A thing she has had to get used to on the ship is the constant lurching movement of the sea beneath her feet. So she stands, waits until she is sure of her footing, then goes to the door. There is no latch, so it tends not to stay properly closed. It is ajar an inch: enough to hear somebody approaching and to let in a little reflected lamplight from the saloon. Her pulse thuds dully in her ears. When she is certain they aren’t moving from the velvet seats to which their drunken backsides are glued, she moves back and crouches beside her husband’s bunk and feels underneath it for the walnut chest.
Her fingers find the brass handle on each end, and slowly, slowly, she begins to pull.
A sudden lurch as the ship pitches down a wave; the chest scrapes against the wooden floor and she overcompensates, falls backwards, fingers flying off the box. She falls inelegantly, and certainly not quietly.
“What is that?” Arthur says.
Isabella quickly clambers to her feet, shoving the walnut chest back under the bunk with her foot, securing it in place with her trunk, and then the door to the cabin is open and Arthur is eyeing her in the dark.
“Isabella?”
“I came down to get a drink of water, and fell from the lowest rung,” she says, gesturing to the ladder.
His eyes catch on her bare wrist, where the black ribbon has been. “Are you still unwell?” he says at last.
She nods. The key to the box burns a guilty hole in her palm.
“Go back to your bed. I’ll bring you water.”
And she can do nothing but go back to her bed. He returns a few seconds later with a cup of water, which she drinks while he waits. The Captain appears at the door and says, “I’m off to bed now, Winterbourne.”
“Good night, Francis. I’ll do the same.”
No! Here is her plan foiled, and here is the wretched key still in her hand. How is she to return it to his waistcoat before he notices it missing, if he is here in the cabin with her?
Arthur undresses and bids her good night. With a grunt and a struggle, he climbs onto his bunk below her. She lies above him on her side, and waits for him to sleep so she can decide what to do.
Finally, the familiar trumpet of his snoring alerts her to his deep drunken sleep. She decides the only safe course of action is to climb down, slip the key back in his waistcoat pocket, then go back to bed and do it all another time.
Once more she peels back the sheets. Once more she climbs down the ladder. As her bare ankles pass his sleeping body, she shudders deeply, as one might when one walks past a snake.
And once her feet are on the floor, she no longer wants to put his wretched key back. Not yet. She stands next to him in the dark, and he doesn’t hear her. He doesn’t wake. A mad courage seizes her. She crouches and reaches under his bunk.
If he wakes, she will be discovered. She knows this, and still she does it.
Gently, she pulls the chest out until it touches her knees. The chest is narrow but three feet long, and she has to feel along its length for the five locks. In the dark, she fumbles with the key. An eternity stretches out between her finding each one, guiding the key into the lock, turning it with a soft snick. She barely breathes the whole time. There is no light in the gray room. She finds her way by touch.
Finally, she cracks the chest open. Two fine gold chains stop the lid from falling all the way back and smacking into the floor. She lifts the layers of black velvet and sees the dull glint of the mace: gold, studded with precious gems. She carefully feels around in the chest for the edge of the velvet cushion on which the mace rests, eases up the corner, slips her precious black ribbon out of the front of her nightgown and tucks it under, then releases the cushion and closes the box.
Snap.
Too confident, she drops it the last half-inch. The noise seems impossibly loud in the dark. Her body ices over and she can’t move. Her heart thumps out of her chest; even her eyeballs seems to pulse. Arthur stops snoring, makes a grunting noise.
Then, slowly, rhythmically, he starts again. She has never been so glad to hear him snore. She almost laughs.
She feels around the box again for the locks. One by one, she fastens them. A kind of reckless certainty has gripped her. All will be well, so she takes her time, quietly pushes the mace under the bed, then slips the key into Arthur’s waistcoat.
Up the ladder. Into bed. She doesn’t sleep for hours and hours because the excitement takes forever to cool from her blood.
For now, Daniel’s bracelet is safe. It will at least get to the other side, Sydney, where Arthur is to hand the mace over to Mr. Barton on behalf of the Queen. Isabella anticipates more key-stealing and tiptoeing about before the ceremony, of course, but for the present she is simply glad that the black ribbon is not in danger of going overboard. The rest she can work out when she is finally off this stinking vessel.
The next few days are bleak. A black cloud descends on her. At first she thinks the darkness is caused by her not having the bracelet around her wrist, and perhaps that is a little of the reason. But more likely it’s the weather, which has turned leaden and windy and rough.
The place to be, on a ship in stormy seas, is above deck. Below deck, without her eyes to find a horizon, the roiling seasickness can set in. So she spends hours every day up on the anchor deck, the voices of men shouting and swearing behind her, watching the gray sea and the gray sky and trying to stay clear of the rain under the canvas cover. Ordinarily, Meggy would have joined her, but Meggy avoids her now, preferring to mark the time embroidering in the saloon. Life goes on below deck, all the little mundane details of lived experience tick along, pushing time into lines. Above deck, with nothing in sight but endless sea, time stops and she is pitching and yawing through an eternal gray moment. It is like her sadness, this interminable journey. She sees no land, she can predict no end, all is storm-beaten.
And sometimes when the rain comes hammering hard, but never cold, and she has to shrink under the last dry space behind the ship’s wheel, she hears Mr. Harrow barking orders and she thinks about what Meggy told her. He lost his wife. And here he functions perfectly well. She would not be able to sail a ship. She would run it aground in her grief, surely. But, while the Captain fumbles through tasks, Mr. Harrow is calm and capable. Sometimes she steals glances at him, looking for the pain on his face, but she doesn’t see it. Then she realizes she is being as bad as Meggy, and she puts her face on her knees again and waits and waits, through time and distance and stormy seas.
Then the first gray light glimmers at the hem of the darkness.
Isabella sees Mr. Harrow in the galley. He, like her, is searching for something to stop up the hunger until lunch. He crouches with his head in the cupboard.
When she says, “Good morning,” he startles and hits his head.
“I’m so sorry,” she says.
“It’s fine,” he replies, standing, rubbing his head. “Are you looking for food too?”
She nods. “I hid some dried apple in a tin at the back, behind the flour.”
He returns his attention to the cupboard, smiling. “Ah, very clever.” He pulls out the tin and attempts to prize off the lid. “Did you put this lid on yourself?” he says, with effort.
She laughs, spreading her palms apart. “My mother used to say I should have been born a boy. ‘Strong as a goat, wild as a blackbird.’” Remembering Mother’s old saying makes her instantly sad. She doesn’t feel strong and wild anymore.
He has the lid off now and is offering her the tin. She selects a handful of sliced apple. Mr. Harrow is about to slip past her on his way out when she stops him.
“Mr. Harrow, wait,” she says. She watches her hand on his forearm as though it isn’t her own. She didn’t realize she was going to speak to him, but a compulsion has seized her.
He waits, and a small stretch of time binds them together in expectation.
Then she says, “Meggy told me about your wife.”
And there it was: the raw pain that she has been so longing to
see on his face. Finally, she has found somebody who knows. To her horror, the corners of her mouth curl up as though to smile. She pushes them down again.
But then the vulnerability in Mr. Harrow’s face is gone, hidden under a constructed expression of acceptance. “Yes, I did lose Mary. It was very difficult,” he says. “But life must go on.”
“Must it?”
Her question flummoxes him. He opens his mouth to speak, then doesn’t. Rather, he remains still with his lips slightly parted.
“My son, Daniel, died nearly three years ago,” she says in a rush. “He was fifteen days old. Born perfectly healthy, growing well. Then one morning my eyes opened late—too late in the morning, too bright—wondering why he hadn’t woken me. He hadn’t woken me because he was dead, Mr. Harrow. Dead and cold.” Here her voice breaks and she puts her hands to her mouth to stop up the tears. “Because I was out of my mind with my grief, my husband’s family saw to it that the child was buried without me in attendance. I didn’t even have a chance to say good-bye to him.”
“Oh, my dear Mrs. Winterbourne,” he says, and gently pulls her hands away from her face and holds them in his rough fingers. “It is terrible to lose a loved one, but the sun will shine again.”
“It cannot.” Now she doubts him. He has only lost a wife, not a child. What can he know about her pain?
Mr. Harrow searches for words. The ship rides over a bump and swell, setting the hanging spoons clanging against each other. Finally he says, “Such sadness doesn’t just bruise, then fade away. It devastates. The only way back is to rebuild, stone by stone. And sometimes one hasn’t the energy, or the inclination, and one sits among the ruins and waits for something to change. But nothing changes unless we stand up again, and keep picking up the stones.”
Her heart lightens and darkens over and over as he speaks: hope, despair, hope, despair, fast-moving clouds over the sun. He does understand, but he is telling her she has to try to get better. Does he not know that if she recovers from Daniel’s death, then she loses Daniel a second time? Recovering is a kind of forgetting.
But she has longed for the comfort of words such as Mr. Harrow’s and perhaps Mr. Harrow has longed for a fellow soul to share his sorrow too, so they stand there for a moment together, hands clasped, tears brimming. And that’s when Meggy comes in.
“Oh,” she says, her pale eyes taking in their stance, their clasped hands, their searching eyes. At first Isabella does not understand the import: there is nothing romantic about the moment Mr. Harrow and she are sharing. But, by God, it looks like it.
Mr. Harrow, alarmed—for Isabella suspects he is sweet on Meggy—drops her hands and takes a step back, knocking his head on a hanging copper pan.
Isabella says, “Meggy, wait.” But Meggy has already turned and hurried off.
Mr. Harrow rubs his head. “I should go,” he says.
Isabella nods, and is left alone in the galley a few moments later, wondering when she will harvest the inevitable consequences.
Dinner is cooking in the galley, and the smell of stewing meat is trapped in the saloon where Isabella sits alone, working on her embroidery ring. She has made many mistakes this evening, and has spent so much time unpicking misplaced stitches that she may as well not have started work at all. Meggy is nowhere in sight. Isabella begins to hope, faintly, that Meggy has decided to keep to herself about the scene with Mr. Harrow. But the hope does not last, for at dusk Arthur thunders down the stairs and a moment later is standing in front of her, his brows drawn down so hard that they create grim shadows on his face. Isabella puts aside her embroidery ring and tries not to blink, or flinch, or indicate in any way that she knows what is coming.
“Whatever is wrong, Arthur?” she says. Forcing her hands to be still, she takes a match and lights the oil lantern above her head, closing the latch softly.
For a few moments, he can’t form words. He splutters and spits, then finally says, “I will not tolerate you showing such attentions to another man.”
She maintains her feigned puzzlement, but feels the sting of Meggy’s betrayal. “And nor should you tolerate it, and nor should you ever need to tolerate it,” she says evenly.
“Don’t play the innocent with me!” he shouts, and she imagines that everyone below deck, all the way down the corridor to the crew’s quarters, hears it. The ship may be one hundred and sixty feet long, but everything is close to everything else below deck. Arthur, sensing he is embarrassing himself, drops his voice. “Meggy saw you with Harrow.”
“Mr. Harrow was comforting me,” she says. “There was nothing in his touch beyond ordinary human compassion.”
“Comforting you over what?” He says this with bafflement, truly believing she has no need for comfort.
What boiling hatred she feels for him then, for his blindness and his complete absence of compassion. “Mr. Harrow’s wife died. I thought he might understand how I feel about Daniel’s death.”
“How you feel, Isabella, is not something to broadcast about to strange men on a—”
“To a fellow human, who has also suffered a great loss,” she says, her words riding over his even though she knows it is the habit of hers he despises the most. Isabella, you ought to listen more and speak far less.
Arthur splutters a little more, pacing in the small space, his shoes clacking on the wood. The smells of rain and rime are strong, and she thinks about the sea out there restlessly churning; and the restless churning is in her guts too.
Finally, he says, “The child’s death hasn’t made you special, Isabella. You are still merely the woman you always were. You deserve no special treatment, you are not above the rules of proper society.” His eyes flick to her wrist. “At least you have taken off that tatty ribbon.”
She bristles, but doesn’t bite.
He squares his shoulders, twitches his nostrils. “You are to stay below deck until we reach Sydney.”
“What? No!”
“Stay here in the saloon or in our bedroom. Keep Meggy company. I don’t care what you do. But stay away from the crew. Guard your modesty. And don’t go about seeking comfort for old wounds that have long healed, just to draw attention to yourself.”
“I haven’t healed!” she cries. But he has already turned and disappeared up the fore hatch. She wants to carve her embroidery scissors into his forehead; perhaps write Daniel’s name there, to put back into his mind the baby that he lost, that they lost. Isabella feels she shall go mad. Every nerve in every tooth is tingling with frustration. The rage builds inside her, under her ribs, around her heart. She wants to break something or someone. Right now, it’s Arthur, but if Meggy came down the hatch she would enjoy tearing her face off too. Where does this violence come from? She was once a gentle woman. How gentle her hands were, when she held the light, sweet limbs of her son.
Confined below deck. The trapped air and the smells from the cargo hold, not to mention the crew’s quarters. She’ll be sick. But Arthur won’t care if she grows sick. Why does he want her at all, if she is such a disappointment and an irritation? How can he bear to be married to her any more than she can bear to be married to him?
Isabella realizes she is crushing her embroidery ring hard between her hands, and the needle has pierced her palm. She gently removes it, and a perfectly round drop of blood forms. She finds herself transfixed by it, by the delicate patterns of lines on her palm. She presses just beside the tiny puncture and the ball turns to a drop, and runs down her wrist.
Escapes.
She is a long way from home. If she were to disappear while in Australia, how would he ever find her? She could find a passage to America, where Victoria lives. And now the plan crystallizes even more clearly. Her sister’s last letter told her she is expecting a baby. Isabella could take Daniel’s bracelet to her and, loath to give it up though she would be, his spirit could live again in her sister’s child. In that moment, seized by the sudden searing rightness of her idea, she wants nothing more than this.
; Isabella feels light for the first time in years.
Six
Isabella sits on her bed. The door to the cabin is shut and held fast by a trunk full of clothes. She has a fountain pen and a scrap of paper, and on it she makes a list of the jewelry laid out in front of her.
1 ruby and diamond bracelet
1 gold pendant with sapphires
1 gold pendant with pearls
1 platinum pendant with pearls and amethysts
1 pair diamond and peridot earrings
1 pair French opal and gold earrings
1 Hungarian emerald brooch
1 enamel pansy brooch with diamond
1 ruby and pearl platinum brooch
1 moonstone and diamond ring
1 sapphire ring
This is everything valuable she owns. Shoes and dresses cannot be sold so easily, but this jewelry can. Each of these items was a present from her husband or his family, but she wears none of this jewelry. When pressed, on a special occasion, she allows herself to be guided by Arthur on what will glitter most beautifully under candlelight, but for the most part the jewelry stays in its silk box, a hidden reminder that she is owned by the Winterbourne family, for every one of these pieces is a Winterbourne original. She has been owned by the Winterbournes since they bought out her father’s business at what Arthur’s mother always called “a vastly inflated cost.”
Every one of these pieces belongs to her too. There can be no accusation of theft. She is almost certain.
Once she has finished the list, Isabella packs the jewelry away in the bottom of her trunk, then folds the list and slides it under her pillow. She lies down with her hands behind her head and closes her eyes. There is no window in the cabin, so even though it is daylight outside the room is gray. The ship rolls on.
Over and over in her mind she turns the delicious thought that if she sells her jewelry in Sydney, she will easily have enough for a passage to New York to meet her sister. And not on a wretched sailing vessel like this one; on a nice, big, stable steamer. Her fantasy grows more detailed by the moment, and the more detailed it grows the more she convinces herself that it is meant to be, pre-ordained somehow. She is merely fulfilling her destiny. The Winterbournes think her unstable and mad, and perhaps she is. If so, then why shouldn’t she run away? Both her father and Arthur’s are dead, and they had arranged the union. Foolishly. What remains of her husband’s family doesn’t want her: she would be freeing him to marry another woman, perhaps one who can give him another child. Her womb refuses to quicken again. She believes it still longs for Daniel, as she does. Perhaps his new wife might even enjoy his weekly visits to her body. Though she can’t imagine that. She remembers being fifteen or sixteen and wondering about the secrets of lovemaking, and thinking it all sounded very thrilling. Either she was mistaken or Arthur is very bad at it.
Lighthouse Bay Page 5