Cambridge

PROLOGUE

England.

The ship was ready to sail. She remembered.

A tall carriage drawn by a pair of horses bedecked with shiny harnesses. Father returned. What now? And daughters sacrificed to strangers. A woman might play upon a delicate keyboard, paint water-colours, or sing. Her father conducted himself as a stern audience. He stood before her, his legs slightly apart, his hands clasped behind his back. She sat upright, her hands knitted together in her lap. A woman must run the household, do the accounts, command the domestic servants, organize the entertaining, but her relations with her children were to be more formal. (Hence the governess and the nursemaid.) She remembered her mother, who had died when she was a young girl. Her mind carried a vignette of her mother in her matutinal pose upon the chaise-longue. It seemed so long ago now. It must be difficult for Papa to understand the heart of a woman without the refining influence of a wife. Papa's decision was that she should travel to his West Indian estate and on her return marry Thomas Lockwood (who was ably provided for). She looked into her father's eyes and thought she saw his pity for the daughter who was being offered a fifty-year-old widower with three children as a mode of transportation through life. She spoke no words. She locked eyes with him, as though to drop her gaze would be to end the years of painful communication they had sought to construct. Still she spoke no words. Papa, I have buried feelings. She listened as her voice unspooled in silence. Feelings locked deep inside of me, hopes that demand that I must not abandon them for years of cold fleshiness made intimate only by the occasional brushing of lips against cheek. Do you understand? He gazed imperiously at his daughter. She saw now the determination to insure his own future. Lowering her eyes she fell into a gloomy study. The rude mechanics of horse-trading. She had once overheard her father insisting that sensible men should only trifle with these children of a larger growth. And then he laughed. To reside under the auspices of a 'petticoat government'! But she had never doubted that Papa loved her. That evening he planted a light kiss upon her forehead. For a few moments it began to live a life of its own. Then, as ever, it faded. And now she simply waited for the ship to haul anchor. The truth was she was fleeing the lonely regime which fastened her into backboards, corsets and stays to improve her posture. The same friendless regime which advertised her as an ambassadress of grace. Almost thirty. Too old to be secretly stifling her misery into lace handkerchiefs.

The ship was ready to sail. She remembered.

England.

The truth.