Esme turned. 'Feel what?'
'Ill. Seasick.'
She thought about it; she took an inventory of her whole being, searching for signs of unease. But there was nothing. She felt shamefully, exuberantly healthy. 'No,' she said.
'You're lucky,' he said, hurrying on his way. 'It's a gift.'
Her parents' cabin door was locked and, pressing her ear to the wood, she heard sounds like coughing, someone weeping. In her own cabin, Kitty was crumpled on the bed and her face was deathly white.
'Kit,' Esme said, bending over her, and she was suddenly seized with the fear that her sister was ill, that her sister might die. She gripped her arm. 'Kit, it's me. Can you hear me?'
Kitty opened her eyes, gazed at Esme for a moment, then turned her face to the wall. 'I can't stand the sight of the sea,' she muttered.
Esme brought her water, read to her, rinsed out the bowl beside the bed. She hung a petticoat over the porthole so that Kitty wouldn't have to see the wild, swinging angles of the sea. And when Kitty slept, Esme ventured out. The planked decks were deserted, the lounges and dining rooms empty. She learnt to lean into the angle of the pitch when the ship shifted beneath her like a horse taking a fence. She played quoits, hurling the rope circles one by one on to a pole. She liked to watch the foaming path left behind the ship, her elbows hooked over the railings, to watch the grey, crested waves that they had passed over. A steward might appear and drape a blanket round her shoulders.
In the second week, more people appeared. Esme met a missionary couple returning to a place called Wells-next-the-Sea.
'It's next to the sea,' the lady said, and Esme smiled and thought she must remember that, to tell Kitty later. She saw them both glance at the black band round her arm, then look away. They told her about the huge beach that stretched out below the town and how Norfolk was full of houses made of pebbles. They had never been to Scotland, they said, but they had heard it was very beautiful. They bought her some lemonade and sat with her on deck-chairs while she drank it.
'My baby brother,' Esme found herself saying, as she swirled the ice in the bottom of the glass, died of typhoid.'
The lady put her hand to her throat, then rested it on Esme's arm. She said she was very sorry. Esme didn't mention that her ayah had also died, or that they had buried Hugo in the churchyard in the village and that this bothered her, that he was being left behind in India while they all went to Scotland, or that her mother hadn't spoken to her or looked at her since.
'I didn't die,' Esme said, because this still puzzled her, still kept her awake in her narrow bunk. 'Even though I was there.'
The man cleared his throat. He gazed out to the lumped, greenish line of what he'd told Esme was the coast of Africa. 'You will have been spared,' he said, 'for a purpose. A special purpose.'
Esme looked up from her empty glass and studied his face in wonder. A purpose. She had a special purpose ahead of her. His dog-collar was startling white against the brown of his neck, his mouth set in a serious downturn. He said he would pray for her.
Esme's first sight of the place her parents called Home was the flatlands of Tilbury, emerging from a shadowy, dank October dawn. She and Kitty had been waiting up on deck, straining their eyes into the mist. They had been expecting the mountains, lochs and glens they had seen in the encyclopedia when they had looked up Scotland, and found this low, fogged marshland a disappointment.
The cold was astonishing. It seemed to flay the skin from their faces, to chill the flesh right down to the bone. When their father told them that it would get colder still, they simply did not believe him. On the train to Scotland – because it turned out that this was not Scotland, after all, just the edge of England – she and Kitty bumped against each other in the lavatory as they struggled to put on all the clothes they had, one on top of the other. Their mother held a handkerchief to her face all the way. Esme was wearing five dresses and two cardigans when they pulled into Edinburgh.
There must have been a car or a tram, Esme thinks, from Waverley, but this she doesn't remember. She recalls flashes of high, dark buildings, of veils of rain, of gas-lamps reflected on wet cobbles, but this may have been later. They were met at the door of a large stone house by a woman in an apron.
'Ocht,' she said to them, 'ocht,' and then something about coming away in. She touched their faces, Esme's and Kitty's, and their hair, talking on about bairns and bonny and lassies.
Esme thought for a moment that this was the grandmother but she saw that her mother gave this woman only the very tips of her fingers to shake.
The grandmother was waiting in the parlour. She had on a long black skirt that reached to the ground and she moved as if she was on wheels. Esme doesn't think she ever saw her feet. She proffered a cheek for her son to kiss, then surveyed Esme and Kitty through pince-nez.
'Ishbel,' she said to their mother, who was suddenly standing very erect and very alert on the hearthrug, 'something will have to be done about the clothes.'
That night, Esme and Kitty curled round each other in a big bed, their teeth chattering. Esme could have sworn that even her hair was feeling the cold. They lay for a while, waiting for the heat of the stone hot-water bottle to seep through their socks, listening to the sound of the house, to each other's breathing, to the clip-clop of a horse outside in the street.
Esme waited a moment, then uttered a single word into the dark: 'Ocht.'
Kitty exploded into giggles and Esme felt Kitty's head brush against her shoulder as she clutched her arm.
'Ocht,' Esme said, again and again, between spasms of laughter, 'ocht ocht ocht.'
The door opened and their father appeared. 'Be quiet,' he said, 'the pair of you. Your mother is trying to rest.'
– gathered the holly that afternoon in the Hermitage, with a kitchen knife. I wouldn't do it, I was scared of the spines tearing at my skin (I'd been soaking my hands in warm water and lemon for weeks, of course, everybody did). But she pulled it from me and said, don't be a goose, I'll do it. You'll tear your dress, I said, and Mother will be angry, but she didn't care. Esme never cared. And she did, tear it, I mean, and Mother was vexed with us both when we got back. You are responsible even if Esme isn't, she said to me, you are responsible because Esme isn't, and we'd have to take it with us on our next visit to Mrs MacPherson. Mrs Mac, she liked to be called, made the dress I wore that evening. It was the most beautiful frock imaginable. We had three fittings, for it had to be right, Mother said. White organdie with an orange-blossom trim, I was terrified the holly would rip at it so Esme carried it as we walked there, taking care on the ice because our shoes were thin. Her dress was strange: she wouldn't have the organdie, she wanted red, she said, crimson was the word she used. Velvet. I will have a crimson velvet, she said to Mrs Mac as she stood at the fire. You will not, Mother said from the sofa, you are the granddaughter of an advocate, not a saloon girl, and she was paying, you see, so Esme had to settle for a kind of burgundy taffeta. Wine, Mrs Mac called it, which I think made her feel-
– wine is kept in the cut-glass decanters on the table behind the sofa. A wedding present from an uncle. I liked them at first but they are a devil, excuse my French, to dust. One must use a small brush, an old, softened toothbrush or similar, to get into all the fissures. I would ideally like to be rid of them, give them to a younger family member, say, as a wedding gift, a fine present they would make, but he likes them there. He takes a glass at dinner, only one, two on a Saturday night, and I must fill it only half full because it needs to breathe, he said, and I said, I've never heard such nonsense in all my life, wine can't breathe, you dunderhead, this last part said under my breath, of course, because it doesn't do to-