The Last Runaway
Authors: Tracy Chevalier
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Literary, #Historical
ALSO BY TRACY CHEVALIER
The Virgin Blue
Girl with a Pearl Earring
Falling Angels
The Lady and the Unicorn
Burning Bright
Remarkable Creatures
The
Last Runaway
TRACY CHEVALIER
DUTTON
DUTTON
Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
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Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Copyright © 2013 by Tracy Chevalier
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REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
has been applied for.
ISBN 978-1-101-60664-3
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Contents
This book is dedicated to Catoctin Quaker Camp and Oberlin College: two places that shaped and guided my younger self
Horizon
SHE COULD NOT
go back. When Honor Bright abruptly announced to her family that she would accompany her sister Grace to America—when she sorted through her belongings, keeping only the most necessary, when she gave away all of her quilts, when she said good-bye to her uncles and aunts, and kissed her cousins and nieces and nephews, when she got into the coach that would take them from Bridport, when she and Grace linked arms and walked up the gangplank at Bristol—she did all of these things with the unspoken thought: I can always come back. Layered beneath those words, however, was the suspicion that the moment her feet left English soil, Honor’s life would be permanently altered.
At least the idea of returning drew the sting from her actions in the weeks leading up to their departure, like the pinch of sugar secretly added to a sauce to tame its acid. It allowed her to remain calm, and not cry as her friend Biddy did when Honor gave her the quilt she had just finished: a patchwork of brown, yellow and cream diamonds pieced into an eight-point Star of Bethlehem, then quilted with harps and the running feather border she was known for. The community had given her a signature quilt—each square made and signed by a different friend or family member—and there was not room for both quilts in her trunk. The signature quilt was not so well made as her own, but of course she must take it. “’Tis best left with thee, to remember me by,” she insisted as her weeping friend tried to push the Star of Bethlehem quilt back at her. “I will make more quilts in Ohio.”
Jumping over thoughts of the journey itself, Honor tried to fix her mind instead on its end at the clapboard house her future brother-in-law had sketched for Grace in his letters from Ohio. “It is a solid house, even if not of the stone thee is accustomed to,” Adam Cox had written. “Most houses here are made of wood. Only when a family is established and unlikely to move do they build a brick house.
“It is situated at the end of Main Street on the edge of the town,” he had continued. “Faithwell is still small, with fifteen families of Friends. But it will grow, by the grace of God. My brother’s shop is in Oberlin, a larger town three miles away. He and I hope to move it when Faithwell has grown large enough to support a draper’s. Here we call it ‘dry goods.’ There are many new words to learn in America.”
Honor could not imagine living in a house made of wood, that burned so quickly, warped easily, creaked and groaned and gave no feeling of permanence the way brick or stone did.
Though she tried to keep her worries confined to the notion of living in a wooden house, she could not stop her mind straying to thoughts of the voyage on the
Adventurer
, the ship that would take them across the Atlantic. Honor was familiar with ships, as any Bridport resident would be. She sometimes accompanied her father to the harbor when a shipment of hemp arrived. She had even gone on board, and watched the sailors furling sails and coiling ropes and mopping decks. But she had never set sail in one. Once when she was ten her father took them to nearby Eype for the day, and Honor and Grace and her brothers had gone out in a rowboat. Grace had loved being on the water, and had shrieked and laughed and pretended to fall in. Honor, however, had gripped the side of the boat while her brothers rowed and tried not to appear alarmed at the rocking, and the curious and unpleasant sensation of no longer having stable footing. She had watched her mother walking up and down the beach in her dark dress and white bonnet, waiting for her children to come back safely. Honor avoided going out in a boat again.
* * *
She had heard stories of bad crossings but hoped she would cope with such a thing as she did any other hardship, with steady patience. But she did not have sea legs. That was what the sailors said. Perhaps she should have realized this from her encounter with water under her feet in the rowboat. After leaving Bristol she stood on deck with Grace and others, watching the Somerset and north Devon coast unfold alongside them. For the other passengers the unsteadiness was an amusing novelty, but Honor grew more and more unsettled, responding to the ship’s movement with a wrinkled brow, tightening shoulders and a heaviness deep in her gut, as if she had swallowed an iron pound weight. She held out as long as she could, but as the
Adventurer
was passing Lundy Island, Honor’s stomach finally convulsed and she vomited onto the deck. A passing sailor laughed. “Sick and we’re barely out of Bristol Channel!” he crowed. “Wait till we reach the ocean.
Then
you’ll know sickness!”
Honor was sick down Grace’s shoulder, onto her blankets, onto the floor of their tiny cabin, into an enamel basin. She threw up when there was nothing left to bring up, her body like a magician managing to conjure something from nothing. She did not feel better after each bout. When they reached the Atlantic and the ship began its long roll up and down the swell of the waves, she continued to be sick. Only now Grace was ill too, as well as many of the other passengers, though only for a time, until they got used to the new rhythm of the boat. Honor never got used to it; the nausea did not leave her for the whole month-long voyage.
When not seasick herself, Grace nursed Honor, rinsing her sheets, emptying the basin, bringing broth and hard sea biscuit, reading to her from the Bible or the few books they had brought:
Mansfield Park
,
The Old Curiosity Shop
,
Martin Chuzzlewit
. To distract Honor she chattered on about America, trying to get her to think about what lay ahead rather than the grimness of the present moment. “What would thee rather see, a bear or a wolf?” she asked, then answered her own question. “A bear, I think, for wolves are like overgrown dogs, but a bear is only like itself. What would thee rather travel on: a steamboat or a train?”
Honor groaned at the thought of another boat. “Yes, a train,” Grace agreed. “I wish there were a train we could take from New York to Ohio. There will be one day. Oh, Honor, imagine: soon we will be in New York!”
Honor grimaced, wishing that she too could see this move as the great adventure Grace clearly did. Her sister had always been the restless Bright, the one most ready to accompany their father when he had to travel to Bristol or Portsmouth or London. She had even agreed to marry an older, duller man because of the promise he held out of a life away from Bridport. Grace had known the Coxes, a family of five brothers, since they had moved from Exeter several years before to open a draper’s shop, but she only showed interest in Adam when he decided to emigrate to Ohio. A brother—Matthew—had already gone there but had become infirm, and his wife had written to ask a spare brother to come and help with the business. Once Adam had moved to America, he and Grace corresponded regularly, and with gentle hints she led him to ask her to join him in Ohio as his wife, where they would run the shop with Matthew and Abigail.