Hannah: Daughters of the Sea #1
of the
Sea
SCHOLASTIC PRESS / NEW YORK
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.
—William Shakespeare,
The Tempest
Chapter 4 Number 18 Louisburg Square
Chapter 14 “Know Your Place, Scullery Girl”
Chapter 18 Girl In The Shadows
Chapter 21 Get Out, Hannah! Get Out!
Chapter 22 The Tail In The Wave
T
HEY SAY THE SEA
makes some people sick. Its slow, billowing waves swelling beneath a ship make stomachs heave. But for Hannah Albury, this was unimaginable. It was land that made her sick. Sick near to dying.
She would have never left the sea had it not been for Miss Pringle at the orphanage—The Boston Home for Little Wanderers. How she detested that woman, with her thin, piercing voice that reminded Hannah of a needle.
The sickness started with Go Forth Day.
Go Forth
was the name that The Home for Little Wanderers called the day when girls who had reached their four-teenth year learned where they were to be sent. It was a day halfway between a graduation and an eviction.
The girls were considered too old to continue living off the charity of others and had to start earning their keep in the world. That day had arrived a year before for Hannah and a dozen other girls, but a scarlet fever epidemic had postponed it, giving them a reprieve. Now the scarlet fever was long gone, and it was time for them to leave.
The girls had all passed their fifteenth birthdays and sat waiting with this year’s fourteen-year-olds to be called, one by one, into Miss Pringle’s office and learn their destinies.
They sat in alphabetical order in a row of chairs. There were two
A
s who came before Hannah: Lucy Abbott and Tilly Adams. The girls waited, whispering in excited voices to one another. Except for Hannah, who sat locked in silence.
Until this moment, the girls had indulged in a range of fantasies about who they really were, how some grievous mistake or cruel twist of fate had caused them, quite by accident, to become orphans. In their own minds, they had been products of wealthy, stylish families. Perhaps even royal families, as Sadie Crawford persisted in believing. Sadie was convinced
that her own mother was a princess from France, or sometimes Russia. When the girls went forth, they imagined that some of these errors would be redressed.
“Just wait and see, Bessie,” said Sadie, who sat next to Hannah in alphabetical order. “If I get sent up to one of those fine homes on Commonwealth Avenue, they will surely see that I have refinements most uncommon. And if they have a son, he might fall in love with me and then I can seek out my true mother because he will have enough money to help me find her—”
“Do you remember Martha Gilmore, Sadie?” Bessie responded, lost in her own inventions. “Well, Martha, she got a job in a hat shop down on Washington Street, and one day, the day she turned eighteen, actually, a man came in to buy a hat for his wife, and guess what?”
“What?” Sadie said.
“He fell in love with her and he divorced his wife and married her. Martha was so lovely and refined that he couldn’t help himself. He saw that she was much more than a mere salesgirl.”
“Divorce?” Sadie gasped. “Oh, I wouldn’t want anything like that—royalty doesn’t divorce.” Sadie turned to Hannah. “Don’t you agree, Hannah?”
There was a burst of giggles down the row of chairs.
“Why would you ask Hannah?” someone whispered.
Why indeed?
Hannah thought. Hannah was not one to indulge in the favorite pastime of the girls at the home. These reveries of alternate lives fed the girls, nourished them, gave them hope. Hannah was not inclined toward dreams.
Lucy Abbott had just come out of Miss Pringle’s office. She was glowing.
“Where are you to go?” A very tiny girl, Cornelia Ellis, jumped up.
“There’s an opening for a scullery girl at that fancy gentlemen’s restaurant on Winter Street. If I do well, I might be able to work at the hatcheck desk. You know, where the men leave off their hats and coats.”
“Hats! Hats! That’s the answer!” Bessie exclaimed. “What did I tell you about Martha Gilmore! Oh,
you’re on your way, Lucy! You always said you thought your father was a true Bostonian!”
“Yes, yes, high born, I think. Maybe a wool merchant.” Lucy nodded.
“What better place to meet him than that fancy restaurant?”
Hannah settled back in her chair. She had no such thoughts, no such dreams of her parents. High born, low born, or anything else. It all seemed out of the realm of possibility that she had connections to anyone. She couldn’t even imagine what to hope for in terms of her placement, and she felt her heart sink a bit as she watched Tilly Adams walk through Miss Pringle’s office door. She would be next. Did it really matter where she might go?
But not ten minutes later, Hannah stood before Miss Pringle in stunned silence and marveled at how she could have ever been stupid enough to think that it wasn’t important.
“Rules are rules.” Miss Pringle sat erect behind her desk and sorted some papers that evidently pertained to Hannah. “The board of directors of the home has a policy about children who, upon reaching
the age of fourteen, seem unsuitable for domestic employment—and that you are unsuitable, have no doubts, Hannah. I could no more send you into the home of a Boston family of society”—she pronounced the word “so-sigh-it-tee,” so each syllable had a poisonous little ping to it—“than teach a cow how to fly!”
“But what about a position in a shop or—”
“Don’t interrupt. And, no, you are no more suitable for a shop than a position in a home.”
“Why not?” Hannah burst out.
Miss Pringle’s mouth settled into a firm line and she regarded Hannah with a look that seemed to say
Where should I begin?
“I can read and write better than a lot of the girls here.” Hannah tried to keep her voice firm as her world reeled.
“So, I suppose, you think that you should be a stenographer or a social secretary?”
“Maybe.” Hannah spoke softly, barely concealing her defiance.
“No ‘maybe’ about it. Definitely not! For one thing you would have to be older for such a job. And
despite your writing skills, you are generally rather awkward. We can’t have you going into a Boston home and spilling their dinners and breaking their Wedgwood.” Hannah had no idea what Wedgwood was, but she hadn’t spilled things
that
often. “So there will be no more of this talk. The board says that a child for whom placement cannot be found in Boston must be put on an orphan train.”
“But I thought the whole point was that now that I am fifteen, I am too old to be considered an orphan? That is why the home is putting me out. So how can I be put on an orphan train?” Hannah was pleased with the logic of her argument. Miss Pringle was not.
Her eyes drilled into Hannah. “You see, Hannah,” she barked. “That is precisely the problem. You know no boundaries. You argue, you challenge. Now, how can I send someone like you into a fine home or a decent shop?”
“But I’m not an orphan now. I’m too old.”
“Not in Kansas you aren’t,” Miss Pringle said matter-of-factly and stood up to signal that the interview
had ended. “The next shipment is to depart within a week for Salina, Kansas.”
“Shipment?” Hannah said weakly.
“Yes, shipment of orphans.”
“Is anyone else from the home supposed to go? Will there be others?”
“No. We found suitable placements for them.”
Suitable.
Why was she considered so unsuitable? She hated the word. It was not the first time she had heard it. Miss Pringle used it the most, but the other adults at the home had picked up on it. The domestic arts teacher, Miss Baker, had just said it the other day when Hannah had gone to comfort a newly arrived orphan girl with a fresh warm bun from the kitchen.
“You can’t just barge into the kitchen and take things without asking. That’s most unsuitable, Hannah!”
“Why? She’s hungry,” Hannah had replied.
“To question your elders is also unsuitable,” Miss Eakins, the home’s nurse, who happened to be walking by, had chimed in.
But Hannah now merely took a deep breath and asked Miss Pringle another question. “Is Kansas near the sea, ma’am?”
“Heavens, no! I took you for being brighter than that, child!” Miss Pringle glared at her, then in an acid voice said, “Certainly, not so bright as to match the brightness of your hair!”
The sun streaming through the window had ignited the red highlights of the unpinned hair that tumbled over Hannah’s shoulders like a cataract of flames. It was a peculiarity of her hair that the color changed with the light. On cloudy days drizzling with rain, it appeared dull, a guttering flame wrapped in fog. On a brilliant winter day with the sun reflecting off snow and glistening icicles, her hair was as dazzling as rubies. And if she were near the sea toward dawn or dusk in a gathering of shadows, her hair acquired a slightly greenish cast, like old copper.
In two quick steps, Miss Pringle strode to a bookshelf and fetched an atlas. Opening it to a map of the United States, she stuck her ink-stained index finger
on a spot in the middle and tapped it several times, then snickered. “It’s about as far from any sea as you could get.”
That was when Hannah felt the first strange twinge of the sickness.
A
WEEK LATER
Hannah was aboard the train. She spent her first morning observing her fellow orphan travelers. Some appeared to be her age or older, but these were in the minority. Most were much younger, under ten years old. She wondered if the few who were her age had somehow failed to “go forth” as she had. Several of these young people had boarded the train in New York. Perhaps they, like herself, were deemed unfit to serve as domestics in the grand houses of that city.
She did not hear any fanciful tales, as she had in Boston, of orphan fates twisted away from their true destinies of distinguished families with great fortune. And yet she could not help but notice that all
of the children seemed excited, full of anticipation. One particularly dingy little girl whose skin looked as if it had never seen the light of day spoke with great animation about the “wide country.”
“I hear that there is at least a mile between every house and sometimes more. That’s why they need children to fill up the land.”
“And to work,” said another girl. “They got more cows and chickens out there than people.”
“The work’s not that hard and there is lots of time to play outside. Meadows for picnics and all,” said a plump girl with a band of freckles across her nose.
“Do you know how to milk a cow?” asked another.
“No, but I reckon I can learn fast enough. It can’t be that hard.”
“Maybe we’ll all end up being farmers’ wives.” This caused a great uproar.
“Hey, you!” A girl with curly black hair and bright blue eyes addressed Hannah, who was sitting across the aisle. “You want to be a farmer’s wife?”
“Oh, Maisy!” Her seatmate giggled.
“I don’t think I’m old enough to be anybody’s wife. Farmer or not.” Hannah laughed softly in reply to Maisy.
“Oh, they marry young,” Maisy said. “You just wait. Why, you look old enough to me. How old are you?”
“Fifteen,” Hannah replied.
“A girl at our orphanage ran off with the milkman when she was fourteen,” Maisy went on. “And you’re much prettier than she is.”
“Thank you,” Hannah replied.
“And I bet you’re smarter, too. I saw you reading that newspaper that you found on the floor. See, if you were a farmer’s wife, you could keep track of the crops—write them all down and the price. You do figures?”
“Yes, even a little bit of long division,” Hannah added.
“Well, there you go! You really could be a farmer’s wife, keep all the accounts. I knew you were different the first time I clapped eyes on you when I got on in New York. I said to my best friend, Amy, here, ‘Look at her. Ain’t she a different-looking thing?’” Hannah
was not sure how to respond. It was not as if Maisy was making fun of her, not in the least. There was only kindness in Maisy’s remarks.
“But me,” freckle-faced Polly began, “I think I’d rather be a farmer’s daughter than a wife, because if your father, say, owned a huge cattle ranch, then you’d maybe get a cowboy for a boyfriend. They have big ranches out West and handsome cowboys.”
A bright light suffused Polly’s face and soon a hush fell on the others. All the girls were beginning to construct their Western dreams, their fantasy lives. They were no different from the girls back at The Home for Little Wanderers. And they all felt that this train was carrying them toward something. But Hannah felt she was moving away, farther and farther with each mile that the train devoured the track. It was also right then that the twinges she had first felt in Miss Pringle’s office turned into pain.
Later that same night, somewhere between Pennsylvania and Ohio, Polly looked down at Hannah’s wrists and asked, “What’s that?” Tiny, dark red bumps had appeared where the cuffs of Hannah’s dress
ended. By noon the bumps had spread to her hands and were creeping up her neck.
One of the matrons who was in charge of the children took Hannah into a private compartment and made her take off all her clothes. Her body was a conflagration. The woman inhaled sharply.
“You say you’ve had measles?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, that’s a relief, we don’t want to be bringing a plague to the middle of the country.” Hannah felt a shock course through her entire body. A double shock that she could be the source of a plague and then those awful words “middle of the country.”
“What other symptoms have you had?”
“Symptoms?” Hannah wasn’t sure what the woman meant.
“You know—itching.”
Until the woman mentioned it Hannah hadn’t itched, but suddenly she did. It was the worst in the regions that her combis—her sewn-together chemise and drawers—covered. “I think that if I could take my combis off, it would help.”
“You mean travel without your underwear?” The woman’s eyes widened. She was completely speechless for several seconds. “You mean naked? Are you depraved, child?”
“No, I’m just itchy. It’s only the clothes beneath my dress. I won’t be naked. No one will know.”
“But…but…I’ll know,” the matron sputtered.
“But you won’t tell…I mean, what does it matter?”
The matron’s mouth quivered, and then her thin lips pleated with vertical lines moved, but no sound was forthcoming. It was as if they were feeling their way around the shape of words she could not quite utter.
“I won’t tell anyone,” Hannah said. “Not a soul.”
Finally the matron spoke. “No, you shan’t.” Hannah felt a little worm of panic squirm deep in her gut. “You shall remain in here. In this compartment for the rest of the trip.”
“But it’s so tiny!”
The matron continued to stare at Hannah, saying nothing.
“And what if I have to…you know, go to the privy?” Hannah asked.
“I’ll bring you a pot.”
“But I don’t understand! I won’t be able to talk to any of the others. Why are you punishing me? I’ll wear my combis and itch. I don’t want to be alone.”
“You are infected!”
No, I’m not!
Hannah wanted to scream. But she could feel her own skin drying up and suddenly yearned for the fog-drenched air of Boston, the moist winds coming off the water.
“You better pray this rash doesn’t spread to your face,” the matron snapped. “No one will ever want to adopt you then!” The woman turned and shut the door.
The window in the compartment was much smaller than the one in the passenger section, but it didn’t matter. Hannah didn’t need to look out to feel that she was getting farther and farther away from the ocean.
Matron would come by and set down a tin bowl of food, but Hannah rarely touched it. She had no
appetite. Time ceased to have meaning for her. Although the itching was always present, it was as if there were times when she left her own body, slipped the prickly inferno of her skin, and entered a kind of dream state. With extreme concentration, she could conjure up the feel of the sea wind against her skin.
It was very late one night when the train pulled into a tiny station somewhere out in the middle of the empty plains, and the conductor called out, “Enterprise! Next stop—Salina.”
Hannah knew that she had better get dressed but the very idea of wearing the combis made her itch horribly. She decided to leave them off. When she got up to reach for her other clothes, she noticed that the floor near the pallet and the pallet itself were covered with what looked like sparkling white dust. However, when she stooped down to examine it more closely, she noticed that it was actually small crystals of what appeared to be sugar.
But did they come from me?
she wondered.
Impulsively Hannah scraped up some of the crystals in her palm and then stuck out the tip of her
tongue.
Salt!
Not sugar at all, but definitely salt. How odd! Immediately she noticed a cool vapor on her tongue, accompanied by a tingling sensation. It felt as if the salt crystals were dissolving but leaving some kind of residue. She stuck out her tongue tip again and picked off a tiny chip. She blinked. On the tip of her finger rested a flat, nearly oval sliver that seemed almost to glow with iridescence.
A welter of emotions coursed through Hannah. She was intrigued and confused, then nearly overcome with a sudden deep and dreadful shame. Had these strange salt crystals really come from
her?
She felt compelled to get rid of this…this evidence of her own freakishness. She began sweeping them up in her hands as fast as she could, before the matron came in. She looked around for a refuse bin. But just as she was about to throw them away, she stopped. Her hand froze. She felt something surge up inside her. She closed her hand around the crystals she had gathered and thrust them into her pocket.
By the time the train reached Salina, Hannah’s face had swollen to twice its normal size. A woman of
considerable bulk approached her with the matron. “What have we here?” She looked down at Hannah, peering through her pince-nez-style spectacles embedded in a fold of fat that seemed provided especially for the task of holding them.
“She has a rash, Mrs. Phillips. I don’t think it’s any cause for concern. She’s a lovely child.”
Hannah shot the matron a furious look.
So lovely that you stuck me in a tiny horrid compartment and half the time you forgot to take my privy pot to empty.
“Just a reaction,” the matron continued. “An allergic reaction.” She spoke nervously.
“A reaction to what?” Mrs. Phillips asked.
“My combis,” Hanna said quickly. “I’m naked under this dress. Naked as a jaybird,” she said pointedly and looked at matron.
“Oh, my! She’ll have to be broken!” Mrs. Phillips said and smiled. “Well, dear, we’re the rodeo capital of Kansas. Bronco busting is our
spécialité
.” She pronounced the word in a foreign-sounding way.
“You’re going to break me…break me in half?”
“Oh, no, dear,” Mrs. Phillips said with a warm chuckle and took Hannah’s red hand. Hannah saw
matron wince. “Breaking is just an expression. It means putting a saddle on a wild thing so it can be ridden.”
Hannah shut her eyes. She wasn’t going to ask anything else.
“What’s her name?” Mrs. Phillips asked matron.
“Let me see a minute. I have it right here.” She had been holding a piece of paper. “Uh…uh…you’re not Loretta.”
“Hannah. I’m Hannah Albury,” she said quietly.
“All right, Hannah Albury, follow me.” Much to matron’s horror, Mrs. Phillips took Hannah by the hand and led her firmly away, apparently not worried about being infected.
In addition to the lack of underwear, the red rash, and her swollen face, Hannah was also emaciated. With every mile that had taken her away from the old port city of Boston and the sea, Hannah’s queasiness had increased. She had eaten very little and by the time the train had reached the eastern edge of the great prairie states, with those undulating fields of wheat and corn, she could not keep even the slightest morsel of food in her stomach.
A quarter of an hour after arriving in Salina, Hannah stood along with fifty other girls and boys, most of them from an orphanage in New York, on a raised platform in the town hall. Mr. Benedict, one of the agents from the New York Children’s Aid Society, announced the names of the applicant families, who then proceeded to come onto the platform and select a child to take back to their farms. Strong twelve-year-old boys were the first to be chosen, followed closely by chubby, irresistible girl toddlers. Polly was the exception. She was the second child picked. Though pudgy and not exactly an obvious choice for farmwork, she was adorable with her dimples and what matron called her lovely quiet ways. Hannah smirked and wanted to call out, “She said I was lovely, too.”
Instead, she watched as couples left with their new “sons” and “daughters.” She studied the faces of the people remaining and wondered if any one of them would see beyond her swollen red face to something else that might make them want her. But she also didn’t want to be wanted—maybe if no one wanted
her, they would send her back. She kept her hand deep in the pocket of her dress and felt the little glistening crystals. For some reason she found it calming to touch them.
Just as this notion of being sent back kindled a spark of hope within her, she saw two tall, skinny elderly people standing in front of her with Mr. Benedict. The man wore a preacher’s white collar. “We’ll take the poor thing. For a spell,” the woman said. “We’re Christians, after all.”
Whatever spark had been kindled was suddenly extinguished. Hannah was not being rejected—not totally, at least. Nor was she being accepted. She was to be tolerated for a spell. She was what was left when the bottom of the orphan barrel was scraped, an object of Christian charity.
The Stubbses were nice enough. However, as soon as Hannah set foot in their house, which perched on a hillock at the edge of town, her health began to fail even more precipitously. The crystals created a tiny blizzard every time she got up from the bed in the small room off the parlor that she was given
to sleep in. She tried to be careful and collect them, but it wasn’t long before Mrs. Stubbs found them.
“What’s this?”
“It’s me. I don’t know why. I think the air is too dry or something.”
Dr. Rose from town was called immediately. He was solicitous and gentle as he examined her.
He balanced one of the crystals on the tip of his finger. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It appears at first glance like dermatitis. Yet the structure is so odd, the shape, not flat, but…but…” He paused a long time. He never appeared to finish the thought and instead turned toward the Stubbses. “Reverend, do you perhaps have a magnifying glass so that I could examine these more carefully?”
Reverend Stubbs returned from his study with the magnifying glass. “Curious…very curious. I haven’t ever seen anything like this.” Hannah felt a terrible fear well up in her as she watched the doctor squinting through the magnifying glass at her crystals. It seemed like an awful transgression, an invasion of not just her privacy but her being.
The doctor looked up and peered now at Hannah. “Where do you come from?”
“Boston,” Hannah whispered. He blinked as if the answer was somehow slightly unsatisfactory.