Along the Endless River

by Rose Alexander

  Mabel shook her head. ‘No, nobody should laugh at you. Never.’ She drank some more and handed the flask to Mac and suddenly they were both chuckling gaily away and Mabel realised that she was lonely too, had been since Archie left. It was good to have company.

  She lost all track of time. It could have been a few seconds or many minutes, but all at once Mac moved from the chair and was sitting beside her, very close to her, and then he had his arm around her and his mouth, smelling of cigarettes and alcohol, was close to hers. And then it was upon hers, kissing her, wrenching her lips apart, shoving his tongue between her teeth.

  ‘No,’ she yelped, instantly terrified, ‘no, stop.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’ Mac’s lips were on her ear, his words, though whispered, booming into it. ‘You don’t want me to stop. You’ve led me on for weeks, years, with those beseeching eyes, those enticing smiles. Now you’re going to get what you’ve been asking for. And you’re going to love it, trust me.’

  And then he was kissing her again and pushing her onto the bed, holding her arms down, and no matter how she struggled she couldn’t get him off because he wasn’t a big man but even so he was far stronger than her.

  ‘Relax,’ whispered Mac. His breath was hot on her neck. He leant into her, bent his head and started nibbling at her skin, her throat. Releasing one of her arms, his hand reached down to her skirt and began to pull it up.

  Seizing her chance, Mabel stretched out her arm to the dressing table. She had a looking glass there; perhaps if she could get hold of it, she could hit him with it, get him to stop. Her fumbling fingers made contact with the glass’ silver handle and she picked it up. Fleetingly, she glimpsed her reflection, saw her own stricken look of fear like a cornered animal.

  And then the glass was gone. Mac had snatched for it, whipped it out of her hand and thrown it onto the floor where it shattered, the sound of tinkling glass momentarily filling the air.

  Seven years bad luck, thought Mabel, and uttered a hysterical burst of laughter at the horror and absurdity of it all.

  ‘Don’t do that, you little silly thing,’ Mac hissed, his hands tight around her ears now, holding her head still. ‘You know you want it. All this struggling – just false modesty, a pretence.’ He sounded really drunk now, his voice thick with alcohol, his words slurring badly. ‘You’re more than old enough to enjoy it, too old really. Much older than my Indian girls. Usually I prefer the young ones, ten, twelve – but with someone as beautiful as you, age is immaterial.’

  Mabel thought her heart had stopped. She looked into Mac’s cornflower blue eyes. They were devoid of all emotion, as if the charming twinkle had never existed. She had completely misjudged him, just as she had misjudged Archie. In the bedroom across the hall was Lady Cardburn, Mac’s daughter. If Mabel screamed, she would hear her.

  ‘Don’t even think about it,’ muttered Mac silkily, reading her mind. He ran his fingers delicately over her mouth and then clamped his hand upon it. ‘This is our little secret, our little treat. I’m not going to do anything to you that you won’t like. Girls like you – they love it once they know how. Once they’ve had expert tuition. But if you tell anyone – if you tell my daughter – you’ll live to regret it. Remember that no one would believe you, anyway. It would be your word against mine – and I would win.’

  His weight was on top of her, the weight of rocks or mountains, the weight of the whole world. Mabel’s head spun and her body drifted away in a haze of alcohol and nausea, and with it all her dreams of the future, of being a French teacher, of working in a school.

  The alcohol coursed through her veins and she floated in and out of consciousness. She was only dimly aware of what Mac was doing, where he was touching her, how much it hurt. Once the worst of the sick feeling from the alcohol had passed, she began to appreciate the numbness, the distance it gave her from what was going on. What Mac was doing. It was nice to be in another world, another state of being. Better to be drunk.

  The alternative was to be sober, and to know.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  The Amazon, 1908

  In the end, Thomas and Katharine lingered in Manaus until the end of the year and then into the next. Katharine hated to say it, but much as the city disgusted her on the one hand, there was something to be said for the luxury of urban life. A bathtub, for one. Fresh running water for another. And now it was so built up, the insects and mosquitoes were far fewer than in 1890, during her first prolonged stay in the city.

  If you ignored the brothels and bordellos that openly occupied a quarter of the buildings in town, you could enjoy the culture – the theatre, the art galleries, the concerts, the bookshops. And despite her initial worries, Lily’s mixed heritage went largely unnoticed. Katharine remembered the evening she and Anselmo had arrived nearly two decades before, how bemused she had been by the huge variety of people on the crowded dockside, the mixing of races that had all generated their own specific term. Now she was part of that human melting pot, and it didn’t seem as bad, or as frightening, as all that after all.

  ‘I wonder what will happen when we take her to London,’ she mused to Thomas one night. ‘She’ll never fit in there.’

  Thomas shrugged. ‘Neither will I.’

  ‘I know,’ responded Katharine. ‘But I love her and I love you and that’s all that matters.’

  ‘Exactly,’ agreed Thomas. ‘What else do we need?’

  In July of that year, just before Lily’s first birthday and after the huge swell of the Rio Negro that occurred every rainy season had subsided, they finally headed home. There were regular sailings all the way to Lagona now, no need to strike special deals with the captain as Anselmo had had to do. And there were water closets on board, plus fully enclosed cabins for first class passengers. Incredibly, there was also a steamer to Norwood. An enterprising young Welshman had bought a small vessel, sailed her to the isthmus, taken her apart piece by piece and carried her over the narrow strip of land that separated the Largo and the Poderoso. There he had painstakingly reassembled her and now the Good Prospects made regular trips as far past Norwood as the river was navigable and back again. It was the first steamer on that part of the river since Anselmo’s had sunk.

  ‘I’m getting too used to luxury,’ sighed Katharine, as she settled Lily into her bassinet in their spacious presidential suite. It was a far cry from a hammock, and the bucket with a basin of water that had been their bathroom on her first journey upriver. The new Lagona steamer was also bigger and had more powerful engines than previous models and they arrived at Mac’s compound in only four weeks. There they had to wait awhile before the Good Prospects arrived. The settlement’s opulence had not diminished over the years, even though Mac was spending less and less time there. And on closer inspection, Katharine saw that the beetles had got into some of his Chippendale furniture and woodworm had taken up residence in the flooring.

  Lily, caring nothing for mahogany or oak, was delighted daily by a family of capuchin monkeys that played in the compound garden. Katharine watched how the mother cared for her baby, so tenderly picking the fleas from its fur, grooming and feeding it with utmost dedication. They really are so like us, she thought, and hugged Lily tight and covered her with kisses because all mothers love their babies.

  Approaching Norwood some weeks later Katharine felt, as she always did, a frisson of trepidation, a lurch of the stomach, in memory of that terrible return that had revealed the devastation of her home and the destruction of her rubber. But this time, all was well, a gentle breeze stirring amidst the tree branches, the sounds of a thriving and prosperous compound drifting over the wide river and just audible above the rumble of the steamer’s engines.

  Life settled back to normal quickly, except that everything about normal was different. With Thomas, Jonathan and Santiago all capable of running the business, Katharine no longer had to work night and day with her baby strapped to her back, as she had when Antonio had been born. She could spend precious time wit
h her daughter, singing to her, playing pat-a-cake with her pudgy starfish hands, or round-and-round-the-garden on her pink palms. It was a revelation and she loved every moment of it – apart from the times when she was filled with regret that she had not been able to do these things with Antonio.

  Her preoccupation with her daughter caused her to put out of her mind the rumblings of problems on the Amazon that were doing the rounds during their sojourn in Manaus, rumours rippling up and down the river of iniquities committed for the love of rubber, not just by Arana but by many others. She didn’t want to think about everything that was wrong, preferred to focus on what was right, which was her new family of three and the extended family of her compound and all of those who lived on it. And the fact that she had now not only repaid her father in full but also given much more, enough to ensure that her parents enjoyed a financially secure future into old age.

  The weeks and months passed, and though Katharine’s happiness continued, there was just one thing that troubled her. She was finding Mabel’s letters stranger and stranger, ever more distant and often disjointed somehow as if she was not quite with it when she wrote. And there were few of them, many fewer than in past times.

  More and more, Katharine began to worry that something might be wrong. But so many, many miles away, what could she do about it?

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  London, 1908

  Mac’s visits started weekly, soon became daily. Mabel was paralysed, unable to react in any way. She could tell no one and had no one to tell. And even if she had, Mac had repeatedly warned her: ‘Say anything, you’re out on your ear.’ He’d told her also not to even think of writing to her sister about it. ‘I’ll know if you do,’ he’d said. ‘I have you followed – everywhere you go, any visit you might make the Post Office, I’ll know about, so I will.’ The addition of the Irish phrasing seemed to make his words more sinister and threatening. But in his tone there was also a hint of reproach. ‘You should be enjoying it by now,’ he’d slurred into her ear one night. ‘They always do, in the end.’

  At first Mabel cried. Then she became enraged, imagining thrusting a knife into his heart – did he even have a heart? – and watching the red blood run forth. Finally she succumbed, knowing resistance was futile. Mac plied her with alcohol, abused her and raped her, and then left. In the mornings, head throbbing, she would rise from her bed and attempt to do her job. She couldn’t believe that Lady Cardburn didn’t notice that something was wrong; she suspected that she probably did – but chose not to do anything about it.

  One day, her suspicions were confirmed. She was in the dressing room, mending stockings and underwear, when she heard a knock on the bedroom door. Hastily, she stabbed the needle into the pincushion, threw the garment to one side, and leapt up. But before she’d reached the door, the visitor had entered the boudoir and the opportunity to escape had disappeared. Moments later, the lilting cadence of Mac’s voice filtered through to her.

  ‘I’ve put that money you asked for into your account,’ he was saying.

  Mabel could picture her ladyship, reclining on her chaise longue, resting. All she did was rest and shop, she thought vitriolically. She’d never had critical feelings about Alexandra before, but now she suddenly hated her and her pampered lifestyle. And she was sure she was unfaithful to her husband, that she was having an affair with the Duke of Huntingshire. She wondered whether, even if Lord Cardburn knew, he would care. He and his wife didn’t seem particularly close. Like so much else to do with the upper classes, much of what they were was a sham, maintained only for appearance’s sake.

  Now father and daughter were alone together, Mabel wanted to shout out loud about Mac, wanted to scream to Lady Cardburn about what her father was doing to her. But she knew she never would, would simply never dare. She had asked for it, as Mac repeatedly told her, and now she was getting it. It was her fault. And telling on him would only result in the worst outcome for her, being thrown out on her ear, utterly disgraced.

  ‘Thank you,’ she heard Lady Cardburn reply, laconically.

  That was how easy money was for them all. In recent years, it had become the same for Mabel’s family – not to the same extent as Mac’s obviously. But Katharine had bought all sorts of luxuries for their parents, including moving them to a newly built property in Highgate, complete with an indoor bathroom and electricity. Mabel had not visited. She could not bring herself to set foot in the same suburb that Mac resided in. And Katharine had written and offered Mabel money, but Mabel had not responded.

  Once upon a time, she would have taken a small amount to give her and Archie a start, as long as he hadn’t minded her having more to put into their marriage than he had. Now, all thoughts of a happy union had long been driven out. Her shame and self-disgust had eradicated everything she had ever been, cared about or wanted. The only thing she could do in retaliation, her only small rebellion, was to write it all down in her diary. She recorded everything, all Mac’s revelations about his Indian girls, his new business ventures, all of it, immortalised in her precise, looping hand. Papers he left lying around her room she gathered up and stored within the diary’s pages. She knew it was dangerous; if found, it would be her downfall. But she did it anyway.

  Sitting back down, Mabel wondered if she should make some noise, remind Lady Cardburn that she was there. But she didn’t. So what if she were accused of prying. She didn’t care about any of it any more.

  ‘Father,’ said Lady Cardburn, her tone suddenly serious, harsh even. ‘I’m worried about my—’

  Mabel held her breath, straining her ears to hear. But she didn’t catch Alexandra’s last words.

  Her next were clarion clear.

  ‘I think you might be going a bit far this time.’

  There was a pause. The silence was heavy, expectant.

  ‘Look, it’s all very well for you to mess around with those dirty, skinny little Indian girls you can’t seem to resist. God forbid that Mother finds out about it – it would certainly kill her. But—’

  Mabel nearly screamed in frustration as Lady Cardburn’s words became inaudible once more. But she registered that what Mac had confessed to her, about his liaisons with his servants, was not the secret she had imagined it to be.

  ‘We’ve already lost two housemaids because of you and servants are harder and harder to find, in case you hadn’t noticed. So please, I’m begging you, leave her alone.’ Alexandra’s voice didn’t sound in the least bit begging. It sounded weary and irritated, as if reprimanding her father was something she often had to do and had grown tired of. Was she talking about Mabel? If she was, that meant she knew. Mabel could hardly bear it. And then there was the fact that there had been others.

  It was a long time since Mabel had felt special. But perhaps she had still retained the tiniest sliver of hope that was the case, that what Mac whispered in her ear about being the only one for him was true. Now she knew she was no different to any of those who had come before her. Something to use and dispose of, just like the housemaids and the Indian girls. Mabel felt sorry for them and wondered what had become of them. For herself, she could no longer think anything.

  In the stillness, she heard the floorboards creak. She assumed Mac was pacing the room in that way he had. The footsteps stopped and were replaced by the gentle drumming of his fingers on the mantelpiece.

  ‘I pay her wages. I pay your bills. I’ll do what I like.’

  Lady Cardburn sighed, heavily enough for Mabel to hear.

  ‘When you come out East to see the plantations there, you’ll understand. It’s a lot of work I’m doing, a great deal of organisation and responsibility. I need a rest every once in a while, some light relief.’ Mac was beginning to sound angry. ‘If you don’t want any more of my cash, you’ve only to say.’

  Weighty footfalls and a slamming of the door.

  Mabel hardly dared breathe. She waited, hoping Alexandra would leave, would follow her father out to continue remonstrating with him. Bu
t she didn’t.

  Eventually, Mabel had nothing else she could reasonably pretend to be occupied with in the dressing room. She was desperate to get out, to be anywhere other than this. She stood up and went into the boudoir. With a curtsy, she addressed Alexandra.

  ‘I’ve done the mending, your ladyship,’ she murmured. ‘If there’s nothing you need now, I’ll go and fetch your evening shoes from the boot boy.’

  Lady Cardburn regarded Mabel with a smile that was part sardonic, part pitying.

  ‘Yes, Mabel,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  Lady Cardburn, who Mabel had thought cared for her and respected her, as much as an employer ever respected a servant, had let her down. She’d had a lazy, half-hearted conversation with her father and then given up. His money was more important to her than Mabel. Of course it was. Mabel was a servant. How ironic to think that she had believed the position of lady’s maid would protect her from abuse. Now she had discovered that nothing could be further from the truth.

  On the way to the boot room, Mabel passed through the dining room. The table was laid for dinner, glass and silverware gleaming and shining in the dazzling light from the electric chandelier. In the Venetian decanters, the wine was acclimatising. Breathing, Mr Robson called it. Well, Mabel needed to breathe, needed to do so more than any of these stuck-up, entitled, posh rich people who’d be stuffing their fat, ugly faces around this table tonight.

  She picked up one of the decanters and took a long, deep slug from it, followed by another one. Then she filled it up to the top from the jug of water that stood on the sideboard. Reeling slightly, she made her way to the door, misjudging the position of the handle and missing it, rapping her knuckles against the wood. As she tripped over the threshold, Arthur and Algernon, the two footmen, approached.