Far From Home

by Val Wood

  He paused for only a second to get his breath back, then scrambled to his feet and, with aching and jarred legs from the fall, stumbled round to the stables. The horses within the loose boxes snickered at his arrival but he clacked his tongue and spoke quietly, trying to see the mount he had ridden when out with Sofia.

  ‘Good fellow,’ he whispered on finding him, and looked about for a saddle. He found several, neatly hanging on the wall with bridles, stirrup irons and a shelf of leathers, whips and grooming brushes. He chose the high pommelled saddle he had used previously, which Sofia had told him was the most comfortable for long journeys.

  The sky was light though it was the middle of the night. Soothing the horse, he led him down the drive, anticipating constantly that there would be a shout for him to stop. He reached the gate and to his relief there was no guard on duty. He lifted the iron bar securing it, swung open the gate and, still murmuring to the horse, walked out, carefully closing it behind him.

  A vivid dawn was breaking as sweating and saddle-sore he reached New Orleans, though thick black clouds were rolling in from the Gulf of Mexico and towards the Mississippi. He rode towards a hostelry close to the Rodriguez’ house and called to a stable boy. ‘Do you know Señor Rodriguez?’

  ‘Sure.’ The boy gave a grin. ‘Everyone knows him.’

  ‘This is his horse.’ Edward slid stiffly down, his knees buckling beneath him. ‘He lent it to me. Keep it here until he comes for it. It’s too early to go to the house,’ he added, seeing the question on the boy’s face. ‘Give him a good rub down, will you?’ He gave the boy a coin. ‘If no-one comes for him by tomorrow, take him up to the house.’

  Don’t want to be charged with horse stealing as well as everything else, he deliberated as he hurried on his way. Now I just hope that the hotel doesn’t lock its doors.

  The hotel door was open and there was no-one at the desk as he sidled in. He ran upstairs to his room, throwing off his coat and unbuttoning his shirt as he entered.

  ‘Who’s there?’ Allen, in his nightshirt, burst in from the adjoining room. ‘Oh, sir! You startled me. I thought it was an intruder.’

  ‘Get dressed, Allen, we’re leaving.’ Edward opened his wardrobe door to take out another shirt.

  ‘Leaving, sir? Has something happened? I thought you were going to a wedding?’

  ‘Changed my mind. Things didn’t turn out as expected.’ He suddenly felt exhausted and plumped down on the bed. ‘God, Allen! I’ve had such a terrible time.’ He bent down and put his head in his hands. ‘I’m a fool. I’ve got myself into such a scrape. There was this woman, you see—’

  He proceeded to give Allen a sketchy outline of what had happened, missing out the affair with Sofia and emphasizing that Elena wanted to marry him so that she could give her child his name. ‘She’s going to say the child is mine, which it isn’t, so I left. By a window! And Rodriguez is sure to come after me, so we have to leave immediately. I’ll pay the bill and we’ll go. Get your things. Come on, start packing!’

  ‘Could I just think about this, sir?’ Allen said slowly. ‘Does Rodriguez know what has happened?’

  ‘No, not yet, but he will before the day is out.’ Edward gazed at Allen. ‘I’ve just had an idea too. He’ll expect that I’ll come back here to collect you and my belongings. I wonder—?’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘Would it be better if I travelled alone rather than two of us travelling with several trunks? Yes,’ he decided. ‘I think it would. If I go now before he knows anything about this shambles, I could be miles away. And if he comes looking for me you can say that you don’t know where I am.’

  Allen agreed that this would be a better idea. One man and his servant, plus several pieces of luggage, would be easily recognizable. Besides which, he had no desire to be caught up in Newmarch’s shenanigans.

  ‘And,’ Edward warmed to his theme, ‘I’ll borrow your clothes.’ He quickly shed his fine cotton shirt and linen trousers. ‘Lend me yours, there’s a good fellow. They’ll be looking for a gentleman, won’t they? Not someone dressed as a valet.’

  Allen silently handed over a shirt, jacket and trousers, which Edward put on. ‘Bit short in the leg,’ he said, viewing himself in the mirror. ‘But never mind. Right – money in my pocket. Enough for about a couple of weeks or so. Shouldn’t be any longer than that. They’ll soon get tired of searching. You keep my papers with you. For heaven’s sake don’t lose them or we’re sunk. There. Now I have no identification on me. Nothing to say I’m Edward Newmarch. To all intents and purposes I’m Robert Allen.’

  ‘One moment, sir.’ Allen left the room and went into his, coming back with a ticket in his hand. ‘The ticket from the voyage. Second class. It has my name on it.’ He couldn’t help the sarcasm in his voice but Newmarch didn’t seem to notice as he postured in front of the mirror.

  ‘I’ll wait here, then, shall I?’ Allen asked.

  ‘Yes. I don’t know what you’ll do with your time. Look at the ships maybe?’ He paused. ‘I was nearly the owner of a ship,’ he said regretfully. ‘Ah well!’

  He slipped down the stairs, keeping his head lowered as he saw the clerk coming out of his cubbyhole behind the desk. He had no clear idea where he would go but hurried along the road towards the river. A boat. I’ll catch a boat and move out of New Orleans for a few days. He patted his pocket where his money was. I hope I’ve brought enough with me. Still, if I travel second class . . .

  The rain started to fall as he scurried along and looking up he saw the dark clouds directly overhead. Should have brought an umbrella, he thought, but then, do servants carry umbrellas? I’ve never seen Allen with one, except when he’s brought one for me.

  ‘Morning!’ A deep voice greeted him. ‘You’re out early this morning, sir.’

  He glanced up and recognized the swarthy fellow who had once offered him a ride in a boat.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, not stopping. ‘I’m trying to catch an early boat.’

  ‘Going anywhere special?’ The man caught up with him.

  ‘Erm, just upriver,’ he answered nervously, not liking the stranger’s close presence.

  ‘I’ve got a friend with a boat. Cap’n Mac. Take you anywhere you want, mister. No questions asked and take you fast if you in big hurry.’

  ‘Oh!’ Edward pondered. I shouldn’t accept people at face value. He can’t help looking so ugly and dangerous. He’s probably a good family man. ‘Well, yes, I am in a bit of a hurry.’

  The man nodded and held Edward’s elbow in a firm grip as the clouds opened up and torrential rain pelted down. ‘Come with me. Better run, she’ll be pulling off any time now.’ He hurried him, not towards the wharfside, but further along the levee where there was a cluster of broken-down cabins within a sparse wood of spindly trees and several piles of felled timber. ‘You got some cash?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Edward shouted above the sound of the storm. ‘Only enough for second class.’

  The fellow roared with laughter. ‘There’s only one class on this boat, mister. There she is.’

  Edward peered ahead. A dilapidated paddle-wheel barge with peeling paintwork on its hull and deck lay where his companion was pointing. The embankment was high at this point and the boat’s stern was low in the water. ‘Is she seaworthy?’ he yelled. ‘She doesn’t look very safe.’

  ‘She ain’t going to sea,’ was the answer and he was pushed from behind whilst a rough-looking man on board, wearing oil-stained twill dungarees and peaked cap, grabbed his arm to pull him down on the deck. ‘Get below if anyone’s chasing after you,’ he directed. ‘I’ll say you’re not on board.’

  Edward wiped the rain from his face as the boat scraped and creaked, and, with much grinding and clanking and clouds of steam, pulled away from the levee towards the middle of the river. ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘How far are you going?’

  ‘Depends,’ said the man.

  ‘Well, I don’t have a great deal of money.’ He put his hand into his jacket
pocket, and finding it empty put it in the other one. That too was empty apart from the ticket which Allen had given him. ‘I’ve been robbed!’ he gasped. ‘That fellow!’ He stared back at the levee, but the man had gone from sight. ‘Do you know him? Is he a friend of yours?’

  ‘Nope. Ain’t never seen him before. You lost your money, mister? Or did you get on my boat under false pretences?’

  ‘No. No, I didn’t. I had money until that fellow asked me if I wanted a boat! You’d better take me back to shore and let me off.’

  ‘Can’t do that, mister. Can’t turn this old girl around. You’ve got to travel along whether you want to or not. Unless you want to swim with the crocs.’ He grinned malevolently. ‘And if you can’t pay for your passage, then you’ll have to work for it. So git bailing, mister.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ‘And that’s the last time I saw him.’ Allen finished his tale of Edward Newmarch’s disappearance. ‘I waited for over a month but he didn’t come back. Rodriguez came looking for him. Oh, not himself of course, but two of his men, and villainous characters they were. I tried to convince them that I didn’t know where Newmarch was, but they were hanging around the hotel every day waiting for him to come back, and the management were getting jittery and asked me to leave. I was glad to go in any case, as the bills were getting bigger and bigger, so I paid from out of the money Mr Newmarch had left, found some rooms and moved in there.’

  ‘He might have come back and not been able to find you,’ Georgiana commented.

  Allen shook his head. ‘I left a forwarding address at the hotel and I went in several times to ask if they’d heard from him. But there was nothing. I took a job as a porter to pay for my rooms, but the Negroes and quadroons made life very difficult. They said I was taking their livelihood, so after another month I decided to move on.’ He shrugged and said defensively, ‘I had no identification of my own, only the papers belonging to Newmarch, and I reckoned that if he was playing at being a valet, then I could pretend to be him.

  ‘I wanted to travel light so I sold some of his things. I’ve still got the money,’ he added, ‘but as he owed me my year’s wages I felt this was within my right. I dressed in his clothes as he’d taken mine and set off back to New York.’

  ‘How very extraordinary,’ Georgiana said. ‘It’s so preposterous that it could be true!’

  ‘Oh, it’s true all right, but as to what happened to him, I can’t tell you. I asked around New Orleans. I went down to the wharf to ask if he’d taken a boat passage. But no-one had seen him, or said they hadn’t, and he hadn’t booked a ticket, not in my name or his own.’

  ‘Well,’ Georgiana said reluctantly. ‘Perhaps I owe you an apology, and I give it. I beg your pardon if I doubted your integrity, but you must see how it appeared?’

  ‘I do! But just to ease your mind further, I’ve told Bill Dreumel about it,’ he said. ‘He guessed there was something wrong when you and I met at the Marius. He’s an astute man and asked me if I knew you. I gave him the story as far as I knew it on our journey here.’

  ‘Except that he’s not here!’ She raised her eyebrows questioningly.

  ‘No. We parted company at Trenton. He has a newspaper company in Philadelphia and needed to go there first. He’ll be back here within the week, I expect. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Miss Gregory.’ He eased himself up from the chair as if he was aching. ‘I need to wash and eat and go to my bed. I’ve had a hard day.’

  ‘There’s something cooking on the stove,’ she told him. ‘If you can stay awake long enough perhaps you’d like to eat with us? Kitty is making soup and dumplings.’

  He stopped in his tracks and his eyes grew large. ‘Soup and dumplings!’ He licked his lips. ‘You mean, real food? Not dry tack?’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know how she’s managing it but she says that she can!’

  When Georgiana next looked out of the cabin door, she saw him swimming in the creek, dipping and diving, disappearing beneath the water, then reappearing. She glanced again and saw, to her great amusement, two other men jump in. Both were quite naked, their white bodies gleaming in the half-light.

  Kitty had made a cauldron of onion and barley soup with dumplings floating on top. Isaac had caught a fish, a large one with sharp silver scales, which he cleaned and gutted and which Kitty then floured and fried. She had also made a batch of bread. ‘’Tis Irish soda bread,’ she said proudly. ‘I found baking soda and I remembered my mammy making this when I was just a little bairn.’

  ‘Just the other day, then, was it?’ Jason grinned. He was one of the men Georgiana had seen swimming in the creek. The other man was Ellis. Both had been working at the mine with Robert Allen, or Ted as they knew him, for as he had explained to Georgiana earlier, he had not felt comfortable with the pseudonym of Edward and had decided to shorten it.

  ‘Well, ladies.’ Isaac looked up from his dish and wiped his bearded mouth with the back of his hand. ‘If it was up to me, you can stay for good and need never go home, wherever home might be.’

  ‘It was in England,’ Georgiana said. ‘Now it’s wherever we happen to be. So right now it’s here, wherever this is,’ she added.

  ‘It’s Dreumel Creek,’ Robert Allen replied, and Georgiana tried her best to think of him as Ted. ‘Though there’s a big question mark as to how much longer we stay. The mine has just about run out,’ he explained. ‘Most of the men who were working here have left. There’s just me, Jason, Ellis and Pike, who’s up there now on guard.’

  ‘So what’s he guarding if the mine has run out?’ Kitty asked perceptively.

  ‘Equipment.’ Ted glanced at her. ‘Bill Dreumel and Charlesworth have spent a deal of money on laying the claim, buying pumping machinery – sinking a shaft and timbering it. And paying the men. Then we’ve put up these shanties. We only had canvas tents to begin with but it was so cold in winter. But we’ve to guard the claim in case somebody else comes along.’

  ‘So all of that will be dead money if the gold’s run out.’ Jason’s words were thick as he munched a mouthful of bread.

  ‘Why are you still here?’ Georgiana asked him. ‘Why didn’t you leave like the other men?’

  ‘Don’t know!’ Jason dipped a crust of bread into his tin bowl and wiped around it, soaking up the last of the soup. ‘Just a feeling, I guess.’ He was a young man, maybe nineteen or so, with thick dark hair and a merry grin. ‘I suppose I just want it to succeed. Dreumel’s a great guy. He has – well, vision, I suppose, so I’ll stay until he says it’s all over.’

  ‘And I’ve nowhere else to go,’ Isaac said, and feeling in his waistcoat pocket he brought out a blackened clay pipe.

  Georgiana and Kitty glanced at each other. The longhouse was warm and smelled of wholesome bread and barley. It was now about to be filled with the odour of tobacco.

  ‘Isaac!’ Kitty got up from the table to serve the fish. ‘How would you like it if I made some sweet bread tomorrow? Sweet honey bread?’

  Isaac’s mouth dropped open and he drooled. ‘Oh, Miss Kitty! I ain’t tasted a piece o’ sweet stuff in I don’t know how long.’

  Kitty gave him a big smile. ‘Well, all right then. There’s plenty of flour. I’d make a cake only there’s no butter.’

  ‘There’s a can of corn oil, miss,’ Ellis, who had said very little so far, chipped in. ‘Would that do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kitty said dubiously. ‘But I could try it. There’s just one thing though.’ She raised a finger and shook it at all of them. ‘I don’t allow smoking in my kitchen – or spitting,’ she added. ‘So if you want to eat cake you’ll have to smoke outside.’

  Isaac stared at her. ‘No pipe?’

  She shook her head. ‘And no spitting,’ she repeated. ‘Not inside.’

  Georgiana hid a smile. She was amazed at Kitty. Everything they had done or been through since leaving England, the girl had taken in her stride. No complaints or moaning. She’d just got on with whatever she had to do. And now, within hours
of arriving here, she had taken charge and was giving out orders to these men.

  When they had finished eating, all the men except for Ted went outside and Georgiana and Kitty started to clear away, though each man took his own bowl and tin plate to wash in the creek. ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ Ted said, and filling a pan with water from a bucket he put it on the stove.

  ‘I wanted to ask you something,’ he said to Georgiana. ‘Although Dreumel knows my story, the other men know me as Ted Newmarch, an immigrant from England. A miner. They’ve no reason to doubt who I am and I’d rather they didn’t know. If they heard I was just a valet, I’d never hear the last of it and they wouldn’t trust me up at the mine.’

  ‘So you want us to call you by the name of Newmarch?’ Georgiana said. ‘It won’t be easy, considering that the real Edward Newmarch is married to my cousin!’

  ‘You could try calling me Ted.’ He looked at her with an anxious appeal in his eyes. ‘Otherwise I might as well pack up and leave. And I’ve worked hard on this project.’ He suddenly sounded bitter. ‘For the first time in my life I’ve done something that I wanted to do, not just to earn a living, but because I felt it worthwhile. And,’ he went on, ‘I don’t want to let Bill Dreumel down. He’s given me a chance, you see. He’s trusted me, even when he found out I wasn’t who I said I was.’

  Georgiana studied him and it was then that she realized that he was only young, maybe twenty-one or -two, younger than her, and as she looked at him in his working clothes and with a rough scrubby beard, he seemed vulnerable. And his present life was in her hands.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘There’s no advantage to me in the men knowing who you are. I came here because I thought you were depriving someone else of their identity, my cousin of her rights, and even betraying Mr Dreumel.’ She saw him bite his lip and take a deep breath. ‘So unless you are a consummate storyteller, I’m quite satisfied on all of those points,’ she continued. ‘And Edward Newmarch has apparently gone to where we can’t find him.’