Lizzie

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There was, for Lizzie, a sense of discovery — no, of homecoming. Standing at the ship’s railing, listening to the groaning and hissing of the steam machinery as it hoisted the trunks and valises from belowdecks, she felt less a foreigner than she did a returning native. This England, this sceptered isle — today wreathed in ominously shifting gray clouds that promised rain — called to her from more than two centuries past, when a man named John Borden left his home in Kent to seek his fortune in the colonies.

Had he felt, upon his arrival in Boston, the same keen anticipation she felt today in this vast and sprawling harbor? Had the skies over that alien port seemed as utterly appropriate to him as did these leaden skies above Liverpool now? Appropriate, yes; sunshine would have been a disappointment, a contradiction of expectations.

The heat in Fall River a week ago had been intolerable. New York City had been even less hospitable, its temperatures hovering in the mid-nineties, the noise and confusion of the docks miraculously disappearing the moment the women boarded the Teutonic and found their cabins. But for all its splendor and speed, the great Ocean Greyhound, as it had been advertised, had seemed only another necessary delay, five days — almost six — before this moment, this already cherished instant, when she could stand here, the wind wet and raw on her face, the harbor crowded with hundreds of ships and boats defying the waves, and glimpse there in the distance the rooftops of an England recalled as though she had been here countless times before.

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