Mrs. Cook Read online

  ‘We’re meeting Father,’ said Jem. ‘Perhaps we’ll see you at the concert.’

  The Cooks and the Dyalls made their escape past pavilions and temples, towards the colonnades and alcoves which housed the supper boxes. They declined the arak for which Vauxhall was famous and settled instead for one of its excellent wines while waiting for supper.

  On an outside bench sat a merry foursome, one of the men thrusting his face so close to the woman beside him that he cast her hat askew. She responded by wiggling his ears. The other couple was younger, but no less merry. The young man was facing his lady friend, booted legs stretched either side of the bench, and she practically sitting in his lap. It looked like she was riding him side-saddle. A waiter stood at the head of the table, attempting to open a bottle of wine held between his thighs, while a tray of mustard and condiments waited patiently at his feet. Cockneys danced a lively jig, zigzagging around the trees and the outside supper tables.

  Though here the avenues were tree-lined, life ebbed and flowed along them as it did on the streets of London. The metropolis was a stew of high and low, of commerce and culture, beggars, sailors, gentlemen with fine clothes and money, an endless round of pleasures, a town in which you could gamble on anything, from a cockfight to the price of corn, and lose a fortune in a night. Foreigners always commented on the energy of London, its hubbub. Church bells vied with postmen’s bells, the cries of street vendors, of ‘Stop, thief!’, the clattering of feet on cobblestones, the clang of buckets and clink of glasses, all players in the orchestra of the city. To some observers it was boisterousness to be feared. A well-dressed foreigner, rather than be admired, was as like to have a dead dog or cat thrown at him, or at the least to be spattered with mud. Other observers called this boisterousness a love of liberty. ‘Paris is the City of the Great King, London of the Great People.’ Wasn’t that what poet Samuel Rogers said? The elegant in their drawing rooms, the fashionable, affected shock or tedium at life on the streets, yet it possessed an allure for them, a titillation, the way talk of South Sea cannibalism did.

  More characters came on stage—two dandies, one young, one older, standing at close quarters to a girl with a sash and pretty bows at her waist. She was on the arm of one, an uncle perhaps, but giving her attention to the other, who had his hands casually in his pockets. The ‘uncle’ was leaning in to hear the flatteries the young woman so readily accepted from the other man. The trio moved on, exposing to Elizabeth’s view a solitary man in fluffy wig, a napkin tucked under his multiple chins, devouring chicken legs, one in each hand, his mouth on them as if they were two beauties, kissing first one then the other, unable to decide which was his favourite till he had consumed them both.

  ‘Every bit as thin as it’s reputed to be.’ Mrs Dyall was holding up a meagre slice of Vauxhall ham for which they’d paid a pretty penny.

  Supper had arrived.

  ‘Such a beautiful day,’ said Elizabeth when they finally got home that night. ‘I didn’t realise how tired I was.’ Although the baby was still small inside her this was Elizabeth’s sixth pregnancy, and at thirty-three she was no longer a young woman. ‘My legs,’ she added, lying down on the bed. ‘All that walking.’

  ‘Perhaps I can be of service,’ said James. He lifted her nightgown and began stroking her legs, long gentle sweeps as well as applying pressure in some places.

  Elizabeth looked at him enquiringly. It was most pleasurable, and it did seem to relieve the tiredness, but he had never done such a thing before.

  ‘It is “rumi”, a Tahitian form of flesh brushing. If you appear tired or languid they will immediately begin “rumi” upon your legs. I have always found it to have an exceedingly good effect.’

  ‘The Tahitians have done it to you?’ asked Elizabeth sitting up.

  ‘I had complained of a rheumatic pain in my leg, from the hip to the foot.’ James drew his finger down Elizabeth’s leg to demonstrate. ‘Several women, eight or nine of them, came on board,’ he said, continuing all the while to perform the treatment on Elizabeth. ‘They desired me to lay down in the midst of them, then began to squeeze me with both hands from head to foot but more especially the parts where the pain was, till they made my bones crack.’ James laughed at the memory of it. ‘After a quarter of an hour I was glad to get away from them. However I found immediate relief from the operation. How are your legs feeling now, my dear?’

  Elizabeth was astonished, and she didn’t know what she found the most astonishing—that such an operation worked, that her husband had submitted to it, or the fact that he was now telling her about it. She had asked for detail so that she could imagine her husband in the places he visited but this was an oversupply. She knew that in his mind he was merely making a scientific observation but the last thing she wanted to do was picture her husband lying down amongst eight or nine women and being rubbed by them. She imagined the titillation such a story would invoke, though she herself found it not the least bit titillating. She drew her nightgown back down over her legs.

  INTRODUCTION TO A VOYAGE TOWARDS THE SOUTH POLE, AND ROUND THE WORLD, WRITTEN BY JAMES COOK, COMMANDER OF THE RESOLUTION

  It is a work for information not for amusement, written by a man, who has not the advantage of Education, acquired, nor Natural abilities for writing; but by one who has been constantly at sea from his youth, and who, with the Assistance of a few good friends gone through all the Stations belonging to a Seaman, from a prentice boy in the Coal Trade to a Commander in the Navy. After such a candid confession he hopes the Public will not consider him as an author, but a man Zealously employed in the Service of his Country and obliged to give the best account he is able of proceedings.

  James undertook the account of the voyage not because he had any special talents for writing, but to give the public what they did not get with Hawkesworth—a truthful and accurate history, with observations based on fact, not fancy, in the plain-speaking language promoted by the Royal Society’s men of science.

  By Guy Fawkes night, 5 November, when effigies of the Catholic traitor were burnt throughout the realm and fireworks set off, and the sky above London was thick with smoke and gunpowder, James was in the South Seas once more, carried along by a feathery quill this time instead of a sail, retracing the route of the second voyage, a task that would occupy him all of the winter and into the summer of 1776.

  It was as well the boys were in Portsmouth, because the manuscript, the charts, loose papers, letters received and letters written, blotting paper, pencils, pens and inks spread over the house like lava. Every so often Elizabeth would raise her head from her embroidery and glance at her husband in the middle of it all, see his determined air, the furrowing of the brow, the look of focused concentration that Nathaniel Dance would so aptly capture in his portrait of her husband. She caught sight of the Newfoundland scar, the end of it disappearing into James’s cuff, rolled up to keep it out of the way of ink.

  The journals were no longer simply an extended report for the Admiralty but for all of England, for all of the world. When published, in May 1777, nearly a thousand pages and sixty-three plates—charts and drawings—in two volumes, they would sell out immediately and go on to become one of the great accounts of Pacific exploration.

  In her Mile End home Elizabeth watched the masterpiece grow, a meshing of threads in James’s sloped handwriting, additions, deletions, insertions between the lines, in the margins, at the foot of the page, wherever its author could find space, till the entire voyage had been caught in the web of narrative.

  Elizabeth was in a boat, a tub, and she was surrounded by water. Not on the sea but in her own house, in front of the fire. Unlike her husband’s vessels which were designed to keep the water out, Elizabeth’s vessel kept the water in.

  ‘A bath, marm, in the middle of winter?’ Gates had protested.

  Though James was a stickler for cleanliness, Elizabeth’s ablutions were most frequently done at the washbasin. A bath, in a tub that was big enough to sit in,
was more of a luxury than a necessity.

  ‘Why not?’ Elizabeth countered. She did not allow herself luxuries very often. They had, courtesy of James’s pension, free light and heat. James was dining with Lord Sandwich, Sir Hugh and Mr Stephens, the Admiralty secretary, so it seemed appropriate that the Admiralty should pay for Elizabeth’s little luxury.

  ‘But the baby, marm.’ Gates was a spinster and had had little to do with birthing, or even assisting a midwife.

  Elizabeth judged herself to be three or four months gone. ‘In my belly the little one is surrounded by water,’ explained Elizabeth. ‘A little more will do no harm. In fact, if the water is allowed to get neither too hot nor too cold, it will be beneficial.’

  Gates had brought one big kettle then another off the fire and poured steaming water into the tub. Cold water had been added till Elizabeth had felt it with her elbow and deemed it to be just right. Towels were waiting on a stool near the tub, and the heat of the fire ensured that the bath would not cool too rapidly. Elizabeth could always call Gates to top it up with more hot water. She stepped into the tub, first her big toe penetrating the warmth, then the rest of her body following suit, sinking into it.

  Perhaps the best thing about a bath, thought Elizabeth, was getting out of her clothes, the corsetry and stays, the stomacher, releasing her body from its confinement. She could breathe. The tightness of clothes, before the Empire style which would arrive from Paris in the next century and shock everyone, was between the breasts and the navel. Below that, between the navel and the stocking tops, no undergarment was worn, which created an airy space between body and clothes. Only when women were in their rags and folded cloth was slung between the legs and attached to the bottom of stays, or to a cord around the waist, was anything worn close to this part of the body. But Elizabeth’s folded cloths would be tucked away in a drawer for a year at least. No blood came while she was pregnant, it being used instead to grow the baby.

  James had been gone an hour perhaps. It was four o’clock in the afternoon and already night was falling. Soon Gates would be lighting the candles. As well as the voyage recently completed, James was busy taking a hand in the voyage soon to begin. The Resolution, due to return to the South Seas under Clerke’s command, was currently at Deptford being refitted, and James, at the Admiralty’s request, was on the lookout for a vessel to accompany her. By 4 January 1776, less than a month after James and Elizabeth’s thirteenth wedding anniversary, and the arrival of Jamie and Nat from Portsmouth to spend Christmas at home, James had found yet another Whitby collier to accompany the Resolution. His advice on this South Sea voyage was much sought after, everything from navigational matters to details such as how many barrels of vinegar to take on board. It seemed to Elizabeth that her husband was busier in retirement than he had ever been in active service.

  She wriggled her toes and sent a gentle wave of water up over her body, a ripple that soon subsided, to be replaced by the tiny undulations caused by her breath. How soothing water was in the container of this tub, how wild and wilful, turbulent, it could become outside. At night, when James was away and Elizabeth heard a high angry wind she, like every sailor’s wife, tossed and turned, knowing how the wind whipped up water, how the two worked together with a potency capable of destroying whatever small barque they found in their path. Sometimes even without wind, water wreaked its havoc, the sea threw itself upon rocks, upon wild coastlines, again and again. Receding momentarily then returning to renew the assault, unmindful of the ships, the lives, it might take with it.

  Elizabeth drew in a deeper breath, smelled the sprig of dried lavender softening in the water, then sighed it out. She would no longer worry on nights of high wind because James would be sleeping safely by her side. Lilliputian waves splashed gently on the sides of the tub. Elizabeth idled the time away, eyes closed, watching thoughts wing their way across her mind like migratory birds.

  She felt as if she were on the verge of a new life, a life with James as a landman. She was a young bride and this baby she carried inside her was their first. Elizabeth dreamt of all the things she and James would do together once the voyage preparations were over and the Resolution had sailed. They would go to plays, visit the Pleasure Gardens again, stroll along the green with the new baby. This one he would see grow up. James would be here for each new tooth, the first steps, the first day at school. But even if a boy, the child would not go off to naval college as his brothers had done, Elizabeth would see to that. This new baby would be a landman’s son.

  The bath was growing cool. Elizabeth opened her eyes, saw her water-wrinkled fingers and decided against a top-up. Where was Gates at any rate? Why hadn’t she lit the candles? Night had gathered outside and the only thing keeping it from overtaking the room was the dull glow of the fire, and its burnished reflection on the tub.

  ‘Gates?’ Elizabeth called. Gates appeared so quickly that she must have been just outside the door. She came in, took a twig from the fire and lit the candles. They had sulphur matches, flat, thin things, but as Elizabeth said, there was no point lighting one piece of wood when there were already plenty alight in the fireplace.

  ‘Sorry, marm, not to have done it earlier,’ Gates apologised. ‘I looked in but you were so peaceful there in your bath I thought it would only disturb you.’

  ‘We must always keep a candle lit,’ said Elizabeth. ‘To welcome home our sailors.’

  Gates looked at her mistress, standing by the fire with the towel cloth around her, like a figure from antiquity. She knew it from her childhood, sailors’ families keeping a candle in the window, a bright flicker of faith for the men at sea. But the master, as far as she knew, had not gone to sea, only to dinner with the sea lords.

  It was late, time for bed, and still James was not home. At every carriage approach Elizabeth pricked her ears, but none stopped outside 8 Assembly Row. James would undoubtedly be returned in Sandwich’s vehicle, but what if there had been an accident? There were so many, what with the state of the roads, the slip of winter ice, and the drivers drunk more often than not. Worse was the possibility of highway robbery, and although her husband had survived all kinds of dangers when he had sailed into the unknown, and could no doubt get the better of any highwayman, still Elizabeth worried.

  She climbed the stairs. It was not that late, she told herself, it was simply the early fall of winter night that made it appear so. Elizabeth said her prayers, a special one at the end to bring James home safely that night, the prayer she said when he was away at sea. Then she parted the bed curtains and stepped into the cocoon.

  Not long after she heard the front door open, then footsteps. But they did not come immediately up the stairs, instead pacing up and down. ‘James?’ Elizabeth called.

  ‘Yes, my dear,’ she heard his reassuring voice, ‘sorry to wake you.’

  ‘I was not asleep,’ she replied, the whole exchange carried out in a loud whisper so as not to disturb Gates, despite Gates having said nothing disturbed her, the proof being that she had slept through the earth tremors that had rocked London in the fifties, and only when her mother grabbed her from her bed had she awakened.

  Through the gauze of bed curtain, Elizabeth saw the play of candlelight rising up the staircase, the shadows it cast on the wall. It flickered as it entered the room, announcing the looming form of her husband. She propped herself up on her elbows, watched him place the candle on the bedside table. ‘It was a good dinner?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, my dear.’

  Something was wrong. He had answered her question but the words were merely small bubbles which had risen to the surface. He was almost bursting with intensity, with fire. He made no attempt to disrobe and get ready for bed. If Elizabeth did not know her husband so well, she would have suspected by his behaviour that he had a mistress and that he had been with her. She pulled the bed curtain aside. Light glittered in his eyes.

  ‘A fruitful discussion?’ she pressed.

  ‘Yes, my dear.’ His eyes were fe
ver bright.

  ‘James, what is it?’

  He paced around the room, came up to Elizabeth, walked away again.

  He took a breath, then expelled the words in one gust. ‘I am to command the voyage.’

  Elizabeth caught hold of the words, felt their barbs. ‘Command the voyage?’ she repeated, the words tasting bitter in her mouth. Elizabeth searched for antidotes. ‘But you are retired. How can they order you to do this? Surely Clerke . . .’

  ‘Clerke will command the second barque.’ James remained where he stood, as if the bed curtain were made of iron.

  ‘Simply to return Omai to his home, you and Clerke both must go?’

  Now James shifted, walked to the window then returned to the exact same spot, as if he were already at sea, already on the quarterdeck, already the captain. ‘That is the public reason for the voyage,’ he said. His voice lowered but retained its passion nevertheless. ‘The true direction of the enterprise is to seek out the north-west passage.’

  She understood now. The sea lords had not inveigled her husband into this, he had volunteered. The warm dreamy atmosphere induced by the bath turned to ice, an ice so cold and hard it was cracking her bones. She made an effort to breathe, but the cold was suffocating her. Fifty or so attempts had already been made to find a passage in the high latitudes of the Arctic Circle, a faster route from one ocean to the other, to the riches of China, the East Indies. But so far none had been found.

  ‘You are prepared to set out on what might be a wild goose chase, to leave your wife, your sons, for something that may not exist, just as the Great South Land did not exist?’

  ‘There is £20 000 in it,’ said James. ‘For whoever finds the passage. We will be comfortable for life.’

  ‘We are already comfortable. I can do with less comfort and more of my husband. In the last seven years we have been together little more than a year. In all thirteen years of our marriage, if you add up the months, the weeks, the days, we have spent little more than four years together. When are you going to be a husband to me, a father to your sons?’ Elizabeth demanded. ‘Have you forgotten the words you spoke in St Margaret’s, “till death us do part”? When we are apart, death comes. The children are born and die, and I bear it alone. They die in my arms, not yours. You hear about it, after the event. I know it disturbs you but it’s not the same as watching it happen. I feel so helpless, nothing I do can stop it.’