Kate Worsley
Extract from opening chapters of my first novel ‘She Rises’ (Bloomsbury, 2013).
‘Sarah Waters meets Carol Birch in a breathtaking historical novel of love,
adventure, and identity—with a shocking twist.
It is 1740 and Louise Fletcher, a young maid, has been warned of the lure of the sea for
as long as she can remember. But when she is offered work in the bustling naval port of
Harwich, serving a wealthy captain's daughter, she leaps at the chance to see more of
the world. There she meets Rebecca, her haughty young mistress: unexpected,
fascinating, magnetic.
Intertwined with Louise’s story is that of fifteen-year-old Luke, who is beaten and press
ganged, sent to sea against his will on board a warship. He must learn fast and choose
his friends well if he is to survive the brutal hardships of a sailor's life and its many
dangers, both up high in the rigging and in the dark below decks.’ (Bloomsbury 2013
catalogue)
CHAPTER ONE
It's the singing that wakes him. He does not move, he cannot move, there's a body
pressed heavy against his left side. He won't be opening his eyes neither, his head hurts
so.
Every note strikes like a clapper, sends the pain clanging round and around. It's a
bitter little tune, spat out in gobbets, sung so thick and crudded he can't make it out.
Damn it's cold, but there's a damp warmth too, blowing on his face. The singer's breath,
close, and sour, like an unscoured milk pan.
He gasps and opens his eyes. Nothing but a solid, choking dark. A cellar? Please not
a prison. Then the singer's heavy body lolls away, for there's a shifting and a rolling to
everything like he's never known. His wits are addled, he thinks. As he lifts his head he
feels a throbbing at the back of his skull. He reaches out to steady himself and he finds
his wrists are cuffed. A prison then.
But the swaying goes on, and on. His stomach wallows and the gorge rises. He's
panicked now, tries to cover his mouth because he can hear himself panting with fear
but the hand that presses against his face is wide and clammy and not his. He beats it
off, twists about, he'll drown if he can't see.
'Whisht,' a voice is saying, gruff and coaxing. 'Whisht!'
Held fast by the shoulder, held back against slime and cold, the boy can't stop himself
crying out.
'H'way there, lads! Here's a squealer.'
There's a muttering and a grumbling of deep voices. A sharp, gleeless bark followed
by a fit of coughing, some feet away. How many are here? What place is this? And how
can he escape?
He sits small as he can, pressing back into the dark. He knows the weakness of his
own body, how small and helpless he is. This place, wherever it is, is no place for the
likes of him. His own breathing is panicking him. It's quick, tearing, like that of a cornered
animal.
Thick fingers prod at his arms and shoulders. And the voice again, right by his ear.
'Not much meat on you, lad.'
He does not speak. He cannot speak. He will give himself away. He twists and turns
instead. What holds his feet?
The burr comes closer. 'Ma-mmy need you home? Or did you no tell your bint you
were off? Hmn. Big-bellied bint is she? Like as not notice you'd slipped out...'
Straightways the boy grows sharp too. 'You'll leave her be or–'
'Woah, Hotspur!' the man chuckles delightedly, and slaps the boy's shoulder.
The boy hears him settle his bulk back in the dark, but now he's thinking yes, I
remember her, my god I remember her, but nothing else. How he came to leave her,
how he came to be here, that he don't know.
'Come men, can't any of you sing? Sing now and raise the dead. Cheerily, lads,
cheerily! There's a ganger hard to windward' None takes up the tune and the man starts
to hum again, like a big cat purring.
The boy waits, sweating.
'Fine mardle, man,' the man says finally, in a bright tone.
The boy has no idea what he means.
'Damned gangers,' says another, off in the dark, and hawks hard.
He hears the spittle land, and a lapping of water, close by his ear. Something begins
to stir in the back of his mind. He struggles again to stand.
'Dinne fash, man, they've snaffled you good,'
'Who?' he cries now. His legs are trembling, his heart racing. 'Who?'
'Whisht, the gangers, man!' The hot rank breath blows close.
'You're pressed, my lad. Welcome to His Majesty's damned whoreson Navy.'
There is a crash and rattle overhead, and raised voices. Hard white light floods upon him
and he curls up like a grub and hides his eyes. It's been many hours since he first woke,
but still he can't believe he is here. He has shivered and coughed and cried as silent as
he can, and he has longed for light, for air, but the sudden brightness wakes a deeper
dread. We are in hell, he think, this is a hell house and God has ripped the roof off.
'Bastards!' shouts the heavy man still slumped against his side. 'Damned bastards!'
He spits, then sinks back, duty done.
The boy screws up his eyes against the light to sneak a glance at his neighbour.
The man must be over six foot and built to match. His bare chest is solid and wide,
wide as a sack of wheat. A mat of red-gold hair bristles all the way up to his collarbone.
About his well-larded neck slides a glinting coin on a thong. His jawbone is that of an ox.
The boy watches his eyes close and his huge red hands clasp over his belly. As his jaw
sinks the coin disappears into folds of ruddy flesh.
The other men are stirring. They rub their faces and clear their throats, squint
upwards into the light. The boy stays on his bench and draws up his knees to hide his
face. Hollering and cursing rise in waves over the drag and rattle of the chains that bind
them all. There must be over a dozen men here, close packed in this dank and dripping
space that he now sees to be the hold of a boat, and a mean and scurvy little boat at
that. They rise up, in ragged smocks and muddied breeches, bruised and bleeding,
mostly young but none so young as he.
Overhead, a hatching of light, and the dark shapes of two men squatting, and another
standing, with a hanger by his side, all three peering in.
His foot is trodden by a squat tawny fellow who struggles to stand but falls to his
knees and cries out to those above, 'Sweet Jesus release me, my mother is dying at
Thorpe and I must go!'
'Damn your navy I'll cut your throats you poxy bastards!' calls another.
'Here take this kerchief and bring us some gin!'
'Tis nigh noon my girls will want milking bad, now release me I say!'
Their shifting sets the boat a heaving and the boy clutches out for balance. A chunk of
timber splits off in his fingers, black and soft as rotten fruit. Then something spatters
hard against his face. It is a squirt of tobacco juice, hot and sticky.
'Damn the lot of you mutinous dogs,' growls a voice from above. 'Choke off your
howling. You'll find release soon enough aboard the Essex, this very day.'
'Or the next. You've caught us a nest of country vermin. How are we to raise sail with
this sorry lot?'
'Scooped the fair. Caught 'em all caterwauling in the alleys after dark. Came like rats
out of a hole, the drunken sots. Got your numbers though ain't you?'
CHAPTER TWO
Was I happy before I met you?
I think now maybe I was happiest before I met you, back at Handley's farm. And
happiest there perhaps, making butter, with my fingers in the cream. I loved to feel the
flakes form, the way they caught around my wrist like a bracelet, how they slipped
between my fingers. Doing it with my bare hand like that, I knew just how the butter was
coming, and when it came. And I liked that, knowing. It made me happy.
Course I was happy. I knew who I was then.
I was young Louise, Squire Handley's dairymaid. And a very dutiful little dairymaid I
was too, trained up from the age of twelve in the dairy work, in cow milking, and the
buttermaking, and the cheesemaking, and getting up the wheys and the syllabubs. I had
other duties, of course; for all that Handley's was the finest place in the district, it weren't
Lawford Hall. I had the chickens to chase and their necks to wring, I had bread to bake
and all the rest of it.
But when I got back to the dairy, and nudged the door shut behind me, I'd always let
out my breath with a sort of relief. It was the place I liked to be the best. It was quiet, it
was clean, and it was neat. It was safe. The air was still and cool. We kept the windows
shuttered against the sun and the dirt and the hot air, and dowsed the floor and walls
regular with fresh water. After I'd strained the new milk and emptied it into clean pans, I'd
take the crocks and pans to the scullery to scald them and when I'd emptied the strained
milk into the clean pans I'd skim off last night's ripe cream and sit down to make butter. I
could get more milk out of those cows than anyone and I could get butter to come
cleaner too. I had the knack of it.
Yes we had a barrel churn then, the end-over-end, we called it. It did the job alright,
and least you could keep your mits on in winter. But oh all that stopping and starting, and
taking a peek, and what a bother to scald and always breaking. You never knew how it
was coming, when it would turn. You'd have to keep on turning, and it never come, or go
on too long and it be too late.
No, I liked to do it the way I was first taught.
'Shut that door for the flies,' said old Mary Gould when my mother first prodded me
over the threshold, 'and mind your feet.'
We was both scared of Mary, with her thickey brows like charred sticks. Mother
stepped aside and set the latch back sharpish. After a moment I heard her clogs skit
away on the cobbles.
Mary took up my fingers and sniffed them.
'My, look at the size of these pats,' she exclaimed, turning my hands back and forth.
I blushed like anything then. I always knew the size of my hands, and my feet too.
You’re more frog than girl, my sister used to tease me, and I'd never forgotten it.
'Chilly too. But that's good. Anyways,' she added, seeing my face. 'Cool hands, warm
heart, that's what they say.' For she was not without heart herself.
'Let's see how you do's, young Louise. This here's ripe.' She passed me a crock of
reddish earthenware. It was tall and heavy and when I tilted it to look inside, cream
lapped halfway up the side in a thick wave. She wedged the crock between my skirts.
Then she took my right hand and slipped it inside the crock, right up to the wrist in the
smooth, cool cream. It was like sinking my bare feet into the river mud.
'And flip that over the top,' she said, snatching down a muslin from the rack beside
the window. 'You don't want none on your bodice. Got my reputation to keep up, and
yorn.' She wiggled her black brows at me. 'Mind you, nothing like the whiff of a dairy
maid to keep the boys off.'
That made me blush again, for I thought of boys much as I thought of flies, to be kept
outdoor and well away.
Mary had a little stool she used to prop her feet out of the draught, but being so small
I had to tuck my toes behind a rung of the chair instead to get the right angle. I'd settle
the crock between my skirts, press my fingers together and cup my palm slightly, to the
shape of a paddle, and set to sculling.
'Always start at a goodly pace,' said Mary, 'or else why bother.'
Before I knew it the flakes would be thickening like a blizzard and when I clenched my
fist I could scoop them into a clot. If I squeezed it too hard it would split and slide apart,
like the stones on the shore that were not stone at all, but a sort of solid clay made that
way by a secret spring downriver. So I would hold it lightly, like you'd hold a living thing.
After a while I would close my eyes as I churned. My tasks ran through my head more
in the way of a lullaby I sang to myself, to the tune of the cream tossing and tumbling
about deep in the crock between my legs. Yes, I was happy then.
But then often as not I would heard a familiar shuffle of clogs round the corner and
the door unlatch.
'Stop out there!' Mary would call, rolling knobs of butter the size of pigeon eggs
between her pats. 'You'll turn the milk.'
It would be my mother, come to see how I was getting on. And already my heart
would sink like it was a lump of butter let go. For it hadn't taken long for me to start
seeing her through Mary's eyes, and those of the other women of the farm.
She would be craning at the small screened window in the door, angling for a peek at
my white bonneted head. I wouldn't look up. I hated to see her raw and red cheeks, her
nose swollen and pocked and always dripping, her hair thicketed with dust and straw. I
was ashamed of her, god forgive me.
She was the only woman as worked out in the fields, with the men and the animals.
She'd got me into the dairy and my sister Susan into the kitchen, but Mrs Handley
wouldn't have her in the house. She wouldn't give a reason but, it was whispered, it was
on account everything else mother'd had to do to make ends meet back home. Until she
couldn't splice us a living any more and came up and over the hill to throw herself and
her girls on the good graces of the Handleys.
My mother would come straight from pulling turnips, with the clag thick on her feet
and splatters on her face, her fingers cracked and her eyes reddened, staring off like a
goat's. Or she'd turn up on a hot afternoon, straw and dust floating off her like a cloud
and onto everything I tried so hard to keep clean. She'd got me away, she'd done her
best for me, but I wouldn't look at her.
This day I'm thinking of, when I heard the latch go, I cursed under my breath. We
were in the new dairy by then, Mary and I. Oh that was a fine place, did you ever see it?
I watched it built, long and low below the brow of the northern hill, across from the
brewhouse. It had smooth whitewashed walls, thick as anything, that glowed like
moonlight and a fine flagged floor. Like a chapel it was. I said as much to Mary and she
said that if our Lord was to pay us a visit then he was welcome to a bit of the famous
Handley butter with his loaves and fishes. I was proud to work there, there was nowhere
better. I was dedicated to that clean pure milk as a novice nun is to dear old Jesus. I
thought to spend the rest of my life there, listening to the cream rising.
And sweet Christ how many days since have I wished, wished with all my heart, that I
had.
© Kate Worsley