I have shared so much with you, Sarah, over the long years since I was first brought to your shores. I fear that you will think it strange that I cannot share in your joy today, though I can understand it. After so much time, a generation’s worth of dreary days, how wonderful it must seem to you to hear the declaration of peace upon the harbourside and to join the crowds as they stream up the hill towards the market square. There everyone will converge to raise a glass of ale, share food and cheer for the victory that they can finally proclaim over Napoleon. You must forgive me if I cannot share in the jubilation of the swelling voices and clapping hands I can hear from my own small room where I sit silently, shutters drawn. It is not that I do not welcome the coming moment when the beacon at the top of the square will be lit to commemorate the end of war. It is just that for me those flames do not signify hope for the future. My future has been taken from me, as has my past, for I can never again savour the place that once sustained me, from which I was removed, a victim of your war. You have been a true friend to me, and I am grateful, but for now it is better that I stay quietly by our fire attending only to the long-ago griefs rekindled in its dying embers.
As every day, I think of you, my poor newborn baby, your first cry breaking through the wall of inertia I had built against the endless buffeting of ocean winds and the sickness that never quite went away however accustomed I became to the shifting waves. You must have been disturbed by the change in the ship’s direction and its gradual slowing. My pains began as we were being guided into the harbour by smaller vessels who ploughed ahead to lead us in. We prisoners were being fetched from below in what seemed like a rare gesture of kindness but was probably intended merely to speed up our allocation to sea or land once we had docked in the harbour. I held on till almost the last gasp before falling to the floor and screaming with pain in a way that alarmed the young officer who had been placed in charge of us and who called for the ship’s doctor to come and examine me. I scarcely needed his attentions as the rush of birth came on fiercely after that and the doctor had only time to catch you in his arms, moaning about his best jacket being blooded and then secure the cord before passing you on to me to be cradled and fed, wrapped in an old seaman’s shirt. When I looked at you, I saw that you were such a thing of beauty, a light of new life shining in that dark cave-hold where we were stowed as cargo during the months of our crossing. I held you close for the joy of taking deep breaths; the perfume of your skin an antidote to the pressing smell of unwashed bodies otherwise relieved only by the lingering tang of salt water used to swab our quarters from time to time. I drank you in and when I touched your skin it was as if I stroked again, oh so gently, the strong and even sapling that had grown steadily outside my ancestral home, its branches thrusting upwards to the far reaches of our starry skies, but also outwards ready one day to shade us from the searing sun. Seeing you took me back there, son, to my birth home and yours, where you came into being in a wordless act of love and, not knowing that you had been robbed of your inheritance, of the sun, the stars, the tree, lay low, cocooned within me, until the time had come to make your entrance.
My darling, my hope, my remnant of that older and oh so precious life before our capture and removal from the island home of our youth, in chains, lulled by the creaking rhythms of the voyage only to be woken, as were you my precious boy, by the cold reality of our destination, moored up so tantalisingly close to land, but made to stay on board until our fate had been decided. And then came the women of the port, employed to make our daily pottage and to swab the decks. You were one of them, Sarah, and there was something kindly in your face that made me certain you could never look upon my baby and hate me. He was a thing of beauty, and no-one surely would begrudge him the air he breathed or breast that suckled him. Like the other women you could not help but smile to see him, bringing little gifts and trinkets hidden in the rags we wrapped him in. You ran your fingers through my boy’s hair and touched his tiny nose with your first finger, talking slowly, confidentially as if in hope that he would somehow understand you. It was you who called him Chester as you gestured to the fortress walls alongside which our ship had sunk its anchor saying ‘Por-chest-er’ repeatedly and waiting with your finger pointing to my mouth until I copied you to signify the castle where we had landed and then my son’s English name. And as you came and went, teaching us new words upon each visit, we were left bobbing in the harbour: A human surplus kept separate, perhaps for fear that, if others saw us, they might think us too like them to hate us anymore.
You tried, Sarah, to help as Chester sickened with a fever, becoming fretful as he weakened, no longer focussing his bright eyes, or seeking out our smiles. You wept with me when he died as we let him gently down into the harbour deeps, though you would not let me pray for death, embracing me as if you knew the meaning of the words I uttered in the depth of my despair.
He would have grown to be a man by now, Sarah, and you have helped me all these years, persuading the authorities that I should be lodged with you until the war was over as if you knew that, in time, the townspeople would grow accustomed to my presence. They watch me now without fear in their eyes as I work in the stubbly field behind your cottage to tend the little crops we grow before sitting down together beneath the shelter of the little oak that has grown there over time.
I was lucky to be rescued by you, Sarah, and I thank you in the language you have taught me for the aid you gave me. Still, you know, as I do, that your story is not my story. Mine runs another course, told in a different tongue, on an island place across the oceans, moons away, and ended long ago when my husband fought back against your people and was struck down and I travelled the seas by force to birth my child who sickened on that coffin-boat.
You deserve your celebration, Sarah, your moment of joy, as I deserve my chance to muse upon past happiness and sorrow. Do not search for me on your return. I plan to rest for a time under the oak tree where we buried Chester’s trinkets, and then at dusk to take myself down to the deserted harbour and watch the incoming tide from the rocks below the castle. Think of me as I will be there, happy for a time, alone, content, then leaning ever closer to the swell to share my whispered story with the sea.
About the author
Jane Spirit lives in Suffolk UK and has been inspired to write fiction by going along to her local creative writing class.
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