Chapter Eleven
“Who is Marianne?”
She’s standing in the bow of the ship, waiting for her first glimpse of France.
The sun beats down on the deck, the sky is a cornflower blue flecked with wisps of cloud.
It’s not at all warm thanks to the hard southeasterly wind, and Isabel has been thinking she should go below to get her cloak, but she doesn’t want to miss the moment land is spotted.
Jack lowers his spyglass to look at her.
She says, “You were talking about her in your sleep last night. The first night on the ship, too.”
They have shared the hammock the past four nights.
The act of climbing in, of the two of them finding their spaces inside the canvas, has not become ordinary, but it has become natural to her.
She knows it isn’t natural, not in the eyes of the world, but shipboard life is so far removed from anything resembling her regular existence she feels it hardly matters.
She dreads the moment she and Jack will have to sleep apart again.
Jack puts the spyglass back to his eye, then hands it to Oppy. “Have a look. I can’t see it yet, but I know we’re close.”
He walks away, motioning for Isabel to follow him. By the gunwale, he says, “Mary-Anne, not Marianne.” He gazes at the empty horizon. “She was my fiancée.”
The blow of his words surprises her. She has no claim to Jack, yet she feels as if someone has punched her. “I didn’t realize you were engaged to be married.”
“It was a long time ago.”
“What happened? In the dream, you sounded upset.”
“I must’ve been. I don’t remember. I’m afraid I must beg you to stop speaking of her. I have to concentrate.”
“I can’t see it, Captain,” says Oppy when they return to the bow. He passes the spyglass back to Jack.
Another ten or maybe fifteen minutes go by with the spyglass going back and forth between Jack and Oppy and the wind tearing at Isabel’s hair, then Jack calls, “I see it!”
He hands the glass to Oppy and points. “There. Two points off the starboard bow.”
Oppy looks and cries out triumphantly. “So it is! Fastest crossing yet, I believe, Captain.”
“You’re right. Should you like to do the honors?”
Oppy lowers the spyglass, smiles, then bellows, “Land ahoy!”
A roar goes up and Isabel is straining to see when Jack hands her the spyglass. His face close to hers, he points. “Right there. Do you see it, Isabel?”
He’s so close to her the smell of him distracts her: the wool of his jacket, a hint of salt following his seawater bath that morning, and another smell, something undefinably Jack, which she has come to relish.
She has spent the past three days going through Jack’s books, checking prices, amounts, sums, as well as climbing the rigging, lounging in the sun on deck, and learning the basics of navigation on the few occasions Jack had a moment to teach her.
“Just to the right of the bowsprit,” Jack says, pointing again. “Do you see it?”
The round lens of the spyglass only shows more ocean, gray, a little choppy, wide. Then she sees something. A strip of brownish gray. “I think so. I can see a line, hovering just above the horizon. Is that it?”
“It’s not hovering. Keep looking. At this speed, you’ll soon know what you’re looking at.”
She keeps the glass trained on the line, watching as it grows into cliffs, rocky inlets, coves, and beaches below a prickly, tree-covered headland. “But that is Cornwall!” she exclaims, looking at Jack in astonishment.
He and Oppy both laugh. “It looks the same, doesn’t it? I assure you we’ve been sailing away from Cornwall these past four days. It’s Brittany, which is very similar to home. I always did think if I were to make a home in France it’d be there.”
She says, “But you wouldn’t really live in France, would you?”
“Not unless I was forced to flee England. Still, it’s a good place.
The people—the Bretons—are as kindly disposed to the free trade as the people of Cornwall.
I shall take you to dine at the house of my friend Captain Cuvelier and his wife.
Cuvelier is my first point of contact when we land.
He arranges for the merchants to come offer their goods and take the tin off our hands.
” He retrieves the spyglass from her, and training it on the growing strip of land, says, “You had better change back into a dress before we anchor.”
She looks down at her legs, free to move as they like in a pair of Jack’s soft buckskin breeches.
The breeches are too wide at the top and she has tied Jack’s spare neckerchief around them to hold them up.
He gave her his extra shirt, too, and declared if one didn’t know any better, they’d take her for a youth of fifteen come to join the crew.
The first time she wore them, the breeches felt both constraining as well as freeing at the same time.
A curious mix, she thought as she walked about the deck for a while to get used to them, to the hilarity of the men.
But when she climbed the rigging, she was twice as fast as the day before and never once slipped.
Running her hand over the leather of the breeches now, she says, “I shall put these back in your bag for you.”
Jack glances at her before lifting the spyglass. “Why don’t you keep them for the return voyage?”
Thirty minutes later, she steps back on deck in a rustle of cotton. She never before realized how tight the bodice of her dress was. Jack’s loose shirt is far more comfortable.
The strip of land has grown. She can see it well without the glass now. “That there is Roscoff,” Jack says, pointing at a place where the land rises up in the shape of distant buildings, a lighthouse, the pointed spire of a church.
Brown brick houses with blue-painted doors and shutters line the quay. Two boats come out to meet them. One, Jack says, belongs to Captain Cuvelier. It will take them into port, where he will present the ship’s papers before they visit the captain and his wife.
A quick exchange between Jack and the boatman follows, something to do with the war, the French customs officers, and the weather, she thinks, but she cannot get at the exact meaning of the conversation.
Some of it doesn’t even sound French, but rather like some of the local dialect she has heard occasionally around Helford.
“I hope my French is good enough,” she whispers to Jack when he helps her down the rope ladder of the ship. Crossing the gap between the ship and the boat proves a lot easier in the calm harbor than it did when she first went aboard the Rapide on the eve of the storm.
“You had no trouble with La Pérouse, did you?” he says. “You’ll be fine.”
“I couldn’t understand what you and the boatman spoke about.”
“That’s because it wasn’t all French. I was reared speaking Cornish as well as English.
Not many speak it now. It’s close enough to the local tongue here that we can understand one another.
” He sits down across from her in the boat.
“But not to worry—at Captain Cuvelier’s table we shall speak only French. ”
“I’m glad,” she says, but her stomach squeezes at the thought of the dinner. Will the dining customs be at all like the ones she’s used to in England? This is her first time dining with any of Jack’s friends, not counting the company at Weatherston.
Captain Cuvelier lives in a large, three-story house overlooking the port, so he tells Isabel when he welcomes her, “I can see the ships come in from one window and the customs men on horseback from the other.”
Jack introduces her as “my particular friend, Mrs. Isabel Henley, who has always wanted to go to sea.” The latter elicits a gasp from Captain Cuvelier’s wife, Madame Lucie Cuvelier, a pretty, dark-haired young woman with a certain earthiness about her, which is soon explained by her declaration that she grew up in the country and shall never fully get used to living in town.
Madame Cuvelier is the same age as her, while the captain is a few years older than Jack, Isabel estimates.
He has an animated way of conversing that sees his hands underscoring his every word, and the mass of curls tumbling down to his shoulders shake whenever he throws back his head in laughter.
The pair has two young children, a boy and a girl, who are brought down and paraded about for a few minutes before they’re whisked off to the nursery again.
Dinner is served in a large room with a view of the port. Isabel is glad to sit down: all during the walk to the Cuveliers’ house, the ground moved under her feet. When she told Jack, he laughed and said she had grown sea legs.
The sun is beginning to set as they sit down to dinner and Madame Cuvelier calls for the candles to be lit.
The glass chandelier above the dining table spits flecks of light on their dishes—a fish stew called cotriade, pancakes wrapped around sausages, a dish of chicken and stuffing with an unpronounceable name, artichokes and cauliflower, and two different cakes.
The food is different from what she is used to—lighter, she thinks, and far better than anything she has had in the past weeks, including the dinner at Weatherston.
As the men fall into the easy conversation of old friends, Madame Cuvelier mentions to Isabel how sad it makes her that their two countries are at war and how glad she is that her husband plays his part in forging connections between England and France in spite of it.
It’s a different way of looking at the smuggling trade, Isabel thinks, but not an unwelcome one.
She says, “It’s very sad indeed. How I wish the war would be over.
” Her hand goes to her throat, finding George’s medal.
Madame Cuvelier says, “Is that a medal?”
“It’s the Trafalgar medal. My husband died there.”
“Was he in the navy?” When Isabel nods, Madame Cuvelier says evenly, “My eldest brother was, too. Auguste.” She gives Isabel a small smile. “I adored him. He died at the Nile, ten years ago.”
“I’m very sorry to hear it.”