The Trespass (38 page)

Above the wind as the
Amaryllis
coasted before the next wave threw it forward she thought she heard someone calling: ‘Miss Cooper! Miss Cooper!’

‘I’m here!’ she called as loudly as she could. ‘I’m here! Here! Here!’

A figure with a guttering lantern seemed suddenly to appear near her, struggling, holding the ship’s rail. She wondered if she was hallucinating as she drowned, yet the brave lamp gave a small, real flutter before it disappeared altogether.

‘Hello!’ she called again desperately. ‘I’m here!’ as she began once more to slide back. Then a figure loomed in front of her, she saw a hand, grabbed it, held with all her strength, felt herself pulled until her hip and her leg hit the side of the deck.

‘Stand if you can and grab the rail,’ called the voice through the raging wind. The hand pulled her, somehow she came upright, felt the rail, clung to it.

‘Quickly now, hold my coat with one hand and the rail with the other, we’re walking back to the cabin passageway.’ The lantern had indeed died but Harriet followed with her hands, feeling the coat and the rail as the wind and the rain smashed across her body, tried to tear her away. They fell forwards with the boat, then picked themselves up and continued onwards, clinging to the rail as the
Amaryllis
was pitched backwards and sideways into the heaving waves. Somehow her rescuer got her to the door of the cabin passageway which was shut tight, he banged on the door and then turned and put his arm around Harriet. From the inside someone else opened the door and the two of them were pulled inside and guided into the first cabin, where Harriet was at once thrown against a wall and on to a bed. A lamp glowed inside the cabin, its light moving up and down with the movement of the ship.

‘Oh my God, my God,’ she whispered, ‘dear God, thank you.’

‘It’s all right, Miss Cooper.’

Holding on to the bed as it plunged upwards and downwards Harriet at last saw that she was in the cabin of Mr Aloysius Porter, and his friend Mr Tennyson. And she saw at once, as he tried to take off his wet and torn coat, that it was Mr Nicholas Tennyson, who had talked about the infected water of the Thames, who had saved her.

Every single thing in the cabin had been nailed down or put away. The three of them tried to wedge themselves on the beds as they were buffeted from side to side.

‘Mr Tennyson,
this
water will be clean,’ said Harriet, half-laughing, half-crying, ‘and I believe you have just saved my life.’

He still battled with his coat, gave up, sat wedged in a corner of the cabin beside the window, and they had to raise their voices above the noise of the storm. ‘I saw you go past the window,’ he said. ‘We are in the cabin next to yours and I saw you going out with a jug.’

‘It was to collect the clean water.’

‘And the storm suddenly got so much worse, it seemed, and it was suddenly so dark so I thought I had better come after you.’

‘It must have been the albatross.’

He knew at once.

And I had done a hellish thing

And it would work ’em woe

For all averred, I had killed the bird

That made the breeze to blow

and just as he finished the words the ship gave a particular crash and the light of the swinging lantern glistened on water as it poured in under the cabin door, swirled about their feet.

‘Hold on to me, Miss Cooper,’ called Aloysius Porter and she saw he had managed to wedge himself into the opposite corner from Mr Tennyson on one of the beds and had wrapped his arms about a bend in the bulkhead, was able to hold on to an iron ring. Harriet was thrown against him, put her arms about his waist as the ship plunged upwards again and more water surged about the floor of the cabin.

‘Think of those poor devils in steerage,’ shouted Mr Tennyson, ‘I heard them battening down the hatches as I came looking for you.’

‘What do you mean, battening down?’ said Harriet, thinking of the crowded dark space.

‘They nail them down. To try to keep the water out of the lower part of the ship.’

‘And nail the passengers in?’ She could hardly conceive of such a terrible thing.

‘And the passengers in, I’m afraid, yes.’

‘But – but there’s no windows, there’s no air.’

‘That’s why I was thinking of them,’ said Mr Tennyson. ‘There’s a hundred and seven people down there.’

Dear God,
prayed Harriet, seeing the dark space again,
please have mercy on us all in these terrible hours and the people in steerage, help them to bear it. Lord see us safely through this storm if it be thy will for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ, Amen.

And then there was a silence in the small cabin; a silence of voices at least, for the sound of the sea and the sound of the wind and the crashing of things as the ship rolled onwards, or backwards, was deafening. Improbably the small lantern still shone.

Harriet wondered why in all this wildness she was suddenly reminded of long-ago days when she was a little girl, and she and Mary had read ‘Frankenstein’ together, excited beyond measure that it was written by the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft; how they had got more and more frightened in a thrilling kind of way in the upstairs drawing room. How in the night, when monsters walked in her dreams, she had crept into Mary’s bed and held her warm back and fallen at last to sleep, safe and comforted.

Up on deck other masts snapped, spars broke, the sailors battled to bind the sails. The Captain himself had taken the wheel, judging the wind and the waves and the sky; other, younger, stronger men physically helped him as they tried to keep the
Amaryllis
on an even keel against the power of the sea. Water poured over the decks, smashed now the skylight in the passage to the cabins, ran into the galley, under the closed hatches into the steerage area. There were cries coming from all directions but they could not be heard: nothing could be heard but the sea and the storm.

In the small cabin Harriet clung to Aloysius’s back. The three of them began to sing in a kind of desperation

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound

    That saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found,

    Was blind, but now I see

almost unable to comprehend that it was only today, at the church service in the sunshine, that they had listened to the steerage passengers singing to the accompaniment of the man with the concertina.

As the ship rose so high they felt it would overturn, and then shuddered back down with a crash into the water, Aloysius began to sing ‘Home, Sweet Home’, then Harriet started ‘I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls’, and Nicholas Tennyson sang ‘Cherry Ripe’, and each time the others joined in and sang as loudly as they could above the storm and the little lantern burned bravely on. Sometimes they were silent, then one or other would start talking again, or singing, or would quote poetry.

Harriet, clinging to the back of Aloysius, thought of how small the
Amaryllis
had seemed to her as she had arrived at Gravesend; tried to picture the red-headed mermaid now, ploughing through the waves, rising and falling, her expression unchanging. For a moment she was consumed with a terrible anxiety that the mermaid might be damaged in this storm. She vowed to herself that, if she lived, she would describe this storm to Asobel, greater, she believed, than the storm of Robinson Crusoe himself, and her mind almost cracked on itself in the small water-filled cabin when she pictured herself sitting in the summerhouse with Asobel. When Mary was alive.

And all of a sudden, in this wild storm, clinging to the back of Aloysius and knowing it was
that
(the warm back, the comfort of Mary’s warm back, of Aloysius Porter’s warm back) that had reminded her of reading ‘Frankenstein’ with Mary, Harriet began to weep.

Aloysius felt her crying beside him.

‘Oh please don’t cry, Miss Cooper. We will surely survive. This is a brave little ship, I can feel it.’

‘Don’t cry, Miss Cooper,’ said Mr Tennyson. ‘You have been so courageous even though I feel you have hurt yourself in the storm. The Captain has done this trip before, he will know these waters well. And like Aloysius I feel the brave
Amaryllis
will get us through.’

‘No!’ cried Harriet, between convulsive sobs. ‘It is not the storm. It is my sister Mary. She died, and I loved her so. And suddenly I am thinking of her and it makes my heart break’

‘Tell us something of her,’ said Mr Tennyson.

‘What do you mean?’ Harriet could only see him vaguely in the light from the lantern as the ship moved upwards and sideways: he seemed to be looking at her thoughtfully from his wedged corner.

‘Tell us about her.’

For a time all they could hear was the sea and the wind and the creaking, straining timbers, and Harriet’s occasional swallowed sob. And then she began to speak.

‘My sister Mary was the person I loved most in the whole world. Without her I cannot feel the ground beneath me properly. She educated me. She taught me to laugh and I have forgotten how. She loved me and – protected me, and taught me everything I know.’

The sea smashed suddenly against the small window, Mr Tennyson held his hand against it, as if to protect the glass.

‘Was she beautiful?’

‘Oh yes. Yes. She was the most beautiful person I have ever seen. You know when people laugh, how it makes them beautiful?’

‘Of course.’

‘Sometimes still, I actually see her, I see her face. Do you think I’m mad?’

Nicholas Tennyson’s face flickered in the swaying lamplight. ‘I heard you praying earlier,’ he said, not answering her directly. ‘Do you believe in God?’

‘Of course.’ Again the sea smashed against the glass. Again Mr Tennyson held his hand to it, trying to protect it. Water had seeped in this time down one of the sides, running down the wall of the cabin.

‘I am not so sure as you are,’ said Mr Tennyson, ‘which is my misfortune,’ (and for a split second Harriet saw the grey, thoughtful eyes of Benjamin Kingdom, in another life.) ‘But I believe a person’s everlasting life is in the people that remember. Of course you are not mad.’

The ship lurched upwards. Then Harriet suddenly felt Aloysius moving beneath her arms and her body, that rested against his back. At first she thought he was laughing. But as the next crash came she understood, because she could smell it, that he was quietly vomiting on to the churning, eddying water of the cabin floor.

*   *   *

Above them the Captain stared into the distance for the first light. His hair was wild, his clothes were torn and drenched. They could do nothing more in the darkness but try to keep upright. He loved the
Amaryllis
and trusted his life to her, but the unexpected violence of this storm out of clear weather had stunned him. It was not the first time this had happened as they moved into the tropics, but it was the worst time, and he was not certain how badly his ship had been damaged or where exactly it had been blown to.

And then, not all at once, but gradually over some time, his experience told him: the worst was over. He waited until he was sure before he spoke. And then he gave the briefest of touches to the shoulders of the helmsmen beside him.

‘Well done,’ he said, and as he looked again far away to the horizon in the distance the first light shone, very faintly.

*   *   *

When they finally unlocked the hatches by order of the Captain as morning came and the wind lowered, a terrible sight confronted the crew, who had seen many terrible sights. Water lay up to two feet deep all over the steerage area. The slats of the bed-spaces had disintegrated, most of the hundred or so mattresses were waterlogged, the long table, even though it had been nailed down, had been smashed. Belongings floated everywhere: food tins and pots, sad small shoes, vomit, faeces, hats. Some of the passengers from the cabins, although in various states of shock themselves, came to help: Mr Nicholas Tennyson and Mr Aloysius Porter and Miss Harriet Cooper were amongst them. Mr Burlington Brown, dressed in his best, although wet, frock coat, was ashen-faced; he nevertheless sent his be-hatted wife forward to reprimand Harriet whose hair was wild, whose dress was torn; when Harriet turned to Mrs Brown, her bruised and blood-encrusted face and her wild eyes stopped the rebuke on the good lady’s lips: she could not speak.

Word quickly went around that a small girl had died: she was three years old. She was handed up to the waiting crew, to the doctor, but one look at the tiny body told everything. People had broken bones, ripped clothing, bloodied faces and limbs. One by one they came up the ladder from below in a terrible silence, like people who had seen hell. Hetty, who had laughingly saved Harriet’s hat not twenty-four hours earlier, had a badly broken arm; it hung, obviously painful, and unusable. The doctor was overwhelmed with work; Harriet ran to her flooded, chaotic cabin, found a towel, ran back, tried somehow to tie up Hetty’s broken bone. In the absence of the Captain at his duties, Mr Burlington Brown thanked God for their deliverance, but not a soul sang. And all the time the crippled
Amaryllis
sailed on and sailors hammered at masts and tried to mend sails and ropes.

And then there was a sound from beneath them. It began low and got louder and louder and then a woman appeared at the top of the hatch. People looked on, appalled: it seemed as if half of her hair had been torn from her head. Her mouth was open very wide as if it was jammed, as if it would not close, and from that open mouth came the sound. She was screaming on and on and on, a terrible terrible sound: she stood on the deck and screamed and not a soul spoke, or could think of any comfort. Harriet stared transfixed: the woman stood beside the deck rail, behind her the sea still rose and fell in an echo of what had been. One of her hands was raised to her mouth as if to pull the nightmare out of her, and still the noise came, on and on. At last the doctor appeared beside her and somehow the woman’s mouth was literally jammed closed and then the doctor somehow forced her to drink something and finally there was just the sound of the wind again and the torn sails flapping and the great wide sea all around them. And this small group of people, all alone in the wide empty Atlantic Ocean.