Signals of Distress Read Free

she’s up and dressed for work and running in the yard, while you’re still on your back. Come on now, Miggy girl.
There’s been enough of this. I’ll get the cart and you can earn your supper.’
    Miggy Bowe tied her hair back in a knot, put on men’s working breeches and her thickest smock, and wrapped the Belle ’s cloth call for help round her throat as a scarf. It gave
a reckless dash of colour to a face that had no warmth. Her mother was the cheerful kind. Rosie Bowe would sing in rain and mud. But Miggy was young enough at seventeen to be a pessimist. Where
would she be at thirty-four, her mother’s age? Still carting kelp. At fifty-one? Cold as stone, with any luck, and nothing to her name except a wooden cross. She petted her two dogs and then
inspected Whip, her teeth, her paws, her collar, her little beard. With luck they’d get some puppies out of her in spring.
    ‘Come on, you little lady,’ she said. ‘Let’s have a look down on the shore.’ Miggy and the dogs ran to catch up with Rosie, who was wheeling the handcart towards
the dunes.
    T HEY SAW the cows from Quebec before they saw the sea. They’d never seen so many cows at once.
    ‘You called for mutton, Miggy. The good Lord sends us beef.’
    ‘Whose cows are they, Ma?’
    ‘That little dog has come with them, that’s all I’m certain of.’
    ‘What’s stopping us from salting one?’
    Her mother didn’t answer. She half guessed that there’d be some wreckage and some carnage on the shore – and, if there was, then who could stop them slaughtering one cow before
the excise men got wind of it? There’d be better pickings than the kelp. Bullion, jewels and plate had been beached the other side of Wherrytown a dozen years before. Tobacco, tea and lace
would suit them well. There would be sailcloth and timber for the house, at least. Winter beef. Wrecks were a godsend. Rosie almost ran.
    Rosie Bowe was the first woman that the sailors had seen since they left Montreal. They watched her, strong and buoyant, pick her way between the cows and descend with her handcart down the
backshore to the beach. They saw another figure, too – a smallish boy in breeches and a smock. He had three dogs. The Americans had spent six hours in the rigging but had been warmed and
dried a little by the breeze and sun, so managed quite a spirited cheer when the seaman, Parkiss, who had the ship’s glass, reported that the smallest dog was their own Whip. The dog,
perhaps, had saved their lives.
    They’d have to wait another hour. A kelper’s handcart couldn’t bring them ashore. Rosie sent her daughter running down the coast. The nearest fishermen were beached below the
Cradle Rock, a mile away. They’d come out in their boats. She waved back at the sailors but didn’t know how she could signify across so wide and watery a gap that help was on its way.
She pushed her cart along the tideline and put the morning to good use. As she had expected, the storm had deposited a lot of kelp on the beach. She chose the knobweeds and the bladderwracks
because their yields of soda were the best. She kicked aside the sugar wrack. A cartload of that would only give a quarter-bucketful of soda ash. She lifted the weed with her right hand and kept
her left hand free to seize the crabs that often sheltered underneath the kelp or the lance eels which could be twitched out of the sand if she were quick enough. When she found timbers from the Belle and broken lengths of rigging she wrapped them up in kelp and hid them on the cart. She watched the water as she worked for bobbing bottles of brandy and liqueur, but all she spotted
was the ready-salted carcass of a cow, floating on its side, and masts and planking from the ship tangled in the offshore weed. Quite soon her cart was full. She pulled it back into the dunes where
she had built a stone pit for burning kelp. She buried what she’d salvaged from the Belle in a soft dune, and spread the load of kelp to