Mrs. Cook Read online

  When the coach was finally out of view Jamie and Nat went to play with the Curtis boys. Mrs Curtis invited Elizabeth in for a cup of tea but Elizabeth made excuses, said the baby made her feel tired and she needed to rest. She entered her still and empty house. It was midsummer, the longest day of the year.

  On the eve of the Resolution and Adventure’s departure from Plymouth, while the chronometers were being checked then started, James Cook received news that on 8 July, a day heavy with heat, his wife had given birth to a son. He wrote to her immediately, leaving the letter to be delivered, and early in the morning of 13 July 1772 set sail, once again, for the South Seas.

  THE GLASS TUMBLER

  As the leaves turned burnished gold and their hold on the trees was loosened by the autumn winds, the post brought letters from Madeira. Though Mr Banks had taken himself off to Iceland, that was not the end of him. Gone but certainly not forgotten. James reported that a person had been waiting on the island of Madeira for three months and had left but three days before the arrival of the Resolution. The person, purporting to be a gentleman, had spent the time botanising whilst waiting for Mr Banks. As it turned out, the gentleman was a woman, by the name of Mrs Burnett.

  Elizabeth smiled as she read this part of her husband’s letter. Mr Banks had thought of all his creature comforts, including a female companion. She wondered what decision James would have made concerning this extra passenger if things had turned out differently and Mr Banks had been aboard.

  James also wrote apropos of Mr Banks that he missed his convivial company and would write thanking him for the dried salmon he left on board, and other words which might mend the friendship.

  Jamie and Nat received a letter from Cousin Isaac. Elizabeth rocked the cradle of baby George, listening to Jamie read. All on board the Resolution were in excellent health, although Mr Banks’s replacement, Mr Forster the elder, gave cause for many frayed tempers. Isaac found him a humourless, pretentious chap who complained endlessly and had no idea of shipboard life. The captain ended a particular meeting by turning the botanist out of his cabin, and on another occasion Mr Clerke threatened to arrest him. The son, George, was more amiable, went around forever apologising for a father who was, Isaac surmised, a great burden for any son to bear. Everyone laughed at the story, and Elizabeth reflected that if an exasperating botanist was the worst of their worries, life aboard the Resolution was not too bad. But these were early days, and they all had a long way to go yet.

  With Cousin Frances and Mr Lieber making plans to go to America, optimistic for their future life despite strained relations between the colonists and the British government, Elizabeth engaged a servant, a spinster a little older than Mrs Cook herself, by the name of Elizabeth Gates. She was a steady, homely woman who became Elizabeth’s companion as well as servant. The boys liked her as well, and she accepted their jokes about gates and fences with good humour.

  Elizabeth delighted in baby George. He readily took to his mother’s breast and gained weight. His healthy appearance after the first month alleviated Elizabeth’s fears that he would go the way of little Joseph. Elizabeth did all she could to ensure he continued to thrive, caring for him in the recommended manner, which she now knew intuitively. She saw to it that the room where he slept was well-ventilated but not draughty. When she put him in the cradle she lay him on his side, never on his back. When she tucked him in she checked that the covers were neither too heavy nor tight. Though little ones had to be kept warm, too much heat excited perspiration and weakened them.

  Despite all her vigilance, when Elizabeth went to fetch him from his cradle on the first day of October, she found him dead. She had not heard him cry during the night nor make any noise at all, nor were there any marks on him. It was as if he’d simply stopped breathing.

  ‘Wake up, little one,’ Elizabeth had implored, her cheek to his nose, waiting to feel even the faintest breath. But there was none.

  Elizabeth was sitting on her bed, nursing his cold little body, when Gates knocked and entered. When she saw her mistress’s tear-stained face she knew immediately what had happened. ‘Oh, marm,’ Gates said. ‘The poor little thing.’ She came as close as she could to her employer but resisted the natural urge to embrace her. Instead, Gates wrung the corners of her apron. ‘’Tis a pity your good husband is not here.’

  Elizabeth looked up, the baby still resting against her chest. ‘He was not here for Joseph or Eliza. I bore those on my own and no doubt I will bear this one too.’ Not here to see the children born and not here to see them die. It seemed James was only home long enough to plant his seed and then he was off again. Why did Elizabeth have to bear this grief on her own when they were his children too?

  She kissed the top of the dead baby’s head, felt the membrane of skin above the fragile fontanelle, and gently brushed away the tears that fell onto his downy hair. ‘You would think,’ said Elizabeth, ‘that the grief would lessen. But it does not.’ She lay down on the bed, placing the little one beside her. ‘I will stay here a moment.’ She could hear Jamie and Nat running around downstairs. ‘Please send the boys up.’ The servant stood there, reluctant to leave her mistress alone. ‘Thank you, Gates, that will be all.’ Elizabeth gazed at little George. Once again death had waited till James was away, then snuck in like a thief.

  Elizabeth wrote to Cape Town, informing James of their loss, but the news arrived after he’d left. His last letter from that place was dated 23 November. He was heading southwards, to the ice. All aboard were in good health, the only death aboard the Resolution being accidental—James Smock, a carpenter’s mate, had fallen into the sea whilst fitting a scuttle. When they had commended his soul to Almighty God, James had read from the Bible: ‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die.’

  How often it seemed Elizabeth had heard these words. She felt like a piece of crazed china, the death of each baby adding more hairline cracks. How many more would it take before she shattered completely and the life-blood spilled out of her?

  Elizabeth turned back to James’s letter, the last precious letter for months that would turn into years. She must cast out these thoughts, must rid herself of the expectation of more deaths. Three dead babies. Surely that was the end of it.

  At Christmas, when Elizabeth proposed a toast to their father, Jamie and Nat toasted him in watered-down wine from Elizabeth’s good glasses, and each thought of what he might be doing.

  ‘Drinking from a coconut,’ suggested Nat.

  ‘No,’ said Jamie, ‘he’s in the ice. Perhaps even at the South Pole.’

  ‘Do they have Christmas down there?’ Nat asked.

  ‘Wherever they are, they will celebrate Christmas,’ Elizabeth said, and imagined her husband drinking whiskey from the glass tumbler he’d had engraved prior to departure. It was a sturdy, heavy-bottomed tumbler with ‘Resolution, Capt. Cook, 1772’ etched into the glass. Elizabeth had traced her fingers over the letters, reading them with her fingertips, feeling their sharp edges.

  ‘In any road,’ said Gates, ‘if I know English tars, they will all be drunk as lords and boxing each other.’

  ‘Not Papa,’ Nat begged to differ.

  Not Papa. James was the captain. He would be drinking with the gentlemen, measure for measure, but he could hold his drink well and did not get sloppy as Mr Blackburn used to, or any of the seamen Elizabeth had observed at the Bell. She hadn’t thought about the alehouse for years. Such a hot steamy place, redolent with the smell of tobacco and ale, salt, hempen rope and the bodies of seamen, yet in the dark brown corridor of her memories, Elizabeth reflected on it fondly.

  Nat was at the window. ‘Mama,’ he said, ‘there’s enough snow to make a snowman. Can we? Can we?’

  The snow had come early that year, and indeed when they all went to the window they could see the blanket of white covering not only their garden but the fields as w
ell. It shone bright on this Christmas night. The boys ran to the back door.

  ‘Mittens and hats first,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I don’t want you catching your death.’

  The boys hurriedly obeyed.

  Gates and Elizabeth sat inside, washing the plates in a bowl of hot water, Gates carefully drying them with a soft cloth. They heard a tapping on the window and turned to see the grinning face of Nat, his warm breath fogging up the pane. ‘Come out,’ he mouthed, beckoning with his finger.

  The washing up was just about done. Gates wiped her hands on her apron. ‘Gloves and hat, marm,’ she smiled to Elizabeth. Servant and mistress put on gloves and hats, while Nat grew impatient at the window.

  As they moved towards the door, Nat disappeared, only to reappear the moment they stepped outside, to lob a snowball at them. Gates shrieked as the snowball hit her skirts, more in the spirit of the game than at any harm done. Elizabeth saw the next one coming and deftly turned to avoid it. ‘I thought you were making a snowman. Why don’t we all build one together,’ she suggested, before the horseplay turned too rough.

  Under the icy stars, Elizabeth, Gates, Jamie and Nat scooped up snow in their gloved hands, packing it on and tamping it down, till finally they had a snowman. They stood back admiring their creation, but there was something wrong—it lacked a face.

  ‘I know,’ said Nat, disappearing inside and returning with the bullet they’d used for bullet pudding, even though Jamie thought it was a silly game. Still, he hadn’t been able to suppress a grin at the sight of his brother’s face covered in flour.

  Nat placed the bullet in the centre of the snowman’s face, for a nose. Jamie dug in the snow and found two pebbles for its eyes. ‘It looks like Dr Johnson,’ said Nat, ‘who wrote the poem for our goat.’ Elizabeth frowned, but not too severely because indeed the snowman did look like the good doctor. She was sure he wouldn’t mind, because she’d heard tell that the tall lumbering man had done an imitation of a kangaroo, the strange animal from Botany Bay with a face like a deer but the rest of its body all out of proportion, which bounded on a big thick tail. Apparently Dr Johnson had gathered his coat-tails and arranged them in a fashion to resemble the animal’s pouch, had put his hands up like paws, then taken two giant hops across the room. His audience hadn’t known whether to laugh or clap.

  It was icy cold outside, and Elizabeth felt it even if the boys didn’t. ‘All right,’ she said, slapping the snow off her gloves, ‘time for bed.’

  ‘He needs a hat,’ said Nat as if he hadn’t heard.

  Elizabeth was familiar with this ploy. ‘Bed,’ she said firmly.

  ‘But Mama,’ protested Jamie, ‘it’s Christmas.’

  ‘And good use you’ve made of it too. I don’t see any other boys in Mile End up at this hour, do you, Gates?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said Gates.

  Once prayers were said and the boys tucked up in bed, Elizabeth poured herself another glass of wine, went upstairs with it, then took out the letters that James had written from the Endeavour. There was a big pile of them and she had them in separate bundles, tied together with ribbon, a different colour for each year. She savoured these letters from the first voyage, taking no more than one a week and not reading the selected one too often so that the words would appear fresh and the pleasure of anticipation would always be present.

  On this Christmas night, Elizabeth selected a letter from the icy latitudes ‘When the sun shines and the sky is clear,’ she read, ‘icebergs are a fine light blue and transparent. In dirty weather they resemble land covered with snow, the lower part appearing black.’ On calm days penguins cavorted at the edges of the floating ice mountains, but when the wind increased, the swells rapidly built up and dwarfed the sixty foot bergs, breaking ‘quite over them, such was the force and height of the waves, which for a few moments is pleasing to the eye, but when one reflects on the danger this occasions, the mind is fill’d with horror, for was a ship to get against the weather side of one of these islands when the sea runs high, she would be dashed to pieces in a moment’.

  Elizabeth prayed there were no such winds with James now, and that it was as still at sea on this Christmas night as it was in Mile End. She read his words of love, his yearning for her, closed her eyes and imagined him sitting at the Spanish mahogany folding table, dipping the nib into the ink, writing late at night, by the lamplight, hearing the sigh of the ocean, the lap of it against the ship. She saw his furrowed brow, the scarred hand holding the pen.

  With these images in her mind, Elizabeth snuffed out the candle and went to the window, looking down on the newly made snowman which stood silent sentinel in their garden of white.

  It was the dead of night yet Elizabeth found herself outside, no gloves, no hat, standing in the snow in her nightdress and slippers. She wanted to feel the cold that he felt in the icy latitudes, while the core of her was warmed by desire. She gazed upwards to the stars that guided him, and she imagined herself into his hemisphere, found the place on that great cold ocean where he was, boarded the ship and glided into his cabin. Did he stir as she lay down beside him on that narrow ship’s cot? He was in the high latitudes of sleep, but sailed closer to the warmth and instinctively reached an arm out for its source.

  Elizabeth asked the snowman: ‘Do you not think it strange that they say high latitudes when they mean the lower reaches of the world?’ The snowman said nothing, merely grinned with the mouth the boys had formed on his face. Elizabeth was disappointed in Dr Johnson, he usually had an opinion on everything. Elizabeth’s mind told her that high, in the sense of latitude, meant high degrees. So the nearer to the poles, the higher the degrees. But degrees were temperature as well, and when Elizabeth thought of high latitudes, her feeling was of heat, of Tahiti, of languid nights, red hibiscus flowers, islands encircled by coral, turtles and sharks.

  Elizabeth was awoken from her reverie by the sound of hooves clip-clopping along the road, careful of the ice. She was freezing. She hurried inside and buried herself under the bedcovers.

  It seemed like only minutes later that a persistent knocking on the door drew her up. ‘Marm.’

  ‘Yes?’ Elizabeth said, pulling herself out of the grasp of sleep.

  ‘It’s unusual for you to sleep so long. I wondered if everything is all right.’

  Elizabeth opened her eyes. It was daylight outside her window. On this midwinter day that meant it must be nine o’clock at least. ‘I will come down presently,’ Elizabeth heard herself say. It was Christmas, Boxing Day, there was not the usual traffic on the road to wake her up. That is what she told herself. She slid her feet out of bed and felt the cold floor. She’d neglected to add coal to the fire before retiring.

  She sat before the mirror, preparing herself for the day. As she put a comb through her hair, droplets of ice fell onto her shoulders like diamonds in a necklace. There was a moment of suspension, between the rhythms of the day and the rhythms of the night. She had been in the high latitudes and brought their iciness back in her hair, had caught it just in time, before it melted in the routine of daily life.

  In 1773 Jamie entered the Royal Naval Academy at Portsmouth, with Nat to follow the year after. It was James’s wish. The academy was an undisciplined place, but no more so than Eton or any other school, and it did provide good training for naval life. Elizabeth hoped that the master, Mr George Witchell, who had worked on the observations James had made of the eclipse in Newfoundland, would take James’s son under his wing. She wanted him under someone’s wing if it couldn’t be her own.

  Ten year old Jamie was as tall as his mother, and insisted on taking the coach by himself. ‘The other fellows will not have their mothers accompanying them,’ he said fiercely.

  ‘You’re not to know that.’ So much could happen, a coach accident, highwaymen, anything. Elizabeth knew she fretted too much but couldn’t help it.

  Jamie’s voice was croaking like a frog, and although he tried to keep it in the lower registers, the rumbling voice
of a man, every now and then the child in him would squeak a protest. ‘I am almost a man. I will go as a man does,’ he said.

  ‘You will not, I hope, deprive us of the pleasure of coming to the coach stop to see you off.’

  ‘Of course not, Mama,’ said Jamie. He wanted everyone to see him go off to Portsmouth to become an officer, to see how grown-up he was. However, though it was important to young Jamie, the rest of Assembly Row virtually ignored the event, except for the Curtis boys, who had come to see him depart.

  Jamie took charge of his own bag, handing it to the driver himself, engaging him in banter about the conditions of the road as if he were a seasoned traveller. Elizabeth knew that his father would be proud of him, making his way in the world—with a little help from James himself, who had entered both boys not only on the ship’s list of the Endeavour but also the Resolution.

  Before the coach departed, Elizabeth found a moment to give the driver a shilling, to make sure her son was looked after on the trip. ‘Don’t you worry, missus.’ Then, as the coach was about to pull away, the driver leant down and said to Elizabeth: ‘Captain Cook’s son, I’d have done it for nothing, but thanks for the shilling all the same.’ With that he cracked his whip and the horses lurched into action. Elizabeth’s eldest son waved from the window. Death had taken three children, now life was taking the eldest.

  THE STAFFORDSHIRE CHINA

  On 14 July 1774, Furneaux, captain of the Adventure, returned to London with an islander in tow, a Tahitian by the name of Omai.

  Elizabeth’s first concern was for James. Why had Furneaux returned and not her husband? It was Joseph Banks who explained, in the same letter in which he asked permission to bring Omai to Mile End to meet the wife of the great captain. The Resolution and the Adventure had parted company off the New Zealand coast in October 1773, not long after young Jamie had boarded the coach for Portsmouth. As far as Furneaux knew, Captain Cook was in good health. Furneaux had been late for the November rendezvous in Ship Cove, New Zealand. The Resolution had already left, but Furneaux found the bottle with Cook’s message that he’d set a course south-east, towards the ice.