Drums of Autumn - Diana Gabaldon [324]
“Take hairt, man. Grub in twa bells.” Duff gave him a companionable elbow in the ribs and disappeared nimbly down a hatchway, from whose cavernous recesses echoed blasphemous shouts and loud bangings.
Roger resumed his unloading of the cargo net, heartened indeed at the prospect of supper.
The after hold had already been half filled. The water casks were loaded; tier upon tier of wooden hogsheads, squatting in the shadowy gloom, each hundred-gallon cask weighing more than seven hundred pounds. But the forward hold still gaped empty, and a constant procession of loaders and quaymen streamed like ants across the dock, piling up such a heap of boxes and barrels, rolls and bundles, that it seemed inconceivable that the mass should ever be condensed sufficiently to fit within the ship.
It took two days to finish the loading: barrels of salt, bolts of cloth, huge crates of ironmongery that had to be lowered with rope slings because of their weight. It was here that Roger’s size proved of benefit. At the end of a rope belayed round the capstan, he leaned back against the weight of a crate suspended at the other end and, muscles popping with the strain, lowered it slowly enough that the two men below could catch and guide it into place in the increasingly crowded hold.
The passengers came aboard in the late afternoon, a straggling line of emigrants, burdened with bags, bundles, caged chickens, and children. These were the cargo of the steerage—a space created by erection of a bulkhead across the forward hold—and as profitable in their way as the harder goods aft.
“Bondsmen and redemptioners,” Duff had told him, looking over the incomers with a practiced eye. “Worth fifteen pund each on the hoof in the plantations, weans three or four. Bairns at the teat go free wi’ their mithers.”
The seaman coughed, a deep, rattling noise like an ancient motor starting up, and hawked a glob of phlegm, narrowly missing the side rail as he spat. He shook his head as he looked the shuffling line over.
“Happen some can pay their way, but no many in this lot. They’ll have had a job to come up wi’ twa pund a family for their feed on the voyage.”
“The Captain doesn’t feed them, then?”
“Oh, aye.” Duff rumbled in his chest again, coughed and spat. “For a price.” He grinned at Roger, wiped his mouth, and jerked his head toward the gangplank. “Go and lend a hand, laddie. We wouldna want the Captain’s profit to be fallin’ intae the water, now, would we?”
Surprised by the padded feel of a little girl as he swung her aboard, Roger looked closer and saw that the stout build of many of the women was illusion, occasioned by their wearing several layers of clothes; all they owned in the world, apparently, beyond small bundles of personal possessions, boxes of food put by for the journey—and the scrawny children for whose sake they took this desperate step.
Roger squatted, smiling at a reluctant toddler who clung to his mother’s skirts. He was no more than two, still in smocks, with a riot of soft blond curls, his fat little mouth drawn down in fearful disapproval of everything around him.
“Come on, man,” Roger said softly, putting out a hand in invitation. It was no longer an effort to control his accent; his usual clipped Oxbridge had elided to the gentler Highland speech with which he had grown up, and he used it now without conscious thought. “Your Mam can’t be pickin’ ye up now; you come with me.”
Grossly mistrustful, the boy snuffled and glowered at him, but suffered him to peel the grubby little fingers away from his mother’s skirts. Roger carried the little boy across the deck, the woman following him silently. She looked up at him as he handed her down the ladder, her eyes fixed on his; her face disappeared in the darkness like a white rock dropped down