A Dark and Promised Land

Thraciae multo cum amore

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.

One by one they are helped through the opening, eyes averted from their skirts. As Rose struggles through the narrow way, several helping hands push against her buttocks; she resists an urge to kick.

The storm that had blown them ashore is unabated, throwing freezing rain and sleet, wrapping the ship in a ghostly integument of ice. Shards as white as polished bone jut from the ship's spars and rigging, occasionally snapping away to go spinning into the darkness. Sea spray showers them; a boom and roar surround them.

The nets had been flung over the rail and men crawl like black insects down the ship's rolling hull. The boats had been launched, but all are destroyed in the mill of rocks and surf.

The ship heels again and several women slide down the icy deck. Rose grabs for the fife rail; clutching a nest of coiled ropes, she digs at the deck with her feet. Her grip slips on the ice so she drops away, tobogganing into the mass of bodies below her.

Crushed among the cursing, shoving crowd, Rose pushes to her feet, bruised and breathing hard. She sees her father, his head and neck protruding from the hatch like a mounted stag's head. He pulls himself through, and, half-crouching, slides toward her.

“Are you hurt?” he asks.

“No. Father, I do not think so. But I have lost my shoes.”

“We must get off this damnable ship. All is lost.”

“How shall we do that? Must we swim?”

They look around. High above the deck, torn sheets of canvas stream away, howling and cracking like grey phantoms. Lines have snapped and blocks are swinging; one flies out of the darkness and collides against the back of a man's head with the sound of a melon being broken open. He flips over the rail, black suit flapping like the torn wings of a bat. The last Rose sees of him, he is floating face down and spread-eagled like some kind of nightmarish starfish, drifting with the ebbing current out to sea.

The wreck of one of the
Intrepid
's boats clutches to nearby rocks, her mast cutting a steep arc with each incoming wave. As Rose watches, the little White Ensign fluttering from her masthead rips and flies away into the dark unknown of Rupert's Land.

“What kind of land is this, what has snow an' sleet in the middle of August?” asks a tousled and coatless young Orcadian; he runs his tongue over thick lips and stares at the white line of surf that marks the shore so close and yet so far away.

“It's home, lad, and it's bloody time we got there,” Lachlan says. “Over you go, lass.”

Rose swings her legs over, and her feet drum against the hull, searching for the netting. Lachlan follows her. The youth watches a moment and climbs after them. “If I'm to die tonight, I'll die among me own,” he says.

They edge down the swinging netting, though what they are to do when they reach the churning water, Rose cannot imagine. Black waves leap at them, spinning with foam. The wind tears at her skirts, threatening to peel her away; the netting is icy and cuts into her numb, red hands. Her mouth tastes of pennies and salt.

They are almost at the water when the youth slips with a shriek and falls into the sea. They watch his head bob on the surface for a moment and disappear. Lachlan curses under his breath. Rose feels his eyes on her, but cannot bring herself to meet them, afraid of seeing her own terror reflected in his gaze. His cold hand encircles her own.

All about them people fall in the water — man, woman, child. The body of a swaddled infant — born on the sea — bobs beneath Rose like a piece of driftwood, its tiny, red fingers curled up under its chin, eyes squinted shut beneath the water. A few bubbles escape from its nostrils as it floats away. The night rolls with the cries of the terrified and the dying.

Rose turns away, closes her eyes and leans against the frigate's hull. She can feel the grinding of the reef, and it reminds her of a time she rested her hand on a dog's head as it chewed on an old knucklebone. She follows that thread back to some comforting memory. The dog gnawing its bone, the singular warmth of her aunt's massive hearth. The smell of peat smoke and brewing tea; pleasing chatter of old women.

“Rose? … Rose?”

She holds her eyes tight, her hands clutched to the rope as if it is all that keeps her sane. An old trick of hers, to be and not be, to remove herself from some difficult experience by fleeing the present and walking down safe, familiar roads in her mind. She sees flowers in a moonlit garden, a star shining through a petal. At the smallest gesture of breeze, the flower bobs in a semaphore of flashing starlight.

“Rose!”She turns toward Lachlan.

“Get away from the ship as soon as you can,” he shouts at her. “Keep away from the rocks. It is not far to shore.” He kisses her forehead. “Now!”

Grasping one another's hand, they abandon the netting and fall into the sea.

Her lungs explode with a gasp. She kicks for the surface, but cannot inhale. The coldness of the water wraps itself around her, crushing out her breath. Waves carry over her head. Thrashing on the surface, her mind swirls with sharp lights. She is lifted by a wave, and her hand strikes something rough and hard.

She climbs onto the rock. The weeds are soft and slippery, the barnacles cutting; it feels like climbing into a mouth. Shaking, she sits down, wraps her bleeding arms around her knees, and looks at the dying ship. Smoke pours from an open hatch. With a sharp crack, the forward mast splits: ropes fly and bronze hoops burst. The great spar swoons forward, slicing through the clustered people in the water, dark heads bobbing like kelp floats.

Wind whips Rose's wet hair across her face. She pinches a fold of skin on the back of her hand, but feels nothing. Her shaking is uncontrollable.

At the next wave, she allows herself to be swept off the rock. As before, the coldness of the water seizes her, but she does not fight it this time, accepting just a gasp of air, the smallest of breaths. She kicks toward shore. Her skirt encumbers her, and she attempts to pull it off in the water. Her body has become an unresponsive lump; the fabric tangles about her feet. She chokes, sinking; her legs drag. Her feet find the bottom and she thrusts away the tangling cloth; wearing only her shift she climbs onto the beach, water running off her and darkening the pure whiteness of the snow.