fully employed just caring for them.
Dinner, for the common folk, was eaten on deck, as the night rose up out of the sea, and fetched stars to peer down at their dining. With the wind light from astern, it was pleasant to sit with plates balanced on knees, feeling part of a great adventure. In that moment all on board were friends. They were united in the face of the sea. If only some babies, somewhere down aft, would stop crying...
More tea was brought out. They drank it contemplatively. Talk had died away with the daylight. The first burst of nervous chattering had passed, and people were thinking about what they had committed themselves to. It took an effort to stir again, and begin thinking about the washing up in hot sea water, using the special soap that would still lather in spite of the salt.
Doctor Reade came past, and tapped Sarah on the shoulder, indicating that he wanted her to go with him.
“I’ll do these,” Jess offered, taking her used plates and dinner things.
When Sarah returned the decks had mostly cleared, and the dirty washing-up water had been pitched over the side.
“What was all that about?” Jess asked.
“Sick babies, and young mothers having trouble feeding them,” Sarah answered. “Matron Greeley was busy with families in the hold, so he asked me to help. Mostly, I just had to stand and watch while he examined them.”
“How many?”
“Three of them. It’s the flu, of course. They’ve just got over it, but all the business of settling on board has upset them again.”
“Poor little things,” Jess said.
“They’ve been put in the hospital flat for the night. Their crying’s upsetting the other children.”
“Can we help?”
“We’ll take turns nursing the babies. One of the mothers has three other children to think about. Come and we’ll take a look at them.”
In the hospital flat somebody had rigged two cots to hang from hooks in the beams. Both contained babies being rocked by tired-looking women. A third woman, thin, distraught, worn out by too many babies born too close together, had a whimpering baby at her breast.
“Let Jess take him for a spell, Bridget,” Sarah suggested.
“You might as well, dearie, and bless you,” the young mother said in a musical Irish brogue. “I’m dry as a sermon on the evils of drink. The poor wee mite’s starvin’, he is.”
“Do you have a dummy for him?”
“I have that,” she replied, fishing in an apron pocket. “He’ll not be fobbed off with it, mind you. He knows there’s no tits at the back of it.”
“I’ll get some honey from the cook,” Sarah said.
“Honey? I canna pay for honey.”
“He’ll not ask me for payment,” Sarah replied confidently.
No sooner had Sarah left to seek honey, taking the baby’s mother with her, than the elderly woman who had helped with the vegetables came into the hospital flat.
“Ah, da puir wee bairn,” she said, the soft lilt of Shetland so thick in her speech, Jess could hardly understand her. “Du’s anhungered an muckle soppit firby. Geng awa lassie, an fan oot whaever’s in milk.”
From the way she patted her own sagging breasts from below, Jess gathered her meaning: go and find whoever has milk to feed the child.
A copy of the passenger lists was on Sarah’s bunk. Jess went and looked for whoever was listed with a child under a year old. Some of those with children under two, even three, might do at a pinch, but Jess knew that the women who had been feeding for less than a year were more likely to have milk to spare. There were more than a dozen to choose from, but three of those were the ones with babies in the hospital flat, and she didn’t know their names. She needed a name. Any woman she approached would be more inclined to co-operate if Jess could speak to her by name.
Who was at home then? The two women still in the hospital would have left empty bunks. That would eliminate them. The one who had returned to her other children she knew by sight. One of the women, though she didn’t know which, had four children; skip all those with four children. That left her to try first a lady with five children, a Mrs Honora Mabon from County Limerick, third tier starboard in the main hold.
At the top of the accommodation ladder the warmth and smell, rising from somewhere in the vicinity of a hundred people, made her think she was climbing down into some kind of reeking chimney. A whiff from the candle lanthorns, the only light allowed in the hold, did nothing to improve matters. Canvas screens hung everywhere, giving illusions of a little privacy where in truth there was none. People speaking in low voices filled the place with a constant hum. They sprawled on bunks. They sat on bunks. They leaned against bunks. Some must have been lying behind the screens in bunks...arms, legs, heads, vague shapes in the dim light. People. Dozens of people.
Jess turned to starboard, and counted back three. A man, a husky giant of a man, and a buxom woman with a child on her knee, sat on the bottom bunk. The top bunk above them was screened. That would be their eight-year-old son. So was all the next tier, the rest of their children...tired children, rocked gently to sleep in the cradle of the deep.
“Mrs Mabon?” Jess asked.
“That’s me, dearie.”
“A sick baby, ma’am, and the mother dry.”
“An’ ye’ve the need of a wet nurse,” Mrs Mabon nodded, putting aside the child on her knee for her husband to take. “Lead on Miss Nightingale. I’ll fill the wee darlin’s belly, I will.”
In the hospital flat they found Sarah trying to distract Bridget’s distressed baby with the dummy coated in honey. She was not having much success.
“Let’s try the real thing, me dear,” Honora Mabon offered, and clamped the miserable little creature to her ample bosom. The wrinkled wee face nuzzled in immediately, lips working before he even found the nipple.
“Now, that’s better,” she beamed.
In the swinging cots the other two ailing babies had quietened down, sleeping fitfully, disturbed. Sarah held a candle lanthorn over them. One was red about the face, blotchy; the other pale and yellowish. The eyes of both mothers glittered worriedly in the candle light.
“I’ve not the milk for her either,” one of them said.
“Nor me,” the other added. “Not enough, see you.”
“I’ll see if there’s another wet nurse,” Jess told them.
While Jess was crossing the deck again in the dark, the motion of the ship changed noticeably. Coming down the river she had eased along so smoothly one needed to look over the side to see that they were moving. Out on the estuary a slight swaying had appeared, making the masts draw spirals between the stars, as she breasted a series of long low swells creeping in over the sandbanks. Now they were starting to meet waves that had come sweeping around the North Foreland from the Straits of Dover.
She rolled, the ‘Haldia’...rolled almost on her sides; tipping first to starboard, far over, with anything loose slipping that way down the deck. Then she paused at the bottom of the roll, and started to come back the other way, slowly... faster...over the top, and down to port. All the loose stuff came back, resting until the top of the roll, and then sliding away to port, arriving at gunwales, bulkheads, any impediments just at the moment everything went into reverse, and the whole process started all over again from the beginning.
But that wasn’t all! At the same time as she rolled, the ‘Haldia’ pitched. Her bows went down into the trough between two waves, while one of those waves lifted her stern into the air. Then the other wave passed below her, lifting first her bow, while the stern dropped into the trough; then her middle section, while she levelled out fore and aft; and then her stern again, while her bows went down to meet the next wave.
From below decks came a concerted groan, two hundred people or more, all voicing their protest at once. From the rigging came laughter, sailors setting more sails high up, hearing from the passengers exactly the reaction they had expected to hear at that point.
Clutching wildly at the railin
g beside the main hold steps, Jess steadied herself before hurrying below. She knew she needed to hurry. The ferry boat from Ireland had rolled and pitched much like this. Most of the passengers then had spent the crossing hung over the rails. These passengers were not likely to be any different. She made it into the hold just in time. A rush started for the ladder, folk headed for the decks, the gunwales, the open air, and it would be some time before anybody else would be able to follow Jess down that ladder.
In the hold it was a bedlam. Buckets, set out especially for the purpose, were in great demand. Mothers were sharing them with their children, taking turns to empty out Angus MacGillivray’s lovely stew. Some hadn’t made it, particularly little ones, who cried pitifully, vomit down their night-shirts, in their bedding, splattered over the deck. Those who could were helping others. Most had to do what they could for themselves.
Jess had made it, without being sick, from Ireland to Scotland across the North Channel, although not without qualms and serious doubts. There she had had the benefit of fresh air, being able to stay on deck for the whole of the short crossing. The main hold of the ‘Haldia’ was an entirely different matter. The smell was like nothing she had ever experienced before. It seemed as though she could claw holes in it with her bare hands, a warm, stinking miasma rising about her, enveloping her, and demanding a response.
Not yet. She just couldn’t. She had work to do. The babies needed help.
Twelve
Swallowing determinedly, Jess plunged into the gloom, seeking the next nursing mother on her list, a woman with four children. Four children that woman had all right, all four violently seasick, and her no better. Jess couldn’t ask her for help. The next, and the next differed only in the number of seasick children they had. So it went each time until there were only mothers with one child each still left to approach.
The second of those was on her feet, helping a neighbour. She was another Shetlander, Janet Tulloch. Her own little baby was sound asleep in the middle of it all, being watched over by its father, who also seemed unaffected by the seasickness.
“I see you’re busy Mrs Tulloch,” Jess interrupted her, “but there’s some wee babies need your help even more than these children.”
“How would that be?” the young woman asked.
Jess explained, and Janet looked doubtful.
“I’ve nae done that afore. Jamie, wha tink du?” she turned to her husband.
“Needs must, lass,” he replied. “Ye can but try.”
“Aye, fir da wee een den,” she nodded. “All right, I’ll come.”
“The lady who sent me to look for a wet nurse,” Jess said, as she led the way out of the hold, “she’s a Shetlander too; a very old lady. I can hardly understand a word she says.”
“That’ll be Auld Maggie, Margaret Willsdaughter,” Janet replied. “She’s not learned much of the English. Not many of the old folk have.”
“What language do you speak at home?” Jess asked, stepping out on to the deck.
“Norn, but there’s a lot of English words in it now. What about you? Do your folk still have the Gaelic?”
“There are folks speak it, but not in my family,” Jess answered. “Not for several generations. We need the English, as we deal with too many who won’t learn Gaelic.”
“Same for us,” Janet agreed. “Our folk trade with the Dutchies, and the Dutchies’ll not learn Norn. They’ve already learned English.”
“Everybody’s learning English now,” Jess said regretfully. “Soon there won’t be any other languages.”
“Well, we can’t all learn Welsh, and Breton, and Cornish, and goodness knows how many other languages, but we all need to be able to talk to each other somehow.”
By that time they had come to the hospital flat, where Janet was quickly handed one of the tiny babies. Her discussion with Auld Maggie was largely incomprehensible to the other women present, but resulted in her allowing the first baby to suckle her dry on one side, before trying the second baby on her other breast. That second one was more of a problem, a sickly child, and weak.
“What’s its name?” Janet asked the weeping mother.
“Matilda, Matilda Earnshaw...she’s just coming on three months.”
“Puir wee bairn. Come along, drink it up.”
But it drank little, and eventually fell into an exhausted sleep. Jess took her, and tucked her down in one of the swinging cots. The child’s mother was doubled up over one of the buckets, retching with seasickness.
“Call me when she wakes,” Janet offered. “I’ll try again.”
“Or me,” Honora Mabon spoke up. “We’ll get ‘em fed between us somehow.”
After they had gone, Sarah persuaded the three young mothers to bed down in the hospital flat. She would stay and watch the babies. It was important that those nursing babies should get all the rest they could, or their milk would dry up, and then everybody would be in even worse trouble.
“You might hold the fort here, while I go and see how Gil is coping with Phyllis and Laurie,” she suggested to Jess.
The great cabin was not so noisome as the main hold, but a blind man would never mistake it for a rose garden. The floor and the benches were clean. The two stewards were going from one huddled sufferer to another, exchanging clean buckets for full ones, which they emptied over the side. Gil was just in the act of carrying out some soiled blankets.
“An accident in your cabin?” Sarah asked.
“No, my two are fine. Sound asleep,” Gil grinned. “They’re used to boats, small ones that leap about a lot more than this. This lot’s from my neighbour’s cabin.”
There Sarah found two desperately seasick parents trying to help two equally smitten youngsters. They were so ill as to hardly know what they were doing.
“Lie yourselves down,” Sarah took command. “Let me do that.”
She pushed the two adults into the lower bunks, and then stood on the edge boards to see to the children in the upper berths. Gil had covered them with clean blankets, but they were scarcely aware of it. They were past the stage of vomiting; they had nothing left to vomit with. Large quantities of water had been forced into them, and in coming back, the water had to some extent washed them out. Now they were lying limp and pale, almost unconscious. All she could do was wipe the perspiration from their faces, and leave them be.
“They’ll sleep now,” Gil predicted, coming back into the cabin. “We’ll wedge the door open, to keep an eye on them, but otherwise I doubt we’ll hear from them again for several hours.”
Indeed doors were wedged open all around the great cabin, with those on their feet trying to help those who were not. Sarah had never seen such a sorry-looking crowd.
“I hope we’re not going to be like this all the way,” she commented.
“No, no, it’ll ease off soon,” he told her. “The ship’s reaching at the moment.”
“So are most of the passengers,” Sarah commented wryly.
“Not that sort of reaching,” Gil laughed. “The ship’s sailing across the wind at an angle, sort of sideways to it, until we weather the North Foreland. Once we’re round that, we’ll start to beat up into the wind, meet the waves more head-on. We won’t roll so much then.”
“That’ll be a relief.”
“Most of the passengers will be over their seasickness by tomorrow night, though some poor unfortunates will stay green for a week or more.”
Sarah looked in on the Rutherfords, and found a wan Mrs Rutherford sitting over Samantha and Charles, both dozing fitfully.
“They’ll be all right now,” Mrs Rutherford said. “It’s just the first few hours is the worst. My husband’s on deck, trying to see that nobody falls overboard.”
Out on the deck again, Sarah found the lee gunwales lined with seasick passengers. Behind them watchful members of the crew, assisted by a few passengers who were not affected by the general malaise, were spaced out ready to go to the assistance of any who looked too unsteady.
; Andy was busy hanging lanterns in the lower rigging. If they had to have sick passengers hanging over the side, Captain Hedley wanted to at least be able to see them. When he had placed the last lantern, Andy swung down to join her.
“How’s your stomach?” he asked solicitously.
“Don’t be personal,” Sarah reproved.
“Must be all right then,” he decided, unabashed. “There’s a mug of tea for us in the galley.”
“I could do with that,” Sarah agreed. “I’ll fetch my mug.”
In the ‘tween decks aft the stench was every bit as bad as that in the main hold. Jess was there helping some of the younger women into their bunks. So was Auld Maggie, who walked the heaving deck without a stumble, and never seemed to need to grab at one handhold after another as everybody else was doing.
“There’s tea brewing in the galley,” Sarah told them both.
Auld Maggie understood that well enough. She and Jess shot up the ladder, but Sarah stayed for a moment to check that nobody else needed help.
A number of people, including Andy and the second mate, Ken MacGovern, were enjoying the warmth of the galley when Jess and Auld Maggie arrived. The tea was black and well stewed, but nobody seemed to mind. At least it was hot and wet. Jess helped herself from the spigot.
“Here, have a doorstep,” Angus MacGillivray invited cheerfully. “Keep your strength up.”
“What is it?” asked Jess, accepting two thick chunks of bread with something in between them.
“A sandwich made with the best fatty bacon.”
Sarah came in the door just in time to hear that.
“Oh, how could you!” she exclaimed, and turned right around and went straight back out again.
“Oh dear,” the cook said. “Now what could have upset her?”
“I’ll see,” Ken MacGovern offered, and rushed out the door after her.
“You seem to have your sea legs anyway,” Mr MacGillivray observed to Jess.
“I was feeling a bit queasy at first,” she admitted, “but I’ve been so busy, I forgot about it.”
“So would most of them, if they weren’t feeling so sorry for themselves already,” the cook nodded. “We have it the same every voyage.”
While Jess enjoyed her tea and the bacon sandwich in the galley, Ken MacGovern caught up on Sarah out on the deck.
“Come up on the poop,” he said. “The air will be clearer. All the sick passengers are being kept amidships, where we can keep watch on them all. I have to take a bearing shortly.”
“May I watch?” Sarah asked, glad to have something to occupy her mind.
“Certainly,” he agreed, glad to have something that might impress her. “Come past my cabin while I fetch my sextant.”
Captain Hedley was up on the poop deck, along with the midshipman, and a seaman at the wheel. They stood in a pool of light from a lantern in the rigging. Above them the night sky was liberally sprinkled with stars, but there was no moon. Out over the water distant lanterns marked the positions of other vessels. The lights looked pretty dancing over the water, mostly