Far From Home by Valerie Wood Read Free Book Online

in the darkness. Just as soon as I see what’s what. There’ll be opportunities galore, I shouldn’t wonder. I might even pan for gold, though the best sites will have gone by now. Not that I’d go into mining. I vowed that when I left home. I saw what coal mining did to Da and our Jim, coughing their hearts and lungs out. No, that life wasn’t for me.
    He had known very quickly that what Edward Newmarch was planning didn’t include Mrs Newmarch. No-one else in the servants’ hall knew anything, and certainly not Mrs Newmarch’s maid, Dora, for he had had a mild flirtation with her and she would have told him if her mistress was going away. No, he had quickly deduced that his master was planning on taking his little filly, who was nothing more than a mill girl.
    Ironic, he thought, and pulled a small bottle of whisky out of his pocket which he had siphoned off from a larger bottle when he was preparing the cabin, and whilst Newmarch was on the wharfside trying to persuade his paramour to accompany them. And she wouldn’t come! He grinned in the darkness and took a drink from the bottle. More fool her! Or maybe not, he reconsidered. Maybe she knew that eventually Newmarch would tire of her and she would be abandoned, just as his wife had been.
    It would be a hard life for a woman anyway. He took another drink. Unless there’s plenty of money, and Newmarch will keep tight hold of his, or rather his wife’s, money. Poor bitch, she’ll be left with nothing. His mind had switched to May Newmarch. Still, she’s got a rich papa, he’ll look after her, I expect.
    Yes, I’ll move on as soon as I can. That’s what folk do in America. They don’t stay in one place like we do. They grasp every opportunity and if they don’t find what they’re looking for in one place, then they move on to the next. That’s what I shall do. And I’ll be welcomed. The country has opened its doors to folk like me, people willing to work, immigrants, poor or not. As long as they’re the right colour of course. He took another drink and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Some of them are not so keen on the blacks having their freedom. He stared up into the dark sky and saw the flicker of stars. But that’s another issue. Nothing to do with me.
    Edward kept to his cabin until they reached London Bridge. Their passage to America was the next day and after staying overnight at the Brunswick Hotel they boarded the
Chelsea
at Brunswick Wharf. Edward had a premier cabin on the top deck, and Allen was in second class, where he had to share with others.
    To begin with Edward avoided his fellow passengers as much as possible and leaned morosely over the rails gazing at the swelling Atlantic waters. He brooded on his misfortune in love and anxiously debated whether he had made a mistake in leaving all that he had in England for a chance of a different life in America.
    Two weeks into the voyage the captain invited him to take supper with him, where he met other first-class passengers who had come from Hampshire, Dorset and Wiltshire and therefore did not know him or his family. Their company was pleasant and he found that they too were as apprehensive and stimulated at what might be in front of them as he was.
    He told them that he was a widower looking for a new life, and following their sympathetic reaction decided that this was the role he would play. He found they were disinclined to enquire or question him after such recent sorrow and understood his need for solitude.
    He had no conversation or discourse with the immigrant passengers travelling on the lower decks, for he had nothing in common with them. According to the captain they were mainly agricultural workers, some taking wives and children in a search for a better life.
    ‘I’ve decided to take another ship and go to New Orleans,’ Edward told Robert Allen as they headed on course for New York six weeks later. ‘And then to California. The captain says that everybody who is