Chapter One Kensa
Chapter One
Kensa
At last, the fish had come. Their slim bodies jostled one another against the water’s surface, flicking upwards as a coin to a thumb.
Portscatho ran on pilchard time, measured in seasons of silver scales.
In those weeks, all hands within the village were called upon, even Kensa’s.
She was twelve and fully capable, as she told those in earshot, with a tone challenging anyone to disagree with her.
It was late August in Cornwall, the evening sky thrown to lark and haze, when the cry was heard: ‘Avee! Avee!’
In previous months, offerings had been made to the Father of Storms in the hopes he would drive the shoals to their nets – and drive them he did.
The boats lay low in the water, heaped with fresh catch.
The men in the village waded among them with wooden shovels, filling hand-barrows with pilchard after pilchard after pilchard.
Dull red lanterns lit their stern faces, creased in concentration.
Next, the barrows were wheeled uphill to the salting house where the women waited, had been waiting all day.
Only the miners did not partake in today’s work, their riches found in soil, not sea.
A pilchard catch was a large event for Portscatho and the pay was handsome at three-pence an hour.
Noise, shouts and curses passed between the villagers, with a laugh or two.
This was a practice bred into them. As each person grew in age, their place within the pilchard catch became fixed.
Catcher or gutter, salter or packer, each was paid a fair wage.
And tonight Kensa would find her place.
Bread, fat and brandy were offered up and candles lit to shy the dark.
There was a feasting air, a mirthful tang, as on Wassail Night or Midsummer’s Morning.
Only this had a reaper’s joy that came from killing.
Fish blood ran down the streets. Kensa’s skirts were wet with it.
Here was a gift to the Father of Storms. Based on its thick flow from land to sea, he would be most pleased and Portscatho would eat well in the coming months, by his grace.
A crystal-cracking sound popped beneath Kensa’s boots as she approached the salting house.
Here, the women ruled. Nimble hands worked quickly, while tongues slapped lips and spoke ripe talk.
Sour tempers met sweet, and lean elbows bashed fuller ones, compelled to band together and complete the work – squabbling or singing, demanding, ‘More fish, more salt.’ Each woman was intent on her task, fish in one pile, coarse brown salt in the other, to be combined into empty barrels.
Clinging to one woman’s apron was a small, fair-haired child. Kensa’s mother, Derwa, and half-sister, Elowen. The latter’s grip was as tight as a limpet’s, which her mother soon suckered onto Kensa’s hand.
‘You can mind her,’ said Derwa.
‘But I can help—’
‘This is helping,’ came the answer, before the grey length of her mother’s dress faded into the salting house depths.
Kensa looked down to her charge who looked up in turn, Elowen’s wide blue eyes in contrast to her own hazel.
Although they were similar in age, with less than four years between them, there was no likeness, bar the shape of cheek and jaw.
Even their personalities were at odds. Kensa was firstborn and, truly, it was in her nature and name to be first. She was first to wake and beat the other children to the harbour, to swim across the headland and see where the tufted seabirds placed their nests.
She was first to call out a lie when she heard it and first to be blamed should trouble arise.
Elowen was even-tempered, quiet and sweet: content to wait and be second.
‘Kensa?’ Always, the fair-haired girl spoke her name as a question.
Those who knew the half-sisters ascribed such variables to the men who’d fathered them.
Whenever she glanced into the looking glass, Kensa saw a face once worn by the most feared smuggler ever to roam the coast off their small, crooked finger of a peninsula.
Freckles, scarlet hair, a thin mouth better suited to man than woman.
Of course, Elowen was as fair and pale as their mother was.
Beautiful, even. If ever Kensa stood beside her sibling, she felt rough and bruised in comparison: an apple no good for eating, ready to be pulped for next year’s cider.
Kensa was quick to drop Elowen’s hand and shunted the younger child into a dull corner where she would not be in the way.
‘Stay there,’ she said firmly, then began to find her true place within the salting house.
It was easy enough, for the busy women called out what was needed.
Although she was too small to move the barrels, Kensa could heave their lids off or keep stray cats from the door.
Hands shot about, writhing as pilchards when first placed upon the shore.
With salt layered, fish atop, salt again and smoothed with a palm, the barrels grew denser, packed and stacked.
In coming weeks, oil and salt would drip from the wood, to be collected, for there was no waste in Portscatho.
After a month or so, when the pilchards were fully cured, they would be washed and packed into hogsheads, sent to Falmouth and sold across the seas, as far away as Spain and Italy, to feed the papists on their abstinent Fridays.
Coin from the pilchard catch could sustain a family for half a year or more, should they be frugally minded.
As the women talked, Kensa listened. Discussions on babes and their mothers, husbands and their wanderings at sea or on the shore of another’s bed.
Plans were made for the cooler months, for there were pantries to fill and preserves to be made.
The words flew as high as fish guts, while Kensa watched, copied, tried her hand until she was ushered away.
For as long as she helped, she was wanted.
It was good, that knowledge: learning where she fit.
Ever since she could remember, Kensa had been unwelcome.
That’s what came with being the daughter of Alexander Rowe.
Rumour was, after he was hanged and strung up over Percuil River, his body refused to rot.
Others say his body disappeared altogether, swallowed by the tides for an unpaid debt.
Kensa thought she remembered that day, too – the hanging – and if she didn’t, she’d been told of it so often that a memory had formed nonetheless.
And she’d been told what she’d done.
‘That chit crawled on to the scaffold and put her hands in his pockets,’ said Old Sal. ‘Thieved from her own father afore he was cold.’
It was true, but Kensa had not taken money.
Instead, she had removed a hagstone from her father’s coat.
It was as large as her palm with a hole knuckled through it.
She could not forget the first time she’d seen it.
Her father had come home from sea, rattling with gifts and thick with beard.
He’d chased her round their small cob-walled dwelling and placed that hagstone to her eye.
‘Here’s how I know when a storm’s coming,’ her father told her. ‘Here’s how I know to go wrecking.’
Although the hagstone had not protected him from the law and the noose, it was a comfort to Kensa. A weight as natural as her own flesh, carried from one scorn to the next. Her fingers strayed to it now in the salting house, nerves hidden behind that flat, hard mouth.
In the corner, quiet as always, Elowen played with another child.
How easily she made friends. Charming everyone with her cow-long lashes and dainty steps.
Ones that would always follow Kensa, asking her to slow down, to wait, to stop.
And her name a question, always a question, asked over and over: Kensa? Kensa? Kensa?
She turned away, stretching to glare inside a half-filled barrel.
A dozen pilchard eyes stared back. Her chest grew tight.
It always did when she thought on her father.
Distracted as she was, she did not see Elowen approach.
‘Kensa?’ A sudden pull on her sleeve startled her, her fingers slackened, the hagstone tumbled into the dark and bounced beneath Old Sal.
And when the heavy-set woman fell, it was with a hard thump.
One which brought a pilchard barrel with it, clattering into two others and sending the carefully packed fish and salt across the bloody floor.
Four hours’ work gone, a hard night ahead, a wage that had to be earned.
Kensa scrabbled for her hagstone and found Old Sal’s face pressed into hers.
‘I didn’t mean to—’
Her excuses fell unheard, replaced by threats to box ears and tan hides. ‘You’re as twisted as your father was,’ said Old Sal. ‘He brought badness with him and now you’ll do the same. Out, go on! Take the little one with you! I want you gone.’
Kensa’s neck burned. Eyes – woman and child and pilchard – turned to her. She opened her mouth to protest and closed it, firmly, teeth clacking together. Head down, she wrenched herself from the salting house, dragging Elowen behind her.
Anger kept Kensa walking. Portscatho’s natural incline, a deep slope to the ocean, propelled her towards the harbour.
A full moon lit the cobbles, turning what would be red in daylight into a long black stream.
By the sea wall, the men had finished unloading the boats and sat together with lit pipes and empty tankards.
Only when she felt a tug on her arm did she slow, remembering the shorter legs which struggled to match hers.
‘Kensa?’
‘No,’ she spat, furious.
One word and all the shame inside her reached out to echo against the receding tide.