JoAnn Wendt by Beyond the Dawn Page A

stopped reading, but Mab gave her a fierce nod. Swallowing the anguish she felt for these two good people, Flavia blinked back tears and found her place in the text.
    “He will swallow up death in victory,” she read quietly, “and the LORD GOD will wipe away tears from off all faces; and the rebuke of his people shall he take away from off all the earth; for the LORD hath spoken it.”
    * * * *
    “I’m glad he didn’t live t’ see this day.”
    Mab’s voice was dull and lifeless, like her empty eyes. She sat defeated on the far end of the bunk, her shoulders hunched, her arms listlessly holding her stomach.
    Flavia could find no word of comfort to offer. So she said nothing. She went on with her sewing. She was embroidering a small cross on the pillowcase. If time permitted before the brief service on the stern deck, she would embroider birds and flowers too. She stitched steadily, oblivious by now to the continuous hubbub in the indentured hold. Women whined, men harangued one another or gambled for buttons at cards, children played games, the sick moaned. Flavia heard none of it.
    The death of Mab’s baby had been inevitable, she reflected. When Obadiah died, Mab had gone into shock. Her breast milk dried up. Flavia had scoured the hold for a willing wet nurse and, for a time, she found one. But the Collins infant was a difficult charge. No nursing mother was strong enough or willing enough to put up with its demands. For a time, Flavia sustained the baby on boiled barley water and molasses that she begged from a crew member. But the baby developed fever.
    “Mab?” she said gently. “Would you like to look at her one last time? Before I sew the pillow shut?”
    The young mother’s shoulders convulsed.
    “No!”
    However, Mab instantly negated her answer by swinging around to stare at the tiny body lying clean and tidy at the bottom of the bunk. A slow smile came to her lips and lingered.
    “Purty, weren’t she, Jane?” She looked from the infant to Flavia and back to the infant. “‘N’ smart she were, too. Like her Pa.”
    “Oh, yes,” Flavia agreed quickly.
    It was a merciful lie. In truth, Flavia had suspected the baby was not quite right. Its muscles had been flaccid. Its splayed, flattened nose resembled the children who were beaten into begging outside the theaters on Drury Lane. Flavia had tossed them shillings whenever the duke had taken her to the theater.
    Mab’s baby had cried day and night. In no way had the infant reminded her of her own precious son, Robert, with his bright-eyed intelligence, his eagerness to reach out for the world and capture it. Yet she’d fought for the baby’s life. When it died she felt a deep grief. Her hands grew still in her lap.
    “Shall you want to sew the pillow shut yourself, Mab?”
    Mab swallowed.
    “No!”
    But instantly she snatched the threaded needle from Flavia’s hand and set to work. When she was done she picked up the small bundle and held it tightly to her bosom, rocking back and forth on the bunk to a dirge that only she herself heard.
    At last the Methodist preacher summoned them. Together—hatless, shawlless—they climbed up into the cutting winds of winter.
    If life had been hard with Obadiah Collins alive and offering protection, it became harder now. Stripped of the good man’s shelter, Flavia felt thrown to the wolves.
    Again she found herself the target of taunts, the recipient of lustful suggestions. The decent folk did not torment her, but the riffraff did. She managed to stay clear of the male Newgate convicts with whom the Dutchman had filled up his shipload of bondslaves. But the women were impossible to escape. The more slatternly the woman, the more Flavia’s beauty and daintiness seemed to rankle. The crones took umbrage at everything she did. They jeered at her attempts to wash and cleanse herself. They hooted whenever she scrubbed lice from her thick coppery hair in a bucket of icy seawater. They delighted in tripping