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Cover
Dedication
Thraciae multo cum amore
Chapter One
Her father calls to Rose from the other side of the door, asking if she is ready. She tells him that she will be there in a moment. She hears shouts and the clatter of running feet in the passage. With a sigh, she arranges her hair as best she can with the cracked and hazy glass.
She is twenty-one and thinned by their voyage; her hair is the colour of cedar, the Pict or Norman ghost in her bones. A smattering of freckles. Full lips, almond-shaped face, the beginning of parentheses lines about a wide mouth. A brown birthmark below her left nipple and on her thigh above her left knee. The possessor of a fine Celtic courage, her father often claiming her to be a descendent of Boudica.
She looks around at the tiny cabin; her home for the many weeks it has taken to cross the north Atlantic. There is little to collect, nothing to leave behind. It is as if her presence here never occurred, and she wonders how something of such importance can show so little evidence.
She has tried to be thankful. After all, the rest of the ship’s passengers are crowded together in the hold like slaves. She thinks of her small room as a womb, a safe place from which she will emerge into a new life, but too many times she has awakened in total darkness to a smell like damp coffinwood. Her aroused imagination had thought the groaning and pitching of the ship felt like being lowered into a grave, and so she has spent many nights haunting the abandoned foredeck, querying frosty stars as to what it all means.
Dishevelled bed, rusty chamberpot. Black pods of rat dung in the corners. There really is nothing else, her one small case having already been removed. She reaches out and her hand traces a familiar path over the wall, fingering the carved prayers and incantations left by scores of previous passengers. One in particular she is drawn to, carved like scrimshaw in flowing letters. The first week aboard she had discovered the name Malvolio carved above her bed. Malvolio. She wonders at the wit of the one who left it there: both foreboding and melancholy, but uplifting in its unexpected reference to art. It had become a friend to her. She will miss Malvolio. Pounding again on the door, and it rattles in its frame.
In the passage she meets her father, Lachlan, anxious, with a guttering lantern. The deep shadows on his face make him look like an ape. “Have you spoken to the captain?” she asks.
“The fool has no idea where we are,” he says. “Nor how long the tempest will carry on. But we must be prepared to leave at a moment’s notice.” The ship lurches and Lachlan steadies himself against a wall. Rose hurries to take his arm.
“Careful, Father. Oh, what a horrible noise!” The wind that started that morning as a gentle hum had become a full, demented chorus. Along with the wind came the waves, with the ship’s motion making moving about treacherous. “Perhaps you should sit down?”
At that moment, a seaman runs up the passage behind them, chased by a cold wind. “Pardon, luv,” he says as he pushes past and disappears down the passage, his bare feet slapping dark wet footprints on the weathered wood.
Rose recognizes the man, a youth from South Ronaldsay, who wanted to “see the world,” as he had whispered to her while they struggled together in a secret closet. His handsome face and wit had convinced Rose to offer her own landscape for him to explore. “Oh, darling, ye have such lovely tits,” he exclaimed hoarsely, burying his face in her breasts. She smiles at the memory of his naïveté, and when they were done, his fumbling proposal for marriage.
“Insolent man,” Lachlan grumbles.
“Please, Father,” Rose says. Detecting an irritated tone in her voice, Lachlan looks into her face. “Are you angry with me, daughter?”
Rose hesitates, recalls the past several weeks: foul water, infested bread, and the unimaginable reek of hundreds of people living in the ship’s belly. Rampant cholera, the dead unceremoniously tossed overboard with a mumbled incantation. During the long nights, she had often cried angry tears for the civilization left behind.
“I am fine,” she replies. “Or would be if this ship would cease its awful tossing.” At that moment they feel a new motion: a kind of shuddering and tearing sensation that makes Rose gasp. After so many weeks, all aboard are keenly tuned to the frigate and sense the loss of the rudder.
“My word, what has just happened?”
“Come, let us join the others,” Lachlan replies. “Quickly, now.”
A rat scurries along a wall; it pauses and sniffs the fetid air, whiskers shimmering in the light of a dying lantern. Timbers creak and another rat emerges from a gap in the bulkhead. They curl about each other. Soon the larger mounts the other and begins drumming. The ship lifts. And falls.
With a great cry, the oak timbers erupt beneath them and the black water of Hudson’s Bay bursts into the cabin. Swimming, swimming, the rats are swept away.
Above them, a crowd of colonists and Company men fight their way to the companionway. Again, the Intrepid falls, shattering her backbone; a cold wind blows through as the sea pours into the ship’s bowels. Scores fall down the companionway ladder.
Rose had not moved, nor had her father or the rest of her people. They were Orcadians, phlegmatic by nature and long used to living under the shadow of death by sea. Most of them had retreated against a bulkhead, shadows from the swinging lantern rolling over them. Those scrabbling in the companionway are young employees of the Company and Highland peasants fleeing the Sutherland and Strathnaver Clearances. Many of the women are on their knees and wet-black rats flow around them, following their prayers skyward.
Pressed against the rusty barrel of a fat carronade, Rose sways with the death agonies of the ship. She feels the cold of the iron seep through her skirt and braces herself with her hands, feeling the wet, slate surface of the corroded metal. Her heart hammers.
Hammocks strung like spiderwebs fill the air between carronades. It had been a long day of rain, sleet, and snow, the deck above running with cold water. Rose stares at a drop forming itself on an oak beam; it swells until fat and pregnant, falling into a silver puddle at her feet, a puddle alive with the tremors of the ship. Another wave pushes the dying vessel farther onto the rocks, and the puddle slides into her shoes.
Jammed by the crowd in the companionway, a Highlander begins setting about his fellows with a cudgel. The violence reminds Rose of the time a stoat invaded her father’s dovecot. Escape that way is impossible.
An Orkneyman removes his hat and looks around; he points a thick finger. “There,” he grunts. In the shadows between two beams is a small butterfly deck hatch, an insignificant break in the overhead timbers. Salt fogs the glass; the brass is green.
He tries it, but time has frozen it shut. With a curse, he grabs a rammer from beside one of the carronades and swings it against the hatch, spraying glass. Reaching through, he fights with the corroded metal, lifting the hatch open with a shriek. The men stand aside to allow the women through.
