The Touch Read online

  “Two morning gowns, two afternoon gowns, two evening gowns and your wedding dress,” said Miss MacTavish, enchanted with this commission. She wouldn’t make much of a profit on the exercise, but it wasn’t every day that a young and very pretty girl—oh, such a figure!—was thrust into Miss MacTavish’s hands without a mother or an aunt to spoil her fun.

  “As well,” the modiste chattered as she wielded her tape measure, “that I am here, Elizabeth. Were you to go to Kirkaldy or Dumfermline, you’d pay twice as much for half as much. And I have some lovely materials in stock, just right for your coloring. Dark beauties never go out of fashion, they don’t fade into their surroundings. Though I hear that your sister Jean—now there was a fair beauty!—is still the toast of Edinburgh.”

  Staring at herself in Miss MacTavish’s mirror, Elizabeth heard only the last part of this. James wouldn’t brook a mirror in his house and had won that particular encounter with Mary, who, when James produced Dr. Murray as reinforcements, was obliged to keep her mirror in her own bedroom. Beauty, Elizabeth sensed, was a word that tripped easily off Miss MacTavish’s tongue, and served as a balm to soothe a customer’s misgivings. Certainly she saw no sign of beauty in her reflection, though “dark” was accurate enough. Very dark hair, thick dark brows and lashes, dark eyes, an ordinary sort of face.

  “Och, your skin!” Miss MacTavish was crooning. “So white, and quite flawless! But do not let anybody plaster you with rouge, it would ruin your style. A neck like a swan!”

  The measuring done, Elizabeth was led into the room wherein Miss MacTavish’s bolts of fabrics were arranged on shelves—the finest muslins, cambrics, silks, taffetas, laces, velvets, satins. Spools of ribbon in every color. Feathers, silk flowers.

  Elizabeth sped straight to a bolt of brilliant red, face alight. “This one, Miss MacTavish!” she cried. “This one!”

  The seamstress-turned-modiste went as red as the cloth. “Och, dear me, no,” she said, voice constricted.

  “But it’s so beautiful!”

  “Scarlet,” said Miss MacTavish, shoving the offending bolt to the back of its shelf, “is not the done thing at all, my dear Elizabeth. I keep it for a certain element in my clientele whose—er—virtue is not what it should be. Naturally they come to me at a prearranged hour to spare embarrassment. You know your scripture, child—the ‘scarlet woman’?”

  “Ohhhh!”

  So the closest to scarlet that Elizabeth came was a rust-red taffeta. Irreproachable.

  “I don’t think,” she said to Miss MacTavish over a cup of tea after the choices had been made, “that Father will approve of any of these dresses. I won’t look my station.”

  “Your station,” said Miss MacTavish strongly, “is about to change with a vengeance, Elizabeth. You can’t go as the bride of a man rich enough to send you a thousand pounds wearing naught but tartan from the mill and plain brown linen. There will be parties, balls, I imagine, carriage rides, calls to pay on the wives of other rich men. Your father ought not to have kept so much of what, I am sure, is your money, not his.”

  That said (for it had burned to be said—what a miserable old skinflint James Drummond was!), Miss MacTavish poured more tea and pressed a cake on Elizabeth. Such a beautiful girl, and so wasted in Kinross!

  “I really don’t want to go to New South Wales and marry Mr. Kinross,” Elizabeth said unhappily.

  “Nonsense! Think of it as an adventure, my dear. There’s not a young woman in Kinross who doesn’t envy you, believe me. Think about it. Here, you will not enjoy a husband at all, you will spend your best years looking after your father.” Her pale blue eyes moistened. “I know, believe me. I had to look after my mother until she died, and by then my hopes of marriage were gone.” Suddenly she sighed, beamed. “Alexander Drummond! Well do I remember him! Barely fifteen when he ran away, but there wasn’t a female in Kinross hadn’t noticed him.”

  Stiffening, Elizabeth realized that at last she had found someone who could tell her a little about her husband-to-be. Unlike James, Duncan Drummond had had but two children, a girl, Winifred, and Alexander. Winifred had married a minister and gone to live near Inverness before Elizabeth had been born, so that was her best chance gone. Quizzing those of her own family old enough to remember Alexander had produced curiously little; as if, for some reason, the subject of Alexander was forbidden. Father, she realized. Father didn’t want to give back his windfall, and was taking no chances. He also believed that ignorance was bliss when it came to marriage.

  “Was he handsome?” she asked eagerly.

  “Handsome?” Miss MacTavish screwed up her face, shut her eyes. “No, I wouldn’t have called him handsome. It was the way he walked—a swagger. He was always black-and-blue from Duncan’s stick, so sometimes it must have been hard to walk as if he owned the world, but he did. And his smile! One just went—weak.”

  “He ran away?”

  “On his fifteen birthday,” said Miss MacTavish, and proceeded to give her version of the story. “Dr. MacGregor—he was the outgoing minister—was quite heartbroken. Alexander, he used to say, was so terribly clever. He had Latin and Greek, and Dr. MacGregor hoped to send him to university. But Duncan wouldn’t have that. There was a job for him in the mill here in Kinross, and with Winifred away, Duncan wanted Alexander here. A hard man, was Duncan Drummond! He’d offered for me, you know, but there was Mother to care for, so I wasn’t sorry to refuse his offer. And now you’re to marry Alexander! It’s like a dream, Elizabeth, it’s just like a dream!”

  That last remark was true. In what corners of her mind the constant hard work permitted her, Elizabeth thought about her future much as clouds passed across the high, wide Scottish sky; sometimes in airy, lighthearted wisps, sometimes sad and grey, sometimes stormily black. An unknown severance with unknown consequences, and the limited ken in which she had spent her barely sixteen years could offer her neither comfort nor information. A tiny thrill of excitement would be followed by a bout of tears, a spurt of joy by a dizzying descent into despond. Even after intense perusal of Dr. Murray’s gazetteer and Britannica, poor Elizabeth had no yardstick whereby to measure this complete and drastic upheaval.

  THE DRESSES got made, including her wedding dress, every item folded between sheets of tissue paper and packed in her two trunks. Alastair presented her with the trunks, Mary with a veil of white French lace to wear at her wedding, Miss MacTavish with a pair of white satin slippers; all the members of the family save James managed to find something to give her, be it Cologne water, a scrimshaw brooch, a pin cushion or a box of bonbons.

  James’s respectable Presbyterian married couple answered one of his advertisements from Peebles, and after several letters had traveled back and forth between Kinross and Peebles, said that, for fifty pounds, they would be pleased to take custody of the bride.

  Alastair and Mary were deputed to take Elizabeth on the coach to Kirkaldy, where they boarded a steam packet for the journey across the Firth of Forth to Leith. From there several horse-drawn trams took them into Edinburgh and to Princes Street Station, where Mr. and Mrs. Richard Watson would be waiting.

  Had she not been felled by the choppy ferry crossing, Elizabeth would have been agog; in all her life she had never been as far afield as Kirkaldy, so the huge city of Edinburgh ought to have transfixed her, if her delight at seeing Kirkaldy was anything to go by. Catherine and Robert lived there and had put them up, shown Elizabeth the sights. But she could summon up no enthusiasm for Edinburgh’s bustle, its wintry beauty, wooded hills and ravines. When the last of the trams deposited them at the North British Railway station, she let Alastair guide her, install her in the tiny, boxlike second-class compartment she was to share with the Watsons all the way to London, and left him to search the jam-packed platform for her tardy chaperones.

  “This is quite tolerable,” said Mary, gazing about. “The seats are well padded, and you’ve your rug for warmth.”

  “It’s the third-class passengers I don’t envy,” A
lastair said, pushing two cardboard chits into Elizabeth’s left glove. “Don’t lose them, they’re for your trunks, safely in the luggage compartment.” Then he slipped five gold coins down inside her other glove. “From Father,” he said with a grin. “I managed to convince him that you can’t go all the way to New South Wales with an empty purse, but I’m to tell you not to waste a farthing.”

  The Watsons finally arrived, breathless. They were a tall and angular couple in shabby clothes that suggested Elizabeth’s fifty pounds had promoted them from the horrors of third-class to the relative comfort of second-class. They seemed pleasant, though Alastair’s nose wrinkled at the liquor on Mr. Watson’s breath.

  Whistles blew, people hung out of the carriage windows to exchange screams, tears, frantic clutches and final waves with those on the platform; amid huffs and explosions, clouds of steam, jerks and clangs, the London night train began to move.

  So near, and yet so far, thought Elizabeth, eyelids drooping; my sister Jean, who started all of this, lives in Princes Street. Yet Alastair and Mary have to hire a room in the railway hotel, and will go back to Kinross without so much as setting eyes on her. “I am not receiving,” her curt note had said.

  The eyelids fell, she crashed into sleep sitting curled in one corner with her cheek against the icy window.

  “Poor little thing,” said Mrs. Watson. “Help me make her more comfortable, Richard. It is a sad state of affairs when Scotland has to send its children twelve thousand miles to find a husband.”

  SCREW-DRIVEN steamships cut their way across the North Atlantic from Britain to New York in six or seven days, but there was no coal to fuel a steamship en route to the opposite end of the world. That was still served by sail.

  Aurora was a four-masted barque with double topsails, square-rigged on her foremast and mainmast, fore-and-aft-rigged on her mizzens, and she completed the twelve thousand miles to Sydney in two and a half months, stopping only once, in Capetown. Down the Atlantic, then across the Southern Ocean into the Pacific. Her cargo consisted of several hundred water-flushing ceramic toilets and cisterns, two barouche carriages, suites of expensive walnut furniture, cotton and woollen fabrics, bolts of fragile French lace, crates of books and magazines, jars of English marmalade, tins of treacle, four Matthew Boulton & Watt steam engines, a consignment of brass doorknobs, and, in her strongroom, many very large cases marked with the skull-and-crossbones. On her way home, she’d carry thousands of bags of wheat and her strongroom would exchange cases marked with the skull-and-crossbones for gold bullion.

  Much against the will of her master, a fanatical woman-hater, Aurora took a dozen passengers of both sexes in some degree of comfort, though she owned no staterooms and her cooks were of the plainest kind—plenty of fresh-baked bread, salty butter kept in insulated firkins, boiled beef and whiskery potatoes, and floury puddings laced with jam or treacle.

  Though Elizabeth found her sea legs halfway across the Bay of Biscay, Mrs. Watson did not, which meant that Elizabeth’s time was taken up in ministering to her. Not a distasteful duty, as Mrs. Watson was a kind soul who seemed to labor under many burdens. The three of them had one cabin blessed with a porthole and a small maid’s cubicle opening off it; Aurora hadn’t entered the English Channel before Mr. Watson announced that he would sleep in the passengers’ saloon to give the women privacy. At first Elizabeth wondered why this news distressed poor Mrs. Watson so, then realized that much of the Watsons’ poverty stemmed from Mr. Watson’s penchant for strong drink.

  Oh, but it was cold! Not until they passed the Cape Verde Islands did the winter weather finally lift, and by then Mrs. Watson was coughing badly. At Capetown her frightened husband sobered sufficiently to call a doctor, who pulled his mouth down and shook his head.

  “If you want your wife to live, sir, I suggest you bring her ashore here and sail no farther,” he said.

  But what to do with Elizabeth?

  Fortified by half a pint of gin, Mr. Watson didn’t stop to ask himself this question, and Mrs. Watson, lapsed into stupor, couldn’t ask it. The two of them were off the ship with all their belongings not half an hour after the doctor had departed, leaving Elizabeth to fend for herself.

  If Captain Marcus had had his way, Elizabeth would have been bundled after them, but he reckoned without taking one of his three other women passengers into account. She called a meeting between herself, the two married couples, the three sober single gentlemen, and Captain Marcus.

  “The girl goes ashore,” Aurora’s master said, tone adamant.

  “Oh, come, Captain!” said Mrs. Augusta Halliday. “To put a sixteen-year-old ashore in a strange place without a soul to protect her—for the Watsons are no fit guardians—is quite unconscionable! Do it, sir, and I will report you to your owners, to the Master’s Guild and whomsoever else I can think of! Miss Drummond stays aboard.”

  As this announcement, delivered with a martial glare in Mrs. Halliday’s eyes, met with murmurs of agreement from the others, Captain Marcus understood that he was beaten.

  “If the girl is to stay,” he said between his teeth, “I’ll have no contact between her and my crew. Nor any contact between her and any male passenger, married or single, drunk or sober. She will be locked in her cabin and take her meals there.”

  “As if she were a prisoner?” asked Mrs. Halliday. “That is disgraceful! She must have fresh air and exercise.”

  “If she wants fresh air, she can open the porthole, and if she wants exercise, she can jump up and down on one spot, madam. I am master of this vessel, and my word is law. I’ll have no harlotry aboard Aurora.”

  So Elizabeth spent the last five weeks of that interminably long voyage locked inside her cabin, sustained by the books and magazines Mrs. Halliday sent her after a hasty trip ashore to Capetown’s only English book-shop. Captain Marcus’s sole concession was to agree that Mrs. Halliday could escort Elizabeth twice around the deck after darkness fell each day, and even then he followed behind, barking at any sailor who came near.

  “Like a watchdog,” said Elizabeth with a chuckle.

  Once the Watsons quit the ship she had recovered her spirits, despite imprisonment; that she understood, knowing that both her father and Dr. Murray would have approved of the captain’s edict. And it was bliss to have her own domain, a larger one than her little room at home, which she was forbidden to enter until it was time to go to bed. If she stood on tiptoe she could see the ocean through her porthole, a heaving vastness that stretched forever, and during the nightly walks on deck she could hear its hiss, the boom it made when Aurora’s bows hammered down.

  Mrs. Halliday, she learned, was the widow of a free settler who had made a modest fortune in Sydney by opening a specialist shop that catered to the best people. Be it ribbons or buttons, stay-laces or whale-bone insertions, stockings or gloves, Sydney society purchased them at Halliday’s Haberdashery.

  “After Walter died, I couldn’t wait to go home,” she said to Elizabeth, and sighed. “But home wasn’t what I expected. So very peculiar, that what I had dreamed about all those years turned out to be a figment of my imagination. I have become, though I knew it not, an Australian. Wolverhampton was full of slag heaps and chimneys, and would you believe that I found it hard to understand what people said? I missed my children, my grandchildren, and the space. We tend to think that, just as God made Man in His image, Britannia made Australia in her image. But she has not. Australia is a foreign land.”

  “Isn’t it New South Wales?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Strictly speaking, yes. But the continent has been called Australia for a long time now, and whether they’re Victorians or New South Welshmen or Queenslanders or from the other colonies, people call themselves Australians. Certainly my children do.”

  Alexander Kinross came up in their conversation frequently. Sadly, Mrs. Halliday knew nothing of him.

  “It’s four years since I left Sydney, he probably arrived in my absence. Besides, if he’s a single man and doesn’
t go into society, only his colleagues would recognize his name. But I am sure,” Mrs. Halliday went on kindly, “that he is above reproach. Otherwise, why send for a cousin to marry? Scoundrels, my dear, tend not to marry at all. Especially if they live on the goldfields.” Her lips drew in, she sniffed. “The goldfields are dens of iniquity plentifully supplied with shady women.” She coughed delicately. “I hope, Elizabeth, that you are acquainted with the duties of marriage?”

  “Oh, yes,” Elizabeth answered tranquilly. “My sister-in-law Mary told me what to expect.”

  WHEN AURORA entered Port Jackson she was taken in tow by a steamboat; plagued by the presence of a pilot he detested, Captain Marcus was too engrossed to notice that Mrs. Halliday had liberated Elizabeth from her confinement, taken her up on deck to point out with proprietary pride the landmarks of what the good lady called “the grandest harbor in the world.”

  Yes, Elizabeth supposed that it was grand, gaze absorbing massive orange cliffs crowned by thick blue-grey forests. Sandy bays, gentler slopes, increasing evidence of habitation. The trees, tall and spindling, became replaced by rows and rows of houses, though on some foreshores they remained around what were majestic mansions, whose owners Mrs. Halliday named with succinct comments that ranged from defamation to condemnation. But the air swam with moisture, the sun was unbearably hot, and over all the beauty of this grand harbor lay a terrible stench. Its water, Elizabeth noted, was a dirty, detritus-laden brown.

  “March is not a good month to arrive,” Mrs. Halliday said, leaning on the rail. “Always humid. We spend February and March praying for a Southerly Buster, which is a south wind that cools everything down. Is the smell bothering you, Elizabeth?”

  “Very much,” said Elizabeth, face pale.

  “Sewage,” said Mrs. Halliday. “A hundred and seventy-odd thousand people, and it all flows into the harbor, which is little better than a cesspool. I believe that they intend to do something about it—but when is anybody’s guess, my son Benjamin says. He is on the city council. Water is a difficulty too. The days when it cost a shilling a bucket are gone, but it is still expensive. Few save the colossally rich have a supply laid on.” She snorted. “Mr. John Robertson and Mr. Henry Parkes don’t suffer!”