He stared at me with admiration and excitement, as though he listened to some wild, romantic story of adventure.
‘All that is material lies shaped in my mind,’ I went on. ‘Of course, a great deal must be left to chance.’
‘What will father and mother think?’
‘They mustn’t know. Why need they know, Will? Put it thus: In any case I go where Tom is sent. That being certain, what can it signify to aunt and uncle how I go? Instead of following in a passenger ship, I choose to make sure of my object in leaving home by putting myself into the same vessel with Tom. Your telling your father would only lead to this: He and your mother will tease me to death with representations of my folly without causing me to swerve a hair’s-breadth in my resolution. And they might do me this mischief: with the best intentions in the world, they might inform your captain that I mean to dress up as a boy and hide myself in his fore-peak. No, not a word to father or mother, Will. This is quite my business and our secret.’
All the while I was talking I was pacing the room, occasionally stopping to gesticulate or to approach him close and grasp him by the arm. Now he got up and began to walk about, too, rolling to and fro as though the floor had been a ship’s quarter-deck, whilst he swore that I had too much spirit for a woman, that my scheme was too daring, that if I knew what a fore-peak was like in a heavy head sea, with the prospect of a fortnight of blackness along with the risk of dying of hunger and thirst, without possibility of escape unless I was liberated, I’d quit the scheme as hopeless.
But all this I had expected. I had never dreamed he would immediately come into my plans. He said he raised objections for my sake, not for his own. To be sure, he would get into very serious trouble if it was discovered he had helped me to smuggle myself into the ship. He was willing to take all risks to do me a vast service and to make me happy; but wasn’t it his duty to keep me, his cousin, a handsome, well-nurtured, fine young woman, out of the black and filthy fore-peak of a merchantman and preserve me from what might follow discovery?
I let him talk and feigned to sympathise with his generous, sympathetic dread of the consequence of my scheme. Yet some time before we sat down to the tea and toast I rang for, I had worked him by entreaty, sometimes by tears, by eager impassioned representations of possibilities of my plan into a partially acquiescent mood. He kissed me, held my hand, called me his sister, declared he would help me if he dared; I must give him time to think; he’d go on board his ship and take a look round and talk over the matter with me again. We arranged a meeting for the day after next, and he left me after solemnly promising to keep my plan and our conversation secret.
I sat alone all that evening thinking of this long talk. One objection of his perhaps sunk a little with me when I was by myself musing; he had figured me arriving at Hobart Town where I was without a friend, and he had imagined Tom being sent up country to a part where the only house for miles might be the person’s to whom the Government handed him. But I resolutely said to myself: I must take my chance; this may not happen; in any case I shall be in the country where my sweetheart is.
Partly to please myself, and partly to convince my cousin, I went to a large outfitter’s shop in the Minories next morning, and representing that I wished to make a present of a suit of clothes to a young sailor friend I asked the shopman to show me a number of sizes in pilot coats and cloth trousers. I said that I was about the height and breadth of the young man for whom I wished to buy the clothes. The shopman measured me round my chest, took the length of my arms and of my figure and then made up a parcel of the clothing that came nearest to the measurements. A lad walked behind me to my house with this bundle, and sat in the hall whilst I took the clothes to my bedroom and secretly put them on.
The first suit I tried fitted me as though cut for my shape; though the material was stout, it buttoned loosely over me and gave me the chest of a plump lad. The trousers had the flowing cut of the tarpaulins of those days; the swell of the cloth at the extremities made my feet look ridiculously small, and I saw that I should require stout boots if my feet were not to betray me.