The Castaways (11 page)

With the woman at one end, Boggis at the other, and the rest of us in between, we labored the coffin to the break in the deck, where it would spend the entire voyage lashed in place by its handles. Right away the little girl heaved it open, for it turned out that the contents were hers alone. She was surely the only girl with a casket for a playbox, but she didn’t mind. It was filled to the brim with her toys and her dolls. Even her tea table came aboard in that grim box.

By the time all was stowed, the sun was setting. Not wishing to make sail in the dark, we decided to lie alongside till morning.

It was a strange night. The birds gave up hunting the flies, but with dusk came a horde of bats. They poured from the trees in a flood, a river of brown swirling through the reddish sky. They flew this way and that, at all heights in all directions, so that it seemed impossible they couldn’t help colliding with each other, or with the rigging of the ship. But they darted in and out among the stays and braces, and not a single bat tumbled to the deck.

Then the huts began to burn. It started with a glow of red,
but soon huge flames appeared. They engulfed the buildings, sending embers floating off at great heights above the trees, and the bats and the embers seemed to gather into one enormous, swirling flock.

In the crackle and the roar a chanting started. The slaves were singing—of their freedom, no doubt. They sang all through the night, stoking the flames with the logs from the wooden wall. Midgely and I, and Weedle and Boggis, stood in a row at the rail to listen. I felt my skin prickling down my spine, my hairs standing on end. The sight and the sounds might have come straight from the cannibal islands.

I slept not a wink, but waited anxiously for the dawn. With the first gray of morning’s light we loosed the topsails, and the canvas tumbled free. We set the spanker at the stern.

It seemed the ship was mine to command. All eyes were upon me. I put Weedle at the wheel—to please him, more than anything—sent Boggis to the mooring lines, and the others to the sheets and braces. On the dock the British flag flapping from its pole told me of the strength and direction of the wind.

In a small voice I said, “Cast off forward, please.”

Away went the lines from the bow. The ship slid backward, squealing and creaking against the dock. Then the stern lines tightened, and the great bowsprit swung away. A gap opened between the bow and the dock, growing wider with each moment.

I felt nearly overwhelmed. The ship seemed unstoppable, already out of control, and we hadn’t even parted from the dock. Everyone was staring at me, waiting on my word. But there was such a noise from rope and canvas that I could
scarcely think. I heard the little King complaining, then Midgely’s answer, clear and loud, “He
does
know what he’s doing. His father’s the best sailor in the world.”

With that I “took the bit in my mouth,” as one would say. I shouted at Weedle: “Hard to starboard!” At the others I roared: “Haul away!”

They pulled on the braces, little Midge and the King at one, the woman at the other. Our always-smiling slave tended the spanker. High above, the topsail yards swung over. “Sheet in!” I cried, and the sails filled with wind.

The ship veered faster. It gathered way, sliding forward through the water.

“Cast off aft!” I shouted.

Boggis threw off the last rope, and we were free of the land. We scudded across the bay with the bowsprit sweeping past the trees, past the shore.

“Jibe oh!” I shouted.

The yards came across with a jarring shudder. The spanker boom followed, its blocks in a clatter, its sheets like a whip. Weedle ducked his head as it passed above him, then looked up with a grin.

“Steady as she goes,” I told him. He straightened the wheel.

“Set the courses! Set the gallants!”

Our poor little crew scurried from place to place, from braces to sheets. One by one, the sails tumbled free from their yards, each giving the ship another little push to the east. We left the bay with a white-water moustache curling at the bow, flecks of foam in our wake.

I looked down the deck and beyond the bowsprit, at faint hummocks of land in the distance. I didn’t know the names of the islands, or a thing about them, but it didn’t matter. They marked the edge of the Caribbean, and another day would find us on their far side, with nothing but the broad Atlantic between us and England. It was a daunting thought, all that water to cross, but it no longer filled me with terror.

I should not have looked back, but I did. I saw that half the bay was hidden already, and that only the tip of the pier was still in sight.

I thought of Benjamin Penny, lying drowned in his chains. I thought of the slaves and wondered what would become of them. I imagined that I could see two or three on their knees at the end of the dock, though the distance was surely too great for that. I couldn’t help thinking that I’d deserted them, that I’d marooned them in their strange land.

This upset me so much that I sought out Midgely, who always knew just the proper thing to say to set my mind at ease. I found him coiling lines on the leeward side, putting them all in order. The wind had freshened, giving a slant to the deck, so that his ropes lay tight against the rail, and the water leapt not far below us. I told him my fears and worries, but his response was disappointing.

“Do you ever think of Mr. Mullock?” he said. “And that lovely Lucy Beans?”

“Sometimes.” I tried to help him with the ropes. But I was “doing it all wrong,” he said, as soon as he touched the coil I was making. “With the sun, Tom. Coil ’em with the sun.”

I saw what he meant. I’d turned the rope backward, putting kinks in the coil. He let it fall to the deck and started again.

“Do you think Mr. Mullock and Lucy are still happy on their island?” said Midge.

“I’m sure they are,” I said.

“But they got nothing,” he said. “Mr. Mullock, he had money coming out his ears when he was a lord and all. Now he ain’t got tuppence, but he couldn’t be happier. He’s got Lucy Beans, and that’s all he wants. He’s living large on his little island, just like he says.”

“Then he’s fortunate,” said I.

Midgely nodded. “It’s the same with them slaves, Tom. They ain’t got nothing; they’re miles from home. But they’re happier today than they was yesterday.”

Well, that was no doubt true. But I still didn’t understand.

“If you could have told them slaves, ‘I’ll grant you one wish,’ what do you think they would have wished for, Tom?”

“To be free, I suppose.”

“Well, they are.” He hung his coil of rope from a belaying pin and went on to the next. “You gave them the most important thing. It don’t matter where they are, so long as they got what they want. That’s what I think.”

His hands moved steadily, letting the rope fall into place. “If I was one of them slaves I’d thank my saints you came along,” he said. “Them slaves ain’t slaves no more.”

We soon settled in to sea-keeping time. Leaving out Midgely, who worked all hours in the galley, we divided ourselves into three watches. Day after day, I was always on deck with the little King and his freed slave, but only rarely with Weedle or Boggis, and hardly ever with the King’s wife.

I quickly grew to know my watchmates. I learned that King George was really George King, born near Bethnal Green. For a small man he was a big liar, as we learned not long into the voyage. In truth, he could navigate no better than I.

Oh, he made a show of it, pointing the sextant at the moon and the sun and half of the stars in the heavens. For better than a week I believed he was a master of the strange
art, and I might never have learned otherwise if not for his daughter.

Her name was Charlotte—Charlotte King—and she was a darling. The whole ship was her playhouse, with a full complement of imaginary creatures. We were all her toys, her playthings. One moment we were animals in the ark and she was Noah. The next we were pirates and she a young Blackbeard. It meant nothing to us, as we weren’t required to play our parts, but merely to stand about as she fed us or stabbed us, according to the rules of the game. Even Walter Weedle was swept up in her play, though always at his expense. In Noah’s ark, he was the ass. Over time, Charlotte came to call anything stupid “a weedle.”

No one loved that girl more deeply than our slave-turned-sailor. His name was unpronounceable, but Charlotte called him Hay-yoo, because those were the words everyone shouted to get his attention. But to Hay-yoo’s dismay, Charlotte saved all her charms for Midgely.

I often found my friend seated at her little table, which they had dragged together into the cookhouse. Midgely spent hours dipping imaginary biscuits into an empty teacup, or sitting grandly still as all the tiny dishes slid back and forth with the rolling of the ship. Sometimes Charlotte would burst into fits of giggles. “Oh, Midgely, you’re pouring tea into the cream pot!” she’d shriek.

Midgely didn’t mind at all. “Am I? Oh, gracious!” he’d say, and laugh as well.

In the second week of our voyage—it had been three days since I’d seen Walter Weedle—Charlotte came early from her nap time and surprised her father with the sextant. I
was steering the ship, and he was standing by the rail, fiddling with the little mirrors and filters, getting ready to shoot the sun. Suddenly he was whisking it behind his back, and Charlotte was clucking her tongue. “Daddy, you’re going to be in trouble!” she said.

The King blushed. “Off with you, Charlotte,” he told her. “Can’t you see we’re busy?” He had gone back to his regal ways by then, always referring to himself as “we.” But Charlotte never curtsied to the King.

She put her hands on her hips. “Did Mommy say you could use that?”

“Charlotte!” he said, a little more sharply. “We haven’t time for this nonsense.”

She clucked her tongue again, turned, and went scampering down to the cabins. A moment later she was back, and Mrs. King was with her.

Now
there
was a strange woman. Calliope King—a delicate name for one so strong and manly. She liked to work aloft in her tumbling skirts, with the wind whipping at her pantalettes in the most teasing fashion. Twice the size of her husband, with a voice half an octave deeper, she was more a sailor than any of us, and not only because she chewed tobacco by the plug. Though I fancied I was in command, it was really Calliope King who decided when to reef and when to run, and when to scud before a gale.

She was the daughter of a whaling captain. Born at sea, she’d never touched land until she was nearly five years old. I should have guessed the sextant was hers, and that she was the one who did the navigation—leaning out through the windows at the stern.

Calliope was one who firmly believed that “children should be seen and not heard.” She had little to say to Charlotte, and less to any of the boys. She merely kept herself to herself, without being rude about it. I found this made her more interesting, and both Midge and I admired her no end.

But the King lived in fear of his wife, for there was no love between them anymore. I never heard them exchange a kindly word, never saw one even smile at the other. They kept as distant as the ship would allow them. It was no wonder that the King nearly had a fainting spell when Calliope came storming up that day.

She spat a stream of brown juice at his feet, and held out her hand for the sextant. The little King very meekly did as he was directed. He didn’t utter a word until she was safely below, when he suddenly found his courage. “What a woman! What a tigress!” he said. “How would you like to have
her
as a mother, Tom Tin?”

I wouldn’t have minded. In fact, I’d thought about that very thing. During long turns at the wheel I had amused myself by thinking how different my life might have been if my father had married someone like Calliope. I would have grown up loving the sea instead of fearing it, sharing—not mocking—my father’s lonely dreams. But now I had to laugh, for I saw that it would have made no difference in the end. My river of fate would still have brought me to this exact spot—at the wheel of a ship in the middle of the ocean, with Calliope King as the navigator.

So when the little King asked how I’d like to have his
wife as a mother, I thought of many things, and gave a strange answer. “I hope I still
have
a mother.”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“It’s a long story,” said I.

“It’s a long voyage,” said he, with a shrug.

I was hesitant to begin my tale. Though I’d come to like the man, he was still a slaver and a liar, not the sort of fellow I cared to trust. I heard a flutter of canvas and looked up to see the wind rippling across the topsail. Without thinking, I turned the wheel to catch the lifting breeze.

“Are you worried that she might be dead?” asked the King.

“Yes,” I said, surprised by his bluntness. “She was ill when I left.”

“Does she know about the Jolly Stone?” he asked, surprising me again. I couldn’t even guess how he’d learned of that.

“Oh, I’m not a wizard,” he said, laughing at my astonishment. “I’ve heard it all through Charlotte. Gaskin told her everything, you know—all about the diamond and the Darkey, and your father and the cannibals.”

Boggis, right then, was lumbering across the fo’c’sle deck. He leapfrogged over the capstan with Hay-yoo at his heels, and Charlotte a bit farther behind. They were playing at Gulliver in the land of Lilliput, and it didn’t matter that Gulliver was smaller than the Lilliputians.

“I hear your father was Redman Tin,” said the King. “Gaskin told Charlotte that he was—”

“Is,”
I said sharply. “My father
is
Redman Tin, do you
understand? He’s still on that island, and he’s still alive, and I’ll see him again one day. We’ll sail together, my father and I.”

“Good for you, Tom Tin,” said the King. “That’s the spirit. Never surrender, what?” He clapped me on the back. “You’ll send a ship for him, will you? Dispatch the navy?”

I wasn’t certain what I’d do. “Somehow I’ll save him,” I said. “I’ll do what’s right by him.”