Of course ten men, no matter what they’d drunk, could not send the Cradle Rock crashing into the sea. It was a hundred times their weight. All they could do was displace it from its pivot stone, so that it slipped an inch or two and rested on its seaward base, to rock no more. They put their ten backs against it when it fell, but they might as well have tried to knock a mountain down. ‘And push! And push! And push!’ There was no ‘Let-her-go’. It was a disappointment then. The Rock had beaten them. The Rock had sobered them as well. The sweat was gelid on their foreheads. The air was icy. Their breaths were sugary and high. What could they chew to take the smell of drink away before they got the wagons — and the cattle — back to Wherrytown?
It was early on the Tuesday morning and still dark, with the sailors nursing headaches and sore backs in their hammocks, when the earth below the repositioned Rock gave way. It could not support the weight. There was an avalanche of stones and earth, which bounced into the sea. The Cradle Rock fell fifteen feet from its platform. It was too big to bounce. It dug into the ground and stopped within two seconds of its fall. Its underside, revealed at last to moonlight, was black and glistening, and barnacled with snails. You couldn’t see it from the path. Its eminence was now declivity. Palmer Dolly, on his last night at home, heard the distant impact of the Rock and trembled in his bed. The Rock was down. The coast would never be the same again. He didn’t care.
Miggy would have trembled, too, if she had not been dreaming of the sea and how a girl with unkempt hair might flourish in America.
14. The Last of Wherrytown
THE NORRISES weren’t the only ones to pack their bags that Tuesday morning and say farewell to Wherrytown. Lotty Kyte was emigrating, too. Her brother Chesney had paid the seventy shillings for her passage, second class, on the Belle. Chesney had been a cabinet-maker before he emigrated with his bag of tools. Now, ‘after just seven years in Canada’, as Lotty explained to everyone she met, he had a wife called Maisie and a factory in Montreal. ‘You can’t take beds and tables with you. Not all the way to Canada. Too far,’ she said as she was led, blindfolded, down to the quay a little after ten. ‘The land of freedom it is. Clear a bit of ground and put a cabin up. That’s all you have to do. But still, for all the freedom in the world, you haven’t got a stick of decent furniture. You can’t sit down, except on logs. You’re sleeping on the floor. What can you do? Speak to my Chesney, of course! He has the furnishings, and you don’t have to pay till harvest time. It’s made him rich in seven years. He sends for me. He tells me, Sister, put your blindfold on and come to Canada.’ She shook the letter and the ticket which she had received from him two months before. ‘He wants his sister by his side, no matter what. To help out with his books. To be a friend for Maisie. A sister can’t refuse. My Chesney’s odd, but he is family, when all is said and done. So I must make this little sacrifice, and blind myself with cloth.’ What, her challenge was, could be more logical, more natural than that?
They found a wooden box for her to rest on by the quay. They dusted it, and cushioned it with folded sack, and helped her sit. At first the sailors, stowing stores and luggage on the Belle, thought Lotty Kyte was pregnant. The only softness to her long and angular body was her stomach. It seemed distended. But she wasn’t fat from pregnancy. She wore an opium bag, tied round her waist, to ward off seasickness. She had three travel chests and a carpet bag at her feet. Every few minutes she touched them with her toes to check they’d not been stolen. She kept her head bowed and her hand across her blindfold for a while, keeping out the harsh sea light. Then she pulled a knitted scarf from her bag and tied it round her head. The extra darkness seemed to comfort her. She was less frightened, and sat quietly, fingering her ticket and her letter. The Wherrytowners who came to stare at her could see a chin, some bonnet and an inch of hair. They morning’d her. ‘Who’s that?’ she asked. They gave their names and wished her luck in Canada. ‘You don’t need luck in Canada,’ she answered. ‘My brother says.’ They didn’t have to hide their smiles. Now here was something they could tell their grandchildren — the blindfolded emigrant!
Lotty Kyte, who lived only two parishes from Wherrytown, had never seen the sea, and never would. When she was born, some Madame Haruspex from a travelling fair had warned the family that if Lotty ever saw the sea she’d die, ‘and not by drowning’. So that is how she’d lived her life. She’d stayed inland for thirty-seven years. It wasn’t hard — until, that is, she received the ticket from her brother and she was taken to the quay. And then it wasn’t even hard, just dark and inconvenient and itchy. She’d take off the scarf and her blindfold when she was in the Belle. She didn’t have to go on deck. She didn’t have to press her nose against a porthole. And even if the sea galed up and lashed the porthole glass, she had simply to pull her bonnet down or hide under a blanket. She would sit as quietly as a mouse for six or seven weeks, hugging opium, and then go blindfolded into Canada.
Aymer Smith, with Whip on a length of rope, had walked down to the quay ahead of the Norrises. He got a short good morning and an even shorter, nervous smile from the preacher, and no reply at all from Walter Howells, who was waiting on his horse at harbour end. Miggy and Rosie Bowe rewarded his greetings with red-eyed, ghostly smiles. He wouldn’t present them with their stipend yet.
He’d not expected such a crowd, nor so much noise and jollity. He joined the queue of onlookers, and listened to a dozen versions of Lotty Kyte’s life story. Someone, he thought, should tear her blindfold off and let her see salt water. There wouldn’t be a flash of lightning or a heart attack. She wouldn’t choke on it. At worst she’d die of fright. ‘Blind superstition,’ he muttered to himself, but loud enough for Mr Phipps to hear. When he saw Robert and Katie Norris arriving on the quay with George as porter, he walked over and repeated it out loud, ‘Blind superstition, nothing more.’
‘What is?’ asked George. ‘What isn’t, too?’ He winked at the Norrises, took the pennies they offered him and said, ‘Here’s better recompense than soap.’
‘No, Mr Smith’s soap is very fine,’ said Katie. ‘I still have a cake of it untouched. It will serve me well in Canada, though I suppose they must have soap in Canada as well …’ She smiled at Aymer. ‘And when I use it I will think of you and these amusing days in Wherrytown.’
Aymer couldn’t find an amusing reply. He wasn’t looking forward to the loss of Katie and his soap to the colonies. At last, to break his silence, he pointed out Lotty Kyte for them, and retold her story. ‘She is your fellow passenger,’ he said, ‘and she is, I might suggest, a parable of sorts, for emigrants. A poet could not better her. She goes blindfolded into the future. She travels with her vision blocked, but her hopes intact. Are not your situations similar, except without the bindings on your eyes?’
‘Oh, Mr Smith, will you not simply wish us God’s speed?’ said Katie. She didn’t want to listen to his lecture. She wanted to sit quietly on the quay, with Robert’s hand engaged in hers, and feel the solid stone beneath her feet.
‘Of course I wish you speed, dear Mrs Norris,’ Aymer said. Her hair was pinned and out of sight. She wore a warm grey cloak with long, loose sleeves. He noted all of it; the rising colour of her face, the laces of her shoes, the ‘Oh’ before she said his name, her frown. ‘And furthermore I wish you every fortune on your arrival there. I would not want you, though, to miss the aptness of the parable.’