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Authors: Eileen Charbonneau

BOOK: The Randolph Legacy
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The boy’s eyes followed the sharp radiance. “Dance,” he whispered. “To dance.”
He could speak. There, he was not an imbecile. The boy could speak. Maupin snorted out his laughter. “What? You are an odd fellow. No fortune? Fame? The hand of some beautiful Helen of Troy?”
The boy’s eyes fired. “To dance,” he maintained.
“Very well,
petit général.
You have had your fill of all the others, yes? You want for only simple pleasures. Good. Those are all we’ll manage for a while.”
Maupin glanced at the fractured leg, wrapped in an eighteen-tail bandage, splinted by a surgeon better at hacking off limbs. “To dance,” he echoed. “For that, perhaps we need a comet.”
 
 
H
e’d fathered a child by Madeline, once. Long ago. The milk-saturated smile of that newborn was somehow like the boy’s as he drifted off to sleep that night. Maupin drew the threadbare blanket over lanced shoulders,
wondering what had possessed him to speak as he had. It was ridiculous, indulging the child. Maupin was a reasonable man of thirty-eight years. He should have known better than to spark those young, trusting eyes with hope. But then, what was the harm? Madeline and their child had not survived that bitter winter. The boy would surely not last this one.
Henry Washington
April 1815
 
One night of peaceful sleep. Judith Mercer petitioned for it,
silently waiting for the Divine Presence. It did not visit. A soft, formless drowsiness did. Then, as sleep descended, the nightmare came.
Black Africans, so crowded they could neither stand nor sit, shamed by their own filth until buckets hailed down fetid water from above. Some were shackled with iron collars, with arm and leg fetters secured by pins. Their feet were large, all out of proportion to thin, brittle-boned limbs, barely clothed. Their eyes, deep-set and glassy, held the essence of suffering.
Judith, a child again, stood in their midst. As she felt the panic rising in her throat, she remembered they were from God, no matter how dark and fearful their appearance. She raised her arms over their defeated heads.
“Brothers, sisters,” she called them quietly in that voice her mother had said was her gift. “What can I do for you?”
“Remember,” they said.
Judith woke, listened for her father’s contented breathing, there in their small storage room on the orlop deck. As soon as she could no longer hear her heartbeat, she rose, placed her warm, dove gray cloak over her shoulders. She climbed flights of steep stairs until she could see the night sky.
Two bells announced the second half-hour of Midwatch. On the port side of the forecastle, Second Lieutenant Mitchell was the only officer on the watch. His fingers touching the brim of his hat confirmed to Judith the captain’s promise that she would be free and safe anywhere on the HMF
Standard,
at any time. Mitchell’s smile was as lopsided as his one-epaulet shoulders. All but a core remnant of her fear dissipated into the salt sea air. Judith crossed the deck to the starboard side.
None of the common sailors got more than four hours of sleep at a time on the
Standard,
their night-watch pattern so different from that of the pampered officers. Judith felt the practice was cruel, and based solely on that hallowed bane of government institution, “precedent.” She resolved to write a letter to the British Admiralty on the subject before the Atlantic crossing was over.
Yet she could not feel sorry for the seamen as she walked among them tonight, under a hail of spring stars. Judith felt immensely glad to be going home at last, after the war had stranded her on the wrong side of the Atlantic.
Wrong side.
Was that the proper way for a Friend to see it? she wondered. Tonight she didn’t care. She was an American Friend, going home at last.
She and her father had lived in London the first year, then extended their mission, visiting many Friends’ Meetings throughout the British Isles, but she had always felt the honored stranger. Now, the pull of the sails toward her homeland was making her feel content and rested at one hour past midnight, and moments past a nightmare. No, not a nightmare. A revelation, whose meaning would come with the help of the Divine Presence.
Judith heard a sound she thought was the wind in the sails. Then the softness became laced with a rich baritone voice singing:
Sur le pont d’Avignon
L’on y danse, l’on y danse,
Sur le pont d’Avignon
L’on y danse, tout en ronde
She turned the corner. There, in the shadow of the mizzenmast, she saw the singer. He was bent over yards of sail. His deft fingers pulled the needle with its coarse thread through the canvas to the rhythm of his sprightly song.
Judith was taught that singing was frivolous, ornamental. But this song had a practical purpose. Would that help absolve her of the distinct pleasure she received in hearing it?
The sailmender’s needle slid through startled fingers.
His ragged clothing draped rather than fit his painfully thin frame. He pulled off a worn cap. A thick crop of hair blew into his bearded face. That face, with its gaunt shadows, suddenly put Judith in mind of the starving, sunken-eyed people of her dream. “Put thy cap on,” she implored, crushing the ties of her cape as the sharp wind blew back her hood.
The sailor complied. Had she frightened him? “Forgive me,” she said softly. “Judith is my name. Judith Mercer. My father and I are taking our passage to America aboard thy ship. We are of the Society of Friends. Thou needs not bow, remove thy hat, or use any titles or formality with us.”
He tilted his head, curiosity seeming to overcome his fear. His eyes closed slowly, their long lashes meeting as he pondered. They were young eyes, Judith realized, when he opened them again. “‘Thee, thou, thy.’ For ‘you, your.’ Yes?”
“In the singular. We use a simplified American form of the old speech, the speech of our Friend forebears.” Judith stepped closer. She looked down at even stitches and the leather thimbles over the sailor’s long fingers. “Thy work is fine.”
“Thank you.”
“What was thy song about?” she asked.
“Dancing.” He smiled, showing even teeth. The smile, the better angle, transformed him from a hollow-eyed skeleton to a young man who needed only more food, a good wash, and a new suit of clothes.
Judith sat beside him on the bench. “What is thy name?”
“Washington.”
“Thou sings French like a native, Washington.”
He gifted her with one of his transformational smiles. “Fayette taught me,” he said.
“Ah, the cordial gentleman who is the surgeon’s mate. He gave me the ginger root that has sustained my father over his seasickness.”
“He is well now, your father?”
“Almost.”
Washington nodded, picked up the dangling needle, and began drawing it through the canvas again. “And what sustains you?” he asked quietly.
“I have not been ill.”
“But troubled out of your sleep?”
“Only by a dream.”
He frowned. “Why did you not take an officer’s cabin when you came aboard? Surely one was offered.”
“My father and I are doing what little we can to deliver the Americans at Dartmoor Prison without delay.”
“By sleeping in steerage?”
“It’s a gesture of protest. Elizabeth Fry, an English Friend who is seeking prison reform, suggested it.”
“For how long have the Americans been at Dartmoor?”
“Some since early in the war. Three years.”
“You have seen them?”
“Yes. My father and I ministered to them.”
“What does that mean?”
“We brought them food, clothes. We wrote their letters home. We will deliver them to their families in America. We talked to members of government about their treatment, about hastening their release.”
“Why?”
“Because we’re Friends. Quakers.”
“And the prisoners are of your religion?”
“No, none are. We are forbidden to be in military service. But they are suffering as a result of injustice.”
He looked up from his work with different smile. Not his radiant one. This was a small smile, the shared-secret smile of a child.
“That’s good work. I will talk to them,” he promised.
“To whom?” Judith asked, perplexed.
“The black people. The ones in your dream.”
Judith sat back, startled speechless.
He went on sewing. “This frigate was a slaver, back before it was outfitted to fight Napoleon. I sleep in the hold, below you. They were packed in the ship back then, the slaves. When I was a child, the echoes of them, they frightened me, with their large feet, their eyes. But they would stroke my head when Fayette was on watch, and I was alone and afraid. Fayette, he is a man of reason, and calls them my
revenants,
‘the ones who come back.’ In English they are … ?”
“Ghosts.”
“Yes. Just so. Ghosts.” He shrugged. “I do not know why they came to you. But I will talk with them on it, yes?”
There was a comfort to watching his graceful plunges into the canvas, out again. Through her shock, Judith sensed that he knew this, and went on sewing steadily, for them both.
“Washington. How long has thou been aboard the
Standard?
”
A stitch faltered. “A long time.”
“How long?”
He scratched the side of his head impatiently, then went back to the steady rhythm of his stitches. “I don’t know.”
“Where did thou live before, in America?” Judith tried.
“I don’t remember.”
“In America, Washington. The South.”
“South?”
“Yes. I am from Pennsylvania. Thy speech is slower, rounder than mine, though phrased by the influence of Monsieur Fayette, I suspect.”
She waited. He looked at her, intensely interested, as if they were talking about someone else. She persisted. “I have not seen thee on the forecastle before.”
“I don’t come up on the open decks except for now, Midwatch.”
“But thou is not a holder, living below. Thou is a sheet anchor man, with thy sewing?”
“No. Fayette’s the sheet anchor man, and the surgeon’s chief assistant, and the yeoman’s trusted mate. He used to be a topman, he was captain of the mizzenmast—up aloft there, next to the stars. His fingers can’t climb now. Stiff, you understand? I help him with the sails, with the numbers in the yeoman’s book.”
“But how is thou listed?”
“Listed?” He looked as if the very notion was absurd. “As ship’s
revenant,
perhaps. That is what you thought me to be, yes?”
“Friend Washington, thou teases me quite as mercilessly as Monsieur Fayette.”
He shrugged his thin, graceful shoulders again. “I am his apprentice, after all,” he said.
Judith fought back a smile at his evasion, and kept her voice serious. “When did thou join the crew?”
“Join?” His voice went hard. “I did not join.”
“Impressed,” she realized suddenly.
“That is what Fayette says. I was sick. Before that I don’t remember, except for pictures.”
“Pictures?”
He touched the side of his head at the temple. There was no secret smile. He did not look up at her at all, only at his work, which quickened a fraction. “There is the dancing one,” he offered quietly, his voice small and pained. “Two women who smell like you, like roses. Above me. I am standing on their feet. We are laughing, laughing and dancing. I wonder, which one is my …” The thread caught. “Is my—”
“Mother?” Judith prompted.
The needle jabbed an unthimbled finger. Three spots of bright red blood stained the canvas. Judith reached for his hand, pressed the puncture wound between her finger and thumb. She looked into eyes that were almost fathomless and bright with stubbornly unshed tears, bright with a pain which far outweighed that caused by the small wound.
“I am not stupid,” he whispered fiercely. “Not lame-brained, simpleton, imbecile. I only don’t remember!”
“Yes. My dear Washington. I understand.”
“Pardon!”
he whispered. “Fayette taught me better than this, how to speak with a lady. But you are as beautiful as the moon.”
He was looking at her hair, Judith realized. The wind that had shoved her hood back had revealed what she had always held within her cap. She had not attended to her hair before coming aloft. Now it blew freely about her face, reminding Judith of that night, twenty years ago, when her childhood ended so abruptly. She’d torn at it until her scalp was bleeding, that night. By the end of the year her flaxen strands had gone as silver as a crone’s. How could he find her beautiful?
Judith followed Washington’s shifted glance to the licorice-scented man standing behind them. Without his charming smile, the surgeon’s mate seemed older.
“Your father is well enough to be left unattended, Judith Mercer?”
“He sleeps soundly, yes.” Her clear voice answered the Frenchman’s implied accusation.
His hand took hold of the younger man’s shoulder. “It grows colder. Time to go.”
“I have not finished.”
“Finish tomorrow.”
The sailor freed himself of Judith’s hand. She felt the pull of his drying blood between her fingers. She sensed the Frenchman’s anger.
“Washington has been pleasant company for me, Fayette,” she said.
“That is good to hear,” he said stiffly before turning back to the young sailmender.
“Fayette, I have yet to search off the stern,” Washington said.
“Neither did you finish mending the sail.”
“But I worked with diligence. Did I not, Judith Mercer?” Washington pulled her into their controversy with a good-natured smile.
“I agree to the truth of what thee says,” Judith affirmed.
“Mr. Carney is keeping watch there, off the stern. Would you join us, Judith? We watch the sea together, Fayette and I.” He turned to the larger man. “Could we invite her, Fayette?”

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