In this way, and as often happens on board ship, we soon became pretty well acquainted. Mr. Cudlipp was a great reader, an enthusiast for poetry, which he invariably misquoted, but as he never minded my putting him right, we continued to enjoy each other’s company. We saw the last of England together. Plymouth was the Odyssey’s last port of call and while watching the Devon coast disappear, Mr. Cudlipp began mangling “This royal throne of kings.”
Shortly afterwards, Ruth emerged on deck looking frail. Mr. Cudlipp immediately offered her his arm, saying in his irrepressible way: “You must be the sister of the man Miss Mary’s going to marry.” And upon Ruth acknowledging it with a weak smile: “You must hang on to me until you have got your sea-legs.”
By the time Mrs. Bushell left her berth a couple of days later, romance between Ruth and Mr. Cudlipp was blossoming, and Mrs. Bushell blamed me for it. She said nothing at first, however, merely giving Mr. Cudlipp repulsive looks—to which he was cheerfully oblivious—and refusing his arm when we were walking about on deck, saying (while clinging to the rigging) that she was well able to stand upon her own two feet.
Just why she so disapproved of Mr. Cudlipp was a mystery to me. Perhaps she did not like to see Ruth hanging on his arm. Perhaps his brother’s farm in New South Wales—a mere two hundred acres in a place called Toongabbie—was not large enough to impress her. Perhaps it was because she could not dampen his spirits—he seemed not to notice her sighs. But one day she was rude to his father and that he could not overlook. Old Mr. Cudlipp was very forgetful, needing to be constantly reminded who everyone was, and when Mrs. Bushell was introduced to him for the fifth or sixth time, she sighed and said she really could not see the point. I quickly quoted Sheridan: “Our memories are independent of our wills.”
Tom Cudlipp said sternly: “He don’t mean to be rude, ma’am, I do assure you.”
The implication was obvious and Mrs. Bushell colored. Thereafter, she directed her sighs at me. She feared that I was “too refined and delicate” for life on a farm. She worried that the harsh antipodean sun would burn my pale skin. And did I know how to ride a horse? Parramatta was at least fifteen miles from Sydney and she was concerned I might feel cut off.
Most of this I could ignore. It fell into the category of the “little things” Mr. Galbraith had warned me about. Also, it was a difficult time on board, with tempers other than Mrs. Bushell’s being tried. We were awaiting a favorable wind to get us clear of the Spanish coast and for days the Odyssey and the other ships in the convoy were either lying still or being buffeted by contrary gusts. Our captain, Captain Ross, a genial and communicative man, owned when we were opposite Cape Finisterre that we were a little too close to the coast for his comfort.
But one evening when the sea was calm, a dance was held on the poop deck and Mrs. Bushell started on a new tack. A fiddler was playing and some four couples dancing, including Mr. Cudlipp and Ruth. Mrs. Bushell suddenly turned to me and said how the girls were “wild” after Peter whenever he played at the assemblies: “Jim Payne used to joke him about it. He reckoned Pete could eye a girl over the bridge of his fiddle—a girl who was not dancing of course—he could fix her in his sights and have her all of a flutter.”
She was looking at me in a bright-eyed, malicious way so that I found it hard to breathe. “Indeed?”
“He said for Pete it was as easy as shooting pheasants.” She leant towards me. “If Pete’d played his cards right, he could’ve married Miss Letty Stoke.”
Ruth returned in time to hear this. “That is just nonsense, Ma, and you know it.”
Later, Ruth came to my cabin and said what she had said when first we met: “You mustn’t mind Mama.” Then trying to joke me: “Imagine Miss Stoke with her Norman blood and all—imagine her marrying the likes of Pete.”
I was not in a humor to laugh, however. I had been sitting in my cot for the past half hour looking through the porthole at the darkening sea. The memory of my first Meryton assembly when Peter had fixed me in his sights—a girl who was not dancing—had thrown me back upon my old self. I was doubting him again—doubting myself.
But Ruth was not prepared to let me sit in the dark. She had brought with her a hand-lantern which she now hooked into the slot beside my cot. “I’ve brought along the bee book, Mary. If you’d be so kind.”
The book was one Tom Cudlipp had lent her—a translation of M. François Huber’s New Observations on the Natural History of Bees (both Ruth and Cudlipp being ardent apiarists). She now scrambled up onto the cot beside me, opened the book, and began haltingly to read.
Ruth was a worse reader than Peter even, and although previously I had been happy to help her, tonight I wanted to be left alone. Gradually though, I found myself becoming interested in M. Huber’s description of how bees go about replacing a lost queen—how they select a “young common worm” and enlarge its cell and ply it with rich food, thus transforming it into a royal bee.
I could tell Ruth relished the description, for after she finished she drew up her legs and hugged herself, saying: “Just goes to show, don’t it, how small rooms and mean rations can hold you back.” She nodded at the cabin, less than eight feet square. “I’ll wager this is the smallest room you’ve ever slept in, eh Mary?”
I could not deny it and she grinned at me, but then her face became serious. “Mr. Cudlipp says they don’t have no honey bees in New South Wales, only the little native ones. His brother said someone once tried to bring a hive out but they all died.”
It was very much “Mr. Cudlipp says” with Ruth these days but this did not bother me—provided he was not misquoting poetry—and I said: “How sad.”
“Mr. Cudlipp says it could be done—shipping out a hive—if the bees had enough wax and honey to last ’em on the voyage. And you could feed ’em sugar and all.” (shaking her head) “But they need air. They must have air. I reckon it’d be mighty tricky.”
After Ruth left with the lantern, I looked out at the sea once more—except that it was now a different sea, no longer calm, for a fair wind had sprung up while we were reading. My own mood was considerably calmer, however. I was relieved that the Odyssey was at last underway and I resolved never again to let Mrs. Bushell upset me—to undermine my confidence in Peter or in myself. I also resolved to forget about the journal entry I had been contemplating—a petty inventory of Mrs. Bushell’s recent remarks.
3.
My journal was written chiefly in pencil (opening an ink bottle on board ship can be a risky undertaking) and I kept it throughout the voyage. For the first month or so, I conscientiously recorded daily latitude and longitude readings and changes in the weather. I wrote of the squall off the coast of Madeira when the tiller-rope broke and three poor sheep and a cage of poultry were washed overboard. I described the tropical storm we experienced off the Cape Verde Islands—of how I stood in the stern on the lee side of the ship and said over the words of the 139th psalm. And I did not omit to log the long interval of smooth seas when Captain Ross said we only wanted a little garden to make us believe we were on land.
I also recorded the meals we ate (for dinner, roast mutton or poultry until the livestock was depleted, fresh fish that the crew caught for us, and then leaner pickings with soup and salt beef, but always a pudding and cheese and our daily dose of lemon juice). I did my poor best too to describe the tropical sunsets and the bright moonlit nights when it was possible to read on the poop until midnight.
Later, I wrote more about “little things”—of the amount of crockery smashed between decks, of how troublesome the cockroaches were becoming and how hot the nights, and how for the first time in my life I had left off wearing stockings. I wrote of how Tom Cudlipp was so keen to sleep like a proper sailor that he slung up an old sheet for a hammock to the ceiling of his cabin, and how the sheet could not bear his weight so that he came crashing down in the night causing old Mr. Cudlipp to wake in fright. (Save for a cut on his forehead, Tom was not badly hurt but his father could not be p
acified. He kept crying out: “Tom! You have hurt yourself, Tom!” so that in the end, Tom had to fetch the ship’s surgeon to reassure the old man.)
I wrote too of how Tom had his head shaved when the ship was crossing the Line. (There is much vulgar horseplay among the seamen when a ship crosses the equator and passengers can be subjected to shocking indignities—“baptized” by buckets of sea-water being thrown over them or having their hair shorn off &c.) When Tom appeared at dinner with a shaven head—and still with a patch of court-plaister on his forehead from the sheet accident—old Mr. Cudlipp was terribly distressed: “Tom! Tom! What have you done to yourself now?”
Ruth and I laughed about it afterwards, for Ruth was an excellent mimic and could imitate old Mr. Cudlipp’s speech and mannerisms. This made me hope that I could correct her own speech—her grammatical errors especially—but she resisted all my hints: “You’ll never make a lady out of me, Mary. I’ll never be like you and Mrs. Bowker.” (Mrs. Bowker was a very genteel young woman who occupied the cabin next to my own and whose husband was presently serving in New South Wales with the Forty-sixth Regiment.)
Ruth persevered with her reading, however, and ironically this led to my own lapse from ladylike behavior when two female cabin passengers (I shall name no names) began tittering as Ruth was reading aloud from the bee book. We were all seated up on the poop deck under an awning, it being a hot morning with the sun almost directly overhead, and I overheard the younger of the women say something about Ruth having “a bee in her bonnet,” to which the other replied quite audibly, “But not, it would seem, her A Bee C.”
They both seemed to find this hilarious and the tittering increased. I waited until Ruth went off with Tom Cudlipp (Ruth hated to have Tom sit by her when she read) before speaking out. “I wonder,” I said, trying to speak calmly. “I wonder if you have any idea how hard it is to read if you’ve not been properly taught as a child. You have to unlearn the bad habits before you can get on. You have to stop guessing and covering up your ignorance.” (Peter had explained to me some of this.) “You have to start afresh and it is very hard.”
I saw with satisfaction that both women had stopped smiling, but then the older woman said with a sort of sneer: “Thank you, Miss Bennet, for that little lecture.” And the younger one added: “Vastly illuminating, I’m sure.”
They then walked off and I sat on feeling my heart beat. The women had hitherto been polite to me but negligent towards Ruth and Mrs. Bushell. I guessed that they had somehow found out that Mrs. Bushell’s husband had once been a convict—the older of the two talked constantly of convicts, how she had heard they were “incorrigible” and what shocking servants they made, and how the Governor was now “disgracefully” favoring the emancipists over the free settlers &c.
And here I should mention that the Odyssey, though a store-ship, was carrying convicts. There were but twenty of them—twenty men—and they were, according to Captain Ross, “the better class of prisoner.” Tom Cudlipp felt sorry for them and made a point of saying good-day to them when he saw them in their little work-parties, washing clothes or picking oakum. But they frightened me, especially when they were all assembled on deck for Divine Service and we were obliged to stand quite close, and I think they also frightened Mrs. Bushell. They would have been a daily reminder to her of what her husband had had to endure—that and the fact that her reunion with him was a steadily approaching reality.
4.
When the Odyssey was over half-way between the Line and the Cape of Good Hope, cold, blustery weather set in and we were happy to huddle in cabins that only a fortnight before had felt like ovens. Mrs. Bushell now spent days in her cot, sleeping sometimes fully clothed and constantly complaining of the cold and how the sea-water was “flooding” her cabin despite the carpenter tightening the scuttles and stopping the bull’s-eye window with a deadlight.
“It puts me in mind of Collins Cottage,” said she, eying me malevolently from her nest of blankets. “Your father’s bailiff never mended the roof and there was also a broken windowpane. How we did suffer!—pots and pans everywhere to catch the leaks and the wind whistling through—the chilblains on Pete’s feet I shall never forget.”
This was her new refrain—my father’s shortcomings as a landlord—and while I did not believe the half of it, I judged it better to be silent. She timed her attacks well—Ruth was rarely present—and after I failed to respond, she started needling me about the convicts: “I couldn’t help noticing, Miss Mary—” (I was always “Miss Mary”) “I couldn’t help noticing how you turn your face away from those poor creatures—as if you could not bear to look at them—as if they was beneath you.”
I said: “I confess I am a little afraid of them.” I tried to make a joke of it: “Especially the fierce-looking one with the tattoo on his arm—what does it say? ‘I love to the heart NKE.’ He certainly frightens me.”
She was watching me, ready to pounce, and I heard myself gabble: “And the one who does all the washing—the one without any teeth—the other men call him ‘Soapy.’ He frightens me a little too.”
“Miss Mary.” She was actually smiling. “Miss Mary, there are just twenty convicts on this ship. How many d’you s’pose there are in New South Wales?”
I had it at my tongue’s end to say: “I believe you are afraid of them yourself.” Instead I said—it somehow burst out: “Why do you dislike me so?”
“Dislike you! I don’t dislike you!”
I said nothing, letting the lie hang there, and after a moment she looked away. A little later though, when Ruth with great difficulty entered carrying a hot plum pudding (Mrs. Bushell had started taking her meals in her cabin), she suddenly said: “Have you told her yet, Ruthie?”
“Told who what, Mama?”
“Told Miss Mary that Cudlipp’s brother was a convict?”
I had been sitting on the floor—it was the only safe place to be, the ship was rolling so—but now I struggled up and despite Ruth trying to catch hold of my arm, made my way back to my own cabin. I was extremely hurt that nobody had told me—hurt and bewildered that they had discussed it among themselves.
I had resolved not to let Mrs. Bushell upset me yet now it seemed she had again succeeded. I could not pray—could not go down on my knees with the ship rolling so. Instead, I climbed into my cot, where I had wedged my little writing-box. I had placed therein some letters that I determined now to read, to comfort myself. They were farewell letters wishing me bon voyage—from Cassandra and Helen, and also from my family—from Elizabeth and Jane and Aunt Gardiner—and a long letter from Mrs. Knowles, which Mr. Galbraith had handed to me at parting.
I had not opened my writing-box for over a fortnight, not since we crossed the Line, and I now saw with horror that the wax on my letters had melted—both those I had received and those I had written in the hope of “speaking” another ship—and that they were all stuck together and spoiled.
It seemed to me then that my old life—everything I valued in my old life—was ruined, and my new life cold and comfortless: a foolish thought, but I could not get the better of it.
When Ruth came in presently, she was eager to explain: “He stole a silver wine cup—he were just thirteen years old—he stole it from a church. Tom said he went a bit wild after their mama died.”
She climbed into the cot beside me. “Tom would’ve told you, Mary, but you are so—” She paused, perhaps searching for the right or polite word. “You have mighty strict views. And Tom thought you’d be shocked—that you wouldn’t want to have nothing more to do with him. He thinks you such a fine lady and all. ’Course I told him you wasn’t.” She grinned. “He only told us because of Pa—one of those nasty ladies told him about Pa.” Here she paused again. “I don’t like secrets. I reckon they’re silly things. But it was his secret, not mine.”
I saw that she had brought with her another of Tom’s books, Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which she now opened at “The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner” (Cudlipp’s favorite poem). But before she began to read, she put her arm around me—Ruth was a most affectionate girl—and said for perhaps the twentieth time: “You mustn’t mind Mama.”
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.
By the time the Odyssey had reached Table Bay at the Cape, Ruth had not only read the whole of “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” she had learned several verses by heart—one of which Tom was especially fond of misquoting:
Water, water, everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, everywhere
Nor any drop to drink.
There was no shortage of water to drink aboard the Odyssey, however, for as we set out across the Indian Ocean the rain fairly pelted down—rain such as I had never known in England—pounding the decks as if trying to drive the poor ship under. Later, the waves grew mountainous—great walls of water that the Odyssey (miraculously it seemed to me) ascended and descended but with such groanings that Mrs. Bushell took to stopping up her ears, for the noise disturbed her much more than the rolling and pitching. With the other ships in the convoy the Odyssey had long since parted company—Captain Ross judged that we were at least a week ahead of them—and towards the end of that tempestuous time (miraculously again) Mrs. Bushell’s attacks on me ceased.
We smelt Van Diemen’s Land long before we sighted it. On the first fine morning in weeks Tom Cudlipp came rushing into the saloon where we were all at breakfast and urged us to come on deck: “I promise you, you can smell it,” cried he. “’Tis unmistakable—the smell of earth.”
The Forgotten Sister: Mary Bennet's Pride and Prejudice Page 31
