Chapter 4 #21
Tomás slipped into the night, blanket roll on his back, his cloth-purse of money hidden beneath his clothes, a thick coat buttoned up to the neck.
He looked at the Pole Star, consulted his compass and set off, summoning to his mind the maps of the area he had perused and, in the case of one slice of the county, drawn up.
Near dawn, a farmer with a cart of cabbages stopped for him and took him a good portion of the way; near the county border, he exchanged a penny for the hind end of a loaf; he lay on the turf to drink from a stream.
By the time he reached the port, it was mid-morning.
The air around him was still, hung with grey vines of damp, and this fact spurred him on: wouldn’t a big boat, as the workhouse boys described it, need a good wind to fill its sails?
Surely weather such as this would keep a craft in harbour.
Even so, he quickened his steps, hastening to the quayside.
To miss this boat, to arrive too late: it would be the end of him.
The dock, in an estuarial inlet, was busier than he had anticipated, with fishing boats and ships large and small lined up along the harbour wall, tethered by great ropes and chains, gangways stretching from deck to quay.
Sailors shouted and yelped to one another in languages Tomás couldn’t comprehend; crates were hoisted above him to land with a crash on wooden decks.
A cow was being led on a rope towards a ramp, and the beast was not pleased at the idea of being taken onboard, lowing and tossing its head.
It occurred to Tomás, with dismay, that there was a distinct and frisky breeze here, down at the docks.
The flags on the ships’ masts were snapping and tugging, the rigging rattling, the furled sails straining against their ties, as if they, too, were keen to be out at sea.
Which is the boat bound for Australia? he asked a sailor with barely a tooth in his head, who was standing by a wooden craft.
The man glanced at him, up and down, then shrugged, casually catching a thick rope tossed to him from the deck.
Ask further down, was his response. Tomás hastened along the harbour, weaving in and out of heaped nets, lobster creels, woven baskets, piles of discarded fishbones.
The smell was overwhelming: salt mixed with fish mixed with unwashed crowds mixed with damp wood.
It was a place of departure, of the fear and trepidation of those leaving, and the grief of those left behind.
Tomás saw an old woman in a bonnet clinging wordlessly to the hand of a young man; he saw a woman with a baby at her breast, and two more children tied by their waists to her wrist, her face set in a mutinous scowl of panic as she looked down into the heaving green waters of the harbour; he saw a fisherman and his wife sitting imperturbably on a box, scraping their catches with the side of their knives, the scales cascading around them in a blizzard of silver.
He saw these things but he also didn’t see them, for what was filling his heart and his mind was the thought of a girl wrapped in a fine shawl, standing near a pair of donkeys, her blue eyes looking into his.
The ship for Australia, he said, to anyone who would listen.
Where is the ship bound for Australia? People shrugged or shook their heads or pushed his clasping hands off their sleeves.
A uniformed harbour official with a ledger under his arm gestured down the quay; a sailor with bare browned arms uttered something in a foreign tongue and pointed, with a blackened fingernail, to a large ship right at the end of the curved harbour wall.
Tomás broke into a run. The ship had high sides, punctured here and there with meagre square windows that looked like a host of disapproving eyes.
Its sails were at half-mast, filling and emptying with air; figures were at work in the rigging, climbing up and along; a crate of something was being dragged across the harbour next to it; a man in a bicorn hat stood at the wheel, conferring with a person beside him, and together they were consulting some kind of document.
Perhaps a map, Tomás thought irrelevantly, as he stopped by the man dragging the crate.
“Is this the ship bound for Australia?”
“Eh?” The man didn’t stop his hauling.
“The penal colony. Are you heading there?”
“We are, but we’re to put in first at Tangiers and then—”
“I need to speak to one of your passengers.”
He grimaced, panting, and Tomás, realising that the crate was too heavy for one, saw his chance. Bracing his hands to its side, he threw his weight behind the crate and it began to shift over the cobbles.
“I’ll help you,” Tomás said.
Eyeing him, the sailor grunted, but accepted his assistance.
The gold hoop in his ear glittered in the weak sunlight: Tomás had heard that they wore them so as to pay for a burial, if they were lost at sea.
He wanted to put out a hand and touch it, for luck, for himself and for the sailor.
Together they hauled the crate—filled with what looked like sacks of oats—towards the gangway.
“It’s one of the workhouse girls,” Tomás said, in a low voice. “Have you seen them?”
The sailor glanced towards the officers at the wheel, then back at Tomás. “I have. They are already below, far down in the hold. There’s a man from the workhouse with them.”
“Take me down there, will you?”
They were reaching the deck, the crate between them. The sailor narrowed his eyes at Tomás as he struggled backwards, the muscles in his arms standing out like cords.
“Give me your coat,” he said.
Without hesitating, Tomás unbuttoned the army greatcoat he was wearing and handed it to the man.
“And that blanket.”
Tomás unstrapped the roll from his back and pushed it towards the sailor, who paused for a moment, glancing again at the uniformed men, then gestured towards a hatch.
Tomás followed him across the deck and down through the hole, finding a foothold on a narrow, slippery ladder.
The space below was half lit and close, filled with jostling bodies and people calling to each other, pushing this way and that.
There were packages and luggage stacked in passageways, bottles lashed together, doors opening and closing, sailors rushing, passengers arguing and shoving.
Tomás heard the noise of a pig from somewhere and the cluck and flap of chickens; there was a strong odour of quicklime and something else, perhaps overcooked meat.
He had to be quick to keep up with his guide, who stepped surefooted through the chaos, not looking round once to check that Tomás was still with him.
Tomás had to barge his way through clusters of people, past passengers coming in and out of their cabins—he was so frightened by the thought of losing his sailor, and also by the awareness that the ship might cast off and leave, without warning, and he would be trapped here, on his way to the other side of the world, where he would have to begin all over again, and never see this land once more.
It was a horrifying thought but he spurred himself on with the idea that Phina was on this ship, that she was almost within reach.
The sailor monkeyed his way down another ladder, along a narrow corridor, and then down a third. The air here was foetid and sour; water and a kind of green rot oozed down the panels, and there was very little light.
Tomás was just about to ask how much further they were going—he was gripped suddenly by the idea that this sailor was tricking him or leading him into some awful trap, perhaps to murder him and steal his money—when the man stopped, so abruptly that Tomás rammed into him.
“Here,” the sailor said, pointing at a narrow door with a high step.
Tomás knocked with his knuckles, seeing, from the corner of his eye, his sailor leaving, climbing up the ladder and away.
He knocked again. And then he looked down and saw that the door was barred from the outside.
He lifted the iron bar, let it clatter to the floor, and he pushed the door open, stepping inside.
The space was dim, strung with lines of greyish linens.
The floorboards were strewn with thin drifts of sawdust; boxes and cases were scattered about.
In one corner, a group of figures could be seen, crouching low, clinging to each other, their frightened faces visible to him, like pale petals pasted on the darkness.
He saw them shift, shrinking away from him, tightening their hold on each other.
“Who are you?” one of them called, in a shaking voice. “What do you want with us?”
“I’ll do you no harm,” Tomás said. “I promise. I’m looking for Phina—Seraphina. Is she among you?”
There was a susurration of whispering, heads turning, hands gripping other hands, and Tomás wondered, grimly, what had happened to these girls to make them so afraid.
“What would you be wanting with her? If she was here?” It was the same voice again. “Which she isn’t.”
“I’ve come for her. For Phina. You might know her as Frances.
I mean her no harm,” he said again, because it seemed important to keep stating this to them.
“I’m wanting…” He stopped. It hadn’t occurred to him, throughout this whole escapade, what his plan was.
He hadn’t formulated what he wanted with her, hadn’t articulated it to himself.
He had been focusing on getting here, and preventing her from being packed off like this. Beyond that, he hadn’t thought.
“What?” the bold girl demanded. “What do you want with her?”
“I want…I want…I need to speak with her…I was sent away, you see, with the redcoats, to make maps and…”
There was a murmur and then a distinct titter. Tomás faltered to a stop, his face suddenly scarlet. It was possible he had made a dreadful mistake in coming here, it now occurred to him. She might well not remember him, might feel nothing for him. This was a grave error. He should go.