Mrs. Cook Read online

  ‘Can I come in with you, Mama? I’m feeling a little sick.’

  Mama groaned, as though she were feeling a little sick herself. ‘Too much pudding, that’s all,’ she murmured. ‘You’re fortunate to have a bed of your own, many children don’t. Off you go.’

  Elizabeth did not feel fortunate. At the Sheppards’ she slept with Sarah. They giggled under the blankets, and sometimes, if they were feeling sick, or if there was a bad storm and they were scared, Mrs Sheppard let them come in with her.

  Elizabeth dawdled by the bed, hoping Mama would say, ‘In you hop, little bunny.’ But all that came out of Mama’s mouth was sleep breath.

  Elizabeth crept back to her bed. She wished Mama would explain about the breeze, the fizz and all the things that perplexed her. Water, for example. If you took a shovelful of soil out of the ground it left a hole, but if you took a cup of water out of a bucket, it didn’t. Mama’s Frost Fair picture was printed on the ice, and if ice was made of water, why couldn’t you make a mark on water? Elizabeth had tried it with a letter tile, leaving it on for a very long time, but when she lifted it off again there was no E on the water, not even a trace.

  Elizabeth felt herself sinking into sleep. Then she was floating down the river on a letter tile. She didn’t find it at all odd that everyone else was in a boat. She was afraid that she might collide with one of them but she never did. In all the crowdedness of the riverside Elizabeth saw a little white bird. No, not a bird, a handkerchief, and it was Mama who was waving it. How wonderful to see Mama waiting for her. The tile floated towards the wharf, Elizabeth held her arms out ready for Mama to lift her off, but then, dismay. Mama wasn’t waving but shooing her away.

  When Elizabeth woke up the pillow was damp and her face wet. Why did Mama shoo her away? Why did she leave her on the letter tile? Was it because Mama had become a Blackburn? Elizabeth wanted to go to Mama’s bed but she couldn’t bear it if Mama shooed her away again. She felt so lonely, the only Batts in the alehouse. But she knew where the other one was.

  Elizabeth put a coat on over her nightgown and tucked Sam Bird into the pocket. Mama had warned Elizabeth about going outside, said there were people who might try to take advantage of a little girl wandering about on her own. But Elizabeth would not be wandering. If anyone looked like they might cut off her hair to sell to the wigmaker, Elizabeth would run very fast, the way she and Sarah did one day when the bull got out of the pen.

  Elizabeth crept downstairs. Although the alehouse was empty and quiet, it still had the same bad smell. She tried to open the front door but it was locked. She went to the back but it was locked too. She was trapped. Elizabeth started to panic, rattling at the bolt, trying to open the door.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  Elizabeth jumped. She turned to see the looming figure of a man on the stairs, lantern in one hand and a big club in the other. She wanted to run but couldn’t move.

  ‘Elizabeth?’ Mr Blackburn said, coming over to her. ‘What are you doing out of bed? Are you off somewhere?’ Her heart was thumping so much Elizabeth thought it was going to burst through her skin. ‘We’ll have to send you back to the Sheppards’ if you won’t stay put. You don’t want that, do you?’

  Yes, she did want that. She wanted very much to be back in Crowcher’s Yard with Sarah and all the Sheppards. Mr Blackburn was still holding the club, waiting for Elizabeth’s answer.

  ‘No,’ she said in a small voice.

  JOHN WALKER’S HOUSE

  Mr John Walker, shipowner of Whitby, had liked the look of the boy from Staithes and had agreed to take him on as an apprentice. The indenture of apprenticeship was the first legal document James had ever signed. He was careful not to get blots of ink on the page as he agreed ‘not to play dice, cards or bowls, not to haunt taverns or playhouses, not to commit fornication, and not to contract matrimony’. For his part, John Walker was to instruct the apprentice in ‘the trade, mystery, and occupation of a mariner; and for the period of apprenticeship find and provide meat, drink, washing and lodging’.

  Now it was winter, the end of the twelve days of Christmas, and James was lodged, with the other apprentices, in Mr Walker’s house in Grape Lane. The attic was a big room extending the length of the house, but crowded enough when all seventeen boys were in from the sea. James was eighteen and already six foot tall and although the attic was high-roofed in the middle, he soon learnt to pay attention to the rafters.

  In a corner, away from the palliasses where the apprentices slept, James sat at the small table which Mrs Prowd, the housekeeper, had kindly provided after she’d found him sitting on the steps one night trying to study. Candlelight flickered over the book Mr Walker had lent him. ‘You must be the master’s pet,’ called one of the apprentice boys from his palliasse. ‘He ne’er gave nought of us a book.’ James could feel his blood rise at the taunt. This particular boy had been trying to rile him all day. James was old for a new apprentice, older than the other boys, and he wearied of their childish games, but he did not want to put himself apart. He spent twenty-four hours of the day with them, splicing ropes, learning the rigging and running of the ship, and at night all of them sleeping side by side in the attic. Shipwork was teamwork.

  ‘It’s just a book of navigation.’

  ‘Hole Haven, Shell Haven and Mucking Creek. Tilbury, Graves-end and Northfleet,’ the boy started shouting out the rhyme. ‘Gray’s, Greenhithe and Purfleet,’ the others joined in. ‘Erith, Rainham and Bugby’s Hole. Greenwich and Limehouse, and into the Pool.’ That was all the navigation they needed to sail up the Thames to London. There were a few more chuckles then gradually the banter died down.

  Though Mr Walker’s copy of English Pilot was old and well thumbed, it was full of mathematical instruction for navigation and surveying, pilotage for various English ports and harbours, and local winds. As James pored over the book, he did the mathematics in his head, remembering Mr Rowland and his hogsheads of tobacco. Mr Walker would not want to see the workings, he was happy enough that James showed interest and promise.

  Surveying—that was something, how maps were made. He had never imagined at the Postgate school or even at Mr Sander-son’s that mathematics could be used to trace the world. The sailors’ rhymes were good enough to go where others had been, to places that had names. Aye, but to make a map! The old salts from Whitby were familiar with every inch of the coast, had the map in their heads, knew every course they should steer. But the tiller wasn’t the only instrument; you could navigate with the quill. In James’s small bag of belongings was the quill that he had made at school, wrapped in a cloth. That feather had felt the winds of the earth, had travelled across the Atlantic Ocean.

  Through the creaks and sighs of the house, James heard the snores and snuffles of the other boys. Occasionally one would cry out in his dream and wake fitfully. Below them, Mr and Mrs Walker and their children were sleeping peacefully in their beds, and Mrs Prowd and the servants. Except for Mr Skottowe’s, the house in Grape Lane was the biggest James had ever been in. There were all sorts of things that caught his attention. A writing desk in the office, with drawers and pigeonholes which held important documents and papers; straight-backed chairs, looking glasses in some of the rooms, not for vanity, but to reflect the light of the candles in the brass candlesticks either side. The timber floors of the house were devoid of carpets and scrubbed to a spotless white. In one room was a clock which stood taller than James himself. He was curious about it. It had only one hand. It was a twenty-four hour clock made by Robert Hender-son from Scarborough, Mr Walker had told him when he had signed his indentures.

  James leant toward the chimney in the attic which radiated warmth from the fireplaces below. He closed English Pilot and snuffed the candle between finger and thumb. He raised his arms and felt the rafters made from old ships’ timbers. The Quakers wasted nothing. Then James quietly stepped down to the landing and looked out through the big round window to the shipyards across the river. He saw the stacks of
timber, and the skeletons that would become flat-bottomed cats used in the coal trade. In the night the river was black as treacle. James could hear the lap of the tide. He came back up the stairs and curled up on his palliasse, the rhyme that the boys had recited dancing in his head. The Pool of London—he could hardly wait to make the voyage.

  EXECUTION DOCK STAIRS

  James came to London in the evening of a lengthening spring day. The colliers, as many as two hundred, gathered in the wide mouth of the Thames estuary, waiting for the tide and a favourable wind that would take them upriver to the Pool of London. James was below deck while the colliers waited. He couldn’t see but he could hear the lap of the tide against the timbers of the Freelove.

  Along with the other apprentices, James had helped load the coal, shovelling it into the hold, breathing in its black dust. The weather was good and they’d done the journey in five days. He’d stood watch, a senior member of his team ringing a bell each time the half-hour sandglass emptied. They kept a count of them, waiting for the eighth bell that would signal the end of the watch. The journey had been hard work with little sleep, yet James was exhilarated by it.

  James took every opportunity for learning. He observed the leadsman in the forechains swing the length of line with knots at regular intervals, and the leaden drogue at the end, watched the line being reeled in again and heard the shout: ‘Six knots!’

  They had barely left Whitby when James went aloft for the first time at sea, a topman called Ned climbing behind him. James looked up to the tip of the mast, a hundred feet or so in the air. He thought of the great tree at Marton, the way he had found one foothold after the other till he’d finally reached the top.

  Those apprentices who were not working gathered around, watching and waiting. ‘Mind you don’t heave your dinner all over us,’ one of them called as James grabbed hold of the ratlines, feeling the tar-covered rope under his grip and thinking about the rough texture of tree bark. He had hardly climbed two or three steps before he realised that this was an entirely different proposition to climbing a tree. The heavy rope seemed suddenly flimsy but James kept going, feeling the increasing sway of the ratlines the further he went.

  About halfway up he stopped, overcome with dizziness. His friends below had their hands to their mouths shouting something he couldn’t hear. ‘Look at your hands,’ he heard Ned’s voice. He was gripping the ropes so hard his hands were almost welded to them. Beneath the grime of coal dust his knuckles stood out white.

  ‘Keep going.’ Ned was directly behind him. James swallowed the dizziness, prised one hand off the rope and reached up, thinking only of the way he had climbed at Marton, thinking only of the tree. Then his leg found the next foothold.

  ‘That’s it, all the way to the top.’ Men had fallen from aloft, to their death, but James promised himself he would not be one of them. Up he went, into the sky.

  He was almost to the yardarm. ‘Now lean backwards and hoist yourself onto the platform.’ James did as he was instructed, trusting the rope, trusting Ned’s voice, trusting himself. ‘That’s it, lad. You’re there.’

  The ship pitched and rolled but Ned was with him now and the two of them bent over the spar and untied the knots holding the canvas. James saw the minuscule figures on deck looking up but he was in a different world. A gull passed not two feet from him. He heard its cry and saw the way its wings caught the wind and soared. Saw its legs tucked underneath its body. James was in the air with it, in the element of birds.

  ‘All done, lad,’ said Ned. ‘I can see you’ve taken to life aloft. Aye, it’s a fine day for it. It’ll be a different matter in the squalls and rain. When it’s freezing cold and you have to chip ice off the shrouds. C’mon, time to go back down.’

  They descended backwards, James looking up at the mast pointing into the sky, wondering how to determine the arc of its sway. A mathematical problem Mr Rowland had never set for him.

  James thought of that moment up in the spacious sky when the tide brought the convoy of colliers upriver. The Thames was so thick with ships and boats of every kind that its murky waters were only just visible. There were ships from across the Atlantic, from Jamaica and the West Indies, bringing tobacco, indigo, cotton and corn. Sugar, rum, coffee and ginger. There were North Sea cats like the Freelove bringing coal; lighters which took the coal from the ship to the wharf. Brigs, sloops, barges and all manner of small craft. Behind it all lay London, the river and its traffic part of the great city’s fabric.

  Through the grid of masts were labyrinths of narrow streets, beggars, thieves, and ladies of the town. Every second house on the waterfront seemed to be an alehouse or tavern. Beyond would be the fine buildings, wide thoroughfares carrying lords and ladies in carriages. In the distance, against the pale sky, James made out the dome of St Paul’s. No-one else in James’s family had ever travelled this far, had ever been to London, and now he was here. He hadn’t even set foot on solid ground yet he was swept up in the excitement of the metropolis. It buzzed in the very air.

  Through all the busyness on shore, James’s eyes settled on one thing. Near a set of steps that led up from the river, a hanged man was being taken down from the gibbet. ‘Execution Dock,’ said Ned. ‘They hang there over the river till three tides have washed over them. An example should any of us seamen get a notion to go pirating or smuggling. Captain Kidd was hanged from that very gibbet.’ James watched the body being dumped on a cart and wheeled away. ‘But don’t be dwelling on the dead,’ his companion went on. ‘There’s plenty of life to be had in London. Once we come ashore. But the coal goes first.’

  When the Freelove had called into Yarmouth, Captain Jefferson had forwarded by land the official papers to the agent in London, who then set wheels in motion—arranging a buyer for the coal and organising the unloading of it, so that everything was done with as much haste as possible to avoid delays that cost money. The delivery of coal was the object of the journey and that was uppermost in the mind of the captain, not furnishing a holiday in London or a tour of its fleshpots for the seamen. Not that you had to go on a tour to find ladies of the town, Ned told him. They came looking for you. Thronging like a pack of seagulls round the docks of the riverside, their beady eyes on the lookout for tasty morsels such as a seaman with a pocket full of wages. Pounce on him before he had a chance to do the alchemist’s trick of turning silver into ale.

  ‘Here’s the lighter heading our way,’ Ned pointed out.

  The river was so full of traffic that James was surprised craft could move at all, but the vessels did inch their way along, accompanied by much cursing and shaking of fists and manoeuvring of oars. Eventually the lighter carrying a gang of coal heavers, bristling with shovels, made its way alongside the Freelove. The heavers came aboard, at least ten of them, men with faces as hard as their muscles, bringing with them, in the soup of smells, the strong stale odour of sweated ale.

  They wasted no time erecting wooden platforms from the hold to the deck; nimble work it was, from the heavy-built men as well as those sinewy as scrawny chickens. Then they began shovelling. James heard the crunch, the impact of metal on coal, as he shovelled alongside them. The bracing salt-sprinkled air that had filled his lungs for the past five days was replaced by the grit of coal dust. He worked methodically, saying nothing, thinking he’d rather be back shovelling muck, at least that was softer, and though you breathed the smell, at least you didn’t breathe in particles of it. As the heavers worked, grunting and cursing, the smell of their sweat grew so strong that James could taste it in the back of his throat.

  A boat arrived with pints of ale, rowed across from the alehouse, the price of which would be taken out of the heavers’ pay. It was thirsty work and they drank at the rate of a pint an hour. Sweat dripped onto the coal and into the men’s boots, and onto each other as shovel-loads of coal flew through the air. James worked away, as hard as the heavers, figuring the quicker the job was done, the quicker ashore. He put his back into it, as he did with ever
ything. Unlike this gang of heavers, in a year or so, when his apprenticeship was finished, he would no longer have to shovel coal. In the darkness of the hold he tasted his own salty sweat as it ran down his face, and saw drops of it glisten on the lumps of coal on the shovel. Where would that sweat be carried to? Would it find its way into the fires of a lord or a poor man? Would it be used to steam-power a pumping engine or sail away to the lands beyond the Atlantic? With these thoughts, and with his arms and his back, and the arms and the backs of all of them, the mountain of coal became a hillock, a small mound and eventually it was no more.

  When James’s feet landed on the slipperiness of Execution Dock Stairs, he felt like Gulliver dropped by a giant orc into the marketplace of a new and exotic land. An old woman with no teeth but a loud voice yelled, ‘Cabbages, cabbages, fresh from the gardens.’ They may have been fresh from the gardens some days ago but presently they wore the same film of coal dust as everything else.

  A man with a tray of oysters was deftly opening six of them for a customer, holding the creatures in a leather-gloved hand and prising the shells apart with a knife that could cause trouble. ‘Oi! I’ll ’ave you,’ he roared, bringing his knife down between the fingers of a small hand reaching up for an oyster. The hand disappeared immediately and a young boy scrambled his way through the crowd.

  ‘Shine your shoes, mister?’ offered a voice somewhere else. James kept his hands firmly in his pockets, so that other hands couldn’t find their way in. It seemed the only place free of the crowd was the gibbet, not six feet away from the Stairs, empty now, waiting for its next lodger.

  ‘Move along there, lad,’ said Ned, coming up behind him. ‘Push your way through and don’t pay any mind to what’s for sale,’ he added as two ladies of the town appeared from nowhere, thrusting themselves at the newly arrived sailors, giving off a whiff of gin as they laughed saucily and made cow’s eyes.