Voyage Out: The Complete Series

Chapter 5

CHAPTER 5

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CHARLOTTE:

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THERE HAD BEEN INTERVALS of unbearable anxiety walking along the boardwalk to meet Lucia at the Chelsea Piers with Aunt Merry and Tilly, who had been elevated from Montrose maid to the ludicrous role of chaperon (it had been the lesser evil, a condition for no other tiresome supervision being foisted upon Lucia and me on the Grand Tour). A porter followed us with my black steamer trunks through the crowds. As Aunt Merry and Tilly looked for the pier where the RMS Mauretania was docked, I kept my eyes alert, scanning the crowds for a Western Union courier hurrying towards me, or of Rhys’s felt Homburg and best Sunday suit, or the possibility of Diego himself arriving with news which would prevent me from boarding the RMS Mauretania. But there were only the ship’s officers and crew, boarding passengers, and their family and friends farewelling them. The noise and cries were not of crisis but of prosaic nautical matters and expressions of love and concern and bon voyage. And then we found and greeted Lucia and her mother and the accompanying entourage. Our boarding of the Cunard passenger liner followed the path of boisterous farewells happening all along the pier. Aunt Merry cried globules of cheerful tears.

I held my breath long after the gangway had been lifted, the last hawser unwound from its piling, and our ship had cast off. No one had come, no urgent message or telegram, no Diego, no Rhys Hadden. I swallowed my relief and joined Lucia in waving back at the people on the pier, at her mother and Aunt Merry and all our friends. No one would know the asphyxiating moments that had transpired. I was grateful to God and to Diego that the three days prior had not been entirely wasted.

When the pounding in my ears quelled, other more natural sounds took their place—the murmur of the ship’s machinery, the busy clamor of activities, the voices of the passengers and stewards moving about, around us, on the main deck, shouts and squeals, cries and laughter of children, the bustling traffic of freighters, tugboats, cargo barges and the other vessels in the harbor, Lower Manhattan, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the New Jersey banks of the Hudson River drifting past, Lucia remarking on this or that sight that she had spotted on the shores—and I remembered walking earlier that morning on the pier with Aunt Merry and Tilly, and listening to the cries of the swooping seagulls overhead, the clanging of chained metal in the waves, the lapping of saltwater and the deep, booming, mournful groans issuing from the great hulking carcasses of the ocean liners docked alongside like whales or sea monsters emerging unsummoned from the deep. In that instant, the anxiety returned—uncertainty, fear, unreasoning hope—and then slowly, and with effort, faded.

Sun and wind buffeted my cheeks. The waves carried us away from the familiar bonds and entanglements. We sailed eastward, towards the rosy-fingered dawn: Europe, our lives ahead of us, New York, our pasts behind us. But a memory remained of one peaceful, unbidden moment—those beautiful, haunting sounds—that had seemed to strike a deep resounding echo within the caverns of my soul and had brought before me the mirage of Destiny, the lovely unknown towards which we were journeying, and what would be lost if the work of the last year and all our endeavors failed.