The Virtuous Feats of the Indomitable Miss Trafalgar and the Erudite Lady Boone

by Geonn Cannon

  Eula didn’t react when Dorothy loaded her bags onto the carriage and then climbed inside next to her. She settled in the seat and faced forward with both hands folded in her lap.

  “You can still turn back, you know. It’s not going to be easy and it isn’t going to be fun and games all the time. I have rules of my own. Rules you may not agree with.”

  Dorothy said nothing. Finally Eula nodded and continued to the car. Dorothy followed, looking back at the estate only when they were far enough away she wouldn’t feel its pull.

  #

  After the initial shock wore off, Dorothy discovered that living with her grandmother was the best thing that could have happened to her. Dance lessons officially became self-defense classes, and Dorothy didn’t have to worry about explaining away bruises on her arms and legs. Most importantly she could now read whenever she desired, and her grandmother could retrieve books from the library for her. She had to adjust to living in town as opposed to their country estate, but Jasper still had three stories to explore. She often took him to a field outside of town where he could chase vermin to his heart’s content. While she and her grandmother went for runs.

  Seven months after Dorothy moved in, Eula started spending more time upstairs in her bedroom. She slept most of the day and was often too weak to make the trek downstairs. Dorothy would take her food and read to her until Eula said it was time to sleep again. One evening when Dorothy bent down to kiss her grandmother goodnight, Eula grabbed her arm with surprising strength.

  “Go away, Dorothy.”

  “I... I thought you wanted me here, Grandmother.”

  Eula smiled. “I do. My only regret is not getting you out of that house sooner. Your sisters are discovering the mysteries of men, but you’ll have your own mysteries to unravel. There are far stranger mysteries out there than any man could offer. Civilizations underfoot, wonders that you must see to believe... I saw them for myself, before I fell victim to...” She sighed and rolled her eyes. “Love and family and romance.” She squeezed Dorothy’s hand. “I don’t regret my family. Not for an instant. But I do wonder what I left out there waiting to be found. And when I saw you, Dot, covered in mud and swinging an old broomstick like it was a broadsword...”

  Dorothy laughed at the memory. “I still have that broomstick.”

  “I know. But you’re a woman now. It’s time to trade the worlds in your imagination for the real thing. Trust me, Dorothy. Oh, trust me, the real thing will be more amazing than you’d ever dreamt.”

  Dorothy blinked away her tears; it was obvious what her grandmother was preparing her for but she didn’t want to face it. “Don’t leave me, Grandmother. I’m not ready.”

  Eula patted Dorothy’s hand. “What makes you think I am? That’s the thing about our lives, Dot. We don’t get to choose the most important parts of it. They just happen to us when they happen and we try to cope as best we can. When I’m gone...”

  “No.”

  “When I’m gone,” Eula repeated with more force, “I’m leaving you quite a portion of my estate. Some will go to your father, of course, but I’ve earmarked a certain amount that will be yours and yours alone. I’m leaving you a few other items as well, just to help ease you on your way, and all I ask in return is one promise from you. Don’t get married before you’re ready. Love is something that needs to happen gradually or not at all. You can be twenty, thirty-three, or forty-five. It can be forced and finessed, but it shouldn’t be. Focus on knowing who you are before you find a man to write the definition for you. Be Dorothy Boone, not Mrs. Whomever of Wherever.”

  “I promise, Grandmother.”

  “Good girl.”

  Eula didn’t live to see another month. The rest of the Boone family gathered at the funeral, together in one place for the first time in years. Her brother was a dashing man now, and all three of her sisters looked content in their lives. Hilda was toting around a fat baby, her second or third, and she smiled as it pulled her hair from under her bonnet. Happy, Dorothy thought with wonder. How could they be happy, keeping a home for their men, cooking dinners and hosting guests? Churning out fat little children who pulled hair and wept at the slightest provocation seemed to be the worst fate Dorothy could have imagined. She caught her mother watching her during the service and Dorothy nodded to her. Clara tightened her lips and turned away.

  After the funeral the family met with the executor of Eula’s will. All three of her sisters scoffed and tutted when they heard how much money Eula had left to Dorothy, but they weren’t being left out in the cold. Everyone got a share, but Dorothy knew that her share was large enough to start a whole new life. She would be able to buy her own home, as it would be far too painful to remain in Eula’s house. After that, she had no idea where she would go or what she would do, but the money provided her all sorts of options.

  She was also given a key to a safe-deposit box at a London bank, and she set out immediately to see what her first real treasure would be. The corridor to the safe deposit boxes was narrow and high-ceilinged, and the thick carpet seemed to absorb every stray sound. It seemed to be a place of quiet power, the place where wealth was distributed and doled out to those lucky enough to be deemed rich. She wondered if she counted as one of their number. Lady Dorothy Boone of the elites. Imagine.

  Her grandmother’s key opened one of the largest boxes in the quiet room. She opened it to find stacks of foolscap bound together to form journals, each page filled with her grandmother’s tight handwriting. Underneath the journals were larger sheets of vellum, and she chose one at random to unfold on the table.

  It was a map. It took her a moment to orient herself, but the language and the sliver of water marked MEDITE RANEO indicated it was a map of southern France. The rest of the safe deposit box was filled with other maps in a variety of languages, and her hands trembled at the thought of exploring them all.

  Clipped to the top journal was an envelope with her name on it. She removed it carefully and teared up as she recognized her grandmother’s handwriting on the note within.

  “I spent my youth collecting these maps. Some of them I edited myself. They will take you to remarkable places, and show you remarkable things, but my path is not yours. Don’t echo my footsteps but use them as a starting point for your own trail. Go beyond the edges of the maps and forge your own trail. The world will never give up all of her mysteries, but it falls to women like us to do our part. I saw myself in you from the moment you escaped your crib and went exploring through the manor (though oh! How your parents fretted you falling down the stairs!)” Dorothy didn’t remember that, but it certainly sounded like her. She laughed in the small room, and it sounded like a hollow bark as it echoed off the tall walls. “Take up where I left off, brave girl, and unveil the world’s mysteries.”

  Dorothy carefully transferred everything to her bag. She paused to smell the maps, smiling when she caught a whiff of her grandmother’s perfume. She imagined Eula packing these treasures away, could almost see her running unwrinkled hands over each journal before consigning it to storage, and she felt the torch being passed to her. She had no clue what work her grandmother had left undone and even less of an idea how she would ever follow in such grand footsteps. But thanks to her grandmother’s legacy she had the means, and she would be damned if she let her grandmother down.

  Ethiopia

  1899

  The tall girl was told she would be a nurse, an occupation that didn’t excite her but was nonetheless respectable. It meant training and education that would be impossible to achieve in her home. She was the only child of a woman who had died giving birth to her, and whoever fathered her took the opportunity to escape responsibility by becoming invisible. She was an orphan, and any name she might have been given was quickly forgotten. There was every chance she was never named; girls in her village weren’t given the luxury of names until they were older and it was clear they would live long enough to require an identity. Due to her height she was simply referred to
as the tall girl, and she soon accepted it as a title.

  When pale men arrived seeking volunteers, Tall Girl was one of the first in line. She had nothing tying her to the small village, and going out into the world would be a dream come true. The men were frightening strangers armed with weapons, but she suspected they threatened nothing worse than she feared from the men of her village. She was ten years old and the men were beginning to take note of her womanly shape in ways that made her run whenever she was out after dark.

  The men chose her and a handful of other girls to be loaded onto a cart strapped to three lumbering camels. The men referred to her and the other children as Abyssinians. She didn’t know what it meant, had never heard the word Ethiopia, and in her mind their word became hers. The men spoke English and she listened to them as they traveled through vast grasslands toward their destination. She tried to keep track of how far they traveled but she knew it was a pointless endeavor. Sometimes they tracked around foothills or lakes. Sometimes they would go north for five days to cross a river, then travel south for five more days to get back to their eastward track.

  The other girls on the cart passed the time by chattering about the lives they were going to have in the new world. They would be nurses or governesses, things they had heard about in stories but never seen. They would be respectable ladies. Tall Girl didn’t understand why they were so certain they would be chosen; they were unfamiliar with big cities like London and Paris. What respectable family would entrust their children to such blank slates? Who would pay for them to be educated as nurses or taught how to take care of a child?

  When the caravan stopped for the night the girls would practice dancing for all the government dinners they would be attending. Only Tall Girl remained suspicious of the truth. She sat apart from the rest, tuning out their blabber and focusing on the guards. None of the girls could speak English so the men spoke freely. Tall Girl listened and soon she could work out their meaning from context or body language. Soon she could understand their meaning if not the full content of their conversation.

  She watched the men standing on the perimeter of their camp. They carried guns ostensibly to protect from wolves and leopards, but she saw that they mostly kept their eyes on the caravan instead of the wilderness. They were preventing the girls from running away. If what they offered was so great, why would they worry about runaways? One man named Clayton Lee noticed she was attempting to learn their language, and some nights he gave her short lessons. She was worried he would want something nasty in return, but he never forced himself on her.

  “Where do we go?” she asked one night.

  “A place called Djibouti. It’s about two hundred more miles that way.” He pointed off into the darkness. Tall Girl couldn’t even comprehend two hundred miles as a real distance, let alone one she would have to cross. “Two hundred miles is what we’ve already crossed. This spot of land is as far from your home as our destination is. Once we get there, we’re getting on a boat.”

  She furrowed her brow and he mimed water with one hand. He used the other hand to cut across it. “A boat, to cross a great body of water. As much water as there is land around us right now.”

  Tall Girl knew he was lying. There was nowhere with that much water. She decided not to press the issue. “And then?”

  He chewed carefully, thoughtfully, and kept his eyes on the fire rather than looking at her.

  “Not nurses,” she said.

  “No. Probably not.”

  Once they crossed the border into Djibouti, their escorts relaxed the pretense of being kindly guides. They were rougher, meaner, cruder, and they gave the girls less food at their increasingly rare rest stops. The laughing chatter ceased, and the girls became quietly frightened. Tall Girl sat with her back against the wall just behind the drivers so she could listen to their conversations. Clayton hadn’t told anyone about their lessons and she never spoke English where anyone but him could hear. She quickly learned what was in store for them, and she hugged herself against the chill that settled over her.

  When they arrived at the docks their fright faded at the magnificent revelation of Arabian Sea. Tall Girl had never seen so much water in her entire life. For a moment she believed some seam had been ripped open and a flood had poured forth from the belly of the earth. The men herded her and the girls she now considered sisters out of the cart and into a long line. Tall Girl’s entire body ached from the cramped conditions. She was hungry and sore, so when a guard passed her it wasn’t difficult to fake a collapse. She slumped against him like a rag doll, her cheek flattened against the chest of his uniform. One button pressed against her cheek before he yanked her back by twisting a handful of her long, thick hair. He called her a word that she’d heard many times on their cross-country trek but that Clayton would never translate for her.

  She smiled and winked, pursing her lips in a lazy kiss.

  He sneered at her. “Save it for your new master. They like to break in the new ones themselves.”

  As he shoved her away, she folded one hand around his gun and the other around the hilt of his knife. His push was all the force she needed to free the weapons. His eyes widened when he realized he’d been disarmed. He reached for her and she swung the knife. A fan of blood spilled from his palm and he shrieked in pain and shock. Someone else tried to grab her and Tall Girl’s finger tightened on the trigger. She only intended to shoot at the ground but one man’s boot erupted in a smoky red bloom. The girls around her scattered like a murder of ravens, shrieking at the sudden twig-snap sound of the gunpowder. Tall Girl slashed with the knife and cut the throat of the man she had disarmed; she told herself it was a kindness when compared to what his employers would have done in the face of his failure.

  Other men converged on the troublemaker. She fired at one while slashing in the other’s direction. The one dodged her knife and wrapped his arms around her, so she jammed the blade up into his bicep. The man howled in her ear like a stuck pig, and in his pain she became the stronger of the two. She twisted the knife as she freed it and bent her knees. She dropped into a crouch and bowled him over her back, standing suddenly to make him fall backward. He grabbed for her foot but she slammed her heel down on the back of his hand with a satisfying crunch.

  Three other guards grabbed hold of her. One closed his hand around hers in an attempt to pull the gun away, but Tall Girl’s grip was too strong. She pulled the trigger and the bullet entered the soft flesh just below the man’s arm. She used the man’s grip to spin him around into one of his friends, knocking them both down. She stooped and stole the other man’s gun since she feared hers was nearing empty, and she pulled her hand free as the boss barreled toward her.

  She turned and brought the gun up, closing one eye to get a bead on his forehead. She had never aimed a gun before but it seemed fairly straightforward: trigger, sight, arms braced against the force of the tiny explosion that would propel the bullet.

  She was about to fire when she was tackled from behind. She twisted to retaliate but saw that her attacker was one of the other girls. More piled on top of the pile, holding her down and shouting horrible names as the weapons she’d stolen were wrenched out of her hands to leave her defenseless once more. The boss ordered the girls up with harsh words barked as he shoved them out of his way, kicking a few in the rear ends when they didn’t move fast enough.

  He grabbed Tall Girl by the hair and lifted her onto her feet as she squirmed desperately to get free. She bared her teeth at him despite the pain in her scalp. He drew his knife and held the blade against her throat, and Tall Girl knew she would be used as an example as to what happened to troublemakers. The bleeding men lying on the ground around them would be more than enough to justify her death. But then someone shouted from near the ramp and hurried over.

  Her salvation came from a bald man wearing a cream suit under a long brown coat. “This is the perfect opportunity. Don’t waste her.”

  The pressure of the blade lessened and she coul
d swallow without fear of being decapitated. He sneered at her. “You are very lucky. You are very, very lucky.”

  He tossed her away and Tall Girl fell. The girls gave her a wide breadth when they boarded the ship. Tall Girl didn’t blame them for attacking her. They didn’t know where the men were taking them, but the world they knew was four hundred miles behind them. They would never find their way back. They could never go home and being alone in this strange place was more frightening than anything the men could do to them. They had no choice but to go forward.

  She saw the bald man in the brown coat after boarding, and he singled her out of the crowd. Two crewmen carried her below-decks on the strange swaying maze of iron, and they locked her in a cramped closet. She was terrified by the sway under her feet, as if the world was no longer locked into position, and the metal of the walls was cold to the touch. She cowered in her cell, chewing her thumbnail and crying silently as she waited for whatever came next. She thought of the other girls on the ship and, in the dark, became resentful of them. She had tried to save them all, so why had none of them tried to save her?

  Hours passed before the door to her prison opened again. She blinked against the light of the man’s lantern as he bound her wrists with a thick rope. The hemp bit into her wrists when he checked to make sure everything was secure, and then he ordered her to “get up and move, now!” She wondered why these men who didn’t know she spoke English insisted on using that language to issue their orders. Three more men stood in the corridor with weapons in hand. She deduced news of her actions had spread across the ship, and they were responding to her reputation.

  They were scared of her. At this realization, Tall Girl smiled.

  She was led up, out of the ship and into a freezing and windy night. Over the railing of the ship she could see water. It was black as ink and reflected the night sky perfectly. The waters were still as glass and her jaw dropped at the thought of being on such a massive sea on such a tiny vessel. Her chest clenched in terror as she was dragged closer to the railing and for a moment she was certain they intended to toss her over the side.