Chapter 4

The crewman was calling me to board when I was still untangling the lantern tassel caught around my luggage strap.

Arthur had won that tassel at a winter fair in our second year of marriage. He missed seven shots and in the end paid the stallholder outright for the prize, yet insisted he had won it.

When we got home, I tied it to the porch lantern. Whenever he was out late, I would have it lit. In time the night watchman learned without being told: if Arthur had not come home, the porch lantern was not to be put out.

This morning, before I left, I untied the tassel. Hobbs followed me to the carriage and asked whether the porch lantern should still be left burning tonight. I said no. He assumed I was only going out to the country for fresh air and urged me to come home soon.

I gave no explanation.

Now the tassel had snagged on the buckle, and after several tries I still could not work it free. The passengers behind me had formed a long queue. A woman with a child in her arms grew impatient. "If you're not boarding, miss, let the rest of us through."

I stepped aside and cut the cord with a small pair of scissors.

The tassel dropped onto the wet stone steps. The tide crept up and swept it under the pier.

The crewman checked my ticket and travel papers, then took my luggage. "Lyme, is it?"

"Yes."

"You'll have to change vessels on the way. More than ten days."

"I know."

I stepped onto the gangway without looking back.

Third class was smaller than I had imagined: six passengers to a cabin, each berth barely wide enough to lie on one's side. The woman across from me complained that my trunk was in the way and motioned for me to push it farther in. I shoved it under the bed and cracked my knee on the wooden frame. The pain kept me doubled over for some time.

No one asked where I had come from. No one knew whose daughter I had been or whose wife.

The woman unwrapped a sweet biscuit for her child, scattering crumbs everywhere. The old woman by the porthole noticed me rubbing my knee and passed over a small bottle of liniment, then asked whether I was traveling alone to stay with family.

"Just going to stay for a while," I said.

"Relatives won't put you up forever. Better to have a place of your own."

I thought of the little cottage in Lyme, which I had seen only in the lease drawings. There was no north wing set aside for an unwanted daughter, no bedroom that could be handed over to a guest at a moment's notice.

My landlady, Martha Mercer, had written in her reply that there was a crabapple tree behind the house. It attracted insects when it bloomed; if I did not care for it, she could trim it back beforehand.

I wrote back and asked her to leave it.

That was the first time in my life I had been able to decide the fate of a tree.

Hoofbeats sounded from the shore just as the crew was casting off. I looked out through the cabin window, but it was not Arthur. It was a young footman from the Grant household.

He ran up drenched in sweat, scanning the dock, and finally stopped in front of a cargo boat to ask the bargeman whether several crates of paints sent from the Harrow house to the old property had arrived.

Arthur did not know I was here.

After the footman left, the dock postman called my name through the crowd. He handed me a note on Grant stationery; it had been delivered first to the inn at Watergate Wharf, then forwarded by the innkeeper.

A few lines in Arthur's hand. He wrote that Lydia had invited two painters on short notice and there would be more people at the viewing, so would I please tell the kitchen to prepare luncheon. He added that he would be home before dinner and that I should stop being difficult and remember to leave the porch lantern burning.

The hull rocked gently, and the riverbank began to slide away. The figures on the dock shrank; the bridge arches disappeared behind the wake.

I folded the note and dropped it into the waste-paper basket.

After the steamer passed Greenwich, the old woman pushed open the porthole and said London was out of sight.

No one lit the porch lantern at the Grant house, and no one gave orders to the kitchen. That note would never be answered.

That night at the Grant residence, Arthur stood beneath the darkened porch lantern and knocked twice on the window. No one answered.

He assumed I was still sulking. He pushed the door open and found that the dressing table, which had stood against the wall, was half bare.

"Where is my wife?"

The maid answered in surprise. "You didn't know? She left the city at dawn, sir."