A Walk Through a Window (15 page)

The deck began to curve toward the front of the ship. As she walked around, Darby could see that the bow of the
Elizabeth
was open to the sky, and almost every plank of the deck was covered with passengers. People, mostly wearing clothing that made Gabe’s rags look good, were sitting or lying around on the deck. Many were wrapped in threadbare blankets like Alice’s. All around the edge of the open area were small ovens that had been built into the sides of the ship. Many of them had tiny fires going inside, which was pretty alarming when Darby thought about it, considering the boat was made of wood. What if a spark got out? The ovens themselves looked rickety, like someone had just hammered a few pieces of wood into place, slapped down some stones and called it a fireplace.

Behind Darby on the deck above, another group of crew members sat with their legs stretched straight out in front of them, working away on huge piles of sailcloth. They wore large thimbles strapped to their thumbs and sewed the cloth with some kind of strong thread. One crewman was standing off to the side with a coil of rope, carefully dipping the end into a bucket of some kind of thick, black goo.

She felt a breeze lift the back of her hair and turned to look out over the water. The sun was getting a bit lower on the horizon, and Darby realized that the afternoon had slipped away while she listened to Alice and her brother talk. The waves around the ship had little whitecaps on them and she had to grip the wooden handrail tightly to keep her balance. Some of the passengers were getting tossed around a bit, but no one showed any sign of wanting to put out the little fires. Darby could see jellyfish sailing along on top of the waves, looking like the caps of giant pink and purple mushrooms, floating on the sea.

She sidled up beside one small group, mostly because they were squabbling instead of just staring blankly at the sky like so many of the others.

“I’m hungry,” wailed one of the children in the group. Darby was shocked to see a woman reach across the body of a sleeping man and slap the child hard in the face. “We’re all hungry, Sammy,” she snapped at him. “Now quiet down or ye’ll wake himself, and you know what he’ll do if ye snivel.”

Darby shook her head in disbelief. This little trip was giving her a whole new appreciation of her own parents’ disciplinary skills. She cast her eyes back to poor Sammy.

He had curled up in a ball, popped a thumb in his mouth and looked up at the sky. But his tears had an effect, after all. The mother, if she
was
Sammy’s mother, dug her elbow into the ribs of the sleeping man. “Git yerself over, ya great lummox,” she said. “The children are cryin’ for their food. It’s time for me to make the cakes.”

The man snorted and rolled out of the way, only to go back to sleep in what looked like the most uncomfortable position possible, face down on the hard deck. He didn’t even have a rag for a pillow. The woman got to her feet and marched over to some kind of hatch flipped open on the deck. She yelled something down the hatch, and presently a man came stumping up a nearby set of stairs with a wooden crate in his arms.

This created quite a stir on the deck as the passengers formed a quick, untidy line in front of the man. Most of the women in the line held out their skirts or their aprons and he scooped a quantity of some kind of dried flour right onto their clothes. A couple of the passengers held out small wooden bowls and got their servings in those. Darby waited to see what else they would be eating, but the man just walked away. That was dinner? A handful of dry flour?

Several quarrels began to break out around the deck, and Darby realized the passengers were fighting over their food. The so-called cakes that most of the families ate were nothing more than the flour mixed with a little water and baked on rusty iron pans. From her vantage point they looked pretty much like small pancakes, burnt on the outside and raw on the inside. No fruit or vegetables to be seen, or even milk. Maybe the cook handed those things out in the morning?

The main deck was now crammed full, more passengers having staggered up from their berths downstairs, so Darby scrambled over to the ladder leading to the deck above, where many of the sailors were watching the events down below. Some were even laughing, and she got the feeling that for some reason they didn’t see the passengers as real people at all.

Gabe sat over to one side, well away from the other crewmen. The giant Alec was nowhere to be seen, and Gabe made a quick gesture to Darby. She ran around the edge of the deck, to keep as far as possible from the crew. It was windier up above, and from where Gabe sat, she couldn’t hear the voices of any of the passengers or the crew at all.

“Put your knees up,” Gabe hissed at her as she sat down beside him. She pulled the sailcloth over her knees, and hunched down underneath.

“If anyone sees me moving under this sheet, they really will think I’m a ghost,” Darby whispered to him. He grinned and pulled the sailcloth right up over his head.

“It’s meal time,” he said in a low voice. “They’ll all be busy for at least an hour—the passengers eating and fighting and the crew watching and laughing. We’re as safe to talk here as anywhere.”

“Where’s the rest of the food?” Darby asked.

He shrugged. “That is all they have. The cook hands out half a pound of cornmeal for every adult, twice a day in the morning and evening. Sometimes he has bread, so they get that instead of the meal. There used to be a barrel of water with an iron cup they all shared, but since supplies have been running low, the cook doles that out, too.”

“And they cook their food in those fireplaces?”

Gabe nodded. “Yes—they are stoves, really. Specially built for the passengers. The captain said that food was to be provided for crew only—passengers were to look after themselves. But so many boarded without any food at all, he’s been forced to give out the cornmeal so they don’t starve.”

“I can’t believe they don’t starve, even with the cornmeal,” Darby said. “No wonder everyone looks so weak and sleepy.”

Gabe twitched the sailcloth aside, and she could see that the few remaining crew members were climbing down the ladder. “Some of the passengers boarded with small containers of herring, and one man even had a little bacon, but anything extra was gone within the first week. The rations are even less for the children, and I’ve seen mothers and fathers go hungry so that their children can
at least have a bite of the burnt bits of cake they make in the ovens.”

Darby wriggled around to make herself as comfortable as she could on the hard surface of the wooden deck. “This is just terrible,” she said. “I’ve walked around a lot today and I’ve figured a bit of it out, but I still have a million questions.”

“Why does that not surprise me?” he said, and his face crinkled a little. Darby could see that it hurt him to smile.

“I don’t understand why you are going through this, Gabe,” she said, pointing at the bruise on the side of his face. “That man really hurt you.”

“Ah, but if it wouldn’t make me red as a beet, I’d show you my ribs,” he said jokingly. “They are all the colours of the rainbow after my taste of Alec’s big boots.”

“Quit joking around, you idiot,” Darby said. “This seems like it could be dangerous to you—it
is
dangerous to you,” she amended.

“We’ll handle that sort of question later, thank you very much,” he said, but at least his tone was more serious. “Now, why don’t you tell me what you’ve learned on board today?”

So she did. Darby related the whole Pádraig and Alice tale, and all about Ellen and her baby sibling. He sat quiet, listening.

“I know this ship is sailing to Canada,” Darby concluded. “But I don’t know why. The people are from Ireland, that much I know. Pádraig said he was from Sligo.”

“Some are from Sligo, which is a port town in Ireland, but most are farmers who worked on the land until it failed them,” he said quietly. “Part of the problem was that the people of Ireland had a massive crop failure, and because they relied so much on that crop, there was a terrible famine.”

The light from the setting sun shone red through the white sailcloth, and Gabe leaned over on one elbow.

“Was it potatoes?” Darby asked.

“Yes. Potatoes were a crop that grew very well in Irish soil—so well that many farmers grew nothing else. In the fall, the farmers began to dig up their crops. In some places, the blight didn’t spread until the potatoes were all in the storage bins. It was a terrible disaster. One day they would have stored a full crop and the next day they would find their crop was nothing but black and rotting mush. In typical damp Irish conditions, one bad potato could infect a whole crop.”

“Why didn’t they just grow something else?”

“Things just didn’t move that fast at the time. They had no ability to change crops quickly. Most of the farmers didn’t even know about crop rotation to protect the soil. So they planted again, and prayed to God. When the second crop went bad, many people began to starve.”

“But was there no other food in Ireland?”

Gabe looked at Darby steadily. “There was,” he said quietly. “Barley, rye and even wheat. But many of the landlords of Ireland were Englishmen and they had the other crops earmarked for markets in Europe
and at home in England. They would lose their profits if the food went to feed hungry people who could not pay.”

“So it was cheaper to get rid of the problem people by sending them away?”

“Look around,” he said. “What do you think?”

Darby peeked out from under the sailcloth, but all the crew members had gone somewhere else. To eat, maybe. The sky was a deep indigo blue—and the stars! She had no idea there were so many stars in the sky. She climbed out from under the cloth to stand against the railing and take a few deep breaths of the night air. With every second, the deep shades of blue drained out of the sky, leaving it black and star-filled. It was a wonder to see.

Most of the passengers had finished eating, and had curled up right on the deck to go to sleep. As the ship sailed on in the dark, the waves off to each side glowed a weird sparkling green against the black ocean. Darby felt Gabe come stand beside her.

“The radiance in the water is from the algae,” he said in a low voice. “When they are disturbed by the passage of the ship, each tiny creature shines a light and together they make the ocean glow.” He touched her arm and pointed her back to the spot under the sailcloth.

“We are better to stay under there,” whispered Gabe. “Voices carry more in the night over water, and the captain has been setting a watch to make sure we don’t get secretly boarded.”

“Secretly boarded?” Darby pulled the cloth back over her head. It was no warmer underneath. She still couldn’t get used to feeling so cold all the time. “Who is going to board a ship in the middle of the ocean?”

He shrugged. “I know it sounds unlikely, but the captain wants nothing to get in the way of completing his passage to Montreal. He pocketed the price for each passenger upon boarding, and he doesn’t get extra for delivery. He wants to be quit of them and pick up whatever cargo awaits him there. And though you may not have seen any other ships today, there are many of them out there. Some are rife with diseases like smallpox and typhoid. If a ship’s company runs out of food, who knows what they will try to do in desperation.”

“Smallpox,” Darby said slowly. “That must be what the baby has.”

Gabe nodded. “Fifteen souls were lost mid-voyage before the crew of the
Elizabeth
managed to stem the outbreak. But perhaps one or two passengers concealed their symptoms, or perhaps the disease passed through clothes not burned when they should have been.”

“They burn the clothes?”

Gabe sighed and sat up a bit. “The crew are deathly afraid of the pox. It is worse even than typhus. It can spread throughout a ship like wildfire, killing everyone aboard in a matter of a few days. So the captain has the crew throw anyone with symptoms of the disease over the side, some even before they have succumbed to
the illness. Or, if he is feeling very generous, he will lock them in a room for the duration of the passage. Those who survive are released at the end of the journey. But usually none survive. The clothes of the dead are supposed to be tossed over the side or burned. But as you can see, these people are so poor, they sometimes hide the clothes and douse them in seawater hoping to kill the pox.”

“Does that work?”

“No, of course not. And so the disease might stay dormant for a while before flaring up again. My guess is that is what has happened here.”

Darby was quiet a moment. How many lives had been lost on this ship? And how many ships like this one had sailed away from Ireland?

Just as she opened her mouth to ask, Gabe disappeared. Or more accurately, a pile of sailcloth was unceremoniously dumped on her head and someone yanked Gabe out by the arm.

“ ’Ere’s the little rat, then! It’s yer turn on watch, bog boy. Mind you don’t fall asleep on the job. Shirkers make good fish food.”

Darby waited a moment or two before sliding out from under the cloth. In the moonlight, she could see Gabe climbing the rigging. He must have to do his watch in the crow’s nest—the tiny platform at the top of one of the masts. It was so high, she lost sight of him when the dark seemed to swallow him halfway up the mast. Darby turned away and made a bed in the sailcloth, tucked tightly into one corner of the
deck. Since there didn’t appear to be any immediate chance to make her way home, she at least wanted to ensure no one would step on the
Elizabeth
’s newest resident ghost while she caught a few hours of sleep.