“But you, Miss Doyle, you interfered with that order. You presumed to meddle where you had no right. Look at the way you acted! The way you’ve dressed! It doesn’t matter that you are different, Miss Doyle. Don’t flatter yourself. The difficulty is that your difference encourages them to question their places. And mine. The order of things.
“Miss Doyle, you ask me what I intend to do. I intend to—”
“You killed Hollybrass, didn’t you?” I now demanded.
“I did.”
“Why?”
“He threatened me,” the captain said with a shake of his head. “And in the midst of that storm. It was intolerable.”
“And then you decided to put the blame on me,” I pressed. “To keep me from going to the authorities and telling them the truth about you.”
“Who shall be blamed for this disastrous voyage?” he asked. “It cannot be me, can it? No, it must be someone from the outside. The unnatural one. To preserve order, Miss Doyle, sacrifices must always be made. You.”
“Am I a sacrifice?” I demanded.
“In all honesty, I wished you had broken your own neck falling from the rigging or on the bowsprit. You did not. As it stands we should reach Providence in a few days. It is crucial that when we make landfall I be firmly established as master.
“Mr. Hollybrass had to die. No one could possibly believe I would do such a thing. So, yes, since you are unnatural—proclaimed so, I hasten to remind you, by all—you shall be held responsible. Thus is our world set right again.”
I still hadn’t moved.
Ignoring me now, he proceeded to light some candles. A soft yellow glow filled the room.
“Look,” he said.
Puzzled, I gazed about the cabin. I saw now what I had not seen before in the light of the moon. In the candlelight I could see that much of the furniture was cracked. Many legs had splints. Upholstery was water stained. Frames on the walls hung crookedly. Some had pictures missing. Maps and papers on the table were wrinkled or sadly torn. The tea service on the table was dented and tarnished, but arranged and presented as whole. The chess pieces were, I now realized, no more than salt and pepper shakers, broken cups, bent candlesticks.
I looked at him again. He was gazing at me as if nothing had happened.
“It was the storm that destroyed much of it,” he said. “I have spent considerable time in setting the room to rights. Have I not done well? Order, Miss Doyle, order is all. Take away the light and …” He leaned over and blew the candles out. “You see—it’s hard to notice the difference. Everything appears in order.”
“You’re … mad,” I said, finally able to respond to the man.
“On the contrary, Miss Doyle, I am the soul of reason. And to prove my reasonableness I’m going to give you some choices.
“You came to my cabin, Miss Doyle, to steal the key to the guns. Is that not so?”
I didn’t know what to say.
“You don’t have to admit to it. I know it’s so. Mr. Keetch has informed me about everything.” Even as he spoke he reached into his jacket pocket and drew out a key.
“Here is the key you wanted,” he said, tossing it so that it landed by my feet. “Take it up, Miss Doyle,” he said. “Go to the cabinet. Take out any one of the muskets. All are loaded. I will sit here. You may carry out the plan you and Zachariah concocted. You must know that I will be murdered. But Miss Doyle, do not doubt for an instant that the world will learn your part in this. Do you think these sailors will keep quiet? No. Open that cabinet and you let out scandal. Horror. Ruination. Not just you. Your family. Your father. His firm.
“So before you do that, consider another choice.” He walked to the far corner of his cabin and picked up what looked like a bundle of clothing. He dumped it at my feet. I saw by the light of my lantern that it was the garments I had set aside weeks ago—a lifetime ago, it seemed—for my disembarkation. White dress. Stockings. Shoes. Gloves. Bonnet. All in perfect order.
“Put these back on, Miss Doyle,” he said. “Resume your place and station. Publicly renounce your ways, beg me for mercy before the crew, and I—you have my word—I will grant it. All will be restored to its proper balance. Like my cabin furnishings. A little dented and torn perhaps, but in the diminished light no one need know. All reputations saved.
“Of course, there is a third choice. You had your trial. A verdict was reached. You could accept that verdict and be hanged. I’ll even invent a story for your family. Some … sickness. An accident. The hurricane. So yes, the hanging is one of your choices.
“Now what shall it be?” He clasped his hands, sat again in his chair and waited.
Out on the deck three bells rang.
“What if I don’t accept any of them?”
He hesitated. “Miss Doyle, I thought I made it clear. There are no other choices.”
“You’re wrong,” I said. And so saying, I turned and rushed out of his cabin, along the steerage and into the waist of the ship.
There was, as I had guessed, a full moon. It sat high in a sky of darkest blue, amidst shadowy scudding clouds. The sails on the forward mast were full, and fluttered with the tension of the wind. The sea hissed about the bow as the Seahawk rushed ahead.
In a line upon the forecastle deck the crew had gathered and were looking down at me. When I turned to look at the quarterdeck I saw Keetch there, not far from the splintered stump of the mainmast. Near him was Zachariah, his hands bound before him. It took but a moment for me to realize that our entire conspiracy had been overthrown and turned against us.
I stepped forward. Behind me I heard Captain Jaggery at his door. I took a quick look; he had a pistol in his hand. As he emerged I moved hastily across the deck.
For a moment all stood still as if each were waiting for the other to move first.
It was Captain Jaggery who broke the silence. “There stands your shipmate,” he proclaimed shrilly to the crew. “She crept into my cabin and would have murdered me in my sleep if I’d not awakened and managed to wrest away this pistol. Not enough to have murdered Mr. Hollybrass! She would have murdered me. I tell you, she would murder you all!
“It was Zachariah there,” the captain continued to rant, “hiding, pretending injury to keep from work, who let her out and set her on this murderous plot.
“She had her trial. She had her verdict, to which you all agreed. Only just now I gave her yet another way to release herself from the punishment of hanging. I begged her to put on her proper dress, and told her I would find the heart to forgive. This she refused.”
“He’s lying!” I called out. “He’s trying to save himself. He’s the one who killed Hollybrass. He’s admitted it.”
“She’s the one who lies!” the captain cried, pointing his pistol now at me, now toward the crew, which made them visibly flinch. “The truth is she wants to take over the ship. Yes, she does. Would you stand for that? Do you wish to put into port and have this girl spread the slander that she, a girl, took command of this ship, took over each and every one of you and told you what to do? A girl! Would you ever be able to hold your heads up in any port in any part of the world? Think of the shame of that!”
I had begun to edge toward the steps to the forecastle deck, thinking the men there would stand behind me. But as I approached none moved forward. I stopped.
“You mustn’t believe him!” I begged them.
“Don’t be afraid of her,” Captain Jaggery cried. “Look at her. She’s nothing but an unnatural girl, a girl trying to act like a man. Trying to be a man. She can only harm you by living. Let her have her punishment.”
I started up the forecastle steps. The men began to back away. Horrified, I paused. I sought out Barlow. Ewing. Grimes. Fisk. Each in turn seemed to shrink from my look. I turned back.
Captain Jaggery fingered the pistol in his hand. “Take her!” he commanded.
But that far they would not go. And the captain who saw this as soon as I now began to advance toward me himself.
I backed away from him until I was atop the forecastle deck. The line of crew had split, some to either side. “Help me!” I appealed to them again. But though they were deaf to Captain Jaggery, they were equally deaf to me.
The captain, in careful pursuit, now slowly mounted the steps to the forecastle. I retreated into the bow, past the capstan, on a line with the cathead. He kept coming. Against the moon, he seemed to be a faceless shadow, a shadow broken only by the daggerlike glitter of the pistol that caught the light of the moon. My heart hammered so I could hardly breathe. I looked for a way to escape but found none.
The bow seemed to dance under my feet. Frantically I looked behind me; there was little space now between me and the sea.
Still the captain closed in. I scrambled back high into the fore-peak. He stopped, braced his legs wide, extended his arm and pistol. I could see his hand tighten.
The bow plunged. The deck bucked. He fired all the same. The shot went wide and in a rage he flung the pistol at me.
I stumbled backward, tripped. He made a lunge at me, but I, reacting with more panic than reason, scrambled down onto the bowsprit itself, grabbing at the back rope to keep from falling.
Clinging desperately to the rope—for the ship plunged madly again—I kept edging further out on the bowsprit, all the while looking back at Captain Jaggery. In the next moment he scrambled after me.
I pushed past the trembling sails. Below, the sea rose and fell.
Vaguely, I sensed that the crew had rushed forward to watch what was happening.
There was no more back rope to hold to. And the captain continued to inch forward, intent on pushing me off. There were only a few feet between us. With a snarl he lunged at me with both hands.
Even as he did the Seahawk plunged. In that instant Captain Jaggery lost his footing. His arms flew wide. But he was teetering off balance and began to fall. One hand reached desperately out to me. With an instinctive gesture I jumped toward him. For a brief moment our fingers linked and held. Then the ship plunged again and he tumbled into the waves. The ship seemed to rear up. For one brief interval Captain Jaggery rose from the sea, his arm gripped in the foaming beak of the figurehead. Then, as if tossing him off, the Seahawk leaped, and Captain Jaggery dropped into the roaring foam and passed beneath the ship, not to be seen again.
Weak, trembling, soaking wet, I made my way back along the bowsprit until I could climb into the forepeak.
The crew parted before me, no one saying a word. I stopped and turned, “Give me a knife,” I said.
Grimes took one from his pocket.
I hurried across the deck to where Zachariah still stood. Keetch had fled his side. I cut the rope that bound Zachariah and then embraced him as he did me. Finally he walked to the quarterdeck rail. As if summoned, the crew gathered below.
“Shipmates,” Zachariah cried. “It’s needful that we have a captain. Not Keetch, for he was an informer and should be in the brig. But Miss Doyle here has done what we could not do. Let her be captain now.”
CAPTAIN IN NAME PERHAPS, BUT NOT IN PRACTICE. I WAS TOO AWARE OF ALL I HAD YET TO LEARN FOR that. Besides, as Zachariah would acknowledge later, the fact that I was the daughter of an officer in the company that owned the Seahawk was no small factor in my formal elevation. It would preserve the niceties. But, though I was entered into the log as captain—I wrote it there myself—it was Zachariah who took true command. I insisted, and no one objected. The crew chose their mates—Fisk and Barlow—and assembled themselves into two watches, and managed well enough. Johnson was more than happy to return to the forecastle.
Regarding Captain Jaggery, the log read simply. At the crew’s urging I wrote that our noble captain had kept his post at the wheel during the hurricane, only to be swept away in the storm’s final hour. Mr. Hollybrass was afforded the same heroic death. I have been skeptical of accounts of deceased heroes ever since.
Though Fisk and Barlow insisted I move into the captain’s quarters, I continued to work watch and watch as before. In between I wrote furiously in my journal, wishing to set down everything. It was as if only by reliving the events in my own words could I believe what had happened.
Within twenty-four hours of Captain Jaggery’s death, Morgan threw the line, pulled up a plug of black sand, tasted of it, and announced, “Block Island.” We would reach Providence—assuming the wind held—in no more than forty-eight hours. Indeed, twelve hours later, the mainland was sighted, a thin undulating ribbon of green-gray between sea and sky.
There was much rejoicing among the crew about this and their grand expectations once they were ashore. As for me, I found myself suddenly plunged into instant, and to me, inexplicable melancholia.
“What ails our Captain Doyle?” Zachariah asked, using the term he had taken to teasing me with. He’d discovered me up at the fore-peak, morosely watching the sea and the coast toward which we were drawing ever closer.
I shook my head.
“It’s not many a lass,” he reminded me, “who boards a ship as passenger and eases into port as captain.”
“Zachariah,” I said, “what shall become of me?”
“Why, now, I shouldn’t worry. You’ve told me your family is wealthy. A good life awaits you. And Charlotte, you’ve gained the firm friendship of many a jack here, not to speak of memories the young rarely have. It has been a voyage to remember.”
“Where is your home?” I asked suddenly.
“The east coast of Africa.”
“Were you ever a slave?”
“Not I,” he said proudly.
“And did you want to become a sailor?”
That question he didn’t answer right away. But when he did, he spoke in a less jovial tone. “I ran away from home,” he said.
“Why?”
“I was young. The world was big. My home was small.”
“Did you ever go back?”
He shook his head.
“Never longed to?”
“Oh yes, often. But I didn’t know if I would be welcome. Or what I would find. Do you remember, Charlotte, what I first told you when you came aboard? That you, a girl, and I, an old black man, were unique to the sea?”
“Yes.”
“The greater fact is,” he said, “I am unique everywhere.”
“And I?”
“Who can say now?” he answered. “I can only tell you this, Charlotte. A sailor chooses the wind that takes the ship from a safe port. Ah, yes, but once you’re abroad, as you have seen, winds have a mind of their own. Be careful, Charlotte, careful of the wind you choose.”
“Zachariah,” I asked, “won’t anyone—in Providence—ask what happened?”
“The thing we’ll do,” he replied, “is remind the owners that we managed to bring the Seahawk into port with their cargo intact. True, we lost captain and first mate, but they died, don’t you see, doing their duty.”
“Won’t Keetch talk?”
“Too grateful that we spared his life. Beside, Jaggery had some hold on him. Blackmail. So Keetch is free of that too.”
“Cranick?”
“Never on board. I promise you, Charlotte,” he concluded, “the owners will be sorrowful for all the loss, but their tears won’t be water enough to float a hat.”
Almost two months after we left Liverpool, we entered Narraganset Bay and slowly beat our way up to Providence. And on the morning of August 17, 1832, we warped into the India docks.
When I realized that we were going to dock I went to my cabin and excitedly dressed myself in the clothes I had kept for the occasion: bonnet over my mangled hair. Full if somewhat ragged skirts. Shoes rather less than intact. Gloves more gray than white. To my surprise I felt so much pinched and confined I found it difficult to breathe. I glanced at my trunk where I had secreted my sailor’s garb as a tattered memento. For a moment I considered changing back to that, but quickly reminded myself that it must—from then on—remain a memento.
As the ropes secured us, I looked upon
the dock and—with a beating heart—saw my family among the waiting throng. There were my father and mother, brother and sister, all searching up for me. They were as I remembered them, prim, overdressed despite the dreadful summer heat.
My mother was in a full skirt the color of dark green with a maroon shawl about her shoulders and a bonnet covering most of her severely parted hair. My father, the very image of a man of property, was frock-coated, vested, top-hatted, his muttonchops a gray bristle. My brother and sister were but little miniatures of them.
Truly, I was glad to see them. And yet, I found that I struggled to hold back tears.
Farewells to the crew were all too brief, carefully restrained. The real good-byes had been spoken the night before. Tears from Barlow, a gruff hug from Fisk, kisses to my cheeks from Ewing—“You’re my mermaid now, lass,” he whispered—an offer (with a sly grin) of a splicing knife from Grimes—refused—a round of rum toasted by Foley, topped out with three “Huzzahs!” from all. Then came the final midnight watch with Zachariah—during which time he held my hand and I, unable to speak, struggled to keep my tumbling emotions within.
Now I marched down the gangway into the careful embrace of both my parents. Even my brother, Albert, and sister, Evelina, offered little more than sighlike kisses that barely breathed upon my face.
We settled into the family carriage.
“Why is Charlotte’s dress so tattered?” Evelina asked.
“It was a difficult voyage, dearest,” my mother answered for me.
“And her gloves are so dirty,” Albert chimed in.
“Albert!” Papa reproved him.
But then, after we’d gone on apace in silence, my mother said, “Charlotte, your face is so very brown.”
“The sun was hot, Mama.”
“I would have thought you’d stay in your cabin,” she chided, “reading edifying tracts.”
Only the clip-clop of the horses could be heard. I looked past the brim of my bonnet. I found my father’s eyes hard upon me as if plumbing secrets. I cast down my eyes.