Free Journey to Bliss (Saskatchewan Saga Book #3) by Ruth Glover

about forty-five females in all; there were farm girls, slum girls, impoverished girls of a slightly better “class”; girls from families with too many children to provide for them properly; girls whose parents had died, leaving them no alternative but to seek refuge with reluctant relatives.
    There were those among them who could not rightly be called “girls,” being more advanced in years, though still single—for one reason or another marriage had passed them by. There were several widows who had been left with no means of support, women weary of serving as scullery maids or laundresses in the homes of the favored and titled. But all, regardless of age, were in good health (or represented themselves as such, desperately fearing being turned back because of some illness or disease), and were, in normal times, full of life and the sense of adventure. It couldn’t help but spill over from time to time.
    But after several days at sea with the ship wallowing in the grip of a storm, even the healthiest among them appeared peaked, pale, and wan. Some suffered the miseries of severe seasickness, and with facilities for personal grooming limited, were in considerable disarray of body, not to mention mind and spirit.
    There were some three hundred females quartered in a space that would have been overcrowded with one-third that number.And yet they considered themselves favored; men, they understood, were in a hold below where farm animals had been kept previously, and the air, what there was of it, was noxious. For eating purposes, they understood, there was a large table in the middle of the hold, but so wretched was the food, the men from the kitchen dare not come in lest they be mobbed, even killed. Standing at the door, they literally threw chunks of meat to the sweating, swaying, cursing pack of men; they tossed in potatoes, cooked in their jackets, deposited cans of water at the door, and fled.
    “Good catchers and tall fellers get most of the grub,” one poor, thin young man had conveyed to Anne when a lull in the storm had allowed groups of emigrants to “ascend” for air and exercise.
    Eventually a delegation of men had insisted on seeing the captain. “We’ll take over the ship and turn her back to Liverpool,” they threatened, “if things don’t improve.”
    Word seeped into the women’s compartments that the captain, recognizing the problem and the desperation, had chosen fifty men, given them free passage, and put them to work preparing decent meals, feeding the starving horde, and cleaning the toilets. Even the women benefited from the improved menu.
    Today, feeling better, and the weather being conducive, the women and girls had bathed themselves, in a limited fashion, washed hair for the first time since leaving land, and were looking forward to going up on deck to dry it.
    With Mrs. Mountjoy’s businesslike order, “Assemble for ascending,” the girls jockeyed for position at the foot of the ladder. A pained glance from the eye of their leader reminded them of their manners, and with a sigh they obeyed the injunction of their morning devotions, led by Ishbel herself: “In honor preferring one another.”
    As the girls were preferring one another, stepping aside as graciously as they could to allow for a peaceable lineup, awaiting the command to “ascend,” Tierney’s thoughts flew toBinkiebrae and home. Her heart was still raw from the painful separation from family and loved ones, her thoughts were still full of the memories of that wrenching leave-taking and the probability of never seeing James again.
    “Maybe,” she had offered between tears and sobs, “you’ll come oot to Canada after a while, James. Could it be, d’ye think?”
    “Na, na, sister, never think on’t. I’m fer Scotland. And Phrenia, she’d never agree t’ leave her folk. See, it’s like a game of dominoes—one after the other, leavin’. Someone has tae stop it, or Binkiebrae will be a ghostly place. Na, na,