Free Astray by Emma Donoghue

taken on a blue tinge, as if they are all part of the same boiling sea.
    He closes his eyes. He shuts his ears to the moans and retchings and convulsions all around him. In his mind, he reads fragments of letters. Our best Days are before us.
    It occurs to him for the first time that he may be dying.
    He knows he should pray. His God is unsentimental; he sits in judgment. There is no time left for Henry’s old prayer, the one he directs as much at his wife as at his Creator: make me what I have not been yet, a good and providing husband.
    At dawn on the day of arrival, Jane is up on deck again. The Riverdale has come to an enticing green island, its slopes furred with beech and ash; blue strings of smoke rise from the sheds. Grosse Isle is its name, she hears; it is where the sick must disembark. The ship pauses only long enough to set down the two gray-faced women from Liverpool. Jane watches their little boat bob toward the shore, with as much relief as compassion.
    The sun is high by the time she glimpses the walled city of Québec on the promontory, pushing into the river like a sentry’s gun. The fiction on which she has lived for a year is about to come true. At the sight of its towers, Jane lets out a small moan. Has she not been brave long enough?
    Soon Henry will be walking beside her, lifting the children to his shoulders, pointing out landmarks. He will make up to her for all the waiting. She leafs through the letters, hungry for a sentence she remembers, the sweetness of his admission that they should never have let themselves be parted, but dont be discouraged Dear Jane.
    This morning for the first time she lets herself taste how hungry she is, lets the children see her cry. But she shakesback the tears so she can glimpse the busy docks, the ladders that will set the passengers free from their prison.
    Henry floats up from unconsciousness and wonders what Jane will do when she steps off the ship and he is not there. P.S. Dear Henry do not neglect to meet us. Which will win out, her panic or her anger? There is no letter he can write to tell her the end of the story. She will have to deduce it from his absence, interpret the suspicion in the faces of the French on the quay, read death in the yellow flags that mark the medicine stations.
    Where will she go? Surely the Emigration Agent will take pity and pay her way to New London. Henry prays his wife will come safe through the plains shaking with heat, the summer storms, the waist-deep mud of Toronto, and reach her sisters before the winter and a cold like she has never known. How long before she hears for sure that she is a widow at twenty-six? Until then, will she keep writing letters? he wonders. No, Jane is a practical woman; she would not write without an address. That is how he picked her: as a fellow traveler in a whirling world, a rock in a hard place.
    Leaning over the rails, Jane imagines the improvement; that slightly hunted look will be gone from her husband’s face. What a cocky letter he sent recently: I am 14 lbs heavier than I was when I left and I Can go into the bush and chop a log. But so much will be the same: his dark eyes, his sweep of hair, the way his hands will close around hers.
    Maybe he will have brought some food with him.
    How will she live, Henry speculates through his fog of fever? Will she and her sisters go into trade together? Or willshe find some slow-moving neighbor to take on her and the children, some Irishman twice her age who will be husband and father both?
    Will she still count the days she has to live without Henry in this country?
    He will be there on the dock, for sure. Without you I will settle myself no place, he wrote in the letter that persuaded Jane to come at once, not to wait a month more, because you never knew what might happen. And Jane Dearest anything I can do Shall be done to make you happy and forgive anything wrong in the foregoing. Every letter is a promise, signed and sealed; they all end, your