The Devil in Paradise--Captain Putnam in Hawaii Page 3

  “You lucky little hellion,” growled Bliven. “I will hang you if I ever get my hands on you, and no mistake.”

  “I will help you,” said Miller. “He is probably wondering why we don’t close and finish him off.”

  “Oh, I think he knows he’s just reached safety. See?” Just visible on the northwest horizon lay the thin green line of the Cuban coast. “Dog’s son. Come about; let us pick up those castaways.”

  “Twenty fathoms, Captain!” called out the carpenter’s mate.

  “Very well, thank you.” They shortened sail and tacked back toward the bobbing dinghy, its ragged black passengers waving, not in greeting, but helplessly. “Mr. Yeakel?”

  “Sir?”

  “They have no oars and cannot come to us. You must lower the cutter and tow them over.”

  Yeakel considered it. “Well, that will be easier than trying to maneuver this big girl right next to them, for certain. Poor blighters.”

  Bliven and Miller followed Yeakel’s skillful operation from the quarterdeck, mindful of how indispensable a decisive, experienced bosun was to a ship’s operation, although he was rated only as a warrant officer.

  None of the slaves was so broken-down as to need hoisting up to the deck; all were able to mount, albeit uncertainly, the ship’s boarding ladder. It was Yeakel, standing somewhat apart from them, who led and beckoned them aft, and they followed.

  Bliven saw the clot of slaves approach him. “God in heaven!” He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and covered his nose. “Oh, God in heaven!” He had spent much of his life at sea and was accustomed to the odor of sailors, but this was a shock to his senses, an almost visible veil of stink that wrapped itself around him like wet muslin. “Do any of you speak English?”

  They stared at him, mute.

  “¿Habla español?” he tried again. Again no one spoke up, but one black man, on the far side of middle age but still powerful looking, seemed to mark what he was attempting. “Parlez-vous français?” he tried once more.

  The man he had noticed stepped forward. “Un peu,” he said. He was barrel-chested, with yellow eyes and a very flat nose. Bliven surmised that they must have been taken from the Guinea coast or Senegal.

  “Très bien.” This was lovely. He had just found a man who knew some French, and Bliven had just spoken about the only five words he knew. Clarity had teased him that she could make herself useful on board a ship, and at this moment he would have given a month’s pay to have her on deck, for her French was faultless. “Mr. Miller?”

  “Captain?” Instinctively he had also placed a cloth over his nose.

  “Who on this ship speaks French?”

  Miller thought on it. “Our surgeon studied in Paris, did he not?”

  “Yes. Yes, he did. Send for Dr. Berend; have him take charge of these people. Get two casks of water forward to the heads, get them washed, men and boys on one side, women and girls on the other. Tell the purser to find them something to wear. Get pallets ready in the cable tier, and have the steward make them something to eat. Have Dr. Berend learn what he can about them and come make report to me.”

  Miller was paying the strictest attention. “Beg pardon, sir, but this is a pork day. Many Africans would rather die than eat pork.”

  “Oh, hell, you’re right.” He gave Miller a cold stare. “One would think that when people are starving, they would be less particular about their diet.”

  Miller nodded. “Well, perhaps when the next world is all you’ve got, you’re not so keen to risk losing it.”

  “Simple people, persuaded to nonsense.” He checked himself before he said more, aware that his disgust with slavery was spilling over into hate for the reality that in this early nineteenth century there could still be a continent full of tribes who were prey to it.

  “Suffering people, Captain Putnam, who have been stripped of everything they know.”

  Bliven slumped from his wonted on-deck erectness and sighed. “You’re right, of course. Is there pork in the steep tub yet?”

  “I don’t know as a certainty, but I don’t believe so.”

  “Well, regulations are overridden for today. We shall have rice and cheese, then, and peas. I am going below to check the hold, then I will be in my cabin. Send Dr. Berend to me after he’s got them settled.” Again he looked aloft. “Easy sail, Mr. Miller. Come sou’-sou’east. Have the lookouts keep their eyes peeled for any reefs.”

  “Aye, sir. Excuse me, did you order a course of south-southeast?”

  Bliven glanced at their pennant aloft. “Oh, yes I see.” With a strong east wind she might not take a south-southeast course. “Well, have the bosun haul as close as she’ll take, but then come sou’-sou’east if the wind allows. My intention is to not turn west until we get clear of the Isle of Pines. South of there we will have deep water and a clear shot through the Yucatán Channel. I am not going to waste time poking and sounding through this labyrinth of cays and rocks.”

  “I understand,” said Miller. “I just thought that, since we sprung a leak, we might want not to venture too far from land.”

  “And I thought, since we sprung a leak, we might not wish to run aground. Course sou’-sou’east when you can, Mr. Miller.” Bliven did not need to say again that he never trusted the Navy’s charts in foreign waters.

  “Very good, sir.”

  How very glad he was to have a Pennsylvanian for his first lieutenant and not a Southerner who would arch his brow over treating the Africans like human beings, and an officer and friend who could function as an added compartment of his own mind.

  Back in his cabin—where Ross, amazing Ross, had foreseen his coming and had fresh coffee on his desk—he thought on it, and Bliven found himself grateful to be homeported in Boston. With a leaking ship he should put in at Mobile or Savannah and heave her down, but he knew what that would mean for his miserable Africans. No, if he could take her back to Boston, he would do so, and give these people some fair chance at a life.

  For the first time in a long time he thought of Jonah, the slave chamberlain of the dey of Algiers. Once safe in Boston, Jonah had not disappeared into but immersed himself in the colored population there, applying himself to it. He had shed his Mohammedanism and become a Congregationalist—how fortunate, Bliven thought, to be so adaptable—albeit a Unitarian, the news of which had nearly given Reverend Beecher a fit of apoplexy. Jonah took the Putnam surname for himself, which gave Bliven a warm and rather honored feeling, and he had become a teacher: basic education to his own people, but also tapped to teach Arabic at Harvard College, which gave that school a significant boasting point and kept Jonah living in some comfort, for a black man. And Harvard, as all knew, had gone over bags and baggage to the Unitarians, which might explain Jonah’s new profession of faith. They were not correspondents, but if he had died, Bliven would surely have learned of it. He determined, once they put in at Boston, to inquire after him. Perhaps Jonah could do something to help settle this clot of wretches he had taken on.

  2

  Miss Clear Day

  Litchfield lay white, quiet, and snug beneath a deep February snow, its cedar rooftops steep enough to shed new-falling powder, its main street frozen even where the snow had been knocked aside, and gray smoke curled from bluish fieldstone chimneys.

  The knock came not at the Putnams’ front hall door but at the keeping room door, at once muted but insistent, as though by an urgent, gloved hand. Dorothea Putnam was sitting at the great old pine table, as erect and prim as a pilgrim, reading in her dress black beneath a white cap, as Clarity stirred a pot of beef stew, almost ready to take in to Mr. Putnam, who lay in bed awake and waiting.

  Clarity crossed the room and spied through the curtains for a tiny second before swinging the door open wide. “Harriet! What on earth are you doing out? Come in and be warm!”

  “Thank you, Mrs. P.”

 
; “Give me your cape. Come, warm yourself by the fire.”

  Harriet Beecher strode less than ladylike to the fieldstone fireplace, handing off her cape and peeling away her gloves, and rubbed her hands before it. She was now thirteen, in the first bloom of slowly revealing maturity. As she had grown, it became all too apparent that, as those closest to her had foreseen, she had inherited the melting-wax features of her father, his mouth that turned distinctly down at the corners, and the eyes that seemed to have begun sliding down the side of her face. She knew very well now that she was not pretty, nor ever would be, a hard revelation for a girl of precocious intelligence but a fate that she accepted with the stoicism of her father’s faith, and not surrendering the remaining prospect that by training herself to be a woman of warm sympathies, content to be a doer of good works, she might one day merit the love of some worthy man, albeit not a young or handsome one.

  “How do things go on with you and the Misses Pierce?” asked Clarity.

  Harriet curtsied at the pleasantry. “Tout bien, merci.”

  It was strange to think of the aging Pierce sisters, Sarah and Mary, and their married sister Susan and her husband, who also taught there, still managing their school after more than a quarter of a century. But as their fame grew and its name was formalized into the Litchfield Female Academy, the family had become pillars of New England education and likely could not have retired even had they desired it. Indeed, the institution had only become more exclusive—and expensive. “And how is your father getting on there?”

  After the death of Roxana, the education of the Beechers’ three daughters had become a serious consideration. Their five boys could make their way through school, but Reverend Beecher’s income had never matched his social and ecclesiastical prominence, and the proper upbringing of his girls required the laying of a strategy. Beecher had attained fame as the most passionate and articulate conservator of the Congregationalist faith, holding fast against the more liberal thinking and even Unitarianism that had engulfed Boston. It was a celebrity, however, that came with only a parson’s modest living, which had constantly to be supplemented with honoraria for guest preaching and a stream of tract and pamphlet publications. Beecher had therefore reached an arrangement with the Pierce sisters to teach religion classes at the Female Academy in exchange for the tuition for his daughters that he could never have afforded. “In truth, Mrs. P., he was overburdened before, and now I fear he has taken on too much altogether.”

  “And how is young Charlie?” asked Clarity. “Will you have a cup of tea?”

  Roxana Beecher had finally given out after the birth of their ninth child, who was now almost three. “Charlie is rather spoilt, I fear. Since dear Mama passed away, Papa seems to hold him most precious of all of us.” Harriet’s visage changed dramatically. “Oh, Mrs. P., forgive me, I must come straighter to the point. I have news of a most distressing nature.”

  “Oh?”

  “Perhaps you should sit down.”

  Clarity observed her earnestness. “Yes, perhaps I should.” She sat and indicated the chair next to her. “Please.”

  “Oh, Mrs. P.” Harriet sat on the forward edge of the chair. “Papa has just returned from Cornwall. Your friend, Henry Obookiah, that first convert from the Sandwich Islands, has taken ill. I fear he has taken most dangerously ill, and he has asked for you.”

  “Oh, no!” Clarity’s hands raised to her chin, fingertips together as if in prayer, but she was not praying. Winter and its close quarters had brought an onset of disease in Litchfield and the surrounding towns, and for two months none knew who might be the next taken. “Oh, no.”

  “Papa is getting the sleigh ready and will come down for you as soon as he finishes a letter. He says if you can come to please make haste, but if you cannot come, he will take your message.”

  Dorothea had laid her book aside and was listening intently. “Is it typhus, Harriet? Do they know?”

  “They fear so. It appears to be the same sickness as the others.”

  Clarity looked at her sternly. “How do you mean, ‘others’? Others generally, or others at the mission school?”

  Harriet hung her head. “Six new students arrived a fortnight ago. One of them—I believe Papa said he is from China—became ill right away, and then another. They are all that I know of.”

  The mission school, thought Clarity. For seven years Henry Obookiah had given the church leaders no peace in hectoring them on the point of sending missionaries to his Sandwich Islands home. Beecher, Mills, and both Timothy and young Henry Edwin Dwight had remonstrated with him that this was an undertaking quite beyond their means, but Obookiah had proved implacable, holding up to them the Great Commission of Christ, gaining his own sympathizers among the Connecticut churches—even gathered about himself further refugees who had made their way to New England from their violent and benighted country. There was Hopu, who had escaped Hawaii on board the Triumph with Obookiah, and Honoree, and Tamoree, who was a prince of one of the islands whose royal father had sent him abroad to gather knowledge of the larger world to bring home to his people, and now half a dozen others. Two years previously, great was Obookiah’s victory when the church established the Board for Foreign Missions and opened a school overseen from the church in Cornwall. There they crafted a course of study to train those who felt the missionary call in not just biblical precepts and practices but in the evangelical arts, the persuasion of the heathen to the light. This past term they had increased the number of students to twenty, accepting the additional number from other Pacific islands, including, Clarity had heard, one from Feejee—which could prove a mighty challenge indeed to a missionary effort, for there was a reason that Western sailors knew them as the Cannibal Isles.

  Dorothea rose stiffly and poured tea from the still-hot pot, handed the cup to Harriet, and patted her shoulder. “Warm yourself, child. Clarity, daughter, such an errand, if you undertake it, would show great compassion but it would not be without risk, as you must realize.” She studied Clarity’s face, still delicately featured as porcelain but now in the maturity of her thirty-one years, and she read there Clarity’s full understanding of the gravity of visiting not just a house touched by disease but one in which a dozen languages were spoken by people—not white people—of uncertain history and habits.

  Clarity found herself staring into the fire, as though it had suddenly become a metaphor of a trial she must undergo, a trial not dreamt of ten minutes previous. She shook her head. “Well, I must go. We preached our religion to Henry, and he believed us. He believed it all; better than we ourselves, he gave himself up to it, body and soul. If we—if I—abandon him now, we shall show ourselves to be not just cowards but frauds.” She shrugged lightly. “There are some points on which I may be a coward, but I will not be a fraud.”

  Having given Harriet her tea, Dorothea crossed to the fireplace. “I thought no less, my dear.” She swung the cast-iron hook from which the pot of stew was suspended away from the fire, and with two pot holders hefted it onto the hard maple butchering block. “You make haste to get ready; I will take care of my husband.”

  Clarity squeezed Harriet’s hand before heading into her small suite behind the keeping room. “I will be only a moment.” When she returned, she wore heavier shoes, and gloves, and Bliven’s great cloak, which she fastened about her throat.

  “Let me just take a brief leave of my father-in-law.” She crossed the hall into the parlor and, finding the door to the bedroom open, knocked lightly on the jamb. “Father Putnam?”

  “Come in, daughter, come in.” He had arranged his pillows unaided and was sitting up in bed.

  “Your lunch is almost ready.”

  “Yes?”

  She sat on the edge of the bed and took his hand. “I am called away to Cornwall. I will be back tonight.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “You know?”

  “I kno
w all. I am not so deaf, daughter, that I cannot eavesdrop.” He wagged his finger. “If I strain hard enough, and perhaps creep over to the door.”

  They laughed together. “You are feeling better?” They heard the door open and knew that Beecher had arrived.

  “Yes, daughter. Yes, yes.” They understood that his answer was relative, for he was always in some pain. “Now, you hasten on and visit your sick friend lest you arrive too late.” Her countenance fell. “Oh, damn me, I am sorry. I hope that he may recover.”

  “Some do recover,” she reflected, “but apparently he is gravely ill.”

  He took her hand in both of his own. “God’s will be done, but I hope he may yet be well again.”

  In the keeping room she found Beecher and Harriet flanking the door, and Dorothea saw them out. “God bless you, my daughter.” Dorothea kissed her cheek and tightened the cloak about her neck. “Do as you feel God directs you,” she whispered, “only, I beg you, do not mingle with the foreign students, do not go into their common area. Keep yourself covered in your cloak and leave it outside when you return. I shall make up a fire and boil it tomorrow.”