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‘She’s worryin’ that ’ee ’s gone so long,’ the boy explained, gloomy now, as if this were one of the moments when lack of understanding in those who should possess it lowered his spirits.

Mr Roxburgh might have continued grumbling had the boy not disengaged himself from the unwelcome situation, skipped expertly beneath the mainsail, and made for the forecastle head.

Stranded thus, the passenger condescended to go between decks. On entering the saloon he found his wife busy with some sewing, an occupation he knew her to dislike. Such strength of mind in one he respected, and even loved, irritated him still further.

He frowned, and grumbled, ‘I wish you wouldn’t strain your eyes sewing by such a wretched light.’

She looked up, smiling too sweetly for his present fancy. ‘Sewing isn’t such a skill that one can’t go along at it by instinct after a while.’

Each knew that in her case it was untrue.

Mr Roxburgh seated himself without taking off his overcoat. It made him look temporarily possessed by a sensation of impermanence. He proceeded to choose something to glare at, which happened to be the teasel-shaped flower, by now faded and wizened enough to justify throwing out.

‘Did you enjoy yourself?’ she asked.

‘Enjoy myself at what?’

‘How am I to know?’

‘How, indeed! Or I!’

So they sat in silence awhile.

Then Mr Roxburgh so far relented as to reveal, ‘I had some conversation with the second mate.’

‘On what subject?’

‘Difficult to say.’ It made him glare at the dead flower.

Mrs Roxburgh sewed.

‘That is,’ he said, ‘I can hardly remember, and if I could, it would be difficult to express in words.’

In fact, the mate’s allusions had disturbed him so deeply he would have preferred to dismiss them from his mind.

Mrs Roxburgh continued sewing with an indifference born of obedience, which at last made itself felt.

‘It was about the country beyond,’ he was forced to admit, ‘beyond the known settlements. Prisoners’, he positively drove himself, ‘will sometimes escape. And wander for years in the interior. Supporting themselves off the land. Suffering terrible hardships. But as a life it is more bearable than the one they have bolted from.’

On passing a hand over his face he found he was perspiring for something he might have experienced himself. He realized, for that matter, he could have continued embroidering almost without end on the few words the mate had uttered.

Mrs Roxburgh’s forehead had creased. She did sincerely sympathize with, and had suffered for, those who had been brought to her notice in Van Diemen’s Land, but still had to bridge the gulf separating life from their own lives, whether stately rituals conducted behind the brocade curtains of their drawing-room at Cheltenham, or a makeshift, but none the less homely existence in a corner of this draughty little ship. Neither of them had felt the cat, only the silken cords of their own devising with which they tormented each other at intervals. Yet, she believed, she would have borne all, and more, were someone to require it of her.

How her mind was wandering! She felt ashamed and at the same time agitated. She got up and started an erratic tidying of their quarters as an excuse for moving about. Had she been her mother-in-law she might have prayed to their Lord Jesus for all those who must suffer the lash. But she herself was so constituted she could not pray with confidence; her prayers had seldom been more than words pitched without expectation into the surrounding dark.

Mrs Roxburgh glanced at her husband to decide whether he had guessed, but Austin Roxburgh was too engrossed in his own thoughts, and perhaps always had been.

Throwing off their mood they spent a pleasant, uneventful evening, dining by insufficient light until the captain called for the candles to be lit. There was not only Captain Purdew; Mr Courtney put in an appearance. Again, seemingly, it was Mr Pilcher’s watch. It occurred to each of the Roxburghs that the second mate had not yet broken bread with them.

The ship’s motion and the few mouthfuls of ale she had drunk made Mrs Roxburgh yawn; or it could have been the captain’s story.

Towards the end of dinner Captain Purdew departed from the sea — for him, a rare occurrence — and was telling a land tale, of a carter and his horse. In celebration of the rare occurrence the worthy seaman heavily emphasized each detail, at times even striking the table with the flat of his hand. Mr Courtney, by contrast, had hunched his shoulders, and was sitting silent, looking at his place. He had spread his coarse, doggy hair with a liberal ration of pomade, perhaps knowing beforehand that, in the captain’s presence, he would not contribute a word to the conversation, and might assert himself in this other way.

Nearing the end of a drive from Scole, Captain Purdew had encountered the subject of his story this side of Norwich, ‘… when the horse began to stagger. I’d been catching up on them for some distance in the trap, and suspected there was something unnatural in the animal’s behaviour — till suddenly — he fell down!’ The captain slapped the table so hard the glasses jumped and tinkled.

Hungry for further mysteries since his talk with Pilcher during the forenoon, Mr Roxburgh was merely frustrated by the plodding tale of the carter’s horse.

‘He fell down between the shafts,’ Captain Purdew continued, ‘and the carter began thrashing the poor beast with the reins.’

Mr Roxburgh might never have encountered a worse bore, while Mr Courtney hunched his shoulders higher and tighter for the superior he was unable to protect against the results of his tediousness.

‘I don’t mind saying I swore at him.’ Captain Purdew turned to Mrs Roxburgh, who showed him the kind of smile which may be worn at any season. ‘For I’d noticed that the dray was braking, and the man was far gone with drink.’

Mrs Roxburgh thought Captain Purdew was possibly in like condition, but held her head graciously when she could have let loose a whole string of the yawns she was suppressing. From feeling them swell inside her throat, she saw them as the continuum of soft, unlaid eggs in the innards of a slaughtered hen.

She glanced at her husband. She would have liked to share with him her vision of soft eggs, but he was likely to disapprove of it as much as he would the sight of hen-dirt on her hands from plunging them into the bird’s gizzard.

‘“The brake, man!” I shouted’ and the captain demonstrated.

It seemed to Mrs Roxburgh that the whole of her uneventful life had been spent listening to men telling stories, and smiling to encourage them. It was a relief to catch sight of the boy, who entered bearing a dish with some of the apples they had taken on board at Sydney, and which were of a wrinkled, though hectic red. The boy’s eyes were absorbed in a silent judgment she was unable to interpret, but this did not prevent her wishing to conspire with him in some innocent way. She wondered whether she would have been able to exchange confidences with her own son had she reared him. It was not then, unnatural, surely, that she should hanker after the trust of this crop-headed lad with the dish of feverish apples?

‘I seated myself on the horse’s head as he lay in the road,’ the captain was explaining to Mr Roxburgh.

The latter nodded, but was looking in his wife’s direction. Her head was the sole reality in this sea of words, or for that matter, life. It flickered at times, then burned steady, like any candle-flame, with the result that her husband was overcome with remorse for his irritable sallies earlier that day, and by a fear that he might not convey his love before one of them was extinguished.

In the circumstances, Mr Roxburgh was maddened by the captain’s story. ‘What happened to the deuced horse?’