Read Like Chaff in the Wind Online

Authors: Anna Belfrage

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Romance, #General, #Time Travel

Like Chaff in the Wind (3 page)

BOOK: Like Chaff in the Wind
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Together they took a turn around the deck and then it was time for Simon to leave. She didn’t want him to; she wanted to grab hold of his coat and beg him to come with her. But she didn’t, of course. Instead, she cleared her throat and tried to smile.

“My son is in your keeping, my son and my home.”

“They’ll be there when you come for them. I swear to you I’ll keep them safe.”

“I know,” Alex said, “otherwise how could I have left?”

Simon swept her into an embrace. “Find him, lass. Find our Matthew and bring him back. You can do it. You will do it.”

“Of course I will,” she said, injecting her voice with as much conviction as she could muster. She kissed him, watched him make his way back down to land, and went to stand by the railings, waving for as long as she could see the shrinking point of brown that she knew to be Simon.

*

Simon stood rooted until the ship disappeared from sight. He rubbed a hand through his sparse hair, produced a handkerchief from his sleeve, blew his nose and wiped his face. Such a little thing on all that water, totally in the hands of our Lord, blown hither and thither like a chaff in the wind. He sighed and pressed his hat down on his head.

“Dear Lord, hold Your hand over them and keep them safe,” he prayed. “Turn the light of Your countenance unto them and guide them back home.”

Chapter 3

Matthew woke to hammering pain and the unwelcome realisation that the floor below him was moving, rolling from side to side. He tried to sit up and knew himself to be in irons, fettered like a beast. He groaned as he levered himself upright.

“So you’re awake then?” a voice said by his ear. Matthew jerked and the voice laughed. “I don’t mean you any harm, lad, none of us do.”

“Where am I?” Matthew asked, trying to make out his surroundings.

“On the
Henriette Marie
– we sailed at daybreak, bound for the colonies.”

“The colonies!” Matthew attempted to stand, only to fall at the next rolling of the ship. “I have to get off! I have a family to get back to.”

“We all do,” the voice beside him said. “But unless you’re planning on swimming, chains and all, you won’t be getting off this ship until we arrive at Jamestown.”

Matthew struggled back to sit. In the light that filtered down from the barred hatches, he saw several men, grey shapes that sat or lay in silence all around. The air stank of vomit and excrement, and from himself came the distinct smell of dried piss. He studied his soiled breeches with disgust. Alex wouldn’t be glad to see the state of them. Alex!

Matthew slumped back against the planking and closed his eyes. This couldn’t be happening to him, no, it was just a dream, and if he allowed himself to drift off to sleep, he’d wake to the dark dawn of a winter morning at Hillview, Alex snoring softly by his side. The screeching noise of the hatches recalled him brutally to this new reality, and he crossed his arms in a self-hug, trying to stop himself from trembling.

“Don’t fret, lad,” the unknown voice said. “It is just them coming down with food and water.”

Matthew nodded and sat immobile until the hatches were back in place.

“Here.” A piece of bread was placed in his hand and a strong hand on his nape supported him while he drank. “You have a nasty bump to your head.”

Matthew raised a shaking hand to his head and winced. “They clobbered me! I was walking back to the inn and…” He frowned with the effort to remember; low voices arguing over his head as they dragged him along, another painful clap to his head, a creaking cart, someone holding him down while his wrists were fitted with chains, and then nothing.

“I’ve been abducted,” he said, a surge of anger rippling through him. Luke! This was the work of his hell-spawn of a brother and now, oh dearest Lord, now there was no one there to protect his wife and son!

He twisted his head to the side and threw up the half-masticated bread. The man beside him patted his shoulder, and to his embarrassment Matthew felt his eyes fill up with tears.

“It’s no shame,” the man said, “we all weep.”

“I have to get back, if not he’ll destroy them.”

“Who?”

“My brother, God curse his soul,” Matthew said.

He must have talked for nigh on an hour, as he told this stranger of the hatred and rivalry that existed between him and his brother. He described finding his first wife, Margaret, in bed with Luke and how his brother had connived to have him accused of treason. Several years later, when Matthew finally returned home with his new wife, Luke had in a fit of rage beaten Alex so badly she lost the bairn she was carrying. His newfound acquaintance made a disgusted sound at this.

“A year later he threatened her again, and I should have killed him then as I should have killed him so many times before. Instead I sliced off his nose.” And now…Matthew studied his surroundings and the chains around his hands. “What has he done to me?”

The man sat back on his heels. “He’s sold you into indenture, I reckon. All of us are going as indentured to Virginia, being the beneficiaries of the good king’s mercy.” He spat as he said that. “I’m James McLean - condemned to hang for preaching that all men are equal. I dare say they begrudged me the length of rope required, and so I’m here instead.” He sighed and shuffled his feet. “I won’t be preaching much where we’re going. I won’t be preaching much at all for the rest of my days.” A flicker of despair flew through his brown eyes and Matthew pressed his hand.

“Of course you will.”

James shook his head. “Seven years, aye? And I am three and fifty…”

Over the coming days, Matthew listened to the stories of the men around him, in many cases heartbreakingly similar, tales of hunger and of being driven from their homes for not keeping up with rents and taxes. Tales of how they were forced to steal to feed their families, and of how they’d been arrested and condemned to hang for their theft, only to have the sentences commuted to years of servitude somewhere far across the sea.

He could see it in their eyes; the resignation, the lack of hope. None of these men expected to ever make it home again, supposing they would either be worked to death or find themselves too poor to ever pay the passage back to wife and bairns. Not me, he promised himself, I won’t die far from home, I’ll somehow make it home to Alex and to Mark.

*

One night as he lay unable to sleep, drowning in worry for his son and wife, Matthew recalled that he had in fact left them some protection. Simon would take care of them, and Matthew thanked the Lord for having signed a deed of guardianship, stating clearly that in the event of his demise it was Simon, not Luke, who was to stand as father to Mark.

It almost made him laugh to think of Alex’s reaction at not being considered an adequate guardian. His peculiar, God-given wife would argue that she was fully capable of defending her son, and he could see her eyes slitting into flashing sapphires as she remonstrated with Simon. He shifted on the hard boards, attempting to shut out the sound of the chains. His wife… He ran his hand up and down his forearm, pretending it was her caress he felt. It made him weaken with longing for her.

“Alex.” He smiled when he said her name, struck by the certainty of what she would do. She’d come after him, find him, and in his gut a flower of hope grew. If anyone could do such, it would be her, but it would cost her, because Simon would never let her take Mark with her – nor should he. He rolled over on his side. Poor Alex; to be torn from another son, just as she’d lost Isaac to the vagaries of time. But deep inside, he was dizzyingly happy as the conviction in him grew, that no matter the cost to her, she would come for him.

*

It was difficult to hold on to that ray of hope over the weeks that followed. For a month they lay at anchor in Plymouth, and while the other in the hold were allowed out on deck to take air, Matthew was kept sitting in the dark, the captain making a point of informing him that he would be given no chance to escape. Matthew raged in his chains and on one occasion lost his temper completely, which resulted in him crawling in pain as the cudgels rained over his shoulders and back.

“You mustn’t provoke them,” James chided him. “You must keep your head down.” But it was too late, and the guards found one reason after the other to taunt and manhandle Matthew. Bend, he told himself, bend Matthew Graham or they will break you. Mostly he did, but sometimes the injustice of it all was too much, and that was how he came to be chained to the main mast in nothing but his shirt, unable to escape the biting iciness of the March wind, as the
Henriette Marie
began her long journey across the open sea.

To distract himself from his helpless shivering and the way his fingers and toes ached with cold, he thought about the day he’d found Alex, a strangely dressed lass lying sprawled face down on a hillside. He stretched his chapped lips in a weak smile as he recalled those odd breeches – djeens, she’d called them – and her short hair. And he’d known, already then, that this lass was somehow meant for him, a gift from God no less, for how else to explain the propitious coincidence that had him on the moor just when she came tumbling through time? He laughed; Alex was somewhat more sceptical to this whole divine intervention, voicing that it was all due to the fluke lightning storm, a freak misalignment in time.

When he was brought back down into the hold, he was unconscious with fever, small bubbles of lucidity popping through his brain. At times he recognised the man who sat by his side, and he’d make an effort to smile at this familiar person before being dragged under yet again.

James’ face was the first thing Matthew saw when the fever finally broke, and he slumped into a deep dejection. In his delirious dreams he’d been home, wandering green fields and wide woods, laughing as he chased Alex up the slope, holding his wee son in his arms. Now he woke to chains and creaking boards, to men who coughed and farted in their sleep, and the despairing insight that mayhap he wouldn’t make it, maybe he would die without ever seeing her again.

*

They all thought they would die some weeks later when the
Henriette Marie
was tossed from wave to wave, all of her protesting when the sea slammed into her creaking sides. For days the storm raged, sweeping anything not securely lashed to the deck overboard. In the hold they sat in ice cold water as huge waves broke above them, sea water cascading through the hatches. It was a relief to see a pale spring sun filter through, and James led them in grateful prayer that this, at least, they had survived.

All of them were allowed out on deck to dry themselves and the hold was mopped up as well as could be done. The captain even accorded them a tot of brandy, muttering something about them being worth nothing to him dead, before ordering them back down into their dark damp quarters.

Three men died; one of what James said was the ague, shivering to death, two of consumption, coughing their lungs apart. Where the other men drew back, afraid of catching these deadly diseases, James sat with them, talking to them and soothing them as best he could.

“Are you not afraid then?” Matthew said.

James just shrugged. “If I die, I die.”

“But…don’t you want to live, to return to your family?”

James sighed and picked a weevil or two out of the bread. “I’ll not be going back, Matthew. I feel it in my bones.”

“Of course you will, we’ll help each other.”

James didn’t reply, his eyes misting over. “We’ll help each other,” he said after a while. “And mayhap one of us will make it home.”

“Both of us,” Matthew insisted, making James give him an exasperated look.

“You don’t know, do you? Most of us will die before our years of service are up, treated like beasts of burden on endless fields.”

“Not me.”

James gave him a sad little smile. “Nay, lad, not you.”

Matthew shivered at his tone and threw a look down his own tall frame. It would be just like it had been in gaol, with him singled out for the heaviest work on account of his size and strength. He’d spend never ending days in back-breaking labour – yet again – and a frightened voice in the pit of his stomach wondered how long it would take before he began to wear down. Matthew shook himself. He was here wrongfully, and once they’d landed he’d find someone he could complain to. But even as he thought it, he knew it wouldn’t help. Who would listen? Who would care? He leaned back against the planking and sighed.

“She’ll come, my Alex will come.” His woman; she’d come for him.

“Of course she will,” James said. Matthew closed his eyes. He could hear it in James’ voice, that he didn’t believe she would.

*

The day the ship anchored in the James River, the men in the hold sighed in relief. Land, soon there would be land beneath their feet, and nothing could possibly be as bad as the sea crossing, could it? A low buzz of excitement spread, the younger men surreptitiously inspecting their wasted bodies. Did they look healthy enough? Only James sat in silence.

To Matthew, the heat came as a shock. It was May, and the humidity hung like a drenched blanket around him, making it an effort even to breathe. He stared at the buildings huddled together on the swampy island, and up his spine snaked a tendril of fear. What kind of land was this? Everything was green, a heavy, smothering green, and just moving made him perspire, sticking his worn and grimy linen shirt to his skin. He couldn’t breathe, his throat closing up in protest at this hot, wet air. How could anyone work in this?

He was manhandled into a boat and rowed across, and the following minutes he spent in a daze. Only vaguely did he understand he was being sold, and when he tried to object that he was not an indenture, that he was a kidnapped man, he was laughed in the face. Had he not been in chains he would have struck the huge man in front of him, but now he just gritted his teeth and swore that someday that bastard would choke on his contemptuous laughter.

He saw James disappear from him, tried to call his name and assure him they would meet again, but a hard hand wrenched him off in another direction, shoving him and six others from his ship towards a waiting cart. Chains were struck off to be replaced by ropes, they were tied to the tailgate like dumb animals and the huge overseer, Jones, gave Matthew a taunting smile, all the while fingering the strop he carried. Matthew broke eye contact and stared down at his feet.

Much later they were finally allowed to stop. Chests were heaving with the unfamiliar humidity and their clothing hung damp and uncomfortable. None of them had said a word, concentrating on keeping up with the cart. Jones ignored them, leaving them to stand, still tied, and said something in a low voice to the two drovers. They all laughed, eyes slinking in the direction of the new men.

“Three years,” Matthew heard one of them say. “No more than that.” With a sinking feeling, he understood they were betting on their survival. It made his stomach turn itself inside out.

BOOK: Like Chaff in the Wind
5.92Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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