by Carrie Brown
There is a pinching sensation in her chest at the thought of Hilda.
She hopes Hilda is already at their uncle’s, that he has greeted her kindly, toasted her health with a glass of wine.
A wind from somewhere moves through her cabin. Hot wax from the candle drips onto her wrist and onto the bedclothes. A moment later, on the next breath, the candle is extinguished. In the dark, she gropes to put aside her paper and ink.
When she closes her eyes, she does not imagine the night sky she has seen through William’s telescope. The pictures that come into her head are of the world she has left behind, the world from which William has liberated her: the dirty courtyard filled with chicken droppings, the narrow tracks along the Leinestrom through the weaving grasses and the willows’ overhanging branches, the streets of Hanover lined with familiar shops and signs, the staircase and the long hall of their house, which bends at a crook—there, where William and her father had to duck their heads to pass—and which leads to the closet heaped with linen and branches of cedar and fir.
In sleep she dreams of Margaretta, coughing in the house next door. She dreams of the horse, stamping in his stall, of the shards of daylight visible through the roof of their old home, of the snow that fell lightly into her bedroom, the lightness of its touch on her cold cheeks. She dreams of her mother, pushing Lina away, and the hard, permanent bulge of her mother’s belly, swollen always with child. She dreams of Hilda, her apron foolishly over her head.
In her dreams William is there, too, his back to her as he paces on the deck of the ship. He radiates heat like the oven in the baker’s wintry courtyard in Hanover, puddles of melted snow underfoot. A penumbra of light surrounds him. She tries to approach him, but he is too bright, and when his feet leave the ground, his head aimed toward the stars, she cries out, for she knows she is being left behind.
—
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, when the storm breaks out across the Channel, she climbs up to the deck, covered in cold sweat, and retches over the rail into the rain. A sailor shouts at her, but she hangs on to the railing, gulping the cold air, the rain in her face. It takes a wave crashing over the deck only feet away for her to retreat. The stench in the cabin from seasick passengers is horrible. She ties her shawl over her nose and douses it with perfumed Hungary water, another gift from William, who seemed to suspect she might need it.
William appears impervious to the nausea that plagues everyone else. He sits reading on the steps beneath one of the hatches at the end of the galley, his wool cloak around him, hanging on with one hand to the rope that serves as a handrail. Lina passes him again and again as she makes her rounds with one of the crying infants in her arms.
Finally he looks up. Her expression must be desperate, she realizes, because he stands without delay or speaking and takes the baby from her, draping it over his shoulder like a sack of meal. He secures the baby there with one hand, with the other holding his book before his face. He turns away from her to stagger down the galley, continuing to read.
Lina takes the place he has vacated on the steps. What is his gift, she wonders, that he does not struggle in the world as other people do? The world does not seem to oppose him as it opposes others.
She goes up the steps to the hatch, which she lifts aside a few inches. The sky is wild, pelting rain; the sails have been lowered halfway. She holds on tightly as the ship rolls side to side and up and down the slopes of the waves. William has explained the dynamics of ship construction to her, the reason the vessel will not capsize, but his assurances have done little to diminish her fear.
They will all die, she thinks. They will be drowned at sea. Of course she is to have no future. She always knew it. She just had not imagined this ending. But William is still calmly walking and reading, and the baby is fast asleep.
Lina puts her face into her hands.
William taps her head with his book as he goes past.
SEVEN
Solitude
She stands on the sand at Yarmouth, dazed by the disconcerting stillness of being on land again. The light is milky. The ships at anchor appear not so much floating as suspended in the mist between sea and sky. She touches her hair, stiff with salt. She feels her skin, her hair, her skirt begin to soften in the warm, damp air.
She looks again for the brown-eyed man who had carried her through the waves breaking onto the shore, but she cannot find him in the crowd of people.
It is absurd to think he might return to find her, to take her hand and ask her name.
From the small boats beached on the sand, men ferry hampers and wooden boxes and trunks up the shingle toward the road. A pair of oxen being dragged through the last feet of surf, eyes rolling, lifting their noses skyward and lowing, step forward out of the mist, and suddenly she can smell them, a smell of sour animal fear. A man balancing a crate of hens on his shoulder veers toward her and then away. Feathers drift in his wake.
William is nowhere in sight.
She touches her hair again. It has come loose, no doubt when the man threw her over his shoulder. She remembers the sensation of his arms around her, her body pressed against his. She tries to secure the pins and push her curls back into place, but her hands are trembling.
On the ship she had forgotten about her face. Troubling about her appearance would have been absurd under such conditions. Now, though, standing alone on the sand at Great Yarmouth, surrounded by the bustling activity, she is aware of the condition of her clothing, her disarranged hair, her pocked skin. She has resolved to do as William proposed; she will no longer go about with her face covered. Here she has a new life, with no mother to complain about her wretched prospects. Still she has to resist the impulse to draw her shawl across her cheek.
She gathers her wet skirt and climbs unsteadily to a place higher on the rocks, where she can oversee the activity below. How will William find her among all these people? She assumes he is making his way through the chaos to recover their belongings, that he will spy her here alone against the seawall.
Unlike the rich light in the forests of Hanover or the silver haze that hovered over Holland’s watery fields—William had explained to her on the post wagon about the brilliance of the higher latitudes—the gray English light is plangent, the sun a hazy circle behind the clouds. She judges by its position that the hour must be nearly midday. A moment later church bells begin to ring in the town above her on the strand. Indeed it is the noon hour.
She remembers that church bells had been ringing when they left Holland. Suddenly she wants to sit down.
She had expected happiness at this moment of arrival, but instead she feels weak in the knees. Is it the melancholy light? The sound of the bells? She realizes that she is a complete stranger in this new place. In all her expectations of this arrival, she had not imagined this: her trembling legs. Her fear.
She berates herself. Now, after so many days of terror, now her courage fails her? The stones of the wall at her back are covered with moss. She runs a hand over their furred surface. From the street above come the sounds of horses’ hooves, the trickling of water from somewhere nearby. Silver lichen grows on the slate roofs of the houses, she sees, and the windows facing the sea reflect the clouds. She feels submerged, as if her ears are filled with water. She turns to face the ocean again, trying to breathe deeply. The Englishmen have pale skin and slashes of bright red as if drawn with a paintbrush on their cheeks. They shout to be heard over the surf, but the sound of the waves swallows their words.
In the post wagon traveling from Hanover, she and William had practiced speaking in English. She has been studying it for months, ever since the arrival of William’s letter announcing that he would come to fetch her in Hanover.
“I am delighted to make your acquaintance,” William had said, prompting her.
“No, kindly, beautiful sir! It is I who is very delighted to make your happy and many years acquaintance again,” she had replied.
William had laughed.
“Ex
cuse me,” she had said to William, pretending offense. “I am very, very lost. Where is my monkey? Have you ten cows? I am twenty-two years old, and I have no feathers like a bird.”
William had fallen over on the seat with laughter.
“Did you get my many thousand letters to the king?” Lina had continued. “I tell her—no, it is I told him, him—that I wish only for twenty geese and cheeses and a red frock.”
William had laughed and laughed. “You are a comedienne, my little sister,” he’d said, delighted. “I would not have guessed.”
She had rehearsed many sentences: I am very well, I am my brother’s sister, I have blue eyes and a green dress and a red hat, you are very kind, it is satisfactory. I can ride a horse, yes.
William also had given her a book, One Thousand and One Nights. “It will improve your accent to read aloud,” he’d said.
—
SITTING ACROSS FROM HIM on the post wagon, she had bent over the pages: On the black road of life, she read aloud, think not to find either a friend or lover to your mind. If you must love, oh then, love solitude, for solitude alone is true and kind.
She’d looked up.
William had been writing on the wooden lapboard he had built for this purpose. When she did not continue, he looked up, too.
“Not solitude alone,” he said. “Other things, also—other people—are true and kind.” He had reached over and tapped her knee with his knuckles, smiling.
She had felt her face grow warm at the compliment. He meant her, she realized.
She had looked away to gaze at the landscape through which they’d been passing. As they had moved closer to the sea, the trees had grown smaller, as if bowed under the weight of a larger sky. She had felt exposed beneath it, their tiny conveyance bearing them at its infinitesimal pace over the landscape. The world outside Hanover had been for her only a fiction, she’d realized, no more real to her than descriptions of places in stories. She’d let her hand drift outside the window of the coach, spreading her fingers to feel the cool air move through them.
They would always be true and kind to each other, she and William.
—
AS IF HER EARS are clearing finally, other sounds begin to reach her now as she waits on the rocks—an animated conversation between men on the street above, gulls crying. Finally she spies William making his way toward her over the sand, two boys carrying their trunks behind him. Carts and horses wait on the street; William waves to her, and then he climbs a set of stone steps to the street and speaks to the driver of one of the carts.
She assumes William is engaging the man to take them to an inn. From Yarmouth there will be diligences going east to London and stopping at nearby inns, he has explained to her.
She longs to wash. Every item of her clothing is filthy. Her hair is horribly sticky.
William comes back down from the street and gives her his hand to help her over the rocks.
“We will stay here for the night?” she asks. “Tomorrow there is a carriage to London?”
“There will be an overnight coach,” he says. “We can catch that.”
“William,” she says. She stops on the rocks. “My clothing. I must wash. For you, it is different.”
She cannot believe he will ride with her into London looking as she does. She is horrified at the thought.
They reach the street, and the driver produces a crate for her to step on so she may climb to the back of the cart. William lifts one of their trunks and fits it beside her. She remembers her promise: she will do anything.
“All right,” he says finally. “We will stop.”
Then, more kindly, he says, “I understand. All will be well. But from now on,” he continues, “we will speak only in English. Yes? It is a good idea.”
“William,” she says. “No.”
If William will not speak to her in their native tongue…
But he has left her to climb up beside the driver. He turns around in the seat, and she has no difficulty with his meaning when he points to his cheek, pulls up the corner of his mouth in a smile.
—
LINA HANGS ON TO the side of the cart as they make their way through the streets. The horse is clearly young and unused to the shafts, lunging ahead; the driver has the animal under poor control. From having driven their own horse and cart through the orchard at harvest to collect the baskets of apples, she knows enough of horse behavior to see that this one is skittish. She used to like standing by their old horse’s head while the wagon was loaded, murmuring nonsense into his feathery ear. It would be wonderful if she could ride a horse sometimes in England, she thinks.
When the horse shies at something, the driver uses the whip.
Mistake, Lina thinks.
Traffic on the roadway eases as they leave the crowded streets of town, but away from the constraints of other vehicles, the driver has even greater difficulty holding the nervous animal in check.
As they turn onto a narrow lane, a cow bellows from behind a hedgerow.
The startled horse tries to rear in the shafts—Lina lurches against the side of the cart—and then takes off at a gallop. The driver stands up shouting, raising the whip. When the horse swerves toward the far side of the lane, the cart tilts, pitching the driver and William and Lina into the ditch along with their trunks.
Lina has the breath knocked out of her. She stares up at the blue of the sky, feeling as if her chest is collapsing. Pain shoots along her leg and her hip, her shoulder and into her neck. She tastes grit in her mouth.
The driver is nearby in the ditch, sitting up and holding his head and groaning.
William runs down the lane after the horse, which has stopped, after all, only several yards away, the cart wedged at an angle against a tree.
Lina takes a breath at last, gasping. She stands painfully, but she is not sure she can walk. There is a bloody gash in her knee.
William gathers the reins under the horse’s chin, and speaks to it in soothing tones. She sees that the cart’s wheels are fortunately intact. She watches as William persuades the horse to back up in the shafts and dislodge the cart from its position against the tree. The horse shakes its head up and down and rattles the bit in its teeth.
“You’re all right?” William calls to Lina. “Come take his head.”
She limps across the lane.
She holds the horse, stroking his damp neck, while William and the driver recover their belongings. The wooden case for the telescope is cracked, but the telescope itself is unharmed. She looks down; her skirt is torn and covered in mud and blood. She does not dare look too closely at the wound on her leg.
At last the complaining driver is restored to his seat, and William helps Lina into the cart again. Lina cannot understand everything the driver says, but she understands that when William speaks to him, he reproves him for handling the horse poorly and for using the whip. William is very confident with the man, she notes. He has the bearing of a gentleman, and obviously he feels his authority, as well as conveying it to others. Everyone on the ship had taken him for someone of importance, his detachment from the general terror marking him out.
William announces that he will walk beside the horse the remainder of the way.
Lina sits in the cart and pulls her torn skirt aside to view the damage to her leg. It is not so bad, after all—only a bad scrape—but it is painful. She suspects she will be bruised, as well. She tries to stanch the blood on her knee with her handkerchief. Her dress is ruined, she fears.
Yet she feels—how can it be, after such a fright?—happy.
In fact, it is as though everything suddenly is a great joke. What does it matter if she is covered in mud and blood and is nearly dead with fatigue?
She did not drown at sea.
She is free of Hanover and her mother and the narrow cell of her future.
She turns her face to the light filtering through the leaves of the trees whose branches arch above them. It is the first of September. The air has
a grassy sweetness. Something fragrant blooms in the hedgerow; bees ascend and descend among the unfamiliar white blossoms. Though the coast had been misty, here the afternoon light is clear and warm. The green fields glimpsed between the trees lining the lane glow, their color so vivid it seems almost unreal.
She thinks again of the brown-eyed man who threw her over his shoulder in the surf, the movement of his chest and belly against her as he pushed through the water.
She has stepped away from the fate she faced in Hanover, the old husband with bony knees and knotted hands who would take her for her good qualities, beat her for her bad ones.
She will never again be her mother’s servant.
Sitting in the cart now, she has again the sensation of too much feeling inside her, but this time—the surprise of it is like a beautiful flower opening in her chest—it is only too much happiness.
—
AT THE INN, William arranges to have their filthy clothing attended to before their departure the next day. A dinner of soup and bread, a pudding of berries and cream is provided for the travelers. There are three others at the inn, an elderly woman and two young girls who are her grandchildren, Lina learns, also on their way to London.
After the meal Lina steps outside to see the innkeeper’s garden. It is a pleasure to be on land again. She feels she cannot get enough of it. She walks slowly, her leg paining her. She touches leaves and flowers: English flower, she thinks. English vegetable. English tree.
Returning to the inn, she stops in the doorway, open to the early evening. In the big room William sits near the fire, a book in his hand. The two little girls play with paper dolls at the table nearby.
Lina gazes in at the scene. The room is tranquil, the little girls whispering to one another, their grandmother in her black dress and shawl dozing in a chair in a dark corner. William’s posture is graceful, one long leg extended and inclined on a footstool. His jaw rests in the cup of his palm as he gazes down at the page before him. Anyone might mistake William for the father of the little girls, she thinks. Then one of the children approaches him and lays one of the paper dolls familiarly on his thigh. He looks up, smiles at her, touches her head. He says something to her in a quiet voice, and she skips back to the table.