Far From Home Read online

  About the Book

  When Georgiana and her maid, Kitty, make the long sea-journey from their native East Yorkshire to America, they are seeking a new life of freedom. But in New York, Georgiana encounters an imposter posing as Edward Newmarch, her cousin’s womanising husband, who has abandoned his wife and fled to America. Edward himself seems to have vanished.

  Meanwhile Edward, having escaped from a disastrous marriage in England, is now running from a bigamous union with the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner. His flight takes him through the Mississippi swamps, across arid desert and mountain ranges towards the gold fields of California. As Georgiana and Kitty journey to the hidden valley of gold, and Edward tries to flee his enemies, the dangers and passions of this new country and its people threaten to overwhelm them.

  By the ever-popular winner of the Catherine Cookson Prize for Fiction.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Map

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Also by Val Wood

  Copyright

  Far From Home

  Val Wood

  For my family, with love

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Thanks to Nick Evans, B.A., Maritime Historical Centre, Blaydes House, Hull, for information on nineteenth-century shipping and emigration to New York and New Orleans. Any fabrications or improvisations on fact are mine.

  Thanks to Peter and Ruth for their constant support and to Catherine for reading the manuscript and checking my geography.

  Books for general reading:

  The Lure of the Frontier by Ralph Henry Gabriel. Yale University Press, New Haven, 1929.

  Frontier America by Thomas D. Clark. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York.

  History of the American People by Paul Johnson. Phoenix Giant.

  The American West by John A. Hawgood. Frontier Library, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1967.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Georgiana leaned her arms on the rails of the packet ship Wilberforce and watched the shores of Hull receding. The vessel drew away from the Humber dock basin, down the estuary, heading towards Spurn Point and the open sea. She turned for a moment to watch the opposite shore, that of Lincolnshire, a county she had seldom visited. On its flat plain, smoke was issuing from factory chimneys. It seems so near, she thought, now that I am travelling so far.

  Turning again she looked back for the last time at the buildings of Hull, the towers and turrets of the Holy Trinity, St John’s and the Mariner’s churches, and the towering Wilber-force Monument. She saw the thick smoke issuing from the tall chimneys of mills and factories which lined the banks of the river Hull, and the ships’ masts in the Humber dock which gradually receded, their silhouettes framed in the bright morning sky.

  Am I doing right? she questioned herself. Cousin May and her parents are convinced that I am not and expect me to come back on the next ship! And they are right that I had a comfortable existence living with Aunt Clarissa, though it couldn’t be described as eventful. Oh, but I must be right! I couldn’t have lived in limbo any longer, waiting for someone to come along and rescue me and give me a different life.

  She nodded her head vigorously as she confirmed her own decision. Surely, better by far to take this opportunity and shape something for myself, she thought.

  ‘Is everything all right, Miss Gregory?’ Her maid, Kitty, plump in numerous woollen shawls, cloak and bonnet, appeared at her side. ‘Wouldn’t you like to come inside? It’s so cold here on deck.’

  ‘No,’ Georgiana refused. ‘I might be seeing this for the last time. I must watch it disappear into the past so that I can remember it.’

  ‘That’s what I’m scared of, Miss Gregory. I’ve never known anything else but this place. Hull and Hessle, I mean. Born in Hull I was, though my ma and da were Irish.’

  ‘And you hadn’t travelled anywhere else until you came to work for my aunt?’

  ‘No, miss.’ The girl smiled, dimples showing in her cheeks. ‘And I thought I was travelling to ’ends of the earth when coachie drove me to Hessle.’ Her smile faded. ‘I wish Ma and Da could have seen ’fine house I was working in. They both died ’following year,’ she added with a catch in her voice. ‘Cholera.’

  ‘They would have been glad for you, I’m sure,’ Georgiana said softly, ‘and perhaps pleased that you are making this journey now?’

  ‘I don’t know about that, Miss Gregory.’ Kitty’s eyes started to water as the breeze freshened. She tucked a wisp of red hair beneath her bonnet. ‘They’d have been worried that I was travelling to America with just my mistress and no-one to look after us.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Georgiana said thoughtfully. ‘Everyone is worried about that, including me,’ she added. ‘I once said that I couldn’t imagine a time when a woman would travel alone, and,’ she remembered, ‘someone replied that there would always be some women who would be independent enough to do that. I took it as a kind of challenge!’

  ‘But you’ve never been afraid to speak out, have you, miss?’ Kitty said boldly. ‘With your Women’s Rights and suchlike. Not like me who daren’t say boo to a goose!’

  ‘You heard about that, did you, Kitty?’ Georgiana smiled. ‘Well, I suppose that was one of the reasons for my making this journey. I’ll be long dead before women get equality in England.’

  But that is only partly the reason for leaving England to sail to the New World, she reflected. I do long for some excitement in my life, but it was Cousin May who made me take this drastic decision. She sighed. I was so heartily sick of her moaning and carping on about her husband who had gone off and left her after such a short marriage. May never thought that I might become weary of her constant demands that we discuss the rights and wrongs of Edward and her marital situation. Nor did she consider that I might have interests of my own! And of course I felt obliged to indulge her, as her father supports me.

  But not any more, she thought gleefully. I have my freedom! Though my uncle has been generous towards me in funding this voyage. But I’ll pay him back one day. I swear I will. I’ll show him, and everyone else who has said that I’m out of my senses, that I can stand on my own feet, even though I’m
a mere woman who has never lifted a finger in her life.

  ‘I want freedom and independence, Kitty,’ she said aloud. ‘To change my life if it is possible.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Kitty agreed, then, glancing at her employer, said bashfully, ‘we’ll be all right, don’t you worry. I’ll look after you in that new country of America.’

  Georgiana nodded. ‘We’ll look after each other, Kitty.’

  Kitty went off to check their luggage, first putting one of her own shawls around the shoulders of Georgiana’s travelling gown and jacket, to save her catching a chill. Georgiana wanted to catch a last glimpse of the villages on the edge of the Humber banks. Places such as Paull with its dilapidated medieval fort and shrimp boats, the strange-sounding Sunk Island, reclaimed from the river bed, and the tongue of Spurn at the mouth of the Humber which two years before had been breached by a great storm, changing its shape and making it almost an island.

  What will I do when I get to this new country? she wondered. I’ve heard such wild rumours that some of it is untamed with ferocious natives, but also that the cities of Philadelphia and Boston are well established. New York is a fine city, so it is said, a melting pot of nationalities. I should like that, to meet people from other cultures.

  Perhaps I could teach, she considered. English or French. Or open a shop! How appalled Cousin May would be. At any rate I must think of earning a living for the first time in my life.

  It was a sharp cold morning and she started to feel chilled in spite of the extra shawl, and returned to the cabin, where she found Kitty boiling a kettle on a small oil stove to make a drink.

  ‘There’ll be food in the saloon at two o’clock, Miss Gregory,’ Kitty said. ‘I’ve been talking to some of ’other passengers, them as have travelled this way before. There’s about fifteen of us all told. Some are businessmen, and they said that going to London by ship is better than by train. There’s some bullocks on board,’ she added, ‘and a pack of dogs, they’re all howling!

  ‘We’ll have got our sea legs by ’time we arrive in London, I expect,’ she continued, pouring boiling water onto tea leaves in a pot as she chatted. ‘Proper sailors we’ll be by then. Put that blanket round you, miss, you’ll soon get warm.’

  Georgiana laughed. ‘I’m glad you came with me, Kitty. You’ll cheer me up when I’m worrying whether I’ve made the right decision.’

  ‘Well, look at it this way, miss.’ Kitty poured tea into a cup, added milk and handed it to Georgiana. ‘What would you have gained by staying? You might have got married, but there’s no guarantee you’d have been satisfied with that, and me neither,’ she added. ‘There’s been nobody that I’ve fancied enough to tie myself to for life. And look at your cousin, Mrs Edward Newmarch. She picked a wrong ’un there – if you’ll pardon my impertinence.’ She blushed and stopped, conscious that in her chattering she had overstepped the mark.

  ‘I suppose everyone has heard of that?’ Georgiana asked. ‘Everyone downstairs?’

  ‘Oh yes, miss. It’s been gossip for weeks in ’kitchen. How Mr Newmarch had a mistress and wanted her to travel with him to America. Onny she wouldn’t go, so he went on his own anyway and left his wife behind to fend for herself. But they don’t talk about them now, they talk about his brother Martin and how he’s marrying a woman who’s pulled herself up from poverty and made a name for herself.’

  ‘Yes.’ Georgiana drew in a breath, then took a sip of tea. ‘So he is.’ And Martin would have married me, she thought, if I had held him to his offer. Only I couldn’t. He is too nice a man to be married to someone like me, a restless soul looking for who knows what.

  They went back on deck as they approached Spurn Point, holding fast to the rails as the ship dipped and rolled and made headway into the open sea. Other passengers came on deck as they passed the Spurn lighthouse, and waved goodbye to the returning pilot boat and the eastern shores of England.

  ‘That’s it, then, Kitty,’ Georgiana murmured as she clung onto her bonnet and huddled into her cloak. ‘We’re on our way.’

  Kitty’s face was turning a shade of pale green. ‘Yes, miss,’ she whispered. ‘Excuse me. I think I’m going to be sick!’

  They disembarked at London Bridge, their legs decidedly unsteady for the passage had been unseasonably rough. A porter called to them as he stood by their luggage. ‘Come on lady, you and your gel! You going to the Brunswick? Yes? Take this growler.’ He whistled to the driver of a four-wheeled hire vehicle, who drew up on the wharf in front of them. ‘Brunswick Hotel, me lad,’ he shouted, ‘and look snappy.’

  ‘There’s no real hurry,’ Georgiana began, for they were not sailing for two more days, but they were no sooner seated and their luggage on board than the driver was cracking his whip and they were buffeted around as the carriage wove in and out of other vehicles, gigs, hansoms, waggonettes, victorias, waggons and handcarts.

  ‘What bedlam, miss!’ Kitty exclaimed. ‘What a row.’ A barrage of sound had hit their ears: the raucous tones of porters and dock workers, the clatter of iron hooves and racket of wheels on cobbles, the lash of whips, the shrieking and crying of children and the strident voices of harassed adults as they tried in vain to quieten them.

  Georgiana put her hand over her nose. ‘And the stench!’ she said. ‘It’s dreadful.’

  ‘No worse than ’river Hull, miss,’ Kitty declared. ‘If you lived along ’Groves like I once did, you got used to ’stink from ’river. Just like this it was,’ she added cheerfully. ‘I could feel quite at home. Except,’ she sniffed, ‘I can smell oranges.’

  Georgiana took a tentative sniff. ‘You’re right.’ She breathed in again and found, mingling with the odours of the river, the sweet nectareous scent of oranges which were packed in crates at the dockside.

  The driver took them to the Brunswick Hotel where they had rooms booked until their day of departure. From their window they looked across the Thames at the Greenwich Peninsula, and below onto the wharf from where they would sail.

  ‘Millions of people, miss!’ Kitty cried excitedly. ‘Just look at them, I’ve never seen so many folk! Some have come by train, I expect. Railway station’s just down there.’

  ‘We’ll walk out tomorrow,’ Georgiana said. ‘We’ll get our bearings, buy extra provisions and see where our ship sails from.’ She was beginning to become animated too, now that they were here in London. The nagging doubts that she had had were starting to fade away, and her dream of a new life began to take on a reality.

  The next day they stepped out to look at the ships being made ready for voyages across the Atlantic. It seemed like pandemonium as porters rushed around rolling barrels, carrying casks, heaving crates and baskets, and all the while shouting to one another. ‘Come on, Jack. Get a move on!’ ‘Here, Harry. Give us a hand with this!’ ‘Now then, me lad, look sharp, the ship sails today not tomorrer.’

  Tipsy seamen, who were not on duty and had spent the previous night in alehouses, rollicked around the wharf with merry girls on their arms. Some had parrots on their shoulders which shrieked obscenities and whistled at passers-by. Other seamen, their shirtsleeves rolled up to reveal brown tattooed muscles, coiled ropes, scrutinized rigging and climbed over passengers who had settled themselves on the decks of their ships to check tickets, trunks, food, count their money and their children.

  Georgiana and Kitty pinpointed their vessel, the Paragon, a three-masted iron ship with three decks which they were due to board the following day. Then they walked away from the dockside to find shops where they could buy provisions. A butcher sold them salt beef, and a grocer’s shop supplied eggs, rice and a fruit cake to supplement the food which they would get on board. Itinerant salesmen carrying wooden trays and boxes attempted to persuade them to buy Union flags, crude paintings of London, watches which were genuine gold and all manner of items which they were assured would be very necessary for their journey to the New World.

  When they returned to the wharf the sound of singing greeted them. An
assembly of passengers had gathered on the top deck of one of the ships and were gustily singing hymns. A queue of people waiting to board joined in the hymn-singing as they patiently stood with their tickets in their hands and a bright expectant expression on their faces.

  ‘Mormons,’ Georgiana murmured, and one of the waiting male passengers turned a smiling face to her and confirmed her remark. ‘That’s right, ma’am. We’re travelling with our brethren to Salt Lake City, the city of saints. We’re following in the footsteps of our great prophet.’ He sounded Welsh, Georgiana thought, his voice sing-song and melodic.

  ‘Good luck to you,’ she said. ‘I understand you’ll have a long journey across the plains of America?’

  ‘We do, ma’am,’ he confirmed. ‘But we have our belief to sustain us. Come with us,’ he cried heartily, including them both in his enthusiasm. ‘You will find true love and happiness.’

  ‘Did you say you were walking?’ Kitty asked in astonishment. When he nodded, she grinned and said, ‘My boots are onny fit for town streets. Not for trekking!’

  He laughed and said that his boots were unsuitable, too. ‘But our faith will carry us onwards,’ he declared, and with a great burst of energy joined in the hymn-singing as he moved down the line towards the ship.

  Georgiana looked around at the passengers waiting on the wharfside for other ships. Some were sitting on crates and packing cases, and were wearing an air of resignation as if they had been there a long time. Others were pacing about, anxious to be on their way. Mostly they were shabbily dressed, country people some of them, the women with worried expressions, wearing hand-knitted shawls and home-made bonnets and carrying babies in their arms. The men were in rough twill trousers, thick wool jackets and heavy boots.

  But there were others, better dressed, and come to view the scene and these she guessed, like herself, had paid for a first-class ticket and a little more comfort on board.

  Georgiana took a deep breath. We are all taking a chance, she thought. Every single one of us, regardless of wealth or status. Like those Mormons we must have faith that it will turn out well, but I wish I could be as sure as they are.