From “Alice, Or The Wild Girl”

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Despite the Lieutenant’s best efforts, the adoption of Lucy as the girl’s name refused to take hold. As word of her spread, the sailors began to weave fanciful theories about her. Some claimed to know her true identity. They had seen her years before, in some far-off port. Her name was Elizabeth, they said, or Ann, or Ruby. She was a harlot, or the daughter of a sea captain; she was even claimed, in one of the more far-fetched stories, to be the bastard child of Danish royalty. 

“They say she does not speak,” Victor explained, “because her tongue has been cut from her mouth.” The boy served as Bird’s eyes and ears among the crew.

“And why would anyone do something like that, I wonder?” 

“To keep her from sayin’ her true name,” Victor answered quickly. “Or else she would get the crown. From her cousin.”

“I see it has all been worked out down to the pin.”

The old sheet-anchor men, the boy reported, unanimously declared her to be bad luck, and claimed that she would bring misfortune to the ship. Bird paid it no mind—these were men who considered it an ill omen if the cook dropped an onion to the floor. 

“And what is your opinion of all of this?” Bird asked him in a serious tone. “Do you believe what they say?”

Victor’s character was unmarked by anything extraordinary. Bird thought he would be lucky enough to become some form of ship’s tradesman, if his career advanced that far. He had none of the ambition Bird had possessed at his age. As a matter of fact, Bird had noticed, early in the voyage, an alarming amount of hair on Victor’s upper lip and on the backs of his hands, a sign that he might have misrepresented his age to continue a comfortable life as a ship’s boy, rather than taking on the more rigorous work of a grown man. Still, boy or young man, he had a knack for going unnoticed. 

Victor was disinclined to offer his own thoughts, if he had any. He knew what Bird wished him to say. “No sir. My thinking is they are just making up tales.”

“Good boy,” Bird said. Then he asked, “Do any say she is a wild girl?”

“No, none say that, sir.”

•

For her first days on the ship, the girl was affected by a terrible seasickness, during which she could not stand, even to relieve herself, and lay in a puddle of her own waste. She continued to refuse all food, and vomited only thin streams of bile or made painful, dry retching sounds that produced no issue at all.

Bird did not cease in his efforts to reacquaint her with the necessity of clothing. Each time she was discovered in the nude, he sent Dowd and King into the close space of her cabin—only the span of a man’s arms across, with a bunk affixed to the wall occupying half of it—to pin her to the ground and force her back into the same soiled shirt. 

Looking in on her was Bird’s first order of business each morning, after his first coffee, his first pipe, and his first whiskey, always enjoyed in that order. She would squint her eyes against the light and look up at him without recognition. When it seemed the worst of her sickness had passed, he decided that she would have a bath. Perhaps warm water and cleanliness would awaken something in her. At the very least, he thought, it would be a comfort. He summoned Mallory to liberate her of her filthy hair. Despite her weakened state, the surgeon would not touch her without first liberally dosing her with laudanum. She swayed without objection as he sheared mudded clumps of the stuff from her scalp with a razorblade, leaving her with a short and uneven stubble, so blond as to be almost clear and revealing the scabby pink of her scalp. Dealing with her womanhood properly and with respect was Bird’s most vexing concern. It seemed more proper to him if Mallory would also be the one to wash her, but the surgeon refused. “First you use me as a barber, and now you wish for a governess. You have no use for a surgeon here.” With that, he stormed off to the sick bay to stew on his humiliation, and would not exit for any reason for the rest of the day.

The girl’s bath required a complex orchestration of bodies; Messrs. Dowd and King positioned themselves around a zinc tub, filled by Victor squeezing around them as he ran back and forth to the galley for pails of hot water. Through all of the proceedings she seemed to sleep, and only woke briefly when they lifted her up by her armpits. She looked pleasantly astonished, to be suspended in the air. 

She let out a gasp and pulled her legs up as her feet touched the water. She clung to Mr. King’s neck like an orang-utan until they pried her loose and pushed her into the tub. She gave a single kick that soaked Mr. King’s shirt, and then drooped lazily in the water. Her breath was shallow and quick and her skin flushed from the tub’s warmth. Dowd and King scrubbed her with rags tied to the ends of short poles, a plan Bird had devised to preserve what he could of her honor. 

His shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbows, King reached into the water to bring up a foot. The sole was hard calloused and gray. Her toenails were jagged and broken stubs, one gouged and half-missing. She made no reaction to the washing of her feet, but when they arrived at her chest she made a queer noise, like huh . . . huh. She was, Bird guessed, laughing. 

As they pulled her out of the tub, Bird reviewed her and said, “Now, you are almost presentable.” 

King propped her up as Dowd fumbled with the sleeves of the dress the steward had fashioned for her, one that could be fastened between her legs so as to be more difficult to remove. Scrubbed to a rosy pink and drowsy from the heat and steam and laudanum, she fell almost instantly into a deep and peaceful sleep in King’s arms, and he gingerly placed her on the bunk and covered her up.   

When Bird returned to her the next morning, thinking to hand deliver her breakfast and see if he could coax her toward speech, he found her once again nude and sleeping on the floor, in a nest of freshly-soiled blankets.

 •

She was dressed and brought up to his cabin for a few hours each afternoon, so that she might move about in more spacious quarters and enjoy the light that seeped in through the thickly-paned windows. During this time, he was content to simply observe her, and allow her to acclimate herself slowly to his company. After the menacing figures of Dowd and King were banished, she would quickly forget about Bird’s presence and begin to explore her surroundings. He sat in his armchair, moving only to lift his pipe or his glass to his mouth. She moved in a low crouch around the edges of the room, as if afraid to stand fully upright. She touched the spines of his books one by one, an activity whose purpose he could not divine. 

Whenever she turned to regard him, he would smile and call something out like, “HELLO LUCY! HOW ARE YOU TODAY?” 

He began to present her with small objects that he thought might interest her: his golden wedding ring which he’d never lost the habit of wearing, a shaving brush, one of the small hand mirrors that so fascinated the Polynesians. She would not take them directly from his hand, but only when he left them for her on the floor and had fully returned to his armchair. She did not long regard the mirror, but an empty tin that had contained peppermints, and which still bore their scent, occupied her for some time. He held before her a photographic card he had purchased in Sydney, commemorating the opening of an opera house. All of the investors stood in three rows on its front steps, dressed in dark coats and tall hats. He studied her face, to see if her eyes focused on the picture or hinted at any recognition of the image it held. She stared past it, past him, her eyes twitching in their sockets. He turned to the windows, where she was directed, and caught the last flicker of a sea bird’s passage.

He noted in his private journal: She shows no understanding of a photograph or even a mirror, as would be expected of any girl her age. When not directly threatened, she seems to have no concern for her situation. She is partial to certain sounds from without, such as the ship’s bell, to others such as speech she seems entirely deaf. Her attention is much like that of a dog’s, wandering unfocused from one object to the next, each a source of momentary fascination which is then entirely forgotten.

He had once known a ship’s dog named Royal, on the schooner Maryann; he recalled he’d earned the dog’s loyalty not by boxing its ears, as the other sailors did, but by giving it crumbs from his meals, and endeavored now to apply the same principle to the girl. At first, she’d eaten only fruit, of which there was precious little remaining on the ship, but through patient experimentation he discovered that she would also eat cheese, and hardtack as long as it was first soaked in tea or wine to soften it. He could not interest her in stewed pork, but she would drink the broth, lapping at the rim of the hot bowl and tilting it with her hands until half of its quantity spilled onto the floor. She would not sit in a chair or eat from the table, no matter what prize he offered her. When several bream were pulled aboard one day, the Lieutenant sent a request to the cook that his be prepared in a sauce of butter and capers, and that another be sent up whole and raw on a plate. This, he placed across from him at the table with a knife and fork arranged optimistically beside it. Though she had no interest in meat, he wondered if, during her period of isolation, she might have survived by eating the carcasses of fish that had washed ashore?

When she saw the fish she approached the table quickly and reached for it—she was starting, he thought, to feel quite at home—but Bird slid the plate away.

“First, you must sit properly,” he told her. 

She leaned over the table, unable to take her eyes from the fish. She did not even seem aware of Bird’s presence, or Dowd and King hovering behind her. 

“Sit,” he repeated, motioning towards the chair. “Mr. King, if you would show Lucy how we sit at a table . . .”

King took hold of her from behind and pressed her into the chair. She tried to twist out from beneath him but he held her fast. 

“There now,” Bird said. “Now, we can eat our supper like ladies and gentlemen.” He slid the plate back across the table. Once the fish was within her reach she seemed to forget all else, and dug into its silver skin with her fingers. 

“You may let her go,” Bird said, and nodded at Mr. King. He did, and stepped back. She remained in the chair, once again leaning crookedly over the table to bring herself closer to her meal. After a few moments Bird tucked his handkerchief into his shirt front, picked up his fork and knife, and proceeded to dine with her, thoughtfully chewing small morsels and pulling the bones from his teeth as she shredded the bloody fish with her fingers, stuffing it into her mouth skin, bone, and all. 

•

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