Hot Winds From Bombay (15 page)

Old Captain Whiddington, his face lined and his silver-gray eyes dulled to pewter by the events of the past ten years, leaned heavily on his daughter Persia’s arm. They were waiting in the crisp October sunshine for the brigade of cars to pull into the station not far from the United States Hotel, where they had been staying for the past two weeks.

Two weeks?
Had it only been fourteen days since they had taken the cars down from Maine? the captain pondered. Too often nowadays each hour seemed to drag its feet. Still, so much had happened. So much had changed. Sometimes, in the dark of night, he longed to pull the years back, to bring Victoria out of the grave, to hear Persia’s bright laughter trilling through the old house on Gay Street once more, even to have Europa back with them. He couldn’t help but feel a certain sadness at the relentless march of time and the havoc the advance of years had wreaked upon his family.

“Father, it won’t be long now. I heard the whistle. Are you warm enough? You should sit down until the train comes.”

He glanced up at her. His “little girl” was taller than he was now. The years had bent his back and stooped his shoulders, while Persia still, in spite of everything, stood bowsprit straight with a proud, unyielding set to her head and a cold blue gaze that dared the world to scorn her for what she had done.

“My dear, you fret over me too much. I’m neither tired nor cold.” He was both, but he had never been one to complain.

“Well, I still say these long trips are getting to be too much for you, Father. There isn’t a reason in the world that I couldn’t have come to Boston and taken care of the auction of our cargo at Central Wharf while you stayed at home and nursed your gout.”

“Blast
my gout!” He whacked his boot with his scrimshandered cane to show his contempt for the ailment and the anger he felt at having to rely on his daughter for almost everything these days. It wasn’t right. Old men should take to their graves, not to their beds!

Persia ignored his reaction, knowing that any further comment would only make him feel worse. Her father’s outbursts at his many infirmities had become routine to her over the past years. Once—long ago, it seemed—he had been a man who never raised his voice except in laughter. But time had dealt him one blow after another, beginning that night she had run off with Zachariah Hazzard, continuing with her mother’s sudden death—some said from heartbreak over her daughter’s elopement—and culminating in Persia’s long years of disgrace. There was not a soul in Quoddy Cove who didn’t know that Persia had run off with Europa’s man, only to be deserted by him before they reached the altar and brought home by her father a
shamed
woman. She had paid a great price for her one night of folly. And in her heart Persia knew she would continue to pay for the rest of her life. It hardly seemed fair. But then who ever promised that life would be fair?

Persia assured herself at least once a day that she never thought about Zack any longer. What was the use? Why should she care what had happened to a man who had taken her innocence one snowy night, then walked out of her life never to be heard from again? She didn’t feel a thing for him after all these lonely years. But, whether she realized it or not, the very act of denying her love was her way of holding on to it.

Just being in Boston brought back so many memories—their night of love, the awful moment in the tavern when she’d realized that Zack had not waited for her as he’d said he would, her desperation at the dock when she had almost ended her life, and the days that followed when she had had to decide what she was going to do. For a time, she had considered taking the offered job at the Tail of the Devil, not so much because she was desperate for money, but because she thought Zack might return there. But in the end, after holing up in the boarding house for several days, unable to make a decision, her fate was decided for her.

She had been careful in her note to her parents not to mention where she was going. But when Fletcher surprised her in the kitchen that night, she had slipped, perhaps subconsciously on purpose. In any case, Fletcher had told her father, and he had come in search of her. Not to drag her home, he’d said, but to make sure she was safe and happy. She had been neither when Captain Whiddington found her. And home had sounded like heaven.

But it was not, she had discovered on her return.

Her mother, by that time, had taken to her bed, physically ill with worry and heartbreak. Although her spirits rallied upon Persia’s return, Victoria Whiddington was never strong again. She made it through Europa’s wedding to Seton Holloway, a hastily arranged affair that took place on the date originally scheduled for Europa’s marriage to Zachariah Hazzard. But after the couple left to honeymoon in the White Mountains and then make their home in Portland, Victoria seemed to let go, growing thinner and weaker by the day. Her smile, which had once been as quick as her temper, showed itself seldom and then was only a wan reflection of its former brilliance.

When Birdie Blackwell stood before the congregation on a bright Sunday morning and pointed one arthritic finger at the “scarlet woman,” as she styled Persia, demanding that the church censure her actions, it was the beginning of the end for Victoria. Collapsing, she had to be lifted from the pew and carried home. Nine days later, the family gathered in a soft spring rain at the town burying ground and bid their farewells to Victoria Forsyth Whiddington, “aged 42 yrs. 3 mos. and 12 days,” as the inscription below the weeping marble angel read.

The death certificate accused pneumonia of dealing the killing blow. But the people of Quoddy Cove accused Persia.

“That poor, dear soul, I warned her,” Birdie Blackwell moaned over tea and cakes to the members of the Ladies’ Missionary Society, her black eyes snapping with malice. “I told Victoria time and time again that no good would come of that fire-haired vixen.
The devil’s own,
that’s what my brother called her after reading my letters about her wicked deeds.” To which her sanctimonious listeners nodded, clucked their venomous tongues, and poured more tea, spicing it with their own tidbits of gossip about Persia Whiddington.

Persia ignored their scorn as best she could. She had no time to deal with the guilt other people were heaping upon her since she blamed herself more than any of them ever could. If only she hadn’t fallen in love with Zack… If only she hadn’t run away to Boston… If only she hadn’t let him make love to her before their marriage…

If only!
What a stupid, ineffectual phrase!

She still attended church every Sunday, but only because her father needed her strong arm to lean on. She endured the congregation’s stares, their whispers, their accusing silences. But more and more she turned within herself, staying about the house to avoid those waiting to jeer at her in the streets. She knew she would never marry—not in this place, not after what she had done. So she tried to content herself with keeping house for her father, and, bit by bit, she took over his shipping business as well. Hard work was a poor substitute for a loving husband. But at least she fell into bed every night, too exhausted to ache for very long before blissful sleep released her from her loneliness. There was no time for self-pity with the ice business booming.

The ice ship that had been only a glimmer in her father’s eyes ten years before had become a prosperous reality. Each winter, after the ice was harvested from the Kennebec and Penobscot rivers and the ponds of Maine and Massachusetts, his ship’s hold was loaded with two-hundred-pound blocks packed tightly in sawdust to be shipped to the markets in Bombay and Calcutta.

Captain Whiddington himself had gone along as supercargo on one of the trips a little over a year after he lost his wife. Persia had insisted upon it, hoping the voyage would relieve some of his grief. Although he had sold the ice at a fantastic profit, he refused to make a second trip, saying, “I’m too old, Persia. My sea legs are gone and my heart’s back here. It’s time I left the sea to younger men.”

“And
women?
” she’d replied, trying to draw him into a rousing debate and also to remind him that she, too, would make a respectable supercargo.

But he’d offered her only a shake of his head as he’d replied, “Aye, everything’s changing and passing me by these days. Steam stacks smoking up the seaways and blacking the sails. It’s an abomination! I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see women in command of ships one of these days.”

Persia had never considered captaining one of the ice ships, although it was something to think about now that he’d mentioned it. But she did long to see India. At least that childhood fire had not left her soul. She dealt often with the Boston auctioneers and merchants. Why, then, couldn’t she sail to foreign ports and barter the cargoes there as well? She didn’t know of any other female supercargoes, but that certainly didn’t mean there could never be one.

“All aboard!” The train pulled in, and a sooty-faced conductor was motioning them toward the round-topped passenger car.

Persia took her father’s arm, making it appear that he was helping her instead of the other way around. Walking slowly, they mounted the steps at the end of the car. Long wooden benches lined either side of the boxlike compartment. Persia knew from experience that they felt as hard as they looked. Still, it was considered fashionable to “take the cars” nowadays. Almost no one traveled by steam packet between Boston and Maine. There was something in the souls of sailing men that refused to allow them to acknowledge those smoke-belching transports, much less travel the waterways on them.

“It’s heresy, I say!” She’d heard the words from her father often. “No God-fearing sailor would dare smut up his sails or go against the wind!”

The four pairs of wheels under the car ground forward, slowly at first. But soon, as the train picked up speed, Persia and her father were both gripping the edge of the bench and steeling themselves against the bucking and jerking that pulled at their backs and wrenched their necks. Once they were clipping along at an awesome seventeen miles per hour, the ride would become smoother, but hardly more pleasant. Soon cinders and smoke would drift back from the funnel-shaped smokestack to pollute their breathing space. Persia took two linen handkerchiefs out of her valise and handed one to her father.

“Don’t need it,” he shouted over the deep rumble of the wheels and the clanking and grating of couplings.

“Just in case,” she answered, forcing the linen into his hand and tying hers outlaw fashion across her nose and mouth.

“Persia…” The captain had to yell to be heard over the din. “I’ve been thinking about what you said a good while back.”

She stared at him, trying to figure out what he might be talking about. “Yes, Father?”

“Surely you remember. About women and the shipping business. I’ve been giving it a good deal of thought, as I said.” A smile—his old smile, filled with mischief—crept over his face. “I have a new duty I want you to take over for me.”

Persia’s mind spun with possibilities. Her father and his partner, Frederick Tudor, were about to launch a new ship, the
Madagascar,
from the Quoddy Cove yards. For a moment, her blue eyes grew wide atop her bandana cinder guard. Could it be that they were actually considering her for the post of supercargo?

She looked down at her hands then, embarrassed by her own folly. Of course they weren’t thinking any such thing! This might be 1846, but her father and Mr. Tudor were the same old sea dogs who refused to set foot on one of the newfangled steam-powered sailing ships. She almost laughed aloud at her own wild imaginings. She didn’t have an icicle’s chance on the Fourth of July of being hired on as their supercargo! More likely her father was about to bestow upon her the honor of christening the
Madagascar
when she slipped down the ways to become seaborne for the first time.

She removed the linen from her face and offered him a sweet smile. Laying her hand on his, she said, “Father, I do appreciate your offer, but do you think it’s wise? If I christen your new ship, not a person in Quoddy Cove—port, landing, or village—will come down to bid her well. You know how they feel about me.”

“The whole lot of them be damned!” he yelled. “You’ll send the
Madagascar
off in style. Aye! But that’s not the duty I had a mind to speak to you about.”

“What, then?”

“It’s the ice harvest. October’s near gone. In no time now, the Irishmen from down Boston way will be showing up to set to work. I’d like to pretend that I’m up to the task again this year, but the fact is I’m not. I want
you
to oversee the harvest for me, daughter.”

Persia could only stare at her father. Never had she dreamed of suggesting to him that she might take on such a job. She could do it, of course. She had observed the process for years. She knew the men who came up from Boston to cut the ice, and they knew and respected her. But to supervise such a rough crew was something no woman would dream of trying to do.

No woman but Persia Whiddington!

“Thank you, Father, for your confidence in me.” The words sounded calm and assured, but inside, Persia’s heart was turning somersaults. She could and would do it! Tongues would wag, but didn’t they stay busy at their gossip about her anyway? It was just too bad that old Miss Birdie Blackwell had fallen down her well three autumns back. She most of all would have gloried in this shocking news.

Persia smiled as a thought struck her. She vowed silently to tell her tidings to the well. That way Miss Birdie wouldn’t be left out since she was still down there. By the time folks had discovered she was in the well, she’d been there too long for them to try to haul up the remains. The smell had been something powerful. So the Reverend Osgood had come and preached her funeral service at well-side, then they’d filled it in. Her brother, the missionary, had sent money for a tombstone to be erected at the site. Persia thought, as did the rest of Quoddy Cove’s residents, that it was just as well Cyrus Blackwell was far off ministering to the heathens in India and hadn’t had a chance to see the stone image of his dead sister. It looked regrettably like her, and that, coupled with the eerie fact that her remains were still down below, had marked the old Blackwell place as a haunted spot.