Evan Hunter: Lizzie

There was, for Lizzie, a sense of discovery — no, of homecoming. Standing at the ship’s railing, listening to the groaning and hissing of the steam machinery as it hoisted the trunks and valises from belowdecks, she felt less a foreigner than she did a returning native. This England, this sceptered isle — today wreathed in ominously shifting gray clouds that promised rain — called to her from more than two centuries past, when a man named John Borden left his home in Kent to seek his fortune in the colonies.

Had he felt, upon his arrival in Boston, the same keen anticipation she felt today in this vast and sprawling harbor? Had the skies over that alien port seemed as utterly appropriate to him as did these leaden skies above Liverpool now? Appropriate, yes; sunshine would have been a disappointment, a contradiction of expectations.

The heat in Fall River a week ago had been intolerable. New York City had been even less hospitable, its temperatures hovering in the mid-nineties, the noise and confusion of the docks miraculously disappearing the moment the women boarded the Teutonic and found their cabins. But for all its splendor and speed, the great Ocean Greyhound, as it had been advertised, had seemed only another necessary delay, five days — almost six — before this moment, this already cherished instant, when she could stand here, the wind wet and raw on her face, the harbor crowded with hundreds of ships and boats defying the waves, and glimpse there in the distance the rooftops of an England recalled as though she had been here countless times before.

The transatlantic journey had not been shortened by the fact that Anna had been seasick almost every moment. They had invited her along, after months of preparation and consultation, only because first-cabin accommodations were so dreadfully expensive ($60 to $140, depending upon the location!) and none of them could afford the luxury of travel in an unshared room. It had been Lizzie’s misfortune — and she hoped to correct this as concerned future hotel arrangements — to have drawn a short straw similar to Anna’s from a hat belonging to Rebecca Welles, the chance draw determining exactly how the ladies would be traveling au paire, as Rebecca had put it in her somewhat strained French.

Even under the best of circumstances, Anna Borden was a dour, pale-faced woman, entirely humorless, and given to wearing a veil day and night, perhaps to hide her plainness, perhaps to ward off unwanted glances from foreign men, of which there had been many on the voyage out. The fact that they were both named Borden had encouraged far too many people to ask, “Oh, are you related?” which they weren’t — except perhaps for some common ancestor in the dim, distant past: there were now something more than four hundred Bordens in Fall River, most of whom Lizzie didn’t even know. She claimed to the other two women in their party that she had never seen Anna without a veil covering her face except when she was vomiting in the ship’s toilet, but this was an exaggeration. Anna slept with her face naked to the night airs. And snored loudly, as though to dispel whatever evil spirits might be tempted to invade her nostrils when the veil was tucked away in her dressing case. She stood veiled and shivering beside Lizzie now, clutching the rail for dear life although the ship was virtually motionless, breathing deeply as though in imminent danger of vomiting again.

Of the three women traveling with her, Lizzie liked Rebecca Welles best. Somewhat younger than Lizzie — she was twenty-seven or — eight, Lizzie wasn’t quite sure — she was a well read and quite attractive young woman with a passable knowledge of French and a smattering of German as well, which Lizzie hoped would stand the party in good stead on the final leg of their journey. They had met the way so many unmarried women in Fall River did, at a church function, and it was Lizzie who had convinced her to join the church’s Chinese department, where they struggled side by side teaching English to the sons and daughters of the town’s laundrymen. In many respects Rebecca — though her forebears were mixed Welsh and English — looked Chinese herself, with masses of straight black hair and eyes the color of loam, somewhat slanted over prominent cheekbones.

The Liverpool harbor resembled nothing so much as a giant canal — miles long and a thousand feet wide, Lizzie guessed — lined with great walls of heavy cut stone divided into berths large enough to accommodate any seagoing vessel. Everywhere she looked, she could see ships and smaller boats disgorging cargo, the markings and flags on the vessels indicating they had come from ports everywhere on the face of — there now! The tenders that would carry them to the customhouse were approaching the ship. Further along the railing, Felicity Chambers, her blond locks blowing in the wind, waved at one of the approaching boats, or rather at the pilot guiding it alongside; she could not imagine how Felicity could even see the man through the grimy window of the pilothouse, but waving she was, and in a thoroughly unladylike manner that caused Rebecca, by her side, to give her an equally unladylike poke with her elbow. Felicity was twenty-four years old, destined one day to become the wife of one of Fall River’s businessmen, Lizzie guessed, a dimpled, curly-headed little thing quite remarkably endowed by nature and possessed of all the cute mannerisms Europeans expected of small-town American girls traveling abroad.

One day, strolling the deck in bright sunshine on the voyage out, Lizzie had chanced to overhear a remark made by an Englishwoman returning to her native land. As Felicity flitted past, the woman said, “So American. Beautiful, rich — and vulgar.” Lizzie had taken this as a comment less directed at Felicity’s blond, blue-eyed good looks and extravagant figure than at the particularly lavish way she was dressed for a daytime, topside constitutional. And whereas she quite agreed that her traveling companion had looked overdressed and inappropriately bejeweled in contrast to the Europeans making the homeward voyage, she nonetheless felt a fierce, protective loyalty. Staring the Englishwoman down, letting her know with her penetrating gaze that she’d been overheard, she had deliberately gone to Felicity, embraced her, kissed her on the cheek, and walked arm in arm with her into the grand saloon.

“Oh, it’s England, it’s England !” Felicity said now, and waved this time at the distant anonymous shore.

At the booking office in the Birkenhead Station, Lizzie was informed (and she was already beginning to regret her role as elected treasurer) that the distance from Liverpool to London was two hundred miles, and that a first-class ticket would cost one pound, eight shillings, which she clumsily calculated as seven U.S. dollars, or approximately three and a half cents a mile, which she supposed was something of a bargain. They followed a porter in blue livery to the luggage van (they called it luggage here, she noticed, and not baggage ) and watched as he labeled each piece Paddington and then hefted the lot of them inside; he was a giant of a man, who tossed their trunks into the van with little effort and even less care. Lizzie waited in vain for a receipt of some sort, but apparently the British confidence in human nature was sublime, and when she saw that none was forthcoming, she began rummaging in her purse for the expected tip.