take care of yourself and write again soon. Tell me everything you’re doing. Give my regards to Sutty and tell him I expect him to look out for you. Listen to what he says because he has experience in these things, meaning life in foreign countries, as he’s travelled so much.
Please have a happy, happy Christmas, although I shall be missing you every minute. I miss you and think about you all the time and dream about you every night.
All my love, your
Annabelle
The next letter, addressed to “Miss Annabelle Sweet,” arrived in early January and was from Sutty. In it was a cheque for sixty pounds.
You must come, it said, because Francis is at his wits’ end, and so am I, if truth be told. He’s impossible to be with because all he talks about is you, Annabelle, and all he wants is you, his “Sweet Annabelle,” as he calls you. I implore you, Annabelle, for my sake if not for Francis’s, to come to Singapore. If I could put him on a ship and send him back, I would. But he is, quite honestly, better off here. You could live very well here and Francis could write something important. It’s not forever, Annabelle, but for now. Try to see it that way and maybe it won’t seem so bad to you. If you don’t come, he will waste his time and his money yearning for you, and I will go mad listening to him!
Use the money to buy passage on the next ship, and consider it my wedding gift to you. No one will be happier to see you than I (except, of course, Francis Stone!) and we will both see to it that you are happy, comfortable, and above all, safe.
I promise. In anticipation of seeing you soon, I remain,
Yours,
Edward Sutcliffe Moresby
Annabelle embarked on the P&O steamship Narkunda on February 5, 1924. She had used Sutty’s cheque to pay for her fare, but had debated with herself long and hard before booking passage. Her father’s sister Ethel, herself recently widowed, had come for Christmas and had been persuaded to stay on. Her only child, a son, had taken the Public Services Examination and had been accepted in the British Indian Civil Service. He had left for Bombay in November and Ethel had found the loneliness more than she could bear. Although Annabelle’s father was reluctant to see her go, her aunt had assured her that he would be fine and that she was looking forward to keeping house for him. He was her favourite brother, she said, and it would also help her to have something to do.
So Annabelle had no more excuses for not going to Singapore, other than the fact that she did not want to go, but she didn’t dare say that to anyone for fear it would get back to Francis. If she hadn’t loved him with all her heart, she might have found a way out of going. Or she might have tried to persuade him to come back to England. But she knew it was his dream to write and, because she had no dream of her own other than to marry Francis and have a family, she could not take away his chance to see it through. They would find a way, as he had said to her so many times. They would be happy.
The ship was to travel by way of Gibraltar to Port Said and Aden, then on to Bombay, Colombo in Ceylon, Penang Island, and then down the Straits of Malacca to Singapore. It would take about a month to get there and Annabelle fretted that she would be bored and alone the whole time.
Much to her surprise, the trip turned out to be relatively pleasant. After a few days of nausea that came in waves — a description she came to understand firsthand as she experienced the ship’s rolling beneath her in perfect harmony with the undulating sea — she found her “sea legs” and was able to take walks on the passenger deck and even enjoyed gazing at the stars in the seemingly endless black night sky. Standing on the ship’s deck she could believe that the world was flat, for there was nothing beyond the water and the sky. They came together in the distance like two sheets of paper whose edges were sealed by the unseen hand of God.
She was seated in the dining room with a couple from Brighton who were doing God’s work in Borneo. They told her about the history of the Anglican Church mission in Brunei and how the “White Rajah” of Brunei, James Brooke, had invited the first Anglican missionaries in 1848.
“White Rajah?” Annabelle queried. “I must profess my ignorance,” she said. “I know nothing about the history of this part of the world.”
The Hendersons, a pious young couple who had been married only a few years and who shared a zeal for bringing heathens and cannibals to God, were only too glad to enlighten her.
“James Brooke,” Harold Henderson explained, “was originally in the Bengal Army attached to the British East India Company in Calcutta. This would have been around 1818 or 1820. After he resigned from the army, he tried his hand at some Far East trading, but by all accounts he didn’t do so well at that. In the 1830s he came into some money — an inheritance from his father — and he bought a ship and sailed for Borneo. Well, when he got there, to a place called Kuching in Sarawak, there was some kind of fighting going on, an uprising against the Sultan by the native Dayaks, who were headhunters and pretty fierce fighters. James Brooke threw in his hand with the Sultan and helped settle things down, and for that, the Sultan made Brooke an official Rajah of Sarawak. Rajah means prince or chief. And he actually ruled the place, too. It wasn’t just an empty title.”
“My goodness,” said Annabelle, a little breathlessly, “that’s quite a story.” Beryl Henderson, a small woman with thin arms and large hands that reminded Annabelle of a washerwoman’s, was nodding in agreement.
“Yes,” she said. “Isn’t it? It sounds like something out of Kipling, made up, you know. But it’s all true.”
Harold, a reedy man with narrow shoulders, a thin neck, and hair the colour of an orange tabby cat said, “Yes, absolutely. Every word of it is true. He ruled as Rajah until he died in the late 1860s, and then his nephews inherited his position. One of them, his great-nephew, actually, Vyner Brooke, is the Rajah as we speak. He has been since his father, the second rajah’s death.”
“And are there still headhunters and cannibals?” asked Annabelle, wondering how far Borneo was from Singapore.
“Well, yes, as a matter of fact there still are, you know, back in the jungle,” said Harold. “But we’ve been making steady progress over the years, and many of our converts among the Dayaks have themselves taken up the cause and have brought many of their heathen brethren to Jesus.”
By “we” Annabelle took it to mean that Harold was referring to the Anglican Church, not himself and Beryl. “I’m glad to hear it,” she said, although not as glad as she would have been had he told her cannibals no longer existed in that part of the world.
Beryl picked up the thread of the conversation. “Doing God’s work is not easy,” she said, “but it is rewarding beyond measure. For every soul we are able to bring to Christ, we feel God’s presence become ever stronger. He loves us and protects us from harm. You cannot imagine how grateful we are that He has brought us to this place so we can do His work and spread His word. It is its own blessing.”
“Indeed it is,” said Harold. “Indeed it is.”
When she wasn’t talking with the Hendersons, Annabelle found herself observing the social mores aboard ship. There seemed to be a lot of single young women like herself on the way to take up married life with a young man who had served his time either in the civil service or in the commercial service with some trading company or other. Most companies forbade their new employees from marrying during the first — and sometimes even the second — five-year term of employment. It often took eight or ten years for a young man to begin earning a salary large enough to accommodate a wife and family.
“Bloody
