Anna's Crossing Read online

  And then his stomach rumbled a loud, hungry, echoing growl.

  5

  July 3rd, 1737

  Bairn wasn’t alone.

  The captain had sent him into the Great Cabin to fetch the sextant to make a noontime bearing, and he took a moment to look through the logbook to check coordinates. He found himself reading through the entries of the last few days:

  June 29, 1737

  Set off from Rotterdam. Freight: 132 qualifying men, German Palatinates recruited by newlander Georg Schultz.

  Georg Schultz. How he despised that man.

  Bairn sat motionless. For the first time in a very long time, memory threatened to push back, and sweat broke on his forehead. He refused to remember. He would not.

  Just as he was pondering how much he abhorred Georg Schultz, how that little man always found a way to tweak him, to remind him of what he held over Bairn’s head, an odd sound emerged from the captain’s bunk. He straightened, lifted his head, turned around, and saw something move behind the curtain. Queenie, the ship’s cat, perhaps? He yanked the curtain open and there . . . was a red-headed German boy from the lower deck.

  Bairn laid a hand on the boy’s shoulder and the boy recoiled at his touch, jerked back. He grasped the boy’s shoulder and held tight. “Do y’realize where you are?”

  The boy’s face skewed up with fear. He couldn’t understand him.

  “You should not be here. You could be flogged.” He made a whipping motion with his hand and the boy understood that. His blue eyes welled in utter terror. Bairn softened; he hadn’t meant to frighten the laddie.

  “Was iss dei Naame?” What is your name?

  “Felix. Mei Naame iss Felix.” My name is Felix.

  “Kumme.” Bairn pulled the curtain open and took a step toward the door. Come with me.

  When the boy recovered from his shock, he scrambled out of the bunk. “Kannscht du mei Schprooch?” Do you know my language?

  Bairn shrugged. “Wennich.” Enough. Mostly forgotten. “Kannscht du Englisch schwetze?” Can you speak English?

  Felix nodded vigorously. “I learn . . . schteik.” Fast.

  Where was Felix? Anna had looked all through the lower deck and couldn’t find any sign of him. Keeping her voice calmer than she felt, she asked Dorothea if she had seen Felix go by.

  They all felt ill. Maria was wretched, Barbara Gerber looked pea-green, Lizzie Mast lay moaning on her bunk, but Dorothea seemed to fare the worst. Ghostly pale, she hadn’t been able to keep anything down for days. Her expression of bleak dismay intensified to one of alarm, but before she could begin to panic, Anna rushed on. “I’m sure I saw him down near the animals.” She skirted around the narrow path toward the front of the ship.

  Anna frightened the chickens by swinging their cages to peer around them. They clucked and fussed at her, but she found no red-haired boy hiding behind them.

  Where was Felix?

  She was struck in the face with the pungent smells of chicken and pig, odors that were so much a part of her life that she seldom noticed them in Ixheim but mixed with the pervasive smell of sick people sent her stomach rolling again. As hard as she tried to keep her mind occupied, she couldn’t stop her stomach from rebelling to the constant roll and pitch of the sea.

  She almost felt like she was drowning in this dark, fetid air, as if she couldn’t breathe. What an awful stench! She had to get upstairs, away from the gloomy lower deck and passengers in utter misery, had to fill her lungs with fresh air, and by now she was fairly confident Felix was up there, prowling around. She could imagine him tumbling overboard when one of those big sails swung around. She had warned him countless times to stay below and out of danger.

  But that is not the reasoning a boy follows.

  As she made her way to the companionway, the ship twisted itself into the trough of a wave and her stomach twisted in the opposite direction. She groaned. The bow slammed onto the water and her stomach clenched. Another roll of nausea rose up and she ran up the stairs as quickly as she could. She took her first full breath of sea air and it filled her lungs, the sunlight and fresh wind revived her. Ah, relief!

  A sailor, washing the decks with a bucket of seawater, eyed her and tossed the bucket right at Anna so she took in a mouthful of dirty salt water. She coughed, choked, tripped, and as she stumbled, a firm hand gripped her at the elbow.

  The scent of sandalwood enveloped her and a low voice spoke into her ear. “Are you all right?”

  “Oh heaven help me,” she said. “I think I’m going to be sick.” She took an unsteady step forward, away from the hand that cupped her elbow and rushed to reach the railing. She gripped the railing and leaned over as far as she dared, sea spray slapping her face.

  Two large hands gripped Anna’s waist and held her steady.

  “Nee. Fattgeh.” Her voice sounded like a mewling kitten’s cry.

  “Go away?” The deep voice sounded amused. “Go away and let y’tumble on yer head into the sea?”

  “Don’t help me.” She kept her eyes closed so she didn’t have to look at that horrible sailor, see contempt or mockery for her weakness.

  But the sailor ignored her and his calloused hand held her head as she choked and gasped, heaving dry heaves. There was nothing left in her stomach to toss up, but the gentle hand continued to hold her head until the dry heaves stopped.

  “There, lassie, let it pass.”

  Her throat burned, but she was done for now. She straightened up, burning with shame, her face scarlet. She could feel it. She wasn’t sure which was worse, heaving over a ship’s railing or having a brute of a sailor try to bring her comfort. With the back of her hand, she wiped her mouth and realized that the sailor’s calloused hand belonged to the ship’s carpenter, not the beast who threw the bucket of salt water at her.

  “’Tis nothin’ but a case of the mal de mer, n’more. Come along with me and the boy while I fetch you some ginger root to help.”

  From around the waist of the ship’s carpenter popped a mop of curly red hair. Felix.

  The carpenter held up a hand. “Before you start giving him a tongue lashin’, follow me.” He tilted his head toward the front of the ship. “Come along then.”

  As she followed him, she saw a sight at the bow of the ship that stopped her in her tracks. She stared at the sight with dropped jaw; so startled, she forgot she was seasick.

  The carpenter spun around to see what was keeping her, then grinned at her obvious embarrassment. A sailor stood on an open platform with holes cut in it, lashed to the bow of the ship. He was relieving himself directly into the channel, rinsing off with a bucket of salt water, for all the world to see. “That, m’ lassie, is known as a head.”

  The Charming Nancy twisted down the side of a wave, and Anna flew forward. The ship’s carpenter caught her shoulders before she struck the railing. Everything around Anna started to spin. Spinning. Spinning, spinning. Then darkening—

  “She’s gone all pasty colored,” she heard Felix cry out.

  Anna’s knees sagged. I must not faint. I must not faint. She grasped onto the forearms of the ship’s carpenter as her stomach flipped and churned. He put a hand firmly on her shoulder to guide her as they walked forward on the shifting deck.

  On any ordinary day, Anna would have been mortified to allow a stranger to help her, to touch her, but this was not an ordinary day. With Felix following closely behind, the carpenter helped her into a small rectangular room not much bigger than a closet. A short bald man was mixing bread dough in a large bowl and looked up in surprise at his visitors. A clay pipe stuck out of the corner of his mouth. He wore an apron covered with food and charcoal smudges and . . . was that blood? Anna’s stomach clenched again.

  “That’s Cook and this is the galley,” the carpenter said. “The ship’s kitchen.”

  “Galley,” Felix quietly repeated to himself. “Cook and galley.”

  The ship dipped and twisted. Anna took long, deep breaths, and tried to think about
the green hills of Ixheim after a spring rain. “I think . . . I think I need to sit down.” Before she sagged in the ship carpenter’s hold or was sick down the front of his expensive shirt. “Please.” The single word nearly choked her.

  He helped her to a barrel along the wall. “Here you go.”

  Anna sat carefully upon the barrel’s lid and braced herself with both hands on the side. She took some deep breaths, willing her stomach to stop cramping. Slowly, she lifted her head and looked around the room, then her gaze landed on the ship’s carpenter. A black cat appeared and twined around his boots.

  “There you be, Queenie,” Cook said. “I haven’t seen you for days.”

  Absentmindedly, the carpenter said, “She’s been trapped under a tub, Decker said.”

  “Queenie?” Felix asked.

  “Aye, that’s her name. She’s the ship’s cat.”

  Anna looked up. “I thought cats were afraid of water.”

  “They are,” Cook said. “But every ship needs a cat.”

  “Why?”

  “To catch rats.” One side of his mouth lifted and the clay pipe bobbed as he spoke. “Prodigious rats.”

  Anna barely stifled a gag.

  The carpenter kept rummaging through cupboards. “Cook, have you ginger root? The lassie needs some t’settle her stomach. She’s as sick as a poisoned pup.”

  “Aye,” the cook said. He jutted his chin toward a basket and went back to punching and kneading the dough.

  “Judas Iscariot!” Felix shouted, pointing to the bowl of bread dough.

  Anna clapped her hand over Felix’s mouth, astounded by his outburst of profanity, then her eyes went wide with shock. The cook was missing a hand. When she saw the reddened scarred stump as he pounded the dough, her stomach twisted and turned again.

  The cook waved his stump in the air in the direction of the ship’s carpenter and laughed. “Fine handiwork of Bairn’s.” Then he calmly went back to kneading the dough.

  “Had t’be done,” Bairn said, matter-of-factly, still poking through the cupboards. “I only lopped it off because it had gone gangrene on you.”

  She slid another glance at the carpenter—Bairn. What kind of name was that for a man who had the courage to cut off a man’s gangrened hand? He was too tall to stand upright in the low-ceilinged cabin. And he appeared strong enough to lift her in one arm and Felix in the other. His face revealed nothing of what he was truly made of, whether good or evil, a man who kept himself closely guarded. And yet those eyes of his . . . there was something compelling to her about them. She couldn’t make herself look away.

  Bairn took a small knife from Cook’s work counter and sliced some ginger root. “Chew on this. ’Twill help.”

  When he handed her the ginger, their fingers met and then their eyes. The spicy scent tickled her nose and she caught a look of mirth flit through Bairn’s eyes. Here and then gone. Shyly, she lowered her chin and nibbled on the ginger root.

  Bairn reached behind Felix to pull a tin off a shelf. He opened the tin and offered cookies to Felix. “Take two, they’re small. Cook is a stingy man.”

  Cook snorted. “I was more generous before you lopped me hand off.”

  “If I hadn’t taken yer hand, you would’ve died fer sure.” He turned to Anna. “The ship’s carpenter often doubles as the ship’s surgeon.”

  “Same tools!” The cook made a slicing motion with his one hand, like he was chopping wood with an axe.

  Anna’s stomach rose and fell.

  “Aye, same tools,” Bairn said, “but I take more care with both wood and bones than he’d have you believe.”

  Mesmerized, Felix’s head bobbed from one direction to the other, listening to the cook’s sloppy English and then the carpenter’s crisp turn of phrase. Anna wasn’t sure how much Felix could understand of this conversation between the cook and the carpenter—he never seemed to pay attention during her English lessons—but the casual description of a gangrenous hand made her stomach twirl like it was being tightened in a vice.

  Chewing the ginger rapidly, Anna tried to get her mind off her nausea and took stock of the compact space of the tiny kitchen. Under the hot furnace rested a platform of bricks, no doubt to keep the heat from burning right through the wooden deck. Every inch of space was claimed, but used in clever ways. Cupboards had been customized to fit the narrow room, including a narrow corner cupboard. Spices were lined in rows of shelving with a wooden dowel to keep them in place. She doubted Cook would have to take more than a few steps to gather ingredients.

  “Anna, how does a cook manage with one hand?” Felix whispered in their dialect.

  Bairn must have figured out what was on Felix’s mind because he answered before Anna could ask. “Cook used t’be a seaman until the accident that took his hand. The sea is all he ken. Becoming a cook was the only job he could do with one hand. You’d be surprised at what a man can adapt to when he has no choice.” After Anna finished translating Bairn’s words to Felix, a grin slowly spread over the carpenter’s face. “But one hand or two, I am thinkin’ he would still serve us rotting slop.”

  Cook pointed a sharp knife at him. “Rotting slop, my eye.”

  Bairn turned to Anna. “The captain is waitin’ for the sextant t’do the noontime bearings. He’ll be bellowin’ soon if I do nae get to him. It’d be wise t’get below decks before the stroke of the bells fer a watch change.”

  Warmed and warned, Anna stood to leave. “Thank you for the ginger. Come, Felix.” His blue eyes, round as silver dollars, stayed riveted on the carpenter.

  “What’s yer name?”

  “Anna.”

  “I’m Bairn. Have you ginger root down below?”

  “I might. I’ll look through my chest.” Her grandmother had given her a box of remedies, but Anna hadn’t paid much attention. She should have thought to look through the box for a seasickness remedy—it would be the same as for stomach ailments. What she really should have done, she realized now, was to have paid closer attention to her grandmother’s methods for healing.

  “If you do nae have any, send Felix to find me.”

  Cook spun around from the stove. “You’ll not be raiding me galley!”

  Bairn winked at Felix. “It’s all in the askin’.” He turned to Cook. “You can always get more in Plymouth.”

  “Plymouth?” Cook scowled. “No wonder we haven’t reached Cowes by now. Plymouth will be days away yet in this wind.”

  “Aye, but the captain prefers to water the ship with the sweet waters of Dartmoor in Plymouth.”

  “That, and he doesn’t want his crew to be tempted to jump ship for higher wages in Cowes.”

  Bairn nodded.

  Anna’s unsettled stomach was finally easing a bit, enough for her to pose an objection. “But why? Why must you stop in England at all?” She wanted to get this sea voyage over with and behind her.

  Bairn and Cook exchanged a look of amusement. “To stock up on supplies.”

  “Why couldn’t they have bought supplies in Rotterdam?” There were all kinds of merchants milling through the dock area, clamoring at them to buy, buy, buy.

  “To comply with law. T’buy provisions for the ocean voyage there, rather than at Rotterdam, boosts the English economy.” Bairn took a step to the door and turned back to Anna. “The layover should only last a few days.”

  A few days! Anna’s heart sank. The delays were adding up.

  Bairn was watching her. “I wish I could spare you the mal de mer, but ye’ll find some relief when we dock at Plymouth. Most everyone gains sea legs. Sooner or later.”

  Cook let out a guffaw. “If you think this little tempest in a teapot is bad, just wait until we’re in open sea and ride out a hurricane.”

  “Pay him no mind.” Bairn dismissed Cook with a wave of his hand. “Believe me, I ken how y’feel.”

  Cook coughed out a rusty laugh. “Bairn was a famous vomiter.”

  A stain of color spread across Bairn’s sharp cheekbones. “’Ti
s true. Years of service is no guarantee against the mal de mer. My solution was to forsake the bunk and sleep in a hammock. Hammocks remain stable while the ship moves, whereas bunks buck and plunge with the ship.”

  “He’s right, girlie,” Cook said. “Hammocks are the way to go. It protects most seamen against seasickness.”

  Bairn looked at her. “Are you sleepin’ in a bunk?”

  “On a pallet, on the ground.”

  Bairn shook his head, looking woeful. “The worst place of all is t’be on the floor of the ship. Sleep in a hammock. I put plenty of hooks along the crossbeams. And there are extra hammocks available. They’re in a barrel in the bow.”

  “I’ll try it tonight.” At this point, she would try anything.

  “And keep a closer eye on that one.” Bairn tipped his head in Felix’s direction, who was occupied by lifting the lid on each barrel to see what was inside. “I found him in the captain’s cabin.” He leaned slightly toward Anna and whispered so Cook didn’t overhear. “Takin’ a nap in the captain’s bunk.”

  Anna shot a hard glance at Felix, bristling with things she felt like saying to him, things he needed to hear, but he was oblivious to her. That boy was oblivious to most everything.

  Bairn walked with them to the upper deck. “’Tis goin’ to come onto rain soon.”

  Anna looked up and saw only blue sky. “Why do you say that?”

  He gestured toward the horizon. A bank of gray clouds inked the line between sea and sky.

  She moaned and Bairn grinned—but not in a mocking way.

  This ship’s carpenter, he wasn’t what she expected him to be. His gray eyes met hers with a gentle compassion that surprised her. She couldn’t look away from his eyes. They were gray. Not blue-gray. Not hazel-gray. Pure gray like polished pewter. They pierced into her eyes from beneath straight dark brows and tanned skin that contrasted with his sun-streaked hair. A strange feeling arose—something familiar, something appealing. Slowly, she adjusted her stance, balanced on her own feet, and backed away, then hurried to join Felix at the stairs.