The Sea Captain's Wife by Beth Powning

Author:Beth Powning [Powning, Beth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2010-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

For days, they travelled past the icefields. Carrie and Azuba stood by the mizzen mast, mittened hands tucked round their waists, faces bound in scarves, watching the shining landscape. It was a glittering wasteland of ice chunks—some flat, others tipped and wedged like ship’s hulls. Vast bergs separated from the icefields and drifted northward, spray booming upward through crevices.

One morning, they came on deck to see that the ice was only a gleam at the horizon. The wind was strong and steady, and when the bow spanked down, spume rose and flew back as far as the gangway. It had rained in the night, and the sky was dappled with shoals of white clouds. In between, the sky was blue, but a shower chased up, a steel-grey band of cloud luminous in the sunlight.

Nathaniel stood by the weather rail, pipe in his teeth. “Look,” he called to Carrie, pointing. A double rainbow had appeared.

“Pot of gold!” Carrie cried, running across the deck, her hood blowing back. Nathaniel put out his arm for her. He grinned at Azuba, his tension lifted. She smiled back, laid a hand on her belly.

Nathaniel had promised that on the next day they would see Staten Island, off the east coast of Tierra del Fuego. Then, at long last, they would pass into the Atlantic.

“You’ll be born in Belgium,” Azuba murmured to her baby, squinting into the sun-shot spume.

“Bennett, if you’re a boy. Dorothea, if you’re a girl.”

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