The Trespass: A Novel

by Barbara Ewing

  ‘You mean, my dear Miss Cooper, that you were alone with two men for a whole night?’ Eunice Burlington Brown had become quite pale.

  ‘I think I have not properly explained. Mr Nicholas Tennyson saved my life.’

  ‘Then why, having saved it, did he not escort you to your cabin?’ Mr Burlington Brown’s face loomed in front of her.

  ‘I truly think it was not possible, or even thought of. The danger was too great. I had nearly been swept off the Amaryllis.’ Harriet was puzzled by their shock and anger. The bruises and cuts on her face had not yet disappeared, nor the big bruises on her body. She had been hit, it was presumed, by the cage of chickens, which was never seen again after that dreadful night.

  ‘Nothing, Miss Cooper, can be as dangerous as spending a night alone in a confined space with two young men. No wonder young girls are not allowed to make this journey alone if the rudimentaries of good breeding are so easily thrown away. Surely you see that your reputation is ruined, completely ruined! What would your father say?’

  ‘I imagine anyone who cared for my safety might thank Mr Tennyson for his bravery.’

  ‘His “bravery” as you call it did not go so far as escorting you to your own cabin,’ retorted Mr Burlington Brown, ‘which any gentleman would have done immediately. I am afraid I am going to have to speak to Captain Stark. We explained to you when we first agreed to take on the responsibilities as your guardians that etiquette and social mores must at all times be adhered to, that it was up to us to keep standards high and never allow vulgarity or impropriety. We simply cannot allow such breaches of propriety.’

  The Captain, in this instance at least, was more sanguine. He observed Harriet’s injuries and spoke to her kindly, understanding how terrified she had been. To the young men he was more admonitory: a young lady should always be delivered to the safety of her own cabin, he said to them curtly, her honour is paramount: their behaviour had not been that of gentlemen.

  Passengers were taught how to tie themselves to their beds for future reference.

  Miss Eunice Burlington Brown, be-hatted, insisted on sitting with Harriet in her cabin and reading from ‘The Women of England: Their Social Duties & Domestic Habits’.

  ‘I think this will assist you, my dear Harriet,’ and she cleared her throat. ‘I will read the important bits.’

  The women of England are deteriorating in their moral character … When the cultivation of the mental faculties had so far advanced as to take precedence over the moral, leaving no time for domestic usefulness … the character of the women of England assumed a different aspect.

  ‘I have read this book,’ said Harriet, ‘my father gave it to me.’

  Miss Burlington Brown was delighted, and she fanned herself with her glove in the small room. ‘I shall read on a little,’ she said.

  Women of England, you have deep responsibilities, you have urgent claims; a nation’s moral wealth is in your keeping … In her intercourse with man, it is impossible but that woman should feel her own inferiority; and it is right that it should be so. She does not meet him upon equal terms. Her part is to make sacrifices in order that his enjoyment may be enhanced.

  ‘I am hoping to be domestically useful,’ said Harriet humbly. ‘For my cousin Edward has bought a farm in New Zealand.’

  Miss Eunice pricked up her ears at once. ‘He has a farm?’

  ‘If he has already arrived,’ said Harriet. ‘I see now that the journeys are haphazard and uncertain. We may arrive before him.’

  Miss Eunice suddenly saw herself married to a farmer perhaps. She had had hopes of Mr Aloysius Porter: his behaviour might yet prove him not to be the one; it was important to keep all one’s options open.

  ‘Are you fond of your cousin, Harriet dear?’

  ‘He is my favourite cousin,’ answered Harriet. ‘He is the kindest man I know.’

  ‘Does he—’ Miss Eunice could not help herself, ‘does he have a – that is, an intended?’

  ‘I do not believe so,’ said Harriet.

  ‘Is he – handsome?’ Somewhere in the cabin Mary gazed down, her quizzical eyes dancing.

  ‘To my eyes he is handsome,’ smiled Harriet. ‘Although I may be biased. Miss Eunice, do you think that perhaps we could walk together on deck now?’

  ‘Of course, dearest Harriet.’ Miss Eunice’s eyes shone with unexpressed hopes for the future, with one man or another.

  * * *

  In steerage, although the Amaryllis had now crossed into the calm of the tropics, people screamed in the night, dreaming.

  * * *

  TO THE DEAR READERS OF MY JOURNAL

  3 January 1850

  4.30 am On this third day of this new year we are becalmed! It is our thirty-eighth day at sea. We crossed the Equator some days ago and now we are in the Southern Hemisphere. I believe – although it is so long since we caught sight of any land – that we are travelling parallel to the bottom half of the coast of Africa, all that wild, undiscovered land of which we know almost nothing. I think often of Asobel’s globe and the route she had drawn for Edward, travelling near land so that he would always be safe. But Captain Stark has told me that often we must avoid land, not cling to it. He expects soon to pick up the trade winds which will help us to travel on southwards and round the Cape of Good Hope, and so eastwards towards our destination.

  I have never been so hot in my life, which is why I get up at first light and come and sit here on the poop deck to write to my dear readers. It does not matter that it is so early – time has no meaning at all (except at the Captain’s table of course, where etiquettes are most strictly observed). I have seen sunrises that I could never have imagined in a thousand years: how the sun appears, just a strand of light at first, and then more strands, forming a glorious flaming whole that fans out across the still, calm sea, which changes colour every day. How could I have even imagined that this is how the sun rises, looking out sometimes from my bedroom window over the rooftops of Bryanston Square?

  But now – such sights I have seen! I have seen fish that fly into the air, they fly upwards and then twist again down into the water and their shining scales catch the sun. And I have seen the friendly porpoises, they play around the bows of the Amaryllis to the delight of all the children on board; they seem to nudge each other and then they too leap into the air, and in the air they seem to shake themselves for joy before they dive back into the water. Of course some of the men try to shoot them: when they succeed the children weep.

  The crew have rigged tarpaulins over both decks and it has been explained to Miss Eunice and to me by Mr Aloysius Porter that tarpaulin is canvas treated with tar so that it is waterproof – a most necessary accoutrement in New Zealand. Most people spend much time on the deck underneath these canvases but it is sometimes too hot to do even that. In the cabin area we have a saltwater bath that we can use for cooling ourselves: the salt sticks to the skin in an odd, scratchy manner. The girl Hetty who saved my hat still has her arm bandaged from the storm; I do hope it will mend satisfactorily. She told me it ‘makes her that mad’ because it is so painful and she cannot do everything she wants to do, and I do not enquire what those wants are for fear of not quite understanding her answer. I do, of course. I …

  Here Harriet stopped writing for a moment. This was a journal for her dear readers, whoever they might be one day (and always she thought of Walter since he had presented her with the journal, and Asobel perhaps), not for herself. The sun was rising now, soon it would be too hot to sit even here. Harriet looked about her: at the still sea, at the drooping sails of the Amaryllis. There was nobody much about, only the helmsman at the wheel at the back of the poop deck, and at the front of the main deck trying to catch any hint of wind a group of steerage passengers sat together talking; perhaps they had been there all night. With her pen she crossed out the last five words. An odd idea had come to her: that she might keep a more private diary where she could talk to herself more freely, which she could keep locked in one of h
er boxes in her cabin.

  Slowly she took a fresh piece of paper from her folder. And then she began writing again.

  Without Mary, who understood, it was as if I was in an inferno.

  What the girl in steerage, Hetty, speaks of so fondly and freely, what Aunt Lucretia spoke of as Alice’s dark duties, are the same thing, although I cannot quite understand how that can be. My father has done great wrong, and great damage. I would rather die than go back to that. I will die rather than go back to that.

  She folded the sheet of paper carefully and put it in her folder and for a long time she stayed motionless, staring at the furthest horizon. Then she seemed to shake herself slightly and began writing again in her main journal.

  Soon now Mr or Mrs Burlington Brown or Miss Eunice Burlington Brown – or all! – will come and admonish me that I should not be sitting here alone, with a man (they will mean the helmsman who stands by the big wheel at the back of the ship and steers us onwards). They will also say that my cheeks have caught some sun, unheard of for a young English lady, and most inappropriate, not to say deeply unfashionable. Then the Burlington Browns will watch over me at breakfast and dinner and tea. At each meal there will be complaints about the food – there is only one more pig to be killed for fresh pork because some of them, and of course all the chickens, were lost in the storm; the last goat died; and we are reduced to eating salted meat and food from tins a great deal of the time and we are not even halfway. I never thought I would think longingly of a fresh cabbage! The men will fish, but so far nothing edible has been caught: the other day they brought up an octopus and all the ladies (including me) screamed at the writhing arms. How the steerage passengers are coping is not to be thought of: imagine how hot it must be down there! We are not encouraged to have anything to do with those people – Captain Stark is very strict on this point: that order, and therefore social rank, must at all costs be upheld. He makes it clear that an ordered ship is a safe ship and that he must be obeyed at all times. And indeed we know only too well that our very lives are in his hands. He is a kind man and a fine Captain of our ship. I have been told that not all captains are so reliable, and that it is the Captain that gives the tenor of the ship. I spend much of my time reading, a pastime I will never grow tired of; I read Mary’s books, books we shared. But many of the cabin passengers are showing signs of boredom and discontent and there are small quarrels daily that may grow to larger ones: Mrs Burlington Brown and the magistrate’s wife are hardly speaking – something to do with who should pour the tea.

  Miss Eunice Burlington Brown, while escorting me, will continue to question me about my cousin Edward, she has got it into her head that he is an eligible gentleman farmer. Then there will be a continuation of a chess tournament this afternoon: there was some surprise when I asked to compete; it was expected to be only men but I explained that my sister was a chess player par excellence and had taught me. I then beat the magistrate, which was I think considered ill-mannered. This afternoon I am to play Mr Nicholas Tennyson – the Burlington Browns will disapprove and think I somehow engineered to play him deliberately, that he has taken my heart since he saved my life.

  How little they know of me and my heart.

  I like Mr Tennyson very much all the same, and he and I will again discuss Coleridge. As far as we both know he did not make a long sea journey like ours – yet we note the power and knowledge of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ again and again; how on these still, tropical days the Amaryllis is

  like a painted ship

  upon a painted ocean.

  I think often of Mary and myself, poring over our books in the upstairs drawing room, trying to make some sort of intelligent sense of the world. And all the time the world was here: the sea and the stars and the sky stretching outwards and upwards and onwards – I have the strangest feeling that I am in eternity, that I am in the world as a whole, that is the only way I can describe what I am feeling. When the Bible spoke of eternity I didn’t understand – now I feel I do – that this is God’s world and we are infinitesimal creatures in it. And I know that somewhere in this vastness Mary is here too.

  * * *

  That evening the cabin passengers, including the ladies, sat on the deck to try to catch a breeze. The men, with the ladies’ permission, smoked their cigars and the smoke drifted upwards. The sound of the sea was like a soft whisper. The Captain explained again how sailors had learnt to take what wind they could in these latitudes, tacking east and west, until, in two days or twenty days, they caught the soft trade winds which would fill their sails and take them southwards.

  Although night had fallen the sky seemed to shine with light. The Captain pointed out to his passengers the stars, allowing them to understand that so far had they sailed already, that the stars too had changed. From the main deck came the sound of the concertina, and voices singing.

  When other lips and other hearts

  Their tales of love shall tell,

  In language whose excess imparts

  The pow’r they feel so well,

  There may perhaps in such a scene,

  Some recollection be,

  Of days that have as happy been,

  And you’ll remember me …

  Miss Eunice Burlington Brown cast a glance at Mr Aloysius Porter: her sister-in law had pointed out, and she had noticed herself, that he smiled a great deal, which perhaps was not a good sign: much smiling made a man a little frivolous perhaps. Mr Nicholas Tennyson cast a glance at the beautiful Miss Harriet Cooper who sat so quietly, but in the light of the stars he saw that her thoughts were far, far away.

  Sometimes something flashed in the distance: lightning or a comet or a shooting star falling towards the sea. Sometimes phosphorescence danced along the top of the water, silver in the darkness, glittering beside the bows. And on the horizon the gentle trade winds sighed, waiting for the Amaryllis.

  * * *

  TO THE DEAR READERS OF MY JOURNAL

  25 January 1850

  Today is the sxtieth day since we left Gravesend and on this day the Captain has informed us that the trade winds have taken us, at last, far enough south: we are approaching the Cape of Good Hope and will be turning eastwards. The weather, which has been so balmy in those warm winds, and so beautiful, has changed yet again: almost a week ago the barometer fell and it has been raining for two days. Nobody cares about the rain – when he made this announcement everybody rushed to the railing to peer into the horizon. Just to see land would be enough, just to know we are not alone in the wide world we are traversing. But stare as we would no land materialised – we are too far from the African coast and anyway the grey rain clouds hang heavy over us and we can see nothing. The Amaryllis is our world and there is nothing else.

  The passengers on the Amaryllis did however see something unexpected on the sixtieth day: another ship. They could not believe their eyes and there were great cries of excitement. At first they thought it was a ship returning to England: people rushed to write letters, or seal up written ones in the hope that mail could be exchanged. Miss Eunice Burlington Brown was dismayed to see Mr Aloysius Porter writing at length and feared it was to another woman. Mr Nicholas Tennyson noted that Harriet did not write anything.

  But as the ships came closer together, close enough to see tiny stick people moving about, flags were run up and messages were exchanged. And it was found that the vessel was a Portuguese ship which had recently been damaged in a storm, sailing home from Africa. The disappointment on the Amaryllis at not meeting some other human beings was extraordinary, and people offered to speak to the Portuguese with sign language. But Captain Stark, looking at the way the clouds formed menacingly over his ship, sailed onwards.

  Captain Stark had reason to be anxious. The weather was deteriorating badly, especially to the eastwards: was his poor sturdy ship to be caught in another bad storm? He made a decision not to travel east but to venture further south, perhaps as far as the island of Tristan da Cunha where there was a tiny set
tlement and where whaleboats stopped for water. At dusk the first iceberg reared out of the mist: this now was another danger in the South Atlantic Ocean. Low over the Amaryllis an albatross flew: here was its latitude rather than further north where Harriet and Hetty had stared in amazement. Winds roared about the ship, ropes flew outwards, torn from the sails, mountainous waves again appeared.

  Night followed day and the Captain seldom left the helm; he and his men watched for icebergs, sailing with only the rigging, tossing and rolling with the ocean. The cabin passengers tied themselves in their beds; the steerage passengers pleaded with the crew not to nail them down, at least not till the last possible moment, knowing many of the people below could hardly bear another lockup; the Captain did not heed them: the Amaryllis must not founder. Terrified screams were caught on the wind, but nobody heard. Every night Harriet tied herself to Mary’s thin bed the way she had been taught; in a strange way she knew no fear: she told herself over and over as the Amaryllis flew forward and then smashed downwards, I would rather die than go back. On one such night she realised she had turned eighteen.

  Finally, but without anyone catching even the smallest glimpse of the wild barren cliffs or the whaling station of Tristan da Cunha, the Amaryllis managed to tack eastwards and the wind began to take the ship with it. Suddenly, for some days, the ship made extraordinary progress with the wind – in two days and nights they travelled nearly five hundred miles. And then another contrary gale would catch them and all the effort of the crew was simply to stay afloat and not hit the white ice that would appear so unexpectedly.

  The winds subsided a little.

  Once again wild faces appeared on deck from steerage; once again there was a funeral. A pregnant woman had died trying to give birth in the worst of the gales, the baby had never breathed. As the winds still blew they buried them together in one canvas shroud, the baby in the mother’s arms. Harriet wept as they laid the shroud on the flapping Union Jack, at the useless, terrifying death of a woman, at the birth of a dead child. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven, the passengers prayed.