The Nine Lives of Charlotte Taylor (2 page)

I
t’s just an hour after dawn on the first Monday in May 1775 when the
Anton
lurches its bulk away from the docks at Bristol and sets sail for the West Indies. Charlotte Taylor is at the rail, rivetted to the huge square sails puffing out like bullies in the wind and bucking the ship into the open sea. A tall woman with flame-red hair tied in a knot at her neck, she keeps her eye to the bow as if setting her own course and her back to the land she has left behind. Standing beside her at the rail is Pad Willisams, her lover and co-conspirator in the hurried exit from Charlotte’s family, Pad’s job as butler in the Taylor household and a truth they each had only a part of.

A hastily packed trunk is stowed with the cargo. The calico sack she’d prepared for the voyage, and now realizes is pathetically inadequate since the trunk cannot be opened again until they reach shore six to eight weeks from now, is slung over her back.

A scrofulous man of indiscriminate age eyes her repeatedly from his place by the forward capstan. He’s one of the woebegone
collection of humanity she’s travelling with—mostly men in their twenties and thirties and one young boy with freckles on his nose who seems to be in the employ of the haughty Captain Skinner. They all stare shamelessly at the white woman and the black man by her side. Pad has pulled together all the stiff dignity of the butler he had been just days earlier, but she can feel the anxiety that thrums through him. She is somewhat surprised to realize that she isn’t daunted by the stares, the days ahead or the consequences of leaving her family’s country home outside of London. Standing in the brisk wind on the deck of a sailing ship just a week after her twentieth birthday, Charlotte Taylor is unafraid—maybe even elated.

She’s still leaning on the portside, watching the water, letting the wind blow on her face when she allows herself to cast her thoughts to what she has run away from. The terrible row with her father when he learned she’d been “consorting,” as he called it, with Pad. The endless rounds of tea, the suffocating rules and her mother’s predictable attacks of the vapours whenever there was a hint of excitement in the household. She smiles in anticipation of the life ahead. A marriage to the dashing Pad, a home in the tropics. She’s grinning at the prospects when Pad interrupts her reverie to suggest they go below and secure their living quarters.

The quarters are cramped; the ceiling is so low they have to duck their heads. The bunks are arranged in two rows, one on each side of the dreary lower deck with damp curtains hanging between them to lend an illusion of privacy. There are hooks on which to hang their possessions and a lopsided stove in the centre. The only light and fresh air is from the hatch to the upper deck; the quarters smell of mildew and rotten wood. Indeed, the black streaks of rot crawling up the legs of the cots speak of the months at sea, the flourishing business of carrying
human and other cargo across the ocean as many times as the weather will allow between May and October, never stopping long enough to refit or repair.

They pick a bunk at the end of the row and tie their sacks to the hooks before exploring the rest of the lower deck. There are stalls toward the stern filled with animals—two steers, four sheep, a ragged flock of chickens and three fat pigs. Charlotte looks at each and lingers on the soft, uncomprehending eyes of the steers that will become meals for the passengers and crew. Tucked under the bow in a wedge-shaped hold are the ship’s stores—burlap sacks of flour, sugar and grain, cases of biscuits, salt and limes. Charlotte and Pad walk back to midship, where a wide hatch is battened shut on the deck.

“What’s down there?” Charlotte asks a stocky sailor who is hurrying aft.

“Cargo, madam,” he says. “Plenty a’ cotton cloth and wool. That’s what makes ’em rich, madam, shippin’ the likes a’ that.”

My trunk is down there too, Charlotte thinks ruefully.

T
HE YOUNG LAD
who’d caught her eye when they left the dock is friendly, puppyish and not too shy to tell her his name is Tommy Yates when she finds him exploring the lower deck.

“Me dad was the one who got me on board,” the boy confides gravely. “He brought me to the dock and hired me out to the captain. He told him I was sixteen, an’ I’m but thirteen.”

“Thirteen?” Charlotte looks at him closely. “Are you even that?”

“Oh yes, madam. Honest, I am.”

She had thought him no more than a scrawny eleven.

When he is not scrambling up the rigging at the captain’s orders or crawling through the hold below the sleeping quarters
to fetch something the captain needs from the cargo, Tommy finds his way to Charlotte’s side. In the first week at sea, she heard about his fourteen brothers and sisters, the drink that made his father what he was and the mother who was so sickly she could hardly manage to stagger from her bed.

Charlotte shares her own story with him—putting a more varnished spin on her departure than is the case. She tells Tommy that she and Pad are married and that her father, General Taylor, doesn’t approve of the relationship so they decided to leave home for the West Indies and start a new life.

She entertains the winsome boy with details of the world she left behind, imitating her nanny’s priggish etiquette. “She insisted I sit like this all day long,” says Charlotte, perching herself on a bench and exaggerating the pose—her back ramrod straight, her legs bent at the knee and turned slightly sideways and her hands folded together in her lap. She makes him laugh when she describes her antics in the straitlaced household—refusing to marry the man her mother had chosen for her, looking contrite when her father admonished her, galloping around the estate on her horse and lingering at the stable with Pad. Tommy thinks it’s a blissful life she’s left, but even this boy can see the rebel in the woman he has befriended.

Throughout those days Pad often lies marooned in his cot. The seasickness is terrible for him, while Charlotte hardly feels the transition from land to water. Sometimes she wonders if Pad’s real sickness is the knowledge of what he has done, leaving all he knew behind, and worry about what might lie ahead.

“They’re such little waves,” she pleads, but he only turns his head and is silent. At night, by a guttering candle, she makes entries in her diary with her best quill, dipping ink from the biggest bottle she’d dared carry.

She flips back the pages of her diary to read the entry made that fateful night after her father had dismissed her and she’d bolted to her bedroom, then scribbles another line onto today’s entry …
The pitched battle I’ve been in for as long as I can remember over the seemliness of my behaviour is behind me now
… and closes the diary.

As one week stretches into two, then to three, then a month, Charlotte is determined to insulate her exhilaration from Pad’s continuing illness, the monotony of the voyage, the worry about the future. The rations begin to diminish in the fifth week and ambitious weevils and fuzzy blue mould appear in the flour and biscuits. She feels as grimy and bedraggled as the gloomy men around her, but her joy is dimmed only a little sitting by the ships rail where, wind and water offering refreshing relief, she takes her diary from her pocket and glances through the entries.

A
BLACK HORIZON
. They’d had squalls and days of grey skies and rain, but Charlotte had seen nothing like the storm clouds that lie ahead, as though the sky is disfigured by bruises, black, yellow and purple. Standing at her usual spot at the rail she’s astonished by the sudden change. The jagged edges of storm clouds ahead meet the white-capped water as though one could become the other at any moment.

“Shorten sails!” the captain calls. “Stiggs, get below with three men and fasten loose cargo!”

“Aye, sir,” the first mate shouts.

“Have the passengers go below now!”

“Aye, sir!”

Salt spray stings her eyes and soaks her cloak as Charlotte struggles to the hatch and steps her way down the wet rungs. She hurries to Pad and is surprised to find him sitting up.

“It must be the little waves that bother me,” he says with a smile. “I feel right enough now.”

Charlotte stuffs their few possessions into her calico bag and ties it securely to the hook on the wall. The stomping of boots plays like a drumbeat on the deck overhead while the livestock squeal and mewl their terror. Anxiety is as thick as fog. She and Pad settle by the stovepipe in the centre of the double row of berths, rubbing their hands together for consoling warmth. She looks back to her berth as though there might be some comfort hanging there in the calico bag. Her keepsakes are so few—a volume of poetry, her well-worn copy of
Clarissa
, her diary, the combs she’d worn in her hair when she’d been presented to the county magistrate on her recent birthday, her sketch of the garden she could see from her childhood bedroom window—flotsam of a life far from the bowels of the creaking ship. A man vomits onto the floor beside her and the latrines tip as the ship rolls and their contents ease out accordingly. She gathers her skirts around her, trying to keep them out of the slop.

Half the night passes. She may have dozed. She opens her eyes to find Pad crouched beside her, his eyes wide. She places a hand on his brow: he’s not right enough now. There is a fever there perhaps. Small wonder. Confined to his bunk since they came aboard, and, with the vomit and night soil sloshing about,
contagion might well spread to everyone. She wipes his brow with her kerchief, he leans his head on her shoulder gratefully. Pad is not himself, she knows. When she’d fallen in love with him, she saw him as a man who knew what to do in any circumstance, who calmed the household by his very presence.

The ship lurches forward. The wind grows louder. Tommy must have escaped his duty with the captain because he appears on the ladder, clutching at the rungs. At the bottom, he stumbles over and huddles on the other side of her for a time without speaking.

“Will we die?” he finally whispers.

“No, we will not.” Charlotte makes her voice sharp, impatient, but she is not entirely certain he is wrong. The permanent frown on Tommy’s brow reminds her of the stable boy, Jack, who helped with her father’s horses. Jack’s grimace disappeared when he was with the animals, and Charlotte would sometimes find him curled up against the haunches of a cow, asleep, his face as tranquil as that of a baby.

“Let’s go and visit the livestock,” she proposes to Tommy, then whispers to Pad, “I’m going to go with the boy, to see the cows. It may calm him.”

In the holding pen, they find trembling animals that look as if they might stampede into the raging sea if they weren’t confined by the barrier leading to the main deck. A sound comes from a heap of straw, hard to hear over the roar of water and the screech of the ship’s timbers—a litter of newborn kittens, meowing for their absent mother.

“Where’s Lucifer?” Charlotte shouts. She had believed the ship’s black cat to be a male, but this was not the case.

“She’s not here,” Tommy calls, kneeling beside the kittens.

“Look!” Charlotte kneels beside him. “Look. They’re as frightened as we are.”

She could imagine the captain would not look kindly on more cats. But here was a cause that could distract a frightened, lonely boy.

“Help me, Tommy! We must hide these kittens or the captain will surely toss them overboard.”

Together they carry the litter into a dark recess of the stalls, where their mother would easily find them later. Tommy would have to occupy his mind with finding a way to keep them out of the captain’s sight.

Charlotte returns to her post by the stove, leaving Tommy to tend to the kittens. Save for the few men whose job is to steer the vessel through the storm, the rest of the passengers and crew have taken refuge in the living quarters—a euphemism for this collection of stacked wooden cots, she thinks.

The rain is pounding the ship now, splashing into the lower deck through the leaky hatch and sending all the passengers to the centre where Charlotte has staked out her spot by the stove. The wind picks up, howling like nothing she had ever heard. Huddled by the stove with men she would rather not talk to, she takes her diary from her pocket, looks through her recent entries.

May 25—I was awakened last night by the most awful noise. It sounded as though someone or something was crying for help outside the so-called living quarters. The wailing went on for several minutes. Then it was quiet, save the sound of a few men busy with a chore. When I got up this morning and went on deck, I found out it was the slaughter of a sheep—the poor thing bleated so pathetically. Pad thinks I’m being spoiled and dramatic
.

June 2—One can’t very well celebrate the halfway point when one doesn’t have a way of knowing where in the middle of all this water the ship is—but Captain Skinner says we’re moving very well
.

Suddenly, as if an explosion had ripped across the bow, the storm strikes the ship and the souls on board with such punishment Charlotte wonders if they will survive. She certainly cannot write in the diary now—it’s all she can do to stay upright. The fire goes out in the stove. The oil lamps in the hold dim and die, leaving them all in darkness. She clings to the pole the stove is lashed to and Pad clings to her. The ship heaves and pitches. Someone near her vomits. Someone else is crying. Most of them are praying. This is as close to hell as she can imagine. The waiting feels like an eternity—hovering in the dark, clinging to anything that is tied down. Waiting, waiting for the abatement.