Dark Waves - Chapter 2
Elizabeth joins her husband aboard a whaling ship to save her marriage, but the voyage holds dark secrets of love and death.
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Six summers before boarding the Cornucopia, my sister and I bought entrance into the Vauxhall Gardens. It wasn’t our first time within the walls of the pleasure gardens as, on special occasion, mother and father would take Alice and I during daylight hours. We begged them to stay late and watch dusk overtake its natural beauty, but they always refused, telling us the gardens were a dangerous, scandalous place at night. Sometimes, I think the danger attracted me even more.
“Ten shillings,” the attendant at the entry said.
“Ten?” Alice asked. “I thought tickets were two shillings each.”
The attendant, a round man sweating through the taught jacket, looked us over and shook his head. “Daytime prices are two, evenings are five. Ten shillings for two tickets.”
“Maybe we could find someone to pay the rest,” I whispered to Alice.
Alice smiled at me, then locked eyes with the attendant, his wide body stuffed inside the wooden ticket stand. “Five shillings.”
“Ain’t up for a haggle, prices is prices.” The man grunted and waved for the next customer. They started to step forward until Alice put her arm out to stop them.
“Five shillings, a kiss on the cheek now, and you will find me waiting for you inside.”
The attendant let out a barking laugh, his plump cheeks reddening. Then, he leaned forward and held his plump hand out. Even from where I stood the sweaty stubble of his cheek made me sick and I had to stifle a gag. Alice dropped the money into his palm, and kissed the man on the cheek, her gloved hand pressed softly against his chest.
He pulled two paper stubs from a box beside him and passed them to me. “See you inside,” he said.
Now able to enter the gardens, our excitement overflowed within us. Father was strict with money – an effect of being a businessman – but Alice and I could skim a coin from our shopping allowances if we were careful enough. He knew the grocers best, so we avoided those as much as possible. Instead, we planned shopping trips to the clothing markets he had little knowledge of, with dresses and textiles pocketing us a greater slice of change before returning the rest.
We entered the gardens, the sun slunk below the horizon, traces of golden-hued sky withering into darkness. The wide stone path, densely lined with trees and trimmed hedges, ran to a great tree in the distance, beside it a pavilion where men and women drank and danced. Joyous conversation buzzed throughout, and music filled the air as musicians busked nearby, the intoxicating sounds rapidly drawing us in. We hurried forward, the last of the daytime crowd passing us on their way to the exit – furious mothers dragging screaming children in one arm and drunk husbands in the other.
“Can you believe this?” Alice said. “Can you believe we’re actually here?”
I shook my head. “What should we do first?”
She tugged at my arm, pulling me toward an offshoot pathway that dived into a narrow tunnel of hedges. “Let’s explore. I want to see how the gardens have changed.”
We ran down the snaking path that curved between dense shrubbery spotted with flowers and trees tipped with the last moments of daylight. Dusk felt magical in the gardens, and every bend we came upon seemed to hold impossible amounts of possibility.
A whistle rang out and soon overhead a glowing flame crawled from lamp to lamp along a wick soaked in oil. The central tree held dozens of globe-shaped lights and, as they lit, we attempted to count them over the top of the hedges. The wick burned too quickly, and we soon lost count, laughing when our numbers ran different. The once-green shrubbery now bathed in light cast from glass enclosures tinted turquoise, pink, and purple. Within minutes, the gardens had transformed, and it was like walking through a dream.
The path came to an end and opened into a circular garden hidden away from the rest of the grounds. Purple flowers grew from the hedge-walls and clay pots around the space held shrubs meticulously carved into geometric shapes.
Within the center of the secret garden a man played a fiddle, cheered on by a small group of patrons. He dug into the music, swaying as he played airy romantic themes, then pushed the tempo and danced about. Coin seemed to pour into the open fiddle case at his feet at a steady rate.
Upon joining the audience, I briefly locked eyes with the musician, who slowed the tempo and moved toward me. My cheeks grew warm with his eyes on me. He played on, sawing the bow gracefully along the strings as his fingers slid along the neck. He knelt, and with the fiddle nestled beneath his jawline, aimed up at me, serenading me with a broad smile.
It struck me, thinking back on it, that at some point it did not matter who else was in that secret garden with us at that moment. For one song, it was just the two of us.
Just me, and Samuel.