Excerpt
A Sweet Sting of Salt
1
November 1832 The ship was burning.
“Sorry . . . ?” Jean looked up from drying her hands on a worn tea towel, frowning at the non sequitur.
“Last night, the ship was burning.” Ida Mae Eisenor waved toward the window over the table in her kitchen as she sat herself up on the sofa. “The moon was full. Everyone says the ghost ship burns in the bay on full-moon nights. Did you see it, out where you are?”
“Oh, sure.” Jean closed the lid of her basket, solid and real. “Had the captain in for tea, too, don’t you know?” She rolled her eyes as she spoke, teasing.
“Jean Langille!” Ida leveled her pinky and pointer fingers at Jean, warning off the evil eye. “You oughtn’t say such things! You’ll have the devil at your door.” With that, she stood, shook her skirts back into place, and went to poke a finger into her dough, testing to see if it had risen enough to go in the oven. When it was done baking, Ida would run a knife ’round the finished loaf and lift it out, rather than turning over the pan and risk turning a ship over with it. That was the superstition, among the German families.
The British had brought the Germans to the South Shore, fresh out of people of their own to settle the colony with, or at least any willing to pay for the dubious privilege of a perilous trip in exchange for hard work and an uncertain reward. England had gone recruiting and come up with a few boatloads of Germans, some French like Jean’s father’s people, and even a handful of reluctant Swiss.
Farmers all, they were set down on a land so full of trees and rocks that they were forced into working the seas and the forests instead. Only their mingled superstitions took root, and those had twined around one another until it was hard to say where one story left off and the next began, which were fanciful and which were true. If something followed you through the wood to the stream, you didn’t know whose boat it had got off of, nor did you care, and you didn’t slow your steps to ask if it was something older still, one of the things the Natives talked more around than about.
The Young Teazer might not have made port on its final voyage, but it had found firm anchor among all the other tales in the twenty years since its demise, said to round the point tipped in silver flame on clear, full-moon nights, only to vanish as sirens and selkies and mermaids did. It was a pretty and romantic notion, the ghost ship, and harmless—as so many pretty, romantic notions were not.
As the village midwife, Jean had seen where romantic notions got you and considered the newly minted Mrs. Eisenor fairly solid evidence of it. A handsome enough lass of seventeen, Ida Mae Mosher had first found herself caught in the family way—and then found herself married within days of the thing being known. The young man involved, Richie, was a pig farmer’s son with a good head of hair and a ready laugh, who’d kissed her breathless after a dance at the hall. The pair of them had certainly had a romantic time, stolen away in a hayloft during a summer thunderstorm, but now it was November, and the three-weeks’ bride was starting to be swollen and sore-footed and not entirely happy with her pig farmer’s son, who hadn’t brought much more to their union than good sausage.
No, Jean wasn’t much for romantic notions herself, not like Ida Mae. Not anymore, for all that some might expect it of a young woman, living all to herself out along a wild stretch of the Nova Scotian coast. Certainly no one had made any effort at trying to court Jean, not since she was nineteen. Not unless she considered the fellow who’d cornered her once and said he’d show her “what was what and set her right” as courting her. She’d caught him in the soft parts with her knee, and she was fairly sure Laurie had had some words with him, too, later, when he was in off the ships; well, words by way of knocking several of the man’s teeth loose, and him off the end of the wharf.
Laurie Ernst was the younger of her mentor Anneke’s two children, and six years Jean’s elder. He was properly named Laurence, though no one ever called him that, and as a child Jean idolized him, following him everywhere she could get away with as though he were truly her older brother. He’d always been astonishingly patient about it. These days, he crewed on a schooner that was back and forth a dozen times a year to the Caribbean, returning with cargos of rum and sugar and fruits that tasted of sunshine. At any rate, between her bony kneecap and Laurie’s fists, Jean hadn’t had similar trouble again.
“Jean?” Ida’s voice interrupted her rambling thoughts. “What do you think you should do, if your marriage is . . . dull? Richie . . .” The girl paused, choosing her next words diplomatically. “It ain’t quite what I expected, being married. I thought there’d be a bit more romance to it somehow. He’s not hardly touched me since the wedding.”
Jean shrugged. She couldn’t say she knew much about marriages, except that she was unlikely to ever make one herself. The village girls had been leaving her out of their gossip for long enough now that her home visits were about as much a look in on the institution as she got. Jean did know about babies, though, and they all knew she did. They respected her as a midwife, at the very least, even if they did still keep her at arm’s length otherwise.
Ida’s babe would be a good while yet in making an appearance—not until well into the new year, God willing. The mother-to-be was healthy and strong, if not in the highest of spirits, but Jean had an answer for that. “Ida, the best thing for you would be to get out of this house for a while, even if it is a bit brisk, on these late fall days. Richie could go along with you.”
It would do the girl good. To take a bit of air, walk a little every day, see people besides her husband. A body needed friends.
Ida hummed and turned toward the cupboard. “Cup of tea before you go?”
“No, thanks.” Jean knew better than to try to become one of those friends herself. It might have been a genuine overture, but she couldn’t bring herself to accept it. She’d learned it was better to keep her distance. She swallowed. “I ought to get back home before the light goes. You’re doing fine, Ida. I’ll be in town to check on you again around the holidays when Evie Hiltz is due, but you can always send Richie out for me before, if you need anything.”
“Too bad. I’m dead curious ’bout that new Mrs. Silber, and I thought maybe you’d have . . .”
Jean let the rest of Ida’s chatter drift by without absorbing another word, bundling herself into her yellow woolen shawl. She supposed it was a blessing the latest gossip wasn’t about her, but that didn’t make pursuing it as a pastime any more attractive.
As she went out, Jean spotted the young Mr. Eisenor at work in the pigpen and paused, considering. A dull marriage. Maybe Ida isn’t the only one who needs advice, Jean thought wryly, then snorted and went to lean on the top rail of the pigpen.
“Richie?”
He paused in his work, shovel half lifted, dripping muck. “Yes, miss? Everything all right with Ida?”
He was so young, his answer the same one he’d have given the teacher at the village school a scant few years before. There were only about six years between the two of them, but it might as well have been sixty. Richie, newly married at eighteen and soon enough a father for the first time. Jean, already settled. A spinster midwife at just four and twenty.
“Ida’s well; there’s nothing for you to fret over. I told her she ought to get out a bit, though, fresh air’s good for more than just sheets. She did say her feet are sore by the time the day’s done . . .” Jean let the line trail, to see if he might take it up on his own.
He did not. “Oh, aye. She’s on them all day, sure enough.”
Jean’s fingers itched to pinch the bridge of her nose, but she kept her tone kind.
“Perhaps you might give them a rub for her, of an evening? Ida’d appreciate it, I’m sure, and I think it would help.” Even if it didn’t, the gesture might go some little way toward improving domestic relations.
Richie Eisenor seemed to be thinking along similar lines, and maybe some besides, for he went pink and hemmed, mumbling something vaguely like an agreement down into his collar before declaring he’d best get back to it. He stabbed his shovel back into the muck of the pigpen, and Jean went out at the gate. As she set off along the shore road toward home, she rather wished she might find someone waiting to rub her own feet when she arrived there. She also wished—not for the first time—that instead of every family in town gifting her live chickens or smoked hams after a birthing, they might pool resources and buy her a sturdy pony.
