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If Jules Verne can be believed, the world entire might be traversed in only eighty days. Sara Crewe closes the book with pinched disapproval, thinking this inexcusably hasty. She spins the big textured globe in Uncle Tom's library, running fingertips over Patagonian peaks and the smooth sands of Sahara and ice on the Antarctic.
Yes, she concludes, far too hasty indeed.
A life of travel seems quite the wonderful idea to this child of thirteen, and though perhaps most would be dismayed by thoughts of high seas and foreign faraway lands, Sara Crewe is a bold, spirited girl, born in the Orient, and has travelled even further in her own imaginings. So you see, for such a child as this, adventuring the world entire is not so startling a dream.
Why, in this fascinating, modern age, anyone might circumnavigate who put their mind to it! At that thought Sara lifts her hands from the globe with a scowl - she would not wish worldly perambulation to seem easy.
Her contemplative little face must impart her musings, for Mr. Carrisford laughs at her furrowed brow as they sit together like the most particular of friends. He reaches for her and asks, “why, Princess Sara, whatever are you thinking so solemnly over?”
Sara takes the hand of her Fairy Godfather (she calls him that sometimes, in her head), she takes the frail wasted hand ever so gently and answers, “Why, I was only pondering my future, Uncle Tom.”
“My, but that is a long way off indeed.” He laughs as he often does at his wit, but she knows he is never making game of her, the Indian gentleman being always ever so kind.
He pats her hand and comforts her through her persevering sulk. “You mustn't worry dear Sara, never again! You are an heiress and will have wealth all your days. You may do or become whatever you like; it is a very bright future.”
His is a thin, aged voice, though Mr. Carrisford is a man of less than forty. She knows it is the brain fever and the loss of Ralph Crewe, her papa, that did it to him, that made him old so young. He is better since Sara came to live with him and mind his house and cheer his spirits, but even now his health could hardly be considered generous.
“I do not say I worry, Uncle, only that I am pondering.”
She is still pondering later and may have gone on pondering forever and ever if something drastic, even dire, had not occurred. Luckily something did occur, although it seemed quite unlucky at first.
She does not recognize the Unluck as being Magic right away because it is a kind of darker magic than usual, a curse some might have supposed, though Magic is not wholly ever black. Just, sometimes it works in curious ways.
(The Magic goes like this.)
It rolls in with the winter solstice and brings a more than usual miserable climate. Perhaps it is Sara's past sufferings that allow her to notice, or perhaps she knows her uncle so well already, but either way she remarks how he stops going on carriage rides, how he cannot finish the wholesome meals Cook prepares, and how he grows thin and wan once more.
And so it comes as really no great surprise that by Christmas eve, dear Mr. Carrisford is laid low with pneumonia.
Sara speaks to Mr. Carrisford softly and strokes his hand and feels how the bones all stick up like a bat wing. He turns away from her when he coughs, and the wispy silvering hairs curl upon his nape from fever-damp.
“Mister Sahib, friend Carmichael has gone for the Doctor.” Ram Dass says in Hindustani, adjusting the reclining chair and the mink furs, murmuring comforts, “yes, yes, a doctor shall be making you well again.” He lights incense and stokes the fire again, his deep eyes warm with care and pity.
It is Becky though, bringing in the tea service, Becky with her honest, plain manner that gives the truest expression to what they all feel.
“Good Lord lumme! Which you might've given us a wink or a nod,” here she sets the tray down with a rattle to match her face, “a hint or summit, as to 'ow sick you was – Sir,” she concludes rather meekly.
Mr. Carrisford coughs, thanks her for tea and prepares them all a dish with sublime civility.
Intuiting sanction from silence, Becky barrels on, “what you ought to be more careful, for if you was to cop it, sir, only think, then what'd 'appen to princess Sara an' poor ol' Becky and Mister Ram Dass, what indeed I do declare.”
“Hush Becky, dear friend.” Sara interrupts the tirade when she sees Mr. Carrisford's face twist, unhealthy color bruising hollow cheeks. “These are not the words he needs to hear right now.”
Sara knows little of invalids but thinks this to be truth. She asks the others to leave and in the quiet of the little sitting room she stares hard at the dear, familiar face before her, stares just as she did years and years ago at Papa, innocent and unknowing it would be their last moment together this side of paradise.
That grief has never died, rather, like some pernicious, loyal creature, it follows, just behind and to the left. Sometimes it grows vicious, nips her heels, demands acknowledgment. When she was starving and freezing and her life seemed ever so bleak, the Creature wisely kept a distance, but as Uncle Tom coughs and coughs and grows whiter and quieter all that day, she feels It sidle close, anticipation of another loss.
“What are you pondering over now, Little Missus?” asks Mr. Carrisford with an anxious, astute glance, his eyes strange and pellucid with fever. He reaches to stroke her cheek, and the Creature retreats a bit. Uncle Tom's condoling fingers are ice, and when he coughs the effort resounds right through him.
“I am only remarking upon you.” Sara soothes her warm hands, soft as cat paws, over his sick damp brow. “Your face has grown so very dear to me, quite entirely dear.”
She imprints every inch of that beloved, scrofulous countenance to her mind's eye. He always tolerates her whimsies and now holds himself quite still, stifling his coughs as she tries to wipe suffering from his face.
“Do not worry, dearest, for I would never have you worry,” Uncle Tom whispers, as if afraid to break the spell. “So dear to me, just like your father. So entirely dear.”
“You must have loved him quite very much,” Sara says with sudden keen comprehension.
“Yes.” He wears a look of crushing sorrow and Sara wonders if perhaps he has a Creature too, one who shadows him as staunchly and hatefully as her own. Mayhap many people, even those that seem quite jolly or carefree, trail such. Mayhap she is not so singular. That little thought makes the Creature seem a bit less terrible.
Mr. Carrisford has quickly schooled his expression to a sort of blank consternation. “Yes, quite very much, indeed," he admits with a slow, sad smile. "I thought the world of him, to say the least. And I adored your mamma as well, such a kind, lovely lady.”
"She must surely have been - to have married the best man in the world," Sara says with sudden appetite. That Mr. Carrisford knew Mamma is such wondrous news! What stories he must have, what treasures and priceless anecdotes! She feels a waxing curiosity, a need to know more, more, but she sees that Uncle Tom's eyes have turned nacreous, and Sara has known enough hardship in her short life to respect the sanctity of unshed tears.
She quietly reflects while he pretends not to cry. She has never given serious thought to having a mamma other than a vague sense of missing something vital and grand, like as a flightless bird might look to the eagle. She feels a sudden need to explain her disinterest, her dereliction. "You must understand Uncle, one cannot earnestly regret something one never had."
The response has an unfortunate, curious effect. Uncle Tom's fragile calm crumbles and he buries his face behind skeletal, trembling fingers. He collects himself in a moment, before Sara can possibly know what to do or say, and gently tells her, "I hope, dear Princess, that you never have the misfortune to find the untruth in those words."
Sara does not understand but thinks that it must have to do with love, for only love could ever evoke such profound emotion from this poor frail and wasted man.
She contemplates on love. Yes, she should have loved a mamma had she the chance, although - a niggling doubt reminds her - she does not altogether like ladies on the whole if Miss Minchin and Miss Amelia are representative. And though she was only lately supposing upon her future, it does not occur to her until just now that she must one day become some sort of proper lady herself.
Bridling at the thought as a wild beast might a yoke, she swears that no matter what, even flightless, like the eagle she shall never allow herself stifled and tamed.
It is later and Mr. Carrisford is worse, paradoxically flushed and wan, restlessly exhausted. They have lapsed to silence for speaking strains his wind, and Sara glares into the rudely cheerful fire.
Uncle Tom watches her with concerned, red-rimmed eyes. After a considering pause, he breaks the quiet to ask, “Sara dear, would you fetch me that, there on the mantel,” lifting both hands to receive it.
“What ever is it, Uncle Tom?” The strange candelabrum is very heavy for its size. Sara stares at the intricate brass twisted into designs with such loving craftsmanship and skill.
He runs his fingers regretfully over cold metal – she has never seen it lit – as he says, “it was your mother's.”
She quickly reaches for it, compulsively, imagining her mamma's fingers on the very same spot as her own, imagining Mamma and Papa together reading or holding hands or sitting happily under its cheery light in their little bungalow in Bombay.
“It is a quite fine candelabrum.” Sara decides.
“It's a menorah, in fact,” Mr. Carrisford says, the word sticking in his chest. His face is white to the lips, and he looks as bad as that first morning, months ago, the morning when she'd come from the other side of the wall to save them both.
She tries to take the menorah back, concerned he might drop it, more concerned that he is growing disturbed, for though he hardly looks it, Uncle Tom is a hot-blooded gentleman and she would not wish his temper raised at such a tenuous time.
He relinquishes with a sigh, studying her under beetled brows. “Do you know what that means, dearest?”
Sara may once have been a drudge and almost-a-beggar, but she had also once consumed books with the ferocity of a wolf, and so she thinks for only a moment before concluding, “I should think perhaps that means Mamma was Jewish.”
The even, factual statement causes Mr. Carrisford a small, satisfied smile. “Well now, dear child,” he says, smoothing her dark hair with a cough – an ugly, afflicted sound – “I daresay that's a trifle unexpected?”
It takes her a beat to understand. When she does it comes rather as a pleasant surprise for her, for you see, children hold little of the preconceptions and vacuous prejudice of grown-up people.
“Oh!” she cries, curiosity burning, visions of yamakas and men with darling ringlets and Hebrew incunabulum with their cuneiform beauty. “Oh, I am very glad for it. How nice, how very nice for me. I shall have to know everything.”
But the time for questions has passed, for Carmicheal's cob screams to a halt just outside nearly overturning the dogcart. The grown-ups tumble out and before she knows it, she is being gently but irresistibly herded away from her most particular friend.
She sits alone in her room and clutches Around the World in Eighty Days, eyes quite dry. She stares at the menorah brought absentmindedly in haste and thinks of her dead unknown Mamma and her dear, doting, dead Papa. If she only had a grave to visit, a headstone to stand over solemnly, dressed all in black, a discrete place to think on them and miss them. Better to constrict grief to one place, for unfettered, it lingers like a storm.
She tries always to act as a princess might, but right now she thinks that if Tom Carrisford dies he should at least have the decency to take her along. It is with no vapors or hysteria she thinks this in her serious little mind, but only with a sort of betrayed petulance. She has already lived a tragedy – something miserly old Dickens himself might have been proud to dream up – and she will not countenance more.
There are serious voices from the sitting room (adults are ever so solemn when there are no children around to make them glad). She does not try or even wish to overhear what must be a grim conversation. Boris scratches at her door, but she does not let him in. Becky blows her nose loudly across the hall, but Sara does not go to her. There is something about melancholy that demands solitude.
She dredges up tallow-stubs and starts their wicks with an oil-lamp. The two candles sit squat and squalid on the menorah after she grinds them into place, forcing them into a shape for which they were never designed. They barely cast a glim and she wonders if she might be doing something sacrilegious. She knows nothing of being Jewish, but it seems right to light candles with her parents so near tonight.
She worries at a third candle, tossing it hand to hand, thinking perhaps it would be best to light it for Uncle Tom as a guard against Death.
But it will not ignite no matter how she tries, and she hurls it across the room as meanly as she did once to Emily in the Bastille, even now cold and barren and just one rooftop away.
“You should remove to the country, sir, for your health.”
That is from the sober old physician, speaking to Mr. Carrisford but really to the room at large. There is the good Mr. Carmichael of course, but also little Sara standing severe and formal, every bit the lady of the house, and next to her plump Becky, covering her catching sobs with a soiled handkerchief, and Ram Dass watching them all with level calm like an owl. Even the monkey and Boris are there, the hound drooling stupidly on Mr. Carrisford's lax hand, huge and fawning and no less loyal than the rest.
“The country is the very thing for a pneumonia. The coast would be even better – sea-air is a mighty cordial,” the doctor says as he edges around the vast dog to ply Carrisford with physic to cut his colossal fever.
It is Christmas day, but only just, and the impenetrable black is kept outside by thin rattling panes of glass, perhaps unequal to the task. In the Country, Sara thinks, there must be fireflies and stars and foxfire and the blackness must seem very much less.
This is when she realizes the Magic has brought this upon them. Magic has a way with timing – it likes drama – and though she does not know so very much about Magic, she does know some call it Chance and some call it Providence, but really, it's all some greater power offering little opportunities - and you best pay attention or else they will all blow right by like leaves in a gale.
The Magic has come so Sara seizes it, trusting the beginnings of a Plan that forms deep in her wild, pliable mind.
“What coast precisely, good Doctor?” she asks in her most solemn, grown-up way. The doctor turns to her with startled attention. She elaborates when he does not answer, “what would be the best coast, do you suppose, the most sanative? Dover, Brighton, Plymouth or perhaps the West-Country, Land's End even?”
“Eh?” The doctor peers at her over his spectacles, disbelieving, unused to little girls asking such big questions. “Why, what a prodigious young geographer you are.” He gives Sara an indulgent smile and answers vehemently, “anywhere but here, anywhere that's not London with its febrifacient damps and its incessant damnable – er, begging your pardon little Miss – regrettable smog. The country, by God, and not London.”
The Plan is developing but still needs titivating. Sara brings Around the World in Eighty Days and the globe and sits vigil over her Fairy Godfather all that Christmas. She traces Phileas's journey over Europe and the Orient and on across the Pacific. She gapes astonished at the vastness of the New World, running fingers over the Continental Divide and ancient Appalachians.
She mouths the far-away places, Turin, Marseilles, Calcutta, Singapore, Auckland, Omaha, while Mr. Carrisford sleeps fitfully in tosses and turns. She contemplates just how much of the world is Not-London and just how much appears to be the Country. Why, they could go a great many places and still follow the doctor's exact prescription.
Tom Carrisford grows a little bit better. He takes weak tea and rice-milk and toasted soda bread after Ram Dass settles him in his recliner each morning. Becky shyly fusses over him as the four pass the time with whist and cocoa and stories.
It is not quite time for the Plan, for Sara periodically plumbs her audience by telling fabulous tales of travel and adventure (some of them are even true).
She says, “I should like to visit Norfolk Island where they sent the children of the breadfruit mutineers.”
“Mutineers!” Becky cries, scandalized. “Bless me, miss. Where be the Norfo'k Isles?”
“Clear on the far side of the world, whereabouts they banished criminals and malcontents. But I should imagine outlaws were glad to go to Christmas Island and Van Diemen's land rather than a dank cellar gaol in Seven Dials. I should very much one day like to meet a kangaroo and a koala.”
“Laws, ain't you got itchy feet, miss! Why, I reck'n you'd go to the back side o' the moon given 'alf the chance.”
Sara says a different day, “I should like to visit Pompeii, beneath layers and layers of ash. They did not know it, poor souls, but it is not altogether wise to have a volcano for a neighbor.”
“That is more than very true,” Uncle Tom says with grave accord. “There is nothing so displeasing as an inflammable neighbor.” His sobriety is thinly veiled, though he hides his adoring amusement behind a closed fist; it's only, his Little Missus does ponder over the queerest of things.
Sara knows the time for the Plan is nigh when one evening she muses, "I should very much wish to sail the Pacific, someday," and Mr. Carrisford looks quickly to her with keen interest and demands, "Sail you say, and why particularly the Pacific? Being half the world away."
"Because Uncle Tom," Sara explains with patient stealth, hiding her intention until the time is ripe. "Because, dear Magellan named it thus on his circumnavigation, he named it thus as it was ever so serene and kind and clement. Only imagine, what a dream such a water would be to sail!"
"Verily," Carrisford echoes. "What a dream."
It is on the first day of the new year that Sara feels it is time to proceed with the first stage of the Plan.
“Uncle Tom,” she says that drab and dreary Saturday. “I believe it is quite important to know where a baby comes from.”
His pale face erupts in alarmed apprehension as he croaks in a thin, ragged voice, “are you asking me where babies come from?”
“No.” She is frustrated to be misunderstood. “I want to know where you come from, you as a baby, as a child. Where you have lived your life.”
He looks astonishingly relieved. She frowns severely at his antics. Grown-up people can be ever so silly. She only wanted to know his birth-place, for it is vital to the Plan. Likely it is rather boring – her father, far as she knows, was only from the West End, although her mother was Alsatian which almost makes up for it.
But it is not boring at all, it delights her, in fact, once he finally gets on with his answer.
“I was at Eaton as a child – that's not so far from here. It's where I met Ralph, your papa.” Carrisford's sick face should have been incapable, but it manages a smile at the memory. “When I accepted my commission, I was posted to Halifax - that's in Nova Scotia - then later with Ralph in Bombay.”
He trails off awkwardly while Sara carefully finds Nova Scotia on the globe and compares it to India. “Those are two places quite apart,” she determines, duly impressed.
“You papa and I, we were born to money and might have set up as country gentlemen or flash city stockjobbers, but we had our duty to Queen and Country, and we craved adventure.”
He looks like someone that could not withstand much adventure beyond his front-step, yet Sara perseveres. “But where were you before all that?”
His gaze lengthens like he has gone a very far way indeed as he falls into remembrance, looking a decade younger. “I was in Ipswich - that's in Suffolk.”
“Would that be in the Country at all? Or near the coast?”
“I daresay both. And truly wonderful country, the oldest in England, some even say.”
Old coastal country. Sara repeats the fine names. “Ipswich. Suffolk.” She plops the globe in his lap and begs, “Oh show me, do point it out! Just where is Ipswich, pray, where is Suffolk – where you were born?”
He dutifully locates a little nook off the east of England, shows her the North Sea and follows one of its arms inland where it becomes a tiny thin blue line. He explains in his reedy, old-man tenor, “just here, the estuary of the river Orwell, and...here,” he taps the globe, and his voice goes firm and rich and deep, “home.”
(Don't think she misses just exactly how he says that.)
She knows without asking there is no family left in Ipswich, for surely, he would have sought them in his time of greatest need. No matter. She dismisses such inconvenience with a child's ingenuous manner; he has his family here now.
“Let us go there.” Sara stares greedily, nose almost touching the point he's indicated.
They nearly collide, for he has leaned just as close, just as ravenous. His eyes so near look very bright and very young.
“Let's.”
Sara has never been to the English countryside and neither have Becky or Ram Dass so they do not know quite what to do with so much air and room and freedom.
“Without all them tall 'ouses an' smokestacks this 'ere sky is big as 'eaven!” Becky cries, gawping at the vast expanse like it's a raree-show.
They take a walk along the Orwell every morning and evening when the weather is fair – and it always seems to be fair, even on overcast days, in this goodly place – they walk and laugh and enjoy themselves completely, Ram Dass pushing Mr. Carrisford in a wheeled-chair while the girls frolic alongside like colts.
Sara delights especially in the birds, so different from the dowdy cackling starlings of London's rooftops. There are kites and gulls and long-legged fat-bottomed things that remind her of women with their skirts pulled up against the London damp. Boris likes them too and grows lean chasing them across the mudflats at ebb tide.
They marvel at eggs come springtime, careful, reverent of such delicate miracles. They plant a wild, disorganized garden behind the cottage and watch a chaos of daffodils and crocuses and cataracts of pea-vines compete for sun and rain.
When Mr. Carrisford is stronger he walks with a cane, and Sara and Becky are constrained to move more like staid old carthorses. He often pauses to watch watercraft creep up the fairway, a cavalcade of tolling steamers, yachts, cutters, and galleys with their flashing oars. Sara can tell he loves the tall ships best, lofty sails of deep startling white against intense blue sky.
Sara tells Uncle Tom one fine summer morning, “I like this place very much. But I cannot possibly decide on Home until I see the rest.”
Mr. Carrisford wears a look of polite confusion on his lightly sunburned face. He has found better health in his native climate, though he is still too thin and frail for a man of not yet forty. “The rest of England?” he seeks to clarify in a distracted voice, staring after a sloop that rides the flood tide.
“Of the world,” she corrects evenly.
They turn towards each other in tandem, the bitterns bombinating and spoonbills wading by, wholly unconcerned with these humans so long as their great devilish dog is nowhere in sight. They stand toe to toe, Carrisford canting lightly on his cane. He ducks his chin to meet her eye. Sara looks back with calm determination.
“Well, I – !” He turns away first, runs an astonished hand through his silvering locks, laughs – a maniacal, hysterical sound. He watches a little schuyt dash past the sloop, tack upon tack, trailing a creaming wake.
“The world,” he repeats, still not looking at her but now wearing a look of sudden, terrible hope. “When I was young, I was just like you, my little princess, I dreamed of travel. Not in the military, by God, but on my own accord, my own itinerary - ”
- a steamship interrupts with a prolonged, stentorian whistle, echoing o'er the riverfront, felt as well as heard. The two friends pause for the moment, blasé, experts by now at such water commerce. They wait for it to heave fully past, smaller watercraft scattering like quail.
Mr. Carrisford finally turns to her in the trailing, ringing silence. With a sad smile he says, “I was like you once, for see, all children are born adventurers. But it is bled out of us - such a shame - bled by schoolmasters and parents and parsons, by care and worry, responsibility. My father was an Army man you see, a colonel, so though I might dream, my fate was entirely fixed.”
“You are yet young.” Sara takes his hand and sees not Mr. Carrisford, but a tow-headed little boy, longing after tall ships and hungering for adventure he was never permitted to seek. “You need never again give up on a dream.”
They book passage on a snow down the channel – two-masted, square-rigged, and glorious. Guernsey and Brittany slide by on the larboard beam, undulating headlands dotted with sheep. Then looms the rock of Gibraltar, a giant in the sky, and behind it the Mediterranean opens before them with its tramontane and cerulean waters.
They marvel at the way Majorca's western mountains cut the pristine horizon as they make for Italy, where Sara watches in quiet victory as skilled chefs manage to tempt Uncle Tom's capricious appetite to prodigious heights. Cuisine draws them to the newly independent Greece where they feast on Papoutsakia in Crete and Souvlaki in Corfu, taking evening constitutionals along pristine coastlines and exploring ancient temples.
They dock in Marseilles and travel overland to Alsace-Loraine so she can see where Mamma was born. The houses are half-timbered and festooned with geraniums and ivy and so charmingly pretty that she just knows her mother must have grown up in one.
It is here that Mr. Carrisford takes her to a synagogue for the first time and stands respectfully in the cobbled street as she speaks with the Rabbi. He answers patiently all of the questions she can think to ask and gifts her with a slim decorated scroll – “A mezuzah – for when you find your home, child, wherever that may be.”
They cross the Mediterranean and land in desert, riding camels through Cairo to board a steamship down the Suez Canal. Ram Dass knows all the landmarks and points them one after another to their rapt admiration – pyramids and tombs and ancient ruins. Sara thinks she has never seen anything better in her life, but that is only because the next bit has not yet happened.
(Here is the next bit that is even better.)
Across the Arabian sea and Sara and Becky and Boris grow sick from a heavy blow. They ride out the heaving swell, miserable and huddled in their little cabin, Ram Dass distracting them with tales of serving on a Malay junk and eating swallow-nest soup.
The greenest crewmates grow seasick too so that the sloop is short-handed. Sara emerges on deck for a breath of storm-tossed air to find Mr. Carrisford, wholly immune, enthusiastically lending his hand hauling on braces and halyards. He's barefoot, shirtsleeves rolled up his skinny arms and there is high color in his cheeks. Uncle Tom has never looked better, for his is the kind of bursting joy that could never be found from one's armchair.
This is better than even lofty pyramids, you see, because she is the Creator, and even small things seem quite fine when they come from your own hands and heart. And though Sara knows she cannot change the entire world, she also knows she can change the entire world for one person.
Happiness is a peculiar thing in that it somehow manages to multiply when divided to share. Mr. Carrisford's joy raises them all to heights unexpected, and such felicity between four friends would be hard to match in the annals of history.
After many days of this perfect cheer, the coast of India spreads before them like a tapestry – green, verdant, bright with asafoetida and saffron. They travel by foot to the Crewe family's old bungalow just outside the barracks to meet the New Family that live there. Papa died a pauper and his possessions were sold off but there is a small satchel the New Family set aside, knowing it was important to someone once and may be yet again.
Sara takes the silk purse with her under a Mango tree to open. Inside is a lock of dark curly hair bound with red ribbon and two simple rings, both gold. There is also a daguerreotype of two young lovers in wedding garb, and she recognizes Papa – younger and gayer than she'd ever known him – and there holding him is her lovely mamma. She closes it all back into the priceless purse and thanks the New Family in perfect Urdu and with a buss.
Sara visits her parents' graves but does not ask Mr. Carrisford to come, for she cannot manage a mingled grief. She brings Becky instead, someone who has seen her at her very worst and someone who, rather than shy away from sorrow or loss, can follow her down into it, stout and brave as Beowulf.
They find Mamma first, buried with care in a proper cemetery. Her's is a pretty grave with wildflowers and a gneiss headstone. They leave after an hour, satisfied, Sara stumbling through a Hebrew psalm she'd memorized for the occasion.
Papa is much harder. He'd died penniless but had been a captain in the Army, so they'd buried him gratis. Sara and Becky search the vast, orderly rows on base until they find the little crooked marker:
R. Crewe, Capt 7th Royal Fusiliers
She will order a proper headstone and put on it instead:
Ralph Crewe, beloved husband, father, and friend
These seem more crucial achievements than rank.
"The hardest part, Becky," Sara whispers, staring at the slate marker as if in a trance, "those perfect moments of just Papa and me, the hardest part is there is no one else in all of existence who recollects them too. It is quite a lonely feeling to be the keeper of such important memories. What if I forget, if I misremember?"
"Why, I believe that might seem right lonely, miss," Becky says doubtfully. "But mayn't you just share them in your story-tales, or with me and Mr. Ram Dass or dear Mr. Carrisford. Then the rememberings shan't seem lonely or sad no more, not with so many people knowin' them, if you take my meanin'."
Sara smiles through tears and takes Becky's hand. She tells her then and there, over Papa's very grave, of one such moment.
They leave after a long while and Sara knows she need not come back. There is no reason to sit here like Patience on a monument, for Papa is not there and she knows now that, in fact, he never was.
It is strange how shouldering through the grief rather than circling around diminishes its tyranny. The Creature that has followed so long, just behind and to her left, it is still there but diaphanous, almost apologetic, a tagging cur rather than a great pursuing mastiff, a testament to her love for Papa rather than any sort of horror.
When she looks at Mr. Carrisford it seems he must have transformed his Creature too, for he looks younger every day and so full of life, like someone existing rather than persisting.
She and Becky overhear Mr. Carrisford release Ram Dass from his service before they leave Bombay. They look to each other with wide, frightened eyes. They cannot hear Ram Dass's soft reply, but the next morning he is still there, and he is still there when they board Euterpe to sail Oceania.
Java's Thousand Islands and Australia, Fiji, Tahiti. They dock in Kealakekua Bay to pay respects to Captain Cook but end up staying for weeks. Hawai'i is strangely beautiful in ways Sara cannot put to words. They explore thick jungles and caves and swim the coral reefs, and Sara thinks she could stay here forever.
Except. She finds Ram Dass alone at sunset, watching the vast Pacific fade from red-orange to moonlit silver. He is quiet and sad, and she stands alongside him and listens to the tree-crickets and the surf rolling in. Sara will not disrupt his silence, rather, she envelops his hand in both her own and waits, knowing he will speak when the time is right.
“I thought at first this was paradise,” he says in the hesitant but precise English that Sara has been teaching him. His voice is a rich, warm bass, made deeper perhaps by deep thought. “Like India, only, India as it could have been, as it should have been.”
Sara knows little of politics but somehow understands exactly what he means. No one could miss the winds of change in this utopia, a turbulent wind, backing and veering like a prelude to a hurricano. She suddenly wants to leave, for who would wish to witness the decadence of Arcadia?
“Suppose it will end different than in India,” she condoles. “Perhaps Kalākaua shall beat off Goliath, for we can hope Hawai'i's king is not named David by mere chance.”
They catch a fair wind and run off long leagues of Pacific, just as calm and lovely as she'd imagined that kindly ocean to be. They make a glorious landfall in foggy San Francisco Bay. California is fast and loud and tacky, but Sara embraces it fully and buys Becky a bracelet of Black Hills gold and Ram Dass a tiny Buddha carved from Giant Sequoya. They take a train to Omaha, crossing prairies of bison and elk after passing beneath the Rockies through a tunnel so long that daylight is blinding.
“Sara, dear, have you seen enough of the world to know where home will be?” Uncle Tom asks her in Ithaca as the Taughannock Falls rage and foam before them.
She gives her mysterious little smile. “I think perhaps not yet.”
So, they take the rail to Boston and pass winter there, immured in snow and cold but ever so cozy in a dogtrot cabin near the dockyard. The monkey stays mulishly by the fire but the rest troop through snow wearing basketed shoes, light as jackrabbits. It is Becky who loves Boston most, her Bow Bells' lilt somehow fitting right in. There seems less and less of the scullery-maid in her every day.
Spring and snowmelt and they book a Baltimore clipper to carry them out from the long arms of Boston harbor and on down the eastern seaboard, battling the Gulfstream.
"They is a plain-looking sort though, ain't they?" Becky says of the scrubby little ponies of Assateague, roaming in small family bands and studying the clipper with alert scrutiny. "What with them manes all ahoo and as piebald as mongrel dogs."
"They are wild and free, and they are happy." Sara determines after studying them through a spyglass. "Perhaps Becky, perhaps it means much less to be called a hoydenish quiz if you have such things," - for she had too oft heard such banal disapprovals from supposed gentlemen and gentlewomen across the world entire - "consider that being elegant and fine, in fact, mean extremely little in comparison."
"As you say, Miss," Becky responds, giving Sara an appreciative grin.
Port-towns and rugged dockyards and the Outer Banks broad on the starboard beam, wildflowers dotting white sand and birds that skim the ocean like ice-skaters. They make their southing to the West Indies and visit every Antilles Island, enjoying each more the last.
They recross the Tropic of Cancer until they find the westerlies, and with that fair wind and a following sea they make their crossing of the Atlantic. All those days past, in that dim sitting-room, Sara had yearned to meet a volcano, so indeed they visit La Palma and marvel at black sand beaches and serrated ridgelines.
They do not discuss their next stop but seem all to have reached some accord, so, before anyone can quite believe it, there lies the Isle of Wight and beyond, Portsmouth, England.
London seems cramped indeed after so much time asea, though not unhappily so. The teeming rows of townhomes are pleasantly frumpy and the people all in such a wonderful bustle. They draw some looks as they crowd up the stairs to their old house on the square, but most people are in too much a hurry to pay attention to windblown adventurers.
Sara is almost fifteen by the time they return and Mr. Carrisford must feel it an awkward chore, but with avuncular duty he sits her down one night and says, “should I tell you of some things a young lady must know about?”
“What things must a young lady know about, dear Uncle Tom?” she says with a twinkle in her green-grey eyes.
The Indian gentleman looks across the street, perhaps wishing he had asked Mrs. Carmichael over. “Young ladies come out at sixteen or thereabouts. Mayn't you like a governess or – or proper lady's maid to guide you?” He spreads his fine strong hands helplessly and says, “you need only ask for anything your heart desires.”
“If you were to marry a lady, Uncle, there would be such a woman at hand to guide me,” Sara ripostes back with a ruthless offensive, for she has about as much interest in Society as he does in women.
She sees with satisfaction his ears and cheeks turn pink – such a healthful color that he could never have managed before! – as he demurs, “Oh Sara, hush. There is very little chance of that, at all.” He wears such a darling, fumbling expression on his plump, rosy cheeks, and she finds she adores him more than she ever thought possible.
“Come now,” he rallies, but he's wearing a teasing grin now, “would not you like to be a debutante, to go to fancy balls and dance with young rakes and someday break a heart or else yield to one?”
“I would not.”
He shakes his head in wondrous affection and that is that.
London grows cold and damp and the firecrackers for Guy Fawkes Day are so soggy they ignite with only depressing pathetic whumps and a halfhearted sparkle. Another long winter looms.
But in the narrow house on the square the four adventurers do not feel the damp or the cold, for they are pondering their next peregrination, sure to be more wondrous and splendid than even the last.