9308-3953

In the beginning of the fourth week, something shifted. Not the winds and not the sails,
but within the mood of the passengers. A sort of frenzied, devil-may-care energy possessed the ship.
People laughed, sometimes rather maniacally. Some sang, and others danced. The crew, never
circumspect in this regard, doubled their amount of drink and one woman, in a sleepwalking sort of
stupor, attempted to throw herself overboard.
The captain had seen it all before. He knew well enough what the doldrums could do to
a group of people and he’d be damned if it would happen again on his watch. Not with a shipload of
middle class ladies entrusted to his care. He ordered that everyone must sleep up on deck. The heat
was the danger, he declared. The heat and the lack of true rest for them all.
And so that very night, with the sun burning the edges of the water to red, they all
trooped up on deck from their various cabins. The passengers from the posh staterooms and those
poor souls crammed into the lesser berths below. From the wife of the Secretary-General to the
cook’s spindly-legged galley boy, they all stood before him, holding their bedclothes in their arms,
their eyes mutely begging him to deliver them from their misery, if only for a single night.
In order to preserve what was left of the group’s rapidly dwindling sense of propriety,
the captain ordered that the useless mainsail be lowered from its mast and stretched across the length
of the deck. It became a canvas wall between the sixteen men and twenty-seven women, and, after a
bit of fuss, everyone made up their pallets and lay down to sleep.
Almost immediately they were thrilled with the unaccustomed sense of an evening
breeze, cooling their bodies for the first time since the ship had rounded the Cape. And then, as the
sun sank completely, they were treated to a canopy of stars. The constellations of the Southern
Hemisphere were strange to most of them. One of the more scholarly sailors called out the names in
the darkness - Orion, Taurus, and of course the Southern Cross. The men could see where he was
pointing, but from their side of the canvas wall, the women had to work a bit harder to find the
promised figures in the ink-dark sky.
The fact that Rose Everlee was married to the Secretary-General of the whole of the
Bombay Presidency, made her without question the most valuable cargo on the ship. But she was also
an enormous pain in the arse and she chose this moment – just when tranquility and even a sort of
enchantment was beginning to settle over the ship – to whisper that she was getting a headache.
Geraldine was not surprised. Rose had announced one headache after another since they left London,
the tedium only occasionally interrupted by announcements that Rose had a backache.
So Geraldine had scooted over on her pallet, just enough to allow Rose to push to her
feet and make her unsteady way across a deckful of dozing women. To go back to the hell of the cabin
and the heaven of the opium that awaited her there. Geraldine was relieved to have her gone. She
could now wiggle into Rose’s prime location on the deck and thus better hear the droning voice of the
impromptu astronomer. For Geraldine was a bit of a scientist in her way, the daughter of a botanist
and the sister to a naturalist, and she knew that when she returned to England, her father and brother
would expect to hear a full account of her experiences on the lower half of the globe.
But most of all Geraldine was relieved because with Rose out of the way she was for
once alone within the privacy of her own thoughts. She stretched out on her back, looking up at this
foreign sky, reveling in the luxury of the doubled pallet, and running her fingertips along the gently
undulating folds of the canvas wall.
There was a sudden movement on the other side. A hand, she believed. A hand moving
in response to her own.
Geraldine froze. Somehow, in the freedom of the setting - the cool breeze, the expansive