Total pages in book: 84
Estimated words: 78100 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 391(@200wpm)___ 312(@250wpm)___ 260(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78100 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 391(@200wpm)___ 312(@250wpm)___ 260(@300wpm)
Then, finally, she was able to move and let out a breath. They were leaving, headed on their journey.
Too late to change her mind now.
*
Marlow looked around his first-class quarters. The small room contained a surprisingly large bed and a heavy mahogany chest of drawers bolted to the walls and floor. A compact but sturdy mahogany chair was likewise bolted to the floor beside a matching side table. It was all exceptionally appointed, as he’d been assured it would be. It was a long way to Suez, where he would change to a larger ship bound for India. He would be comfortable, if miserable.
He removed his cravat and flung it across the room. There would be no trusty Pierre to fetch it later, to press and starch it. There was an adjoining room for a servant, but he’d released it to be let to some other passenger. He could not have dragged his valet across the miles to India, so he’d left him behind like everyone else.
Curse it. He turned and stared at the door, and wondered if it was too late to abandon his plans. He was a coward, a fool, to run away from England. To run away from her.
He reached for the knob, putting together the words to reverse everything. Here, boy, he’d say to the chipper young deckhand. Take my things topside again. I’ve decided to delay my journey. He’d go to his parents’ home straight away, embrace his mother so she needn’t gaze at him with that worry in her eyes.
Then he’d make another attempt, five attempts, twenty, to convince Rosalind’s parents he could be the husband she deserved. If that failed, he’d hide in the country, perhaps, until Rosalind Lionel was claimed and married by Brittingham or whatever lucky blighter the Duke of Lockridge esteemed deserving of his youngest daughter’s hand. Eventually he’d enter some damned marriage of convenience and find a courtesan or whore to occasionally satisfy his perverse needs on the side. Someday, he’d be able to look at Rosalind again without his heart aching.
No. Hopeless. He had to go far, far away or lose his soul.
He threw himself on the bed and sank into it, finding it far softer than his bed at home. Rosalind hadn’t even come to see him off. She must be furious with him still for leaving, for giving up. That was who he was, though, an irresponsible cad. She wanted them to have a life together, but he wasn’t good enough for her. The best thing he could do for her was leave.
He sat up, grabbed the cravat from where he’d thrown it and twisted it between his hands, then pressed it over his eyes. Perhaps it was best she hadn’t come with her family to see him leave. He would have been ashamed. She would have been sad, or worse, quietly scornful of his cowardice, and he’d have had to sail all the way to India with that image in his mind.
He sat like that, hunched on the side of the bed, until he felt the ship moving, until the chance to abandon his journey had passed. Even then, he moved despondently as he stowed his belongings for the months-long trek to India. He deserved this. He was a disappointment to so many people. He had never been good enough.
But he would become better. In India, he would seek enlightenment and self-discipline. Many lesser men remade themselves in distant climes.
By the second day of the ship’s journey, he’d found his sea legs and bestirred himself to dress for dinner in the captain’s galley. Thereafter, he dined with the captain each night, so he could listen to the stories of the businessmen, military officers, and other passengers who had been to India before and found success.
There were no women to temper the men’s storytelling bravado, aside from the elderly, cantankerous Lady Woodworth, traveling to live with her son and his family in Bengal. There was also a businessman’s wife, Mrs. Prescott, but she was kept busy with a brood of sniveling children in second class while her husband swilled rum at the captain’s table each night.
Then there was Mrs. Lintel, a widow residing in the room beside his, returning to her family in India. He did not believe she was real for he never saw or heard her. “A tragic young thing,” said Lady Woodworth, who purported to have caught a glimpse of her.
A young widow in the adjoining chamber… As the journey stretched long, he might be tempted to seduce her, although that was not in line with the enlightenment and self-discipline he hoped to develop in himself. She would surely be a poor substitute for Rosalind, who continued to take up too much space in his heart and thoughts. He still felt Rosalind near him, about him, in an almost eerie way. The spirit of her, the scent… Madness, that he sometimes imagined he could perceive the scent of her clothes, her hair, leagues across the ocean. Such madness would fade, he hoped.