The Touch (3 page)

So near, and yet so far, thought Elizabeth, eyelids drooping; my sister Jean, who started all of this, lives in Princes Street. Yet Alastair and Mary have to hire a room in the railway hotel, and will go back to Kinross without so much as setting eyes on her. “I am not receiving,” her curt note had said.

The eyelids fell, she crashed into sleep sitting curled in one corner with her cheek against the icy window.

“Poor little thing,” said Mrs. Watson. “Help me make her more comfortable, Richard. It is a sad state of affairs when Scotland has to send its children twelve thousand miles to find a husband.”

SCREW-DRIVEN steamships cut their way across the North Atlantic from Britain to New York in six or seven days, but there was no coal to fuel a steamship en route to the opposite end of the world. That was still served by sail.

Aurora was a four-masted barque with double topsails, square-rigged on her foremast and mainmast, fore-and-aft-rigged on her mizzens, and she completed the twelve thousand miles to Sydney in two and a half months, stopping only once, in Capetown. Down the Atlantic, then across the Southern Ocean into the Pacific. Her cargo consisted of several hundred water-flushing ceramic toilets and cisterns, two barouche carriages, suites of expensive walnut furniture, cotton and woollen fabrics, bolts of fragile French lace, crates of books and magazines, jars of English marmalade, tins of treacle, four Matthew Boulton & Watt steam engines, a consignment of brass doorknobs, and, in her strongroom, many very large cases marked with the skull-and-crossbones. On her way home, she’d carry thousands of bags of wheat and her strongroom would exchange cases marked with the skull-and-crossbones for gold bullion.

Much against the will of her master, a fanatical woman-hater, Aurora took a dozen passengers of both sexes in some degree of comfort, though she owned no staterooms and her cooks were of the plainest kind—plenty of fresh-baked bread, salty butter kept in insulated firkins, boiled beef and whiskery potatoes, and floury puddings laced with jam or treacle.

Though Elizabeth found her sea legs halfway across the Bay of Biscay, Mrs. Watson did not, which meant that Elizabeth’s time was taken up in ministering to her. Not a distasteful duty, as Mrs. Watson was a kind soul who seemed to labor under many burdens. The three of them had one cabin blessed with a porthole and a small maid’s cubicle opening off it; Aurora hadn’t entered the English Channel before Mr. Watson announced that he would sleep in the passengers’ saloon to give the women privacy. At first Elizabeth wondered why this news distressed poor Mrs. Watson so, then realized that much of the Watsons’ poverty stemmed from Mr. Watson’s penchant for strong drink.

Oh, but it was cold! Not until they passed the Cape Verde Islands did the winter weather finally lift, and by then Mrs. Watson was coughing badly. At Capetown her frightened husband sobered sufficiently to call a doctor, who pulled his mouth down and shook his head.

“If you want your wife to live, sir, I suggest you bring her ashore here and sail no farther,” he said.

But what to do with Elizabeth?

Fortified by half a pint of gin, Mr. Watson didn’t stop to ask himself this question, and Mrs. Watson, lapsed into stupor, couldn’t ask it. The two of them were off the ship with all their belongings not half an hour after the doctor had departed, leaving Elizabeth to fend for herself.

If Captain Marcus had had his way, Elizabeth would have been bundled after them, but he reckoned without taking one of his three other women passengers into account. She called a meeting between herself, the two married couples, the three sober single gentlemen, and Captain Marcus.

“The girl goes ashore,” Aurora’s master said, tone adamant.

“Oh, come, Captain!” said Mrs. Augusta Halliday. “To put a sixteen-year-old ashore in a strange place without a soul to protect her—for the Watsons are no fit guardians—is quite unconscionable! Do it, sir, and I will report you to your owners, to the Master’s Guild and whomsoever else I can think of! Miss Drummond stays aboard.”

As this announcement, delivered with a martial glare in Mrs. Halliday’s eyes, met with murmurs of agreement from the others, Captain Marcus understood that he was beaten.

“If the girl is to stay,” he said between his teeth, “I’ll have no contact between her and my crew. Nor any contact between her and any male passenger, married or single, drunk or sober. She will be locked in her cabin and take her meals there.”

“As if she were a prisoner?” asked Mrs. Halliday. “That is disgraceful! She must have fresh air and exercise.”

“If she wants fresh air, she can open the porthole, and if she wants exercise, she can jump up and down on one spot, madam. I am master of this vessel, and my word is law. I’ll have no harlotry aboard Aurora.”

So Elizabeth spent the last five weeks of that interminably long voyage locked inside her cabin, sustained by the books and magazines Mrs. Halliday sent her after a hasty trip ashore to Capetown’s only English book-shop. Captain Marcus’s sole concession was to agree that Mrs. Halliday could escort Elizabeth twice around the deck after darkness fell each day, and even then he followed behind, barking at any sailor who came near.

“Like a watchdog,” said Elizabeth with a chuckle.

Once the Watsons quit the ship she had recovered her spirits, despite imprisonment; that she understood, knowing that both her father and Dr. Murray would have approved of the captain’s edict. And it was bliss to have her own domain, a larger one than her little room at home, which she was forbidden to enter until it was time to go to bed. If she stood on tiptoe she could see the ocean through her porthole, a heaving vastness that stretched forever, and during the nightly walks on deck she could hear its hiss, the boom it made when Aurora’s bows hammered down.

Mrs. Halliday, she learned, was the widow of a free settler who had made a modest fortune in Sydney by opening a specialist shop that catered to the best people. Be it ribbons or buttons, stay-laces or whale-bone insertions, stockings or gloves, Sydney society purchased them at Halliday’s Haberdashery.

“After Walter died, I couldn’t wait to go home,” she said to Elizabeth, and sighed. “But home wasn’t what I expected. So very peculiar, that what I had dreamed about all those years turned out to be a figment of my imagination. I have become, though I knew it not, an Australian. Wolverhampton was full of slag heaps and chimneys, and would you believe that I found it hard to understand what people said? I missed my children, my grandchildren, and the space. We tend to think that, just as God made Man in His image, Britannia made Australia in her image. But she has not. Australia is a foreign land.”

“Isn’t it New South Wales?” Elizabeth asked.

“Strictly speaking, yes. But the continent has been called Australia for a long time now, and whether they’re Victorians or New South Welshmen or Queenslanders or from the other colonies, people call themselves Australians. Certainly my children do.”

Alexander Kinross came up in their conversation frequently. Sadly, Mrs. Halliday knew nothing of him.

“It’s four years since I left Sydney, he probably arrived in my absence. Besides, if he’s a single man and doesn’t go into society, only his colleagues would recognize his name. But I am sure,” Mrs. Halliday went on kindly, “that he is above reproach. Otherwise, why send for a cousin to marry? Scoundrels, my dear, tend not to marry at all. Especially if they live on the goldfields.” Her lips drew in, she sniffed. “The goldfields are dens of iniquity plentifully supplied with shady women.” She coughed delicately. “I hope, Elizabeth, that you are acquainted with the duties of marriage?”

“Oh, yes,” Elizabeth answered tranquilly. “My sister-in-law Mary told me what to expect.”

WHEN AURORA entered Port Jackson she was taken in tow by a steamboat; plagued by the presence of a pilot he detested, Captain Marcus was too engrossed to notice that Mrs. Halliday had liberated Elizabeth from her confinement, taken her up on deck to point out with proprietary pride the landmarks of what the good lady called “the grandest harbor in the world.”

Yes, Elizabeth supposed that it was grand, gaze absorbing massive orange cliffs crowned by thick blue-grey forests. Sandy bays, gentler slopes, increasing evidence of habitation. The trees, tall and spindling, became replaced by rows and rows of houses, though on some foreshores they remained around what were majestic mansions, whose owners Mrs. Halliday named with succinct comments that ranged from defamation to condemnation. But the air swam with moisture, the sun was unbearably hot, and over all the beauty of this grand harbor lay a terrible stench. Its water, Elizabeth noted, was a dirty, detritus-laden brown.

“March is not a good month to arrive,” Mrs. Halliday said, leaning on the rail. “Always humid. We spend February and March praying for a Southerly Buster, which is a south wind that cools everything down. Is the smell bothering you, Elizabeth?”

“Very much,” said Elizabeth, face pale.

“Sewage,” said Mrs. Halliday. “A hundred and seventy-odd thousand people, and it all flows into the harbor, which is little better than a cesspool. I believe that they intend to do something about it—but when is anybody’s guess, my son Benjamin says. He is on the city council. Water is a difficulty too. The days when it cost a shilling a bucket are gone, but it is still expensive. Few save the colossally rich have a supply laid on.” She snorted. “Mr. John Robertson and Mr. Henry Parkes don’t suffer!”

Captain Marcus descended, roaring.

“To your cabin, Miss Drummond! At once!”

And there Elizabeth remained while Aurora was towed to her berth; then all she could see through the porthole were masts, all she could hear were bellowing voices, the chug of an engine.

When, it seemed hours later, the knock fell on her door, she leaped off her bunk, heart thudding. But it was only Perkins, the passengers’ steward.

“Your trunks have gone ashore, Miss, and so must you.”

“Mrs. Halliday?” she asked, following him into a chaotic world of winches lowering crates in rope baskets, ruddy-faced men in flannel shirts, sailors whistling and jeering.

“Oh, she disembarked a long time ago. Asked me to give you this.” Perkins fished in his waistcoat pocket and handed her a small card. “If you need her, you can find her there.”

Down the gangplank, across the filthy boards of the wharf between high stacks of crates and cases—where were her trunks?

Having found them in a relatively peaceful corner against the wall of a tumbledown shed, Elizabeth sat on one, put her purse in her lap and folded her hands on top of it. Where to go, what to do? Thinking that if Alexander Kinross saw the Drummond tartan he would recognize her at once, she was wearing one of her home-made dresses, but this was not the weather for serge wool; in fact, she thought, dazed with heat, little of what reposed in her trunks was suitable for this climate. Sweat dewed her face, ran down the back of her neck from her hair, confined inside a matching bonnet, and soaked through her calico underwear into the Drummond tartan.

And after all that, it was she who recognized him in an instant, thanks to Miss MacTavish. She sat looking down a narrow lane between the off-loaded cargo and saw a man who walked as if he owned the world. Tall and rather slender, he was dressed in clothes strange to her eyes, used to men in working flannels and caps, or in the splendor of kilts, or in somber suits over shirts stiff with starch and stiff hats upon their heads. Whereas he wore soft trousers made of some fawn-colored skin, an unstarched shirt with a scarf at its neck, an open coat of the same skin that dangled long fringes from its arm seams and hem, and a soft fawn hat with a low crown and wide brim. Under the hat was a thin, deeply tanned face; his hair was black sprinkled with grey and curled on to his shoulders, and his black beard and mustache, greyer than his hair, were carefully trimmed into the exact same style as the Devil wore.

She rose to her feet, at which moment he noticed her.

“Elizabeth?” he asked, hand out.

She didn’t take it. “You know that I am not Jean?”

“Why should I think you Jean when you’re obviously not?”

“But you—you wrote for—for Jean,” she floundered, not daring to look at his face.

“And your father wrote offering me you instead. It’s quite immaterial,” said Alexander Kinross, turning to signal to a man in his wake. “Load her trunks into the cart, Summers. I’ll take her to the hotel in a hackney.” Then, to her: “I’d have found you sooner if my dynamite hadn’t chanced to be aboard your ship. I had to clear it and get it safely stowed before some enterprising villain got to it first. Come.”

One hand beneath her elbow, he guided her through the aisle and out into what seemed an enormously wide street that was as much a depot as a thoroughfare, littered with goods and crowded with men attacking the wood-block paving with picks.

“They’re putting the railway through to the docks,” Alexander Kinross said as he thrust her upward into one of several loitering hackneys. Then, as soon as he was seated beside her: “You’re hot. It’s no wonder, in those clothes.”

Finding her courage, she turned her head to study his face properly. Miss MacTavish was right, he wasn’t handsome, though his features were regular enough. Perhaps that they were not Drummond or Murray features? Hard to believe that he was her own first cousin. But what chilled Elizabeth was his definite resemblance to the Devil. Not only in beard and mustache; his brows were jet-black and sharply pointed, and his eyes, sunk deep between black lashes, were so dark that she could not distinguish pupil from iris.

He returned her scrutiny, but with more detachment. “I’d expected you to be like Jean—fair,” he said.

“I take after the Black Scot Murrays.”

Came a smile; it was indeed, as Miss MacTavish had said, a wonderful smile, but no part of Elizabeth’s anatomy went weak at the sight of it. “So do I, Elizabeth.” He reached out a hand and put it under her chin to turn her face to the brilliant light. “But your eyes are remarkable—dark, yet not brown or black. Navy-blue. That’s good! It says there’s a chance our sons will look more like Scots than we do.”