Slaves of Obsession - Anne Perry [46]
“I think it is a good thing Mr. Trace is coming also. I am sure he will be here, even though we haven’t seen him. Do you think we should tell him about the watch?”
“No,” he said immediately. “I would rather wait until we hear from Merrit what her account is of that night.”
She frowned. “Do you believe Breeland could have taken it from her and dropped it deliberately? That would be a very cold and terrible thing to do.”
“It would be effective,” he answered, his face registering his contempt. “It would be an excellent warning that he will stop at nothing, if we pursue him.”
“Except that he did not know we were aware he had given it to her,” she argued. “The police would see only his name on it. Judith would not tell them, especially if she knew it had been found.”
“No, but she would know,” he answered, his lips thinning bitterly. “That is all he needs. He didn’t count on her courage to send someone privately, or on her resolve to face the truth, whatever it is.”
They were coming to the outskirts of the city now, great open stretches of field spread out in the morning light. Trees rested like billowing clouds of green over the grass. It was going to be a long day, and two nights in a strange bed before they embarked on the Atlantic crossing and landed again on an unknown shore. She wondered fleetingly how she had had the courage, or the lunacy, to do it before, and alone.
They arrived late in Liverpool and it was as they were following the porter along the platform towards the way out that they saw Philo Trace. He came striding over to them, his face lighting up with relief. He greeted them warmly, and they went together to find a hansom, directing it to a modest hotel not very far from the waterfront where they could spend the time before sailing.
Judith Alberton had telegraphed the shipping office as she had said, and their berths were reserved for them. It was a ship largely crowded with emigrants hoping to make a new life for themselves in America. Many were looking to travel west beyond the war into the open plains, or even to the great Rocky Mountains. There they could find refuge for their religious beliefs, or wide lands where they could hack from the wilderness farms and homesteads they could not aspire to in England.
The ship was scheduled to pick up more passengers from Queenstown in Ireland, half-starved men and women fleeing the poverty that followed the potato famine, willing to go anywhere, to work at anything to make a life for their families.
It was a strange sensation to be at sea again. The smell of the closed air of a cabin brought back to Hester the troopships to the Crimea more sharply than the pitch and roll of the deck, the sounds of the sea, of erratic waves, and the wind. She heard the cries of seamen one to another, the creaking of timber. The squawking of chickens and the squeal of pigs troubled her because she knew they were kept to be eaten as they drew farther and farther away from land and provisions became stale and short. The wind was against them off the coast of Ireland. It would be a long crossing.
They were in a first-class cabin with tiny bunks, a single small basin, a chamber pot to be emptied out of the porthole, a small desk and a chair. Clothes were to be hung on a hook behind the door. Monk said nothing, but watching his face, hearing the tension in his voice, she knew he found it almost unbearably oppressive. She was not surprised when he went up on the deck as often as he could, even when the weather was rough and the seas drove hard in their faces, and cold, in spite of it being early July.
Thank heaven they had not had to travel steerage, where men, women and children had no more than a few square feet each and could not take a pace without bumping into someone else. If a person were sick or distressed there was no privacy. Fellowship, good temper and compassion were necessities of survival.
The crossing took just a day under two weeks, and they landed in New York on Monday, July 15.
Hester was fascinated. New York was unlike any city