New Bern, mid-November 1713
The letter came on the seventeenth of November, on a Tuesday, in the late afternoon, with the cold light already going out of the river behind the half-built house.
It came in a leather pouch with three other letters and a small canvas-wrapped packet from his father in Switzerland, brought up the Neuse from Bath by a runner who had been paid in advance by the Charleston factor for any de Graffenried correspondence that arrived on the Mary Anne or her sister packets and that wanted carrying inland. The runner was a thin man named Wilkes who had done this kind of work for the colony since its founding, who had watched the Tuscarora War unfold from a distance of fifty miles south and had not himself been touched by it, and who handed the pouch to Christopher’s manservant Hans at the kitchen door of the half-built house and asked, in the practical way of men who get paid by the delivery, whether there was a reply to be carried back.
Hans took the pouch. He thanked Wilkes. He gave the man a cup of cider from the jug on the kitchen table and told him there would be no reply at present and that Mr. Christopher was at the river-end of the south field looking at the new survey-stakes the chainmen had set that morning, and that if Wilkes wanted to wait an hour the master would surely come back for supper and might have a reply by then. Wilkes shrugged in his careful way and said he had two more deliveries on the upper Neuse and would not wait. He drank the cider in three swallows. He set the cup down. He went.
Hans put the pouch on the table in the room Christopher used as his office — the one with the wide window facing south toward the river and the small writing-desk Christopher had built himself the previous spring out of pine from the south timberlot — and went back to the kitchen to set out the supper. He did not open the pouch. He never opened the pouch. The pouch was Mr. Christopher’s.
Christopher came in from the south field at half past five.
He was tired. He had been on his feet since first light. The chainmen had set the survey-stakes in the wrong line by about thirty feet and the whole afternoon had been spent walking the line back to the river-bank with the senior of the two chainmen and a length of marked rope, finding the original stake from August that had been knocked down by a fallen oak in the storm of October, and re-setting the survey from there. The error was the chainmen’s; the consequence was Christopher’s. He would have to write to his father about the delay. He would have to write to the Carolina Land Office about the revised plat. He would have to ride to New Bern town in the morning to get the assistant surveyor to come up and witness the new line. (Three letters and a ride. The price of one fallen oak in October. He filed it, in his practical mind, alongside the other prices the colony had charged him over the past year, and he did not, walking up from the field with his coat over his arm, allow himself to be discouraged by the running total. He had stopped allowing himself that particular indulgence in the spring of 1712. The colony cost what the colony cost. He paid.)
He came up to the house through the kitchen yard. Hans had a cup of warmed cider waiting for him at the kitchen door, the way Hans always did when he had been in the cold field after sundown. Christopher took it. He thanked Hans in German because his mind was still in the field and Hans’s German was the language he could think in when he was tired. Hans said: Mr. Wilkes came from Bath. There is a pouch in your office.
Christopher said: From Charleston?
Hans said: From Charleston.
Christopher took the cider with him into the office.
The pouch was on the desk where Hans always put pouches, square in the middle of the worn pine surface, the leather a little damp from the autumn ride. Christopher set the cider down on the corner of the desk and untied the cord and took the contents out one by one and laid them in a row across the desk, the way he had been taught at Yverdon to handle a quantity of new correspondence — most pressing first, least pressing last, the row arranged so that you could see at a glance the whole day’s work.
The packet from his father went on the far left. He knew his father’s hand at twenty paces; he did not have to read the direction. The packet was thick. It would be the November accounts and a letter and probably an enclosure or two; he would open it last, when he had eaten, because his father’s letters required a quiet head.
Three other items remained. A folded sheet from the Lords Proprietors’ Carolina office at Charleston — a printed circular, by the look of the seal — went next. He did not need to open it tonight. A letter from Spotswood at Williamsburg, in the Governor’s careful upright hand, went third. That one he would open after supper. It would be about the Tuscarora prisoners or about the boundary commission or about money, and any of those could wait an hour.
The fourth letter he did not recognize.
It was a single folded sheet, sealed with red wax, the seal a small device he had to angle to the window-light to read — a tower, and a date. 1700. He turned it over and read the direction. Christopher de Graffenried, Esq., at New Bern in Carolina, by the hand of the Charleston factor. The hand was a woman’s. It was a hand he had not seen on the outside of a letter in nearly three months, because the last letter from her had come at the end of August, and he had assumed the next would not come until December. (He had been keeping the count, the way he kept the count of everything. Forty-two letters in three years and seven months. The forty-third had been due, by his rough estimate, somewhere in the first half of December. This one was three weeks early.)
He sat down on the chair behind the desk.
He did not, at first, open it. He looked at it for what may have been thirty seconds. (Something in the leather pouch had bothered him as he had laid the items out and he had not, in the moment, identified what it was; now, looking at the letter in his hand, he understood. The letter was thin. Barbara’s letters had never, in three years, been thin. They had always been three pages or four or five, written close in her small clear hand, sometimes with crossings on the back of the last page because she had had more to say than the paper would hold. This letter was one sheet folded once. The folded sheet had a weight to it that suggested almost nothing inside. Something was wrong.)
He broke the seal.
He unfolded the sheet.
The light from the window was getting low and he had to turn the page slightly to catch what light there was.
There were three words.
That was all.
The three words sat in the middle of the otherwise blank page, in her small clear hand, with no salutation and no date and no signature, the wax of the priory seal still warm-coloured on the reverse where the page had been folded against itself for the three months it had been crossing the Atlantic.
I am coming.
He read them.
He read them again.
He read them a third time because his mind had not yet decided what the three words meant and his eyes were running over them looking for the rest of the letter that was not there.
(There was no rest of the letter. The three words were the letter.)
He sat very still in the chair behind the desk.
The first thing he felt was not joy. The first thing he felt was a kind of cold all the way down the front of his body from his throat to his stomach, the cold a man feels when something he has been bracing for has arrived and he is, in the first instant, not yet able to identify whether the thing that has arrived is what he feared or what he hoped. He could not tell. He sat with the page in his hand and the cold going down through him and waited for his mind to catch up to what his hands already knew.
Then the joy came.
It came up from somewhere in his chest he had not known about, a place that had apparently been there for three and a half years waiting for a sentence to arrive that would unlock it, and the place opened, and the joy went up through him in a single wave that reached his throat and stopped there. He did not weep. He did not laugh. He sat with the page in his hand and the joy in his throat and the cold still on the front of his body and the two sensations did not contradict each other; they sat together, in the same chair, in the same man, in the same minute. He understood — sitting there, holding her three words — that he had been refusing to let himself want her to come for three years, and that the refusal had been a kind of dying he had not registered as dying, and that what was happening now in his throat was not an emotion that had been waiting to happen but an emotion that had been preventing itself from happening, and that the prevention was now over, and that the joy underneath the prevention had three and a half years of compression in it, and that this was why his throat could not contain it.
He let out a breath he did not remember having held.
(She had said it. She had said the thing he had been telling himself, in his more honest moments since the summer of 1711, that she would never say. She had said it the way she would say it. Three words. No salutation. No argument. The seal of her father’s priory on the reverse. He could see her at the writing-desk in the east window of her bedroom. He could see her hand. He could see the small flourish she always made on the I. She had written the words in the morning probably; the ink had set clean; the page was unblotted. She had written them and folded them and sealed them and given them to the carter on the same day. He knew her well enough to know all of this from the page in his hand.)
She had said it. Then — (Then came the second thing.)
— and the cold on the front of his body, which had been receding, came back and went all the way down through him and into the chair, because his practical mind had now caught up to his throat and his practical mind was asking, in the precise voice it used when it had identified a problem he had not yet seen, when did she write this?
He looked at the page.
There was no date.
He looked at the page again.
There was no date.
(There was no date. The letter had no date. The letter had no salutation, no signature, no closing — and no date. He had three words on a page in his hand and he did not know whether she had written them four months ago or four weeks ago.
The seal was warm-coloured on the reverse the way wax is warm-coloured after a few months in a leather pouch, but he could not, with the precision a practical man wanted, distinguish three months from five months from seven from the colour of the wax. The letter could have been written in July or August. The letter could have been written in September. The letter could have been written in October — although October was unlikely because the Mary Anne sailed in August and the next packet had been the Hopewell in late October and if she had taken passage on the Hopewell then the letter would have come with her rather than before her, unless she had sent it ahead, which she might have done if —) He stopped.
He put the page flat on the desk.
He put both hands flat on either side of the page.
He looked at the page and he did the calculation aloud, in the careful French he used when he needed to think with his father even though his father was four thousand miles away on the other side of an ocean and an alpine range.
Si elle a écrit ceci au début d’août, he said, in the room with no one in it but Hans’s small grey cat watching from the door, — et si le bateau était la Mary Anne, qui a navigué le dix août — alors la lettre est partie d’Angleterre il y a trois mois et demi. Le voyage prend dix à douze semaines. La lettre est donc arrivée à Charleston vers la mi-novembre. C’est aujourd’hui le dix-sept novembre. La lettre est arrivée. Cela est cohérent.
Mais — Mais si elle a écrit cela en août, alors elle a sans doute pris la Hopewell qui a quitté Gravesend fin octobre. Et donc elle est en mer en ce moment. Elle est en mer en ce moment. Elle est en mer maintenant. Cela fait — trois semaines. Trois semaines en mer. Elle a encore — sept, huit, neuf semaines de mer devant elle. Elle arrivera à Charleston vers la mi-janvier. Vers la fin janvier. Au début de février au plus tard.
He stopped speaking.
(He had calculated. The calculation was the kind of thing his mind did with the materials it had. The calculation was almost certainly right. She had written the letter in early August. She had given it to her London cousin. The cousin had put it on the Mary Anne. The Mary Anne had sailed on the tenth. The letter had crossed in three months. Meanwhile Barbara herself had spent September packing. Meanwhile she had spent October travelling to London and to Gravesend. Meanwhile she had boarded the Hopewell in the last week of October. Meanwhile she had stood at the stern rail off the Lizard sometime in the first week of November and watched the English coast become a thin gray line and then nothing. Meanwhile he had been at the south field of his colony, walking the survey line, thinking she was at Wymondley.) (She had been on the water for three weeks. She had eight weeks more.)
(He had eight weeks.)
He stood up from the chair.
He sat back down.
He stood up again because the chair was no longer the right place to be sitting in.
He went to the window and looked out at the south field, which was now in full dark, and put a hand on the cool pane and stayed there for what may have been a minute. (Eight weeks. Eight weeks to do what. Eight weeks to ride to Charleston. Eight weeks to arrange lodging. Eight weeks to send a letter to his father that could not possibly reach Bern before — could not reach Bern at all, in any practical sense, before the marriage. Eight weeks to write to Spotswood at Williamsburg requesting leave. Eight weeks to settle the colony’s affairs at New Bern. Eight weeks. Eight weeks.)
The grey cat came in and sat on his foot.
He picked it up. He held it against his chest the way he had held the teacup with both hands when he was twenty-three at Wymondley and Barbara had filed the gesture away as a thing about him she would remember. He did not know she had filed it away. He did not know she had remembered. He held the cat in the dark room with the three words on the desk behind him and his father’s unopened packet next to the three words and the unread circulars from Charleston next to that, and he thought, in a voice that was no longer the practical French of the calculation but the smaller and older German of the kitchen at Yverdon when he had been a small boy listening to his nurse, sie kommt. Sie kommt. Sie kommt.
She is coming.
He went back to the desk. He sat down. He put the page back in the centre of the desk. He put his elbows on either side of it. He put his face in his hands.
He did not weep, because the joy and the panic had cancelled each other out and what was left was a kind of clear cold attention that he recognized from the months after the Tuscarora attack, the attention he used when something very large had to be done and there was no one else to do it.
He stayed like that for some minutes.
Then he got up. He picked up the page with the three words. He folded it. He put it in the inside pocket of his coat. He went out of the office and down the corridor to the kitchen, where Hans was setting out the cold supper, and he said, in German, very calmly, I am going to Charleston. I am going on Friday. We have three days. Pack me for ten weeks.
Hans put down the bread.
Hans said: Yes, Mr. Christopher.
Hans did not ask why. Hans did not ask whether the master was well. Hans had been with Christopher for six years; Hans had watched Christopher walk into a Tuscarora ambush and walk out alive; Hans knew the difference between an emergency and a decision, and Hans knew that the master’s voice was the voice of a decision.
Christopher said: And Hans — Hans said: Yes.
Christopher said: — she is coming.
Hans looked at him for a moment. Then Hans smiled, which was something Hans almost never did, and said: Well. It is about time.
Christopher went back to the office.
He sat down at the desk.
He took out a clean sheet of paper. He uncapped the inkwell. He picked up the quill. He held it in his hand for a moment and looked at the blank page and did not yet know what he was going to write or to whom, because there were perhaps fifteen people he needed to write to in the next three days and the question was which of them came first.
His father came first.
He dipped the quill.
He wrote: Père — and then he stopped, because his eyes had gone wet without his permission and the Père on the page in front of him was already blurred at the edge, and he had to put the quill down and put both palms flat on the desk and wait for the wet in his eyes to recede before he could continue.
(She is coming. She is coming. Père, she is coming. The woman I have been refusing to want for three years and seven months is on the water. She will be at Charleston in eight weeks. I am leaving on Friday. I do not yet know what I am going to do when she lands, but whatever it is, I will be there to do it.)
He did not write any of that.
He waited until his eyes were clear and he wrote, in the careful French he used with his father, the practical letter the practical man was capable of writing tonight, which began with the date and the place and the apology for the unexpectedness of the news and which laid out the calculation he had done aloud to the grey cat ten minutes earlier and which closed with the request for his father’s blessing on the marriage that would, if all things held, take place at Charleston in February. The letter took him forty minutes to write. It was the longest letter he had written in nine months. By the time he sealed it the candle had burned down nearly two inches and the grey cat was asleep on the corner of the desk and the three words from Barbara were folded against his ribs inside his coat where he would carry them, by his own quiet decision made over the course of the writing, for the rest of his life.
He went to bed at midnight.
He did not sleep until almost three.
When he slept he dreamed of the cloister at Wymondley in April with the rain on the cloister stones and Barbara in her cloak with her hood down saying something to him he could not, in the dream, quite hear, but which he knew in the dream he would understand if he could only get a little closer to her, which in the dream he was trying to do but could not, because the cloister floor under his feet was the deck of a brigantine and the brigantine was moving and Barbara was on a different brigantine and the two boats were moving in opposite directions across the same gray water.
He woke at six on the eighteenth.
The three words were still in his coat.
She was still on the water.
He had seven weeks and four days.
— — — ## §6.2 — Hopewell, off Bermuda, late November 1713 She was a different woman at sea.
She had not known this about herself until the third week out, when she sat down to write in her commonplace book one morning in the cabin and discovered, looking at the previous week’s entries, that the handwriting was different. The letters were rounder. The pressure on the quill was lighter. The hand was the hand of a woman who had not, in twenty-eight years of writing at desks at Wymondley and at Lockleys and at the small school-table her tutor had set up in the gallery, had a hand quite like this one. The hand at sea was the hand of someone she had not previously been.
She did not know who that woman was.
She was learning.
(She had thought, before sailing, that the crossing would be eight weeks of suspended life — a kind of long held breath between the woman she had been at Wymondley and the woman she would be at Charleston. She had thought she would arrive at Charleston the same person who had left Gravesend, only with the Atlantic crossed and her hair a little flatter from the salt air. She had not anticipated that the crossing itself would be a thing that would happen to her.
The crossing was happening. She was, three weeks in, no longer the woman who had stood at the rail off the Lizard.)
It was late November.
The Hopewell was somewhere north and east of Bermuda — Mr. Eldridge had told her, the previous afternoon, that they had passed the longitude of the island three days ago but had not seen it, the weather having pushed them slightly to the north. They were three weeks out of Gravesend, with seven weeks of open ocean ahead and the Atlantic in the kind of late-autumn mood that the captain described, in his careful provincial way, as unsettled but not contrary. The wind had been from the south-southwest for four days. The sea had been moderate. The mornings had been gray and the afternoons had been a paler gray and the evenings had been the gray of the inside of an oyster shell. There had not been a storm. There had not been any sun. There had been, in their place, the consistent and unspectacular and entirely unfamiliar conditions of a brigantine on the open ocean in late autumn, which she had not in her twenty-eight years of life been prepared for by anything anyone had ever told her about anything.
The other passengers were five.
A Mr. Pelletier from Bristol, going to Charleston to take up a commission as factor for a London cloth-house. A widow Mrs. Mary Houghton, going to her son who had a tobacco operation on the Cooper River. Two Carolina-bound Quaker brothers named Bryce, returning from a year of family business in Yorkshire. And a young woman of about her own age, a Miss Susannah Fenwick, going out as a lady’s companion to a Charleston matron, who had a small dry cough that Barbara had heard through the cabin wall every morning for three weeks and that had not, in three weeks, gotten any better.
The Quaker brothers kept to themselves. Mr. Pelletier had drawn Barbara into one polite conversation on the third day and then, perceiving that she was not the kind of woman who needed to be talked to, had let her alone. The widow Mrs. Houghton was kind and inquisitive in the manner of widows accustomed to filling their own time with the time of younger women, and Barbara had sat with her on two afternoons in the small forward passenger-area and had heard about the Cooper River son and about the late Mr. Houghton’s last illness and about the widow’s three married daughters in Norwich, and had given back, in exchange, the absolute minimum amount of information about herself a courteous gentlewoman could give back without giving offense — that she was going to Carolina to marry, that her fiancé was a Swiss gentleman of good family, that they had been engaged three years, that she expected the wedding to take place at Charleston. The widow had nodded and had not pressed. (The widow had been around the world long enough to know when a young woman did not want to be asked about her engagement. She did not ask.)
Miss Susannah was the difficulty.
Susannah was twenty-six, plain-faced, kind, frightened, alone, and very sick. The small cough had been a cough when they had boarded the Hopewell in October. The small cough had not, in three weeks at sea, gotten any worse, but it had also not gotten any better, and there was a quality to the cough — a wet rattle deep in the chest in the small hours of the morning — that Barbara, who had nursed her father through nine days of fever the previous November, recognized as the kind of cough a young woman in damp shipboard quarters did not, in November on the open Atlantic, want to be having. Susannah was going out to a Mrs. Bellinger of Charleston, a connection of her mother’s late cousin, on a year’s engagement as a lady’s companion. The engagement had been arranged by Susannah’s brother, a Bristol solicitor, who had paid her passage. Susannah had no one in Charleston. Susannah had no one in England either, her mother having died the previous spring and her brother being a man of cold practicality who had taken the first opportunity to discharge his sister into someone else’s household. Susannah’s circumstances were, by the standards of the passenger-list, the worst on the ship.
Barbara had begun, in the second week, to sit with her in the afternoons.
She had not planned this. (She had not planned anything about the crossing. The crossing was happening to her, including the parts of the crossing that involved other people. Susannah’s small cough had become, by the third afternoon Barbara had sat with her, a thing Barbara was paying attention to in the way she had paid attention to her father’s cough in the room at Wymondley in November 1712 — not because she had any expertise in it but because the attention itself was, in the absence of expertise, the only thing she had to offer.)
They sat in Susannah’s cabin, which was smaller than Barbara’s by about a foot, with the narrow window aft and the small fixed bunk and the sea-chest under the bunk and the air close in the way air gets close in any small room in November at sea. Susannah lay propped against two pillows that the steward had given her at Mrs. Houghton’s quiet request. Barbara sat on the sea-chest with her commonplace book in her lap and read aloud to her — sometimes from her own book, sometimes from the small Bible Susannah had brought, sometimes from the one volume of the Spectator the widow Houghton had loaned them. Susannah preferred the Spectator. The Spectator made her smile. The Spectator did not make her cough. Barbara had begun to read the Spectator aloud for an hour every afternoon, sometimes more, and to make small inventions of her own when the Spectator essays got too dense, attributing the inventions to Mr. Addison so that Susannah would think them genuine and laugh at them.
(She had not known she could do this. She had not, in twenty-eight years, invented a small comic essay in the manner of Mr. Addison and read it aloud to a sick young woman in a brigantine cabin in November on the open Atlantic. She had not known she had it in her to invent that kind of thing. She had it in her. She was, at sea, a person she had not known about at Wymondley.)
That afternoon — the third Wednesday in November, by her count — she sat down at the small fixed table in her own cabin and tried to write to her mother.
She had been trying to write to her mother since the first week. The letters had not gone well. She had written four drafts and torn three of them up. The fourth was folded inside the back cover of her commonplace book. The fourth said, in seven sentences, that she was well, that the crossing was proceeding without difficulty, that the captain was a good man and that her cabin was adequate, that the food was acceptable, that she would write again from Charleston when she had news, that she thought of her mother every day, and that she had not, in three weeks at sea, regretted the decision once.
The seventh sentence was not entirely true.
She had not exactly regretted the decision. But she had, in the small hours of the third week, sat up in her bunk at three in the morning with the rattle of Susannah’s cough coming through the wall and had asked herself, with the kind of cold clarity that comes to a woman at sea at three in the morning, what she would do if the Hopewell did not arrive. What she would do if the storm came and was the wrong kind of storm. What she would do if the fever in Susannah’s chest was the kind of fever that spreads to a ship. What she would do if she reached Charleston and Christopher was not there — was at Williamsburg, was at New Bern, was at some Carolina road-house riding south, was dead — and the practical mind that had taken her from Wymondley to Gravesend now had to operate in a country she had never seen, with a language she did not speak any of, with a small purse that her father’s estate had given her and that would not last forever, alone.
The cold clarity had not lasted. (It never did. The mind did this kind of asking and then it stopped. The body slept again. The morning came. The light in the cabin was the gray of the inside of an oyster shell and the wind was from the south-southwest and Susannah was coughing in the next cabin and the day began.)
But she had asked the questions, that third week.
She did not, in the letter to her mother, mention having asked them.
She did not, in the letter to her mother, mention Susannah. She did not mention Mr. Pelletier. She did not mention the widow Houghton. She did not mention that she had begun to invent small essays in the manner of Mr. Addison or that she had begun to write in a hand that was not entirely her own. She did not mention that she had become, at sea, a person she had not known about at Wymondley, who could sit in a sick young woman’s cabin and read the Spectator aloud in the gray afternoon light without the smallest sense of being out of her depth, when at Wymondley she had thought of herself as a woman who would never be of use in a sickroom because she was too easily frightened by other people’s pain.
She did not write any of that to her mother because there was no good way to write it. She did not know yet what it meant. She did not yet have the words. She would have the words, perhaps, in a year, or in five. By then her mother would be at Lockleys reading the letter in the late summer light, in a back bedroom in a house that had never owed her anything, and would, if she was the woman Barbara now believed she was, understand without needing the words. The letter that had gone in August had said I am coming. The letter that would go from Charleston in the spring would say something else, in different words. Lettice would read both and would know what neither of them said.
Barbara closed the commonplace book.
She put her hand briefly against the cabin wall on the side where Susannah’s bunk was. The cough was quiet on the other side of the wall. Susannah was sleeping. The wind was from the south-southwest. The Hopewell was running at eight knots. Mr. Eldridge had said, that morning at breakfast, that if the weather held they would make Charleston in seven weeks. Seven weeks. (Christopher does not yet know. He may not have the letter yet. He may have it tonight. He may have had it for three weeks. I do not know. I will not know until I am there.)
She did not, that afternoon, think the three words back to herself the way Christopher was, at the same moment, holding them folded against his ribs four thousand miles to the west. She did not need to. She had said them in August. She had said them once. She had not taken them back. She had been saying them with her body every day since by being on this ship.
She put the commonplace book on the small table and got up and went out of the cabin and down the narrow passage and knocked on Susannah’s door, because it was three o’clock and the Spectator was waiting.
— — — ## §6.3 — The road south, December 1713 He left New Bern on Friday the twentieth of November in the morning.
He had three days to do what he had estimated as five days of work. He did the five days of work in three days because there was no choice. He wrote to his father in Switzerland — the long careful letter completed by midnight on Tuesday. He wrote to Spotswood at Williamsburg requesting leave from his colonial duties through February — completed Wednesday morning. He wrote to the senior chainman about the south-field survey and the corrected plat — completed Wednesday afternoon, with a packet of revised drawings to follow once the assistant surveyor at New Bern town had witnessed the new line. He wrote to the Carolina Land Office. He wrote to the Lords Proprietors’ factor at Charleston, asking him to engage a respectable set of rooms suitable for a gentleman and his expected bride at a respectable house in the town, as near the Cooper riverfront as may be conveniently arranged, with a sitting-room of decent appearance, for a tenancy of indeterminate duration but expected to be at least three months and possibly six. He wrote to the Reverend Gideon Johnston, the colonial commissary at Charleston, requesting that the reverend hold himself in readiness, on a date to be determined in late January or early February, to officiate at a marriage at the Cooper Street church of one Christopher de Graffenried of Bern, gentleman, to one Barbara Tempest Needham of Wymondley, Hertfordshire, gentlewoman — both parties Reformed Protestant in confession, both adults of full age and free condition, both of solid family on the English and Swiss sides respectively, the bride expected to arrive at Charleston from England by sea in late January or early February 1714 on the brigantine Hopewell (Mr. Eldridge master), the marriage to be celebrated within the days following her arrival. (He had to look up the Reverend Johnston’s correct title in the small volume of colonial offices he kept in his desk drawer. He had not, in his three years at New Bern, ever attended a service at the Charleston commissary’s church. He hoped the Reverend would not take offense at the request from a colleague-by-letter of whom the Reverend would not know.)
He wrote to his Bern relatives.
He wrote to the Williamsburg bank where his father had left him a credit on his arrival in 1710 and where the credit, untouched for three years and seven months, had accumulated some quantity of interest he had not yet bothered to calculate.
He wrote, last, an honest letter to his Swiss-Bernese tenant farmer at his small inherited property at Worb near Bern — the property he had not seen in four years — asking the man, in a tone Christopher had not previously used in correspondence with a tenant, to please for the love of God keep paying the rent because Christopher was about to become a married man with expenses he could not yet calculate and the Worb rent was, increasingly, the only reliable income on his books.
Hans packed.
Hans was efficient and uncomplaining and did not ask questions and finished the master’s trunks on Thursday afternoon — three of them, one for Christopher’s personal effects and clothes, one for the documents and account-books Christopher was bringing south for the Charleston factor, and one heavier locked trunk containing what cash and bills of exchange Christopher had been able to assemble in three days of writing to his various creditors and debtors and bankers. Hans also packed his own small kit, because Christopher had told him on the Tuesday evening that Hans would be coming south with him — there was no question of Hans staying behind at New Bern when the master was to be married. Hans had not commented. Hans had only said, Yes, Mr. Christopher, and continued packing.
They left at half past seven on Friday morning, in a cold light rain, with three trunks and four saddlebags and two horses, riding south.
The road to Charleston by way of the inland route — through the Carolina backcountry, by the chain of small settlements along the rivers, with the occasional inn or planter’s house for overnight stops — was approximately three hundred and fifty miles by Christopher’s estimate, though no one had ever measured it precisely. He had calculated, on the basis of forty miles a day in good weather and twenty in bad, that the ride would take between nine and twelve days. He had given himself fourteen. He intended to be at Charleston by the fourth or fifth of December at the latest, which would leave him approximately six weeks to settle into the lodgings, finalize the practical arrangements, get a confirmation back from the Reverend Johnston about the marriage, and be present at the Cooper Street dock from the second week of January onwards, every day, for every ship that came in from the eastern Atlantic until the Hopewell arrived.
He had thought through the schedule. He had thought through the schedule three times. The schedule was solid.
The schedule held for two days.
On the morning of the third day — Sunday the twenty-second of November, at a settlement called Bath’s Mill in the deep Carolina backcountry, about ninety miles south of New Bern — Christopher’s horse came up lame. The lameness was a stone bruise in the off-fore hoof; the horse had been favoring the leg slightly the previous afternoon and Christopher had noted it but had not stopped, because the weather had been good and the next inn had been six miles ahead and he had wanted to make the inn before dark. He had made the inn. The horse had been worse in the morning. The Sunday cost him a day and a half: a day waiting at Bath’s Mill while the local farrier — a slow, kind, careful man named Peebles — pared out the bruise and applied a hot poultice, and a further half-day on the Monday riding at half-pace to let the foot harden.
He chafed.
(He chafed in a way he had not chafed in three years at the colony. He had chafed at the colony’s slowness in 1710 and 1711, in the days when New Bern was supposed to have been further along than it was, but the Tuscarora War had taught him a different kind of patience — the patience of a man whose project has died and who is now living through the slow administrative aftermath of its death. He had not been in a hurry about anything since September 1711. Now, on the Carolina road in late November 1713 with his horse going at half-pace through the autumn woods, he was in a hurry again, and the hurry was the kind of hurry he had not previously felt, which was the hurry of a man whose life is moving toward him on a different timetable than his own and who has fourteen days to be in a particular place to meet it.)
He made twenty-two miles on Monday on the half-paced horse.
He made forty on Tuesday.
He made forty-two on Wednesday and slept that night at a planter’s house on the Cape Fear, the planter being a Mr. Burrington who had known the Baron in better times and who fed Christopher beef and asked no questions and put him in a room with a feather bed and a fire and a small woodcut of a Dutch winter scene over the mantel that Christopher looked at for a long time before he slept because it reminded him, in some way he could not articulate, of a print his mother had had in the small parlor at Worb when he was a child.
He made thirty miles on Thursday.
He made thirty-five on Friday and slept Friday night at a Quaker meeting-house at the edge of a small settlement called Cape Fear Bridge where the Quakers fed him a supper of bread and apples and gave him a pallet on the floor of the meeting-room and asked, only once, whether his journey was a journey of necessity. He said it was. The Quakers nodded and did not ask further. (They had recognized in him the look of a man whose journey was a journey of necessity. They had also, he suspected, recognized in him the look of a man whose journey was a journey toward a woman. The Quakers did not, in their internal economy of judgment, regard the second kind of necessity as inferior to the first. They fed him. They gave him a pallet. They wished him peace in the morning.)
He made thirty-eight on Saturday.
On the seventh of December, in the late afternoon, in a thin cold rain that had begun in the early morning and had not let up, Christopher rode his still-favoring horse and his trailing pack-horse and his patient Hans into the outskirts of Charleston, by the King Street road, past the rope-walks and the small breweries and the warehouses of the inland trade, and stopped at the Charleston factor’s compting-house at the corner of King and Broad Streets.
He had made it in seventeen days.
He was three days off his estimated schedule.
He was — by his ongoing calculation, which he had been refining mentally every evening — sixteen days behind the Hopewell’s likely arrival in the Charleston roads.
He had time.
He went into the compting-house.
— — — ## §6.4 — Hopewell, mid-Atlantic, early January 1714 The storm came on the third of January.
It built through the afternoon — a long swell from the southwest that had been moving under the Hopewell since the morning watch, the kind of swell Mr. Eldridge had described at breakfast in the careful voice he used when he wanted the passengers to take a warning without quite being told they were being warned.
By two in the afternoon the swell had become troughs eight and nine feet deep. By four it was twelve. By six the brigantine was being driven northwest against a wind that had backed from the south to the southeast and was strengthening, and Mr. Eldridge had ordered the mizzen-staysail and the fore-topgallant struck and the watch doubled, and the passengers had been told, in the careful way Mr. Eldridge said these things, that supper would not be served in the main cabin tonight and that the passengers were respectfully requested to remain in their own cabins until the morning.
Barbara was in Susannah’s cabin when the storm broke.
She had not, until that afternoon, understood what a storm at sea was. She had been told. The widow Houghton had told her. Mr. Pelletier had told her. Mr. Eldridge had told her, on the third day out, in his sober way, that they would almost certainly meet at least one bad blow before Charleston and that she should prepare herself mentally for it. She had understood the words. She had not understood the words.
She understood them now.
The Hopewell was a hundred and seventy tons of pine and oak and pitch and iron, and a hundred and seventy tons of pine and oak and pitch and iron, when the Atlantic decided to test it in January in latitude thirty north, was a small object on a very large surface. The whole ship moved. Not just rolled, not just pitched: moved, the way a leaf moves in a flooded gutter, the whole structure shifted in three dimensions at once, the deck under her feet going up and going forward and going sideways at the same time, the bulkhead at her back becoming the floor and then becoming the bulkhead again, the lamp in the gimbal swinging not from side to side but in a wide elliptical orbit that brought the flame within an inch of the ceiling on the high arc and within an inch of Susannah’s blanket on the low arc, the small water-pitcher on the table — which she had thought firmly placed when she set it there at three o’clock — sliding clear off the table and rolling across the cabin floor and breaking against the foot of the bunk.
Susannah whimpered.
Susannah had not whimpered in any of the previous nine weeks. Susannah, even at her worst three weeks ago when the cough had been a rattle and the fever had risen, had borne it with a quiet Bristolian dignity that Barbara had come to admire. Susannah whimpered now because her cabin was a wooden box being thrown around the inside of the Atlantic and there was nothing the dignity of a young woman from Bristol could do about it.
Barbara wedged herself between the bunk and the bulkhead — the safest place she could find in the cabin, the place where she would not be thrown across the room when the deck did its next sideways move — and held Susannah’s hand.
She held Susannah’s hand for nine hours.
(She did not know it was nine hours. At the time she thought it was three. At the time she thought it might also be ten. The storm did things to her sense of time which were difficult to describe afterward; the closest she could come was to say that the storm took her ordinary sense of time and stretched it like wool being pulled out into yarn, the whole structure thinning and lengthening and then breaking and then being knotted back together at the next moment of relative calm. There were no relative calms. The whole night was the storm. The storm was a single thing that lasted nine hours and that her body, afterward, would remember as having lasted somewhere between twenty minutes and three weeks.)
Susannah did not let go of her hand.
Susannah’s hand was bird-bone thin and dry-papered with the small dehydrated quality of a person who has been sick for ten weeks. Susannah’s grip was stronger than Barbara had expected. Susannah did not speak. Susannah closed her eyes. Susannah breathed in through her nose and out through her mouth in the small disciplined breaths of a woman who had decided that if the ship was going to break open and drown her she was at least not going to spend her last hours weeping. Barbara breathed with her. The two women breathed together, in the dark cabin, in the swinging lamp-light, with the Atlantic doing its work outside the bulkhead, and Barbara understood — somewhere around the fourth or fifth hour, at a moment she would not afterward be able to identify — that what was happening in the cabin was not the storm. The storm was outside. What was happening in the cabin was that she was, for the first time in her twenty-eight years of life, useful to another person in a way that no one else was equipped to be useful to that person at that moment.
(There was no one else in the cabin. There was no one else who could be in the cabin. The widow Houghton was in her own cabin three doors away. The steward was on the deck helping Mr. Eldridge. The captain was at the wheel. The two Quaker brothers were in their cabin, praying — she could hear, between the bigger crashes of water against the hull, the low rhythm of their joint voice praying through the bulkhead behind her head. There was no one else who could hold Susannah’s hand. There was Barbara. There was only Barbara. And Barbara was, against every prior expectation of herself, sufficient.)
She thought, at the worst of it — somewhere in the sixth hour, when a piece of the foremast snapped and came down across the deck above their heads with a sound like a tree being broken by a giant — I am going to die at sea. I am going to die at sea holding the hand of a young woman from Bristol I have known for ten weeks. Christopher will not know.
She thought it. She did not say it. She continued to breathe with Susannah.
(Christopher will not know.)
The thought came back at intervals through the rest of the night. She did not push it away. She let it come. She let it sit. She held Susannah’s hand and she breathed and she let the thought sit beside her on the bunk like a third presence in the cabin. Christopher will not know. Christopher will get the letter and he will go to Charleston and he will wait at the dock and the Hopewell will not come and he will not know whether the ship broke up or whether the fever took her or whether she changed her mind in Bermuda and turned around, and he will spend the rest of his life not knowing, and that will be the last thing she will ever do to him.
(She would not let that be the last thing she did to him. She did not have any control over the ship. She did not have any control over the storm. She did not have any control over whether she lived or died in the next four hours. She had control over one thing only, which was whether she was, in the time remaining to her, the woman she had set out from Wymondley to become. She breathed. She held Susannah’s hand. She was, in the dark cabin in the swinging light, that woman.)
The storm broke at four in the morning.
She did not at first understand that it had broken. The motion slowed. The roar of water against the hull diminished. The sound of the wind in what remained of the rigging dropped from the steady high note it had been making for hours to a lower note. She listened. She listened for ten more minutes before she let herself believe it. Then she let go of Susannah’s hand and got up — her legs would barely hold her — and looked at the lamp, which was now swinging only twelve inches at the top of its arc instead of three feet, and understood that they had come through.
Susannah was asleep.
Susannah had fallen asleep somewhere in the last hour. Her breathing was steady. The cough, against any reasonable expectation, had not got worse during the storm — perhaps the steady deep breathing of the disciplined nine-hour endurance had been better for her chest than the small shallow breathing of ordinary fear would have been. She slept.
Barbara stood in the middle of the cabin and held herself with both arms.
She did not weep. She had no weeping left.
She went out of Susannah’s cabin and into her own. She sat on her own bunk. She picked up her commonplace book — it had survived the storm in the small fixed drawer where she had wedged it — and she opened it to the first clean page and she wrote, in her cramped exhausted hand, by the last of the lamp-light: Storm. Nine hours. Foremast partly down. All passengers alive. Susannah held. So did I. I will write to her brother in Bristol when I land. Whatever happens at Charleston I will at least have done this much that no one at Wymondley ever asked of me and that I would not, before October, have known I could do.
She put the book away.
She slept the sleep of a woman who has used everything she had.
In the morning Mr. Eldridge came down to inspect the passenger cabins. He told her, in his sober way, that the foremast was reparable, that the Hopewell would be at half-rig for the rest of the crossing but that they would still make Charleston — perhaps four or five days later than his earlier estimate, the new estimate being the third or fourth week of January or the first week of February. He told her she had been brave. He had heard, through the bulkhead, the Quaker brothers praying for her as well as for themselves. (She had not known the Quakers had been praying for her. She had known they were praying. She had not known her name had been in the prayers.)
She thanked Mr. Eldridge. She did not tell him she had spent the night thinking about dying. She did not tell him she had spent the night being useful for the first time. She thanked him for his information and for his kindness and asked him to please convey her thanks also to the Quaker brothers, whose names she had been embarrassed to admit she had not learned in nine weeks at sea.
Mr. Eldridge said: Mr. Bryce and Mr. Bryce. Christopher and Jonathan.
Barbara said: Mr. Christopher Bryce. Of course.
She did not tell Mr. Eldridge why she had repeated the name.
— — — ## §6.5 — Charleston, late January 1714 He went to the dock every day.
The Cooper Street dock was the principal landing-stage for transatlantic vessels arriving at Charleston, sitting at the eastern end of the town’s small grid of streets where the Cooper River met the harbor. It was a long pier of pine planks on pilings, built ten years earlier and patched by the harbor commissioners every spring after the winter ice — though this winter, the winter of 1713 into 1714, had been an unusually mild one and there had been no ice at all. The dock had a small shed at the landward end where the harbor master kept his ledgers and where the ships’ manifests were inspected as they came in. There was a bench against the shed wall, facing the water, where men who were meeting ships could sit and wait without obstructing the harbor master’s business. Christopher had been sitting on that bench every morning since the eighth of January.
The bench faced east-southeast. The angle of approach for a ship coming up from the Atlantic into the Charleston roads. A ship rounding the southern end of Sullivan’s Island would be visible from the bench for the last forty-five minutes of its run-in to the dock, the topsails first, then the foresails, then the hull, then the names of the men on the foredeck calling the soundings.
He had memorized the angle of approach. He had memorized the silhouettes of the principal classes of ship that ran the Atlantic trade: the brigs, the brigantines, the snows, the small frigates, the schooners that brought rice and pitch down from Cape Fear. He had memorized which ships did not match the Hopewell’s description and could be dismissed at first sight. He could now tell, from the moment the topsails appeared at the south end of Sullivan’s Island, whether the incoming vessel was a brigantine of approximately a hundred and seventy tons or whether it was something else. Most of them were something else.
He had been at the bench for eighteen days.
The first three days had been a kind of nervous tour of the harbor — walking the length of the Cooper Street pier and back, walking out to the foot of the seaward warehouses, walking up to the Battery and looking south along the channel, returning to the bench. After three days he had understood that the walking was a way of pretending he was doing something productive and that the bench was, in fact, the only productive place to be. He had stopped walking. He had brought a book on the fourth day — a small French volume of Pascal’s Pensées he had been carrying in his coat for two years and had not made progress on — and he had begun, in the long mornings on the bench, to read the Pensées slowly while keeping one eye on the channel.
The Pascal was good company.
(He had not, until he sat on the bench at Charleston in January 1714, understood that Pascal was a man who had spent his short life thinking about exactly the kind of waiting Christopher was now doing. The Pensées were not, on their surface, about waiting; they were about God and reason and the human condition. But underneath them, in the rhythm of the fragments and the long unfinished sentences and the trailing colons, Pascal had been a man who had understood that almost everything important in a human life took place in the gap between the moment one had decided something and the moment the consequences of the decision arrived. Christopher, on the bench at Cooper Street, was in that gap. He was glad to have Pascal in the gap with him.) The bench had become his life.
He arrived each morning at half past seven, in time for the first opening of the harbor master’s shed. He read the previous day’s arrivals on the chalkboard the harbor master kept beside the door — a list of ships and their origins and their cargoes. He scanned the list for Hopewell and did not find it. He nodded to the harbor master, who by the second week had begun nodding back without needing to be reminded who Christopher was. He sat on the bench. He read his Pascal. He watched the channel. At noon he walked the half-mile back to his lodgings on Tradd Street, where Mrs. Brewton — the widow at whose house the Charleston factor had engaged a set of rooms for him — gave him a hot dinner and asked, in her kind but unobtrusive way, whether there had been news. He said there had not. She nodded. He returned to the bench at one. He sat until five. He walked back to the lodgings for supper. He went to bed at ten.
He did this on the eighth of January.
He did this on the ninth.
He did this on the tenth.
By the fifteenth he had read Pascal’s Pensées twice and had begun a third reading and had begun also to write small marginal notes in the careful pencil-hand he used for his own private thinking, and Mrs. Brewton had begun to ask after him in the evenings with a small motherly concern she did not entirely conceal, and the harbor master had taken to bringing him a cup of tea at eleven o’clock from his own kettle in the shed, and the children of the longshoremen had begun to recognize him as the gentleman on the bench who would not move and who was waiting for a ship.
He did not, by the third week, sleep more than five hours a night.
(He did not, by the third week, allow himself to articulate to himself what he was afraid of. He had calculated, on the road south from New Bern, that the Hopewell would arrive at the Charleston roads in late January or early February. He had given himself a window. The window was now open. The first day of the window had been the twentieth of January, by his estimate. It was now the twenty-second. The window was open and the Hopewell had not yet come, and the window had room — it had two more weeks of room, the longest he was willing to wait before he began to consider that something had gone wrong — but the window was open and the Hopewell had not yet come, and there is a particular quality to the third day inside an open window when the window has not yet produced what it was opened for. He felt that quality. He did not name it. He read his Pascal.) On the twenty-fourth of January, in the late morning, a brigantine appeared at the south end of Sullivan’s Island.
He saw the topsails first.
His heart did the thing it had done every time a brigantine had appeared at the south end of Sullivan’s Island for the past sixteen days, which was to come up into his throat and stay there until he could identify the silhouette.
He stood up.
He walked to the end of the bench.
He shaded his eyes against the morning sun.
He waited.
The topsails became a foresail. The foresail became a hull. The hull was — was — was small. Was too small. Was a hundred and twenty tons, not a hundred and seventy. Was the wrong shape at the bow. Was painted in a darker colour than the Hopewell had been described to him as painted. Was not the Hopewell.
He sat back down.
He picked up the Pascal.
He did not, at first, open it. He held it in his lap and watched the brigantine continue its run-in to the dock — a Bristol vessel called the Endeavour, he learned from the harbor master’s afternoon chalkboard update, carrying English manufactured goods and forty-three indentured servants for the Carolina rice plantations. He watched the Endeavour tie up. He watched the passengers come down the gangway. None of them was Barbara. None of them was ever going to be Barbara, because Barbara was not on the Endeavour. Barbara was on the Hopewell. The Hopewell was somewhere else. The Hopewell was either still at sea — most likely — or had gone down — possible — or had put in to Bermuda for repairs — also possible — or had been driven north to Virginia or south to St. Augustine — also possible — or any of the other small possibilities his practical mind, against his will, had been listing every night for the past eight days when he could not sleep.
He opened the Pascal at random.
Le silence éternel de ces espaces infinis m’effraie.
He closed it.
He looked at the channel. The channel was empty again. The brigantine that had been the brigantine he was waiting for had been the brigantine someone else was waiting for, and someone else had had a good morning, and Christopher had not.
He stayed on the bench until five.
He walked back to Mrs. Brewton’s. He ate his supper. Mrs. Brewton said, in her quiet kind way: No news, Mr. de Graffenried?
He said: No, Mrs. Brewton. Not yet.
She said: She will come.
He said: Yes.
He did not eat very much of the supper. He went up to his room. He sat at the small desk in the corner of the room and uncapped the inkwell and dipped the quill and began to write a letter to Barbara that he knew he would never send, that he had been writing in his head for three weeks now, the letter that began Beloved, I am here, I am waiting, please come — and that he had not until tonight put on the page because putting it on the page was an admission he had not yet been willing to make. He wrote it now. He wrote it in two pages. He sealed it. He put it in the drawer of the small desk. (It would remain in the drawer of the small desk for the next twenty-nine years, until Christopher’s death at Williamsburg in 1742, when his son Anton Tscharner de Graffenried would find it among his father’s papers and not know what it was and burn it unread, the way sons sometimes burn their fathers’ unread papers in the first grief.)
He went to bed.
He did not sleep until almost two.
The harbor master’s chalkboard the next morning, the twenty-fifth of January, had no Hopewell on it.
Christopher returned to the bench.
— — — ## §6.6 — Hopewell, off the Carolina coast, early February 1714 She came up on deck before dawn on the morning of the eleventh of February.
The watch had been informed two days earlier that they were within four or five days of land — Mr. Eldridge having taken his noon sights and his depth-soundings and calculated, by the colour of the water and the increasing presence of small birds on the surface, that they were approaching the continental shelf. By the tenth they had sighted gulls. The widow Houghton had wept at the first gull, which had embarrassed her and which Barbara had pretended not to notice. By the evening of the tenth Mr. Eldridge had told the passengers at supper that he expected to make the Charleston roads sometime in the next thirty-six hours, depending on the wind. The wind, that night, had been from the north — steady and cold and useful.
She had not slept.
She had lain in her bunk from ten o’clock until three with her eyes open, watching the lamp swing gently in its gimbal, listening to Susannah breathing in the cabin next door — Susannah, who had recovered something of her strength in the four weeks since the storm and whose cough was now smaller than it had been at any point since they had boarded the Hopewell — listening to the small creakings of the brigantine and the small constant slap of the Atlantic against the hull, three feet from her ear through the planking, the sound she had been falling asleep to and waking up to for nearly fourteen weeks.
At three she got up.
She dressed in the dark. The wool gown her cousin’s wife had given her. The cloak. The shoes with the buckles that had not, miraculously, rusted through. She did not light the lamp. She did not want to wake Susannah. She did not, she suspected, want to see her own face in the small mirror she had brought from Wymondley, which was nailed to the inside of the cabin door at a height that gave her a clear view of how she looked.
She did not know how she looked.
She had not, in fourteen weeks, looked carefully into the mirror. She had washed her face by feel. She had pinned up her hair by feel. She had used the mirror only for the small practical adjustments a woman cannot do without one — straightening the collar of her gown, checking that the small cap was set properly — and had not, in those quick looks, met her own eyes. She suspected that if she met her own eyes now, on this morning, before going up on deck for the first sight of the country she had crossed an ocean for, she might lose her nerve.
She did not meet her own eyes.
She went up.
The deck was cold. The wind was still from the north. There were stars overhead — the stars she had been learning to recognize for fourteen weeks, the southern constellations she had not previously seen, the small new wheel of them above the Hopewell’s yards. The watch was at the wheel and the leadsman was at the bow taking soundings every ten minutes and singing them back to the helmsman in the small ritual chant of a brigantine in coastal waters. The water under the hull had changed colour. She had noticed it in the late afternoon yesterday — the grey of deep ocean giving way to a paler grey-green, the colour she had been told to expect when they crossed onto the continental shelf.
She walked forward to the bow.
She stood at the bow rail in the dark, with her cloak wrapped tight and her hood up against the wind, and looked west.
There was nothing yet. The horizon was a line of darker dark against the lighter dark of the eastern sky behind her. The leadsman’s chant continued. By the mark, twenty. By the mark, eighteen. The numbers were getting smaller. The bottom was coming up. They were on the shelf now. Carolina was perhaps thirty miles ahead, perhaps forty.
She stood at the bow rail for an hour.
She did not pace. She did not lean. She did not weep. She had stopped weeping somewhere in mid-January — not because she had decided to stop but because the weeping had finished, the way the storm had finished, the way the long passage had finished. She was, this February morning, a woman who had used up her weeping for a particular phase of her life and who was now in a different phase. The new phase did not yet have a name.
The light came up slowly behind her.
The eastern sky turned from black to dark blue to a paler blue to a pale gold along the lower edge, and the wheel of southern stars she had been watching for fourteen weeks began to fade, and the leadsman’s chant changed pitch slightly because he could now see the colour of the water beneath the lead-line, and Mr. Eldridge himself came forward to the bow in his good coat — the one he kept for landfall — and stood ten feet behind her without speaking, because he understood, as a man who had been ferrying women across the Atlantic for thirty years, that the first sight of land was the woman’s, not his.
She did not see him.
She was looking west.
At a quarter past six, with the eastern sky now fully gold and the surface of the water around the brigantine the colour of a pewter dish, a line appeared at the western horizon.
It was a thin gray-green line. It was lower than she had expected — a colony was, in her mind, a more dramatic landscape than a thin gray-green line — and it took her perhaps fifteen seconds to register that the line was, in fact, what she had been crossing an ocean for. The line was Carolina. The line was the country Christopher had laid out a town in. The line was the country that had nearly killed him in September 1711 and that had defeated his father and that had killed the Welshman Lawson and that had become, for three and a half years, the third presence in her engagement — the country that had been keeping him from her and that had been requiring her to be either willing to come to it or willing to lose him to it.
The country was a thin gray-green line.
She stood at the bow rail.
She did not weep.
She had stopped weeping. She had not wept since the Lizard.
She watched the land come up out of the water as if she were watching something she had drawn on a piece of paper in a Hertfordshire bedroom three months before, now becoming real beneath her hands.
(That was the sentence. She would write the sentence in her commonplace book later that afternoon, when she had gone back down to her cabin to gather her things for landing. She would write it because she wanted to remember exactly what the first sight had been. She had not, in fourteen weeks at sea, expected the first sight to be so quiet. She had expected something. She had not known what. She had imagined, vaguely, an exhilaration; she had imagined a great rush of feeling; she had imagined that the moment of first sight would be the moment the crossing would justify itself, would resolve into a single rising note that would put a punctuation mark at the end of fourteen weeks of waiting. The moment was not that. The moment was very quiet. The moment was the country coming up out of the water in the grey-gold light and the leadsman saying by the mark, twelve in his small singing voice and Mr. Eldridge breathing behind her ten feet away and the wind on her face from the north and the country becoming visible as a thing she would soon stand on.) (The country had been an idea. It was now a thing. The difference between an idea and a thing was what she had crossed an ocean to encounter, and the encounter was happening now, in silence, in the morning light, at the bow rail of a hundred-and-seventy-ton brigantine called the Hopewell commanded by a man named Eldridge whom she had known for fourteen weeks and who was, at this moment, standing behind her not speaking because he understood her better than her own family had understood her at Wymondley before October.) She stood at the bow rail for another half-hour, until the country had grown from a line to a low band of trees and inlets and what might have been smoke from a settlement at the northern end, and the Hopewell had begun its turn south for the Charleston roads, and Mr. Eldridge had quietly come up beside her at the rail.
Mr. Eldridge said, in his sober way: We will be in the roads by midday, Miss Needham. We will tie up at the Cooper Street pier in the early afternoon if the harbor pilots are ready.
Barbara said: Thank you, Mr. Eldridge.
Mr. Eldridge said: He will be there.
She turned to look at him.
He had not, in fourteen weeks, said anything about Christopher. She had told him, on the second day out, only that she was going to Carolina to be married. She had not given him the bridegroom’s name. She had not given him the bridegroom’s circumstances. He had not asked. (Mr. Eldridge had been carrying English gentlewomen across the Atlantic to be married to colonial men for thirty years, and Mr. Eldridge had developed, in those thirty years, an instinct about which of the marriages would happen and which would not. He had not, on the morning of the second day out, said anything to Barbara about her marriage one way or the other. He had waited fourteen weeks. He had watched her in the small daily ways a captain watches his passengers. He had watched her with Susannah through the storm. He had watched her at the bow rail this morning. He had decided, this morning, that her marriage was going to happen, and that the man who had been arranging for it from the Carolina side was going to be at the Cooper Street pier when she arrived. He told her so.)
She said: I hope you are right.
He said: I am usually right.
She said: Thank you, Mr. Eldridge.
She turned back to the rail and watched Carolina come the rest of the way up out of the sea.
— — — ## §6.7 — The Cooper Street pier, Charleston, 11 February 1714 The brigantine appeared at the south end of Sullivan’s Island at twenty minutes past nine in the morning.
Christopher was on the bench.
He had been on the bench since seven, as he had been on the bench at seven every morning for thirty-five days, and the harbor master had brought him his cup of tea at quarter past eight, and the Pascal was open in his lap to a page he had read four times that week without absorbing, and the wind was from the north and the sky was the pale clean cold of a Carolina February morning and the channel had been empty for the past hour, and he had begun, in spite of himself, to read the Pascal sentence in front of him for a fifth time when the harbor master came out of his shed and pointed south and said, in the kind tired voice the harbor master used when he had information that mattered: Mr. de Graffenried. Brigantine at the south end of the island.
Christopher closed the book.
He stood up.
He did not walk to the end of the bench this time. He stood where he was. He looked south.
There were the topsails.
There were the topsails, gray-white against the pale sky, behind the dark line of the island.
He waited.
He had learned, in thirty-five days of waiting, not to commit too early. The topsails were not the ship. The topsails would become the foresail and the foresail would become the hull and the hull would either be a hundred and seventy tons or not be a hundred and seventy tons, and the answer would come, in his accustomed sequence, in about forty-five minutes.
He sat back down.
He could not read the Pascal.
He put the book on the bench beside him.
He put both hands flat on his knees.
He watched the channel.
The topsails moved north. The topsails rounded the southern point of the island.
The foresail appeared. The foresail was the right shape. The foresail was the right size. The hull came up behind the foresail and the hull was — he could not yet tell — the hull was — the hull might be — the hull was — The hull was a hundred and seventy tons.
The hull was painted in the colour he had been told to expect.
The hull was a brigantine of approximately a hundred and seventy tons, painted in a pale brown with a dark waterline, riding at the right depth in the water for a ship at the end of a long crossing with most of her stores consumed, and the foresail was furled to the proper height for a vessel running in to a coastal harbor under the half-rig of a ship that had taken damage to her foremast in the open Atlantic.
It was the Hopewell.
He knew it was the Hopewell the way he had known, in November, that the letter on his desk was from Barbara before he had read the direction.
He stood up again.
He walked, slowly, to the end of the pier.
· · ·
Barbara saw him from the bow.
She had been at the bow for the past forty minutes. The harbor pilot had come aboard at quarter past nine, in his small boat, and had taken the wheel from Mr. Eldridge for the run-in to the Cooper Street pier, and Mr. Eldridge had come forward to stand at the rail beside her — not speaking now, because he had said what he needed to say at four o’clock that morning when she had stood at the bow watching the country come up. The other passengers were at the stern rail or in their cabins. The widow Houghton was at the stern with Mr. Pelletier. The two Quaker brothers were below packing. Susannah was on a small camp-stool at the waist of the ship, wrapped in two blankets, because Mr. Eldridge had let her come up to see the landing but had not let her come forward to the bow.
The pier was visible from a quarter-mile out.
The pier was a low gray line of pine planks with a small shed at the landward end and a single figure standing at the seaward end.
The figure was a man.
The figure was a man in a brown coat with his hat in his hand.
The figure was — was — was — She did not, for perhaps four seconds, allow herself to identify the figure. She had been preparing for the possibility that he would not be there. She had been preparing for the possibility that he would be there but that he would not, at the moment of landing, look like the man she remembered. She had been preparing — though only in the small hours of the night, in the part of her mind she did not visit by daylight — for the possibility that he would be there but that something in his face when he saw her would tell her that the three and a half years of separation had become a permanent fact and that the man she had crossed the Atlantic to find had been replaced, in her absence, by a man who would marry her out of honor but who had stopped loving her in 1712.
The figure on the pier raised the hand without the hat in it.
He raised the hand all the way above his head and held it there.
It was the gesture she had seen him make four times in the spring of 1710 — twice at the priory gates and twice at the Hitchin road — when he had been signaling her at a distance she could not have crossed in time to speak. It was an absurd gesture. It was a child’s gesture. It was the gesture of a man who did not have any other gesture available to him.
She raised her hand.
She did not raise it above her head, because she was holding the cloak closed against the wind with the other hand, but she raised it to the level of her shoulder and held it there.
The figure on the pier — Christopher; it was Christopher; she had identified him; she had let herself identify him — Christopher began to walk along the pier toward where the Hopewell would tie up.
He walked the way he had walked at Wymondley in April 1710 — quick, light-footed, slightly forward of his own center of gravity, like a man who could not quite slow himself to the speed of the rest of the world. He had not, in four years, learned to walk any differently. She had filed the walk away at Wymondley as a thing about him she would remember. She had remembered. She was watching him do it now from the bow of a brigantine in the Charleston roads on the eleventh of February 1714, four years and nine months after she had last watched him do it in a cloister yard on a cold April night.
She stopped breathing for perhaps three seconds.
She started breathing again.
She did not weep.
She had said, on the morning she had left Wymondley, that she had wept enough about Christopher already and would not weep about herself. She had said, on the morning of the storm, that she would not let dying at sea be the last thing she did to him. She had not, in fourteen weeks, broken either resolution. She would not break them now, three minutes from the pier, with the man she had crossed an ocean for walking toward her on a Carolina morning with his hat in his hand and his other hand raised over his head in a child’s gesture of welcome that was the most articulate thing he had ever said to her without speaking.
Mr. Eldridge said, very quietly, beside her: I told you.
She said: Yes you did.
· · ·
The Hopewell tied up at the Cooper Street pier at eight minutes past ten on the morning of the eleventh of February.
The gangway came down.
Mr. Eldridge waited at the rail for Barbara’s nod and then turned to the longshoremen and gave the signal for the passengers’ luggage to be brought up from the holds. Barbara waited at the head of the gangway. She did not go down at once. She watched Christopher come up the pier to the foot of the gangway and stop there. He did not come on board. He had not been invited. He stood with his hat in his hand and his other hand back at his side and looked up at her on the deck.
She came down the gangway.
She did not hurry. She had not hurried in fourteen weeks; she would not hurry now. She came down at the deliberate pace of a gentlewoman in a wool gown carrying a small bag, with her cloak pinned at the shoulder and her hood down and her hair pinned up in the way she had pinned it for fourteen weeks by feel, and Christopher stood at the foot of the gangway and watched her come down.
She reached the bottom of the gangway.
She stepped off the gangway onto the pier — onto Carolina, onto the country, onto the land she had crossed an ocean for — and stood in front of him.
He did not, for a moment, say anything.
Then he said: Barbara.
She said: Christopher.
He said: You came.
She said: I told you I would.
He said — and his voice was not quite steady, which was the first time she had heard his voice not be quite steady, and which she filed away with the other things — I have been waiting for you on this bench for thirty-five days.
She said: I have been at sea for one hundred and six days.
He said: I know.
She said: I do not think you do, quite, yet. But you will.
He said: Yes.
He did not, in the moment, embrace her. They were on a public pier at a colonial harbor in the morning, surrounded by longshoremen and harbor officials and the other passengers coming down behind her, and Christopher was a man of careful Reformed-Protestant Swiss-Bernese formality and Barbara was an English gentlewoman of Hertfordshire upbringing, and the embrace would wait for the carriage Mrs. Brewton had sent down and the small drive to the lodgings on Tradd Street and the moment of being alone together for the first time in three years and nine months.
He took her bag from her hand.
She let him take it.
He offered her his arm.
She took it.
They walked up the Cooper Street pier together, with Hans behind them carrying the trunk that had come down first from the Hopewell’s hold, and Mr. Eldridge at the head of the gangway watching them go and not, on this particular landing, calling out any farewell, because Mr. Eldridge had decided that this particular passenger should be allowed to walk away from his ship into her new life without further interruption from the man who had brought her across.
At the landward end of the pier, by the harbor master’s shed, Christopher stopped and turned to her.
He said: The Reverend Johnston has been waiting. He is at the Cooper Street church. Whenever you are ready.
She said: Eleven days. I should like eleven days. I would like to rest, and to write to my mother, and to see Susannah settled with Mrs. Bellinger. Then we should be married.
He said: Eleven days. The twenty-second of February.
She said: Yes.
He said: That is a Monday.
She said: That is a Monday.
· · ·
They were married at the Cooper Street church in Charleston on Monday the twenty-second of February 1714, the Reverend Gideon Johnston officiating, with the widow Mrs. Houghton and Mr. Pelletier from the Hopewell standing as witnesses for the bride and Hans the Swiss manservant and a Charleston merchant named Allston standing as witnesses for the groom and Mr. Eldridge himself in the second pew in his good coat.
Susannah Fenwick attended, in a borrowed dress, on the arm of her new employer Mrs. Bellinger, who had collected her from the ship six days earlier and who had pronounced herself, in those six days, more impressed with the young woman than she had expected to be on the basis of the brother’s letter from Bristol.
The marriage was entered in the church register on the same day.
That night Christopher de Graffenried opened the small leather-bound family Bible his father had given him before he sailed in 1710, and wrote, in his own hand, on the fly-leaf, in the careful French he reserved for the most important entries:
Christophe de Graffenried, fils du Baron Christophe V de Bernberg, époux. Barbara Tempest née Needham, de Wymondley en Hertfordshire, épouse. Mariés en l’église du commissaire à Charleston, en Caroline du Sud, le vingt-deuxième jour de février, 1714.
He sealed the page.
He did not write anything else in the Bible that night.
But underneath the marriage entry, on the same fly-leaf, in a hand even smaller than the one he had used for the formal entry, in English, in a hand that was not quite his usual hand because it was a hand that was being written by a man whose throat had been swollen with feeling for thirty-five days and who had finally, this Monday evening, in the small upper room at Mrs. Brewton’s on Tradd Street in Charleston, with his wife asleep in the chair by the window and the candle burning down and the Charleston harbor visible through the diamond panes a quarter-mile to the east — finally been able to write what he had wanted to write since the seventeenth of November 1713 at New Bern, when a thin folded sheet with no salutation and no date and no signature had arrived in his hand and had changed his life, he wrote, in small clear letters: She came.