The Trespass (40 page)

The crew have rigged tarpaulins over both decks and it has been explained to Miss Eunice and to me by Mr Aloysius Porter that tarpaulin is canvas treated with tar so that it is waterproof – a most necessary accoutrement in New Zealand. Most people spend much time on the deck underneath these canvases but it is sometimes too hot to do even that. In the cabin area we have a saltwater bath that we can use for cooling ourselves: the salt sticks to the skin in an odd, scratchy manner. The girl Hetty who saved my hat still has her arm bandaged from the storm; I do hope it will mend satisfactorily. She told me it ‘makes her that mad’ because it is so painful and she cannot do everything she wants to do, and I do not enquire what those wants are for fear of not quite understanding her answer. I do, of course. I …

Here Harriet stopped writing for a moment. This was a journal for her dear readers, whoever they might be one day (and always she thought of Walter since he had presented her with the journal, and Asobel perhaps), not for herself. The sun was rising now, soon it would be too hot to sit even here. Harriet looked about her: at the still sea, at the drooping sails of the
Amaryllis.
There was nobody much about, only the helmsman at the wheel at the back of the poop deck, and at the front of the main deck trying to catch any hint of wind a group of steerage passengers sat together talking; perhaps they had been there all night. With her pen she crossed out the last five words. An odd idea had come to her: that she might keep a more private diary where she could talk to herself more freely, which she could keep locked in one of her boxes in her cabin.

Slowly she took a fresh piece of paper from her folder. And then she began writing again.

Without Mary, who understood, it was as if I was in an inferno.

What the girl in steerage, Hetty, speaks of so fondly and freely, what Aunt Lucretia spoke of as Alice’s dark duties, are the same thing, although I cannot quite understand how that can be. My father has done great wrong, and great damage. I would rather die than go back to that. I
will
die rather than go back to that.

She folded the sheet of paper carefully and put it in her folder and for a long time she stayed motionless, staring at the furthest horizon. Then she seemed to shake herself slightly and began writing again in her main journal.

Soon now Mr or Mrs Burlington Brown or Miss Eunice Burlington Brown – or all! – will come and admonish me that I should not be sitting here alone, with a man (they will mean the helmsman who stands by the big wheel at the back of the ship and steers us onwards). They will also say that my cheeks have caught some sun, unheard of for a young English lady, and most inappropriate, not to say deeply unfashionable. Then the Burlington Browns will watch over me at breakfast and dinner and tea. At each meal there will be complaints about the food – there is only one more pig to be killed for fresh pork because some of them, and of course all the chickens, were lost in the storm; the last goat died; and we are reduced to eating salted meat and food from tins a great deal of the time and we are not even halfway. I never thought I would think longingly of a fresh cabbage! The men will fish, but so far nothing edible has been caught: the other day they brought up an octopus and all the ladies (including me) screamed at the writhing arms. How the steerage passengers are coping is not to be thought of: imagine how hot it must be down there! We are not encouraged to have anything to do with those people – Captain Stark is very strict on this point: that order, and therefore social rank, must at all costs be upheld. He makes it clear that an ordered ship is a safe ship and that he must be obeyed at all times. And indeed we know only too well that our very lives are in his hands. He is a kind man and a fine Captain of our ship. I have been told that not all captains are so reliable, and that it is the Captain that gives the tenor of the ship. I spend much of my time reading, a pastime I will never grow tired of; I read Mary’s books, books we shared. But many of the cabin passengers are showing signs of boredom and discontent and there are small quarrels daily that may grow to larger ones: Mrs Burlington Brown and the magistrate’s wife are hardly speaking – something to do with who should pour the tea.

Miss Eunice Burlington Brown, while escorting me, will continue to question me about my cousin Edward, she has got it into her head that he is an eligible gentleman farmer. Then there will be a continuation of a chess tournament this afternoon: there was some surprise when I asked to compete; it was expected to be only men but I explained that my sister was a chess player par excellence and had taught me. I then beat the magistrate, which was I think considered ill-mannered. This afternoon I am to play Mr Nicholas Tennyson – the Burlington Browns will disapprove and think I somehow engineered to play him deliberately, that he has taken my heart since he saved my life.

How little they know of me and my heart.

I like Mr Tennyson very much all the same, and he and I will again discuss Coleridge. As far as we both know he did not make a long sea journey like ours – yet we note the power and knowledge of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ again and again; how on these still, tropical days the Amaryllis is
      
like a painted ship
      
upon a painted ocean.

I think often of Mary and myself, poring over our books in the upstairs drawing room, trying to make some sort of intelligent sense of the world. And all the time the world was here: the sea and the stars and the sky stretching outwards and upwards and onwards – I have the strangest feeling that I am in eternity, that I am in the world
as a whole
, that is the only way I can describe what I am feeling. When the Bible spoke of eternity I didn’t understand – now I feel I do – that this is God’s world and we are infinitesimal creatures in it. And I
know
that somewhere in this vastness Mary is here too.

*   *   *

That evening the cabin passengers, including the ladies, sat on the deck to try to catch a breeze. The men, with the ladies’ permission, smoked their cigars and the smoke drifted upwards. The sound of the sea was like a soft whisper. The Captain explained again how sailors had learnt to take what wind they could in these latitudes, tacking east and west, until, in two days or twenty days, they caught the soft trade winds which would fill their sails and take them southwards.

Although night had fallen the sky seemed to shine with light. The Captain pointed out to his passengers the stars, allowing them to understand that so far had they sailed already, that the stars too had changed. From the main deck came the sound of the concertina, and voices singing.

When other lips and other hearts

Their tales of love shall tell,

In language whose excess imparts

The pow’r they feel so well,

There may perhaps in such a scene,

Some recollection be,

Of days that have as happy been,

And you’ll remember me …

Miss Eunice Burlington Brown cast a glance at Mr Aloysius Porter: her sister-in law had pointed out, and she had noticed herself, that he smiled a great deal, which perhaps was not a good sign: much smiling made a man a little frivolous perhaps. Mr Nicholas Tennyson cast a glance at the beautiful Miss Harriet Cooper who sat so quietly, but in the light of the stars he saw that her thoughts were far, far away.

Sometimes something flashed in the distance: lightning or a comet or a shooting star falling towards the sea. Sometimes phosphorescence danced along the top of the water, silver in the darkness, glittering beside the bows. And on the horizon the gentle trade winds sighed, waiting for the
Amaryllis.

*   *   *

TO THE DEAR READERS OF MY JOURNAL

25 January 1850

Today is the sxtieth day since we left Gravesend and on this day the Captain has informed us that the trade winds have taken us, at last, far enough south: we are approaching the Cape of Good Hope and will be turning eastwards. The weather, which has been so balmy in those warm winds, and so beautiful, has changed yet again: almost a week ago the barometer fell and it has been raining for two days. Nobody cares about the rain – when he made this announcement everybody rushed to the railing to peer into the horizon. Just to
see
land would be enough, just to know we are not alone in the wide world we are traversing. But stare as we would no land materialised – we are too far from the African coast and anyway the grey rain clouds hang heavy over us and we can see nothing. The Amaryllis is our world and there is nothing else.

The passengers on the
Amaryllis
did however see something unexpected on the sixtieth day: another ship. They could not believe their eyes and there were great cries of excitement. At first they thought it was a ship returning to England: people rushed to write letters, or seal up written ones in the hope that mail could be exchanged. Miss Eunice Burlington Brown was dismayed to see Mr Aloysius Porter writing at length and feared it was to another woman. Mr Nicholas Tennyson noted that Harriet did not write anything.

But as the ships came closer together, close enough to see tiny stick people moving about, flags were run up and messages were exchanged. And it was found that the vessel was a Portuguese ship which had recently been damaged in a storm, sailing home from Africa. The disappointment on the
Amaryllis
at not meeting some other human beings was extraordinary, and people offered to speak to the Portuguese with sign language. But Captain Stark, looking at the way the clouds formed menacingly over his ship, sailed onwards.

Captain Stark had reason to be anxious. The weather was deteriorating badly, especially to the eastwards: was his poor sturdy ship to be caught in another bad storm? He made a decision not to travel east but to venture further south, perhaps as far as the island of Tristan da Cunha where there was a tiny settlement and where whaleboats stopped for water. At dusk the first iceberg reared out of the mist: this now was another danger in the South Atlantic Ocean. Low over the
Amaryllis
an albatross flew: here was its latitude rather than further north where Harriet and Hetty had stared in amazement. Winds roared about the ship, ropes flew outwards, torn from the sails, mountainous waves again appeared.

Night followed day and the Captain seldom left the helm; he and his men watched for icebergs, sailing with only the rigging, tossing and rolling with the ocean. The cabin passengers tied themselves in their beds; the steerage passengers pleaded with the crew not to nail them down, at least not till the last possible moment, knowing many of the people below could hardly bear another lockup; the Captain did not heed them: the
Amaryllis
must not founder. Terrified screams were caught on the wind, but nobody heard. Every night Harriet tied herself to Mary’s thin bed the way she had been taught; in a strange way she knew no fear: she told herself over and over as the
Amaryllis
flew forward and then smashed downwards,
I would rather die than go back.
On one such night she realised she had turned eighteen.

Finally, but without anyone catching even the smallest glimpse of the wild barren cliffs or the whaling station of Tristan da Cunha, the
Amaryllis
managed to tack eastwards and the wind began to take the ship with it. Suddenly, for some days, the ship made extraordinary progress with the wind – in two days and nights they travelled nearly five hundred miles. And then another contrary gale would catch them and all the effort of the crew was simply to stay afloat and not hit the white ice that would appear so unexpectedly.

The winds subsided a little.

Once again wild faces appeared on deck from steerage; once again there was a funeral. A pregnant woman had died trying to give birth in the worst of the gales, the baby had never breathed. As the winds still blew they buried them together in one canvas shroud, the baby in the mother’s arms. Harriet wept as they laid the shroud on the flapping Union Jack, at the useless, terrifying death of a woman, at the birth of a dead child.
Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven,
the passengers prayed.

One day the Captain appeared in the dining saloon in his uniform as if he had not been standing at the wheel in oilskins for days and nights. He told Harriet, who was clutching the table and trying to eat some cold beans as water eddied about her feet, that if she could see into the distance due northward she would see the continent of India: nothing lay between the
Amaryllis
and the beautiful flowers and the spices and the coloured birds and the sunshine. And Harriet smiled at him, and at the imagined scent of tropical flowers instead of cold beans and the smell of rancid fat.

The winds subsided further and they felt a warmth in the air.

And now the passengers knew that they had come much more than halfway. It was already February. By midway through March they might reach their destination. For the first time Harriet began to think properly about her cousin Edward Cooper, about when he might have arrived; about what she herself would do in this new land with her new life. She tried to imagine the surprise on his dear, round face when one day she came into his view. And she felt a great, great surge of relief, that soon now she would be with someone who knew her. With all the other passengers she laid clothes and blankets in the warmer air. She helped Hetty, whose arm seemed not be healing, whose natural high spirits seemed now so subdued, to dry her few belongings from her tiny space in steerage. Harriet was careful not to offend the Captain’s proprieties, but nevertheless insisted on working with Hetty in the sunshine, helping her because she could not do it herself, to lay out blankets, to tie a thin dress to the ship’s railing so that the winds would dry it. They sang ‘Home, Sweet Home’ as they worked, singing always cheered Hetty a little, but Harriet thought how she disliked the song; at least until home meant something other than Bryanston Square. She asked the doctor to look at Hetty’s arm: he said he was too busy, the arm would knit if Hetty kept still.