Chapter 5 — I Am Coming

The meeting at Wymondley, spring 1710

He arrived in the second week of April.

The road from London had been bad after a wet March and his coach had thrown a wheel at Stevenage and he had ridden the last seven miles into Wymondley on a hired horse with his manservant trailing on foot through the lanes, and when he reached the priory gates he was wet through and his hat was ruined and the first thing he said when her uncle handed him a cup of warmed wine in the great hall was an apology for his condition, which he made in three languages because he was not sure which one her family preferred.

English. Her family preferred English. Her uncle said so. Christopher laughed at himself for the gaffe and accepted the wine and looked up over the rim of the cup and saw Barbara for the first time, standing in the doorway of the hall behind her uncle’s right shoulder, and that, she would think later, was when it began — not at the formal presentation a quarter of an hour afterward when he was dry and she was introduced by name and he bowed to her in the Swiss style, lower than an English gentleman would have, with a small flourish that managed not to be ridiculous, but in the doorway, in his wet coat, with his ruined hat in his hand, when he was being apologetic and trilingual and twenty-three years old and entirely unprepared to find that the woman his father had arranged for him to marry was watching him drip onto the rushes.

He stayed three weeks.

By the end of the first week they had ridden together to Hitchin and back, twice. By the end of the second they had walked the priory’s east field and the long meadow and the path down to the brook that the canons had used five hundred years ago to wash their linens. By the end of the third they had each, separately, written to people they trusted in London — he to his father, she to the Wingate cousin who would, in three years, book her passage to Carolina — and the two letters had said, in different words but in essentially the same sentence, that the arrangement was no longer an arrangement. It had become something else. The two writers were unsure what to call it. Neither of them was the kind of person who used the word easily.

What he was, in those weeks, was specific. He was twenty-three, tall, dark-haired, narrow-shouldered, a young man whose face had not yet decided whether to be his father’s. He spoke English with a faint accent on the consonants. He did not drink to excess. He read German devotional poetry in the morning and Dryden in the evening. He could ride. He could not shoot. He had a habit of holding a teacup with both hands when he was concentrating, the way a much younger person would, which surprised her and which she filed away among the other things she was filing about him. He laughed easily but did not waste laughter. He had a slight stammer on the letter B which he managed by choosing other words; she had not noticed it until the second week, and then could not stop noticing it, and then stopped noticing it again entirely, which was its own marker of something.

What she was, that he found, was harder for him to describe. He wrote to his father, in the careful French they used between them: She is what we hoped for. She is also other things. I had not expected the other things. He did not say what the other things were. He was not sure he could. She was twenty-four; she was tall for an Englishwoman, with her father’s straight back and her mother’s dark eyes; she had been educated at home and in London by tutors and by the books her father had bought her and by the Wingate aunts at Lockleys who had taken an interest in their poor relation; she read Latin slowly but read it; she had a particular kind of silence, when she was thinking, that was not the absence of speech but the holding of it. She did not flirt. She did not perform. When she said something, she meant it, and she meant the precise thing she had said, not something near it. He had not, in his twenty-three years of acquaintance with marriageable women in Bern and Yverdon and London, met anyone who used words quite that way.

By the end of the second week they were in love. They did not say it. They knew it, both of them, the way two careful people know a thing without having to confirm it; and they each, separately, knew that the other knew it, which was its own kind of contract, signed in silence.

By the end of the third week the difficult conversation had to be had.

He had not come to Wymondley to marry. He had come to be looked at and to look back, and to agree, if both parties were satisfied, to a formal engagement that would be solemnized once he had crossed to Carolina and made the colony into a place a wife could be received. The plan had been clear from the beginning. The plan had been his father’s plan. The plan had been Barbara’s family’s plan. The plan had been Christopher’s plan, until the second week of April, when it had stopped being his plan and had become, instead, an obstacle.

On the night before he left she walked him out to the cloister court after supper. The April air was cold. She had her cloak. He had a borrowed coat of her uncle’s, because his own was still being mended after Stevenage, and the coat did not quite fit him in the shoulders but he was wearing it anyway because the alternative was to be cold, and he was a man who would rather be slightly ill-dressed than slightly chilled, which she had only realized that week and which she had already filed away as a thing about him she would remember.

He said, in the cloister: I would marry you tomorrow if the colony were ready for you.

She said: It is not ready for you either.

He laughed at that — a real laugh, surprised out of him — and looked at her in the half-dark and did not say anything for a moment, and she understood, in that silence, that she had just gone past whatever line the arrangement had drawn between them and that he had gone past it with her.

He said: When it is ready I will send for you.

She said: I will be here.

She would not be there. She would be on a ship. He did not know that yet. Neither did she. But the two sentences they had exchanged in the cloister that April night were the contract that would, three and a half years later, put her on the deck of a packet out of Gravesend in late October with a small trunk and a packed length of fine linen and her mother’s parting words in her mouth and the rest of her life in front of her.

In the morning he rode back to London. The arrangement, formally, was now an engagement. He would sail in the summer. He would write.

· · ·

The decision not to marry yet, summer 1710

He left for Carolina in late June.

The crossing took eight weeks. He wrote to her from the ship, when there was a packet to take the letters back; he wrote from Charleston when he made landfall; he wrote from the long ride north up the colonial roads to the place his father had bought, the fork of two rivers in eastern Carolina that did not yet exist as a town and that he would, in September, lay out in the cruciform plan his father had drawn on a piece of paper in London the previous winter. He wrote often, in the early months. He had time. He had a great deal to say.

His letters reached her at intervals of weeks or months, in batches, depending on which packet had carried them across and which had been lost. The packet schedule in 1710 was unreliable — sometimes a letter took ten weeks to come from Charleston to London, sometimes it took five months, sometimes it never came at all and a second letter, written later, would arrive first and refer to events the first letter had described. She learned to read the letters out of order. She learned to read each new letter twice — once for what it said, once for what it implied was already known to her from an earlier letter that had not yet arrived. Sometimes the earlier letter would arrive a fortnight later and she would read the second letter again in light of the first. Sometimes the earlier letter would never arrive at all and she would have to reconstruct it from what the later letter took for granted.

He wrote about the founding of New Bern. The Palatines had landed in April, well ahead of him; the Swiss had come over with him; the site at the river-fork was being cleared. The town would be laid out in the shape of a cross — two main avenues meeting at a central square, building lots assigned by lottery to the families, the river-frontage reserved for warehouses and a small wharf. The land was good. The soil was rich. The climate, in late summer, was hotter than anything he had imagined; the air was heavy with insects he did not have names for; there was a kind of small biting fly that came up from the marshes at sundown and that he had learned to outrun by riding inland for the last hour of daylight. The Palatines were homesick. The Swiss were holding up better. The Tuscarora and the Coree people of the country were polite at present and were trading with the settlers for skins and corn and pots. The Welshman Lawson had been at the site for several weeks helping with the survey and was now gone south to attend to other Lords Proprietors’ business. The colony was, in its first weeks, what they had hoped it would be.

He wrote about himself. He was lonely. He was tired. He missed the cloister. He missed her.

He wrote about the colony’s future and about hers in it. In a year, perhaps a year and a half, I will have a house standing. I will have the road from the town finished. I will have neighbors of substance — there are several families I am cultivating already, Carolina English and Carolina Swiss together, the kind of people you will not find tedious. I will send for you the moment it is fit. In a year, perhaps a year and a half. The phrase recurred in his letters through the autumn and into the winter. She marked it. She did not press him on it. She trusted, with the trust of a young woman in love with a man she has not seen in months, that the year-and-a-half would come and would resolve into a ship’s berth out of Gravesend with her name on it.

She wrote back. She told him about Wymondley. About her mother. About the rains in November and the early frosts in December. About her cousin George’s daughters, the youngest of whom had begun to walk that autumn. About the Wingate aunts at Lockleys, who were watching her closely and who had begun, gently, to suggest that the engagement was a long one and that engagements that went on too long sometimes ended in nothing. About her father, who was well, who sent his regards, who was already speaking of Christopher as a son rather than as a future son-in-law. She did not tell him about the nights she lay awake. She did not tell him about the small careful ways she was beginning to arrange her life for a departure she did not yet know how to imagine. She thought he would think she was being dramatic. He would not have. But she did not yet know that about him.

The winter of 1710 went by.

· · ·

Wymondley without him, autumn 1710 to summer 1711

The first year of separation was the easy year. She did not know that at the time.

She rose at six. She dressed. She helped her mother with the household account-book in the mornings; she walked in the priory grounds in the afternoons; she read in the evenings. She wrote her letters on the desk in her bedroom, by the window that looked east toward the cloister yard, in the small clear hand she had learned from her mother’s mother. She sealed each letter with the wafer her father bought in Hitchin by the box. She gave the letters to the carter who came up from the village on Mondays and Thursdays and who took them down to Hitchin where they joined the London post.

She received his letters in batches, as they came. Sometimes a packet of three would arrive on a Tuesday morning, all written in the same week in October but having travelled by different routes; sometimes there would be nothing for forty days and she would convince herself, against her own better sense, that he was dead or had forgotten her or had decided, on second thought, that the engagement had been an enthusiasm of April that the long Atlantic had cooled out of him. Then a letter would arrive, addressed in his hand, and she would carry it up to her bedroom and read it twice and put it in the small wooden box at the bottom of her trunk and go back down to the household and the day would continue.

She knew his handwriting now better than she knew her own. He wrote a quick sloping hand with the loops of his y’s and g’s reaching down into the next line; he abbreviated freely; he made his capital letters with a small flourish at the top that she had decided, after the third letter, was a Swiss thing rather than a personal thing. She had begun to imitate the flourish in her own writing, very slightly, and then had stopped, because she did not want to be a woman who imitated her fiancé’s handwriting.

She was twenty-five in the summer of 1711. The age came and went. The cousin George who would inherit the priory was forty-two; his wife had given him three daughters in a row and now appeared to be done; the family male line at Wymondley would, barring a son not yet conceived, end with George. Everyone in the house knew this and no one said it aloud. Barbara, twenty-five and engaged to a man across an ocean, was the family’s other open question. If the engagement held, she would go to Carolina and the priory line — the one that came down through her father — would continue there. If the engagement broke, she would be a poor relation at Wymondley for the rest of her life, the spinster daughter of the younger son, kept on out of kindness in a house that was sliding toward its own dissolution.

She did not, in 1711, allow herself to think about the second possibility.

In June a letter came from Carolina that had taken almost six months to cross. He had written it the previous December. I have your letter of August, he wrote, the one about the cousin’s youngest beginning to walk. I am glad. I am thinking of her this morning because we had a Swiss child here at the colony who began to walk yesterday and the mother was crying and I was crying with her, which I did not let the father see. We have not had so many easy things here that the easy ones do not get noticed.

It was the first letter he had written in which he had cried.

She did not, when she read it, think anything was wrong. She thought it was a letter from a man who was tired and far from home and who had begun, after eighteen months, to feel the weight of his project. She put it in the box with the others.

In late July a second letter came, which had taken only three months — the packet schedule had improved that summer — written from New Bern in early May. The tone of this letter was different. We have had two deaths, he wrote, both Swiss, both old men, both of fevers I cannot identify. My father is concerned. We have begun to dig a second well at the higher ground; the lower well has been bad since the spring rains. He did not say that the colony was in trouble. He said that two old men had died and that they were digging a new well. He closed the letter as he closed all of them: I think of you every day. I will send for you when it is fit. C.

She put it in the box.

In August a third letter came, written in late June. More fever, he wrote. I am not yet alarmed but I am vigilant. Do not, when you read this, think that the colony is in any present danger; by the time this reaches you the season will have turned and the fever will have passed. But I want to be honest with you. I am writing to my father separately about the same matter. He said again that she should not, for the time being, plan to come.

She had not been planning to come. She had been waiting for him to send. But the sentence — do not plan to come — rang in her ear in a way the earlier I will send for you when it is fit had not. The earlier sentence had been a promise. The new sentence was a warning. She did not yet understand the difference. She would understand it by Christmas.

· · ·

The news turns, summer 1711

She did not get the worst news from him.

She got it, in mid-October, from a London newspaper her uncle brought up from town — a printed sheet of small dense type, four columns to a page, with a short notice on the second page under a heading about American intelligence. The notice said that letters from Charleston of the late summer reported a fever epidemic in the new colony at the river-fork; that Baron de Graffenried’s settlement of Palatines and Swiss had been afflicted with the bloody flux and with what the writer called a Carolina fever; that an undetermined number had died; that the colony’s chief surveyor, the Welshman Lawson, was missing in the woods; and that the Lords Proprietors had been informed.

Her uncle read the notice aloud at the table after supper, the way he read all the colonial intelligence, and Barbara sat very still in her chair and did not interrupt and waited for him to finish. When he had finished she asked him for the paper. She took it up to her bedroom. She read the notice four times. She lit a second candle. She read it a fifth time.

Then she went down to the kitchen, where the cook was scouring pots, and asked for a cup of warm milk, and the cook gave her one without asking why, and she carried the cup back up to her bedroom and sat on the edge of her bed with the cup in her hands and watched the candles burn down. She did not cry. She did not, that night, allow herself to think about what fever in October meant for a young man in eastern Carolina who had last written to her in June. She thought instead about the cup of milk, which was cooling, and about the cook, who had not asked.

The next morning she wrote to him. She kept the letter short. I have seen the notice from London concerning the fever at New Bern. I am writing to ask only that you tell me, when next you write, that you are well. I do not need any other thing. Only that. — B.

She gave the letter to the carter on Monday.

His next letter, when it came in early December, had been written in early September. It was short. The fever, he wrote, had been bad. They had lost eleven Swiss, four Palatines, and three of his father’s servants, including the old man Hans who had been with the family for thirty years and whom Barbara had heard about in earlier letters. His own household had been spared. He himself had been ill briefly in early August but was now recovered. His father was well. The Welshman Lawson had reappeared from the woods and was at Bath. The autumn rains had come and the fever had abated. He was, he wrote, as well as a man can be who has spent a summer burying people he had hoped to grow old beside. He closed: I do not yet say do not come. I do not yet say come. I am waiting to see what the winter brings before I decide which letter to write you. Forgive me. C.

She read it twice and put it in the box.

A week later, on a cold morning in mid-December with a frost on the cloister grass, she came down for breakfast and found her uncle standing in the great hall with a different newspaper in his hand and a particular look on his face that she had not seen since the day, two years before, when her grandmother had died.

He gave her the paper without speaking. She read the notice.

The Tuscarora, the notice said, had attacked the settlements on the Neuse River in eastern Carolina at the end of September. The casualties were extensive. The Welshman Lawson was confirmed dead, executed by the Tuscarora at a place called Cotechney. Baron de Graffenried was taken prisoner and his fate unknown. The Swiss-Palatine colony at New Bern was reported destroyed. The notice gave no names of survivors. It did not, anywhere in its three printed paragraphs, mention Christopher VI by name.

She read it three times.

Her uncle said, Barbara.

She said, Do not.

She gave him back the paper. She walked out of the hall and across the cloister yard, in her morning gown and no cloak, and stood by the chapel door and looked at the chapel for what felt like a long time and was actually a minute and a half. Then she went back to the house and went up to her bedroom and closed the door and sat on the edge of her bed and waited for whatever was going to happen next inside her chest to happen.

It did not happen, exactly. What happened instead was that she became, for a period of approximately six weeks, a person who got out of bed in the mornings and went down to breakfast and sat through the day and went to bed at night, but who was not present in the house in any way that the household could reach. Her mother spoke to her; she answered. Her uncle put a hand on her shoulder at supper; she felt it. Her cousin George brought the new baby in to be admired; she admired it. Inside, she was waiting. She was waiting for a letter in his hand. She was waiting for the second printed notice that would either name him among the dead or name him among the survivors. She was waiting to know whether the rest of her life was the life that began with a wedding in Carolina or the life that began with widowhood-without-marriage in a Hertfordshire priory whose male line was running out under her feet.

The letter came on the fourth of February, 1712.

It was in his hand. The wax was his wax. The seal was his seal. She carried it up to her bedroom before she opened it because she did not want to be watched while she read it.

I am alive, it began. I was not at New Bern when the attack came. I was south, at Bath, with Lawson, the day before he started up the Neuse to his death. I have been in Virginia these three months with Governor Spotswood, who has been negotiating my father’s release. My father is alive but ill, and is now with me at Williamsburg. The colony is destroyed. The Palatines who survived are scattered. I do not yet know what we can save. — I will write you again when there is news that is not all of it bad. I am sorry to have made you wait so long for this letter. There was no way to send it sooner. C.

She read it twice. She put it on the desk under the candle. She put her head down on her arms on the desk and for the first time since October she cried — not for him, because he was alive, but for the previous six weeks and the woman she had been during them, who had become someone she did not entirely recognize and who, she suspected, would never entirely go away.

When she had stopped crying she put the letter in the box at the bottom of her trunk with the others. The box was getting full.

She did not yet know that the worst news of the engagement was still ahead of her. She thought, that February morning, that the worst was behind. She would have, in the spring, two more relatively easy months — months in which she wrote to him often, in which his letters from Williamsburg arrived with reassuring regularity, in which the family at Wymondley began cautiously to speak again of the eventual marriage as something that might still happen — before the second blow fell, this one from inside the house.

· · ·

The Tuscarora aftermath, spring 1712

The spring of 1712 was, in its surface details, a normal spring at the priory.

The lambs came in March. The orchard flowered in April. The cloister grass came up green. The chapel bell, which had been recast in 1595 and had hung over six generations of Wymondley Nedhams, rang at compline through the lengthening evenings. Barbara wrote letters in the mornings and walked in the priory grounds in the afternoons and sat with her mother in the evenings, and the household around her began, slowly, to lower its voice when speaking of Carolina, the way a household lowers its voice around a convalescent.

The letters from Christopher came more regularly that spring. He was at Williamsburg, in the Governor’s circle, working with Spotswood on the practicalities of what could be salvaged from the colony. His father was recovering from the captivity but was not himself. The Baron had been held by the Tuscarora for several weeks in difficult conditions, had watched Lawson executed in front of him, had been released only when Spotswood had threatened reprisals against the Tuscarora settlements in Virginia; he had come out of the captivity an older man than he had gone in. Christopher wrote about him with a tenderness Barbara had not seen in the earlier letters. He is sixty-one and looks seventy. He sleeps badly. He does not eat. He is going home to Switzerland in the spring of next year, I think, as soon as we can get the colony’s accounts in a state he can leave behind. I will stay. There is no one else to stay.

He stopped, in the spring letters, telling her not to come. He also stopped, in the spring letters, telling her when he would send for her. The phrase in a year, perhaps a year and a half had vanished from the correspondence sometime in the summer of 1711 and had not returned. What had taken its place was a careful silence — long descriptions of the practical work, of the people he was meeting at Williamsburg, of the small recoveries the colony was making — and around the silence, the unspoken thing, which was that the colony was not going to be a place for a wife in 1712 or 1713 or possibly ever.

She read the silence. She did not press him on it. She trusted that he would tell her, when he could, what came next.

What came next, she did not yet know, was nothing — or rather, was an extension of the not-yet that had been the engagement’s whole condition since the cloister conversation two years before. He would not, in 1712, write the letter telling her to come. He would not, in 1713, write it either. He would write love letters; he would write practical letters; he would write descriptions of Williamsburg in autumn and of the Carolina coast in winter and of the Tuscarora prisoners coming through on their way to be sold south to the Charleston traders; he would write about everything except the one thing she was waiting to be told. The Baron sailed for Switzerland in April 1713. Christopher stayed. The colony continued in its half-life. The letters continued to come.

She was, in the summer of 1712, twenty-six years old.

In June her aunt Margaret, the elder of the two Wingate aunts at Lockleys, came up to Wymondley for a fortnight. She brought a proposal with her. There was a widower in Bedfordshire — a Cordwell of Sandy, fifty-three years old, three grown children, a comfortable competence, recently bereaved and looking — who had let it be known through the Wingate cousinship that he would receive favorably an introduction to Miss Nedham of Wymondley. The aunt put it forward with the careful neutrality of a woman who was not herself proposing the match but who was, in her own quiet way, very strongly proposing the match.

Barbara listened. She thanked her aunt for the consideration. She said no.

The aunt said: Think about it for a week.

Barbara said: I have thought about it for two years. The answer is the same.

The aunt did not press further. She left Wymondley after the fortnight without raising the subject again. But Barbara understood, watching the aunt’s chaise turn out of the gatehouse, that something had shifted in the family’s calculation. The aunt had not come up of her own initiative. The aunt had been sent. Someone — possibly her uncle, possibly her cousin, possibly the Wingate aunts collectively — had decided that two years was long enough and that the engagement to a colonial widower-in-waiting was, after the Tuscarora War, no longer a credible plan. The Cordwell of Sandy had been the family’s first move. There would be others.

She wrote to her father in Bedfordshire — Maurice was visiting his Wingate-side relations at Lockleys that month — and told him about the conversation. She asked him to write to the aunts. She asked him to make it clear, in his own hand, that the engagement to Christopher held and that the family was not to make further such proposals.

He wrote the letter. He wrote it in his careful old-fashioned hand, with the long s’s that he still used at sixty-three. He sent it to Lockleys and a copy to her uncle at Wymondley. The aunts received it. Her uncle received it. The proposals stopped, for the rest of the summer.

In November Maurice came home from Lockleys for the winter. He had been at Lockleys longer than usual that year — almost five months — because there was sickness in the house at Lockleys and he had stayed to be useful, as he always did, for people who were not quite his own and had never quite been anyone else's either. He arrived at Wymondley on the third of November in a hired chaise, looking, Barbara thought, smaller than she remembered. He had been thinning for several years; she had not allowed herself to notice. That November she noticed.

He took to bed on the seventh. The fever came on the tenth. The Hitchin physician was sent for and pronounced the case difficult but not desperate. The fever stayed for nine days. He died on the cold week before Advent, on the nineteenth of November, with Barbara holding his hand and her mother on the other side of the bed and her uncle standing in the doorway because the room was too small for three watchers and he could not bring himself to leave.

He was sixty-four years old. He was buried in the chancel of the priory church, four days later, in the same row where his father George Senior had been buried in 1679 and his grandfather Eustace in 1658. The chapel was full. The Hitchin curate read the burial service. Barbara stood at the front of the family party, in the black gown that had been her grandmother’s and had been altered for her, and did not weep at the graveside, because she had wept the previous night and had decided, against her own grief, that she would not weep where the household could see her.

She wept again that night in her bedroom, with the door closed, until the candle burned down and the chapel bell rang midnight and she could not weep any longer.

The next morning she came down to breakfast and the household went on.

· · ·

After Maurice, December 1712 into 1713

The household went on, but the household was different.

Her mother, widowed at fifty-six, did not stay at the priory.

The Wingate aunts came up from Lockleys before Christmas to fetch her down, and it is worth being exact about who they were, because Barbara had never once been exact about it and neither had anyone else in that house. They were not Lettice's aunts. They were not Lettice's anything. They were the Lockleys women — the kin of Frances Wingate, who had been Eustace's second wife and Maurice's step-grandmother and had been dead for forty years — and their claim on the widow of Maurice Nedham was a claim of no blood whatsoever. They came because there was nobody else to come. Lettice had no people. She had never had any people. In thirty years at Wymondley not one soul had ever arrived at that gatehouse asking for her by her own name, and now that her husband was in the chancel floor the women of her husband's step-grandmother's family got into a chaise and drove up from Welwyn to collect her, because a gentlewoman of fifty-six with no jointure and no natal cousinage cannot simply be left in a house that belongs to her nephew.

She would live at Lockleys the way widowed gentlewomen in this country had always lived — with kindness, in a back bedroom, useful where she could be useful, deferring on questions of the household to a woman younger than herself, kept by family because she had nowhere else to be kept. Except that it was not her family. It was the family of a woman who had married into the priory eighty years before and had no more to do with Letisia Bowyer than the road between the two houses did.

Lettice did not want to go. Lettice went. The Wingate aunts took the matter into their own hands with a firmness that did not, in the moment, brook discussion, and there was no one on the other side of the question to discuss it with.

Barbara watched her mother get into the chaise on the morning of the twenty-third of December with the small trunk that contained the things she had decided to keep and the larger box that contained the things she had decided to send on ahead of her, and the chaise turned out of the gatehouse and down toward the Welwyn road, and Lettice was gone.

Barbara stood in the arch until it was out of sight. She was twenty-seven that December. It did not occur to her, then, to wonder why her mother was being taken in by her father's people, and it would not occur to her for a long time afterward, and by the time it did she would be on the other side of an ocean and there would be no one left to ask.

Barbara, twenty-seven that December, was now a woman without a father in a house that belonged to her cousin.

The cousin George was a good man. He had always been a good man. He had treated Barbara, since she was a child, as something between a younger sister and a fond niece; his wife Anne had been kind to her in the practical ways the wives of householders are kind to unmarried female relations. None of this changed. The cousin’s kindness did not change. The cousin’s wife’s kindness did not change. What changed was that Barbara’s position in the household, which had been the position of daughter of the late Maurice, fiancée to the Swiss baron’s son, future mistress of a Carolina estate, was now the position of poor relation in someone else’s house, engaged for two and a half years to a man who has not sent for her, of an age at which the engagement may not resolve.

The cousin did not say this. The cousin’s wife did not say this. The household did not say this. It hung in the air around Barbara, that winter and the following spring, in the way unspoken things hang in households — in the slight adjustment of who was seated where at dinner, in the gentle inquiries from the aunts about whether she might consider a season in London, in the way the family began, slowly, to speak of the Carolina engagement in the past tense without quite using the past tense, as if it had become something that had happened to her once rather than something that was still happening.

In March a second proposal came. This one through her uncle, from a connection of his own — a merchant in London, widowed twice, fifty-eight years old, well established in the Levant trade, with a house in Cheapside and a settlement that would have made Barbara a woman of substance for the rest of her life. The uncle put it forward at the supper table one evening, in front of the cousin and the cousin’s wife, in the manner of a man who expected the matter to be discussed seriously.

Barbara refused at the table. She did not raise her voice. She did not weep. She said only that her engagement to Christopher held; that she had given her word in April 1710 and would not, in March 1713, take it back; that she would consider no other proposals until and unless the engagement was, by Christopher’s own letter, dissolved.

Her uncle said: Barbara. He has not sent for you in three years.

She said: He will when he can.

The uncle did not press further at the table. But that night, after the household had gone to bed, Barbara heard the uncle and the cousin in the cousin’s office, with the door closed, talking for what must have been an hour. She did not eavesdrop. She did not need to. She knew what they were saying. She knew also that whatever they decided in that conversation, she would not be able to refuse a third proposal as easily as she had refused the first two. The family was running out of patience with her. The family was running out of patience because the family had begun to believe that she was running out of time.

She wrote to Lockleys the next morning. She wrote to her mother.

The letter was short. She told Lettice about the merchant proposal and about her refusal. She told Lettice about the conversation in the office. She asked her mother to come up to Wymondley, for a fortnight if no longer, because there were things that needed to be said in a room with the door closed and there were not, at present, three people in Hertfordshire who could say them with her.

Lettice came up at the end of March.

· · ·

The mother’s visit, April 1713

She came in a hired chaise. She arrived on a wet Tuesday afternoon. She did not bring much with her. She had been at Lockleys five months; she had been a widow five months. She looked, Barbara thought, neither older nor younger than she had looked at her husband's funeral, but she looked smaller, the way Maurice had looked smaller when he came home in November. The Wingate aunts had not aged Lettice. The Wingate aunts had concentrated her.

They sat in Barbara’s bedroom — the one Barbara had grown up in, with the writing-desk in the east window — because it was the only room in the house where they could be sure of not being heard. Lettice took the chair by the desk. Barbara sat on the bed. The April rain ran down the diamond panes.

Lettice said: Tell me.

That was all she said. Barbara had been ready for the strategist — the older woman who had lived through her own difficult marriage and her own widowhood and the long cousinage politics of the Wingate aunts and who would, in her quiet way, present Barbara with a reasoned analysis of what to do. The older woman she had been ready for was not the one in the chair. The one in the chair was someone else: a woman with her hands folded in her lap who had said one word and who was now waiting, with the kind of stillness Lettice had used at Maurice’s bedside in November, for Barbara to fill the room with her own voice.

Barbara filled it.

She started with the proposals. She told her mother about the Cordwell of Sandy, about the merchant in Cheapside, about the supper-table conversation in March and the night-time conversation in her uncle’s office afterward. She told her about the cousin’s wife’s small adjustments at dinner. She told her about the aunts’

Lockleys campaign that had run all winter and that Lettice had only this morning at the chaise told her about in any detail. (She had not meant to start there. She had meant to start with Christopher. The proposals came out first because the proposals were the surface; she would, in a moment, get to what was underneath.)

She said: They are not wrong, Mama. The cousin is good. The uncle is good. The aunts have meant me kindly in their way. Two years is a long time. Three years is a longer one. The merchant is a respectable man with a settled situation. The Cordwell of Sandy probably is also. If I marry one of them, I will have a life. I will have a house. I will have children. I will have the dignity of a married woman, which a woman of twenty-seven who has been engaged for three years to a man across an ocean does not, at present, have.

The rain ran down the diamond panes. Lettice did not say anything.

Barbara said: And if I wait. If I keep refusing them. They will keep coming. There will be a third proposal in the summer and a fourth in the autumn and the autumn after that one, and at some point I will be too tired or too lonely or too afraid, and I will accept one of them, and I will write Christopher a letter that begins with the small words a woman uses when she is breaking her word, and I will marry the man and I will live the life. I will be respectable. I will be a Mrs. Somebody at Cheapside or at Sandy and I will have children and I will keep house and I will read the gazettes from Carolina sometimes when the news from there reaches London, and I will know, every time, what the news is costing me, because I will have paid for it already.

(She had not known she had been thinking this. She had been thinking it for two years. She had been keeping it under a stone in the part of her own mind she did not visit.)

Lettice did not say anything.

Barbara said: That is one ending. There is another. He will not send for me, Mama. He has stopped saying he will. He has not said the words I will send for you in any letter since the summer of 1711. The phrase used to be in every letter. It has been gone from every letter for almost two years. He is not going to send. He loves me. He loves me. But he is, in his own mind, protecting me, and he is wrong, and the colony is never going to be ready in the way he means, because the way he means it would require Carolina to be a different country. He is twenty-six years old. He is going to spend the rest of his life there. If I wait, I will wait until he marries some Carolina English girl with a name I will never learn, because he will have finally decided, five years from now, that I have refused him by my silence the way he has refused me by his caution. And I will be at Cheapside.

Her hands were on her knees. She did not remember having put them there.

Lettice did not say anything.

Barbara said: Neither of those is the ending.

(There. She had said it. She had not known she was going to say it; she had said it; she was hearing herself say it; the sentence had come up out of her like a thing that had been growing in the dark for two years and that had now broken the surface of the water, and she could not, having said it, unsay it, and did not want to.)

She said: I am going to him.

The rain on the panes. Lettice’s hands in her lap. The candle was lower than it had been a quarter of an hour ago.

She said: I am not going to wait for him to send. He is not going to send. I am going to write him a letter in the summer that says I am coming, do not write back to tell me not to, by the time you read this I will already be at sea. I am going to give the letter to your London cousin and she is going to put it on the next packet for Charleston. I am going to take a passage out of Gravesend in October. I am going to be at Charleston in February. I am going to find him at Williamsburg or at New Bern or at wherever he is. He will marry me there or he will not. If he marries me, I will have the life I have wanted for three years. If he does not, I will come home and I will take the merchant and I will be no worse off than I am right now. I am going.

(She was speaking faster than she was breathing. She did not stop.)

I am going because I cannot stay. I am going because if I stay I will rot. I am going because I have been waiting for him to be ready and he is not going to be ready and the waiting is going to kill the woman I am before it kills me, and I would rather lose him in Carolina than lose myself in Cheapside, and if he sends me back I will at least know. I am twenty-seven. I have been engaged to him for three years and three months. He told me he would send for me when the colony was ready. The colony is not going to be ready. I am going to make it ready. I am going to be the part of it that is ready. I am going.

She stopped.

She had not known, until she had said it, that the sentence I am going to be the part of it that is ready had been the sentence the last two years had been writing inside her. She heard it after she had said it, the way one hears a bell a second after it has rung. She put a hand briefly to her own mouth. She did not weep. She had wept enough about Christopher already; she would not weep about herself.

Lettice had not moved.

After what may have been a minute and may have been longer, Lettice unfolded her hands. She did not get up from the chair. She did not lean forward. She did not put a hand to her own face or to Barbara’s. She looked at her daughter across the small distance of the bedroom — the distance that had been twenty-eight years of mother and daughter, of teaching and watching and hoping and worrying, and that had now, in the last quarter of an hour, become something else, the distance between a woman and another woman who has just become herself — and Lettice said three sentences.

She said: You are not fine here.

She said: He is not fine there.

She said: Go and find out.

That was all. It was the blessing. It was the thing Barbara had not, until this moment, known she had still been waiting to be given, and that Lettice had not, until this moment, known she had still been waiting to give. Barbara understood, hearing it, that her mother had been waiting longer than she had been waiting — that Lettice had been waiting since the cloister conversation in April 1710, waiting for her daughter to come to her own decision so that she, Lettice, could finally release her to it. The waiting was over for both of them at the same moment.

The candle was burning down. Lettice got up from the chair. She put a hand briefly on Barbara’s shoulder. She went to the door of the bedroom and turned, with her hand on the latch, and looked back at Barbara on the bed.

She said: Do not believe him when he says he is fine. He is not fine. None of them are. Go and find out.

Then she went out, and down the corridor to the guest room where the cousin’s wife had laid out a fire for her, and she did not speak of the conversation again for the rest of her visit.

Lettice went back to Lockleys after a fortnight.

Barbara stayed.

She did not write the letter at once. She thought about it for two months. She walked the priory grounds in April and May; she sat at the writing-desk in the east window of her bedroom; she watched the cloister grass green again; she watched her cousin’s youngest daughter, the one she had described to Christopher three years before as having begun to walk, now run across the cloister yard with a stick and stop and turn and run back. She read Christopher’s letters out of the box in her trunk, in order this time, from April 1710 forward, all of them, all forty-one of them as they had come to her in the three years since the cloister conversation. She read them slowly. She read them again. She put them back in the box.

She wrote the letter in the first week of August.

· · ·

The letter, August 1713

She wrote it in the morning, at the desk in the east window, on a clean sheet of the good paper her uncle bought in Hitchin. She did not draft it. She did not need to. She had been composing it in her head for three months and what was left to do, that August morning, was only to put it down.

She had, in her head, written it long. She had composed paragraphs. (She had composed, in the small hours of the previous nights, a careful explanatory letter — three pages of it — that began with a salutation and laid out the reasoning and named the ship and gave the date of expected arrival and closed with a courteous and explanatory and apologetic and loving signature, and that did, in the composition, all of the work a letter of this kind was conventionally required to do.)

She uncapped the inkwell.

She picked up the quill.

She dipped it.

She held it over the paper for what may have been ten seconds.

(The three pages were in her head. She knew them. She could have written them out without thinking. What stopped her, the quill in her hand and the morning light on the paper and the cloister visible through the window-glass green with August, was that the three pages — the explanations, the apologies, the careful naming of the ship — were the same three pages that the Barbara of the previous April would have written. The Barbara of the previous April had not yet been in the room with her mother. The Barbara of the previous April had still been a woman who owed Christopher an explanation. The Barbara who was now sitting at the desk in the east window did not owe Christopher an explanation. She owed him an arrival.)

She wrote three words.

I am coming.

That was all.

She did not sign it. She did not date it. She did not write a salutation. She read the three words on the page and they sat in the centre of the otherwise blank sheet, in her own small clear hand, with no flourishes and no underlines, and she understood — the way she had understood the day before yesterday at the writing-desk that I am going to be the part of it that is ready had been the sentence the last two years had been writing inside her — that the three words were what the three pages had been trying to say all along. The three pages had been the surface.

The three words were what was left when the surface burned off.

She folded the page once.

She folded it once more.

She sealed it with the small Wymondley seal her father had given her on her sixteenth birthday — the one with the priory tower and the date 1700 — and she pressed the seal carefully so that the priory tower came out clean. She put the letter in her pocket.

Two days later, when the carter came up from the village on Monday, she gave him the letter and a half-crown and asked him to take it to the London road and to put it into the hand of the next coach guard headed south, with the half-crown for the man’s trouble, and to tell the guard that it was to go on the Wingate packet for Charleston — the next one, whichever one — and not to wait. The carter took the letter and the half-crown and asked no questions, because the carter had been carrying her letters for three years and had long ago decided that whatever was in them was none of his business.

The London cousin had been told to expect it. She had been told by Lettice in May, in the careful way Lettice told things, that a letter might come that summer and that if it came it was to go on the next Charleston packet without waiting and without inquiry. The London cousin received Barbara’s letter at her house in the Pool of London on the morning of the seventh of August. She read it in five seconds. She put it into a fair-paper envelope addressed to a captain of her husband’s acquaintance who was loading for Carolina that week, and she sent it down to the Customs House by her own boy, and the letter sailed out of Gravesend on the tenth of August on a brigantine called the Mary Anne and was, by the end of that day, in the Channel, headed west on a freshening wind toward the Atlantic.

The London cousin did not write to Barbara to confirm. She wrote, instead, to Lettice at Lockleys. The letter has gone, she wrote. Tell her, when next you see her, that her passage on the packet Hopewell, out of Gravesend on the twenty-eighth of October, has been booked under her own name. The captain is a man my late husband sailed with twice and is a person I trust with this. The fare is paid. She is to be at the Pool of London by the twentieth, at my house, and I will see her down to Gravesend myself. Tell her also that I am glad. — Anne Lettice carried the letter up to Wymondley the next week. She read it aloud to Barbara in the bedroom. Barbara nodded. She did not say anything for a moment. Then she said: Thank her, when next you write.

Lettice said: I will.

Barbara said: Tell her also that I am glad.

Lettice did. The letters of the late summer of 1713 between Wymondley and Lockleys and Cheapside contained, by the standards of the eighteenth-century English provincial post, an unusual proportion of single-sentence acknowledgments. None of the three women felt the need to elaborate. They had been waiting three years for something to happen. Something had now happened. There was very little, between them, that required further explanation.

The packet Hopewell was a hundred-and-seventy-ton brigantine, eight years old, with a regular Charleston run and a captain — a Mr. Eldridge — who had been at the trade since the South Sea fever and who was, the London cousin reported, sober and competent and trustworthy with female passengers. The ship would sail on the tide of the twenty-eighth of October. Barbara would board on the twenty-seventh, in the late afternoon, after a night’s rest at the London cousin’s house in the Pool. She would be in Charleston, weather permitting, by the early days of February.

She had ten weeks to pack.

· · ·

The night before

She had packed the trunk twice.

The first time was for the practical winter at sea — the two wool gowns, the linens, the shoes with the buckles that would not rust through, the small things her cousin’s wife had given her without being asked because her cousin’s wife, at least, had not tried to stop her. The second time was after the house had gone to bed, when she opened the trunk again in the candlelight and took out the heavier of the two gowns and put in instead a length of fine linen her mother had folded into a press fifteen years ago for the trousseau Barbara had not yet had.

Her father was eighteen months in the chapel floor.

She closed the trunk and sat on the edge of her bed and put her hands flat on her knees and listened to the priory at night. The chapel below her was silent — compline had been an hour ago. The wind was in the cloister, the way it always was in October. Somewhere in the east range her cousin George’s youngest was crying again, the autumn fever still not broken. She had grown up inside the sound of that wind and the sound of the chapel bell and the sound of children sick in the east range, and after tomorrow she would never hear any of it again.

She thought of the letter.

Not the one she had written to him in August, the one in her own bad handwriting — she had cried while writing it and the page was buckled — the one she had folded and sealed and given to the carter the next morning saying I am coming. Three words. No salutation. No signature. No date. That letter was somewhere west of the Azores by now, riding the gulf stream toward Carolina in the hold of a packet she would never see. She did not know if he had read it. She did not know if he was alive.

She thought instead of his last letter, the one she had received in late August, the one she had read eleven times — she had counted, the way she had counted everything for three years, the weeks, the ships, the silences — the letter in which he had told her again, with the patient gentleness she had come to hate because it was the only thing standing between her and him, that the colony was not yet safe and that he loved her and that he would send for her and that he begged her to wait.

She would not wait.

She was twenty-eight years old. She had been engaged to him for three years and six months. The Wymondley male line was failing — her cousin George had three daughters and no son, the priory would be out of the family within a generation, everyone in the house knew it and no one said it out loud — and she herself had become, in the long aftermath of her father’s death the autumn before last, a woman with no place. Her aunt had offered her a Bedfordshire widower the summer before. Her uncle had offered her a London merchant in March. She had refused them both with a kind of cold serenity that had frightened her aunt and outraged her uncle and that she herself had not quite understood until the night she sat down at the writing-desk in this room with a clean sheet of paper and wrote I am coming, and understood, as she sealed it, that the decision had been made for two years and that she had only been waiting for her own permission to act on it.

The candle was burning down. She did not light another.

She thought of her mother. Lettice was at Lockleys, among her husband's Wingate cousins, where she had gone after Maurice died — widowed at fifty-six, taken in by a family that was not hers the way widowed women in this country were always taken in by family, which is to say with kindness and with a hundred small reminders that the kindness was a gift. Lettice had not tried to stop her. Lettice had said, in the April week when she came up from Lockleys to say what she had come to say, only one thing of any real weight: do not believe him when he says he is fine. He is not fine. None of them are. Go and find out.

That had been the permission Barbara had been waiting for, though she had not known it at the time.

In the morning the carter came for the trunk and she went down to the priory yard and her cousin’s wife handed her a small parcel — what was in it has not survived but Barbara would carry it for the rest of her life — and she got into the cart and she did not look back at the priory as it rode away from her and she did not cry until the cart was past the gatehouse and out on the Hitchin road.

Then she cried for the length of the road to Hitchin.

She stopped before the cart entered the town, because she would not be seen weeping by strangers, and she pressed her hands flat against her face until the heat in her eyes went down, and she sat up straight and she put her hands back in her lap and she did not weep again until she was on the open ocean three weeks later and the English coast was a thin gray line behind her and the wind smelled of salt and she understood, for the first time, what she had done.

She was on the London road by nightfall.

She slept at an inn at Welwyn that she had not slept at before and would not sleep at again, and rose at six and was at the Pool of London by mid-afternoon on the twenty-fifth of October, in the rain, and the London cousin met her at the dock with an umbrella and a small dry warm voice that was the first kindness Barbara had received from a stranger in some weeks and that made her, briefly, want to cry again. She did not cry. She thanked the cousin. The cousin took her up to the house in Wapping. The two of them sat together in the small parlor by the river and ate a supper of cold chicken and apples and very weak wine, and the cousin told her what she would need to know about Mr. Eldridge and the Hopewell and the Channel crossing and the open Atlantic and what to ask the captain for and what not to bother the captain about, and Barbara listened and made small careful notes in the back of her commonplace book in pencil, and at nine o’clock the cousin took her up to the small front bedroom on the second floor and pointed out the bell-pull and the chamber-pot and the basin and the candle and the spare blanket, and went back downstairs, and Barbara sat on the edge of the bed in the spare bedroom of a London house she had never been in before, in the middle of the city she had not lived in since a brief stretch as a girl, and put her hands flat on her knees, the way she had sat on the edge of her own bed at Wymondley two nights before, and listened to the city outside the window — the boat-bells, the rain, the men on the river, the things she had not grown up inside the sound of — and understood that the priory was now behind her in a way that it had not been in any of the previous twenty-eight years of her life.

She slept for six hours. She did not dream.

On the twenty-seventh in the late afternoon she went down to Gravesend in the cousin’s hired chaise and boarded the Hopewell, with her trunk and her small bag and her commonplace book and the parcel her cousin’s wife had given her in the priory yard three mornings before. Mr. Eldridge met her at the rail. He was a square-built man of fifty-some, weathered, sober, courteous in the careful way provincial sea-captains were courteous to passengers above their station. He showed her the cabin she would have — a small one, eight feet by six, with a fixed bunk and a narrow table and a sea-chest under the bunk — and told her the tide would turn at first light and that she should sleep if she could and that they would be in the Channel by midday. He left her alone with her trunk and her bag.

She did not unpack. She sat on the bunk with her hands flat on her knees and listened to the brigantine creak around her and the river slap against the hull and the voices of the watch on the deck above, and she did not, in that moment, think of Christopher, or of Wymondley, or of her mother at Lockleys, or of the letter that was somewhere off the coast of Carolina by now riding south on the gulf stream. She thought, instead, of nothing — a careful, deliberate nothing, the way she had thought of nothing on the morning after the Tuscarora notice in December 1711, the way she had thought of nothing on the morning after her father’s funeral in November 1712. It was the kind of thinking she had learned to do when she was waiting for the next thing to happen.

In the morning the tide turned and the Hopewell dropped down the river on the ebb and stood out into the Channel by midday, and Barbara stood at the stern rail in her wool cloak with her hood up and watched the English coast move from a near thing to a middle thing to a distant thing, over the course of three days, and on the third afternoon, in a freshening westerly off the Lizard, the coast became a thin gray line and then it became nothing at all, and the wind smelled of salt, and she understood, for the first time, what she had done.

She stood at the rail until the cold drove her below. She did not weep. She had wept enough for one autumn. She went down to the cabin and lit the small lamp and opened her commonplace book and wrote, in pencil, at the top of a fresh page: Hopewell at sea, off the Lizard.

The English coast gone behind us. The wind westerly and stiff. Mr. Eldridge says ten weeks to Charleston if the weather holds. I have begun.

She put the book away. She blew out the lamp. She lay down in the bunk and pulled the blanket over her and listened to the Atlantic begin under her.

Three weeks ahead of her, four thousand miles west across the same water, the letter she had written in August was riding the gulf stream south-by-southwest in the hold of a brigantine called the Mary Anne, in a small leather pouch lashed to a beam beside the captain’s berth, the priory seal still warm-coloured on the reverse where the page had been folded against itself since the seventh of August. The letter would reach Charleston in mid-November. From Charleston it would be carried inland by a runner named Wilkes who had been paid in advance by the de Graffenried factor for any de Graffenried correspondence that wanted carrying inland. The letter would arrive in Christopher’s hand on the seventeenth of November at New Bern, on a Tuesday, in the late afternoon, with the cold light already going out of the river behind his half-built house.

He would open it.

He would unfold the sheet.

He would read what she had written.

I am coming.