The Trespass: A Novel

by Barbara Ewing

  Harriet stood at the ship’s rail, time forgotten. In every direction, the sky disappeared into the horizon, grey and lowering, only the brave little Amaryllis, scudding onwards, nothing else as far as the eye could see. She looked over the side of the deck. Grey-green water slipped by, white waves curling and churning and disappearing beneath them. As she looked back she thought perhaps she saw suddenly a flock of birds in the far distance but the vision disappeared into the greyness of the sky and she wondered if she had imagined it.

  Further down the ship, by the steerage hatch, a group of young women stood close together talking, holding their shawls tightly, nodding, blown about the deck, coming together again. Two sailors walked past: she saw the sailors and the women stare openly at each other. And then they all laughed – even from where she was standing Harriet caught bursts of laughter that carried to her on the wind. Then one of the ship’s mates called to the sailors and they were away at once, up to the front of the ship, pulling at ropes, winding chains.

  Harriet stared again at the sea below, seeing shadows and journeys in the foaming waves’ white curves and falls. And everywhere the smell of salt and air and rope and tar caught at her, pulled at her, and the sound of the sea over and over again declared to her that she was free.

  ‘Ah there you are, Miss Cooper, I have been looking everywhere. Really it is most unsuitable that you walk alone on the main deck, the sailors are everywhere, my dear, and there are lots of unscrupulous men in the steerage compartment who think nothing of the Captain’s ruling, and wander very much in this direction. I think it will be best if you walk only with me. And although the niceties of fashion are not my field exactly – rather my wife’s or my sister’s – a hat, I think, Miss Cooper, rather than a shawl. We of all people must keep up appearances so that standards are maintained aboard ship. With so many of the lower classes travelling with us it is up to us to at all times preserve the rules of etiquette and propriety against the vulgarity and impertinence that could easily overrun us. I think you will find the Captain feels the same.’

  Harriet had turned and regarded the long nose and piercing eye of Mr Burlington Brown of Starlight Gas Lighting. From his nose droplets of water hung and the wind stung his eyes as it did hers, pulled at his frock coat.

  ‘I am most grateful for your attention,’ said Harriet, ‘but I do not wish to trouble you and your family unduly—’

  ‘No, no, no,’ protested the Chairman, endeavouring to pat her shoulder.

  ‘And sometimes, the – the seasickness, you know, I needed to hurry here, there was no time to call for you.’

  ‘Ah, ah, quite, quite, but look at the time, my dear Harriet (if I might call you that),’ and indeed as he spoke the ship’s bell rang. ‘Time to dress for dinner; the Captain appreciates this also, even though, of course, we understand that you are still – as it were – in mourning.’ And he ventured a further fatherly hand upon her shoulder and then ventured it down to her arm, and propelled her back towards her cabin.

  She looked back, at the sea and the sky and the echo of birds.

  * * *

  A shipboard dinner, Harriet saw, was a large affair. Onion and pork broth; roasted fresh pork (one of the travelling pigs had already been slaughtered, the Captain proudly told her, because last night it had broken its leg, that’s how fresh it was) served together with roasted onions and parsnips and much prune and plum compote and many potatoes, plus cold mutton and cabbage and large bowls of gravy. There were several extremely elaborate fruit pies decorated with iced pastries, and jugs of custard, and a big cheeseboard. There was glacéed fruit, and wine and beer, and port for the gentlemen. Although it was mid-afternoon lamps had been lit, as only dim light came in from the small windows.

  Harriet was given pride of place at the Captain’s side and made a great fuss of now that she had appeared at last. As there were only fifteen cabin passengers she met them all: smiled and bowed; saw gentlemen and ladies; saw a cross-looking girl of about twelve kick her younger brother when she thought nobody was looking; met Miss Eunice, the rather pinched sister of Mr Burlington Brown; admired a baby belonging to a magistrate’s wife which was displayed just before prayers. Stewards bowed and removed plates for all the world as if they were dining in London (but the sound of the wind in the sails above them, and the occasional sliding of cutlery, and the way liquid moved in the glasses reminded them they were not). The Captain spoke of the joys of their destination: this was his fifth journey; of the chance of making many fortunes; of the necessity of keeping a tight rein on the natives. A bridge school was suggested for the long days ahead, and the possibility of a few amateur dramatics; Harriet was asked if she would honour them with something on the ship’s piano this evening after tea had been served.

  She enquired how many other passengers were aboard the Amaryllis; found that over one hundred men and women and children were in the steerage quarters; that they had different food (‘A lot better than they had in their previous lives, I’ll be bound,’ said Mr Burlington Brown knowledgeably). She was told that single men and women (with married couples and children between) were housed at either end of the steerage space at the bottom of the ship, with a matron in charge of the single women; how they must all be in bed by ten o’clock when the ship’s bell rang. (‘Otherwise they’d be careering around the ship in the darkness getting up to no good, I’ll be bound,’ Mr Burlington Brown contributed.) And they told Harriet how water everywhere must be treasured.

  ‘Even you, my dear Miss Cooper, must learn to catch the rainwater: water shortage is the most vexatious problem, salt baths are the rule rather than the exception, and water with meals is a luxury.’ Harriet stared at the odd-coloured water in carafes on the table which she had declined to drink.

  ‘Much safer to catch rainwater,’ said a young man whose name was Mr Aloysius Porter, ‘for I expect the water we took on board comes from the Thames.’

  His friend Mr Nicholas Tennyson (‘no relation to the poet I’m afraid’) agreed: ‘It would seem foolish to bring our London bacteria to the South Pacific.’ But the gentlemen were turning to the port and the ladies were retiring to one end of the dining saloon, only Miss Eunice Burlington Brown hung on Mr Porter’s every word and nodded. Harriet, as she moved with the ladies, said to Mr Porter and Mr Tennyson that she was looking forward to catching water out of the sky.

  * * *

  ‘I say, Captain Stark,’ said the doctor in the evening after tea, ‘the Bay of Biscay is treating us kindly, I’ve heard a story or two about its treacherous gales.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said the Captain, and he turned courteously to the ladies to explain. ‘The Bay of Biscay has a fearsome reputation, especially at this time of year. Ships on their way to the Antipodes have been wrecked before even they sighted Spain, but we seem, so far, to be having a brisk but extraordinarily smooth passage, all things considered. We have been running before the wind and have covered many miles today. Perhaps your presence, my dear Miss Cooper, is bringing us luck, and all such journeys as ours need luck.’ Stewards had lighted more lamps; outside the sun had set on the horizon.

  ‘Miss Cooper.’ The Captain spoke again. ‘Perhaps you will play something for us now as this evening is your first excursion among us, even though we left Gravesend a week ago.’ The rebuke was soft, the request was firm: it was Harriet’s duty to entertain them prettily. Dutifully, Harriet went to the piano. A little sigh seemed to go round the dining saloon: so beautiful, so pale, so dressed in black.

  For a moment Harriet sat quite still before the small upright instrument. She had not touched a piano for so long, it seemed: it was another life when she lived at Rusholme and played in the evenings before Eddie and Augusta branched out into ‘When Other Lips’. When Mary was alive. And she quickly bowed her head and played one of Chopin’s études. The piano did not move with the roll of the ship, it was nailed to the floor, but no doubt dampness got in to the strings inside and it was perhaps not quite in tune. But there was something
about the way the pale young woman played: the dining saloon was silent and the notes hung in the air although all the time the wind in the sails was there above them in the Bay of Biscay and the Amaryllis ploughed through the waves. The last notes died away and Harriet stood abruptly.

  ‘Goodnight,’ she said.

  And like Cinderella she was suddenly gone, even before the gentlemen could rise and accompany her with one of the swinging lanterns that hung over the round wooden table.

  Later the murmur of voices outside her window mixed with the rushing sound of the sea as some of the gentlemen endeavoured to take a somewhat blustery evening stroll with their cigars. For a long time she heard the other cabin doors opening and closing, people using buckets or chamber pots or walking to the water closet beside the cabins, walking back again, coughing, settling. She sat motionless on her thin bed, her candle burnt down. She counted again the sovereigns and placed them carefully in one of the boxes, remembering how she had seen her Uncle William and Cousin John and Edward shut themselves in the study and speak about finance, a subject never discussed with women: she could only hope that English money was currency at her destination. She had over three hundred sovereigns: she believed it was a great deal of money. Finally she took out her pen and her ink and Walter’s pale cream notebook and put them on Mary’s little table by the cabin window. She sat on the end of the bed for a seat and picked up the pen.

  Very slowly, by the light of the candle, she wrote:

  TO THE DEAR

  She stopped. She could not imagine who her dear readers were to be. But then she thought of her mother whom she had never known, writing all those years ago and leaving a message for Harriet. And then she wrote firmly, holding on to the ink bottle that was sliding from one end of the table to the other in an alarming manner:

  TO THE DEAR READERS OF MY JOURNAL

  30 November 1849

  I am, on this day of my life, sailing to New Zealand.

  TWENTY

  The Right Honourable Sir Charles Cooper, MP, persuaded himself that he was travelling to New Zealand on government business. The activities of the New Zealand Company had been troubling Her Majesty’s Government for some time: they now troubled Sir Charles Cooper exceedingly: almost he could say they had kidnapped his daughter. His rage was monumental, and frightening (he seemed sometimes almost to have taken leave of his senses although nobody voiced such an unthinkable sentiment): he blamed everyone in Bryanston Square as well as the New Zealand Company, he also blamed all his relations in Kent for putting ridiculous ideas into his daughter’s head. It could not be kept from the Prime Minister and others that Miss Harriet Cooper had not been kidnapped but had run away; or at the very least had travelled without her father’s knowledge or permission and if that wasn’t running away what was it exactly? Quite simply it was unheard of. So Sir Charles Cooper told everyone (and came to believe it himself) that his daughter’s mind had been temporarily unhinged by the death of her beloved sister: people remembered her, that pale ghost, at the funeral on the hill, nodded, felt much pity for the poor, wifeless father. An even smaller paragraph in The Times pronounced that the MP’s daughter (her name was not actually given), much distressed by the death of her sister, had nevertheless been found safe and well.

  His younger son, Walter, offered to go and find Harriet. Sir Charles laughed shortly. ‘You would drown on the first week out,’ he said, ‘in a poker school held in steerage.’ His older son, Richard, laughed also. His laugh was like his father’s in the cold, formal dining room, where now only three of them sat for breakfast. Nobody noticed or cared that Quintus no longer appeared.

  Walter could not tell his father how frightened he had been, a man of twenty, to have twice now woken in the night, weeping. Harriet’s terrible disappearance had suddenly shown Walter how much he missed Mary, how he had not grieved for the death of the sister who had mothered him. And now it seemed both sisters were lost to him and he was marooned in this world of indecipherable businessmen. How could he explain these things to this suddenly wilder, older man that was his father?

  ‘I wish you would let me go, sir,’ he repeated doggedly. ‘I should like to find Harriet. I should like to look after her, so far away from home. I don’t like to think of her alone.’

  Sir Charles strode without answering from the dining room and into the privacy of his study. It was he who would find Harriet. He who would look after her. And when he found her he would punish her: there was no question that she must be punished; he had lost face and she would be punished for it. He would beat her. Alone in his study he held his head in his hands and went over it again. He would take her perfect feet in his hands. And then he would beat her. He could see her. He alone would administer the punishment, a special kind of punishment, and she would beg him to stop, and beg him for more, and he would tame her at last and she would offer him her breast as she had once before. Every time he conjured her beautiful, closed face he almost groaned aloud. Every time he remembered the night she had held her breast for him his heart, his head, all his being gave a wild, wild leap. When he found her – and he never for a moment doubted that he would find her – he would never let her out of his sight again: he could not live without her. She was his daughter: she belonged to him.

  * * *

  The Prime Minister agreed: a reliable person should look at New Zealand. It was arranged that Sir Charles would leave as soon as a passage could be arranged. All information that the New Zealand Company held on his nephew Edward Cooper’s land purchases and his daughter Harriet’s travel arrangements was of course made over to him. He puzzled over how she had paid for her fare, and how she was planning to live: he did not believe she was in love with her short, fat cousin, he had observed her so carefully and the only person he had ever worried about was Lord Ralph Kingdom who was obviously a problem no longer since he remained in England; the servants said he had called. Sir Charles hoped he would not call again. He acquired some immediate facts about New Zealand. He enquired as to the number of people in the whole country: it was infinitesimal. He enquired as to the number of people in Wellington where Edward had bought his land: they told him 4,381 at the last census and he laughed. She would no doubt try to find Edward; Sir Charles himself would be able to find Edward within an hour of disembarkation.

  He would punish her (again the visions came) and then he would bring her home. But one thing she had forfeited: her right to freedom. He alone, from the moment he found her, would hold the key. Peters would accompany him: between the two of them she need never be alone again. From Doctor Adams he obtained, without question, a large amount of laudanum. She may need to be calmed. They would be back with Harriet by the end of the summer.

  There would not be an election until the winter at least and the Right Honourable Sir Charles Cooper, MP, leaving Peters to deal with the final arrangements, went back to Norfolk with various inducements that would make sure that his seat was absolutely safe. All was under control.

  Only in his deepest, unconscious dreams did Charles Cooper recall how Harriet had looked at him the morning he left for Norfolk: that last wild look. And then all at Bryanston Square in the watches of the night heard a terrible cry, as if a man visited hell and could not forget what was shown to him there.

  * * *

  Lucy the maid stole Quintus the dog.

  She did not mean to; she didn’t want a dog, she couldn’t feed herself, let alone a dog. Once again she had been forcibly removed from Bryanston Square, without a position, without the wages due to her, without a reference, with blisters on her heels from hurrying from Spitalfields just to apprise Sir Charles Cooper of the whereabouts of his daughter.

  She sat on the steps in the mews behind Bryanston Square on the grey, cold November day. She had managed to sleep in the kitchen for three nights in all the turmoil of the household; had heard with relief that Harriet had got away, felt shame at her own perfidy. But Peters had found she was still there. Cook had quickly given her a small parcel of
food and some stockings: she knew Lucy had been badly treated, but there was nothing to be done; all their places were uncertain now. Peters rampaged about the house in a rage mimicking his master’s: Peters was to go on a long sea journey, and Peters was afraid of the sea.

  ‘Get out! Get out!’ he shouted to Lucy. ‘And never come back. You’re an Anathema in this house.’ Lucy presumed that was a new swearword.

  In the mews she did not cry (Lucy never cried). Instead she fumed and fulminated at the unfairness of life and ate a cold chop. She licked her fingers, getting the last traces of meat, not knowing when she might see meat again. That position in Bryanston Square had been meant to change her life.

  Although Lucy looked so young she had actually turned fourteen. Lucy’s eldest sister had disappeared when she was fourteen. They heard she’d been seen parading in the Haymarket where some of the young girls had luck: Lucy’s sister had not had luck. She had come back to Spitalfields with big scabs and a big belly: her father had kicked her in the belly. Lucy never forgot that day. The vicar’s wife had spoken to Lucy at her sister’s pathetic funeral, Lucy had thereafter, aged twelve, trained in the vicar’s house and a girl never tried so hard: she was the best, hardest-working maid the vicar’s wife had ever had, and the vicar’s wife had taught her to read. At last, like a gift from the Lord, she had been chosen for Bryanston Square, chosen by Sir Charles Cooper on the recommendation of the vicar. What would Sir Charles say to the vicar now?

  It was starting to rain. She supposed she must go back to Spitalfields. Lucy was otherwise on the streets. Like her sister.

  She got up and started walking. It was then that she saw Quintus. He lay mournfully beside the stables, his face on his paws. He raised his eyes to Lucy, recognised her, the one who sang to him; he gave an almost imperceptible wag of his tail to show Lucy that he remembered.