Eclipse as she left the western counties of England astern and cracked on canvas, her prow rising and plummeting through an already heavy sea.

  The mess boy was still confined to his berth with the flux. Phillipe was put on duty at once. The ship hadn’t been away from the mouth of the Bristol Channel two hours before he received six whacks of a stick from the bandy-legged ship’s cook.

  The Dutchman, named Gropius, spoke only a few words of English, and those mostly obscene. But Gropius’ vocabulary and the stick were sufficient to indicate that Phillipe had committed his first error.

  Gropius had handed him a kettle of stew to lug to the crew’s mess. Phillipe observed aloud that the stew seemed to include a number of recently cooked white slugs. That brought on the howls and the whacking.

  Phillipe’s anger flared at the first blow. But he accepted the punishment because he realized he was lucky to be sailing for the colonies so soon. He carried the kettle to the mess without protest, rubbed his butt on the way back and decided to say nothing about the weevils in the biscuits or the worms in the potatoes.

  Besides, he had plenty to do just learning to negotiate the tilting decks and companionways without spilling the contents of such a kettle, or the tots of rum Captain Caleb allowed his New England crew in the evening.

  The first day at sea—the ship rolling and pitching; tackle creaking; canvas snapping; men scrambling aloft to frightening heights as if born to it—brought Phillipe acute nausea and the conviction that he would never be a seaman. And as much as eight more weeks of this lay ahead!

  To compound his problems, he was worried about his mother again.

  When he’d accompanied her aboard Eclipse at sunset before the schooner sailed, he’d tried to ignore the continued listlessness of her movements, the way she spoke only in monosyllables and let her gaze wander up to the tips of the masts without seeing them.

  During the second and third days at sea, the weather grew increasingly worse. Phillipe made frequent trips to the rail, to the loud amusement of the sailors. But he managed to recover fairly fast every time. Marie, in contrast, simply lay on her side in the single cramped bunk in their tiny steerage cabin.

  Located on the port side of the schooner’s berth deck, the cabin was even less appetizing than Hoskins had painted it. For one thing, it was noisy; similar cubicles for the boatswain, the carpenter and the captain’s clerk were nearby, along the poorly lit fore-and-aft gangway. For another thing, the cubicle reeked constantly. It reeked of pitch, of the water in the bilges and of other stenches Phillipe didn’t care to identify. And seeing anything clearly was almost impossible. A candle in a wrought-iron holder with a hook for securing it into the wood of the bunk provided the only light.

  All through the third day, Phillipe looked in on Marie as often as he could. Her position in the bunk seldom changed. She clutched the leather casket to her stomach, her legs drawn up against the now-worthless treasure. Each time Phillipe urged her to eat a bowl of the stew Gropius grudgingly offered, she refused. It was increasingly evident that her precarious mental state and the rolling sea were taking a double toll from her already low reserves of strength.

  Two more days, and Phillipe was almost frantic with fear. After dark, he got up his nerve to go to Captain Caleb’s quarters in the stern.

  He knocked, heard a voice answer above the crash of the waves and the grinding of the hull, bidding him come in.

  Caleb’s cabin was only about three times the size of Phillipe’s. It was sparsely furnished with a built-in bunk, a locker, a small desk bolted to the bulkhead. A small, round table of oak and two chairs were similarly bolted to the decking.

  A hanging lantern swung back and forth above the table. Seated there, Caleb glanced up from an open book which Phillipe recognized with some surprise as a Bible.

  Caleb gestured to the other chair, then to a platter of biscuits. The swaying lantern threw shifting shadows across the New Englander’s face as Phillipe sank wearily into the chair, declining the food.

  “Some difficulty, lad?” the captain asked.

  “It’s my mother, sir. She’s not well. Does anyone aboard have medical skill?”

  “The first mate, Mr. Soaper, has some simple knowledge. But Eclipse is a commercial vessel. We don’t often carry passengers. So we can’t afford the luxury of a doctor.”

  Phillipe’s face fell. Caleb leaned back, his eyes unblinking.

  “I’m aware the hard weather must be troubling the lady, since she hasn’t showed herself at table with the mates. Makes me regret you didn’t take my warning about a rough crossing more seriously.”

  “It was important we leave England as soon as possible.”

  “Because you are running away from some trouble,” Caleb said, so quietly he could barely be heard against the smash of the Atlantic on the hull. “I read it in your face the moment Hoskins brought you aboard. I accepted your word that it was otherwise because I wanted Hoskins’ cargo.”

  Phillipe came close to pouring out the entire story to the captain. But didn’t. He was just a little afraid that his tale of persecution by the Amberlys might sound like the ravings of a madman. Caleb was tough, practical, independent; a tangled, story of a woman who had dreamed of her son becoming a nobleman could hardly interest him.

  Besides, that part of Phillipe’s life was past. His concern was the immediate moment.

  “I felt my mother and I would be better off starting our lives over again in the colonies,” he said. “Can we let it go at that, sir?”

  “Since the British Isles are now well behind us—yes.”

  “Now it seems I made the wrong choice.”

  Caleb touched the page of his Bible without glancing at it. “What man doesn’t, almost hourly? Can you tell me what ails your mother?”

  He shook his head. “Not exactly. I’m afraid the idea of traveling to a country we know nothing about—a country where we’ll be strangers again—has hurt her mind. She won’t eat so much as one bite.”

  “You’ve tried?”

  “Over and over. She just lies in the bunk. I don’t know what I can do to help her.”

  “Say prayers to Almighty God,” replied Caleb with perfect seriousness. “There’s no way I can turn Eclipse back
to England.”

  iii

  Seven days onto the Atlantic, Phillipe came to the realization that Marie was in all probability dying.

  When the thought struck, his first emotion was renewed guilt. Then came fresh rage at all those he considered responsible. Lady Jane. Roger. Perhaps, in a small way, even Alicia.

  But the dominant reaction was guilt. It ate into his mind like some voracious monster.

  The mate, Mr. Soaper, examined Marie in the cabin that now smelled sour with her feverish sweat. He stated that unless Phillipe could force her to take nourishment, she would indeed die. Another effort to pour a little broth between her clenched teeth failed.

  “Perhaps dying is what she wants,” was Soaper’s brief and gloomy conclusion.

  Phillipe took to staying in the cabin as much as his duties would permit. He hardly knew what hour it was, let alone the day. Eclipse continued to run through rough seas. He was able to live with that at last, although he knew he’d never like it.

  He slept only for short periods, seated in the corner between bunk and cabin wall, hard planking for his pillow. Even in sleep he was half-awake, alert for changes in his mother’s shallow breathing. He woke in the darkness of their tenth night at sea to hear her calling his name.

  “Wait, Mama,” he said, scrambling up in the black, fetid cabin. “Give me a moment to light the candle—”