Silence the Dead Read online

  There was no point dropping the line; it would simply be laid horizontal in the fast-moving current. Instead, Thomas and Slocum, anticipating impact, gripped the rigging with all their might, hugging the bowsprit and staring holes in the fog to port and starboard, trying to make out the land that, judging from the way the sea was piling up, must be closing rapidly in on either side.

  “Look!” Slocum cried suddenly, pointing to starboard.

  At that instant, a jagged promontory of treeless land – a beached whale of bleached granite – burst through the fog, seeming to throw itself at the ship. Before Slocum could yell “Ledge to starboard!” the peninsula fell away. The alarm had died in his throat when another ledge, this one crowned by a single, wind-bent spruce tree, punctured the swirling mists and leapt toward them. Once again, the cry sprang to his lips; once again the threat retreated into the fog.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” he sang out; more fervent a sailor’s prayer had never been uttered.

  The impact, when it came, was none of what they expected. Suddenly, the Crimea simply slowed as if the sea had congealed around it like treacle. The wind, catching up, at last filled the sails, which pulsed and strained but to little apparent effect. The ship slowed more.

  Quiggly was on deck. Thomas realized that, for some time now, the captain had been shouting orders at the helmsmen and the mate, but his voice had been one with the crashing of waves on either side. Perhaps he had been yelling at he and Slocum as well, but they had been too caught up in the horror and awe of the moment to notice. In any event, he fell silent now. There were no commands left. Only prayer, wind, and whatever forward momentum they had left would deliver them from sure destruction.

  Overhead, the masts and spars creaked and groaned with their heavy burden of air.

  “Cap’n!” Meservey said, “We’ve got to reef sail or the masts’ll snap!”

  “Hold, Mr. Meservey,” said the Captain, staring up at the sails, as if upholding the groaning masts by the sheer force of his will, “that’ll be the least of our problems if she don’t get through!”

  Meservey fell silent, as did the rest of the crew on deck and in the rigging.

  There had been no sudden impact as Thomas had anticipated. No thunderous crash of stone on wood. Even now, there was . . . nothing. The submerged bar – nothing more than sand and mud – had simply seized the hull in its grip and was slowly attempting to squeeze it to a standstill.

  Yet the Crimea fought on. The weight of the waves and the push of the wind on her stern and in her sails were powerful allies in the titanic wrestling match between the elements. Just when it seemed she was about to succumb to the pressure of the mud along her keel, the ancient ship broke her bounds and slipped and shuddered into open ocean. The cheer that followed started in the rigging and, in seconds, was taken up by every throat on deck, except the Captain’s. The celebration was joined by a chorus of passengers below deck who, though not sure what they had escaped, sensed in the cries of the crew how near a thing it must have been.

  The Captain caught Thomas’s eye and gestured to him. Thomas climbed down from the bowsprit and threaded his way across the deck, not knowing what to expect. “Mr. Conlan.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  “I hope I ain’t too proud a man,” he said, the authoritative resonance of his voice silencing the general tumult, “to admit my mistake.” He nodded at the helmsman. Some of the passengers began to poke their heads from the hold; he swept them with his gaze. “It ain’t our custom to come this way, folks,” he said, and the crew laughed. “Mr. Burley steered where I tol’ ‘im.” He indicated the helmsman. “An’ young Mr. Conlan here,” he gripped Thomas’s shoulder firmly then, when Thomas winced in pain, at once softened his hold. “Same as I ‘ad whipped t’other day in public and now thank in public as well, ‘as saved Lloyd’s a small fortune, deprived the good men of the life savin’ station on yon island the opportunity to earn their keep, and by-the-by, delayed our reunion with our ancestors, robbin’ Davy Jones of our cargo into the bargain!”

  The round of huzzahs that followed shook the rigging, and Sadie, breaking free of the rabble, rushed to Thomas’s side and embraced him unabashedly, an embrace which he, forgetting his pain, returned with his whole heart.

  At the same moment, in the shadows of the forecastle, wrapped in the embrace of his little sister, the soul of Tiffin Conlan surrendered to the light and entered the place where sorrow is no more.

  Quiggly sometimes wondered if he’d tossed more passengers overboard than he’d delivered safely ashore. Sometimes it felt that way. That wasn’t going to happen to Tiffin Conlan. The little brother of the boy who saved his ship was going to have a proper land burial, with a proper priest, in a proper churchyard. It would mean keeping the body in ice and sawdust, which might yet be had, even this time of year, from the old hospital or almshouse on Deer Island in Boston Harbor, for the two or three days the Crimea would be in quarantine awaiting clearance by the Custom’s physician. “Please, God,” he whispered, “blind his eyes.”

  Monday, October 10th, 1879.

  For two days after the Crimea tied off at Long Wharf in Boston Harbor and the residue of its cargo of passengers was safely off-loaded, Captain Quiggly wandered the North End, which had lately become more Irish than Ireland, searching for a plot of hallowed ground. At last, in consideration of two English liters of premium whiskey, he’d secured a thimbleful of dirt from Sian O’Malley, last of his line, within the weed-choked precincts of that worthy family’s plot in Copp’s Hill burying ground. In that sad, neglected, but holy earth, Tiffin would be buried alongside Cotton and Increase Mather, whom Quiggly had heard of, though he couldn’t recall who they’d been or what they’d done.

  When the Captain returned in triumph with the news, the remaining Conlans and Sadie were nowhere to be found.

  “He was in an awful state!” said Mrs. Quiggly, wringing her hands, pacing back and forth across the cabin that she’d scrubbed to a religious sheen. “The little one wandered off whilst Thomas was sortin’ out the foredeck. ‘e thought Sadie was watchin’ ‘er, an’ she thought ‘e was . . . ”

  “What was there to watch?” Quiggly interrupted, his alarm rising. “She ‘adn’t took more’n six steps since the fever!”

  “I know! I know!” said the distraught woman, anxiety driving her aimlessly about the cabin like a skittles ball. “Poor thing! Poor, poor thing! But she done it, someways. Off she goes and Lord only knows what’ll come’ve ‘er! Oh, Lord Jesus!”

  Quiggly knew only too well what could become of a five-year-old girl lost in the mean end of Boston. White slavery was the best of it. The worst . . . well, it didn’t bear thinking. Having conducted a quick search of the harbor in the immediate vicinity of his ship, he struck off amidst the cacophony of the docks, wondering what chance Thomas had of finding his sister, even with the extra help of Sadie’s eyes and street savvy. Then again, how far could the child have gone, recovering as she was from near-death of the fever?

  “She can’t have lived through that, only to face worse here,” Quiggly assured himself as he turned up Milk Street in the direction of Haymarket, where all traffic seemed to be headed. He reasoned that Katy would have been too weak to oppose the tide. Defying the odds, he began calling her name, but his voice, which commanded unquestioning and immediate obedience aboard the Crimea, was all but silenced by the immensity of uncaring in Boston.

  Not far away, headed in the same direction, Thomas and Sadie worked opposite banks of the human river, echoing the same name, with the same results. For them the hue and cry, the sheer vastness of the city – which otherwise would have both stupefied and enticed them – was now nothing but an impediment to their search. The hawkers and barkers, trumpeting miracles natural and manmade; the wonders of the untamed west; the lure of gold “to be had by the handful for no more work than it takes to bend over and pick it up!” equally failed to distract the frantic duo from their object. Alike, they were blind to the filt
h and poverty infesting the warren of streets and the depravity to which plaster-boards and posters stood testimony.

  Thomas, having lost sight of Sadie, climbed a lamppost to give him a clear view above the heads of the crowd. “Sadie!”

  Her head appeared almost at once, jumping up and down not twenty feet away. “Any sign?”

  His words were unclear, but she grasped the meaning. Quickly upending an empty crate, she jumped up on it so he could see her. “No!” she yelled, pointing toward the gold-roofed cupola of Faneuil Hall in the near distance. “Meet me there!” Thomas nodded and jumped back down into the passing throng.

  Passersby had no time for Thomas’s problem. As he pressed forward, people either ignored his frantic queries or told him to “tell it to the police,” one of whom was nearby on horseback.

  “I’ll telegraph her description to the precincts, lad,” said the policeman, not merely a fellow Irishman, but from County Limerick as well which, from the perspective of America, was practically County Kerry. “It’s the best I can do. We’ve more lost folk in Boston than anyplace this side of Judgment.”

  Thomas and Sadie converged on the square almost simultaneously. Tumbling free of the gravitational pull of the dispersing masses, they nearly collided. Thomas gripped her by the arm. “Nothing?”

  She shook her head. “No sign.”

  Quickly, Thomas appraised the situation. Had he not been benumbed with alarm for Katy, he would have stopped and pitched his tent (if he’d had a tent) on the spot and never moved. Before them stood a massive building, three stories high, its upper floors resting upon a long arcade of huge arches, each of which was occupied by a food vendor whose goods of milk and cheese descended from the dark, cool interior and spilled to the street in pyramids of gleaming copper kettles. Bakers’ stalls overflowed with breads, rolls, pies, cakes, and pastries of every description. In others, eggs nested in beds of hay, great burlap sacks of grain swelled their seams, butchers’ helpers shooed flies from dangling cuts of bloody meat as big as an Irishman’s eyes.

  Each arch sheltered a little community of offspring, ancillary vendors who shouted the virtue of their wares – corn, carrots, beets, onions, pumpkins, preserves, and a hundred other commodities Thomas couldn’t identify – at the indifferent shoppers who casually drifted by.

  The sight was beyond Thomas’s ability to dream. Even Sadie, whose demeanor suggested that the world held no more surprises, stood gaping for a moment, her amazement magnified by the emptiness of her belly.

  “Bloody ‘ell!”

  He shook off the trance. “Never mind that! You go ‘round that way. I’ll go this way, and we’ll meet up on the other side.”

  Sadie wasn’t so easily de-mesmerized. “Bloody ‘ell! Look at this . . . ”

  “You can look all you want . . . later.”

  Sadie was skeptical. “You think she could have come this far . . . in her condition?”

  Who had time to think? Assuming Katy had followed the general flow, he’d have done the same. Words were forming on his lips, but what his reply might have been would remain unknown, for at that moment they were drawn into the outer fringes of a group of people orbiting around some little drama on the cobblestones.

  A fine, black carriage, gleaming in the occasional shafts of sunlight thrown at it by scudding clouds, stood on the opposite edge of the storm’s eye. Within was a beautiful woman who had opened the door and, half-in and half-out, was quietly giving directions to her liveried footman who was bent over an object on the ground and seemed to be trying to pick it up.

  Sadie was the one who first realized what the object was. “It’s Katy!” she said, pulling at his sleeve and pointing at the unconscious child. At once, Thomas tensed to run, but Sadie yanked him back.

  “What’re you goin’ to do?”

  “Let me go!” Thomas yelled, looking at her as if she were mad.

  She grabbed him with the other hand.

  “What’re you goin’ to do?”

  “I’m goin’ to get ‘er!”

  “And?”

  “An’ what?”

  “That’s what I mean. ‘And what’ are you goin’ to do when you get ‘er?”

  Thomas’s muscles relaxed slightly. “Take ‘er back to the ship.”

  “An’ what?”

  Thomas’s head was spinning. Feed her? There was no food left on the ship. What little that remained had been shoveled out so the ship could be cleaned in readiness for loading its next cargo. Even the Captain and mistress had taken to eating ashore, mostly at the Oyster House.

  “I’ll get ‘er a doctor!”

  “That costs money.”

  “I’ve got two sovereigns,” said Thomas, beginning to rummage through his pockets for the coins he’d taken from Tiffin’s still, frost-blue body. A brief search, increasingly frenzied as pocket after pocket turned up empty, produced nothing of the Conlan family fortune. “It’s gone!”

  He’d had the sovereigns when they left the ship. He ransacked the crowd with his eyes. There were too many of them. In the bump and bustle of all those people, even an inexpert thief could have picked his pocket with impunity and he’d have been none the wiser.

  The footman had picked up Katy’s limp body and was gently transferring it to the coach. The woman stepped out to assist him. Anywhere from her late twenties to early thirties, Sadie thought, she was not dressed in the street fashion of the day, but wore a tailored riding habit with a starched shirtwaist, an ascot tie, soft, cream-colored kid gauntlets, and handmade riding boots. Her maroon riding skirt brushed the ground so that her boots were seldom visible. Atop her head of bright, coppery hair, a blue silk hat sat at a jaunty angle. Sadie was transfixed.

  “Coo, she in’t ‘alf luvly, ain’t she?”

  Thomas, too, was stunned as he stood staring at the woman. But he was blind to both her beauty and her accoutrements. It suddenly all became too much for him. The specter of misery and loss that haunted him across Ireland had made the leaky Crimea a bridge of sorrows to the New World. His mother and father and Tiffin all dead, Katy on her way to join them, and now the little wealth with which he’d hoped to buy them all a new life – stolen. He stood in his unwashed rags and his father’s boots, his hands hanging in defeat at his sides, and wept.

  Sadie embraced him as he sank to the ground. “She’s a good Christian woman, Thomas. Look ‘ow gentle she’s bein’. An’ kind. Yer c’n see it in ‘er face. Look! Jus’ think, Katy’ll ‘ave a proper doctor now. An’ food wot you ‘an me can’t give ‘er, an’ a clean bed. Oo knows, she might grow up to be a parlor maid in some fine ‘ouse!” To be a parlor maid had been the height of Sadie’s ambition ever since she’d seen a picture of one in a tuppeny paper, all smart and crisp in her black frock, tidy white apron, and patent leather boots. An image as lofty and out of reach as Queen Victoria in all her regalia.

  Thomas wasn’t listening. Boston whirled about him more violently than any storm at sea. He was overwhelmed with a passionate need to surrender. But to whom? What? Should he throw up his arms and beg lightning bolts to filet him, bone from flesh, flesh from soul. Nothing would happen. All that would remain then, when his cries had shaken the rafters of heaven and its echoes retreated unanswered, would be the miserable gray creature of his faith, writhing and wilting in the emptiness of his stomach . . . the pitiless cavern that defined him.

  His line of sight, in drifting aimlessly about the vicinity, fetched upon the carriage. He wobbled to his feet.

  “Leave ‘er go, Tommy!” Sadie implored. “She’s bet’r off.”

  Unheeding, Tommy staggered forward. “I’ve got to find out where they’re takin’ ‘er!”

  Fortunately, for Thomas’s purposes, the coachman had to thread the vehicle carefully through the crowd. He had no difficulty keeping up, even in his weakened state. Nor did Sadie have any trouble keeping up with him. They were close enough to hear the words when the woman leaned out the window and called to her driver.

  “Can’t
you go any faster, Louis? The poor child’s dying!”

  “I’m doin’ my best, ma’am,” said the coachman. “This ‘ere’s market day traffic. There’s no gettin’ ‘round it.”

  The lady caught sight of Thomas. “You, boy . . . come here!” She patted the door, as if she were calling a dog, but her eyes spoke no offense. With effort, Thomas caught up to the coach and trotted along beside it. “How would you like to earn a dollar?”

  “Ma’am?

  Chapter Nine

  “Take this card to the police station on Commercial Street. Tell the sergeant there to telephone Dr. Graysmith and send him to that address at once. Do you understand?”

  “Yes’m,” Thomas replied, but he was torn between going for help and staying near his sister.

  “Now!” said the woman. “You come to that address, too, and you’ll get a silver dollar. Now, go!”

  He stopped briefly in his tracks and the carriage pulled away, the woman still leaning out the window, her expression admonishing him to make haste. In a moment, Sadie was beside him. “Go on wi’ ya!” she said, slapping him on the arm. “I’ll keep watch on Katy.”

  Thomas looked at her, his eyes at once hopeless and desperate. After all he’d been through, he was about to be separated from Sadie as well. Reluctantly, as if accepting the defeat that couldn’t help but come on the heels of his decision, he nodded and jogged feebly into the crowd asking directions to the police station on Commercial Street. Sadie set her dirty face, hitched up her tattered skirt with both hands, and trotted off barefoot after the lady in the coach.

  Less than half an hour later, Thomas was riding the running board of the doctor’s hansom as it clattered over the cobblestones and down the narrow streets of Beacon Hill. The police station’s telephone had been out of order, so he’d accompanied the police wagon to Doctor Graysmith, who telephoned the woman, Mrs. Eleanor Saltonstall, to determine if his services were still needed. The Saltonstall’s butler assured him they were, and learning that Thomas was with him, conveyed his mistress’s wishes that the doctor fetch him along to receive payment for his services.