The Vanishing Point (7 page)

Hannah looked away to give them their privacy. She heard
her friend crying in his arms, heard him gently hushing her. Ned and Will hung close by Hannah and traded nervous glances. Eight-year-old Will had been in his mother's womb when his father sailed to the colony. Hannah reckoned that even ten-year-old Ned couldn't have much memory of him.

Their father called their names. "Are these my little men?" He threw his arms around them, drawing their heads to his bony chest.

Elizabeth took Hannah's elbow. "This is Hannah Powers. She read your letters to me on the ship."

Michael Sharpe bowed to her. "We live near Cambridge on the Eastern Shore," he said. "You are always welcome."

Hannah smiled. "You are kind, sir." It was comforting to know she already had friends in the New World.

"Look!" Little Will grabbed her hand and pointed.

The auction had begun. A girl she recognized from the ship stood on a barrel while planters in plumed hats pointed their walking sticks at her and placed their bids.

"Two hogsheads for that wench."

"You say two for a healthy girl of seventeen?" The first mate, presiding over the auction, lifted his eyebrows incredulously. "Young and pretty, no pox on her. Sure she'll make some lonely man a good wife."

Laughter shook the crowd. The girl on the barrel stood without flinching, her strong chin pointed toward the distant hills. The rumor on the ship was that she had been a kitchen girl made pregnant by her master's son. Her baby had been stillborn.

A man in homespun clothes with a hickory walking stick stepped forward. "I bid four."

A while later, Hannah heard Michael Sharpe tell his wife that their ferry for the Eastern Shore was about to sail. Elizabeth threw her arms around Hannah's neck. "If you ever need anything, write to my husband."

"I am happy for you," she whispered, holding Elizabeth tightly before letting her go.

"Can Hannah come with us?" Will asked.

"No," Hannah told him firmly. "I am to meet my sister and her family."

"Does she have little boys?" Will sounded jealous.

"She has a child I have never met." Hannah stooped so that her head was level with his. "I don't know if it's a boy or girl."

Elizabeth embraced her again while the boys waved goodbye. Michael Sharpe doffed his hat. "Good luck to you, Hannah Powers."

Hannah waved until she lost sight of them in the crowd. Suddenly alone, she wondered what to do with herself. The smell of roasting meat caused her empty stomach to growl. Beyond the pier, she made out the cookstalls. After twelve weeks of dry biscuit and weak beer, she couldn't imagine anything more delectable than freshly cooked food. Her fingers weighed the cloth purse that hung from her belt and contained her small hoard of coins. On her way to the stalls, a man stepped in her path and smiled, revealing a row of rotten teeth.

"I see, mistress, you are yet unclaimed. Let me tell you, I have two hundred acres and am looking for a wife. Timothy Sower is my name, and I am a widower with four boys in need of a stepmother."

"I am not seeking a husband." Hannah spoke sternly. "I am bound for Banham's Landing to join my sister."

"Banham's Landing, you say?" He grinned lewdly. "Is your sister one of Banham's whores?"

Hannah could only gape as he melted back into the throng.

"You must forgive him for his words," a voice behind her said.

She swung around to see an immense woman with a body like a proud galleon. Her skin was indigo-black. "The men come to sell their tobacco and buy a few nice things from the ship. There are so few Englishwomen here. When they see a girl like you, they act like fools."

Hannah could not think what to say. She had never stood face to face with an African before, but something in the woman's gaze reminded her so much of Joan that she ached.

"I am sure you are right," she said at last, dipping her head.

***

"What meat is this?" she asked the man at the cookstall while he ladled thick brown stew onto a wooden trencher.

"Venison," he said without ceremony, as though he were dishing out pigs' feet. Hannah shook her head in amazement. At home only the gentry were allowed to hunt deer and eat their meat.

After she had finished the stew and was wiping her trencher with a hunk of coarse bread made from Indian maize, she realized that every man within twenty feet was staring at her. This time she tried not to let it unnerve her. She reminded herself that she was brand-new to their world, still unmarked by this country. She was fresh from the land most of them would never see again. How could they help but stare?

***

As the sun crept toward the western hills, there seemed little point in remaining on shore. The auction had ended. The sailors had unloaded the goods for Anne Arundel Town and were ready to sail north up Chesapeake Bay at first light. How many days, she wondered, would it take them to reach Banham's Landing? Now that Elizabeth was gone, the ship was a lonely place. Crawling under the bedclothes, she couldn't wait for the voyage to be over.

She had just dozed off when a sailor carrying a lantern awakened her.

"Hannah Powers," he said, "two women have come to take Elizabeth Sharpe's place in your sleeping box." At that, he was gone, taking his light with him.

One of the women, however, held a guttering candle. Her face above the unsteady flame was black. Raising herself on one elbow, Hannah recognized the woman she had spoken to earlier that day.

"I am Lucy Mackett," said the candle bearer. "And this is Cassie." The face of a younger woman hovered over Lucy's broad shoulder. "We are free midwives bound for the Mearley Plantation."

"I am Hannah Powers," she replied, her voice hoarse with sleep. "Bound for Banham's Landing."

"You are the girl I saw before."

"Yes."

"Banham's Landing, you say? Your journey is longer than ours."

How long?
Hannah wanted to ask when Lucy and Cassie turned their attention to moving their things into the narrow space and spreading their blankets on the shared pallet. Lucy set her candle in the tin sconce, then began to undress. Shadows flitted across the rough walls.

"You are midwives." It was too awkward to just lie there in silence as the two strange women prepared to bed down beside her. "Have you been to the Washbrook Plantation? It's upriver from the Banham Plantation. My sister bore a child ... almost two years ago. Her name is May."

"I have never heard of the Washbrook Plantation," Lucy replied. "Cassie, you ever heard of it?"

"No." Cassie's shadow was girlishly slender.

"Good night to you," said Lucy, lowering her heavy body on the pallet. The sleeping box filled with the scent of dried herbs. Cassie blew out the candle, then squeezed into the space between Lucy and Hannah.

Rolling over to face the wall, Hannah tried to ease herself to sleep, but Lucy Mackett's words hung heavy in her mind. Her journey was far from being over. The waters of the Chesapeake swayed and surged beneath the ship as though she were still—and would always be—at sea.

A
NNE ARUNDEL TOWN
fell behind, lost and forgotten as a dream upon waking. With each hour they sailed, the land grew wilder and stranger. It reminded Hannah of the stories her father used to tell her. Once Britain had been covered in forest. Centuries ago, before the Civil War, before Henry VIII and the Reformation, before the tall trees had been cut down to make ships, there had been a lost wilderness full of bear and wild boar.

The ship sailed past harvested tobacco fields where the stripped earth stood out like a giant wound against the dense woods beyond. She sighted a group of black men burning harvest stubble. Although it was halfway into October, they worked shirtless, their backs glistening in the fire's heat. Their voices rose on the wind with the smoke as they sang in an unfamiliar language, their music so haunting that it made her shiver.

Those men, she gathered, were not free like Lucy and Cassie. She turned as the two women walked toward her.

"Soon we anchor at the Mearley Plantation," Lucy said when they joined her at the rail. "The ship only comes once a year, and when it comes, it is like Christmas."

"Christmas?"

"You will see for yourself," said Lucy. Cassie said nothing, only cracked a smile.

The ship swung around a bend, revealing a plantation that reminded Hannah of a prosperous yeoman's farmstead at home. The two-story house had a steep-pitched roof and red shutters flanking gabled windows of real glass that glinted in the dazzling autumn light.

"Do they make glass here?" she asked.

Cassie snorted.

Lucy shook her head. "I heard that the Mearleys did order their glass from Holland."

Scattered around the house were outbuildings of more primitive construction. Lucy pointed out the livestock barns and tobacco sheds.

"That little cottage you see with the smoke coming out the chimney," said Lucy, "that is the kitchen. They cook in there so the big house doesn't get too hot in summer."

"Then it must be very cold in winter." Hannah could not imagine a house without a kitchen.

What Lucy did not point out were the hovels half hidden among the bushes and pines. Hannah reckoned those were the slaves' quarters.

"Look," said Lucy. "The children are blowing horns." She raised her hand to wave at the cluster of young ones jumping and whooping. One boy shouted to the sailors to throw him a mooring line so he could tie it to the dock. A woman in a russet-colored dress waved so wildly, Hannah thought her arm would loosen from its socket. Hannah waved back. She was beginning to understand why Lucy said the ship's arrival was like Christmas. The woman in the russet dress was obviously the planter's wife and the mother of those children, yet she was waving with the enthusiasm of a young girl. Did May also wave to the ship like that?

Everyone clapped and cheered. Black men began rolling huge hogsheads from the tobacco sheds down to the dock.

"That is their entire fortune," Cassie said.

"What happens if the harvest fails?" Hannah asked.

"They go into debt to the ship captain. They pay by credit—as long as he allows it. If the debt keeps rising, they lose their leasehold. Not a single planter here truly owns his lands. All is on lease from the Lord Baltimore."

"Further north I hear that storms have ruined the crops," Lucy ventured.

May lived north of here, Hannah thought. What if her harvest had been lost?

When the sailors lowered the gangplank, the first mate stepped ashore, saying he had letters for Mrs. Mearley. Hannah watched how eagerly she took them from his hands, how she hugged them to her breast as if they contained jewels. Hannah allowed herself to pretend she saw May clasp letters from home.

Meanwhile the men unloaded the goods that the Mearleys had ordered the previous year. She listened to the first mate read the inventory to Mr. Mearley. "An oaken table and eight chairs, two casks of Rhenish wine, a box of China tea, a bolt of India silk, six cones of sugar, one steel plow..."

"Do they not have ironmongers here?" Hannah asked Lucy.

"Who would be an ironmonger when he could be a planter?"

"Come." Cassie tugged Lucy's arm. "Let us go down and see if we are needed."

"Is Mrs. Mearley expecting a baby?" Hannah asked. The woman on shore did not appear to be pregnant, though the fabric of her dress was bulky enough to hide a growing belly.

"We tend to the others, too." Lucy nodded toward the shacks in the pines.

***

Hannah wandered down the gangplank, but soon lost sight of Cassie and Lucy. Mrs. Mearley beckoned people off the ship to a table of rough planks, where a cask of ale and a plate of crabcakes were laid out.

"Come and refresh yourselves!" she cried. "I'll let no one say that the Mearleys are not liberal and generous."

Mrs. Mearley looked about thirty-five, still handsome, but when she smiled, Hannah saw the gaps in her teeth.
For every child, a tooth,
the saying went. She wondered if May had lost a tooth with her first pregnancy. Hannah reckoned Mrs. Mearley was hiding something behind her smile—she could make out the strain in her face as the lady pressed a pewter tankard of ale into the ship captain's hand.

"I cannot tell you how pleased we are," Mrs. Mearley said to the captain, "to finally have the good table and chairs. For years we made do with what the servants could cobble together. At last we shall be able to receive guests in style. There is nothing Mr. Mearley likes better than company."

Mr. Mearley, busy overseeing the loading of tobacco barrels, did not strike Hannah as a man who enjoyed guests, or much of anything. She observed him limping along as though every step caused him pain. His posture was one of forbearance, spine hunched and arms clutched to his belly as if to protect his inner organs.

"In his condition, he should rest indoors." The captain spoke delicately. "I heard the news of his malady in Anne Arundel Town."

A fretful look passed over Mrs. Mearley's face. "I tried to persuade him to book passage to Bristol so that he might have the care of a physician, but he refused." She lowered her voice. "He fears sea travel. Last time he boarded ship, he caught a fever that was nearly the end of him."

"Madam." Hannah spoke before she could stop herself. "What is the nature of your husband's illness?"

Mrs. Mearley and the captain turned to her with puzzled faces. Mrs. Mearley appeared affronted.

"This is young Mistress Powers from the ship," the captain said.

"If you please, madam, my father was a physician, and I know something of physick myself. Perhaps I could be of service." Hannah curtsied with what she hoped was appropriate deference.

"My dear girl, I think you overestimate your powers." Mrs. Mearley spoke in a high and brittle tone. "This is no matter for amateurs."

"Begging your pardon, madam." She swallowed. "I only wished to offer help."

"Your offer is kind, mistress," said a man who appeared at
Mrs. Mearley's elbow. Hannah hadn't seen him until now. His voice was conciliatory and smooth as cream. "But Mr. Mearley requires a surgeon, not a nursemaid, however solicitous."