Weird Sisters are very excited to share a glimpse of Jay Taverner’s forthcoming novel, Liberty – in which Miss Rebecca Wiston sets out on a sea voyage. We can't wait to read more.
(Liberty is the fourth in the ‘Brynsquilver’ series of historical novels (the others are Rebellion, Hearts and Minds and Something Wicked), and is set at the time of the French Revolution.)
PROLOGUE
The Robin, two-masted coasting vessel out of Salem, walloping southwards before a following wind off the Carolinas in the early spring of 1789. The Robin, shabby, worm-eaten and stinking, laden with oak staves for sugar casks and fusty rice to feed slaves in the British colonies. The packet plodded along, more Dobbin than Robin, Rebecca thought: an old nag bound head-down for its stable. But she did not care. She loved the ugly little ship. For her, everything – salt spray and heaving deck, swearing sailors and puking passengers – was insignificant in the face of the huge shining sky and the swooping, thrusting flow of brilliant air. And every day of rolling progress brought her nearer to her new, half-guessed future.
She sat each day on a pile of spars in the steadily strengthening sun, breathing deeply and, with each long breath, letting go of another link that chained her. On the ninth morning, the new warmth seeping into her back through the serviceable grey wool of her winter gown made her wonder for a moment whether she might go barefoot, as the sailors did; she had not felt the world though her toes since she was a wild child running in the summer woods, twenty years ago.
It had taken some persuasion to make the Captain take her as a passenger. She knew that her appearance had hardly recommended her – a tall, spare woman dressed in Quaker grey, past her youth at eight-and-twenty and, she thought ruefully, with all the marks of an old maid; but she’d fixed him with a steady gaze, and made him listen to her carefully prepared speech about needing a passage to England, and begging information about getting there via Jamaica. Captain Singleton had clearly been unhappy about an unaccompanied woman traveller. It was not entirely unprecedented, of course, for the Friends did quite often go forth alone, to bear witness in distant places; and, by a stroke good fortune, Captain Singleton’s mother and father-in-law were already on board, bound to see their new grandchild in Jamaica. They had agreed, a little reluctantly, to take Rebecca under their protection, and so the problem was solved.
In the event she had seen very little of these other passengers. Since the Robin had sailed, Rebecca had spent every day on deck, mostly gazing out eastwards towards her distant destination; she rarely entered the cabin. She had watched Salem dwindle out of sight as they sailed out of the harbour and, as they sailed on, she’d watched the sailors at work. They watched her in return, and grinned, and answered when she spoke to them. She’d stood out of the way while they kicked the poxy old tub into shape, and now she strode the length of the deck without so much as holding to the rail. She had stood by the man at the helm for two days, asking questions which he had answered with surprised politeness. Now the sailors tipped their caps, and she smiled, as they passed by.
On the tenth day they left American waters, passing out into the Gulf, the last leg of the trip to Jamaica. The sun grew hotter and, by the time Rebecca went down to her cot in the narrow cabin, the wind seemed to have dropped to a lulling whisper. But when she woke, too early, before light, she could feel a strange shift in the motion of the ship. The other passengers were both sound asleep on the other side of the cabin, their sickly faces pale in the surging sea-light that slapped against the porthole. Rebecca sat up. The everlasting wallow of the ship had changed to a choppy, gut-wrenching rhythm. Rising quickly and wrapping her woollen shawl over her shift, she made her way across to the companion-way, holding on against the unnatural buck and rear of the deck.
Above, in the midst of the turbulent motion, there was a strained stillness about the crew. She could see three men holding on by the port rail, and the captain at the wheel; all were staring into the east, as if to catch the rising dawn. Rebecca turned her head. The easterly sky was livid, with green-tinged rays of light rising eerily from the coming sun. Singleton caught sight of her at the companion-head, and called out, gesturing for her to go down again – but his voice was lost in the wind, and in the disaster that fell upon them. A screaming, twisting squall swept down on the ship, tossing it madly like a nutshell in a waterfall. As Rebecca clung to the rope at the stair-head, a wall of water wrenched her sideways, completely off her feet. The icy wave knocked all the breath from her body, but she clung on, pressed against the companion housing for what seemed an age, banging helplessly in the wall of water that swept across the deck. The sound of crashing, splintering timber deafened her.
Then the surge of the sea dropped her abruptly and spewed out of the bilges. Men ran by shouting, laid hold of ropes and began working like demons with knives and axes to free the cumbered ship as she thrashed like a terrified horse tied by the head. Tons of broken wood and sail trailed away in the water. The mast, Rebecca realised – the main mast – had gone by the board. She ducked down the stairwell out of the screaming wind, but darkness and enclosure filled her with terror and she scrambled out again, watching as the crew slashed and chopped to clear the rigging, while two men struggled with the wheel. The captain was gazing away from the rising sun now, westwards, and she pulled herself along by the rail to see what he was watching.
It was land. A rocky coast, green cliffs incredibly near. She had imagined them still out at sea, swept by this twister in mid-ocean; but they were hard by the shore. Her heart leapt. Then, as she turned back to watch the struggle to master the ship, the deck shuddered and rose under her feet, freed from some of the dragging debris. A man screamed. Horrified, she watched him fly by, mouth open and hands clutching, caught by the leg in an escaping mass of rigging that he had cut free. The ship seemed to right itself, pulling upright before the wind, almost as if it answered to the helm; but as she drew a stunned breath, the air exploded into wet chaos again and she was flung aside, up and away as, quite unmistakably, the hull struck a rock.
