CHAPTER TWELVE

The Indian Ocean, February 1854

1

In the starlight the metal pole wasn't hard to see where it jutted from the side of the ship. Seawater made it slippery, and Lillian's left hand clung to it so tightly that her fingers ached. She needed it for support to lean so far out from the side of the ship.

She'd already untied the bundle of letters. Now she pulled papers from the stack one by one and dropped them over the edge. The starlight was so bright, it was hard not to read a word here and there before letting them float down.

Her writing had changed since she wrote them. The perfect governess-trained loops of the "l's" and "p's" had long since been replaced by a more abrupt scrawl.

It looked as if the letters were drifting onto the whitecaps of the phosphorescent sea. She lost sight of them below the edges of the lower decks, but could imagine them littering its surface with pale scraps until they were swallowed in the glowing wake of the steamer. Then followed the dozen little shirts she'd sewed for the baby. They unfolded as they fell.

Only one shirt remained. This one shed keep; who could conjecture anything from one cotton baby shirt? No one would see it, anyway. She could always make something up; a friend's christening, or even her own childhood memento.

Then she heard a noise, right behind her. She jerked around and knocked her hand against the rail, losing her grip for an instant. Catching herself just in time, she stared through the night, trying to silence her breathing. Her arm throbbed in pain the way she was hanging there. She was afraid to stir. In her black dress she prayed shed be invisible.

Four men's sailor uniforms shone through the darkness. They carried a long white bundle, heavy and swinging. The four of them approached the rails close to where she stood; only the ropes and masts separated them from her. She could see as clear as morning.

"Heave ho, boys, and send her away," called one of them in a harsh whisper. They swung the body three times and flung it into space. It turned twice before hitting the swell. The men brushed their hands and headed back to the hatchways.

"There's two more down below," said the leader in a harsh mutter. "Be sure to use that tar water after, like the captain said." He spat over the rail. Their shadows faded behind the masts.

Lillian loosed her grip and stretched her fingers with pain. It was only then that she realized the last shirt was gone. It had fallen over the rail after the rest when she slipped. She shut her eyes, and waited to see if the heaviness would leave her throat. Perhaps with all physical reminders gone she could finally forget. But the sadness didn't change. She turned and picked her way toward the stairs.

Her mind had registered the sight of the bodies going overboard, but she didn't think about it at all. It was as if she had seen nothing. She didn't want to think about who they were or why they had died. She wanted her mind to be as empty as the carved box which had held her letters and the shirts.

She looked up at the sky, where a thin cloud cover was drifting over the stars. Just then her foot hit a projecting cable and she stumbled forward over her skirts. Her knee landed hard against a spar and it caused a clink of metal. A deep ache pulsed through her leg.

"What's that?" a sharp voice called from the starboard side.

Lillian didn't move.

"Who goes there? Answer, I say!"

Lillian let out her breath, which shed been holding, and took another before calling, "Its Miss Aynsworth, a passenger. I meant no harm." She tried to make her voice sound as casual as she could.

A figure came into view through the rigging. From his trim figure and slight limp Lillian recognized the ships captain, Mr. Trevelyan.

"Miss Aynsworth?" He peered at her and frowned. "What are you doing? Do you realize what time it is?"

She hesitated a moment before saying, "I needed air. I hardly meant to disturb anyone." She thought of the bags going overboard. "It's so . . . close below decks."

Voices emerged from below. The sailors were coming back with their second burden. The captain glanced over his shoulder, then reached a hand toward Lillian.

"Let me escort you downstairs, ma'am. I'll speak to the purser tomorrow about the ventilation in your suite. For now its best that you go below." He took Lillian's arm above her elbow and steered her to the stairs.

His palms sweated. She could feel it through the thin silk of her sleeve.

Two sailors came up from behind with another shrouded bag.

"What about this one sir, should we -- oh, beg pardon, miss. The man's glance went from the captain to Lillian and back to the captain again. He moved away two steps and stood with his body bent slightly forward, his hands still gripping the bag behind him. His partner lingered in the shadows.

"Yes, all of them," barked Trevelyan. He turned back to Lillian and his grip on her arm tightened.

"A few crewmen fought over some bets. These incidents will happen aboard a ship. Nothing to concern yourself with." He stepped toward the entry again and they descended the steep stairs, both of them stiff and embarrassed.

In her cramped stateroom Lillian undressed quietly so as not to wake Olympia in the lower bunk. Her hands were shaking slightly. Other than a decision to believe the captain, she refused to think about what she had seen. Fighting over some bets; it made perfect sense.

She swallowed three of the tablets that the military doctor had given her after the funeral, and climbed to the upper bunk. She found she still needed them to sleep, though she had started with ten at a time, and over the days had reduced the dose. Gradually the drug took effect and she relaxed. Her fate was out of her hands. Her breathing slowed a little.

The first few days of the trip had been miserable. All the preparations for the departure from India were beyond Olympia, and eventually Lillian had to make every decision without asking. The day they left, Olympia had allowed herself to be led onto the deck of the steamer as a little child would. So far on the voyage Olympia had only left her room for meals, and even those she ate in private. She rarely spoke.

Lillian had been seasick from her first hour at sea. Her nausea was compounded with an ailment of the soul, a kind of dread of everything around her. Now that the efforts of packing and directing were over and there were no more distractions, she slipped into a state of mental paralysis.

Her thoughts had been fixed in a cloud of fear and confusion. The very wood grain of the beams over her head, the shape of the waves outside her porthole, the flying fish, all held menace in their movement and color. Olympia's rare words sounded threatening, even though she knew rationally that couldn't be so. Lillian tried to wrench herself from the grip of the mental weakness, telling herself it was absurd, that the shape of a cloud or the smell of her tea couldn't be sinister.

Every time she slept, which wasn't often with the seasickness, as she slipped into drugged unconsciousness she prayed that on waking, her thoughts would be clear again. And she would slide into nightmares of that terrible dawn as she stood at the door to her fathers room, with the shrieking peacocks outside.

Sometimes she woke from these, sweating and with a scream stuck in her throat, and the sound was still there - -or was it the shrill wail of sea gulls? No gulls flew to the middle of the ocean. She tried to listen and decide where it came from, but every time the creak of the ship overpowered all else.

Then one morning, two weeks into the voyage, she woke later than usual. The fear had disappeared. Lillian turned her head cautiously, as if the dread were a headache that could return, and took in the details of her room. The furniture, though shabby, was only furniture. No evils leered from the corners. The light was like lemons and she felt happy for the first time in ages.

Throughout that day she handled herself prudently, pacing out her strength and holding her euphoria in check. She felt as if she were recovering from a long illness, and she experienced the recovering invalids delight in the ring of the ships bell, the taste of her salt bacon, and the slip of clothes against her skin.

That night, and many nights that followed, it wasn't seasickness, but her thoughts, which kept her awake. The starlight and phosphorescence through her porthole added to her trancelike state of mind. Nothing seemed to really matter except what she was feeling right at that moment. The voyage seemed like a dream to her, as if past, present, and future had merged into a timeless stream as she floated west.

Henry's disappearance still made no sense to her. Of one thing she was certain; the body they found was not Henrys. She and Olympia had still never discussed it, in fact they had hardly spoken at all. There had been a few awkward times when the two women received condolences for father and son, and Lillian and Olympia had exchanged glances and said as little as possible.

Whatever his reasons for wanting to disappear, she felt a definite sense of relief that he was out of her life. He knew too much about her past. In some people that might be a blessing. But Henry wasn't to be trusted. And it wasn't just his knowledge; that last morning together, before cholera had struck the house, he had looked at her with a green light in his eyes that she found disturbing. She was no longer sure of his sanity. Things were better this way, with Henry probably settled as a merchant somewhere in the Far East. She could imagine him in Bombay, or Hong Kong, slowly increasing his thousand-pound inheritance until it became a solid fortune. He would find a docile, middle-class wife who would never have to know about his many failures or his complicated relationship with a stepsister she would never meet. It was better this way.

Other ideas drifted into her mind as reassuring talismans to turn over idly. As time removed her from her father's death, she now occasionally felt a flicker of perverse gratitude at events; no one else could know her true history. She was safe. And she could afford to set up her own household in London with her stepmother.

No saris anywhere, no lepers, no cobras, but streets full of gentlemen and ladies, and a pure white snowfall every night in winter.

After a few days of this sort of careless meditation the carved box with its old letters and the shirts began to weigh on her mind. She should have destroyed them years ago, or never kept them at all. It seemed like another lifetime now, that day before the cholera came, when she had come home from Aunt Floras and found her things opened up. She had vowed then to destroy everything. Of course she hadn't. Nor had she ever checked to see what might be gone.

Lying in the bunk now, still sleepless, the bruise ached on her knee and the place where shed smashed her arm throbbed. She thought about the letters which were lost forever to fish and seaweed.

There used to be fifteen in the pack. Ten from him and the five of hers that she'd asked him to return. Had she dropped fifteen into the water?

Through all her thoughts pulsed the image of the sacks of dead men, turning over as they fell heavily into the waves. In her heart she knew they had died of cholera, that cholera was on the ship, and that it would still be a part of her life. But somehow she couldn't bring the thought to the surface, and she let it stay buried too deeply to do more than give a slight uneasiness, like the recurring throb of pain in her knee.

Sleep washed over her and she settled more comfortably into the bunk. The raucous cry of peacocks broke once again into her ears. She couldn't be imagining it. But, like the image of the falling sacks, she pushed it to the bottom of her mind.

2

The animals for the London Zoo weren't loose below the third deck, but once you were down there it sounded as if they were. Hoots, cries, barking, wails, roars, and a constant twitter rumbled from the hold day and night.

Besides an elephant, there were a two-humped Bactrian camel whose dehydrated humps sagged piteously, three dozen longtailed langur monkeys, and a flock of mynas and lorikeets whose feathers gleamed like jewels in the dark. A dainty-hoofed onager shared his cage with three muntjac deer. A pair of leopards flicked their tails at the continual sight of a box of long emerald-colored snakes. And there were a half dozen dholes or wild dogs, their tongues lolling in the heat. Other unnamed creatures lurked in the shadows of their cages.

The animals' undersized bamboo and brass cages were filthy, overcrowded, and barely gave most of them enough room to turn. The monkeys had some vertical space they could climb, but they were the lucky ones. The peacocks had lost most of their tail feathers. Many of the smaller birds had died. To open the cages and retrieve the dead ones would risk the escape of the others. So their limp bodies were left, the feathers still brilliant and falling in clumps from the decaying flesh.

Only the elephant was uncaged. A chain bound his rear leg and tethered it to a pile of waste iron, which lay buried under a thick litter of wet and rotten straw. The top of his head brushed the ceiling. A few weeks into the voyage, he started a habit of banging his skull upwards against the boards, gently and repeatedly. Perhaps it eased some itch or nightmare memory of his journey.

The passengers in steerage were shocked at first that they were expected to share a living space with this menagerie. Their objections were laughed at. The owner of the troop paid well for his passage and the ship's captain wasn't about to lose the money, more than all the third-deck payers combined.

When the cholera broke out, the worst place was down here in the hold. The foot soldiers and fortune seekers slept four to a bunk, packed tight as coiled rope. Those who weren't sick tried to force their way to the upper decks, so that the hatchways were kept locked.

It killed twenty-six of the forty in steerage. But only three of the first-class passengers fell ill, and none died. Most hardly sensed any problem, and no one questioned the captain's announcement to stay below decks after dark. Mosquito danger, he said.

The bodies later washed up on the west coast of Madagascar where they were seen only by sea tortoises and giant crabs.

The owner of the animals stayed healthy. Although he had booked first-class accommodations, he never showed himself above. Tonight, as usual, he spent his hours in the unchanging gloom of the only private room on the third deck; first looking over his contracts with the London Zoo, and then lying in his bunk scrutinizing the rough ceiling beams and restlessly pulling at his fingers. The smaller beasts had cost him almost a thousand pounds. The elephant had fallen into his hands, without cost, at the beginning of his journey from Cochin, though its transport to Bombay hadn't been cheap. But even if only a third of the animals survived the trip, he'd be rich.

When the lady's letters drifted onto the wet third-class deck the other night it was a delightful bonus, completely unexpected. He recognized the handwriting instantly. If he'd been sleeping in first class, instead of pacing the slippery third-class deck, he would never have seen them. The paper dried out in a few hours, with the ink clear and even the ribbon still attached to the thick one.

He wasn't surprised at what was in them. Or that she had tried to destroy them so inefficiently. He had expected all along she might do something like that. Some day shell appreciate how carefully I've watched her, and followed her, he thought. Why, anyone could have got hold of those letters if I hadn't been here. She's lucky. And he smiled to himself.

He spent day after day gazing out of his dirty porthole and making plans.

3

On a freezing March day, with a sharp wind biting through the thickest overcoat, the steamer finally reached London's East India Docks [B5].  Captain Trevelyan was more relieved than he had been at the end of any other voyage for years. He had achieved his goal; the cholera was still a secret and no quarantine was placed. He left the unloading supervision to the first mate and he limped over to The Drowning Man for a pint. He chose a window seat, his eye on the ship, so that he could get back in a moment if any problems arose.

"Trevelyan!" A rough hand clapped him on the back. "Returned from the climes of paradise!"

"You too, Wentworth? I thought you'd shipped for a year to Rangoon." Trevelyan signaled to the owner for another pint.

Wentworth, a short, nervous-looking man, sipped at his drink. "So I did, so I did. But the winds changed early this year and we had word of a big indigo cargo in Ceylon." His voice dropped. "Cholera on the ship."

"You too?" Trevelyan found that he had joined the other man in whispering. "Did you unload?"

"Had to, man. I'd be out five thousand pounds if that cargo was quarantined; indigo can't be washed. They'd have dumped it in the Thames and turned the river blue." He laughed, but it was without humor.

Both men drank in silence for a minute.

"Besides," began Trevelyan, "they say its not catching."

"Of course not," Wentworth rushed to agree. "It'd make no difference what we did with our cargo. Anyone would have done the same. And the passengers, well, tha'ts their own look out."

"Were many sick?"

"Just a few. And it was steerage, anyhow." Trevelyan nodded in agreement. "It could have been anything, really."

The two men sighed with partial relief, finished their beers, and headed back to their ships. They shouted directions and abuse at the laboring dock workers as they watched them guide the passengers down the gangplank, unload the various cargo and animals, and pour hundreds of barrels of stale drinking water into the Thames.

Within five hours the passengers were scattered all over London.

Within five days captains Trevelyan and Wentworth, sharing a rooming house near the river, were dead of cholera.

The 1853-4 cholera epidemic in London started with an index case on July 25, 1853.  For more information, click here.