The Last Geomancer

Scene 9: The First Dinner Aboard is Served

Howel bounced up from his seat near the port end of the benches bolted down the compartment’s centerline. He waved a hand, reaching up above the crowd’s heads, and called “Jack!” as he spotted his compatriot making a slightly bewildered entrance, pausing in the hatchway at the far end and blinking in confusion. Whether Jack’s befuddlement arose from the kerfuffle as folk set up for their first evening meal aboard ship, or from something foregoing, Howel couldn’t rightly say. He called again. “Jack! We’re sitting down here!”

Jack made his way through the confusion, people digging through luggage and carrying items to the tables between the bench row Howel now stood at and their compatriot row down the other side.

“No, we’re not!” he reproved.

Howel blinked, a moment of social panic trying to creep in at the edge. The young couple on the other side of the table, a man with the curly temple locks and broad brimmed hat of an Ashkenazi, the woman at his side wearing a kerchief over her hair in an Eastern European style, also looked confused, and a bit taken aback. Their little girl, sitting in between them, quit playing with her braid, pulled over her shoulder, and watching her feet swing, and looked up at Jack. A spark of interest arose in her bright hazel eyes. This was someone new.

“We’re both standing,” Jack went on, in the same exasperated, pedantic tone, “you because you arose and I because I just arrived and haven’t been invited properly to take a seat. Neither of us is sitting at present.” Jack grinned wickedly, having landed the Da joke.

Howel sighed, crestfallen, and let his shoulders slump. He collapsed back down onto the bench gracelessly, and leaned his head on his hand, elbow on the table, ignoring the bad look the woman in the kerchief gave him.

“Oy,” said the man on the other side of the table, and rolled his eyes. “Would you,” he intoned with mockingly elaborate politeness, “care to join us at the table for this evening?” He spoke with an accent not Polish, more German, maybe? Didn’t sound like any of the foreign sailors Jack had met in Forcette and on the occasional trip to Penzance. Jack took the seat the man had indicated with a flourish of a long-fingered hand. No manual laborer, here, if he worked with his hands he was a skilled craftsman.

“I am Heinrich Meisener,” the host continued, “and I welcome you to our table, such as it is.” He waved the same hand at the spread of elderly, slightly yellowed linen, embroidery at the edges faded and with loose threads here and there, that covered the table area between the five of them. A matched pair of embossed tin salt and pepper shakers sat out in the middle, to either side of where the creases crossed, a bit lost with nothing around them. “My wife, Eike.” He indicated the woman in the kerchief. She nodded, but said nothing, just gave Howel a deeper frown. He took the hint and took his elbow off the table.

“Und this little wiggle worm,” Heinrich went on, letting his hand rest atop the little girl’s head just long enough to annoy her, removing it before she could claim to have shaken it off, “is Ingrid.”

Eike sighed. “The Lord in His wisdom has only seen fit to bless us with the one so far,” she said, a wistful tone hovering at the edge of her voice as if she wasn’t sure she wanted it.

All around them, other folk had been putting out linen or burlap or woven mats, and a few added tin cups, crockery bowls, wooden spoons, and the occasional spice box. Conversation ebbed and flowed as folk got to know each other properly in the anticipatory time before dining together.

“We are from Austria,” Heinrich offered, “although we haf been in Paris these last two years. It would be shorter from Wien, yes, to go the other way, but travel through eastern Asia is dangerous and at times woefully inefficient.” He gave the Asian travel hazards a disapproving frown.

“This is Jack Hollow, who I was telling you about,” Howel replied, indicating his compatriot, who acknowledged his name with a nod. “He’s from Forcette, and signed up with not only the same mining company, but the same agent on the same day.”

Eike gave a slow nod of approval. Heinrich refocused, did a quick sum in his head. “You are being given a sign,” he mused, still considering it. “That sort of repetition, in patterns of three and three, you should pay attention to this. You’re being told something.” And he glanced upward meaningfully.

“Far be it from me to ignore a word from the Almighty.” Jack folded his hands on the edge of the table as if saying a casual grace.

“So we’re just now leaving England for the first time,” Howel picked back up the thread.

“The United Kingdom for me,” Jack put in, “Cornwall’s as close to a land of its own as makes no difference.” He patted the leather bag of earth through his shirt.

“Do either of you speak German” Eike asked hopefully.

“No, ma’am, I’m sorry.” Jack shook his head. “I’m fluent in Kernewek, but I doubt you’re familiar with the old language of Cornwall.”

“My apologies, but no.” Her turn. “We are both of a diaspora, then. Your mother taught you the language?”

Jack shrugged. “A little, her and Da before he was lost.” Eike cocked her head at that, and made a mental note to ask later. “Mostly it was me uncle Peran. Big on preserving the culture, he is.”

“You should preserve it,” Heinrich agreed. “We have been teaching Ingrid Yiddish by using it around the house.” He glanced about. “Or what we have for such.”

Jack nodded. “I guess we’ve got more in common than we thought, then, both of us leaving our homelands and taking a language with us nobody uses much any more.”

“Yiddish is still very widely used,” Heinrich corrected him with a touch of asperity, “in our theater, our written works, our newspapers –” But Jack had glanced away from him, up at the hatchway, where a new wave of noise had arisen.

Howel jumped up out of his seat again. “Godfried!” he called across the compartment, earning a few dirty looks.

The mess steward, in the ship’s duty uniform of unbleached muslin tunic and canvas dungarees, with a besmirched kitchen apron tied over the front, glanced up from where he was explaining how serving was done. The thin, blonde young man gave a nod back, then went back to handing stacks of wooden plates to the people at the starboard end of the tables. They started passing them down.

"“He’s from Delft, in Holland. Met him earlier during my ramble,” Howel explained to Jack. “He’s the mess steward for our compartment and the one on the other side, plus the next two in either direction. Poor lad’s going to be run ragged. He has to deliver the plates and flatware and such, then bring the cart with the food and get that passed out, then go back and gather up the dirty dishes, haul them back to the galley, and do the washing up. And he has to do it three compartments at a time. I walked with him while he was doing the plate distribution down the other side of the passage.”

“Thank you,” Jack said to Howel, then again to the woman the other side of him, for the stack of plates, down to just enough for the five of their party, just the hull beyond them. She provided essentially the same explanation, only in the form of directions for the passengers.

“So Mr. Goss here was telling us that you are going to be miners?” Heinrich prompted, once Jack was done.

“That’s the idea.” Jack glanced up at the far end of the table, where baskets of bread and a tray of cheese cut up into cubes were starting down the way. “While I grew up in Cornwall, and I’ve been to the minehead a few times, I’ve never been down the pit before. My uncle and nephew are already at the mine we’re going to, though, have been for two years gone now.”

“Year and three quarters, really,” Howel put in, taking one of the last chunks of heavy rye bread. “Given the sea voyage they had to take. There’s an extra bit,” he told Eike, offering her the basket. “You could put it away for later.”

Eike took the next to last piece, folded it in a cloth napkin and tucked it away in a pocket of her apron. “Someone else can have the last piece,”: she said, and sent the basket back up the table. Jack offered her the tin serving tray with the last of the cheese that had made it to the far end of the table. She put a couple of the larger pieces on one of the plates she and Heinrich were sharing, and a few smaller chunks on Ingrid’s plate, then gave the girl a stern look and a shake of her head when the child reached for a bit.

“Not until we have said prayers, Ingrid, you know that.”

Ingrid tucked her hands under her elbows, arms crossed over her chest pugnaciously, and hmphed.

Godfried followed the cheese tray down the table carrying a stewpot by one of its big bolted-on handles, with the other hand ladling out the rest of the dinner, a thick stew, mostly veg, and assuring people down the table that it was actually beef, not pork or horsemeat, if the packer had labeled the barrel correctly. The gravy had partly set, making it almost a casserole. It held together in a heap in the middle of the plates, wiggling a little from the vibration of the ship’s engines just a compartment or two astern. Jack gave it a dubious look.

“You’ve eaten shipboard rations before, sea dog,” Howel teased. “What’s your problem?”

“Anything you put on your plate that’s still moving like that,” Jack pointed to a bit of gel hanging half off a large chunk of carrot, visibly trembling, “you smack it in the head a couple times with the butt of your knife and throw it back in the skillet.”

Eike and Heinrich had covered their faces with their hands, and bowed their heads. Ingrid, after prompting from her mother, did likewise. Jack tucked his own head down and whispered a quick grace in the words of John Wesley, memorized long ago.

First thing, Ingrid reached for her spoon and the stew, but her father laid a hand gently over hers.

“You may have the cheese,” he told her, “and then you may have the stew. What is the rule, Ingrid?”

She pouted. “Milk before meat, never meat then milk,” she recited grumpily.

“Very good,” Eike assured her, tearing off a bit of the bread, topping it with a bite of cheese from Ingrid’s plate, and offering it to the girl. She tucked into it with gusto.

“If only we could have separate plates,” Heinrich groused, “but they allow only one plate per passenger in steerage, and will not allow us to use our own tableware that we brought. We are not allowed into the galley to wash our dishes ourselves, and we cannot ask the steward to wash dishes that are not part of the ship’s equipment.”

Eike indicated her plate, holding the bread and cheese, and Heinrich’s, with the stew. “But we can make do at least among the two of us.”

“You can’t have the meat and the cheese together?” Howel asked.

Heinrich shook his head, put down his own bread and cheese, and swallowed before answering. “We are commanded in the Torah to separate the two. We can follow milchig, dairy, with fleischig, meat, but not the other way round, not for many hours.”

“And they can’t eat shellfish,” Jack put in between bites, shoveling the food down as young men tend to do.

“No?” Howel glanced from Jack to Heinrich for confirmation.

Again, a slow shake of the head, finishing the mouthful so he could speak respectfully. “What comes from the water must have fins, and must have scales that can be removed without tearing the skin.”

“Yeah,” Jack muffled for a second, then swallowed. “Besides the fact the equipment’s different for schooling fish and shellfish, you don’t want to mix up your cod and mackerel with cockles or mussels. The Jewish buyers at the markets further inland will refuse the entire lot.”

“Huh.” Howel took a few moments to think about that. “What about fish and milk?” he finally asked Heinrich.

“Fish are considered pareve, like vegetables,” Heinrich answered, distracted by the need to wipe the gravy off Ingrid’s chin where it had dripped off the bottom of her spoon. “You are thinking of a fish chowder, with haddock and cream? Ja, we can have that.”

“So what are you going to Adelaide for then?” Jack asked, to steer the conversation away from the idea of tastier food and back to an earlier subject.

“I will be working for the newspaper there as an engraver,” Heinrich replied. He dug into his side of the stew on the shared plate, speaking between bites. “They’re moving into rotogravure. I haf spent the last two years in Paris, training on the new reel-fed gravure press.”

Eike waved a hand dismissively. “Don’t worry, he gets like this. Maybe someday he will start using words we all know again.”

Heinrich shrugged broadly, shoulders up like an Austrian, hands upturned in a Gallic gesture. “It’s a sin to love what I do?” he asked, then grew serious. “We’re very worried about our daughter growing up in Australia instead of Innsbruck, and what kind of influences she will encounter.” He gave both the young men a sharp look.

Howel laughed it off. “I don’t think you have much to worry from us, sir. I’m a blacksmith’s son, and if I lie, my iron goes out of temper and everybody will know it.”

Jack, meanwhile, had caught Ingrid’s attention, and gave her a conspiratorial wink. “I’ve got a younger sister of my own, left back in Cornwall along with me mum,” he said, speaking to Heinrich but his eye still on Ingrid, who was giving him a mischievous grin.

“Well, then,” Eike summed up, who hadn’t missed anything of what was going on, “taking in young men who are out to improve their station in life, learn new trades and study, is a very long tradition with our people. If my husband assents, and you will, Heinrich?” She turned to him not quite in a questioning way.

Heinrich cocked his head to the side a little. “If I know what’s good for me, do you mean?” he asked her playfully.

Eike blushed a little. “Then it’s settled,” she said, not taking her eyes off Heinrich’s. “We’ll patch our little bits of family together and see what we can make of it for the next three months.”

“How about that?” Heinrich asked Ingrid. “You’re going to have two big brothers for a while to help keep you out of trouble.”

But Ingrid had caught Jack’s eye again, and this time she gave him the wink. So exaggerated was it that Heinrich and Eike both burst out laughing. Howel and Jack joined in, and the merriment rose to mingle with the rest of the voices, talking, laughing, a few singing down at the far end, as the steerage passengers did their best with what they had.