The Voyage of the Morning Light Read online

  The

  VOYAGE

  of the

  MORNING LIGHT

  A NOVEL

  MARINA ENDICOTT

  For Timothy

  CONTENTS

  Part One: Yarmouth, 1911

  1. The Sea

  2. Boston

  3. Eleuthera

  4. The Atlantic

  5. The Doldrums

  6. The Boston Seaman

  7. Port Elizabeth, South Africa

  8. A Change of Heading

  9. Tonga

  10. Ask and You Shall Have

  11. Aren

  12. China

  13. A Cough

  14. A Passenger

  15. An Eclipse

  16. The Horn

  17. Corcovado

  18. New York

  Part Two: Yarmouth, 1922

  1. Yarmouth

  2. Pilot

  3. Lake Milo

  4. The Constellation

  5. At Sea

  6. Wellington

  7. Auckland

  8. Nuku‘alofa

  9. Pangai

  10. Ha‘ano

  11. Onward

  Acknowledgements

  PART ONE

  YARMOUTH, 1911

  They are higher than the heavens above—what can you do?

  They are deeper than the depths below—what can you know?

  Their measure is longer than the earth and wider than the sea.

  JOB 11:8-9

  1

  The Sea

  The Morning Light set out from Yarmouth on the early tide and ran with a light wind south along the shore before heading to the open sea. Teal-green water foamed and bit at the breaking prow in front, and a long, purling cleave poured out behind her. Kay was at first made uneasy, not by the motion of the ship, which thrilled her, but by the gradual shrinking and eventual disappearance of the pier, which had seemed to anchor them to land somehow. She had never been to sea before this.

  Shifting into deeper water, the ship settled, sails filling to a taut curve, and made way. Thrumming along the narrows in a stiff breeze, they passed Johns Cove on the way to Cape Forchu. Seaweed covered the rocks there in vivid green locks, cascading, slippery—deeper strands revealed by the tide now glinting black-brown in the sun, the darkest ropes of it like rippling hair let out of braids for sleep. Like a dark head no longer on her pillow but askew in the doorway, shadow slipping sideways. Kay caught her mind’s eye back from that.

  Past the wave-washed rocks, there was the clean stretch of empty shore that their little party had strolled along when Aunt Lydia took them to the May Day picnic, their first week in Yarmouth after the long journey from Alberta. Kay had stood stock-still on the gravel, not even allowed to take her shoes off to feel the sand slumping beneath the soles of her feet, that graceful submission against bare skin. She did not know the point of coming to the seashore when Aunt Lydia would not let her wade at the wave’s edge while the women walked the pebble path along the beach.

  From the ship, the land looked different. A different country, no longer their own. Past the last bare, solitary rocks—out here in the nothing, in the expanse of green and grey, what was to pull them back to land? Francis spoke of voyages he had made without sight of land for a hundred days or more, without fresh water or milk or anything green save the scum on the water barrels, following the whales when he was a boy. Now, in command of his own ship, he would decide what landfall to make. Being careful of his new wife (still strange to Kay, that he and her sister Thea should be married) on her maiden voyage, perhaps they would saunter along the coast for a while.

  Not that Kay wanted that herself. Once they passed out of the shallows into the great roll of ocean, she lost the unconfessed fear that she might be a poor sailor. Feeling only electric vigour, she pitied Thea suffering in the parlour.

  They were out of sight of land now. Kay tucked in close beside a neat tri-coiled pyramid of rope and held tight to the rail, mind more at ease but fists still tight with the possibility of falling into the ice-green water. Behind her, the crew ran back and forth in obedience to orders Francis or his first mate called out, repeated by the men in a verse and response like the Litany in church. None of the shouts made sense to Kay; they were almost in a foreign language. Belay, she knew: at dinner at Orchard House, Francis would say Belay that, if he had asked for salt but found the cellar near his elbow.

  An island slipped out of the clouded sky on the port side. The upper mind said left was port: both were four letters; right was starboard, for the stars must always be right . . . The lower layers of her mind were quiet, absorbed by the smooth greyness, greenness, the gyres and eddies of the never-static sea. At a gap in the busy stream of crewmen, Kay slipped across to the port railing, her new boots silent on the deck, to see the island more closely. One boot fitted sideways into the scupper, the narrow drain-ditch along the deck, and again she stood braced to the rail, leaning into it as the ship rolled.

  Over the side, green water laced with white stretched doilying across to that small rocky shore. The island was uninhabited. Wait—there was a little house. Look, a scrap of sand between great grey rocks, a rowboat beached on the shale, a path through scrubby pines leading up to a grey cabin, hidden in the trees. That would be a place to live. When she was a grown woman, she would live there, and be alone always. Perhaps a boy would come with victuals from the mainland once a week, a boy with fawn-coloured skin and understanding eyes. But she would not speak to him.

  Already the island had slid past, receding into the old life. She had a sharp sensation that this was the beginning of her real life—this voyage, all round the earth to the South Seas and China. She could not live alone on an island for a great length of time still to come.

  The girl stood sure-footed upon the deck, leaning into the wind, her eyes shining with the light of distant horizons . . .

  As soon as you try to tell your life, it goes false. Her eyes had bleared with the wind.

  Down below, she heard Thea calling from the saloon for the stewardess, her voice thready and hoarse from losing her breakfast. It would smell of sick down there, but Thea ought to be in bed, and would need help. Up the length of the deck to the fo’c’sle, Francis stood busy with Mr. Wright, his first mate. Kay looked back down astern through the intervening copse of ropes and sail, readying her feet to match the swell and rise of the deck.

  As she made the companionway, a particularly good wave took the ship. She caught at the stair rail and half-tumbled down the steep stairwell to the door, standing open as she’d left it, leading into the bright, wood-panelled saloon. An acre of sun was streaming down through the great skylight Thea had hung with geraniums. Everything shone with polish and cleanliness. This long room, with cabins opening off it on both sides and down the little halls, was their quarters now. Kay’s cabin was down the port corridor, on the same side as Thea’s.

  Her face palest green, Thea said, “You must learn to close doors on a ship.”

  Kay’s pride rose again—she was having no difficulty. She went to Thea, shrunk in an armchair with an empty basin at her feet, and took her arm to help her to bed. Good that the basin was empty now, because the smell of sick always made Kay be a little sick herself.

  The stewardess came as they were shuffling across the long saloon. A lardy woman, thickset and a little deaf. She took Thea’s other arm, and Thea straightened to pretend all was well, so they made faster progress. When they had her settled into the beautiful carved bed Thea shared with Francis now, the stewardess went away.

  Between careful breaths, Thea said, “The motion is no more than Francis gave us to understand. I don’t complain! The rocking and sidling can be bor
ne, but this intermittent plunging—” She put a hand on Kay’s, resting on the coverlet. “I’m better now, dear heart. Will you play for me?”

  Before going to the piano, Kay fetched the basin from the saloon and tucked it in between the carved bed and the neatly nestled chest of drawers. That way, when halfway through O’Connor’s Nocturne no. 2 (soothing for an invalid) she heard Thea weakly retching, she could leave her to it.

  Between fresh spasms, Thea listened, apprehensive. But to her relief, Kay had gone into the music and did not hear or come to help. Good. She would be safely out of the crew’s way for an hour or so, and Francis would not find her underfoot, at least at first.

  This is the purest dream, the best life possible, Thea told her fist, inside the cave of sheet and comforter. If only she was not so queasy. But that too was to be expected. The outer motion and the inner motion, that secret movement deep inside, had overset her temporarily. She would be better soon.

  By nightfall they had gone a long way, so that Francis was happy with their progress when he came down to the saloon for his supper.

  Mr. Wright the first mate came too. He had his own cabin farther along the corridor, and might sit down to supper with them sometimes, although Francis said he would more often eat with the boys and Mr. Best in the crew mess. Mr. Wright was a lanky man, quiet but with a firm disposition, perhaps a little unbending. He knew odd facts and delighted to tell them, and was a student of astronomy; he promised to let Kay look through the little telescope he had made himself, to see the rings of Saturn.

  Saying she was stronger after a rest, Thea came out in her Delft-blue going-away dress, laughing at herself for succumbing to a weak stomach when she wished to be the perfect seafaring wife. Her ranging eye caught Kay licking salt from her wrists, where the spray had coated them all afternoon, and later again, meditatively tonguing the back of a spoon at table. Thea looked pointed and shook her head a fraction. Because even when one was twelve years old, she never would cease telling one what to do. Perhaps she ought to go back to bed for a while longer.

  Kay had the middle chair, and Mr. Wright sat across from her, his back to the wood stove. But he only stayed for a formal greeting to Thea before taking his bite of beef and cup of tea back up with him. Lena Hubbard the stewardess and her husband, the steward, who was just called Hubbard, served them boiled beef and potatoes with beet relish, and summer pudding the cook had made with blueberries from Lake Milo.

  Dinner was short, both Thea and Francis wanting nothing after the summer pudding but to sit talking before the stove a little while. The skylight was still open, though the night had turned cooler. They spoke softly to each other, a word or two rather than sentences. Kay was not one of them and ought not to be there at all. She went to the piano at the other end of the saloon and played a little—soft Chopin études that would not make a dent in their solitude.

  Before very long, Thea got up from the armchair and said that Kay should find her bunk, and the sea air, and Francis said yes, yes, what a long day this has been for a young lady on her first voyage, so there was nothing to do but acquiesce and leave them.

  Lena Hubbard came to set a tin of hot water in her little washbasin, and showed Kay where to stow the tin on a hook below the basin when she was done, and where the pan hid, for if one did not want to go along to the head (as they called the toilet closet on a ship) in one’s nightgown.

  The cabin was satisfyingly trig and trim: dark wood boards fit tight together made the walls, curved as the ship’s wall was curved, and the last of the August twilight glimmered in through the port, a thick, round, bolt-fastened window over the bunk. The featherbed was tucked up taut with a blue wool blanket, and above it ran a shelf with short walls for a book and a small lamp. She got a lecture from Lena (which she did not at all need, having already had one from Francis, twice) on how one could only have a lamp in a calm sea, and on putting out the flame very carefully. Kay did not mind being lectured to at first, it was only when the people ought to know that she would know that she grew irritable. Lena gave her a pat on the knee, saying she was already a great sailor and they would soon have her in the navy—speaking as if she was a child still.

  At last Thea came and kissed Kay’s cheek and left, her blue skirt filling the door and emptying out into the corridor to go back to Francis, who was her husband now, shutting the door behind her. You must learn to close doors on a ship.

  Alone in her bunk, Kay stared sightless at the wooden ceiling, recounting her life so far, putting it into language: I have bad dreams, I cannot be left.

  She was afraid to dream here, in case Francis put her off at the nearest port. Because it had happened before, at Orchard House, Aunt Lydia Wetmore’s spreading white villa out at Lake Milo.

  Then there had been such a clanging and a whispering and the sacred telephone being used to ring up and summon Thea, so that she harnessed Aunty Bob’s pair herself and drove the wagon out from Yarmouth town at five in the morning, before the trolley car began. Kay had not slept since waking the house by shouting with the nightmare, but had dressed herself and sat stiff as a mummy on the top stair, waiting for punishment or something worse. She felt darkness as huge as a bear inside her, eating and eating, becoming larger.

  Hearing the wagon’s arrival, Kay had got up her courage to go downstairs.

  Aunt Lydia’s daughter Olive stood bandy-legged in the front hall, staring at Thea with her pale fish eyes almost popping out, her upper lip strangely trembling: “It is too much, Theodora! Too, too much—you cannot expect us to—and Forrest away, too—and the house in an uproar, an uproar, and Mother! Mother did not sleep one wink last night.”

  Fish in the eye, rabbit in the lip, light hair frizzed over her ears. Kay found Olive very ugly and was glad that she was not related to her at all, because she was Thea’s cousin on her mother’s side, and Kay had had a different mother who was not from this stupid place.

  “It was not so bad,” Kay told Thea in her bedroom, as they packed her trunk again. “I woke up in the upstairs hall, that’s all. I had been shouting a little.”

  “What were you dreaming?”

  Kay did not want to say. “The bare trees were coming down to the shore like bones walking, and we had to run, I had to warn them.”

  Thea bent to look under the mahogany bed. “Where is the blue valise?”

  “The attic, I think—Aunt Lydia said it was too old and should be put away.”

  “Well, run and get it.”

  Kay hesitated, because the attic was full of webs, with damp-sifted dust furred over everything, but she could not bear Thea to reproach her for cowardice; and the valise had belonged to her own mama, Eliza Warner Ward, and she did not want to leave it in this house.

  She went, treading carefully only on the strips of carpet and never on the black walnut boards of the floor, and found the door that led upstairs again, and the heavy Bakelite switch for the single bulb. Then up, coir matting on the narrow attic stairs sharp under her stockinged toes, into the lofty space under the roof. The light was dim, so early—but there, tucked under the eaves, was her valise. E.W.W. in gold letters on the side. Still clean, because Kay had only arrived yesterday morning. The only clear, clean thing in this blurred space. The valise’s black bone handle fit her hand. The attic was only dusty, not haunted. The rope dangling from one rafter was not a noose, or at least not a noose for a person.

  Then they all said that she must leave Aunt Lydia (who was not Kay’s own aunt, but Thea’s mother’s oldest sister) out at Lake Milo, and go to Aunty Bob, the youngest sister, who could use a girl to run and fetch for her—terrible prospect—at the grey house with the tower on Parade Street in town.

  All afternoon at the grey house they sat with Thea in the round front parlour at the bottom of the tower: Aunt Lydia and Cousin Olive, Aunt Queen the middle sister, and little Aunty Bob, all speaking in low voices as if that meant that Kay, huddled on the window seat, could not hear them. Aunt Lydia and Aunt Queen said again that
they had no patience with Father, nor with their sister Maria for being so determined to throw away everything civilized and trek out to the wilderness with him, for all the good it had done either one. It was a foolish venture, and if he was so determined to help the Indians surely he could have found some nearer to home. Thea reminded them that Father had sent her home to go to normal school, as he promised, and that it was only to be expected that he might marry again being widowed so early, and history went on being retold, so Kay looked at raindrops on the curving window and found two to follow down the pane in the slowest race imaginable.

  Then the aunts began telling Thea about boarding schools in Nova Scotia where Kay might be very happy. School was what Kay was not allowed to talk about—or what could only be talked about in a certain way—and she sat growing cold while they discussed nourishing meals, teaching philosophy and suitable study for young ladies, such as Home Economy or Pitman’s Course in Shorthand. The aunts talked on as the room greyed into evening (no fire lit to cheer them, no matter how chill the rain, because it was August) about difficult eventualities, and twelve years old, oh dear me . . . At last Aunt Queen brought her mouth into a line and pushed the bottom lip out, and said that hospital treatments had been found efficacious for—ahem . . .

  At that, Thea stood up so sharply that the tea cart jittered across the shining floor. She put out her hand to Kay.

  “Please excuse us,” she said to the aunts. “I must give Kay her drops.”

  “Mastoiditis,” murmured Aunty Bob, who did not often align with her sisters against them.

  Thea shook her head without looking back. “Only the earache. She has a proclivity.”

  Kay said nothing. Anything she said would be wrong.

  Thea bustled with the drops and made Kay get straight into her nightgown, though it was only six in the evening and they had not had their supper, and turned down the coverlet on the cot Aunty Bob had put up in the dressing room, and knelt beside her to say prayers. She kissed Kay and said, “We have not been happy for a long time. But now we will be.”