The Rathbones (15 page)

I looked at Mordecai and saw the young man under the pale skin and behind the faded eyes of my tutor. The little boy sent to live in the attic, alone. He felt my eyes on him and stood up straight, clearing
his throat. He reached to wipe his brow and felt the stovepipe hat, pulled it off, glared at it, and tossed it to the side of the deck. His hair sprang out of its neat pigtail and blew around his head in the wind.

“Why do you think your mama always walks up there? She’s not hoping for your papa to return. She’s afraid he will come.”

I thought of her walking the boards, night after night. Mama, faithful and abiding. I pulled my knees up and lay my head on them. I closed my eyes. I remembered an entry in a whaleman’s logbook that Mordecai had read to me, describing how he and his mates had tapped the sperm’s oil. They plunged a great ladle into the dead whale’s head, into the vast pool of oil in the case, over and over, until it was empty. I felt as hollowed out as that sperm.

After some time I took up Mordecai’s journal again and opened out the chart. I drew Mama’s face above her name, her hair coiled tight, her collar buttoned high on her neck. I drew Mordecai’s face with its mist of white hair, and my own face, counting out and adding my aunts’ hundred braids.

My pen hovered above the place where my missing brother’s name should have been. I had Theseus in mind, as he faced the Minotaur; his small, sturdy form and thick hair seemed to me most like the Rathbone men of Moses’s time. But my brother wouldn’t hold still and pose. The face I drew was too narrow, and the hair would make no firm wave but only floated. It ended by looking much like Mordecai’s: not a face to confront the Minotaur. I rubbed the drawing out and started over, this time trying to match Jason’s bold profile as he seized the golden fleece from the tree. I sketched in his face and armed him with the sword of Aegeus; I drew the many-headed Hydra, already slain, lying behind him. Jason’s eye turned to look at me. He had something to say, but his mouth was only a smudge through which he couldn’t speak. Something moved behind him: The children of the Hydra, the skeleton warriors born from its teeth, sprang up from the ground and started toward me with their swords, clanking and clattering.

I rubbed my eyes and looked up. Mordecai was standing by the
foremast, his back to me. He had tied his hair, which the wind had been blowing all around, with a length of cord. The cord had passed around a stretch of rigging as well as his hair and he had accidentally tied himself to the foremast. He was muttering angrily to himself, trying to get free.

“Mordecai?”

“No more questions.”

I glanced over at Crow, riding along beside the ship on the red hat.

“I found something, too.” I held out my wrist, turning and turning the rope bracelet. It had been a long time since I last asked Mordecai about my missing brother or mentioned the singing voice, but I was sure he wouldn’t have forgotten.

Still struggling with his knotted hair, his head twisted toward me and he saw the bracelet. He froze.

“Don’t you want to know where I got this?”

Mordecai stared at it a moment longer, then went back to working at the knot.

“That’s just a common rope bracelet. Your crow, doubtless, dug it up from some bin or other.” He sniffed at the word “crow.” Though Mordecai was devoted to ornithology, he considered the common crow unworthy of study.

“Have you seen knots like these on a common sailor’s bracelet?” I pointed out the little Turk’s heads, made from doubled cord so that they jutted up from the otherwise flat bracelet.

Mordecai reached down to the deck and pulled a ribbon from a packet of letters. “Enough,” he said, fastening the end of his pigtail.

I sighed. I threw my pen over the side and rubbed my eyes. The wind had picked up and the ropes were rattling against the foremast. I scrubbed at my brother’s face with a gum until it was only a faint smear of gray.

The mate cried out from the rigging above our heads.

“Hard abeam! Luff and touch, luff and touch.”

We were drawing near the islands. Mordecai and I watched in silence as Captain Avery and his mate made ready to anchor.

Mordecai had taken up the spyglass again and was busily scanning the islands. When a seabird passed overhead, he jerked up his glass, gasping.

“Look, look!”

I jumped onto the bottom beam of the railing, looking all around.

“Is it a sperm? Do you see a whale?”

“No, no, surely it’s
Himantopus mexicanus
! The black-necked stilt!”

Mordecai’s glass was pointed straight up. I followed his gaze. A white seabird with black-tipped wings glided across the sky.

Mordecai drooped. “No. No, it’s only a sooty tern.”

I jumped back down, disappointed. “But when will we see the whales?”

“Not just yet. They will not be in among the islands, the water is far too shallow; they will swim in open water, just past the archipelago.” Mordecai took his eye away from the glass and looked at me, his thin mouth drawn into a long firm line. “When we find the whales, we will find your father. And I will tell him everything. I will tell him all about your mama and that man.” Mordecai smiled bitterly. “I believe that is why the man in blue chases us. He knows what I intend to do and means to silence me.”

I considered Mordecai, now standing at the rail, his glass raised to the Stark Archipelago. Had he really considered what would happen if we found Papa? Did he think that Benadam Gale, that any man, would welcome such news about his wife? Did he think that Papa would turn to him in gratitude and be for him the father that he lacked?

I stood and joined Mordecai at the rail. Crow no longer floated off the starboard side; instead we saw a drab shorebird bobbing there. Mordecai brightened.

“A least sandpiper! I wonder that it is so far at sea, they usually incline to the salt marshes. You see how the crest is darker, the legs stouter than the semipalmated …”

He looked at me. I was standing at the rail, staring down into the water. He faltered, and stopped.

I felt Crow’s weight on my shoulder, water dripping on my gown. The crimson captain’s hat dropped to the deck, sodden, its brim scored with beak marks. Mordecai leaned slowly and picked it up, shaking the water from it, turning it in his hands.

“Shall we review the feeding habits of the humpback?”

I shook my head, slowly.

“Perhaps we have had enough of lessons for now.”

With his penknife he snipped off a lace cockade trimmed in satin ribbon. He took a paper tack from his box of instruments and pinned the cockade to my breast.

“Felicitations, Mercy, on your graduation from Mordecai Rathbone’s Finishing School for Young Ladies,” he said with a faint smile.

{in which Mercy and Mordecai encounter the in-laws}

L
ATE IN THE
day we reached the outer borders of the Stark Archipelago. We glided through a scattering of small islands as verdant as Mouse Island was bare. The sun hung low over a sea so smooth and glassy that we might have been floating across a still lake. In the distance we caught glimpses of long green lawns and bright buildings on the central islands toward which we sailed. Far beyond the archipelago, a hazy coast stretched into the distance: Long Island, the captain told us.

Mordecai sat on a crate, bent over a map. “The main house is, I believe, Captain, just northeast of the—”

“No need, Master Rathbone, I know my way.”

The mate had been hoisting up crates from the hold for some time and was now prying one open. Crow was excited at the sight of the crate and tried to assist him, poking at the knots with his beak, but the mate preferred to work alone. Eventually Crow spied something of greater interest among the islands and flew off. I turned to see what had attracted him, spotting a flash of crimson against the green.

I leaned over the rail and gazed down as we passed the first islands. The outermost seemed small enough to cross in a few strides. Though the shallow mounds were formed of the same rough granite
as Naiwayonk’s shore, they were closely covered in thick grass, with a curiously neat appearance, smooth and shapely. As we passed I saw that the grass had been clipped and rolled to velvety perfection. A man in a gardener’s smock kneeled at the edge of one islet, digging away salt-browned sod and laying down fresh strips of grass, creeping around the perimeter. On nearby islands two other gardeners worked at the same task.

As we approached the center of the archipelago, the islands became larger and the channels narrowed. The captain, concerned for his hull, asked for frequent soundings as the brig floated along under close-reefed sails. The mate leaned well over the side and swung his lead, calling out after each drop. “By the deep eight … by the mark ten … a quarter less ten … by the deep nine.” His words hung in the still air.

Some islands had not been tamed into soft green mounds but left in their natural, craggy state. Between two such islands stretched an airy footbridge of brilliant scarlet, mirrored in the motionless sea. Structures of Oriental style appeared, like those in one of the colored plates in Papa’s atlas: on one peak a pagoda tucked among low twisted trees, on another an open pavilion with curling eaves and pierced screens. Inside the pavilion, two figures dressed in Mandarin clothing lolled on a couch. Above them, a monkey in a tasseled red cap swung from the branch of a stunted pine. The figures—whether male or female, I wasn’t sure—at first took no notice of us. It seemed impossible that they wouldn’t hear or see our passing. Then one figure raised hand to brow and peered toward us. I could have easily made out their faces if they were not hidden under enormous circular hats that rose to a point at the top. The brig glided on, and the pavilion slid out of view.

We were nearing what appeared to be the main island, larger than all the rest. Unlike its craggy satellites, the central island was a single low dome of unnatural smoothness, probably filed down by an earlier crew of gardeners and smoothed with sod. A promenade of oaks, their dark crowns struck with crimson and yellow by autumn air, climbed the center of a long green swell of lawn that was as closely
manicured as the outlying islands. At the summit stood a large house of two stories surrounded by a high yew hedge. The house’s shape was familiar enough, a foursquare Georgian dwelling with a steeply gabled roof. It shared the same sober white clapboard form of many houses in Naiwayonk. But the yew hedge, familiarly clipped just at the sill of the lower windows, here towered above the upper windows, almost to the eaves. Only a few inches of the top pane of glass in each window was visible.

We approached a long, slender dock of the same crimson red as the footbridges, its piers carved with Oriental glyphs. The mate stood at the port rail, holding a long staff to brace against the dock, to keep the
Able
’s hull safe from scraping.

I leaned close to Mordecai and whispered, “Are we stopping here? Is the captain going into that house?” I wondered if we might go with him. I was excited at the prospect, though nervous, having never been in any house but my own.

“Captain Avery has business to conduct here. He tells me there is a wondrous library.” Mordecai hesitated. “Also, I believe you may be interested in meeting the locals.”

“Master Rathbone, lend us a hand, will you?” Captain Avery called to Mordecai from the helm. “Tie us off on the port side. There’s a lad. Handsomely, now.”

Mordecai, who had been leaning idly on the rail, staring up at the house, jerked to a stand.

“Oh, certainly, certainly.”

He crouched, bracing his legs, holding his arms out rigidly. The captain uncoiled the bow-anchor lead and tossed it as we came alongside the dock. Mordecai lurched and missed, hands grasping air. He snatched up the rope end and began to fumble with it, trying to tie what looked like a strangle snare, ending up with only an unseamanlike tangle. Meantime, the mate had already made fast on the port stern. Now the bow began to drift away from the pier. I seized the rope from Mordecai, tied a quick timber hitch, and in one cast we were moored. Mordecai opened his mouth to make some
ready remark, then closed it. He felt the captain’s eyes upon him from the foredeck and put his hand up to touch the stiff sailor’s cap he had put on again. Captain Avery, with a final glare, adjusted the brim of his own well-weathered cap and turned back to his task, making the foresail shrouds neat.