“You see?” the captain said to her when the sailor did not appear again. “He does not love you enough. He does not love you as I do.”
The captain grabbed an ax and began to chop the widow’s walk from the house. When he was finished and his anger exhausted, he unlocked the chains and kissed the cuts and bruises on her wrists while he cried with despair at what he knew would leave scars and spoil her perfection. “Tell me you love me,” he said to her as he carried her to the bed. “Tell me you love me and I will forgive you all.”
But the girl could not. She could not lie.
Now bad times were coming to Salem. The British had placed a trade embargo on all American ships, hoping to stop their lucrative trade with France, with whom Britain was at war. Since Salem’s profound wealth was almost completely dependent on trade with foreign ports, the city had been severely damaged by the embargo, and the only ships sailing out of port these days were the newly commissioned privateers, which the British ships stood waiting just off the Atlantic coast to intercept.
Like so many others, the captain’s ship was at the wharf, with no sail date on the calendar. And though he did not want to leave his wife again, he had begun to hatch a plan that would end his troubles. But the plan involved going to sea. So when he was approached by Leander Cobb about a new venture, he was more than eager to hear the man’s proposition.
The Maleous was an old slave-trading ship that was as evil-looking as its name implied. After five years in dry dock, the ship still held the stench of death and decay.
Though there had been slave traders in Salem as in Boston, the Salem ships had long ago given up the practice. Most of the old slave ships had been destroyed, some set afire and cheered as they burned, but the Maleous was different. It was a huge vessel, and there had been plans to convert it to a merchant vessel, but that had never been done, many considering it cursed. For years it had sat empty and neglected at the far end of Cobb’s Wharf.
Old Leander Cobb was a practical man, who owned many ships. Not wanting to risk his other vessels in such dangerous times, he had begun to have the Maleous restored, removing the rough wooden sleeping decks where slaves had been forced to lie on their sides so that they occupied less than three square feet of space as cargo.
Aided by the embargo, which had stolen the livelihood of many a sailor, Cobb was fairly certain he could muster a crew for the Maleous, cursed or not. But there was only one captain whom he would consider for the job, and only one likely to take it. Cobb knew that Arlis Browne would come at a price. And with all trade suspended and his fortunes dwindling, Leander Cobb was more than willing to pay that price.
Cobb offered Browne more shares of the ship than he had ever earned as a captain, an amount large enough to ensure him voting rights with the promise that he could purchase the Maleous as soon as the embargo was lifted and Cobb was able to go back to sailing his full fleet. Arlis Browne would finally get his ship. Browne easily agreed. It not only fit his lofty idea of himself as a ship’s owner, but it suited the new and more devious plan that he had hatched for the young sailor who’d stolen the heart of Zylphia.
Cobb had been right-the captain had little trouble getting his crew back together. Most of the sailors had already spent all or most of the money they’d earned during their last voyage. Broke and debauched, the men were eager to go back to sea and had scant prospect of sailing if not with Captain Browne.
Hard times engendered more loyalty to their captain than was previously seen, and so when Browne asked their help with the young sailor, no one was able to refuse his request, its being a condition of their new employment on the Maleous, one of the only ships likely to sail from Salem anytime soon.
What the captain was asking was not unheard of. He was not asking for murder or even revenge on the young sailor. All he asked was that his crew get the sailor drunk and press him into service on the Maleous in much the same way that the British navy was pressing sailors into service on their ships every day.
It was not difficult to get the young sailor drunk. He’d been drinking every night in an effort to forget his true love, whom he now believed to be deceitful and false. A simple lie did the rest of the trick. The crew of the Maleous told the young sailor that they were taking him back to the Friendship, which had been repaired and was preparing to sail. It was in fact just what the sailor had been praying for. He went along easily and far too drunk to notice, on that starless night, that it was the Maleous they were boarding and not the Friendship.
Early the next day, with the seaman still asleep, the Maleous sailed out of Salem Harbor. Zylphia was left on her own, with no housekeeper. Of course the captain was also gone, and for now that was enough. Propelled by love, she searched ceaselessly for the sailor, but to no avail. Those who knew the truth of what had happened were too afraid of Arlis Browne to tell her the story. They looked away. Someone who’d seen the seaman that last night said he had sailed on the Friendship, but the Friendship had not yet sailed, and the seaman was not on board. She began to despair.
True love speaks from the heart, so the town could not stay mute forever. A sailor who took pity on the lovers told her what he’d heard, that the captain had taken her lover on board the Maleous and that the young seaman was not likely to return alive.
Zylphia screamed in horror. She sobbed. She begged God to save her sailor, she begged the towns-people to do something, anything-but what could they do? The ship was on the high seas, en route to Sumatra and Madagascar, and would not return for over a year. She should go on with her life, they advised her. She should go home and live the life of a captain’s wife, as was fitting to her station. She should forget her seaman and the notion of true love. There was nothing to be done but that.
With no other choice, the girl went back to the captain’s house. When she was there, she grew strong again and waited for her sailor to return. For she never lost her faith in true love, and she knew, somewhere deep inside, that he was still alive. She would know if he wasn’t. The world would stop if he was no longer part of it, she was certain of that.
One day Zylphia saw a beggar on the wharf. She recognized the brown skin, the familiar hunch of shoulder. It was the housekeeper. Though she had once known the woman as her captor, Zylphia was kind, with a forgiving heart. She knew well what a woman alone was sometimes forced to do. She took the beggar back to her house, for the former servant was as alone in the world as she was, with nothing and no one to save her. The housekeeper who had been cast out was welcomed back to the house on Turner Street. Zylphia nursed her back to health.
Together they opened a cent shop and sold goods through the window to the towns people. The housekeeper instructed Zylphia in the ways of the islands. Long ago, back in her native land, she had been a practitioner of the healing arts. She taught Zylphia to formulate poultices using bread, milk, and herbs. They brewed cough syrup by boiling bark and bethroot. In the year they had spent together, the old woman and the captain’s wife became not just friends but sisters. The towns people came to the shop for medicines, for cures for everything from boils to pneumonia. Zylphia learned that a poison used to kill the huge rats that came off the ships could also be used in minute amounts to cure respiratory ailments.
And when the mast of the Maleous was one day sighted on the far horizon, Zylphia knew what she must do. She paid the housekeeper all the money she had in her accounts and said a tearful good-bye to the woman with whom she had grown so close. Then she waited for the ship to reach the wharf.
But the Maleous did not head directly into the harbor. Instead she stopped, as ships did in those days, on the Miseries to drop off her sick sailors, for there had been an outbreak of yellow fever and many of the crew were ill and dying of it. Falsely fearing contagion, the port of Salem would not allow the ship and its bounty to unload at the wharves with sick sailors on board. So Captain Browne discharged the ship’s ill and dying on the Miseries, neighboring islands aptly named for the sailors who were left to die within sight of the homes they were struggling desperately to reach.