The Brideship Wife

by Leslie Howard

  We both sat in silence. Above us, Jacob’s laundered nappies hung on a clothesline to dry, looking rather like neat rows of white surrender flags.

  * * *

  A cool dampness descended over the town as winter arrived. Day after day went by with no hint of sun, as low clouds clung to the landscape, trapping moisture near the ground. Looking out the windows in the tearoom, one would not guess that a string of islands lay in the distance, as the mist rarely left them. My wool clothing acted like a wick, drawing in the wetness and holding it next to my body. Everything felt soggy, and my skin was chronically chafed. By mid-November, the rain was a constant, just as it had been in England. A small part of me had hoped to somehow escape that weather.

  One particularly soggy day, I stopped at the Royal Mail office on my way home in hopes of a letter from Wiggles. The mail clipper ship had just come in, and to my delight, the postmaster handed me two envelopes. I practically snatched them from his hand and raced home to read them.

  Throwing myself on my cot, I ripped the seal on first letter. I knew the script instantly. Wiggles.

  October 30, 1862

  Dear Charlotte,

  No words can express my sadness over the passing of Harriet. My concern now is for you. I am consoled in my knowledge of your character. I know you to be stalwart and robust. As a child, you were not easily pushed off any task or course you had set for yourself. I remember you as a twelve-year-old, when you were determined to read five novels over Christmas break. I’m sure you must have stayed up very late every night, but you did it.

  I encourage you not to lose sight of your future. You have the opportunity to choose your own path and to live a full and complete life, something that so few women have the opportunity to do. Try not to be disheartened. Press on through this dark time.

  I paused, relishing her words. They were like a gift, a loving embrace from afar.

  Charles came to see me last week. At first I wasn’t entirely sure why. He told me of his wedding to Mary Sledge, which was apparently a grand affair at St. Paul’s. When he asked after you, the real purpose for his visit became clear. He requested your address and mentioned that he needed you to return any monies that Harriet had at the time of her death. I thought of ignoring his request, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. At least you have the necklace to help you as you make a way for yourself.

  Write me soon with your news. I cherish letters from you.

  Hortense Wiggins

  P.S. I went around to Harriet’s bank as you asked. See the enclosed letter.

  I hugged Wiggles’s letter to my chest just as I would have her, if she were with me now, and digested all that she had written. I felt guilt about the necklace, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it had been stolen. As for Charles, he would be disappointed. There was no money to send. What little was left of Harriet’s money from the voyage had been spent long ago on accommodation. I had searched her things for the money she had taken from Charles but hadn’t found it. I had thought that maybe she had deposited it in her bank in England. If she had socked money away for my dowry, there was no way I would give it to Charles. I truly felt it was mine to keep, my father’s legacy. Charles, no doubt, would feel otherwise.

  Tucked into Wiggles’s envelope was another sheet of paper, a one-page formal letter from Hari’s bank. The funds in Mrs. Baldwin’s account, it said, were insufficient to cover the cost of sending a bank draft from England to Victoria. I was to send further instructions. They recommended I donate the small sum to a favourite charity in my late sister’s name.

  I crumpled the paper in my hand. It seemed nothing would go my way. Had Charles found out about the bank account and beaten me to it? As Hari’s former husband he might have persuaded the bank manager that the funds were his. I would likely never know the answer. I sagged under the weight of this new information.

  My earnings at the tea shop were slowly accumulating, but I could never save enough to buy a house and some land. In truth, after the loss of the necklace, I hadn’t had the energy to think of a new plan. Harriet had always been the one with the ideas, and I missed hearing her guidance now. Wiggles was right, though. I had to press on and not squander my opportunities.

  I turned to the last letter. Probably from Charles gloating over the money, I thought, not recognizing the writing. But when I tore the seal and scanned the bottom for the sender’s name, I was surprised to see that it was from John.

  October 27, 1862

  Dear Charlotte,

  Words cannot express how sorry I am for the way we parted last. I’ve just arrived in England, and I haven’t thought of anything else the entire trip back. I see now how foolish I was to think you could rush into a marriage. I regret that I didn’t listen to you. I was afraid to lose you, and I did anyway.

  I trust that Dr. Carson gave you the vaccination tools. Since I had no use for them, I wanted to leave them in good hands. Your compassion for others and your medical skills impressed me, and I hoped you might find a way to put them to good use in the colony.

  I hope our goodbye was not our last. And that we might remain friends.

  Deepest affection,

  John

  I traced over his salutation with my fingertips, remembering the happier moments we shared, our dance, our kiss. I folded the letter. It seemed like another life in another world. I was happy to hear from him and would write back to assure him that we were still friends and that I would find a way to use the vaccination equipment, but I knew I would never see him again. His life was in England and mine was here. Beyond that, other circumstances and obligation separated us. I had to pick up the pieces of my life and move on.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  “You won’t believe what I have just found out, you just won’t believe it!” Sarah gasped as she burst in the barracks in a whirlwind of snow.

  “You’ve found work?” I asked hopefully. Christmas had come and gone and we were now the only women left in the barracks. We had twice asked the welcoming committee for a little more time to find other lodgings but we knew we had to make other arrangements soon.

  “Better than that.” She put little Jacob down in his bed and took my hands in hers and squeezed.

  “Ouch,” I said, “this news better be worth a couple of broken fingers.”

  She let go, then twirled around the room.

  “All right, then. I’m all ears. What’s your news?”

  “It’s your great news as well.” With a flurry, she opened her satchel and took out some papers with official seals. They were the stock certificates she had shown me on the boat the day of Jacob’s birth.

  “My father sent me a letter telling me to sell the shares, so I went to the assay office and asked about them. They’ve gone up in value and are worth much more than the pennies my father paid for them.” She giggled. “We can sell ’em tomorrow for five pounds each! I have nine shares and don’t forget you have one.”

  I stared at her, disbelieving for a minute. “Five pounds?” I echoed. That was almost three months’ salary at the tea shop. With it I could rent a decent place to live, maybe even a house.

  We both danced about this time, silently mouthing shouts of joy and waving our hands in the air, so not to awaken Jacob.

  Sarah grew serious and once again took my hands in her own cold ones. “Come with me.”

  “Come with you where?”

  “To Barkerville. There are far more opportunities there than here, and five pounds is more than enough for the stagecoach. My father said he’ll help us get on. I told him all about you, and he said he has a job for you, if you want it.”

  “Yes,” I said, without a second thought. Sarah was my best friend, and the thought of her leaving had been gnawing at me the past months. I had nothing holding me here, and according to the audacious De Cosmos of the Colonist, Barkerville was a place where “opportunity waited around every corner, where gold nuggets lay scattered in riverbeds, free for the taking.” Perhaps there I w
ould be able to truly make a fresh start.

  Sarah and I began counting down the days until the stagecoach line opened again in the spring and we were determined to be first in line to purchase our tickets. Sarah fretted about her previous experience and was nervous we’d get turned away again.

  “Why don’t we ask some of our friends, Florence, Emma, and Alice, to come with us?” I suggested. “We’ll tell them about how you were treated last time. There’s strength in numbers.”

  When the ticket office did reopen, Sarah and I arrived two hours before and were surprised to see our friends and twelve other emigrant women already waiting. There were so many of us that when the doors opened, we trooped inside and filled the entire small space. Not a single man made it in off the street. The bald-headed clerk at the counter looked up at us with narrow eyes.

  “Two tickets on the first Barkerville stage, please,” I said, placing the funds on the counter.

  He didn’t move a muscle. “It’s gentlemen first, then ladies. Them’s the rules.”

  “Whose rules?”

  “My rules.”

  “I don’t see any gentlemen in this room, do you? And I believe the usual procedure is first come, first served.”

  The clerk flushed. “What game are you ladies playing at? The tickets are reserved for men with serious business in Barkerville, not ladies out sightseeing. Now you girls clear out of here and stop wasting my time.”

  Alice pushed in next to me and leaned across the counter. She grabbed the clerk’s shirt collar in her fist. “Listen up, bucko, we ain’t leaving here till you sell these ladies their tickets. So get off your scrawny flee-bitten arse and get on with it!”

  His eyes widened. “All right. Have it your way.”

  “Glad we have an understanding,” Alice said, releasing her grip. The clerk swept our money off the counter and placed two tickets to Barkerville in front of us. “Now, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” she said.

  I gave her an appreciative look and scooped up the tickets. They were for the first of April. We were leaving in just two days’ time.

  Back out on the street, we took turns hugging each other and promising to write. Alice insisted we come for a visit in the fall.

  “Timothy’s building me a fine house, and you’re all welcome to come and stay,” she said.

  She was very happy in her marriage, and I was glad the risk had worked out and that she and her husband were so well-suited for each other.

  Florence hugged me and gave me a copy of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol to keep as a memento of her. She couldn’t disguise her envy. “I’m not going to stay a governess forever,” she said. “I’ll find a way to get into the theatre somehow.”

  Emma gave us each a Bible for the journey. “My friend David Spencer got these for me,” she said shyly. “I met him at church. We’re sweet on each other. He’s asked me to marry him, and I said yes.”

  We all congratulated Emma and, with a final round of hugs, then said our final goodbyes.

  That night, I wrote letters to both Wiggles and John telling them of my plans to travel to Barkerville and to advise them that letters could be sent to my attention at the Royal Mail office there. I felt a heady mixture of sadness and excitement, but overall I was happy to be leaving Victoria behind and taking a new path. Where it would lead and if it would prove to be what I wanted, I had no way of knowing.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Once we had sailed from Vancouver Island to New Westminster on the mainland of British Columbia, the first part of the journey would be by an ignominious horse-drawn wagon on a narrow path as far as the town of Yale and the start of the Cariboo Wagon Road. The second part would be a stagecoach up the Fraser Canyon, through the Cariboo range lands, and finally to Barkerville. I was reluctant to board a ship again, but the distance across the water was short, and we were in the wagon in a matter of hours.

  I recalled the conversation on the Tynemouth about the colony of Vancouver Island and the colony of British Columbia being separate, but when we arrived on the mainland, I could see that it made good sense to merge the two colonies into one, as they were very similar. Vast tracts of logged land, sawmills, and fishing boats dominated the landscape. What I didn’t like was the idea of consolidating British rule. Since my journey and my arrival in Victoria, I had begun to realize that the empire only benefited the privileged few. Perhaps if a new independent country was formed—Canada, as Sir Richard had called it—there would be more equity, but who knew when that would happen or whether it would bring freedom for everyone.

  Sarah, Jacob, and myself jostled inside the old, wooden wagon as it creaked and bumped along the deeply rutted roads. We were squeezed in next to three other male passengers—presumably the highly regarded businessmen the stagecoach clerk had mentioned. They eyed us curiously, but didn’t engage in conversation.

  Our progress was slow, and I took in the sights before me. All I knew of Yale was that it was a teeming gold rush town. There were only a small number of actual buildings, but tents and lean-to huts stretched along the river as far as I could see. The whole place was one seething mass of agitated, grim-faced men. They were everywhere—spilling out of overstuffed rude accommodations, loafing three and four deep on the wooden boardwalks, squatting around large campfires drinking coffee. The feeling of impatience and frustration was palpable.

  Our driver, Louis Jandin, a boyishly handsome young man with black curls, explained that they were waiting for the Fraser River spring runoff to subside once the snow in the surrounding mountains had melted. Then they had a chance of tackling the notorious, death-defying rapids with some hope of success. The prospectors would either work the sandy bars along the river or travel north to the Cariboo. Some gold seekers had come from as far away as the coal pits of Wales and battlefields of the American Civil War, he said.

  These were desperate men, I realized. They had risked all that was dear to them for a chance to escape lives of poverty and misery. As time wore on, they must have found it harder and harder to believe that they would strike it rich.

  Louis stopped the coach in front of a small, dubious-looking wooden hut with a badly constructed sign out front proclaiming it to be an American-style restaurant. Sarah and I exchanged a doubtful look.

  When we prepared to climb from the wagon, there was a great commotion as a group of strangers rushed forward to assist us. I murmured a thank-you and reached for the grimy hand of the closest man, but just at that moment, he was shoved out of the way.

  “What in God’s name do you think you’re doing, Jeremy? I was here first! Get ye yellow scurvy face out of here,” the first man shouted at the man behind him.

  I began to pitch forward into the street and had to grasp the wooden side of the wagon to keep my balance. A general shoving match ensued, and a brawl seemed likely, but Louis rescued Sarah and me by helping us down on the opposite side of the wagon. The three businessmen had made it out of the wagon unscathed.

  Louis cleared his throat. “This is where you can get a bite to eat,” he informed us. “After that, you have rooms set aside for you in the hotel across the street.” He pointed to a two-storey, rough-hewn wood building with an elaborate sign in white scrolling letters declaring The Ritz Hotel and Saloon.

  “I’ll have the stagecoach ready for you tomorrow morning. One more thing,” he said, turning to Sarah and me, his eyes resting on Sarah for a moment longer. “You two should not leave your rooms till the stage is here. It’s a rough town, no place for ladies.”

  We had not even made it to the door of the restaurant before the sudden boom of a firearm caused us all to jump nervously and instinctively huddle together. The door to the Ritz burst open, and one man backed onto the street, his revolver drawn, while a second, taller man followed with his pistol pointed squarely at the first. A fellow traveller from our group spread his arms wide and pushed us backwards, through the door of the restaurant, where we huddled, peering through the windows to see what would happen next.
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  “Where are the constables?” I asked the stout proprietor.

  “New Westminster,” he replied.

  “But how can they police the town from there?”

  He shrugged. “They can’t. There is no law here. Men get away with all kinds of bad things—no punishment. The cemetery’s the fastest-filling hotel in town.”

  The men in the street were clearly both extremely inebriated, and they were having trouble holding their firearms steady as they waved them in each other’s faces.

  “I did not try to steal your goddamned business, you ignorant dim-witted hornswoggler,” the first man shouted up at his fair-haired nemesis.

  “You tried to, but I put a stop to it, you two-faced lying Yankee,” the other man rejoined.

  As he said this, the first man seemed to tip forward, losing his balance. In an attempt to steady himself, he desperately shuffled his feet and tripped, waving his hands in the air for balance, and the gun he was holding went off. Sarah gripped my arm, and we watched in horrified silence as both men peered at each other, obviously unsure what had happened, until a dark, seeping stain appeared on the left shoulder of the Yankee. He slowly curled forward, falling into a pile at the feet of his hapless assailant.

  I turned to the restaurant owner. “We must do something. Is there a doctor in town we can send for?”

  He gestured to the duellers, seemingly unruffled by the scene. “Them two be the only doctors in this town, ma’am.” Sarah and I looked at each other with wide eyes, and I silently prayed that Barkerville would not turn out to be lawless and violent like Yale.

  * * *

  Though the stagecoach offered more comfort than the wagon, the second leg of our journey was not for the faint of heart, but Louis promised us he was an experienced driver. The route through Fraser Canyon was a narrow roadway cut into the granite cliffs of a steep-walled canyon. Sarah and I settled in together and took turns holding Jacob. The three quiet businessmen sat stone-faced across from us. I was pleased to have an empty seat beside me, but at the last minute a new traveller joined us.