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Then he’d make another attempt, five attempts, twenty, to convince Rosalind’s parents he could be the husband she deserved. If that failed, he’d hide in the country, perhaps, until Rosalind Lionel was claimed and married by Brittingham or whatever lucky blighter the Duke of Lockridge esteemed deserving of his youngest daughter’s hand. Eventually he’d enter some damned marriage of convenience and find a courtesan or whore to occasionally satisfy his perverse needs on the side. Someday, he’d be able to look at Rosalind again without his heart aching.
No. Hopeless. He had to go far, far away or lose his soul.
He threw himself on the bed and sank into it, finding it far softer than his bed at home. Rosalind hadn’t even come to see him off. She must be furious with him still for leaving, for giving up. That was who he was, though, an irresponsible cad. She wanted them to have a life together, but he wasn’t good enough for her. The best thing he could do for her was leave.
He sat up, grabbed the cravat from where he’d thrown it and twisted it between his hands, then pressed it over his eyes. Perhaps it was best she hadn’t come with her family to see him leave. He would have been ashamed. She would have been sad, or worse, quietly scornful of his cowardice, and he’d have had to sail all the way to India with that image in his mind.
He sat like that, hunched on the side of the bed, until he felt the ship moving, until the chance to abandon his journey had passed. Even then, he moved despondently as he stowed his belongings for the months-long trek to India. He deserved this. He was a disappointment to so many people. He had never been good enough.
But he would become better. In India, he would seek enlightenment and self-discipline. Many lesser men remade themselves in distant climes.
By the second day of the ship’s journey, he’d found his sea legs and bestirred himself to dress for dinner in the captain’s galley. Thereafter, he dined with the captain each night, so he could listen to the stories of the businessmen, military officers, and other passengers who had been to India before and found success.
There were no women to temper the men’s storytelling bravado, aside from the elderly, cantankerous Lady Woodworth, traveling to live with her son and his family in Bengal. There was also a businessman’s wife, Mrs. Prescott, but she was kept busy with a brood of sniveling children in second class while her husband swilled rum at the captain’s table each night.
Then there was Mrs. Lintel, a widow residing in the room beside his, returning to her family in India. He did not believe she was real for he never saw or heard her. “A tragic young thing,” said Lady Woodworth, who purported to have caught a glimpse of her.
A young widow in the adjoining chamber… As the journey stretched long, he might be tempted to seduce her, although that was not in line with the enlightenment and self-discipline he hoped to develop in himself. She would surely be a poor substitute for Rosalind, who continued to take up too much space in his heart and thoughts. He still felt Rosalind near him, about him, in an almost eerie way. The spirit of her, the scent… Madness, that he sometimes imagined he could perceive the scent of her clothes, her hair, leagues across the ocean. Such madness would fade, he hoped.
It had to. There was only so much rum to be had. On a long journey it was strictly rationed, and he didn’t want to arrive in India a drunkard on top of everything else.
*
It took a week for Rosalind to accustom to sailing, a week of nausea and sickness that made it difficult to eat. She slept most of the day, too fatigued to worry about what she’d done, where she was going, or what might become of her for taking this monumentally reckless step. Later, she thought. I will worry about things later, when my stomach isn’t flipping and squeezing like a landed fish.
As she lay in her narrow bed on the rocking seas, she took solace in one thing only—that Marlow was a thin wall away. In her waking moments she strained to hear him. The creak of his bed, the scrape of a drawer… His footfalls became the cadence of her drifting life, the gait she knew like the beat of her own heart. She came to know his schedule, when he was wont to walk up on deck or pace the narrow hallway or go to dinner. It was useful information—when she was finally well enough to move about again, it helped her avoid him.
She allowed herself only the most abbreviated trips outside her room when she needed a quick breath of fresh air. She would duck her head and hide behind her hat’s black veil, speaking to no one, then hurry back inside until she thought she must be the most mysterious wraith ever to board an East India Company ship.
It had to be that way. It was too soon for Marlow to discover her. Now and again she’d hear his voice as he greeted passengers in the hallway outside, and she’d nearly cry for want of revealing herself. How she craved to speak to him, to show him that they could be together after all, that she had also set off for India so they could be married and live happily ever after.
But they must pass Gibraltar first. Once they were through Gibraltar, there would be no more easily accessible ports, no way for him to send her back to England out of some sense of propriety and honor. There would be no choice but to go all the way to India together, or Egypt, or wherever they were destined to land. After Gibraltar, it must be left up to Providence, just like the name of the vessel that drew her farther and farther from England.
She must wait at least a month, to be safe. In the meantime, she would read her romantic poetry book and hope for the future, and pray all her dreams would come true.
