Brunonia Barry - The Map of True Places

When the captain returned from sea, he was quick to hear the stories. He had his spies everywhere, and there are always people who love to be the first to tell a person bad news. The town gossips never thought about the consequences, as gossips never do. If they had known that he would take his revenge on Zylphia, whom they loved deeply, they might not have been so impulsive in their tale telling. They might have stuffed stones into their mouths to keep from speaking, or sewn their lips shut with flaxen thread. But, alas, it was too late. The dreadful damage was done.

He immediately dismissed the housekeeper, calling her a useless drunkard and casting her into the street. Then he went upstairs to take vengeance on his betraying wife.

Yet when he saw her beauty, he could not bring himself to hurt her. Instead he fell down on his knees and begged her to love him. But she could not, and her innocent eyes were too unwily to hide what it would have been in her best interest to disguise. Enraged by her refusal, he chained her to the wall of the bedroom below the widow’s walk, and there he sat with her, brooding and scheming.

Evening came and went. And then another.

Each night the sailor climbed to the widow’s walk, and each night Zylphia was not there. With no food or water, she failed to thrive. And as she grew weaker, the captain, who was fueled best by jealousy and bile, grew stronger.

On the third day, the sailor did not return. He began to doubt that she had ever loved him. He began to doubt that true love existed at all. And his mind began to play tricks on him. Who was he to think he deserved such love? She was the wife of a captain-how could she love him?

“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.