The Secret Mandarin. Sara Sheridan

       Prologue

       Indian Ocean, 1842

      When the ship went down the other women were praying. The captain had ordered us stowed below decks, out of the way, while the crew battled the storm. I sat silently in the candlelit gloom, keeping my balance as best I could while the boat pitched violently. As the others mumbled on their knees, my heart was dancing along with my stomach in a strange, whirling tremor that brought me out in a sweat. We did not know what would happen and there was nothing any of us could do. It had been hours.

      In the end it was sudden. The ship was noisy, the timbers creaking before they finally broke, the wind screaming. Outside, the scale of the weather was titanic and I remember thinking that we were so tiny, so vulnerable. The whole ship split open like the cracking of an egg—just one almighty crash and then the shrieks of terror, my own among them, quickly silenced by the rush of water.

      There was no point fighting the storm. Besides, it happened so fast there was little opportunity but to move where the water threw us. Another world, it was completely silent under there—a relief after the long, noisy hours of terrifying anticipation. I became an observer, my panic quelled, as if this was only a strange dream that I was swimming through. The currents rushed, all bubbles and smashed pieces of the ship, as the faces of the others loomed in and out of my line of vision, never close enough to reach out, to cling together. I surfaced once into a blinding torrent of tropical wind and rain and grabbed three long, desperate breaths before the waves crashed over me once more. The towering currents were impossible to scale. It seemed safer, somehow, under the surface.

      ‘Just swim upwards,’ I told myself. ‘Watch for the bubbles and swim upwards as much as you can.’

      Swimming was familiar and the action itself rid me of any anxiety. The water had always been my friend. I was put in mind of my sister, Jane, and our childhood outings to the pond at the bottom of the big hill about half a mile from the house where we were raised. We used to discuss our plans endlessly at that pond. In the summer we splashed about in the sunshine, squealing as we jumped off the rocks. Now in the middle of this wild monsoon, my mind transported itself to happier times. I comforted myself that I was safe and at home again. Truly, I must have been hysterical, half out of my mind. But I did not struggle. The storm was nothing. The storm was gone and in its place my childhood swirled around me.

      ‘I want to be married,’ Jane said down by the water, ‘to a gentleman. A gentleman is always kind and looks after his wife.’

      I spat at her as I surfaced—a long jet of ice-cold water. Jane was barefoot in her pinafore and blouse, sitting at the edge while I dived in and out like a baby seal that sunny summer day.

      ‘A gentleman,’ I scoffed.

      Such people were above our station. Jane, however, had decided. She was in possession of a novel, which she read in secret. She hid it under the washstand. In my opinion, it had given her airs.

      ‘Yes,’ she said, attacking my dreams because I had laughed at hers. ‘Better than wanting to be Fanny Kemble.’

      ‘When Fanny Kemble played Juliet grown men cried. Gentlemen,’ I told her. ‘Anyone with the talent for it can be a great actress, Jane. But gentlemen marry ladies.’

      ‘Then I shall be a lady,’ she said simply.

      I moved off without a splash.

      Now Jane was Mrs Fortune and I, well, I had failed.

      I cannot remember any more of the storm, only swimming and swimming. The water felt like a living thing as it moved around me. I truly believed my dear Jane was waiting on the side, dangling her feet as she read passages aloud from her foolish love story. And then, warm and very drowsy, my vision narrowed to a tiny beam of light, the arms of the ocean entombed my body and I was gone.

      When I opened my eyes again the storm had faded and I could see a beach. I had come up on a rocky outcrop. My clothes were torn and my arms purple and yellow with bruises that ached as I moved. Confused, shaking and dry-mouthed, I crawled over the rocks, pushing aside the splintered flotsam and jetsam that had ridden the current with me. The shattered dreams of the others. Wedding trousseaux. Photographs torn at the edges, still trapped beneath the glass—families far away. They would never see Calcutta now.

      The