The fever left me a little before dawn, and I woke to the sound of the sea trying to get into the ship.
For a long while I did not move.
I lay in the dark and listened to the water working against the hull, close to my head, patient and cold.
The floor lifted under me, held, and fell away, and my stomach turned over with it.
The air was thick with salt and sickness and the warmth of too many people breathing in too small a space.
Somewhere a child was crying, worn thin with it.
Somewhere else a woman prayed the same soft words over and over, as though she had forgotten anyone could hear.
I let it all come to me slowly, and I understood where I was before I was ready to believe it.
A ship.
Old and small and long at sea.
Beyond its wooden walls, an ocean with no end.
The Mayflower.
My body did not feel like mine.
It was a boy’s body, thin and light, the wrists narrow, the hands unsteady in the dark.
I raised one hand above my face and watched it tremble, and I held it there until it went still.
It was a small thing.
It was also the first thing I chose to do in this life, and I have thought about it often since, because a man’s whole nature is sometimes there in the first quiet thing he does when no one is watching.
I did not weep and I did not cry out.
I made the shaking stop.
Then I lay still and began, carefully, to learn my new world.
“Thomas.
Thomas, can you hear me?”
A man was leaning over me in the gloom.
He was old, gray in the beard, and his eyes were pale and gentle and tired past telling.
It was the face of a man who had given everything to something he believed in, and found the price higher than he had been promised, and paid it anyway.
His name rose in me quietly, and I let it come without wondering how I knew it.
William Brewster.
“You gave us a great fright, boy.” His hand closed warm over my shoulder.
“The fever held you a day and a night.
I sat with you through the worst of it.
There was a moment I thought we had lost you.”
So I was Thomas.
I turned the name over in the dark and found that I could wear it.
I would make it fit.
“I came back,” I said.
My voice was low and cracked and younger than I expected, and it hurt to use it.
“You stayed with me the whole time.”
“Where else would I be?” He said it as though it were nothing, and that was the thing that reached me.
He had a hold full of the sick and the frightened, every one of them with a claim on him, and he had spent a night of his old strength on a half-grown boy who was almost a stranger to him.
I have known powerful men.
I would come to know far greater ones.
I do not remember many of them as clearly as I remember that tired old man on the boards of the Mayflower, giving away kindness he could not spare.
Whatever I made of the years ahead, I promised myself in that moment, I would not become a man who forgot how this had felt.
A woman came out of the shadows, round-faced and gray with exhaustion, and pressed a piece of bread into my hand.
It was hard and dark and small.
“Eat, child,” she said.
“You look half gone to the other side already.”
I was hungrier than I could ever remember being.
But I looked up at her first, and I smiled, and there was nothing clever in the smile, only thanks.
She smiled back before she thought to, the way people do, and a small child beside her laughed at nothing at all, the way children laugh when the grown ones stop being afraid for a moment.
And just like that, the freezing dark felt a little like a place where people might live.
Then I ate, slowly.
I have sat at great tables since, in halls these gentle people could not have dreamed of, and I have never once eaten anything better than that hard bread in the belly of that ship.
I ate, and while I ate I watched.
I have watched people all my life, and it has kept me alive and made me rich and carried me further than any strength of arm ever could.
Even sick and weak and new to that body, I could feel the two halves of the company around me.
There were the ones like Brewster, quiet and burning, who had crossed the whole ocean for the right to kneel and pray as they chose.
And there were the others, harder and more practical, who spoke less of God and more of land, and had come for a share of a new world and a life out from under old masters.
They shared the cold between them, and the hunger, and the foul water.
They did not share a single dream of what waited on the far shore.
One day, and not a distant one, that difference would have to be settled.
I put it away where I kept such things, and said nothing.
“How much further?” I asked.
“To the land.”
Brewster looked up toward the deck, where a thin gray light had begun to show at the edges of the boards.
“Close now, the master says.
Days, if the wind is kind.” He pressed my shoulder once more and got to his feet, slow and stiff, one hand braced on the low beam above him.
“Sleep if you can, Thomas.
The sea has been the easy part.
What comes after will ask more of us than this ever did.”
He moved off to the next body that needed him, and I lay back in the dark and did not sleep.
I was thinking.
I had been given something that almost no one is ever given: a second beginning, clean, in a place where nothing was decided yet and everything was still soft enough to shape.
I did not intend to waste it staying small.
I would live through the winter that was coming.
And when I had lived through it, I would begin, quietly and without asking anyone’s leave, to build.
I did not mean a house or a farm.
I meant something larger than that, and slower, and far more lasting, something with my own blood at the root of it, still standing and still growing long after the last soul in this hold had been forgotten by the world.
I did not know how yet.
But I had time, and a clear head, and a whole new life to spend on it.
For now, that was enough.
Above me, faint through the timbers, the first gulls of the coming coast began to call.