The Sacred River (4 page)

“No, I don’t. I never have.”

“Perhaps it’s for the best.”

“Of course it’s for the best, Lavinia,” Louisa said, her voice sharp.

Lavinia pulled the cuff of her woolen dress down over her knuckles and dabbed underneath her eyes, one side and then the other.

“I think I shall go and dress for dinner.”

When she’d gone, Louisa threw the shirt down on the bed and hugged her arms over her chest. Pacing over the roses, feeling their soft yield under her feet, she felt disturbed. The company of any of her sisters could give her the feeling that the life she’d worked so hard to construct and maintain, the life of a wife and mother, an angel in the house, might be dismantled as easily as a set at the end of a theater performance. The stage laid bare again, leaving only splintered boards and dust. Emptiness.

All through her life, Louisa had tried to leave behind her childhood. Her father, Amos Newlove, was not often home. Her mother, Amelia, felt poor and lonely all her days and longed above all for a son. Louisa was her fourth daughter, after Beatrice, Hepzibah, and Lavinia, but before Anna. Before poor Antony.

Even prior to the tragedies that later befell their family, a family that Louisa grew to see as precarious as a gull’s nest on the cliff side, she grew up resolved that her life would not be what her mother’s had been. She would not marry a sailor, would not be poor, would not give birth to a row of daughters like Russian dolls, the female endlessly spawning the female.

The dinner gong sounded downstairs. Dragging a chair to the open wardrobe, Louisa climbed up on it and reached inside, felt for the box hidden at the back of the shelf at the top. She found it and lifted the lid, tentatively, her hands exploring until they met a compact, cold weight. Lifting it out, she stepped down from the chair, holding the gun at arm’s length. She laid it gingerly on the dressing table, pointing at the wall, lying between the ivory-backed brushes, the pots of cold cream. The gun was loaded with a cartridge, Blundell had told her when he warned her not to touch it.

Picking it up by the carved wooden handle that emerged from the holster, Louisa wrapped the pistol round and round in the old shirt. She slid it under a folded nightgown at the bottom of the trunk and closed the lid. They would be three women, traveling alone, without male protection. She would protect them. Death would not get anywhere near them.

As the brassy sound of the gong floated up the stairs for a second time, she repinned a falling coil of hair and prepared to join the others in the dining room. They were eight for dinner. Blundell and Harriet. Harriet’s elder brother Tom, and his wife, Flossie. Lavinia and her husband, John Day. Mrs. Heatherwick, their widowed neighbor, who often joined them for supper. And herself.

It pleased Louisa to see every section of the octagonal table occupied.

FIVE

Harriet fitted her face to the porthole by the pillow. On the other side of the thick glass, the land glided by, steady and fluid, as if the warehouses and sheds and cranes of the docks passed by in a stately procession, as if England was on the move, floating away, and they on the ship were anchored amidst a traveling world.

She lay down again. Beyond the sawing sound of her own breath, she could hear boots treading along the passageway outside, shouted commands between men, the pulse of an engine. The bunk vibrated underneath her, and over her head her journal, in its cotton bag, swung from a peg.

They’d left the house in London at first light, Harriet keeping the dog under her cloak as the carriage jolted toward Waterloo. The fog thinned as the train steamed through the outskirts of London and had cleared entirely by the New Forest, puffs of black smoke from the engine trailing over a landscape of skeletal trees and frozen ponds, drifts of steam striping a pale sky. All of them stared out of the train windows, mesmerized by being able to see distance again. Harriet’s father and eldest brother were coming to the port to see them off.

Louisa was against bringing Dash.

“It’ll be nothing but a nuisance having him with us,” she said.

“He’ll be no trouble, Mother. I’ll look aft—”

“I refuse to quarrel with you, Harriet.”

“A dog deters rats,” Yael remarked to no one in particular as the train pulled into Southampton and in the rush of alighting nothing more was said on the subject.

Standing on the deck of the steamer, Harriet’s father had intervened. “Let the little chap come with you, Louisa. It’s a companion for Harriet.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when a voice announced through the speaking trumpet that non-passengers should disembark. Her father had opened his arms and hugged Harriet to his chest. Feeling his solid presence, the rough brush of tweed on her cheek, she experienced a sharp and dismaying sense of regret.

“We’re going so far away, Father.”

“You’ll be fit and well by the time you come home,” he said. “Don’t come back until you are, eh? Look after your mother. And your aunt, of course.”

He’d shaken hands with Yael, then gripped Louisa’s arms through the sleeves of her new traveling coat.

“Write, Louisa,” he said, looking down at her. “Write as soon as you are able. We shall miss you at home.”

Louisa’s face caught a gleam of wintry sun and Harriet thought she saw tears on her cheek.

“I will, Blundell,” Louisa whispered. “I will.”

Louisa embraced Tom and so did Harriet and Yael and then the farewell was over. Her father and brother turned to join the crowd passing back over the gangway as Harriet picked up the dog and she, Yael, and Louisa made their way down to their cabin.

Harriet had just enough strength left to climb up onto the raised bunk on one side of the tiny room.

“This surely can’t be meant to accommodate all three of us?” Yael said, edging through the doorway.

She opened up a large leather bag and retrieved a tin of flea powder that she began to shake over the dark blankets.

“You must rest now, Harriet,” Louisa said, dabbing at her eyes with a corner of her handkerchief. Sitting on the edge of the bunk below Harriet’s, Louisa removed her hat, leaning her head and shoulders forward, checking the chignon at the back of her head with little pats of her hand.

“I’ve lost a hairpin. I can’t think where it’s gone.”

“Don’t fret, dear,” Yael said, hanging her ulster on the back of the door, stowing the bag in the overhead locker and maneuvering herself onto the single bunk on the other side of the cabin. “I daresay you’ll be able to buy a card of pins when we arrive. The women in Egypt have hair, after all. They must do something with it.”

Yael rolled over, with difficulty. From above, her aunt reminded Harriet of the whale they’d seen beached on the mud one year at Boscombe. Harriet had stood in the crowd on the promenade, looking down on the mighty creature in its helplessness. Her brothers joined the people on the shore who were splashing buckets of water over it, trying to keep it alive until the tide came in. Next morning, the same individuals were back with knives and whetstones, cutting steaks and rectangles of white blubber from the open-jawed corpse, sharpening their blades with as much enthusiasm as they’d previously filled buckets.

“I can’t imagine why I didn’t bring spares,” Louisa said. “When I think of all the useless things I’ve got in the trunk. A few pins wouldn’t have occupied any space at all. Will you take a drop of tincture, Harriet?”

“No, Mother.”

Pulling a pair of blue velvet curtains along the side of the bunk, closing herself away, Harriet breathed through her nose, toward the pit of her stomach.
One, two
. . . She breathed out again, slowly, counting, as Dr. Grammaticas had taught her to do to measure her breath and steady it.
Two, three, four
.

Her chest ached and her breath was short, made worse by the cold air and the fumes from the engines, but she didn’t want to start the voyage feeling queasy with the nausea that the tincture provoked. The medicines—foul-tasting, headache-inducing—could be almost as bad as the asthma. She had tried scores but not one fulfilled the promises made for it, of bringing about a lasting change in her health.

Harriet got the red journal out of the pocket and held it to her chest. Despite the roar of the engines, the cry of seagulls outside, the stink of fish and coal, she felt as if she might be dreaming. Putting her face to the porthole again, she watched as the coast grew indistinct and was lost to view. She pinched the back of her hand and told herself she was leaving England. She was on her way to Thebes.

•  •  •

Yael’s bunk was empty.
Gone to Divine Service
, read a note on the pillow. Louisa moaned in her sleep and rolled over to face the side of the ship, tugging her blanket over her head. Lifting her cloak from the hook on the back of the door, Harriet picked up the dog and let herself out of the cabin.

She walked past a line of numbered doors to a circular iron staircase, pulling herself up by the handrail. Pausing at the top to steady her breath, she glanced through the windows of the saloon cabin. At the far end, a circle of a dozen people were on their knees, their heads bowed. Harriet recognized Yael’s gray skirts spread on the floor like a puddle.

The stairs up to the weather deck were grand and polished, made of wood. Stepping out to the rush and freshness of sea air, she gasped as the wind whipped back her hair and blew her cloak out behind her like a sail. The sky was immense, a soft silver bowl over her head with long fingers of pearly cloud on the horizon. All around, the sea glittered and rolled, looking grand and clean and alive.

The deck was deserted apart from a couple sitting on a bench, and at the bow, just visible between the masts, a man setting up an easel. As Harriet put down the dog, the couple rose and walked toward her, arm in arm, the woman clutching a hat to her head with one hand. The height of the woman’s hat, the aigrette of iridescent turquoise feathers attached on one side, gave her the appearance of a gorgeous bird herself. She nodded at Harriet as she passed by.

The sun emerged between the scudding clouds and Harriet became aware of her shadow in front of her on the scrubbed planks. Her own head, in a close-fitting winter bonnet, looked small, her body like a narrow giantess’s. Her brown tweed traveling skirt, chosen by Louisa at Marshall & Snelgrove for its warmth and durability, announced her as an invalid, unfashionable and unmarried, set apart from other women of her age. Everything about her carried the same message: her five feet and nine inches, which her brothers used to say made her look like an etiolated plant, shooting up in search of the light; her pale complexion and forced avoidance, often unsuccessfully, of the emotions that she seemed to feel more strongly than others.

Raising her head, she took a gulp of salty air and began a tour of the deck. Passing by a row of upturned lifeboats, she noticed the man again. He stood at his easel, a little distance in front of her, black hair flying out behind him in the wind. She watched as he wiped a brush clean and began to load it with paint from the palette balanced on his forearm. An oily cloth fell to the deck at his feet and as the wind lifted it, Harriet’s dog sprang forward. Seizing the rag between his jaws, he began to worry it, shaking it as if it were alive, growling with all his might.

Harriet laughed as she walked toward him. “Here, Dash. Give that back.”

“Drop it, brute.”

The painter aimed the tip of a laced, two-toned shoe at the dog.

“Don’t kick him,” Harriet said, her voice half carried away by the wind. “Dash. Let go!”

She knelt down and pulled the rag from the dog’s jaws, handed it to the painter.

“You ought to keep it on a leash,” he said, taking the cloth and securing it underneath the palette.

“Not it. Him,” Harriet said.

The painter looked at her without interest. He was broad-faced and clean-shaven, his hair swept back over a low forehead. He wore a white shirt in an unevenly woven and unbleached fabric, the kind of cloth that Rosina might use to apply beeswax to furniture. No collar. A red scarf decorated with peacock feathers fluttered at his neck. Harriet had never seen a man dressed in clothes like his.

She was staring, she realized, feeling the start of a blush. Turning away, she caught sight of the canvas clamped on the easel. The picture was barely begun; a few arcs of sea spray in shades of pewter and olive and charcoal flew upward into a naked canvas sky.

Dash was shivering at her feet. Harriet gathered him under her arm and walked slowly back along the starboard side, past a stall with two cows lowing from within, a stack of rabbit hutches, a sailor in a chef’s hat disappearing down through a hatch with a basket of eggs. The deck was filling with other passengers, English people, shouting and laughing in a way that interrupted the lonely meeting between sky and sea. Harriet felt breathless, the exhilaration she’d felt when she emerged on the weather deck spent.

On her way back down, she stopped again outside the grand saloon. Behind the glazed doors, groups of people sat in the red plush seats, talking and reading newspapers. A fug of pipe smoke rose in front of the mirrors, wreathing the swags of red velvet curtain, the framed illustrations of ships. On the carpeted floor, children played with dolls and toy lambs, the boys hopping and jumping, pretending to fall over from the movement of the ship. Harriet had a familiar sense of looking in on life from outside.