The captain cleared his throat. “You must want some time to yourself. Izra will stay close should you need anything.” The planks creaked under his weight as he stood. “Perhaps you’ll join me this evening for dinner? There is much to consider with regard to your future.”
I nodded. I needed information and food. I hoped there’d be troughs of both.
Around me, men swabbed the deck. They scoured pots and pulled hemp from old ropes to make oakum. Never had I sat while others worked. Soon the singing began again, but it was only one man this time, up at the helm, singing about a lost true love, his voice so pretty I wanted to cry and cry over it.
A breeze puffed at the sails above me, carrying me away from home. To where? Soon as this voyage was over, I’d have to care for myself, but how? The skills I had wouldn’t help me. Wrecking wasn’t proper work for girls. I’d only been able to carry on in West End ’cause on an island inhabited by criminals, runaways, and disgraced women, a wayward girl scarcely deserved mention.
Maybe I could knock on doors till I found work as a maid? But who’d bring an orphaned girl into their home—a girl without a single person to vouch for her character?
Dread curled in my bones as the awful truth of my situation sank in.
I knew what happened to a lone woman in this world.
It had been a long while since I’d thought about the time after Papa died of smallpox, but my mind drifted to those dark days now. I remembered Mama crying for days and days. Her heart was broken, she’d told me. It would never be whole again. In time her tears dried up and she took over his shoe shop. I remembered how strong she’d looked hammering nails into soles, sweat rolling down her pretty neck. Papa’s customers liked her shoes—she’d made them just like he had. Eventually she’d done one better, burning flowers and patterns into the leather with hot needles and selling buckles she bought from a trader from the Orient. Word had spread of her artful designs and soon merchants from all over the Out Islands came to buy from her—but not a year after Papa’s passing, everything had changed again.
A man named Mr. Slade who had his own shoe shop in Nassau accused her of being an immoral and depraved woman. He spread rumors that Mama was having relations with men—some of them enslaved men—and she became a woman of ill fame.
People crossed the road when they saw her. They hissed “filthy strumpet” and “bloody doxy.” They threw eggs and rubbish at our shop, sometimes in plain daylight. With a few untruthful words, Mr. Slade had ruined Mama and caused his own business to thrive.
Mama sold the shop and we moved to a room above a tavern. Then the money from the shop ran out, but our hunger didn’t, and that was when she started leaving me for long stretches. Day and night, and night and day. I began to suspect she was doing just what she’d been accused of, but I never asked. It didn’t matter to me what she did. She was my mama and my everything.
Then Sewel came around and I saw her smiling again. With him by her side, people still crossed the street—but no one dared speak a backward word to her anymore. With him beside her, she held her head up again.
After they married, we left Nassau to start our life in the Out Islands. Year by year, she laughed less and Sewel drank more, and yelled more, and on bad nights did even worse, but she accepted all of it. He’d claimed her—a fallen woman. And no amount of drunkenness or wickedness mattered, ’cause he was loyal, and that was better than many men in the world, Mama said, and certainly better than no man.
I was meant to learn from all her hardships. Live for something more, she told me, again and again in different ways, but always with that word. You must have more than I’ve had. More than my life has given me. More than this. While we gardened. While we cooked. Even while I slept, I knew she whispered in my ear, sliding her wish for me right into my dreams.
Vivas por algo más, mi hija, she’d say.
Never marry for love, as love doesn’t buy bread.
Never marry in haste, as those who rush, stumble.
Never marry low, as poverty is a stain that never washes out.
Instead, I was to find safety. Comfort. Respectability. Things only a good marriage could provide ’cause a woman alone wasn’t safe from the words and deeds of evil men. A woman alone had not a thing in this world that couldn’t be taken from her if a man wanted it, not even her dignity.
Now here I was. Aboard a strange ship sailing for no place I knew.
A girl alone.
* * *
With the sun beginning to dip, I returned to the captain’s quarters and found Izra inside.
“Some of your things was recovered before we left, Miss Coates!” he said. He scooped a folded bundle from a basket and set it on the table, where other items had already been spread out. “I’ll come back to fetch you for dinner.”
He bowed, quick as a sneeze, and sped off, throwing the door shut behind him.
I studied the colorful assortment he’d left me. Most of the items were garments, rumpled and still damp from the sea. A thick cloak of midnight-blue velvet for use in weather such as I’d never known. A gown of sea-green brocade. Petticoats in shades of pink and blue. A shift of white holland. Front-lacing boned stays of pearly silk. A red slipper with a silver buckle. A yellow slipper with a gold buckle. A tangle of ribbons in colors like happy wishes.
In addition to the clothes, there was a leather journal with a cord tied round its bulging pages. I picked it up and brushed my hand over the soft cover, my heart thumping in my chest.
I hadn’t thought about staying Miss Coates, but…could I? Miss Coates had true prospects in life. Everything Mama always wanted for me.
I brought the journal to the stern bench and dropped onto the soft sheepskin, which held gentle warmth from the sun. The Ambrosia stood in calm waters, barely swaying. Outside, the rising moon was splitting itself in two, one for the sky, another for the sea. The journal pages were wavy and the ink had bled in one corner. Turning to the beginning, I read:
The Reflections and Occasional Musings of Miss Emmeline Cecily Coates, Daughter of Nathaniel Coates and the Late, Beloved Elizabeth Anne Sumner
Miss Coates began her entries the day of her departure from Antigua, on July 29, 1776. My Grand Adventure Begins! she declared, sailing from her home on the Paladin with the Ambrosia in convoy.
How sad. Her grand adventure hadn’t lasted long at all.
I read on slowly, pressing dents into the paper in my concentration. Sewel had sold all our books a year ago and I was rusty. Even when we’d had books, I’d seldom read, much preferring the freedom of swimming and dreaming up my own stories, which were always more thrilling. But I kept on and wrestled each word into my understanding.