The Map of True Places (15 page)

“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.

Now, try as he might, the captain had not been able
to kill his wife's young lover in the long year they had been at sea.

With each day he feared their return to Salem and the loss of his young wife, whom he had begun to dream of feverishly every night as they got closer and closer to home. He began to pray that the sailor would die before they reached Salem. And as even our darkest prayers are sometimes answered, the unfortunate sailor contracted yellow fever. And so the captain left him on the Miseries, to die with the others before the waning of the moon.

The captain returned to port, and his wife was waiting on the wharf as the ship landed. His heart leaped at the sight of her. Was it possible? Did she finally love him? But it wasn't to be. When she looked at him, her eyes held nothing but hate. Her gaze moved beyond him, scanning the crowd for her true love. His rage was murderous, and he shouted aloud without any thought to listening ears. “An entire year gone and not even a tender look for me?”

And though it would have been in her best interest to do so, she could not feign even the slightest warmth for the man who had taken her true love from her. She could not lie.

During his long months at sea, the captain had almost been able to convince himself that she would love him one day, but now he feared it would never be.

He rushed toward her, grabbing her roughly by the arm and pulling her down the street. “Your lover is dead,” he told her coldly. “He died of the yellow fever,
crying out in pain and suffering. And he never cried your name, but the name of the South Sea maiden he got the fever from.”

“You killed him,” she said, not believing his story about the maiden but desperately fearing that her true love might be dead.

“Don't you hear me, girl?” he said, digging his fingers into her arm. “I told you he was dead. Infected, as all men are, by a faithless woman.” Then he dragged her back to the house while the towns people watched in horror.

He beat her until she cried out. But without her sailor, Zylphia had no will to live. She did not try to stop him. When he finally struck her with his closed fist, she fell to the floor, motionless and mute.

For the first time, the captain feared he might lose her, not to the sailor but to death. He cradled her in his arms, begging her to come back to him and vowing to nurse her back to health.

He carried her downstairs, to a room with cooler air and a view of the ocean. In the days to come, he cooked for her. But she would not eat. He bought fresh fruit and sugar, which he knew she had loved, but still she would take nothing. On the third day, the housekeeper appeared at the door, with a pig roast and apples and some soup made of mutton and celery.

“It is no use,” the captain said. “She is beyond nourishment and will take no food.”

“Let me see her,” the old woman suggested. “For it is her choice to live or to die.”

Desperate for her help, and knowing about the
Haitian woman's healing powers, the captain let the old woman into Zylphia's sickroom.

“Leave us,” she said, and the captain obliged.

The old woman sat on the edge of the bed. “Your true love lives,” she whispered, and at those words Zylphia opened her eyes.

The captain was so grateful to the housekeeper that he offered to take her back with full wages, but she refused, saying she would stay only long enough to prepare their meal. When the food was ready and the table set, she returned to Zylphia and whispered softly in her true friend's ear, “Make your peace now with your husband. Eat your evening meal at his table. Take what nourishment you can, for you will need your strength. But do not drink the porter. Not one drop.”

The housekeeper helped Zylphia to the table. Then she left the house.

The captain was so happy to see his wife alive that he ate a hearty meal and then drank heavily of the porter, filling himself with ideas of what he would buy his wife now that she had chosen to live.

When the convulsions began, his arms standing straight out by his sides, she sat wide-eyed and disbelieving. His head arched back until it almost touched the floor behind him. She stared as his body stiffened, then collapsed. She had no strength to move.

By the second round of convulsions, the housekeeper was at the door carrying clothes needed for travel and medicine to heal the sailor of his fever. “Come quickly,” she said.

Released from her nightmare, Zylphia followed the
housekeeper out the door and down to the stolen dory. “Your true love is alive on the Miseries,” the housekeeper said. “Hurry on now, and do not look back.”

Zylphia, weak only moments before, now found the strength it took to row.

As she left the mouth of the harbor, she passed the
Friendship,
just hoisting sail and making ready to head out to sea. She passed one of the smaller fishing boats coming into port. She looked at neither but kept her eyes focused straight ahead, never taking them off the island where her true love waited….