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Mrs. Jenkins nodded and waited. For the rest of the introduction, no doubt.
There was none. There was no one, Emma thought bleakly. Most of the steerage passengers were farmers and their families, lured across the Atlantic by the promise of homesteads in the Canadian west. But Emma was alone.
Her heart twisted. She had not expected her family to come and see her off. Hadn’t her father told her she was dead to them now? And her mother would never defy him to make the journey from their farm on the coast of North Devon. Six years ago, Emma’s determination to remain at Miss Hallsey’s School for Girls as a junior teacher rather than return to her family’s farm had created a deep and permanent rift with her parents. Her father always said education would be the ruin of her.
How humiliating to accept that he was right.
Emma drew a steadying breath.
“I am going into service,” she explained.
“Ah.” Mary nodded. “Well, plenty of opportunities where we’re going, eh? Pretty puss li
ke you.”
Emma’s smile froze. She knew her looks attracted attention. Her hair was too red to escape notice, Paul had told her. Her mouth was too wide, her bosom too generous to seem completely respectable. But…
Plenty of opportunities? Bitterness assailed her. Dear God, she had left work she loved and the only people she cared for to travel three thousand miles across the Atlantic as an indentured servant.
She did not see opportunities. Only exile.
Emma gave herself a mental shake. Better to scrub floors than earn her living on her back as Paul had offered. She had made her choice, driven as it was by panic, pride, and desperation. She could not afford the luxury of regret.
“You are very kind,” she said. Surely the woman meant her remarks kindly.
The woman clucked. “And nobody, no sweethearts, to see you off?”
“No,” Emma said firmly. “No one.”
Her throat ached. No one at all.
The brown river rushed between the ship and the shore. The deck shuddered and surged underfoot. She watched—she felt—everything she had known sliding away to starboard. The great clock tower, the Custom House’s dome, the spires of St. Nicholas’s and St. Peter’s, all the familiar landmarks disappearing forever because Paul had been a villain and she, a trusting fool.
Emma swallowed the lump in her throat. She would not give in to tears. She would not. She had wasted tears enough.
She caught herself straining for one last glimpse of the school, as if she could see beyond the bustling dock and busy streets to pick out one tiled rooftop among hundreds of other tiled rooftops in the city. Ridiculous. And yet…There was the promenade where she walked sometimes at the head of her girls, a line of bobbing baby ducks in blue wool uniforms.
The wind kicked up. Among the squawking, darting kittiwakes, a gannet soared, its wide wings flashing in the sunlight. The gray ocean rolled over the brown waters of the river, the waves adorned with foam like dirty lace.
An aching sense of loss weighted her chest.
A solitary seal heaved its head above the choppy water, braving the harbor traffic all around. Emma caught her breath. The massive dark body wore a thick band of scars like a necklace. The seal stood a moment against the wash, regarding the ship with dark, clear eyes, almost as if it marked Emma’s passage. Emma stared back, wondering at the seal’s boldness. Oddly comforted by its presence. As a girl walking along the cliffs of North Devon, she used to watch the seals hauled out on the rocky shore. But she had never seen one here before.
Just as suddenly, the great, sleek body disappeared. Disappointed, Emma squinted a long time at the moving water, willing the seal to surface.
When she looked again toward shore, the city and all the remnants of her past life had slipped away.
The wind blew from the west, retarding the ship’s passage. The engines labored through long, heavy swells. After five days at sea, the ship was barely midway through the voyage, and most passengers had lost their stomach for adventure…and everything else.
The stench belowdecks was terrible.
Emma braced fourteen-year-old Alice Gardner in her bunk as the girl retched violently into a bucket. The child had been separated from her family and quartered aft with eleven other single women under the watchful eye of Matron. It should have reminded Emma comfortingly of school, but with so many seasick and bedridden, the area between decks felt more like one giant infirmary.
At least Emma had some experience nursing pupils. Alice was the same age as many of her students. Emma wiped the girl’s face with a damp handkerchief, murmuring some soothing nonsense. She was grateful for something to do, for the opportunity to feel needed. She could not teach. That did not mean she could not be useful.
Matron—jealous, perhaps, of her own authority or suspicious of the color of Emma’s hair—had initially spurned her offers of help. But the surgeon’s time was taken up almost entirely with the twenty-six first-class passengers, and as conditions deteriorated in steerage, Matron relied more and more on Emma to help her with the younger girls.
After several days, Emma struggled simply to keep her eyes open. She moved through a viscous fog of exhaustion. Her arms and legs felt weighted. Her stomach felt like lead.
