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water on a dreamer, but it is still effective.”
Geraldine thought she was too young to have known heartbreak? That was quite the
laugh. And proof, Emma supposed, that we all suffer from a type of emotional nearsightedness,
seeing the people closest to us in a kind of soft-edged blur.
“Are you saying,” she said, “that after your romance with Anthony failed, you knew
without question that you would never marry?”
“That is precisely what I am saying,” said Geraldine. “From the moment I received the
letter telling me that he had married Rose, I saw that the still life of domesticity was not for me. That
my life’s purpose would be placed out against a broader landscape. Heavens, listen to me ramble on,
for I am quite poetic tonight, am I not? Filled to the gills with metaphors. Tapestries and paintings
and cold water and the like.”
Emma shook her head and pushed away from the railing. “I know you think I am too
young to understand, and in truth I don’t. I’m not sure at all why you answered that horrid man’s letter
or why we are undertaking such a complicated journey. Is it that you feel the need to show him that,
despite or perhaps because of his absence, your life is a grand success?”
It was Geraldine’s turn to be pulled up short. Could that truly be why she had so readily
written to assure Anthony she was on her way? Because she could not resist the chance to show him
the woman she had become – an heiress, a socialite, known and respected in her own right, never
again to serve as the ornament of some undeserving man? But the minute she had the thought,
Geraldine rejected it. No, she was not crossing an ocean merely to gloat. Not to look upon Anthony
in his cell and Rose in her coffin and relish the knowledge that, in the end, she had bested them both.
“Not at all,” she said. “I have come to India with one purpose alone. To face up to my
past.”
“But the past is…past,” Emma said. “That’s rather the whole point, isn’t it?”
“Ah, my dear,” Geraldine said. “You truly are so very young.”
***
The Weeping Susan
April, 1856
It had surprised her to learn that the doldrums were a real thing. Not a synonym for
unhappiness or boredom, as the word was often used on dry land, but rather a feature of the wind.
The Weeping Susan became caught in them just as she neared the equator, which is where the danger
is most acute. Almost at once, the breezes failed. The sails sagged. Even the cawing birds and
chattering porpoises which had followed the ship around the tip of Africa were abruptly,
instantaneously gone. All movement and sound ceased and there they sat, day after day, just as the
poet described.
As idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.
The first week was tolerable. The second, stultifying. In the third week a sort of panic
set in among the passengers, who could see land in the distance and who begged the captain to lower
the rowboats and take them to shore. Anything to escape this floating prison. He refused. ‘Twas
Africa, he said, with a jerk of a thumb toward the verdant land mass. The savages would devour
them before they were ten steps up the beach. Then on the other side, he offered, before anyone could
bother to ask, lay Arabia. Even worse. A land where little children were trained as soldiers and the
knife blades ran as long as a man’s body. And the Arabs, unlike the Africans, were utterly immune to
Christian conversion.