Ellie Kent, abandoned as a child and raised in a bleak and harsh asylum,
becomes a governess for a family bound for South Africa. Before reaching
their destination, she is abandoned again and left to navigate a vast and
unforgiving land alone. Forced to join a caravan of settlers, Ellie travels
with a questionable trader, a mysterious opera singer, and a young Afrikaner,
Gysbert de Boer, who must protect and deliver her to an uncertain future.
As war looms and survival grows desperate, Ellie must forge a home or
be lost to the wilderness forever. The Immortalites is a sweeping tale of
survival, sacrifice, and belonging.
Let me begin with sparrows, if in all of Africa I must fix on one part of it to make a start. So, sparrows: I had not before then paid any notice to them, but at that moment they filled my sight and I was glad of them on the Africky sands. The wind gusted and pushed the hopping birds off their course, but they braved it and drew nearer to each other to bob and peck at something there.
At least they have sparrows here, I said. It was me speaking to myself for comfort, for while I watched the urchin birds I was watched by girls who clutched their shawls, unfriendly as hens.
A man stepped up to engage my attention. The birds beat into the air and whipped away.
‘All right, you,’ he said. He looked at a paper and not at me.
‘You’ll do as your ticket says and make for the destination. They’ll know what to do with you there.’
We were on the edge of a sea strand. My eyes watered in the splintering light.
He turned the paper in his hand but there was nomore to see there, no more to be got from the problem of me. He hitched his inexpressibles and jutted his behind, bending to my height, and put his head alongside mine. The warmth of his rotten breath filled my bonnet and he had me sight along his pointing arm.
‘Him in the hat,’ said the man. ‘He knows about you. He’ll see you to the town.’
He handed me my carnet. I took it in finger and thumb and did not speak.
He said, ‘It were a bother, mind you. A bother you made.’
He waited for my answer. Under my bonnet, from under my lowered lids, I sought instead the little birds. Here came one, an outlier, with dun feathers and a bright black eye. If I could hold fast to the birds I might forget my circumstance. If I lifted my head to the broad scene of us on the sea’s edge I knew I should not breathe for fright. Let me hide in the wind.
At last I dared to look past the bothered man to he who would have charge of my delivery to the capital town. This one was in a wide straw hat and was being pleaded with and tugged at by men, and was lifting his elbows to escape them. Papers made a bouquet in his hand and he stepped backwards, flourishing it between them. There was a flurry and a flourishing everywhere you looked, of troops and traders and families.
I collapsed my carpet bag at my feet and pressed the buckle out of the way, and sat upon it, covering the EK of my initial letters. After some time, Georgie saw me and came across the dune at a trot, his arms held high to be lifted by me. His cries of ‘Ellie! Ellie!’ alerted his mother and she snatched him back, made her jaw stiff and told me to remove my filthy hands from her boy. This brought more hissing from the watching girls, and a straightening of shoulders from the more grown women. A tightening of mouths.
It also seemed to remind the man in the hat of me, for not long after he came with full arms: two tin plates of food and a three-legged stool that he dropped at my feet. He sat on it and faced me, but did not hand me a plate. He held one up and out of reach, as if to ask me to pay before I should eat. He said, ‘So, our little temptress. You hardly look the part. But perhaps that far into the journey even the brownest baggage and her brimstone brows will raise a man’s taste.’
Worse, his over-sounded ‘brow’ and ‘brown’ and ‘brimstone’ made him jut his mouth like a suckling baby. It was the sincerest mockery. I felt my own face drop and he changed again.
‘Oh no-no-no, no tears! I was teasing, it was naught but teasing. You ought not to mind me so, Ellen Kent. Here, take your dinner. It is only the strain of it, the journey and this place. You must not mind. You must not cry.’
Down came the plate and I took it. He shifted in his seat to present his side aspect to me and give the beach parties his bold regard. I discovered a keen hunger and I spooned up my first food in Africa. I thought he was some species of gentleman mixed with some species of beast – though I had little acquaintance with either – but he seemed to be for me, or at least not against. He had laid his hat aside to take his meal, and bared a head of yellow hair that fell across his brow.
‘I am to shepherd you to some grisly mother in the town, they say. Until I do, you will be useful to me. You seem useful, I’ll give you that.’
His teeth worried a heel of bread, and he spoke around it.
‘They are so fearful about you that they’ve signed for double passage and a fee for me if I’ll keep you out of trouble, so already you have come in handy.’
He took the bread in his hand and pointed it at me. ‘I conjecture you have a sorting sort of mind, as women of your age and circumstance do. Whatever happened on the Immortalite, I am going to trust you with the stores on our journey. The lists, the inventory. You’ll be quartermaster. Quartermistress,’ he said. He had by then cleared his mouth and could laugh at me. I blushed with gratitude at being spoken to and not despised.
In a short time, our bolting slowed and he introduced himself as Captain Fynmore Makepeace, ‘once a cavalryman of the 21st Light, quite recovered since’.
“My mother had thirteen children and none died,
guaranteeing our line would always be poor.”
Plain Ellen Kent being my name and plain brown my aspect, you would have taken me for a sober girl, as did he, on my way to being a ‘sorting’ sort of woman, a manner of unsexed female who has retained only the useful womanly parts – quick hands, small opinions. I am not sure you would have been right in supposing so, for I did feel it, the rising hilarity of my sex, pressing upwards. It could come when I was alone, when it might shiver like quicksilver resisting the bottle. That is almost the sum of what I knew about myself: that I laughed often, and cried. Oh, and that I was small. Of no great height, nor even common height. Small and brown and with those brows.
The wind dropped, the sun too, and I had a bed in my full wardrobe and unlaced stays. I settled among sacks and barrels, too weary to spend a single breath on the stars that were arriving in the ocean’s sky.
While I sleep, here are the circumstances of my arrival, in disgrace and under a species of arrest, and for which I was shunned by the girls and women: That I had been engaged fresh from the New Asylum for Female Orphans in St George’s Fields, Lambeth, though I was no girl by then, but in my years at that house had been moved from inmate to a manner of teacher or minder of the younger ones, and was on my way to being the older sort of young person myself.
That I had been recommended by the Asylum Guardians for employment and set forth in the penny press as a governess, though that was a lie. I could read and write and was thorough in grammar, but I had not a governess’s skills, having not got so far as geography, music, the classics. Fortunately, it was not someone to teach their children that the new family sought when they engaged me. From both sides, from the offer and the ask, I came more as a maid of all work, though all parties gladly enrolled in the governess fiction. I hoped no money changed hands for what that would make me and the Guardians both, but otherwise I would say the arrangement suited me, for in it was my chance to start on myself at last – the family was set for emigration, and I would travel under a ticket to be paid for by them and worked off by me.
My employer was Mr Cockcroft, who had a Mrs C and a daughter, Missy, a thriving red-faced giant of fifteen years to my twenty-four. There was a son, Georgie, and some more in indeterminate babyhood.
Though I was an Asylum girl, I was no more orphan than Missy, and this alone separated our lot: my mother had thirteen children and none died, guaranteeing our line would always be poor. Published in The Advertiser on a Wednesday had been that ‘The objects to be admitted to this Asylum are to be orphans or other deserted girls of the poor within the Bills of Mortality from the age of eight to twelve years’. By Saturday we had stood at the Asylum door, certificates of age pinned to us or in our pockets, we five who could fit into eight-to-twelve and could swear we were now such deserted objects. I spread my right hand and comforted my smaller sisters that we were, thumb to little finger, five together and still kin.
On our first day in this house of girls, before I would let them admit me or my sisters, I had planted myself before a housekeeper and insisted she record our parent as extant and vital but only gone from us for now. I said I would have it ‘noted in the records of the Guardians’ that we had a parent, possibly two. I watched her pen move and I believe a record was made; certainly she was kind about it.
I would take a deserting parent over a dead one, the better to believe in still having a mother, but even as I watched my littlest sister spread her own fingers and count herself among her sisters, I had another thought: that it was only just above water, that hand. Indeed, I remember that day as a drowning, by which I mean I felt I had lost the complications of family life, that shifting constant parry, the certitudes, and found myself alone, unable to hear so well, in a single element that I must always be aware of; I never had given it a thought before then – the way water will dispossess air.
After the record was made, or a housekeeper’s mime of it, I unstiffed my back and agreed to us being let into the place, gulping ’til I grew more used to this underwater way to be. We were, as I say, five of us left to the benevolent to raise, one of them me.
In the case of the Cockcrofts, my new employers, croup and accidents had kept the size of their family on the manageable end, and I was promised matters would be more manageable yet with another grown girl to bend to the work.
The governors said that upon the conclusion of their business with the Cockcrofts, I was to leave my handful of sisters and the idea of our mother, and travel. I would go farther than any in the Kent line in its dim history of very close clinging to castle walls and city walls, when we never had ventured so far as across the river. Never to Scotland. Never even to France, or to sea, ’til me. But here was I for Africky, and I knew the old world was opening to me at last.
While I recall, I note a curiosity at the start: that my farewell from the Asylum and my reception by the Cockcrofts included two of the same gift, a comical pamphlet on a settler scheme that had once promised as its prize the very same place we were going. Its chiefest part was an illustration of hopping shaded naked men, their sharpened teeth closed on the arms of British babies, and there were crocodiles and large-leafed plants. The settler scheme it derided was years past, so old that already it had failed, and the picture itself was much copied and the lines blunted and furred ’til it felt harmless as a legend; but at the Asylum it was what I got instead when I went to seek a copy of the record of my parented state, and on my first night with the Cockcrofts it was handed to me with keen looks to see how I took it. I dwelt more on the fact that my wardens at the home and my new employers had both settled on it, as if there were, in all sorts of places, enjoyment to be had in frightening me.
“On the good ship Immortalite another discovery was how soon something
as loud and strange as shipboard life grew to become small and tame,
and came second to the daze of work.”
Otherwise I was presented with that selfsame token given to every departing Asylum girl, and thus I went forth armed with A Practical Grammar of the English Language. (How many letters are there in the English language? Twenty-six. How are they divided? They are vowels or consonants: thus are the several parts of speech methodically explained.)
Missy – younger but somehow possessed of more authority than I – soon declared herself superfluous to nursery tasks. On the good ship Immortalite another discovery was how soon something as loud and strange as shipboard life grew to become small and tame, and came second to the daze of work. The freight of swabbing and tucking and scrubbing and cooking and carrying to and from the Cockcroft bunks deep below deck to the patch of Cockcroft deck and Cockcroft hens’ cages above made the idea that all this was taking place at sea of small consequence, and when I did have a moment on deck to simply see where I was, it was no more unusual.
Next among these circumstances pressing for my disgrace was that I and Missy, little Georgie and two babies slept five to a bunk, with Mr and Mrs and the suckling in the bunk above, and that nightly from the upper bunk would come the searching arm, carrying its hand to penetrate our blanket and fuss among our clothes. My clothes: it was Kent it visited. That we, I, never said a word about it, only I turned on my side and curled around the children and held myself stiff as it found my spine and commenced to read me up and down, like furniture it had bumped into in a dark room, a chair or a commode. Some nights I slept and it managed to get past my limbs to find that which it would, and it woke me with a stab and a pinch. Having said nothing (what were the words for this?), I could say nothing; instead I constructed shame, level by level, and stowed myself there.
That, as with being at sea, I both knew and did not know that this was Cockcroft. He who his wife called Poor Mr C, who suffered the direst sea biliousness long after she and the children had found their ‘legs’; he who moaned all day in his bunk and, at night, quiet at last, sent out his hand to find me. I tried, once, to change places with Missy and slithered into the low space and jammed myself against the far wall and called breathlessly for Georgie to join me, quick-quick, and Missy did not stop for a moment but took hold of my hair and my skirts and pulled me squealing out of there, and settled us all in our places. By that I knew she was glad it was me.
And so we might have gone on for both of the months at sea, but after three weeks our paterfamilias found his own ‘legs’. Now, when Mrs C sent me below at any time, or when I was about stripping the bunks or fetching something from our baggage, he would find me. Now it was my hand his fingers sought, to inexhaustibly employ in entering his clothing. When by chance or impatience I brought matters more hastily to the cursing tremor that would end them, I tried to recall what I had done and do it the next time, and in this way – as butchers learn, as cooks and piemen pinch a crust – I grew adept, and could parcel it into a few minutes, and learnt even when to grab my hand away in anticipation of the more horrid moment.
This facility with something I could not even name gave proof of my whore’s skills when, one sultry day, I and Mr C stood to complete it without a thought that two points of light in the bunk in the dark hold were the eyes of Mrs Cockcroft, retired with an aching head, seeing it all. I had been thinking on the baby’s muslins and trying to recall if I had rinsed and knotted them on the ropes to dry or had left them in the soaking bucket; you can imagine my startlement when I and my hand were discovered.
He was forgiven as the victim of harlotry and joined in my shunning to prove it. I both knew and did not quite know what I had done. Though Mr and Mrs C petitioned the captain for my imprisonment, I was merely found a dank space between the end of a bunk and the mortuary wall and jammed there with my bag, and spoken to by none of the decent women, nor their men if the women were by. For the sake of Missy, now pressed back into service, and for Mrs C, and for me, it was fortunate that mere weeks remained of the journey.
When we made Africa (at a place surely named by privateers and missionaries: by Good Hope this False Bay), most of them stepped ashore at Simon’s Town. They sent a customs man to visit me on board, though he was gentle about it and said, ‘But you’re just a lass and a small one too.’ At this kindness I burst from the mouth like a water bladder and sobbed, and he turned from my twisted face and waited for me to be done.
My throat ached and I was calm and spent.
The Immortalite tacked the rest of us along the coast.
I watched the low green land through the sea haze and sent my thoughts across the water to it ’til at last our journey found its end.
And I am awake.
Extracted from The Immortalites by Claire Robertson, out now.
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