On Starlit Seas Page 21

  Richard almost stamped his foot. ‘You think I can’t do it.’

  ‘Do you believe it may be of profit?’

  Richard nodded. ‘In my gut.’

  The feeling twisted as surely as if the captain had a loaded die or a hidden ace up his sleeve. Henderson had bested old man Fry – six guineas a sack was a crazy amount for wild beans that cost nothing to grow.

  Mr Fry stroked his chin. Perhaps it was a good idea to give Richard a run. It might get this restlessness out of his system. ‘Perhaps it’s time you struck out on your own.’ He pushed down the window and beckoned to the captain, who was seeing them off from the foot of the gangplank. ‘Might you have a free berth on your trip to London, Captain?’ he asked. ‘Richard wishes to visit his cousins in Marylebone. If you can accommodate him, I will gladly pay his passage.’

  Henderson bowed. ‘It would be an honour.’ He smiled. ‘We will make way once we are unloaded.’

  Fry waved his hand regally. ‘Most obliged.’ He tapped his stick on the roof to set the cab in motion, leaving his son to oversee the transportation of his latest purchase.

  *

  Maria broke her fast in her room and dressed. It was strange to be so steady after the constant movement of the ship, and to be so far from Henderson. For weeks now they had moved around each other as if in orbit. This morning, she realised she had no idea of his whereabouts. The stage was not due for hours. She peered out of the window onto the cobbles. At least it was dry and bright. The weather in England was so changeable. She felt tremendously English, taking an interest again in rain clouds and breaks of blue sky – abroad, things were predictable and people only noted the extremes: the earthquakes and the thunderstorms. Because of her long shipboard confinement and the brisk sunshine, it was difficult to keep to her room. Her journey to London would take two days at least, and quite probably three. For much of that time she would be confined to a carriage. She tried not to think of the Bittersweet.

  Maria had formulated her plan. First she would visit Thomas’s family in Mayfair, where she would lodge, and then Murray. She must also visit her aunt and, more pleasantly, one or two of her favourite booksellers. Maria could get any editions she desired from Murray, but she had a fondness for bookshops, bar one. Mr Thompson, off the Strand, had made it clear that he did not approve of ladies writing, especially about serious matters. He refused to stock her titles. Mr Bromer and Mr Thin were kinder, more enlightened gentlemen. She would take the prestigious business of the young princess’s education to their establishments and buy leather-bound editions for the court schoolroom. Her Imperial Highness had given Maria a letter of introduction to a London bank that would secure more than adequate funds for everything the princess might require.

  Maria wondered what changes the last three years had wrought on the capital. London was in a constant state of flux – new buildings and, she had heard, a horse-drawn tram in the West End. She longed to see it, and to read the latest proofs. The capital was girded in scientific advances. She looked forward to discussing them. Still, as well as moving towards these wonders, she was also moving away from something. Maria stretched, raising her hands high and then pushing them as low again. Highs and lows, she thought. There was no argument against the fact that becoming Mrs Henderson was out of the question. And yet the thought of the captain warmed her cheeks. She checked the cobbles once more. Three black men were transporting barrels on a wagon. Maria smiled. It was pleasant to know here, at least, all men were free. And what, she wondered, of the women? I am free, she told herself, though she knew it wasn’t entirely true.

  Finding her cape, she set out for the park. Being able to stride out still felt like a luxury. She was unhindered by the footmen walking the lapdogs of the fashionable, almost the only other occupants of the wide green spaces so early in the day, bar one or two prompt gentlemen riders. She considered extending an early call to Mrs Fry or, indeed, Mrs Falconer, the hostess from the evening before, but Maria was not really interested in society and she feared that instead of speeding the time towards her departure, such an activity might make it drag. Besides, calling at such an early hour would only disturb the ladies. She did not wish to visit the Fry factory without Henderson. That would feel like a betrayal. Instead, she cut out of the park and picked a path along the fine terraces, following the line of the rooftops and peeking into the long windows to catch sight of the Indian cabinets, sculpted Chinese dragons and elegant palms in the more fashionable upstairs drawing rooms.

  Maria had never had a drawing room of her own. In Italy she had rented a house, but nothing in it had been of her own choosing. Likewise in Chile and in Brazil. Since she and Thomas married, the couple had moved almost constantly. She had followed him from ship to ship, writing one book after another. As she swung back past the theatre where the playbills were being pasted for the evening’s performance of The Prince of Homburg, it struck her suddenly that she had been in perpetual motion for years now, always missing the next play, the upcoming concert and news of her friends. Apart from her books, she had not amassed even commonplace possessions – pieces of furniture or paintings. To own a painting and to have it with her would be a pleasant extravagance, she realised. It was one that up till now she had not missed. A flutter of melancholy turned her stomach. Had she been running from something all these years, scattering her opportunities to stay in one place and establish something real and lasting? Her mother had tended a garden and Maria had never appreciated that – the art of making plans and growing them to fruition. She made friends wherever she went, or, rather, acquaintances, but the people in her life came and went – few of them were constant. To know somewhere or someone completely was rare. Instead she chose the constant stimulation of different cultures and the kaleidoscope of company that went with them. Is that what was troubling her? A picture of Captain Henderson’s cabin and his long box bed flashed across her mind’s eye, the sight of it a humiliation. What on earth is wrong with me? she thought. Will I never be content? Surely she had everything that any woman of sense might desire. London feted her. She had friends. She had family. She had reviews.

  That afternoon, Henderson did not arrive. Time dragged until it was too late to go anywhere or to see anything. She tried not to linger by the window, so, almost at four of the clock, the sound of his steps in the hallway came as a welcome surprise. She curtseyed as he entered and he immediately apologised, bowing very low.

  ‘I wish you would allow me to take you to London, Maria. There is still time to change your mind.’

  Mrs Graham drew herself up. It was going to be difficult whenever they did this. It might as well be now. ‘I have matters to attend.’

  ‘The post is an arduous way to travel – far worse even than the Bittersweet.’

  She liked that he kept his sense of humour.

  The boy had come for her trunk and the bags already. The coach was downstairs, the first set of horses harnessed in place. There wasn’t long. Maria did not look at him.

  ‘Will you avoid me in London, Mrs Graham?’

  ‘I will not see you in London, Captain Henderson, or at least I doubt it. A lady cannot call—’

  He cut in. ‘I could call on you.’

  She nodded. ‘If you do, I will receive you gladly. If I can be of any help . . .’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked.

  She nodded, but offered no address, time or definite arrangement.

  He paused. ‘I shall accompany you down.’

  In the yard, two girls leaned against the side of a cart, lazily watching the coach loading. One dandled the other’s fingers flirtatiously in her own. The boy from the inn had loaded the bags and now sat crouched on a stool, cleaning a leather apron with a brush. Maria checked to see if Henderson noticed the vignette, but his eyes stayed on her. He kissed her hand as he handed her up. A man and a woman in the carriage shifted as she found her place. Maria wished she had removed her glove. Her heart was pounding with the terror of never seeing him again, of
making a mistake. Maria Graham did not make mistakes. She could not afford them. She peered down, feeling as she had when she was a child and her father left on a voyage. She felt unaccountably alone, although this time she was the one leaving.

  ‘Goodbye then,’ he said. ‘I shall call on you in town.’

  ‘For London, Miss? Charing Cross?’ the coachman asked as he slammed the door.

  She lifted a hand to wave, but Henderson’s figure was obliterated by muddy glass. The coachman mounted and the carriage moved off. The female passenger smiled apologetically.

  ‘It’s a long journey,’ she observed. ‘Three days, the fellow said.’

  Maria nodded. It felt like one of the longest journeys she would ever undertake. I’m doing the right thing, she repeated to herself silently, and dragged her attention away from the vague receding figure still waving from the inn’s gatepost.

  Long after the coach had disappeared round a faraway corner, Henderson stood in the eye of the courtyard.

  ‘Goodbye, Maria,’ he murmured. ‘I shall see you there.’

  20

  On board the Bittersweet

  The night before the Thames came into view, the captain perched by the prow, waiting for the first sight of the city to appear over the horizon. He couldn’t sleep. Here it was – the city of his childhood. He did not want to miss his first glimpse. In the dark, he remembered his mother taking his hand, helping him to walk downstairs in his new shoes when he was very small. He visualised the chimneys belching smoke into the snowy sky, a line across the slate roofs he could see from his nursery window all those years ago.

  Installed in the second cabin, Fry had been observing Henderson these last days. The boy was adept at gaming, and after his first night aboard Clarkson reported he had won at crown and anchor, fleecing several of the men. Henderson had taken the boy aside as the mate looked on, breakfast cooling on the plates sent from the galley.

  ‘It’s not right, Richard. Mr Clarkson says you have talent, but we don’t gamble with the men. If they end up owing you money . . .’

  ‘People are never just taken as they are,’ Richard spat, hard-eyed.

  The captain stood up to him. ‘You’re not in need of the money.’

  ‘No. It’s the skill I enjoy.’

  Clarkson crossed his arms, as if he were the boy’s nanny. The mate had grown fond of Fry already – the boy was eager to learn, if a touch difficult. He clearly had talent, but it wasn’t obvious yet where that talent lay, beyond the gaming table. ‘A boy of seventeen making his own way is mostly just lucky,’ he said. ‘But you’ve a way with the dice, that I’ll admit.’

  ‘Plenty boys are married at seventeen. My cousin is married,’ Fry sulked.

  The captain, observing this exchange, gave a wry grin. He wasn’t sure if his amusement was at Fry’s surly manner or Clarkson clucking like a mother hen.

  ‘My brothers make their way,’ the boy objected.

  ‘Your brothers? Is that what this is about?’ the captain said. ‘What made you want to come aboard, Richard? The post is a quicker way to town. I am happy to afford you passage, but I’m curious.’

  Fry paused and drew up his courage. Things had changed since he left Bristol. Though he’d engaged in laying wagers, in only a few hours on the Bittersweet he had found something that intrigued him even more than the fall of the dice. Clarkson and his crew were tough – a breed of men he hadn’t exactly encountered among the poverty-stricken slums. They worked as a team under the captain, who engendered a flinty respect. The crew told tales about how Henderson had brought down one man or another, or saved the ship by navigating through a storm. Fry’s fascination in these heroes of the wide world was crystallising now, and he decided to admit it. He rolled the words around his mouth as if they were a slowly melting bonbon. ‘I wanted to see what you were up to, Captain Henderson. I had a feeling about the Bittersweet. I came to search it out, and I was right.’

  Henderson removed his hat and scratched his head. ‘A feeling about what? You can’t make decisions on superstitions and hocus-pocus, Fry. London is a big city and it will hold its own dangers. You know that, don’t you?’

  Richard laconically raised a fist. ‘I can punch,’ he said. ‘I’ve fought my way out of trouble before.’

  ‘No more gambling with the men, son,’ Henderson ordered. ‘And your fists won’t do. London’s the biggest city in the world. Fetch Mr Fry a knife, Mr Clarkson. That at least will be a start.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  Clarkson disappeared below decks, and Henderson put his hand on Fry’s shoulder and leaned in. He felt, if not paternal, at least fraternal.

  ‘It must be boring, I suppose,’ he said kindly. ‘I was twelve when I left home for Brazil and it was too soon, in truth, but I was summoned. Still, I can imagine the lack of spice, if it gets later and a chap has some pluck. You look like you could punch like a rocket, but you need experience. You don’t want to get killed on account of curiosity.’

  Understanding flooded Fry’s eyes. ‘Do you think that’s what it is?’ he whispered. ‘Curiosity? I don’t want to be a fop. It’s easy for a chap to appear simple. Like Reeves and all his sugar money. He knows nothing about the real world. I want something to do – not just do-gooding but something that earns respect.’

  ‘I tell you what.’ Henderson drew a pack of cards from his pocket. ‘I’ll teach you a game I learned last year in America. They call it poker. At least it’ll keep you away from my men.’

  Fry nodded as Clarkson reappeared and gave the boy the weapon he’d retrieved from below decks. ‘The blade could do with sharpening, Mr Fry, but it’s good enough. I can have one of the crew see to it for you,’ the mate offered.

  ‘No,’ the captain interceded, laying the cards to one side. If Fry wanted experience, then best give it to him. ‘That’s not what Mr Fry is after, is it, Richard? Take him down and show him how to keen it himself, Clarkson.’

  Richard’s eyes had burned with delight and later they stayed up late discussing the merits of the five-card trick and arm-wrestling like junior officers in His Majesty’s senior service.

  Now, almost at London, sleepless and settled in his place in the ship’s pecking order, the boy joined Henderson at the prow.

  ‘Not far to go.’ Fry shivered, leaning over the side to see the movement of the water. The misty air curled off the surface. It was so cold he could see his breath.

  ‘We could do with some chocolate to perk us up, eh?’ The captain was cheery.

  From the galley they could hear Thatcher snoring, his hammock strung across the room.

  ‘A chap requires an edible chocolate block in situations such as these.’ Henderson smiled. ‘Something to be eaten straight from the pocket by a working man about his business. Wouldn’t that be the thing?’

  ‘That’s an extraordinary idea.’ Richard’s mind whirred. ‘The bar would need to be soft. Perhaps the consistency of a slice of cheese. And we’d need to add sugar.’ Fry’s stomach growled as he imagined the rich taste of melting chocolate slipping down his gullet. Why had no one thought of it before? The recipe would be worth a fortune. For an instant, Richard missed his brother. ‘Delicious to eat,’ he whispered.

  The captain certainly had some stimulating ideas.

  After sun up, the Bittersweet banked up the Thames. The state of the river left Henderson open-mouthed. The water was fetid through Tilbury, North Fleet and Grays, green where it wasn’t brown, a mass of sewage and discarded rubbish. At low tide, pockmarked children picked their way through the mudflats, looking for shellfish, poking the ground with twigs as thin as their grubby legs. At Deptford, when the men spotted the first corpse, an eerie silence descended. Time slowed. The crew kept about their business, all eyes to the deck, stolidly ignoring the bodies of dead smugglers and pirates hanged at Execution Dock. One man, untarred, at Rainham Marsh was almost covered in gulls. He must have been freshly sentenced – the soft parts of his body easy pickings.

  Henderson r
emoved his hat but refused to avert his gaze. He was no coward. ‘There is no shame, lads,’ Henderson called. ‘Poor buggers. It’s a good thing we’re a merchant vessel, eh?’

  A burst of bile-yellow ragwort poured out of cracks in the brickwork and fissures in the mud as a growing flotilla of bargemen, armed to the teeth, every one as violent as a South Seas pirate, called out their wares. ‘Take you up the Thames, guvnor. As far as Shoreditch for tuppence. I’m robbing myself. Sixpence to Chelsea.’ Business was brisk. The waterway, after all, was safer than the shore. A fog hung heavily in the morning air, blackened by the soot of a thousand chimneys. Two long-dead horses, putrid and bloated, were caught in abandoned netting that staked them to the shore. Rooks and crows cawed over the carrion, the black birds seen off periodically by cloud-white gulls with beaks like golden razors.

  As the river curled back on itself, Henderson remembered the house where he grew up near Covent Garden, with its genteel cornicing strung like lace around the drawing room ceiling. There had been dancing classes, private gardens and flocks of scrawny sparrows along the road on Soho Square. It had been refined. Clean. Ordered. Not like this.

  He decided to dock at Greenwich, as Sam Pearson had suggested. From the water, there was sight of not one church but two, the long grey spires reaching above the rooftops. Not that the place seemed set to be a centre of spiritual delights – there were plenty of hostelries to keep the men supplied. The stink of the river was almost overcome now by the waft of baking pies, sold from open-fronted stalls along the main street. Music emanated from public houses and further along a girl played a tin pipe and danced a jig for ha’pennies between tomcatting with anyone who would pay her – a whore to be had standing up.

  Most of the crew were given shore leave immediately. Clarkson set a rota detailing work for the remaining men. Once dismissed, Big Al Thatcher moved so quickly you’d think he was jumping ship in broad daylight. Taking no chances, he stowed an eight-inch blade in his belt and disappeared into the maze to visit his sister, who kept a draper’s shop two hours’ walk along the water. ‘I’ll be a right surprise,’ he beamed. ‘That is if she’s still there and with the same fella. She’s always been flighty, our Jenny.’