So she sat with her arms round that other responsibility, the child whose presence had been her secret burden over the last five months.
The sea raked the sides of Bristol Maid with increasing fury. As its spray lashed the deck, in collaboration with more vicious because more substantial whips in the form of snapped cordage, the galley walls strained and vibrated.
Those sheltering inside did not realize that the captain had appeared at the doorway, until he called. ‘Are we in good heart?’
Captain Purdew followed it up with a curiously half-hearted laugh. These whom he was looking over through the doorway were officially his passengers, not pet animals to which he had taken a rash fancy and now regretted having acquired. Had they been pouter-pigeons or white mice — or easiest of all, silkworms, he might have disposed of them without a qualm.
Mr and Mrs Roxburgh assured Captain Purdew that they were in the best of spirits.
From their perch they sat looking back at the one who had them in his keeping, and who, they hoped, was possessed of benign wisdom and superhuman powers in spite of resembling an old, moulted member of the same species, Adam’s apple wobbling above a dirty collar, blue-red flesh thinly stretched over such bones as were visible, and deposits of salt on drooping lids and in the corners of disillusioned eyes.
Captain Purdew braved their inspection. ‘We have two stout boats which the men will lower at the first opportunity.’ For more than the first time he glanced over a shoulder, and confirmed in a trailing voice, ‘The sea is too high at present.’
Then he left them, not to direct further operations, but to avoid, one suspected, those of his subordinates who had automatically taken over. In fact, Captain Purdew was in much the same plight as the inferior beings, or unwanted pets, his passengers, though nobody might have admitted yet to the true state of affairs.
The Roxburghs languished on their perch, and to give each other courage, asserted from time to time that the storm was surely abating; when Mr Roxburgh made a most distressing discovery.
‘My Elzevir! I don’t remember — but could have left it — in the cabin — no, more likely the saloon.’
‘Your what?’
‘My Virgil.’
‘Ohhh?’ Her voice climbed to a point of disbelief which almost revealed an opinion of her own: that in spite of a respect for books instilled by her husband and mother-in-law, they were another kind of furniture, but unlike tables, chairs and so forth, dispensable.
Fortunately Mr Roxburgh was too distracted to detect in his wife signs of possible apostasy. He had risen, apparently preparing, not so much to show his respect for books, as to demonstrate his adherence to a faith.
‘You are not going back?’ Her voice should have had more colour in it, but she was understandably debilitated.
‘There is no danger as yet — from what they tell us.’
‘Oh, no, no! There’s no need to go back. Not for a book!’ Whatever the eventual outcome, she had said it; in the present, however, the languid tones of female despair did not serve to restrain her husband; it made him, if anything, the more determined to carry out his intention.
When he had left her, and she had sighed out her formal disapproval, and tidied up some of the physical ravages, Mrs Roxburgh was secretly glad. It was the greatest luxury to be sitting alone, to give up the many-faceted role she had been playing, it now seemed, with mounting intensity in recent months — of loyal wife, tireless nurse, courageous woman, and more unreal than any of the superficial, taken-for-granted components of this character — expectant mother. Yet her body told her that this child was the truest part of her, of such an incontrovertible truth that she had not admitted it to the company of those ‘formed’ thoughts, affectations, and hypocrisies recorded in her journal, just as she had banned from its pages another, more painful truth — herself as compliant adulteress.
A reality accepted might have left her less detached had she not felt fulfilled, and had she not been reared besides, on the realities: she was still to some extent a lump of a country girl, chapped hands folded in her lap, seated on a rock amongst furze and hussocks in a failing light. In the ordinary sequence of events someone would have come courting the farmer’s daughter, and got her with child and to church, in that order.
Mrs Roxburgh stirred on her bench. In her thoughts she was torn between reality and actuality. On breaking the sequence of events and spiriting her away, her preceptors had attempted in all good faith to foist what they recognized as a mind on the farmer’s daughter. Had she perhaps expressed herself too explicitly, Mrs Roxburgh wondered, if only by the tone of a phrase, the absence of a word, in her journal? The possibility began to rankle in her, along with her child, and a not entirely renounced lust.
She unlocked the dressing-case. There was the excuse of passing time, and incidentally, that of pacifying her conscience, while the light held. She searched through Mr Roxburgh’s papers, letters, his journal, the fragment of a ‘memoir’ (‘it is thought, not action, Ellen, which makes an eventful life, and for that reason — who knows — I may some day begin harvesting the fruits of thought.’) These she could remember snatching up before she left the cabin. She fumbled with the velvet bag which held the few unimportant jewels she had brought on the voyage, and back through the individual documents without laying hand on the object of her search. As she rummaged, it became of increasing consequence to find, to read, to confirm that she had not written more of the truth than can bear looking at. Her breath rasped. In her mind’s eye she saw the vellum-bound volume floating in the tipsy waters of the wrecked saloon, salvaged by her husband at danger to his balance, and finally her own complete equilibrium — if the prize had not already fallen to a member of the crew, or more likely, Mr Pilcher.
As the second mate emerged into the foreground of her imagining, it no longer occurred to her that a storm was raging round a shipwreck. It was clear that the elusive Pilcher, of reserved manner, and colourless eyes to conceal the depth of their vision, had shown by his behaviour and appearance that he was designed to be the instrument of her undoing. Armed with such hints and overt disclosures as the journal contained, he would break his silence, the lines on either side of his mouth opening like wounds healed but temporarily.
In the twilight of the galley she almost warded off an apparition as convincing as it was unreasonable; for there was no reason why her mind should turn to Pilcher, except through the contempt in which she suspected he held her, as well as the suspicion that had they met by a similar light on the Zennor road they might have hailed each other as two beings equally secretive and devious.
Mrs Roxburgh sat locking her hands, which had grown too soft to resist her thoughts. The strength was drained out of her. She wished, and did not wish for the return of Mr Roxburgh, who might be floating, face down, in bilge water.
Her thoughts were inflating into monstrous waves. My dearest husband … In the absence of her own regrettable journal, should she open his and pass the time reading from it while there was light enough? She re-opened the dressing-case, which retained something of the original scent of expensive leather with which the English fortify themselves against their travels. Fossicking around inside the bag, her fingers, sliding between the sheets of grained paper, hesitated to advance farther. Would she find herself looking in a glass at a reflection which no amount of inherited cunning and cultivated self-deceit could help her dismiss?