Moon Rising (37 page)

There was also a sense of satisfaction for me, in that I had travelled with one cargo, seen another growing in the great forests of northern Europe, and yet another – wheat – beginning to ripen before our eyes as we reached the great delta where the Danube entered the Black Sea.

If nothing else, our journey had been one of enlightenment. Henry often said, drily, that it had been a trial akin to Bunyan's
Pilgrim's Progress
; but by the time we reached Constantinople his endurance was wearing thin. He managed to persuade me to abandon cargo ships in favour of something more conventional, and we transferred to a hotel for several days of sightseeing before picking up a passenger steamer to take us on to Piraeus and the ancient city of Athens.

After all our privations – and we had endured many in the previous six weeks – it was good to have some basic comforts. Henry, who had been stoical, was delighted to play the tourist, and so thankful to be in acceptable circumstances again, he was ready to give me the moon had I asked for it. All I wanted was the chance to work for him – which was perhaps a shade more difficult – but to my surprise he was even willing to grant me that. As a consequence we were both immensely happy, drawn closer by our shared experiences. Reluctant to let go, we took another month to get home.

~~~

Henry may well have believed that I would not work for long, because either pregnancy or boredom would intervene, but I was so pleased with myself, so full of satisfaction at all we'd overcome and managed to achieve, I found it hard to believe anything could dent my happiness, let alone puncture it. We had agreed on where I would work, how many hours, and what I would do, and every morning we set off to Henry's office in the city.

Most of his work was done elsewhere, either at the Baltic Exchange or in meeting other brokers and agents at various hostelries and coffee-houses nearby. The City being such a male preserve, that was perhaps the most taxing part. The public houses were not exclusive clubs, but the men who frequented them liked to think they were. To begin with, my appearance – albeit in sober grey or brown – shocked them, and that first week I found myself so uncomfortable that if I'd been less determined I would have surely given up.

I kept telling myself that working on the fish market was worse, that a woman who had sailed on a Whitby collier, and travelled all the way through eastern Europe, ought not to be afraid of civilised men in an English city. But some were extremely hostile. Wherever I went I was either stared at or pointedly ignored, while the men to whom I was introduced talked at me or around me, sat in silence or made some excuse to stand up and move away. At first, Henry was embarrassed too, but, having made a bargain in Constantinople, he was determined to stick by it.

There were one or two seriously unpleasant moments, in which Henry was cut dead by men he'd regarded as friends, but at last the situation settled down enough for me to be accepted as one of Leadenhall Street's minor eccentricities. I could not enter the Exchange, of course, because I was not a member, but I was able to involve myself in most other aspects of the business of buying and selling. New ships, old ships, cargo space and cargoes.

If the Addisons were surprised by my addition to the London office, old Mrs Addison was delighted. She wrote a glowing letter to Henry, praising his shrewdness and pioneering spirit, which brought forth a wry smile; but as I settled down he became happier and, as I began to pull my weight, I think he even started to be proud of me. His praise, reluctant at first, was genuine, and that for me was the very pinnacle of satisfaction. I had proved myself to him. I felt then that I could go on to prove myself to his contemporaries.

That was when I received my first communication from Isa Firth.

Mystified by the handwriting, which was so much more precise than Bella's unformed scrawl, and far less elegant than Mr Richardson's, I wondered who else would write to me from Whitby. Inside was a letter, folded around an unmounted photograph. I didn't need to peer too closely at the couple in the centre of the picture, the naked man and woman making love amongst the rocks, to know who they were. After the first second of shock I even knew where it had been taken.

I slipped it straight back into the envelope, as though hiding the evidence would obliterate it. Thankfully I was breakfasting alone that morning, but even so it was a while before the panic subsided, I dared not read the note, nor examine the photograph, in case someone came into the room. Like a criminal I slipped upstairs to be alone, but not before taking a magnifying glass from the study.

Even without the glass I could recognise my own face quite clearly, catching the light from the rising sun. With my head thrown back, arms clinging to my lover, legs hooked around his naked haunches, it seemed I was urging him on to greater endeavours – which may well have been the case. With the glass, however, details were even more distinct – our clothes on the rocks, the remains of a picnic, the foam of the incoming tide – all somehow suggesting other hungers, other surges. What could not be seen, because his head was turned away, was the face of the man so obviously pleasuring me, but his back was beautifully defined from head to heel, he was almost moving in that captured moment, muscles rippling in the low, revealing light.

It was a shockingly beautiful picture, so good it might have been posed. Except I knew how natural it was, how stolen, how long the photographer must have watched and waited amongst the rocks at Saltwick Bay before he pressed the shutter.

And that was when I had to rush to the wash-stand, in order to vomit my shock and disgust. It was a while before I stopped shaking, before I could be sure the nausea was over. I sponged my face with water from the ewer, and sat down by the window to read what was written.

Isa Firth. Her signature was so clear it was as though she stood before me. Bile rose again but with an effort I quelled it, forced myself to take in her words.

Cutting aside the fact that she and I had never had anything of any moment to say to each other, that letter must have been the chattiest blackmail note ever written. She must really have enjoyed conveying the bad news; I even sensed a relish to the bitterness that came off the page.

News, tone, content, were all shocking. One blow came hard upon another until I hardly knew what to do, what to think.

Jack Louvain was dead.

I could barely take this in, and had to read the details over and over again. A nasty accident on the cliffs at Upgang – Jack had slipped and broken his leg. The leg refused to set properly, which meant it had to be amputated – but then the wound wouldn't heal, gangrene had set in. Despite several operations and a long stay in hospital, Jack had died a month ago.

Isa had apparently been housekeeping for him for some time, as well as working in the shop, and in the course of sorting his possessions had come across some very interesting photographs. Ones Mr Louvain seemed not to have published. She felt it was a shame to leave them languishing in a drawer, as she was having to find money to erect a suitable stone to his memory. As I'd been such a friend of his, she thought I might like to buy this photograph of myself, and so help contribute to keeping his memory alive...

Jack had taken it?

No, I refused to believe it. How could he?
Why
would he?

And yet he must have done. He had. My initial reaction was that the death and suffering of a Peeping Tom were well deserved. But hard on the heels of that came disbelief, a conviction that none of it was true, bar Isa Firth's poking and prying, and her wicked desire to stir up the past and ruin my life. But then grief for an old friend overtook me; Jack wasn't old enough to die, he couldn't be dead in such a terrible way, he –

But he was, he had to be – Isa wouldn't,
couldn't,
make up something like that, it was too easy to check. Anyway, his death, true or not, was incidental to the facts, and the facts were that Isa Firth had somehow found prints of Bram and me making love one early morning at Saltwick Bay during that summer of '86
.

Did she know who my lover was? Did she know his name? I could not help wondering if there were other photographs which showed Bram's face, because he would have been a prime target for blackmail. That thought made me quake, made me want to rush out of the house at once and straight to the Lyceum. I was so badly shocked, I needed the support of someone who knew and understood, someone who could give advice without making moral judgements.

The temptation was almost overwhelming. I might even have done it, except that some quirk of fate sent Henry back to the house that morning. An accident on the main line just outside King's Cross meant that trains were indefinitely delayed, so he had telegraphed the Addisons to postpone his trip to Hull. If he was surprised to see me still at home, he was concerned, wanting to know what was wrong.

I made some excuse about a badly-upset stomach, whereupon he urged me to return to bed. And there, thankfully, I took time to reflect. Henry loved me, trusted me – more than that, he'd risked his own professional reputation in order to satisfy my desire to work in his field. I could not betray that trust in any way, least of all by contacting Bram. I would have to face this problem alone.

~~~

That first letter with the photograph did not mention a specific sum; only that Isa would appreciate a reply with some indication that I understood and was willing to make a contribution towards Mr Louvain's memorial stone. She made it sound like a shrine, which to her it probably was, something to be cleaned and polished and genuflected to. Something to give her empty life a focus. I even had an image of her in my mind, kneeling at a little prie-dieu with Jack's picture nailed above it.

It was a sickening thought.

Every time the photograph sprang to mind – I didn't need to look at it – I found myself hating with a passion I would not have believed possible. I wished something violent for Isa, such as the braining smack of a winch hook, the terrible splintering crash of a load of timber giving way, or a bolting dray-horse to knock her down and pulverise her underfoot.

Despite those ill-wishes, I wrote a civil enough reply saying I understood the situation very well, and how much did she expect? Her reply mentioned £50, which was outrageous, so I sent a curt demand for the plate as well as every print in her possession. In the letter which followed, Isa dropped the charade, threatening to post a copy of the photograph to my husband if I did not forward the money before the end of the month.

I knew Isa too well to doubt her word. She wasn't doing this just for the money, but out of envy and wickedness. No doubt Bella had told her about my marriage to a wealthy man, and that would have rankled, especially in the light of her unrequited passion for Jack. I found myself wondering whether he'd left a will, and if so, who had inherited his photographs. They were part of his business, after all. But if his accident and subsequent death had been the darkest of thunderclouds to Isa, then those photographs must have been the crock of gold at the foot of the rainbow. I wondered how many the crock contained, and whether all had been taken on the same occasion.

At one time I would have sworn Jack Louvain was incapable of such behaviour, but Isa's letters knocked all such certainty out of me. Were we chanced-upon – or had he followed us? Not knowing, I was ready to believe anything – and trusted no one. Instead of sending money through the post, I would have liked to go to Whitby to throttle the truth out of Isa, but the work I'd fought so hard to do made it impossible.

Henry was away for several days in Hull, which at least gave me time to compose myself, but he had started to count on me, to use me, and as a result the business was picking up again after our extended leave in the summer. The challenge was what I'd prayed for; I could not abandon everything on a whim. So, although it grieved me sorely, I took money from my own account in five-pound notes and posted it to Isa's new address.

Next day I wrote to Bella, an apparently general, chatty letter, asking for all the news since it was so long since I'd heard anything from anyone in Whitby; at the same time I sent a note to Mr Richardson, asking him to take out a year's subscription to the
Whitby Gazette
for me. It was something I should have thought of before, since it would give me an official version of local events, with more to be read between the lines. After some years in which the past had begun to lose its hold on me, suddenly it was on my heels again with a vengeance. I needed to know what was going on in Whitby, and from as many sources as possible.

~~~

After that, Bella wrote from time to time, largely because I kept up the correspondence and refused to let it lapse. I learned that Lizzie and the youngest sister – no more than seven or eight years old when I lived with them – were both in service, the two eldest boys were doing all right at sea, and only Davey and young Magnus were still at home. Davey was the bright one, Bella said, he wanted to join the railway company, so they were hoping to keep him at school until he was fourteen. Magnus was a willing bairn, but a bit slow, so there wasn't much point in sending him to school. Their mother still liked her tot of gin, but with most of the bairns off her hands and lodgers bringing in money, she was a lot happier. Especially now that Isa had a place of her own. In the end she'd done quite well out of what Mr Louvain left her...

Bella rarely mentioned herself, and for a long time I assumed that she was doing what she'd always done, helping her mother in the house. Except that she was twenty-seven years old and most women of her age were married with children, while those of the fishing community in Whitby were generally baiting lines and selling fish as well as raising a family. Remembering how hard we'd worked that winter, and for so little reward, I did ask myself how Bella was managing to survive; it wasn't until the following spring, however, that I discovered the truth – from the
Gazette.