Desire in the Sun (12 page)

From the woman’s terror, Lilah expected her husband to be in extremus, but she did not expect the terrible stench of uncontrolled diarrhea, or the pools of vomit
that had long since overflowed every available container and lay in puddles near the bunk where the skeletal Mr. Gorman lay. Obviously he had been sick for some hours before Mrs. Gorman had summoned help. His daughter—a too—thin spinster whose first name Lilah thought was Doris—was sitting on the edge of his bunk wiping his mouth. Lilah’s stomach turned over, but both women looked at her so hopefully that she could not follow her first instinct to flee. Trying to control her revulsion, Lilah stepped carefully toward the bunk, holding her skirt well clear of the floor. “Oh, Mum, did you get the doctor? Da needs him sore bad.”

Miss Gorman’s wailing question was punctuated by loud gasps from the man in the bunk. As his daughter leaned over him and Mrs. Gorman ran to his side, Mr. Gorman sat bolt upright in bed, gasping for air. Then he fell back against his pillows like a collapsed balloon.

“Is he dead?”

“No, Mum, look, he’s breathing. Oh, we need the doctor!”

“He’s coming,” Lilah murmured reassuringly, her horrified eyes moving over Mr. Gorman. If he was not yet dead, he was surely near death. He lay unmoving, his face drained of all color, his emaciated body drenched in sweat. Only by looking closely could Lilah detect the faint movement of his chest that proclaimed he still lived.

“What can we do?” Mrs. Gorman asked hopelessly. Lilah was just wondering how she was going to answer that pitiful question when Kevin arrived with Dr. Freeman.

“What’s this now?” Dr. Freeman asked as he entered, his black bag in one hand, only to be brought up short by the scene before him. Short, heavyset and plainly dressed, he had a skimpy gray beard and a bald head. Spectacles were perched on the edge of his nose.

Lilah stepped back, thankful to leave the whole horrible situation in Dr. Freeman’s capable hands. She was very much afraid that Mr. Gorman was going to die. …

Dr. Freeman shooed her from the room, and Kevin with her. Kevin was frowning as they walked back down the passageway toward Lilah’s cabin.

“What do you think is wrong with him?” she asked, having no idea herself. She had never done much nursing, in fact did not like to be around sick people. Jane did the nursing on Heart’s Ease, and she was glad to have it so.

“I don’t know,” Kevin answered, his voice deep with worry. Lilah looked up at him sharply. Before she could question him further she heard the sound of a door opening behind them. Looking back, she saw Dr. Freeman step out into the passage, shaking his head. Behind him, framed in the doorway, stood Mrs. Gorman, pale and shaking. He said something to her, shook his head in reply to a question Lilah could not hear, and turned away, coming toward them. Just one look at his face told Lilah that something was very wrong indeed.

“What is it, Doctor?” Kevin asked, his voice tight as though he was almost afraid of the answer.

Dr. Freeman came up to them, and studied Kevin over the top of his spectacles. He looked very tired, far more tired than ten minutes in a sickroom warranted.

“Cholera,” the doctor answered briefly, pushing by them. Lilah had no trouble at all recognizing the emotion in his voice. It was stark fear.

XI

T
hree days later, the ship was a floating death trap. The cholera had spread amongst the passengers and crew erratically. Nearly a third of the seventy-odd souls aboard were ill. Four, including Mr. Gorman, were already dead. The able-bodied were divided into two camps: Those who feared the disease but whose conscience or feelings for the stricken drove them to nurse the ill anyway, and those who had forced a quarantine on the sick, and refused to go anywhere near the half of the ship that was given over to them. As the illness advanced each day, striking down its victims seemingly at random no matter what they did to avoid contagion, the quarantine seemed a waste of time. But it was strictly upheld for as long as possible.

Despite her early exposure to Mr. Gorman, Lilah had not so far been stricken. With Betsy at her side she worked tirelessly, soon growing immune to the hideous sights and smells, to the pained whimperings of the ill and the dying and their survivors. The stench of the horrible rice-water diarrhea that was the hallmark of the disease seemed to stretch from one end of the ship to the other. By the seventh day she hardly noticed it anymore.

At least she was able to get up on deck. The slaves, as afflicted by illness as the rest, were confined to the
hold. The well among them were recruited to nurse the sick, but conditions in the hold were hideous. Finally, as the disease took its toll, the able-bodied slaves were released from their confinement to do what they could about the ship, which in most cases was not a lot. Most of the slaves had never even been aboard a ship before. Their labors had to be strictly supervised, and with half the crew stricken by the disease and the other half terrified, competent supervision was hard to come by.

Joss was the exception to the general uselessness of the slaves as replacements for the stricken sailors. Having been a sailing man all his adult life and later the captain of his own ships, he was able to take the place of at least three of the crewmen. Lilah saw him everywhere, up in the rigging setting canvas, in the crow’s nest wielding a spyglass, on the quarterdeck reading the sextant as he assisted Captain Boone to chart their position and plot the course for the nearest landfall, which was their only hope of salvation. He was unfettered, released from his chains because of Captain Boone’s personal request to Kevin, and seemed tireless. He never spoke to Lilah, though they brushed past one another occasionally as each went about their duties. In fact, he did not even seem aware of her, and Lilah was content to have it so. Whatever spark had once flared between them had been extinguished by circumstance, and in truth she was so tired and so frightened that keeping her mind off him was not as difficult as it might have been under better conditions. Though they were less than three weeks out of Barbados, Dr. Patterson had urged Captain Boone to change course for the nearest port. Haiti was to the south, and it was toward Haiti that the
Swift Wind
headed. But then the wind died to a whisper and the ship slowed to a scant two knots, … It began to look as though few of them would reach port. Men, women and children were dropping like flies, and dying within days.

Kevin came down with the sickness on the ninth day. Lilah nursed him with a tireless devotion that owed far more to their long acquaintance than to the love she should have borne her fiancé. By the twelfth day she was worn to a shade, thin and so exhausted that she could sleep leaning up against a wall. More than two-thirds of those who were stricken were gone within three days. Kevin passed that milestone, and the vomiting and diarrhea lessened. As the fourteenth day dawned and Kevin was still with them, weak but mending, Lilah and Betsy looked at one another in weary triumph over his sleeping form, too tired to even smile. Then they went on to nurse another victim.

The bodies of the dead were buried at sea. Each evening at sunset the bedraggled contingent of survivors not needed to nurse the sick gathered at the rail in the lee of the main mast. A prayer was said, and the names of the dead were called out as they were heaved over the side. It was a sketchy funeral, and Lilah was not the only one who felt it, but those who still lived were simply too weary to cope with much more.

The good weather held until the evening of the fifteenth day. Then, toward sunset, ominous dark clouds blew in to obscure the horizon. Lilah was too tired to notice, but Betsy, though as worn as her mistress, called her attention to the lowering sky as they struggled across the deck, each weighted down with a pair of buckets brimming with slop to be emptied over the side.

“We’re in for some weather,” Betsy grunted as she set her buckets down and arched her spine, glancing at the threatening clouds. The deck moved up and down as the ship plowed through the waves, and a little of the gruesome mess in the bucket splashed out onto the once pristine boards. Once swabbed religiously twice a day, the deck was grimed now with salt and the dirt from many feet, and marked here and there with dried pools
of vomit. No one had the energy to think about such unimportant details as the condition of the deck.

“I hope not,” Lilah sighed, not even stopping to look, The buckets were heavy, yet they had to be emptied if the ship was not to be overrun with the foul-smelling products of the disease. She who had never even put or her own stockings before was simply doing what had to be done.

“We are—somethin’ heavy. I can feel it comin’.” Betsy’s father was an Obeah man, and her voice was dark with prophesy. Lilah was just too tired to worry about it. After the horrors they had endured, what was a little rain?

A short while later Lilah stood beside Betsy on the deck, head bowed as the captain muttered hasty words over the four corpses that were to be committed to the deep that day. Besides herself, Betsy, and the captain, there was Mrs. Gorman, who had mysteriously escaped the pestilence along with her daughter; Mrs. Holloway, a widow who had lost both her sons to the cholera; Mrs. Freeman, the doctor’s wife; and Mrs. Singletary, an elderly lady who looked as if a brisk wind would blow her away but who had as yet escaped the disease. Dr. Freeman was below with Joanna Patterson, who had lost her husband to the disease and now battled mightily to save her young son. Both Irene Guiltinan and John Haverly had already been lost. Two slaves whose job it was to tip the dead into the sea stood a little apart, behind the corpses, which had been sewn into sheets and now lay on planks in a neat row. Joss was present as well, standing with hands clasped in front of him and head bowed as he listened to the prayers. Lilah scarcely noticed him.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, amen,” the captain intoned wearily, signaling the end of the prayer. The two slaves, well accustomed to the ritual by now, reached down in tandem to grasp each end of a plank, lifted it to rest on the rail, and tipped the body into the sea. This
was repeated four times, as Captain Boone called each victim’s name. At the splash that heralded the sea’s acceptance of the last corpse, a woman wailed loudly. It was Mrs. Holloway, and Lilah realized that the body must be that of her younger son. A vague pity for the woman’s suffering coursed through her, but Lilah remained dry-eyed. She had seen so much death over the past two weeks that she was beyond grief.

With the corpses consigned to the sea, the funeral party went back about its business. Lilah, hurrying to relieve Mrs. Patterson in her tireless nursing of her son, passed by Joss, who seemed to be waiting by the rail. To her surprise, he stopped her with a hand on her arm.

She looked up at him questioningly, so weary that her eyes barely focused.

“Stay below tonight. We’re in for a storm.”

“A storm?” Conversation was almost beyond her, but from somewhere deep inside her an almost hysterical little giggle bubbled forth. “After all this, what’s a storm?”

He looked intently down at her. “You’re worn out, aren’t you? Well, at least you’re alive. And you might stay that way, if you listen to what I’m telling you and stay below deck for as long as it takes the storm to blow itself out, even if it’s two or three days. Topside’s not safe during a blow like we look to be having.”

It occurred to her that he had gone out of his way to warn her, but she had no energy to wonder at it or ponder his reasons. Looking up at him, she saw that, like herself, he was thinner, with lines of fatigue in his face that had not been there before. The place on his cheek where Kevin had hit him with his pistol had healed to a faint red scar. He held himself stiffly, and it struck her that his ribs must still be sore. She realized that he must have been in pain throughout the entire time he was doing the work of three men. Whatever else he was, he was a brave man, and deserving of the gratitude of everyone
on board. She smiled at him, the effort feeble because she was so tired.

“Thank you for the warning,” she said. He nodded brusquely, and turned on his heel. Lilah looked after him for a long moment before Dr. Freeman, emerging from the causeway, recalled her wandering wits by shaking her arm.

“Mrs. Patterson needs help badly, Miss Remy,” he reminded her. Lilah was almost glad to be recalled to the present. She hurried below to do what she could for the desperate mother and her sick child, and gladly banished Joss from her mind once more.

XII