“Isabella?”
Isabella turns and smiles at her friend. A ship is no place for a woman, but for two women it is bearable. “Shoes,” she says.
Meggy grimaces, scrunching up her pretty face. “Yes, one must wear shoes. Sharp things and rough things everywhere.”
“But it’s so much easier to climb the stairs without them.” The staircase between the main deck and ’tween deck more closely resembles a ladder. Here in the saloon there is light from the small round windows. There is even a semblance of civilized comfort in the mahogany dining table, the embroidered cushions, the hanging lampshade. The Captain’s desk is laid out tidily under a porthole. Books and maps, though Isabella would be surprised if he read and even more surprised if he could follow a map given the frightening amounts of whiskey he consumes daily. Isabella, still shoeless, sits next to Meggy and picks up her embroidery ring.
“Still,” Meggy says, “you don’t want to stand on a nail. Much more blood than falling down stairs.” She speaks with the weary authority of one who has been on many voyages, seen many shipboard injuries. And indeed she has. Meggy Whiteaway is one of the reasons Isabella is here. Meggy travels a great deal with her husband, the Captain, and longs for female company. Life aboard a cargo ship is not a natural environment for a woman, and Meggy has been pressing Isabella for years to join them on a journey. Arthur and the Captain are old school chums. Isabella met Meggy the day she married Arthur and has always liked her, or felt sorry for her, or perhaps both.
Another reason Isabella is here, of course, is the parliamentary mace. Commissioned by the Queen, designed by Arthur Winterbourne, made lovingly on British soil and destined for Sydney, where it will be handed to the new Australian government to celebrate federation. Arthur wanted to accompany it, and so Isabella came too. Better than staying in Somerset, prey to his viperous family.
But Isabella knows the most pressing reason she is aboard the barque Aurora. She is here because it solves, temporarily, the problem of What To Do About Isabella, a question she hears whispered behind hands in the parlor at her mother-in-law’s house, as much as she sees it in the eyes of her husband. There was a time when she might have felt ashamed that she had brought them all so much worry and embarrassment. But social shame became beyond insignificant when she lost Daniel.
“Are you well, Isabella?” Meggy is saying, her round blue eyes soft with concern. “You look quite pale.”
Isabella fights tears. Isabella is always fighting tears. She shoots out of the seat. “My shoes,” she says, half an explanation, and takes herself off alone to her quiet cabin.
Isabella is awake early, lying in her narrow bed considering that cold nausea known only by mothers who have lost a child. Each day when she wakes, there is perhaps two or three seconds of reprieve, and then the sadness floods back in and she is reminded that her life is ruined. The fall, from unknowing to knowing, is agony. She would prefer to simply wake into sadness. But those few seconds of reprieve mock her every morning: they are a false time, a cruel promise of happiness that cannot be kept, just like the fifteen and a half days that Daniel lived.
But life ticks on, and Isabella knows she must get up and go to the anchor deck to say her prayer to the ocean. She slips through the fore hatch and immediately sees Meggy sitting up on the anchor deck with a forlorn expression, her red-gold hair catching the morning light. Curious, Isabella approaches, sits down next to her. Arthur often complains about the way both she and Meggy “pose like children” around the ship. Ladies, he thinks, should never sit anywhere but in a chair. But just in front of the ship’s wheel is a wonderful place to sit with her knees under her chin and feel as though she were skimming fast along the edge of the known world with the sunshine in her hair.
Isabella had kept her decorum for the first little while on the ship, but the farther she got from home, the quicker she shed her manners. As they sailed from Bristol, down the river Avon, past St. Vincents Rocks, she still wore a hat and gloves. When they hit contrary winds just two days later, and she couldn’t stand up without vomiting, she soon removed everything that was likely to intervene between her and getting to the side of the ship quickly. Within three weeks they had moved into the trade winds, and the speed of the ship and the pressing warmth made her feel reckless enough to abandon her corset. She breathed for the first time since she was a child.
“Up early, Meggy?” Isabella says.
Meggy faces the quarter deck, not the bow. “Couldn’t sleep.” Her eyes follow someone on the main deck, on the other side of the wheel. Isabella studies her a few moments, then realizes she is watching the First Mate.
“Mr. Harrow interests you this morning?” she says softly, leaning against Meggy briefly.
Meggy’s eyes flicker and return to Isabella. “Do you not think he is splendid?”
“Splendid is perhaps not the word I would use.” Isabella turns to assess him. He speaks with two crew members down on the quarter deck. He is a little man, shorter than Isabella, but perhaps that doesn’t matter so much to Meggy, who is a tiny woman with a body shaped like a bell. Isabella wars inside herself. She wants to protect Meggy, but she is also exasperated by her friend’s foolishness. Women with the twin curses of beauty and breeding do not choose where they love. “Meggy, you know how unsafe it is to harbor a secret love for him.”
“I don’t love him, Isabella. I just admire him so terribly much. His wife, Mary, died last year. He nursed her until the end; he was there to hear her last breath.”
“How do you know?”
“I overheard him telling Francis, on our last voyage. Do you not think it a wonderful thing when a man loves so deeply? They are meant to be so strong and hard, yet in their hearts they can be so soft.”
Isabella doesn’t answer. She is imagining if she were sick, dying. Arthur would simply stay away until it was over. Just as he did when Daniel died. Isabella didn’t see him until after the funeral, an event that took place without her knowledge. Arthur had been afraid she would make a scene.
“How terribly sad, for him to be a widower so young,” Meggy breathes. “What misery he has endured.”
Isabella glances at Meggy’s face. Her friend’s eyes are shiny with tears. A knotted, angry feeling hardens within her. Meggy has never once cried with Isabella about Daniel, and losing a child is far worse than losing a wife. Meggy, who has never had a child of her own, had merely said, “You’ll have another, and this sadness will turn to sunshine,” as though children were like tea sets and the loss of one could be compensated easily with the purchase of another.
Isabella gets the devil in her.
She stands, calls out, “Mr. Harrow!”
Meggy shrinks up, knees against chest, putting Isabella in mind of a spider when one raises the broom at it. “Isabella, don’t!” she hisses.
But it is too late. Mr. Harrow turns towards them and raises his hand in a wave. Meggy climbs to her feet, in the hope of escape. Isabella beckons Mr. Harrow with one hand, while capturing Meggy by the upper arm. Isabella is strong, tall and queenly; Meggy cannot get away. Mr. Harrow’s shiny pink face is curious as he approaches.
“Yes, Mrs. Winterbourne?”
Meggy has turned her face away, deep red with embarrassment. The first tendril of regret touches Isabella, but it is too late. Her mouth has already started to form the words. “Mrs. Whiteaway and I were just having a little chat, and it seems that Mrs. Whiteaway admires you greatly.”
Now it is Mr. Harrow’s turn to glow with embarrassment, and Isabella can’t for the life of her recover the evil spark that has made her start this nonsense, and shame creeps across her skin. She releases Meggy, who runs past them and down the fore hatch with a sob. Mr. Harrow watches her, then turns back to Isabella. She cannot read his expression. Is he angry? Puzzled? Perhaps he is sweet on Meggy too?
Ah, of course he is. They travel all over the world together, and it’s “Mrs. Whiteaway” this and “Mr. Harrow” that and dropped eyelids as they pass each ot
her in the narrow wood-paneled corridors of the saloon.
“I’m sorry,” Isabella manages. “I don’t quite know . . .” She trails off, nods once, then goes to the anchor deck to recite her morning plea to the ocean.
She realizes it is unlikely Meggy will speak to her for the rest of the journey and for a few hot moments she doesn’t care. But then she cools again, and despairs because she is a woman who is too broken to reassemble herself nicely when the situation requires. Too broken, surely, to move among other people, whose hearts are whole.
The ship is large, but the rooms are very close together. Isabella and Arthur have two cramped bunks in what is otherwise the bosun’s cabin. The bosun, for this journey, sleeps with the crew at the dark end of the ship. At night the ship creaks. The sound of wind gusting outside. The sea slapping the boards. But Isabella has never slept so well in her life, rocked in the arms of the ocean.
At night, when she lies in her bunk, she can hear Arthur and the Captain talking in the saloon. They don’t know she can hear them, because they talk about her readily and clearly. Her body tenses as she hears her name.
“My wife is inconsolable this evening, Winterbourne. Isabella’s gone and done something silly.”
Arthur harrumphs. There is the sound of a drink being poured. “Did Meggy tell you what she’d done?”
“Wouldn’t divulge. Simply said that she’d embarrassed her greatly, and that she is as wild as a spitting cat.”
Isabella’s heart wilts in her chest. Meggy has turned on her. She knows why, but she still feels betrayed. Why can nobody be kind to her? As kind as she needs them to be? Is there something in her face or bearing that invites people to unkindness?
“Ah, yes. That’s Isabella,” Arthur grumbles. “She wasn’t always this way, Francis. When I married her she was much more amenable. The infant’s death . . .”
“I have to speak plainly to you, Winterbourne. She can’t keep using that as an excuse.”
“Some women never recover from it.”
“Because they don’t want to. They’re in love with their own grief. You say Isabella was more amenable at the start, but I remember she had a will of her own even then. When the child died, nobody stopped her from raging and rambling. Everyone made excuses for her, so she learned quickly that she could do as she pleased, even if it upset others.”
Isabella doesn’t know where to take greater offense: the idea that she has learned to behave badly, like a mistreated dog, or the fact that they are talking about her perceived failings so openly. But no, the thing that stings the most is the way they use the words the child and the infant. He had a name. Daniel.
“I don’t know what more I can do, Francis. I sent her out with a friend’s wife one day and removed every trace of the child. The cradle, the clothes, the little rabbit my mother had knitted. She flew into a rage, of course. I had to grasp both her hands quite firmly to stop her from clawing my eyes out.”
Quite firmly. He’d left two black bruises that hadn’t faded for a week.
And then the Captain says what Isabella feared he would. “Meggy tells me the ribbon around her wrist is significant.”
“Really?”
She can hear the penny drop even from her bed.
“We were having this very conversation today. Isabella, the baby, the way she refuses to get over it. And Meggy revealed that inside the ribbon, pressed against her wrist, Isabella has sewn a baby bracelet that you missed. A coral one, made by Isabella and her sister when they were children.”
Even as he says these words, Isabella is running her fingers over the familiar lumps under the ribbon. Yes, he had thrown it all away. She had come home from an interminable day in Bath with Mrs. Evans to find the nursery stripped bare. Only this bracelet, in the back of a drawer, had been missed. As children, she and her sister Victoria loved to make jewelry. Their father had been a jeweler, though not on the scale of the Winterbournes, of course. He had a small workshop in Port Isaac, the seaside town where Isabella grew up. He had handmade unique pieces for his rich bohemian clientele, often European nobility; and he’d taught his daughters all the techniques for wrapping stones in wire without soldering. She and her sister were eleven and twelve when they made the coral bracelet, each link held tightly in a coil of silver wire, with only enough beads to make a tiny thing. Victoria had kept it in her jewelry box for years, for they had always agreed that whoever had a child first could have it. It had arrived at Isabella’s house the day before Daniel was born, in a special package from New York, where Victoria now lived, married but so far childless.
“You’ll have to take it off her, Winterbourne. Throw it in the sea. She’ll never get better till it’s gone.”
Isabella’s heart is hot with fear. She knew he would suggest it, she knows Arthur will agree with it. But it is the only thing that remains of Daniel, the only thing that is keeping her in one piece. Quite simply, if she loses this string of coral, she loses herself. So she unties it immediately and slides it under her pillow. But it is not safe there, not for long. It will be the second or third place he looks, if he is determined to take it from her.
There is one place the bracelet will be safe, if she dares to put it there.
Five
Supper is always served in the saloon, and that is where tonight’s plan starts. For everything to work, Isabella must go ahead of her husband to bed, so when the steward brings them a slab of undercooked, oversalted pork with a few sunken potatoes swimming in its gravy, she feigns a sudden fit of illness. Though in truth she scarcely needs to feign illness, looking at that food. How she longs for fresh meat and newly dug potatoes.
“Oh,” she says, her hand flying to her lips.
“Isabella?” Arthur says, with his usual wary tone.
“I feel suddenly unwell,” she says.
Meggy, who sits silent and stony across from her, won’t meet her eye. The Captain is busy sloshing claret into his crystal glass. This leaves Arthur in charge of the problem.
“Will you eat with us?”
“I think not,” she says. “I will go directly to bed.”
Arthur opens his mouth to encourage her to stay. He is a man who worries constantly what others will think of him, and any perceived lack of manners on her part makes him huff and puff like a steam train. But she suspects he has reckoned that illness will only make her manners worse, so he holds his thoughts, and waves her away with one doughy white hand.
Once the cabin door is closed behind her, she unbuttons her bodice and unhooks her stays, slips off her skirt and hangs them all in the narrow wardrobe built into the nook behind the bunks. She throws on her nightgown and stands still a moment, heart beating hard, straining her hearing for the sound of footsteps. Nothing. Hung on the door is her husband’s waistcoat. Isabella reaches into the pocket. When she has what she is after, she lies down on her bed. But she doesn’t sleep. She lies still and listens to them. The clink of silver on china. Their conversation: always the weather, though she understands such an obsession out here at sea. Just the previous week, when they were sailing out of the East Indies, a storm had come upon them so fast and unexpectedly that she had been sure they would all perish. They live or die by the weather.
Isabella hears Meggy’s soft tones retreating. Isabella relaxes a little: she needs Meggy—who has uncannily sharp hearing—out of the saloon. Then, Arthur and the Captain resume their conversation. The constant unstopping of the bottle of claret, the clunk of their glasses on the polished wood. Every night after dinner, Arthur drinks with the Captain. And the Captain drinks a lot. The drunker they are, the louder their voices become.
She listens to them a long time. They talk about the weather, old friends, about Isabella. Arthur tells the Captain about the new house he intends to build on their return to England, and for a little while he sounds excited and happy. Isabella does not feel sorry for him. She does not want the new house, because Arthur’s mother will then move in with them. And if she is there, it is likely Per
cy will be there often, and Isabella never wants to see Percy again.
Eventually Arthur resumes his usual sour tone. “How well do you trust your crew?” he asks the Captain.
“Well enough. Why?”
“There are seventeen of them and they are a low sort of men. Can you be sure nobody is stealing anything from you?”
“They’d have nowhere to hide it, Winterbourne,” the Captain slurs, managing to find a sibilant consonant in every word.
One of Arthur’s chief concerns in life is that he will have something stolen from him. Several servants back in Somerset have been sacrificed to this fear. In fact, his whole family appears to share this unfounded fear: unfounded, for it has never happened to any of them, to her knowledge. Perhaps it is working with gems that does it to them: small, precious things that are easy to hide and transport. But Isabella has always thought it ghastly that people who have so much should be so fearful of losing a little of it.
“If one of them should think to touch the mace,” Arthur continues, and now Isabella realizes just how drunk he is. With his drunkenness, all his morbid thoughts come to light like frightened bats flying from a cave.
“Nobody’s going to touch your mace.”
“I’m wary,” he says. “I have the key on me, day and night.”
Isabella smiles, as she has the key in her hand at that very second. He pins it inside his waistcoat pocket, and his waistcoat is hung on the inside of their door just before supper every night. He hangs it, rolls up his shirt sleeves, washes his face and hands in the china dish by their beds, and thus the day is over and the night has commenced. Arthur is a man who revels in routines.
The Captain mutters something else to Arthur, and then they are off on another topic of conversation. She waits a few more moments, then decides if she waits too long Arthur will be beyond drunk and want to fall into bed, so she quietly peels back the covers and climbs down the ladder.
Lighthouse Bay Page 4