On Starlit Seas

by Sara Sheridan

  13

  On board the Bittersweet

  Maria lay on the bed, wakeful. The flame guttered. Most voyages left ample time to consider. On this journey, she realised, she would have more to consider than most. The ceiling was pine, the wood knotted and stained. She followed the ingrained lines, thinking about what had happened. She had quite lost herself. Did other couples feel such astonishing passion? It was outrageous. She turned, disquieted, recalling a glance she had seen in Recife between Admiral Cochrane and his wife, which she now understood differently. Yes, it dawned on her – Cochrane and Kitty were in love. It was a feeling contrary to the friendship she had felt for her own dear Thomas. She must be careful. This was surely a kind of madness inside marriage, never mind out of it, and Henderson was entirely unsuitable.

  It occurred to her that the tiny dot that would mark the Bittersweet on any map as they travelled north could not represent the significance of what she felt. She had seen ancient maps about goodness, French maps about love – perhaps there should be a map that showed importance. A private document. The cold blue of social importance – the royal household. The London to which she must return, lit by the practical green of those who brought money. And then there were the sunny orange fires of desire that shone here, aboard the ship. Her heart weakened as she realised there was another map – a shameful chart of other people’s expectations and of currency lost. Maria knew her own mind, but she was also aware that that didn’t matter as much as how other people saw her, even if she knew of a certainty that those people were wrong. A woman could lose everything over a misapprehension. London was unforgiving in such matters. And in this case, not only her personal reputation but also her professional judgement were at stake – both fragile shells easily crushed. There was an undeniable chemistry between her and Henderson. Nothing came of nothing. On her map he would appear orange as fire, like a beacon, and she a watery red, bounded in shame. Overwhelmed by it. She had wandered across the globe for years, believing herself free, and now she realised that all the while she had been constrained. She longed to wheel like a gull. To be at liberty.

  Maria’s fingers traced the outline of her lips, her mind wandering as the candle burned out at last and the cabin plunged into darkness. She lay for a long time, listening to the creaking of the boards. She was still trembling, or at least it felt that way when, still torn, she finally drifted into fitful sleep.

  *

  The next morning, she woke thinking of her book before she remembered what had transpired. The sun slipped its fingers below the shutters and she squirmed. It would be easier never see him again. On shore, that was exactly what she’d do. But she was not ashore. Her stomach fluttered. Perhaps this cabin would become her cell. Perhaps she ought to simply stay here. The boy knocked on the door, bringing her morning choc-

  olate and a jug of warmed seawater in which she might wash.

  ‘Toca aqui,’ she said. Put it there.

  Things seemed normal and yet somehow the world had changed. As she washed, she let the water drip, listening to its splash in the hammered-metal bowl. A line of sunlight cut through the cabin.

  That day, her diligent copying was abandoned and Maria stayed inside. She sat by the window, watching the waves and bathing in the light. All travellers know how to wait. It was something of which Maria had never written, but a good deal of what she did involved simply passing time. Waiting for the weather to be right, for a ship to sail or another to arrive. Waiting for permission, for a guide, waiting to see if there might be a storm or if a horse would become available to hire. Now the day passed slowly. Each creak at the cabin door stopped her heart. The boy came late in the afternoon and announced the captain’s invitation to dinner. Maria hesitated.

  ‘You aren’t hungry, miss?’ the boy questioned.

  Hunger was not the appetite that was on her mind. And yet if she did not go out to him, perhaps he would call on her here.

  ‘Are you unwell?’ the boy hazarded. ‘You haven’t taken a turn about the deck today.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ Maria relented. ‘I’ll come at the usual time. And tomorrow, I promise, you can read to me. You must practise.’

  Deciding not to dress in her fancy gown, she sat thinking until the sun sank. She must try to be sensible, she told herself. She must try not to overreact. When the bell sounded on deck, and with all things well considered, she quit her cabin wearing her grey travelling attire.

  The table was set as it had been before and Henderson was waiting under the scatter of stars. He rose as she appeared, her candle lamp in hand.

  ‘You have come for dinner?’ he asked.

  She put down the night light. ‘I did not want to wear anything more formal . . .’

  ‘You think it was the dress?’

  She cast her eyes downward. This was humiliating. There was no hiding from him. He was too direct, used to this, perhaps, whereas she felt awkward – a novice even at her age.

  ‘Please.’ He pulled out her chair. ‘Even if it vexes you, I must apologise again.’ A small jug of chocolate was already on the table. ‘I had Thatcher make this. I thought you might like to try it. I only ever drink a tot now and then. It’s strong, but I like it.’

  ‘No wine tonight?’

  Henderson poured the chocolate. ‘I shall call for wine if you like. In the meantime, I propose a toast.’ He smiled. ‘To the rest of the voyage. In company.’

  Had he truly regretted it, then? Maria followed the captain’s lead and downed the shot. After only the merest pause, the inside of her mouth grew fiery. She coughed.

  ‘This helps,’ Henderson said, and passed her a slice of orange.

  It did. The fire was doused and what remained was a curious feeling of being very alive with only a twinge of the regret that had taken hold of her belly. She caught his glance. ‘You cannot look at me like that, Captain.’

  Had she not been fired up on chilli, she might not have voiced it, but then, it seemed, Henderson appreciated directness. If it was such an effective weapon in his arsenal, perhaps she should employ it in hers.

  ‘I shall try not to.’ He did not even deny it.

  ‘We must be friends,’ she stated calmly. ‘This will pass. We must eat together as friends.’

  The captain was bluff. ‘The galley is mostly repaired, but we have caught no fish today. It will take a real friend to eat what Thatcher has made. He has a store of dried cod for such occasions. Sadly, it escaped the fire. The Portuguese like it, but I admit I do not.’

  ‘Do you never simply go through the motions?’

  ‘On these occasions, certainly, I pretend. I make-believe it is not dinner time but the hour to break my fast and I have him griddle cornbread.’

  ‘We shall breakfast together, then?’

  ‘It is my favourite meal. Since I was a child.’

  ‘Little boys can be strange.’

  Henderson laughed.

  It occurred to Maria that the captain seemed to draw back any veil. He revealed things. As Henderson leaned in, Maria calmed herself. He did not realise his effect, the smell of the pipe tobacco and the urge she had to touch his hair. It was a compelling form of torture. She thought of her schoolmistresses, her aunt, her cousins – the look on their faces if they knew of this.

  Henderson smiled. ‘In my first year in Brazil I almost blew up my father’s storehouse trying to make a string of firecrackers from vinegar, brown paper and gunpowder. I manufactured them in my bedchamber. I was not a happy child. What I was thinking, I cannot say.’

  ‘So you are by nature a scientist,’ Maria countered, for at least they were talking. ‘It’s a sign of intelligence.’

  ‘May you only sire boys, Mrs Graham. It seems you will forgive them anything.’

  Maria flinched only an instant, but he saw it.

  ‘Do you want sons?’ His voice was searching.

  Maria shook her head. He had done it again. Still, she decided to make the admission. ‘No. Not that.’

  Chi
ldren would have changed everything. Everyone expected that she and Thomas had been disappointed, but for Maria her childlessness was a relief. As a mother, Murray would not have published her. The few ladies on his roll were unmarried or so elderly their children were grown. Had Maria had sons, her education would have come to far less.

  Besides, that side of marriage had not been a pleasure for either herself or her husband. They had abandoned it early in their relationship, for it had only made them quarrel. They settled instead into the affectionate intimacy of holding hands, arms wrapped around each other, warm in sleep but never going further. Thomas was a different man to James Henderson. He had been smooth, gentle and inoffensive. A gentleman. Still, she had been fond of him. Many in society had noted the closeness of the Grahams, but no one guessed that, despite loving each other, their friendship masked a lack, an utter lack, she realised now, of passionate intimacy. Before, she had not even thought of it as a secret. Now it seemed shameful, her childlessness the proof that this woman who had done so much was inexperienced. This, she told herself, was not what mattered. And yet.

  ‘You have a great mind, Maria,’ her father, Captain Dundas, had said, putting an arm around his daughter. He had come home from a voyage – nine months in India – and suddenly she was a lady. ‘You must use what you have learned.’

  If she had not had children, she told herself, at least she had written books. Words were a reliable escape from the sadness of being sequestered at boarding school or the heaviness of a dull voyage. It was no surprise that she had written two books in two years when she was mourning poor Thomas.

  ‘You’re so direct,’ she said. ‘In a way, you remind me of my father.’

  ‘Was he an ogre?’

  ‘Not at all. I was fond of him.’

  This was an understatement. With a stab, Maria remembered how lonely she had felt when her father went to sea, two years at a stretch sometimes. She recalled the joy of his return – sitting by the window of her aunt’s house as he told her about his adventures, pressing her fingers to the glass so she could feel the chill as he told her about the searing heat of India and Africa and the islands that floated between, neither one place nor the other.

  ‘The world is everything, Maria,’ he swore.

  Had he known about this feeling that was as large as a continent?

  The boy arrived with a warm loaf and a bottle of wine. He set them on the table.

  ‘We should eat.’ Maria tore a chunk of bread and Henderson poured.

  ‘More cacao,’ he told the boy, who disappeared into the galley.

  ‘With every meal?’ Maria teased.

  ‘Perhaps not every meal.’ Henderson smiled. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘The chocolate we talked of at home – the powder made by a press. This tastes so much nicer.’

  ‘Good.’

  They set to eating. Maria was glad she had stuck to the grey. It sent a clear message that she wished she might take to heart. She flung herself into the diversion and Henderson did not press his advantage. Instead, he talked about cacao, describing its outlandish appearance, the cracking of the pods when they were ripe, and how the beans might be roasted and winnowed, the nibs removed. Maria fetched her sketches from the Brazilian highlands and, with the bread finished, they pored over them as he identified the wild and cultivated cacao and she showed him the most unusual flowers she had come across during her stay. Vivid Amaranthaceae and elegant orchids vied for attention with canna lilies. She wished she had drawn more.

  With Henderson, there was an extra dimension to mere conversation, and if a door had been opened into a forbidden room, neither stepped through, though they both hovered at the entrance in plain sight.

  ‘These bromeliads are like jewels.’ Henderson studied her sketchbook. The leaves hung heavy, lapidary as rubies. ‘You would suit such finery.’

  Maria’s heart fluttered. The opal necklet she had once, only once, allowed herself to covet flickered across her mind’s eye. She folded the sketchbook closed and affected to stretch her arms. ‘It’s late,’ she said.

  ‘Let me escort you to your cabin.’

  He lifted a lamp high and the shadow stroked her shoulders. He had never before restrained himself like this. Her perfume lingered and he followed its trail.

  ‘Goodnight.’ He bowed.

  Maria did not speak.

  As the door closed, Henderson found he couldn’t move. The world stopped without her. He dimmed the candle lamp as he hovered, for he did not want a line of light to betray him. The thin passageway held his attention, each sight of the threshold a silent prayer, a symbol of wanting more. The voyage, he realised, was time out from the world, and every moment the captain stood there on the cusp, it was as if his feet were burning indents in the wooden planks. He remembered a quote from Samuel Johnson, a man redolent of London. He had not thought of it in years. When making your choice in life, do not neglect to live.

  *

  As the stars fell into place along the Bittersweet’s course, this spot became a place of pilgrimage for Henderson on his nightly rounds. He loitered outside Maria’s cabin every evening after she retired. Dinner after dinner as the ship’s supplies dwindled to the last of the lemons. Some days there was fresh fish and others only cornbread or rice. The cook flavoured the chocolate with cinnamon and long curls of orange. Night after night. For Henderson, the closed cabin door punctuated the sunny days, long dinners, close conversation, checking the men, plotting the chart and keeping the log.

  ‘It cannot be far,’ Maria said at last, and he fetched the chart to show her.

  There was a nip in the air now, an undercurrent. And as the weeks passed, Henderson kept his promise. He had not touched her, but the conversation had become gradually more intimate. Maria admitted the punishments she’d suffered for not behaving as her aunt wished. She spoke of her early propensity for botany and how shocked her family had been at her desire to travel and her decision to write. Henderson talked of his shame when he met his father for the first time. Small remembrances. Secrets shared.

  ‘I had not realised we were so close to England,’ she said, her head bent over as she read the chart and her finger traced the last few inches.

  Henderson rolled up the parchment.

  ‘It will not be long,’ he said.

  14

  Piccadilly

  John Murray, the capital’s most celebrated publisher, crossed Piccadilly set to visit his tailor on Jermyn Street. Mrs Murray had suggested his waistcoat was old-fashioned and he knew from experience that he must act timeously upon such a pronouncement.

  ‘Something grey, sir – the colour of your hair – would be more distinguished,’ she insisted.

  Murray, friend and advisor to such notables as Lord Byron and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, to say nothing of the distinguished lady authors who placed their literary work in his care – the sadly deceased Jane Austen as well as the celebrated Mrs Maria Graham – always took his wife’s advice in sartorial matters.

  The early summer fog was so thick today that even the sounds of horses’ hooves were muffled and a fellow would be lucky to recognise his own mother should he come upon her. In these circumstances, how Lady Dundas, Maria’s aunt, picked out Murray’s figure in the gloom was a mystery.

  ‘Mr Murray,’ her voice chimed, instantly so compelling that the publisher stood to attention as the venerable lady materialised next to him. Attired as always in the height of fashion, her outfit dripped fox-fur trim and seed pearls. Beside her stood Georgiana Graham, Maria’s sister-in-law and doyenne of St James’s. ‘This is terribly fortunate,’ Lady Dundas drawled. ‘I was only just saying to Miss Graham, we could expect you to have news of Maria. Do you know where on earth the girl is? I declare I can hardly keep up with her.’

  Murray bowed.

  ‘The last I heard, madam, she had moved from her year’s residence in Chile and was settled in Rio de Janeiro.’

  Georgiana clutched the ribbons of her drawstring bag as
tightly as she pursed her lips. ‘Writing a book, no doubt.’

  ‘I certainly hope so.’

  ‘How very French,’ Miss Graham managed, with only the hint of a sneer.

  Murray drew up his shoulders. Maria was a friend and a favourite as well as one of his stable of authors. While not entirely in favour of, as his wife put it, those ghastly females who wish representation in the House, the publisher was certainly fair-minded about the fairer sex. Maria’s decisions had not quite scandalised London, but almost – the attitude of her family didn’t help and he felt his blood rise as he stood up for her.

  ‘Your niece has the happy knack of combining commendable notices with a prose style that is a pleasure to read,’ he said smoothly. ‘She sent me a few botanical sketches last year, which I passed to Sir William Hooker when he visited recently at Kew. He was most impressed. She has a keen scientific intellect as well as a winning way with words. Mrs Graham is a credit to you, ladies – to your family, indeed to your entire sex.’

  Lady Dundas looked most discomfited by this news. ‘Maria is a widow and we had hoped she might come home,’ she said sadly.

  Miss Graham cut in. ‘I have raised a memorial to my late brother. I visit it every day and yet Maria as his wife has not even seen it.’

  ‘When she comes home I am sure she will be delighted,’ Murray lied.

  ‘And when, sir, might that be?’

  Murray shrugged his shoulders. So many of his authors were abroad. The storerooms at the publisher’s house on Albemarle Street were chock-full of their correspondence and journals. Byron insisted on dispatching boxes of artefacts he bought on his way across Europe, including several bulky paintings and curiosities. He had also deposited a shocking memoir that Murray was holding – although noble, the boy was sometimes beyond the pale. Mrs Murray bemoaned the space that such rigorous record-keeping required.

  ‘We shall run out of storage for our wines, sir,’ she insisted, but Murray was adamant. The correspondence must be preserved.