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sky, the deep drowsy sighs of the women around her - she had forgotten that a regiment of men lay so
very close.
She pressed her hand. Lightly. Tentatively.
The hand pressed back.
“Darling?” said a voice beneath the canvas. No more than a whisper, but she heard it
quite distinctly and recognized the speaker: Anthony Weaver.
Geraldine had watched him every day since the voyage began. It had been a challenging
quest, for days upon end would pass without the female passengers coming into any sustained contact
with the male. Furthermore, Rose was a hawk, rarely giving Geraldine the freedom to mingle with
those on the lesser decks, no matter what their gender. That was, until the doldrums had seized the
ship and all rules had seemed to go out the window. Over the last three weeks Geraldine had
conversed with Anthony daily. At times, it had seemed he was flirting with her but Geraldine was
inexperienced with men beyond her family circle and hard-pressed to tell the difference between
socially-required politeness and genuine interest. Anthony always seemed to be close by, this was
true. But perhaps it was more in service to his commander’s sickly wife than due to any true desire
for congress with Geraldine.
There was not a single book in her father’s library that could help a woman at a time like
this.
The hand again. Not against the canvas wall now, but rather slipped below it, lifting
back a fold of the heavy cloth. Just enough to allow him to slide a palm underneath, to inch out his
fingertips until they touched her bare arm.
“Darling?” he said again.
How had he found her in the dark? She remembered him standing on the deck as the sail
was being lowered. She had been among the ladies, of course, and he among the men. But for a
moment their eyes had met. He had taken note of where she had been on the women’s side, and he
must have aligned himself opposite her.
How bold of him, she thought. And how mad to do this without knowing what her
reaction might be. She could easily have pulled away, screamed. Alerted Rose, who would not have
hesitated to bring the entire ship down around his ears.
But Geraldine did not scream. Instead, she rolled toward him.
For she had come to India to change herself, you see. She had known precisely what it
meant for a woman to round the corner of thirty - as definitive a milestone as rounding the Cape of
Good Hope - and to still have no matrimonial harbor in sight. Back in the family estate in Leeds, she
had thus determined months ago, perhaps even years, to be a different kind of woman – independent,
adventurous, unheeding of the calls of society’s crows. To do this she would have to leave her old
self behind, to abandon pieces of her history with each step of her journey.
This seemed as good a time as any to leave this particular part behind.
Geraldine knew she was not pretty. Neither was she feminine nor graceful and she
furthermore knew that the ardors of the long voyage had robbed her of whatever small delicacies she
might once have claimed. By the time Anthony Weaver groped beneath the canvas sail and found her
hand, she was sunburned and windblown, her skin coarsened by the continual sting of salt, her eyelids
heavy with the cumulative exhaustion of innumerable days and nights without sleep.
So even at the time she had wondered why he had chosen her. The men would
outnumber the women once they docked, but here, on the boat, females were the commodity in
excess. Anthony Weaver was the only man among them who was of a marriageable age and not a