The Last Runaway. Tracy Chevalier

the Somerset and north Devon coast unfold alongside them. For the other passengers the unsteadiness was an amusing novelty, but Honor grew more and more unsettled, responding to the ship’s movement with a wrinkled brow, tightening shoulders and a heaviness deep in her gut, as if she had swallowed an iron pound weight. She held out as long as she could, but as the Adventurer was passing Lundy Island, Honor’s stomach finally convulsed and she vomited on to the deck. A passing sailor laughed. ‘Sick and we’re barely out of Bristol Channel!’ he crowed. ‘Wait till we reach the ocean. Then you’ll know sickness!’

      Honor was sick down Grace’s shoulder, on to her blankets, on to the floor of their tiny cabin, into an enamel basin. She threw up when there was nothing left to bring up, her body like a magician managing to conjure something from nothing. She did not feel better after each bout. When they reached the Atlantic and the ship began its long roll up and down the swell of the waves, she continued to be sick. Only now Grace was ill too, as well as many of the other passengers, though only for a time, until they got used to the new rhythm of the boat. Honor never got used to it; the nausea did not leave her for the whole month-long voyage.

      When not seasick herself, Grace nursed Honor, rinsing her sheets, emptying the basin, bringing broth and hard sea biscuit, reading to her from the Bible or the few books they had brought: Mansfield Park, The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit. To distract Honor she chattered on about America, trying to get her to think about what lay ahead rather than the grimness of the present moment. ‘What would thee rather see, a bear or a wolf?’ she asked, then answered her own question. ‘A bear, I think, for wolves are like overgrown dogs, but a bear is only like itself. What would thee rather travel on: a steamboat or a train?’

      Honor groaned at the thought of another boat. ‘Yes, a train,’ Grace agreed. ‘I wish there were a train we could take from New York to Ohio. There will be one day. Oh, Honor, imagine: soon we will be in New York!’

      Honor grimaced, wishing that she too could see this move as the great adventure Grace clearly did. Her sister had always been the restless Bright, the one most ready to accompany their father when he had to travel to Bristol or Portsmouth or London. She had even agreed to marry an older, duller man because of the promise he held out of a life away from Bridport. Grace had known the Coxes, a family of five brothers, since they moved from Exeter several years before to open a draper’s shop, but she only showed interest in Adam when he decided to emigrate to Ohio. A brother – Matthew – had already gone there but had become infirm, and his wife had written to ask a spare brother to come and help with the business. Once Adam had moved to America, he and Grace corresponded regularly, and with gentle hints she led him to ask her to join him in Ohio as his wife, where they would run the shop with Matthew and Abigail.

      The Brights were surprised by Grace’s choice; Honor had thought she would marry someone livelier. But Grace was so thrilled by the prospect of living in America that she did not seem to mind her prospective husband’s reserve.

      Though patient, and perhaps feeling guilty for subjecting her sister to weeks of seasickness, even Grace grew irritated by Honor’s persistent illness. After a few days she stopped urging her to eat, as Honor never kept anything down for more than a few minutes. She began to leave her sister alone in their cabin to walk on deck and sit and sew and chat with the other women on board.

      Honor tried to accompany Grace to a Meeting for Divine Worship organised by the handful of other Friends on board, but as she sat in silence with them in a small cabin, she could not let go of her thoughts enough to empty her mind, worrying that if she did so, she might lose what little self-control she had and vomit in front of them. Soon the rocking of the ship and the upheaval in her stomach forced her to leave the cabin.

      Sometimes on the fraught voyage between Bristol and New York, when she was curled like a shrimp in her cramped berth or doubled over a chamber pot, Honor thought of her mother standing on the pebbles at Eype beach in her white bonnet, and wondered why she had left the safety of her parents’ house.

      She knew why: Grace had asked her, hoping a new life would quell her sister’s heartache. Honor had been jilted and, though her spirit was less adventurous, the prospect of remaining in a community that pitied her propelled her into following Grace. She had never been dissatisfied in Bridport, but once Samuel had released her from their engagement, she was as eager as Grace to leave.

      All of her clothes stank with a sour meatiness no washing could remove. Honor avoided the other passengers, and even her sister: she couldn’t bear the disgust mixed with pity in their faces. Instead she found a space between two barrels on the leeward deck where she tucked herself out of the way of busy sailors and curious passengers, but close enough to the railing that she could run across and heave into the water without drawing attention. She remained on deck even in the rain and the cold, preferring it to the tiny cabin with its hard board for a bed and the close stench of her blankets. She was, however, indifferent to the seascape – the huge sky and sea that were such a contrast to the neat green hills and hedgerows of Dorset. While others were amazed and entertained by the storm clouds and rainbows and sunlight turning the water to silver, by schools of dolphins following the ship, by the sight of the tail of a whale, for Honor monotony and nausea struck dead any wonder she might have felt for such feats of nature.

      When not leaning over the railing, she tried to take her mind off her sore, churning stomach by bringing out her patchwork. As a gift for the journey her mother had cut out hundreds of yellow and cream cloth hexagons and paper templates for Honor to sew into rosettes. She had hoped she might complete a whole grandmother’s garden quilt during the voyage, but the swaying of the deck made it impossible for her to establish a steady rhythm in which to make the neat, tiny stitches that were her trademark. Even the simplest task of tacking the hexagons on to the templates with loose stitches – the first sewing Honor had learned as a young girl – required more concentration than the movement of the ocean allowed. It soon became clear that whatever cloth she worked with would be forever tainted with nausea, or the idea of it, which was much the same thing. After a few days of trying to sew the rosettes, Honor waited until no one was about, then dropped the hexagons overboard – they would make her sick if she ever saw that fabric again. It was a shocking waste of precious cloth, and she knew she should have given them to Grace or other women on board, but she was ashamed of the smell that lingered on them, and of her weakness. Watching the bits of cloth flutter down to the water and disappear, Honor felt her stomach grow calm for just a moment.

      ‘Look at the horizon,’ a sailor commanded one day after witnessing her dry heaves. ‘Get up the bow and keep your eyes on where we headed. Pay no mind to the humping and bumping, the rocking and the rolling. Watch what don’t move. Then your stomach’ll settle.’

      Honor nodded, though she knew it would not work, as she had already tried it. She had tried everything anyone suggested: ginger, a hot water bottle on her feet, a bag of ice on her neck. Now she studied the sailor out of the corner of her eye, for she had never seen a black man up close before. None lived in Bridport, and when she visited Bristol once she’d seen a black coachman drive past, but he was gone before she could take him in properly. Honor eyed the man’s skin: it was the colour of a conker from a horse chestnut tree, though rough and wind-burned rather than smooth and shiny. He made her think of an apple that has ripened to a deep, rich red on the tree while its neighbours remain pale green. His accent was untraceable, from everywhere and nowhere.

      The sailor was studying her too. Perhaps he had not seen many Quakers before, or he was curious what she looked like when her face was not ragged with nausea. Normally Honor’s forehead was smooth, punctuated with eyebrows like wings over wide grey eyes. Her seasickness, however, etched lines where there had been none, and pinched the calm beauty from her face.

      ‘The sky is so big it frightens me,’ she said, surprising herself by speaking.

      ‘Better get used to that. Everything’s big where you headed. Why you going to America, then? Going to find you a husband? Englishmen not good enough for you?’

      No, she thought. They are not. ‘I am accompanying my sister,’ she answered. ‘She is marrying a man in Ohio.’

      ‘Ohio!’ The sailor snorted. ‘Stick to