The Vanishing Point (6 page)

"Her match was made for her," Joan wheezed. She paused to cough into a sodden rag. Hannah took it from her and gave her a clean one.

"Hush, now. Take your broth."

Joan struggled to swallow with her infected throat. "They say love matches are unlucky," she rasped. "But that's just the talk of men who can't think of anything but dowries and..." Her speech subsided in a fit of coughing.

"Let me bring you the coltsfoot syrup."

Before Hannah could leave her side, Joan seized her wrist.

"Listen, dear. You make your own match. For love and affection. Find someone to cherish you."

"I will, Joan." Hannah tried to smile.

At last the older woman's fingers relaxed, relinquishing their hold.

***

Early the next morning Hannah carried wood and kindling up the stairs to light the fire in her father's room. He lay utterly still, a smile glowing on his face. Hands shaking, she turned her back to him and knelt to stir the ashes, uncovering a few embers, then built the fire, fanning the flames until they nearly licked her face. Cheeks smarting, she went to her father. When she touched his hand, it was as cold as the floorboards beneath her thin slippers. The cold crept up her legs, making her shudder.

"Father."

She opened his eyelids and saw the irises rolled back. Sinking to the frigid floor, she began to wail.

***

Father's coffin was so light, two boys could carry it easily. Hannah stood in the wet churchyard and watched them lower him into the freshly dug pit. He would finally rest beside her mother.

Though well-wishers crowded around her, Hannah had never felt more alone. Joan was too ill to attend. People offered kind words and genuine compassion, for there was hardly a family who hadn't lost at least one relative to the grippe. But no confidante stood beside her, no special friend or sweetheart, no sister.

How could he be
dead,
the man who had fed her with all his learning? As they shoveled dirt over her father's coffin, a few clods of damp earth stained the hem of her good dress. Fist to her mouth, she poured her entire concentration into keeping her spine erect so she wouldn't double over.

***

Hannah paid the rent and funeral costs by selling her father's globe, his clothes, and the furniture she could spare. The barber surgeon offered to buy Father's skeleton and anatomical diagrams. Hannah would never forget the way he stood there with his shoulders thrown back, his hat at a rakish tilt to show off his brand-new wig. She wanted to slap him for the way he strode through Father's study as if he were the new landlord. If he made a show of expressing his condolences, she knew he was also glad that his only competitor was gone.

Bargaining hard to raise the price, she sold him everything except what he coveted most—Father's books of physick and the leather case that housed the surgical instruments.

***

When spring came, Joan recovered. "I knew my time wasn't up," she told Hannah. "I read it in the cards."

Thin from her long illness, she used one of Father's old belts to hold up her skirts. "Ooh, look at me." Winking at Hannah, she paraded through the kitchen. "Slender as a girl again."

Joan's belongings were tucked neatly into three wicker baskets lined up beside the back door. She was going to join her niece's family who lived in a village south of Bristol. "My lungs and knees are still weak, but I will do for Nancy and look after her children. Poor wench has seven already, with one more on the way. She'll need her aunt Joan, she will."

While they waited for the niece's husband to come fetch her, Joan and Hannah drank cider in the kitchen.

"Remember this," said Joan. "Your father wouldn't want you to squander your youth mourning him. Go to your sister and look after her. Give her a kiss from old Joan."

***

Alone in the empty house, Hannah packed for the journey. She found a wry comfort that it was not a maiden's hope chest that contained her future but her father's heavy old trunk carved with rectangles and stars. Among her father's papers she found the letter from Cousin Nathan asking for her sister's hand for his son. Yet another letter described the beauties of Maryland. She enclosed both letters in the velvet-lined case with her father's surgical instruments. If she had lost her father, she would at least regain her sister. Hannah sat on the bare floor and hugged herself. May had always chosen a life of adventure. Her own adventure would now begin.

In August 1692, she boarded the
Cornucopia
and sailed out of Bristol.

In Faith, I assure you Maryland is so beautifull and abundant that many have called it the Bower of Eden. Our Bay is full of Oysters and Striped Bass. The Land about the Bay is rich in Soil. Here do grow many towering White Oaks as grand as any in England. Indeed, when the Land is cleared and cultivated, it does resemble our native Gloucestershire. The Season for Growing and Planting is long and Winters but a mild Interlude—a mere Dream, if you will. In our Forests grow Wild Cherrys, Plums, Persimmons, and Strawberrys. Hickory and Walnut grow in plenty, and we do have Tulip Trees with flame-like gold and red Flowers. I need not tell you that many a Gentleman Planter has made his Fortune growing Tobacco in our Tidewater Districts. A full-sized Ship can sail up the Chesapeake and there reach the most far flung Plantations. The Indians here are peaceable. There are many who say that Maryland and Virginia shall be the wealthiest Region in the Americas.

Trying to keep her balance on the rocking deck, Hannah reread Cousin Nathan's letter to her father. "The Bower of Eden," she murmured as people shoved past to spew over the rail. A storm had blown the ship off course. The journey ahead would be long. After two weeks of staring into the waves, she had come to believe that the ocean itself was her new world, possessing a topography all its own, with precipitous mountains the ship barreled over only to slip into treacherously deep valleys.

The sailors had told her to banish seasickness by looking at the horizon. But how could she when the horizon was as evershifting and inconstant as everything else? There was much that confounded her. May's letters had not made Maryland sound like a Bower of Eden in the least. By this time her sister had been married for three years, with one baby born, perhaps a second on the way. Would she even recognize May? Had motherhood and the hard life in the wilderness made her robust and ruddy like Joan, or thin and haggard? And what of her husband? He would cease to be an enigma, Hannah thought. She would finally get to see him face to face.

***

She shared her sleeping box with a woman named Elizabeth Sharpe and her two sons, Will and Ned, aged eight and ten. Elizabeth would not allow her boys to sleep in the men's quarters. "God only knows what unsavory characters are lurking on a ship such as this. And you," she said, "must stay close by me. Let no one know you are an orphan. There are evil men what prey on girls such as you."

Elizabeth's husband had gone over eight years before as an indentured servant. "Last year he got his freedom," she told Hannah. "His master gave him seventy acres on the Eastern Shore. He's the first of our folk to ever have his own land."

Although Elizabeth's hair was thin and she was missing half her teeth, Hannah sensed that she had once been pretty. When she spoke of her husband, her eyes shone with pride. "My Michael can read and write, he can. When he was a lad, he had a kind master what taught him his grammary." Back in England, Elizabeth had begged the vicar to read her husband's letters to her. Now Hannah read them aloud as they huddled on the deck, trying to shelter from the wind.

Her husband's reports had made Elizabeth wise to the ways of the colony. When Hannah told her that her brother-in-law was a tobacco planter, Elizabeth just laughed. "A planter! Every cracker and freed slave calls himself a planter. Half of what folk call plantations are miserable smallholdings. After three years, the land goes barren, and they try to sell it back to the Indians. I hope your brother-in-law owns a few hundred acres." She pressed her hands together. "We only have seventy, but my Michael is a clever farmer. I hope we pull a decent crop the first year and buy more land. If we have enough acres, some might lie fallow until the soil is fertile again."

***

The ocean seethed. Hannah learned to walk in broad strides, shifting her weight from one foot to the other with the roll of the waves. She tried not to stare at the indentured servants, whose threadbare clothing and gaunt faces set them apart. They received the scantiest rations. In the hold, they slept six to a box. Most were men and boys, but there were a few women and girls. Elizabeth told her that many of them had been let out of debtors' prison, poverty being their only crime.

"When we get into port, the gentlemen planters will buy all the healthy young ones. But the sickly ones will be shipped straight back to Bristol Gaol."

"Do they not get their freedom back after seven years of indenture?" Hannah asked.

"If they survive the climate and fevers of the place," said Elizabeth. "Pity the servants what are wenches. In no time, their masters will be at them, seeking to roger them at every turn. If a master gets a wench with child, he can prolong her indenture. The only virgin in the colony is a girl what can outwit her master."

She clutched Hannah's arm and pointed at a pair of gentlemen planters striding across the deck. Their linen shirts, even after seven weeks at sea, looked almost clean. The feathers in their hats bobbed like living things.

"They do own many servants," Elizabeth whispered, "and many more slaves besides. Africans are the only ones what can
bear the climate. Mark my words, Hannah. Late summer is the season of fevers. Many an English servant will sicken and die ere he sets foot off the ship. But the Africans will go on working."

***

After ten weeks on board, everyone on the vessel stank like a goat. The gentry tried to mask their stench with eau de cologne. The salt pork ran out, and the biscuit was infested with mold. The water tasted foul. One morning Hannah awoke with a burning forehead, her bowels in agony. Half the people on board were ill. Weak as she was, it was too awful to stay in the dank hold and breathe everyone else's offal and sickness. Swollen-headed, she leaned against the ship rail. In her fever, she fancied she saw tulip trees rising from the waves. Their crimson-gold flowers were like shooting flames.

She cleaved to her vision of those radiant trees, trying to see only them and not the corpses that the sailors launched overboard. Elizabeth's boys pointed and shouted as sharks devoured the bodies.

H
ANNAH SQUEEZED ELIZABETH'S
arm as they leaned over the ship rail to view the harbor front of Anne Arundel Town. The place appeared to be little more than a village of around forty roughly constructed houses. Cows and sheep grazed in pens between the buildings. Her eyes anchored on the church where her sister and Gabriel had married.

"Oh, Hannah. Somewhere down there will be my Michael. I wonder if I'll recognize him after all these years."

Most of the people on the pier wore buckskin and rough homespun, except for the gentlemen planters in their linen and brocade. Everyone seemed in good cheer to see the ship. Yet something about the crowd troubled Hannah—there were no old people. She remembered Elizabeth's talk of contagion, the toll the brutal climate exacted.

"Of course, you will know your own husband," she told Elizabeth, hoping to chase away dark thoughts. She asked herself if she would be able to pick May out of a crowd when the time came. Her sister didn't know she was coming—there had been no chance to send a letter that would arrive before the ship did. Hannah would disembark at Banham's Landing, fifteen miles up the Sequose River from the Washbrook Plantation. She had heard it would take another two weeks before the ship reached the mouth of that river. But the Washbrooks would be there to deliver their tobacco harvest. Wouldn't May be surprised to see her? Wouldn't it be a dream to see her sister again?

"How do I look?" Elizabeth asked. "Clean and decent?"

The night before, they had moored at Jamestown, Virginia, where the crew had brought barrels of fresh water aboard. The captain would fetch better prices for the indentured servants if they washed before the auction. Hannah and Elizabeth had soaped and scrubbed themselves from their toes to their hair, then Elizabeth had given her boys a good sponging. Hannah dug to the bottom of her trunk for a fresh shift, but she was saving her good bodice and petticoat for her arrival at Banham's Landing.

"Look," said Elizabeth. "They're lowering the gangplank." Ned and Will edged away from their mother as she began to weep. "Oh, what if he hasn't come for me, Hannah?" She looked terrified. "What if he's forsaken me? What will I do?"

"Stop talking nonsense." Hannah took her hand. "Of course he'll be there."

"Come down to the pier with me," Elizabeth begged her. "Hannah, please. I don't want to stand alone down there like a servant waiting to be sold off."

They waited until it was their turn to file down the gangplank.

"Don't leave my sight!" Elizabeth shouted to her boys. "Stay close by me. We mustn't lose one another." She took each of her sons by the hand. Hannah watched her search the sea of faces for her husband.

There were few women in the crowd, but Hannah's heart surged when she saw a young mother with wide blue eyes who was struggling to quiet a squalling tot. Of course it couldn't be May. Yet the illusion was perfect. Hannah allowed herself to pretend that the moment of reunion was upon her. Then the strange woman turned her head, revealing a pockmarked cheek. No, it couldn't be her May. No pox had ever touched her May.

Elizabeth made a noise from deep in her throat as a man approached. Though he was scarred in the face and thin as a barber pole, his smile was enough to bring fresh tears to Elizabeth's eyes. "Is that my Betty?" he asked. "Is that my girl?"