In fact, he seemed to shower Eliza with luxuries. A little spinet stood in one corner of the cabin, and a sewing machine had been screwed to a small table for her use. The dark blue Brussels carpet with its pattern of roses and acanthus was smooth, undisturbed, and scrupulously clean. The gilt-framed mirror, the brass lamp above the long, black walnut chart table, and the polished glasses of barometer and thermometer gleamed richly.
The China Star was what the booking agent in London had called a “hen coop.” It was the seamen’s term for a ship that carried the wife — and sometimes the children — of its master aboard, and there were many of them, from whalers to packet boats, roaming the seas at that time.
To shorebound women, the life seemed bizarre. “No respectable woman would live surrounded by all those rough sailors!” my Devonshire aunt had cried. “Wife or no wife, she must be a low, immoral creature!”
“A married woman may very well civilize the crew,” I told her. “Besides, Cousin Philip sails to Hong Kong on business for his bank, so I shall have an escort. And I must go out to Papa at once, ill as he is.”
“Hmmph! If you had a grain of sense, Philip Rossiter would be your husband now, instead of being wed to that silly chit of his. Cornelia Plambeck, indeed! You mark my words, Harriet. Philip’s not over you. And strange things happen at sea.”
The voyage seemed endless. I despised ocean travel, and after eight years on Aunt’s farm, life aboard ship made me tentative and unsteady in spirit. In my familiar world of chicken feed and mousetraps and cabbages, I had had no doubt that it was right to refuse Philip’s offer of marriage three years before. He had no prospects, and I had feared the strength of my own feelings for him. I called it prudence then, but I was to learn a truer name for it aboard the China Star.
Philip had secured his post with the London and Colonial Bank a month after my refusal, and had proposed to Miss Plambeck soon after. As for myself, I was still only twenty-six, and I had a small inheritance from my mother and enough work to content me. On the farm, with my unhappy father on the other side of the world, I had at last felt perfectly complete. I did not care to marry, nor, for that matter, to love.
But once at sea, in ceaseless motion and with all that dark element of ocean breathing beneath me like a secret self, I had lost my smug certainties. Philip’s nearness, too, unsettled me. Did I love him, after all? Or did I merely want what I could no longer have?
So it was that I stood, on that terrible October morning, in the small, overfurnished after-cabin of the Star, with the shadow of Eliza Logan’s body upon me, and felt my hold upon my own destiny slipping away.
“Harriet?” said Philip’s voice, out of nowhere. “Hallie, my dearest!”
He stood motionless in the open door of the companionway, his fair hair drifting in the sea breeze, his grey eyes wide and fixed. “God in heaven,” he whispered, staring up at the body.
I did not reply. As my cousin entered the room I noticed a sound of running water from beyond the green velours curtain that concealed the captain’s stateroom and bath. But aboard ship one exists in a womb of water, the sound of it filling even one’s dreams. I stood listening, trying to sort the real from the unreal.
I did not succeed. The birds flew up again. Overwhelmed, I sank down on the long, brown plush sofa built into the curve of the stern and forced myself to take deep breaths.
“Has no one else seen her?” Philip murmured. “It’s gone eight bells. Surely Stoddard and McKenzie have been here?”
They were the first and second mates — Stoddard middle-aged, foully profane, with a face like a steamed pudding; McKenzie in his thirties, with dark auburn hair, a courtly Scots’ manner, and wide boyish eyes that reminded me of my cousin’s.
“I have seen neither of them,” I told him. “And this is the captain’s private parlor. Even they must have his permission to enter.”
“They’ll pay hob getting it now,” he said quietly. “We’ve searched every inch of the ship for him. Logan’s not to be found.”
“But,” I objected, “we won’t make port at Gabinea for another day. Unless he took a lifeboat—”
Philip knelt down by me and took my hand. “Hallie, there are no boats missing. He’s gone over the side.”
I could feel his warm breath and smell the pipe tobacco he always kept in his breast pocket. His gentleness reached so deeply into me that it frightened me, just as it had back in Devon. Control, I thought. Control yourself. I took my hand away.
“Nothing can be done at Gabinea beyond a decent burial,” he said, looking up again at Eliza’s dead body. “But there’s sure to be an enquiry once we reach Singapore. The American consul, and their maritime courts-martial. I think we must assemble what facts we can before then. Will you keep a record of anything we discover? With good records kept, we may be delayed for a shorter time, and with your father so ill—”
“Of course,” I agreed.
Philip went to the desk that was suspended from the bulkhead and rummaged for pen and paper. “What brought you here so early this morning?” he said. “I feared for you when you were not at breakfast.”
“Mrs. Logan had invited me to help her cut out a new gown,” I replied — and everything in the room testified to the truth of what I said. A length of rose-colored calico, the ten yards it would require for a decent plain gown, lay folded on the sofa, along with Eliza’s workbox, pincushion, measuring tape, a worn muslin pattern, and two pair of shears. “She said I must come early, before the table was needed for charting.”
There was a ladderback chair lying on its side just under the body, and Philip picked it up. It was not high enough to have served Eliza as a scaffold. He laid a hand on her bare foot. “She still has a little warmth,” he said. “The deed was done no earlier than first light, I should say. Logan must have come to himself and realized the horror of his crime. He’d have had to go over the side before the watch changed at six.”
“You make your assumptions very easily,” I snapped suddenly. “I have seen no proof of Captain Logan’s guilt.”
“Oh, Harriet, be reasonable. She is dead. He has disappeared.”
It was too facile, and all circumstance. “There are no signs of struggle, either about her body or within this room,” I said, “and surely she would have fought against a murderer, even her husband. If she took her own life, Captain Logan may have found her afterwards, been overwhelmed with grief, and so joined her in death. Or some third party may have done for both of them.”
He shook his head. “If she did it herself, then how did she manage? It would take a ladder, but where is it? Who put it out of sight?”
“It is a puzzle,” I admitted. “But if it was murder, why kill her in such a difficult way? Why not smother her, strangle her, slit her throat as she slept?”
My cousin was as stubborn as myself. “Very well. If she meant to die, why put out all this dressmaking gear? Why plan a new gown?”
“Even a suicide may intend to live, Philip, but she — or he — may be taken unawares. Seized in a moment.” I reached out my hand into the liquid sea-light that all but overwhelmed the room now that the sun was fully up. “My mother went off to Hastings market with a careful list of things to buy and her string bag over her arm. She turned a corner, saw an omnibus, and walked in front of it. My father exiled us both to the other side of the world, and now he will die in Hong Kong and his penance will be complete.”