Chapter One

Ostend Roads — Thursday, 27 December 1781

The wind died at three o’clock, off Nieuport, and Cheston was up the poop ladder before the topsails had finished shaking.

Passengers did not go up there. The boy had told them so at ten, at the foot of the gangway, with the tide at the top and the bells going: the poop was the master’s and the waist was the crew’s, and the gentlemen might have the quarterdeck so long as they kept to the lee side and out of the way of the braces. Cheston had kept to the lee side for five hours. He had stood there while the pier went down into a line and the woman at the end of it into nothing he could have sworn to, while the dunes went by low and pale with a church tower standing up out of them every few miles and the north-east wind held on the quarter as steady as a hand in the small of the back; and he had done the sum over and over, a little differently each time, as a man turns a coin to see whether it is the same on both sides. Now the wind had simply stopped. It had not dropped, as a wind drops in summer. It had stopped, as if somebody had shut a door on it, and the Graaf van Vlaanderen lay rolling on a long oily swell with every block in her knocking and her canvas slatting against the masts like washing on a line; and to the south-west, coming across the lead-coloured water, there was a dark patch, and another behind it, and the rain behind them both.

The master was at the weather rail with his glass. He was a short broad Irishman of fifty named Tierney, out of Waterford, in a blue coat made for a larger man, and he did not turn round.

“You’re on my poop, Mr James.”

“I know it. I’ll go down in a minute.” Cheston came to the rail beside him. “You’re going to put back.”

“I’m going to look at that for as long as it takes me to be sure of it, and then I’m going to do what it tells me.” Tierney lowered the glass. “Yes. I’m going to put back.”

“It’s a shift of wind. It’ll come round again by morning.”

“It’ll come round into the west by midnight and blow, and stay there till it’s blown itself out, which might be Sunday and might be Twelfth Night. Between here and Dunkirk there’s a sandbank for every saint in the calendar, sir. The Stroombank. The Breedt. The Smal. They move. I’ve a chart that says where they were in ’seventy-four and a leadsman who says where he thinks they are now, and in the dark, with a westerly on my beam and the whole of Flanders to leeward, I’d not give you sixpence for either.” He shut the glass. “Ostend roads are two hours astern, with good holding in nine fathoms and thirty ships in them already that have had the same thought. That’s what I’d say to an owner. I’ll say it to you, because your sister paid me in gold and didn’t haggle, and a woman who doesn’t haggle is either rich or frightened, and she’s not rich.”

“She’s not frightened either.”

“Then she’s the other thing. I’ve met it once or twice. Generally in women.” He turned at last and looked at him: a square weathered face with the veins broken over the cheekbones, and small pale shrewd eyes that had been reading weather for forty years. “Say your sum to me, Mr James. Out loud. You’ve been saying it to yourself since Bowens’s quay; I’ve watched your lips. Say it to me and I’ll tell you where it’s wrong.”

So he said it, there on the master’s poop, with the rain coming and the Danish mate standing ten feet off pretending not to listen. The twenty-seventh of December to the first of March, sixty-four days. Fifty to the Delaware with a fair wind. Two up the river to Chester or Wilmington, three if the ice was in. Then the road down the Peninsula to the Head of Elk and the Maryland line, and a magistrate. Anne would have found the magistrate. She would have found him already and told him the day.

Tierney heard it to the end.

“Fifty,” he said.

“It’s been done. I’ve heard of forty-six.”

“So has every master between here and Cadiz, from a man in a tavern who knew a man.” Tierney hooked the glass into its becket. “I’ll tell you what I’ve done myself, and then you’ll know. I’ve made the Capes of Delaware from the Lizard in fifty-one days, once, in a clean Salem brig with a master who drove her till her pumps went day and night. I’ve taken eighty-three in this ship, in the winter of ’seventy-nine, and buried four men on the way. From now to Lady Day the wind in the Western Ocean blows out of the west when it’s blowing, and when it isn’t it’s getting ready to. She’s not a brig and she’s not clean. Most winters, nine weeks. Some, ten.” He let it sit. “Nine weeks is sixty-three days, Mr James. I can count too.”

“And then the road.”

“And then the road, which you’ve not counted, because you don’t know it.” Tierney was looking at the rain now. “I’ll drive her. I’ll not break her. That’s all any master in Ostend could have given you, and some would have given you less and charged you more.” He raised his voice without turning his head. “Mr Lund. We’ll wear ship.”

The Dane said something in Danish, and the hands came running.

Cheston went down the ladder, but not to the lee side. He had spent five hours there doing a sum, and the sum had just been taken off him by a man who could do it better, and he found at the foot of the ladder that he could not stand and watch other men do the only thing there was to be done. The hands were tailing on to the main braces in the waist, a dozen of them, Flemings and Danes and a black man from St Croix and a boy with a harelip, and the rain had reached the ship and come across the deck in a single cold sheet; and before he had thought about it at all he had jammed his hat inside his coat and laid hold of the rope between the boy and a big Fleming with a pigtail.

Nobody told him not to. The Fleming looked round once, saw a passenger in a good brown coat on the brace, grunted, and went on hauling.

He had not hauled on a rope since he was fourteen, the summer his father sent him down to the wharf at Chestertown to learn what a hogshead weighed, and his hands remembered the shape of it and nothing else. The brace was wet and hard and alive, a thing that fought back. It ran through his palms when the yard swung, and he did not let go because nobody else did; and when they had belayed it and the Graaf had come round heavily with the rain on her quarter and stood back the way she had come, he opened his hands and saw the skin gone off both palms in a long raw stripe, as clean as if it had been planed.

“You don’t let it run, sir,” said the harelipped boy, in an English learned in several ports. He was about fifteen and grinning. “You let go and take another hold. Every man new does that. Every one.”

“You might have said so before.”

“Nobody told me neither.” The boy considered the palms with professional interest. “Piss on them. Is the best thing.”

Jacob found him at the lee rail a quarter of an hour later with his hands held out into the rain, and took one of them, turned it to the light, and gave it back.

“The boy’s right,” he said. “Stings like the devil, then it doesn’t.” He looked away over the water at the coast they had spent the day leaving. “Nan’s lying down. Mrs Ashby says it’s the gin; says the ship’s soaked in it, it’s like being sick inside a bottle.”

“Is she bad?”

“She’d never been on the water before the galley. Not so much as a punt on the Brent.” He put his own hands in his jacket. “She says she’s well. She would.”

They came into the roads a little after five, in the dark, in nine fathoms, among the riding lights of thirty ships that had had the same thought, and the cable went out through the hawse with a roar that went through every timber of her and up into Cheston’s feet. She snubbed at it, swung, and lay with her head to the rain. Two miles off, the lights of the town came and went through it: the lamps on the quay, the lanterns at the pier-heads, the windows in the tall houses on the front. One of them was Bowens’s, with the crane over the door and a fire in every room. He tried to find it and could not, and knew it did not matter which it was, because she would have seen the topsails come back over the edge of the sea in the last of the light. She had very likely stood on the pier-end all afternoon waiting for them. She would have gone back up the quay in her black with her hood over her face and sat down at Bowens’s table in the lamplight with the pocket-book open, and taken one off. Not crossly. She had never in her life been cross with a figure for being what it was. She would have taken it off because it was true, and then sat looking at the new one for a while, as their father used to sit over a bill he meant to pay and could not pay yet.

Sixty-three. He said it into the rain to hear what it sounded like, and it sounded like what it was; and he put his torn hands on the wet rail and held on until they hurt properly, which was better.

There were seventeen passengers and eleven of them dined aft, in the great cabin under the poop, at a long table with fiddles on it and a lamp swinging on a chain; and since the Graaf lay at anchor with nothing to do but pitch, the cook, a Portuguese with one eye, had seized his chance, so that the dinner that should have been at two came at six, with the rain drumming on the deck overhead.

Cheston sat where Tierney had put him, between the Fleming and the Frenchman.

The Fleming was a stout anxious linen factor from Mechelen named Vranckx, who owned a third of what lay in the hold under the gin and the tea and had not slept since Michaelmas for thinking of it. He had been told that Mr James of Philadelphia was a merchant, and he fell on him as a man falls on a countryman in a foreign port. He told him the price of Brabant linen at Philadelphia in ’seventy-four and the price now, the price he hoped for and the price he feared; what the war had done to the Flemish looms, which was to double them, and what the peace would do to them, which was to ruin him. And Cheston, who had not talked to a man about the price of anything since Bristol, found that he was answering, and that the answers were good, and that for a quarter of an hour at a stretch he could put down the figure he was carrying and carry these instead, which weighed nothing.

“You know the trade,” said Vranckx, peering at him.

“I know a trade. Tobacco, mostly. Linen came back in the ships.”

“Tobacco is simple. It grows, you pick it, you sell it. Linen you must make, every yard, and at every step there is a man who wants paying and a man who wants to cheat you, and sometimes the same man.” Vranckx put down his spoon. “Philadelphia, you are from? I have a correspondent in Second Street.”

“Not in the town. Along the river.”

It came out slow. It always did. He heard it come out, slow and exact, like a clerk giving evidence, and across the table one of the two Quaker sisters raised her eyes from her plate.

They were the Misses Satterthwaite of Philadelphia, grey-gowned and white-capped, with the same long upper lip and the same quiet hands, going home after two years in a damp house at Tottenham nursing an aunt who had taken the whole of that time to die. The elder was Hannah. She had not spoken since grace, said silently with her eyes open, and now she looked across at Cheston with the pale steady attention he had seen on the faces of the Friends at West River when somebody stood up at meeting who had not been moved to.

“Which river, friend?”

“The Delaware, ma’am.”

“There are two banks to it. Which bank?”

He could have said Jersey. He could have said Chester County and a farm, and invented the farm; he had heard Robert invent a whole life for a porter in Bishopsgate Street between one breath and the next, a silkman’s bankruptcy, a dividend at ninepence in the pound, and never trip. He opened his mouth to do it and nothing came, because a Quaker woman was looking at him across a table the way Samuel Galloway looked at a man who was about to tell him a lie, and he had never once been able to lie to that face.

“The Jersey side,” said a voice from the foot of the table, pleasantly. “Surely. You’ve a Jersey look, Mr James. They all talk carefully in Jersey, as if they were charged for it by the word. It comes of dealing with Philadelphia.”

Everybody looked down the table.

She was a woman of about forty in a dark travelling dress with a little good lace at the throat, handsome in a strong-boned way that would last, with a great deal of dark hair put up plainly and a pair of straight black brows. She had been eating her dinner with close attention, and she went on eating it.

“We’ve not been introduced,” she said. “I’m Mrs Ashby.” She had an English voice, from the south and from money, and under it some other music, faint, that he could not place. “I’m going to Philadelphia too, nearly. My husband has been there since the summer of ’seventy-six. I’ve been in Bath with my mother, who didn’t approve of him. I’m going to see whether I’m still married.”

She said it as a woman states a fact she has had five years to get used to, and it turned the table, as she had meant it to. Miss Satterthwaite lowered her eyes. The Frenchman on Cheston’s left, who had been feeding mutton to a liver-and-white pointer under the table and had not followed a word, laughed aloud and said “Bravo, madame,” and the dog barked.

“You’ll forgive Milord,” said the Frenchman, in an English that went at everything head down. “He is a dog of Brest. He has no manners, no English, and no respect for the Protestant religion, and he is a prisoner of war the moment an English officer puts his foot on this deck. So am I.” He was a thickset man of five-and-forty with a big bald head, a broken nose, a stock he had not troubled to tie, and a pair of red scrubbed hands that ate as hard as they worked. “Vauclair. Surgeon-major of the King’s Marine, of the hospital at Brest. They send me to Virginia, to the hospital at Williamsburg, where they have eight hundred men from the siege lying in the college with their legs off and a surgeon who writes to Versailles that he has no more saws. So I go. The convoy from Brest sails without me, because I am cutting a stone out of an admiral’s nephew and the admiral says it is more important than Virginia.” He fed the dog a piece of fat. “It was a very large stone. I have it in my trunk. Then two months at Ostend waiting for a ship that is not French, because a French ship will be taken, and here I am, with the stone and the dog and a box of saws for Williamsburg.”

“If the English board us,” said Vranckx, alarmed, “they’ll take you.”

“Certainly they will take me. And my saws. And then they will put me in a prison at Portsmouth full of Frenchmen with the fever, and in a week I am the surgeon there instead, and nobody pays me.” Vauclair shrugged with his whole body. “Either way I cut. It is only a question of whose legs.”

Brother Kühn, the young Moravian at the surgeon’s other side, who was going to teach the boys’ school at Bethlehem and had kept his hat on through grace and soup and mutton, reading a small black book between mouthfuls, looked up from it for the first time.

“That is a very Christian view of the matter,” he said gravely. “For a Frenchman.”

Vauclair roared, and bowed to him from his chair. The dog barked again. Somebody laughed, and it was Mrs Ashby; and Cheston, looking down the table, found that she was not laughing at the surgeon or the Moravian at all but looking at him, glass in hand, those black brows level: the look of a woman who has paid a small debt and would like the man she paid it for to notice.

He noticed. He knew her face. He was as sure of it as he had once been of a figure in a column that turned out to belong to another account entirely: sure of the figure, and unable for his life to say where he had seen it. It was a face that belonged in a room, a particular room with particular people in it, and he could not see the room.

He raised his glass an inch to her. She raised hers an inch back, and went on with her dinner.

He could not sleep. He shared a box of a cabin with Brother Kühn, who slept on his back with his hands folded like a man on a tomb, and through the bulkhead he could hear the steerage: the Walloon family’s youngest crying and being hushed, a man snoring, and under it all a girl being sick into a basin, and then a man’s voice going on and on, low and patient, saying nothing in particular, the voice a man uses to a frightened horse. It went on for hours.

Some time after midnight he got up and went on deck.

The rain had stopped for the present. The wind was in the west, as Tierney had said it would be, hard and cold across the roads, and the Graaf was pitching to her cable, lifting her head and coming down with a jerk that went the length of her. The riding light at the fore stay made a small wet swinging circle on the deck. Beyond it thirty other riding lights rose and fell on the black water, and beyond them the town, and a church clock somewhere striking one against the wind.

Jacob came up the steerage ladder a little after, saw him, and came aft.

“She’s asleep,” he said.

“Good.”

The lantern caught the side of his face: the new gap in his teeth from Michaelmas, the scar through the eyebrow that had been there on the Plankier in February. He was twenty-five. He looked older tonight, and Cheston told himself it was the lantern, and knew it was not.

“Mr Cheston.”

“Jacob.”

“When we get in. The Delaware, or wherever he puts us. You’ll go down to the Head of Elk. That’s your road, to the line.”

“Yes.”

“That’s my road too. My uncle’s on it.” He waited while the ship lifted and came down. “You’ll not have forgotten my uncle. He stood in the street outside the White Swan in June of ’eighty with the whole town round him and hit you in the face for my cousin, and you let him. I was at the back of the crowd. That was the first time you saw me, I think. I don’t know if you did see me.”

“I saw you.”

“Well.” Jacob took one hand out of his jacket and laid it on the rail. “I’m bringing you home to him. Mr Justice Cheston, that wouldn’t swear. On the same road, walking ten yards behind you, where anybody on the Elk road can see me do it. And I’m bringing a wife they never heard of, from Middlesex, that I married in a church they’d call English, in a coat I borrowed off an actor, the Friday before Christmas, on a licence from a man in a wig.” He said it like a man reading back a bill of lading, not an ounce more weight on one word than another. “And I’ve been thinking how I’ll say it to him. At his door. What I’ll say first. Whether I’ll say her first, or you. I’ve been at it since Stanmore, every night in the loft, and on the box on the Dover road, and in that galley with my arm in the water, and I’ve not got it yet.”

Cheston had nothing that would be of the least use at a door on the Sassafras, and Jacob knew it. He had sat on a bench for three years and told men what the law was, and never once been able to tell any of them what to say to their own family.

“Say her first,” he said.

Jacob turned his head.

“Before he’s had time to see me behind you. Say, Uncle, this is my wife, Ann, she’s never seen a river, and let him look at her. He can’t hit her. He can’t hit you, not with her standing there. Let him get that far.” Cheston put his own raw hands on the rail beside Jacob’s. “Then I’ll come up, and he can hit me. He’s done it before. I’ll not mind it half as much as he’ll think I ought to.”

Jacob looked at him a long while in the swinging light.

“You’d let him.”

“I let him last time. It did me more good than anything anybody said to me that year.” He found that he could smile. “He was right, Jacob. That’s what nobody in that street understood, and I couldn’t tell them. I’d not sworn. Your cousin had. Your cousin was in a pit at Morristown and I was at home by my own fire. If I’d been your uncle I’d have done it myself, and harder.”

“You’d not.”

“No,” said Cheston. “I’d have wanted to, and been too careful. That’s worse. He’s not careful. That’s why you love him.”

Jacob made a sound that might have been a laugh if there had been more room in it. He put his hand back in his jacket and stood with the wind flattening his collar against his neck, and when he spoke again it was low, and not to Cheston, quite.

“It was the only week we had. Before the ship. I’d not change a day of it.” He swallowed. “Only I’d like to have it right before I’m on his step. I’d like to say it the once and have it done. I’m no good at saying a thing twice. Nan is. I’m not.”

“Then let her say it.”

“Aye. She’d say it better. She’d have every word in its place.” He was quiet. “I’m only telling you so you’ll know, sir. When we come to the Elk. If I’m slow on that road, it’ll not be the cold.”

“You’ve never been slow in your life.”

“No,” said Jacob. “Well. I’ve never been home before. Not like this.”

He went below. Cheston stayed at the rail with the lights of Ostend going in and out through a new squall, and thought of a big angry man on the step of a house on the Sassafras with a Middlesex girl in front of him, not knowing where to put his fists; and found that he wanted, more than he had wanted anything in a long time that was not Anne, to be on that road and see it, and to see Jacob’s face when it was done.