The covenant - James A. Michener [253]
'How old are you, Richard? Thirty-one?' He nodded. 'And you, Vera? Twenty-nine?' She nodded.
'Then you're old enough to realize that a four-month sail to Cape Town, aboard a small ship, in close confinement . . .'
The couple found it embarrassing to look at her, so she spoke with extra vigor, demanding their attention: 'Inherently dangerous, wouldn't it be?'
'I suppose so,' Richard said.
'Old romances are full of this sort of thing. Tristan and Iseult over in Cornwall. One of the Spanish kings, if I recall, and his brother escorting the bride. Are you listening to what I'm saying?'
Richard placed his hand on his mother's and said, 'I'm taking a little girl I knew at playtime . . . out to marry my brother. When I seek a wife, I'll find one for myself.'
'Those are insulting words,' Vera snapped, and for the first time the two Saltwoods looked at her as an individual and not as a prospective answer to a Saltwood family problem. She was, as Emily said, twenty-nine, tallish, thinnish, not especially beautiful of face, but lovely of voice and smile. Like many young women her age she knew how to play the piano and had taken watercolor instruction from Mr. Constable when he stayed in the village. For the moment she was reticent, but as she grew older she would become much like the woman now counseling her: a strong English wife with a mind of her own.
She had never yet been kissed by any man other than her father, and by him only rarely, but she had no fear of men and had always supposed that when the time came, her parents would find her a husband. She was a girl of spirit and rather looked forward to an interval on the frontier, always supposing that her husband would return to a position of some importance at the cathedral, in whose shadow she had been raised and intended to die.
'I'm fully aware of the dangers,' she told her putative mother-in-law, using a low, calm voice even though she realized that Mrs. Saltwood's questioning reflected on her as much as on her son.
'That's good,' Emily said with an inflection that signified: 'This meeting's over. We understand one another.' But Richard had one thing more to say: 'You must tell Vera where the idea came from that sent you to her house . . . seeking a wife ... for Hilary, that is.'
Emily laughed vigorously and took the young people's hands in hers. 'Vera, when Richard passed through Cape Town various army friends advised him that Hilary needed a wife. It was Richard who set this all in motion. And now he proposes to complete the transaction.'
'I don't think of myself as a transaction,' Vera said.
'We're all transactions. My husband married me years ago because the Saltwood holdings needed close attention, much more than he needed a wife.'
They rose from their chairs under the oak trees and looked across at the stunning beauty of the cathedralwhich some of them might never see again.
The Alice Grace was a small commercial barque accustomed to freighting cargo to India but now commissioned to carry some three hundred emigrants to Cape Town, in conditions which would have terrified owners of cattle being shipped across the Channel to France. Her burthen was two hundred and eighty tons, which was significant in that by law she was entitled to carry three passengers for every four tons; this meant that she should have sold passage to no more than two hundred and ten emigrants. Thus, when she left port she was ninety over complement, but since most of the passengers were charity cases, government inspectors smiled and wished her 'Good voyage!'
She departed Southampton on 9 February 1820 on a gray, wintry day when the Channel looked more immense than the ocean, its waves far more menacing. For seven painful days the little craft tossed and pitched in waves that seemed determined