California had been the plan, but the worm-ridden old hulk of a ship, known rather fancifully as the, SS Gallant, sank off Ceylon, stranding Swann and three other passengers in a small rowing boat for the best part of a week before they were picked up by a Royal Navy frigate that put the unfortunates ashore on the north-eastern coast of India.

One of the unfortunates (as the captain had named them) was a young American widow by the name of Mary Hartwell who had been making her way back to San Francisco to bury her poor husband in the small churchyard that overlooked the Golden Gate Harbour. The poor man was, in his lead-lined coffin, now very firmly wedged at the bottom of the Indian Ocean with his distraught widow, who had only been married to the Rev Hartwell for six months, now suffering a tragic double loss she had tried to alleviate by trying to jump overboard from the rowing boat on at least three occasions during that long week adrift.

Only Swann’s constant vigilance had stopped Mary from quite literally drowning her sorrows, with the other survivors so totally lost within their own helplessness and fears as to be utterly useless.

Once back on shore Mary Hartwell clung to Herbert Swann like the very life preserver he had been at sea. And, if Herbert Swann was completely honest with himself, he rather enjoyed the young woman’s dependence on him and her need not to have him out of her sight. She even insisting he sleep at the foot of her bed in the cheap lodging house in Anakapalle, so as to be there if she awoke screaming for the lost soul of her dear lost husband.

A local doctor, who had trained in London and spoke a beautifully lilting English, insisted that Mary must have complete rest and that a sea voyage, so soon after the shipwreck, was completely out of the question.

” My dear young man,” the doctor explained to Swann after examining Mary, “I fear that if the young woman were to venture upon the ocean she may very well go mad. I have seen such things many times here in the Bay of Bengal. Look after her, my dear sir, and perhaps by next spring she may be fit enough to travel.”

And Swann did look after Mary with a tenderness he never knew he possessed, but which filled him with a warmth he had also never felt before and he knew, by looking into Mary’s dark green eyes, that she too felt something, something deeper than the sea that had swallowed the man to whom she had declared her most profound love.

Neither spoke of those feelings, but allowed each day to lay its healing hand upon Mary and upon Swann too, for his heart felt broken as he watched the almost silent American woman sit on the beach in a borrowed black dress and look out to sea as if by some great miracle of her late husband’s religion he might come out of the waves and stroll up the sand to where she was sitting and take her in his arms once more.

It was, at moments like these, as Swann watched her watching, that she invariably turned, smiled and waved at him. Swann – usually reading on the veranda of the small wooden bungalow they now rented – smiled and waved back; but his very bones felt crushed by the weight of a million unexplained emotions as he watched her slight frame convulse yet again in a grief that went beyond understanding.

But very slowly Mary spent less and less time on the beach, which had, by the end of December 1857, become windswept as banks of dark storm laden clouds raced in from the north, their icy Tibetan fingers curling the sharp, once warm sand into swirling, howling, blood chilling warriors of nature’s grindstone.

Mary now chose to sit indoors, curled in front of a fire Swann had built from drift wood and read, with a steely concentration, volumes from the small library left by the owners of the villa (an elderly couple who were now making a final journey back to England to see never seen grandchildren) that consisted, in the main, of Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and, strangely, Fennimore-Cooper, with a few slim volumes of poetry, mostly Keats and Shelley.

Late most afternoon, having prepared the evening meal, Swann would sit in an armchair by the fire, with Mary leaning back against his legs. There was no conversation – in fact, in the six months they had been in the small fishing village of Anakapalle, with its views westward across the flood plains of the Godavari and Indravati rivers, and its ever hopeful seaward vista toward Rangoon – the couple had said fewer than twenty words to each other. But on a particularly cold and dark short winter’s afternoon, as the drift wood crackled in a hearth built from blue stone brought down from the foothills of the Himalayas during the last great ice age, Mary began to read:

But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.

” Keats?” asked Swann.

” Yes.”

A long silence then endured as darkness fell and Swann and Mary became mere silhouettes etched by the dying flames. And as the rain began to fall heavily outside and Swann threw another piece of driftwood onto the fire, he asked Mary a question:

” Will you marry me?”

” Yes, oh yes, my darling.”

For Swann, at the moment Mary said darling, the world tilted slightly and he felt as if he might fall helplessly from his chair and slide into some void of broken dreams. But he had asked her to marry him and she had said yes and called him darling and he knew, the moment he took his beloved Mary (for that is what she had become these past months) in his arms, and her sweet smell intoxicated him, and her soft New England accent whispered the word darling again and again in his ear, he knew he was in love, deeply, irrevocably, in love; and that nothing would ever be the same again.

And as that new piece of driftwood flared they made love in front of the fire and upon their discarded clothes, with the storm howling outside, and, if they had listened, within the discord of the storm, the distant voice of a dead man screaming – ” Mary! Mary! Mary!”

Three days later Swann borrowed the doctor’s pony and trap, and with Mary close at his side, the couple made the short journey down the coast to Rajahmundry where they hired a hotel room and arranged with a drunken Welsh Methodist Minister to marry them the following day.

And it was a wedding ceremony the twenty-two British residents of Rajahmundry would remember for quite a long time, because, for just an hour, it reminded them of home: of those far away hills and streams, of the glens and mountains, the valleys, cliffs and pebble beaches, of thatched cottages and ancient churches, of shop windows and busy London streets.

And later, in their hotel bed, Herbert and Mary Swann made love, and knew within seconds that a new Swann, that might take the name into the 20th century, had been conceived.

Once returned to Anakapalle the couple began to make plans for the future, a future Mary insisted included the birth of their baby in America. Swann agreed and immediately made plans to travel south to Madras to book passage on the next steamer to San Francisco.

And it was whilst Swann was in Madras that he heard the news about the Indian Mutiny.

To Be Continued…

Read Chapters 1 – 15