The Rathbones (16 page)

Mordecai clambered down the ladder and I descended behind him. When I turned at the bottom I saw, between two islands, a painted barge floating in our direction. It was poled by a figure in a peaked hat. A seated figure within, shaded by a parasol, leaned toward us. One of the two occupants of the pavilion; I recognized the jade-green robe.

“Say nothing, Mercy. I have all well in hand,” Mordecai whispered into my ear and jerked his head toward the house. A deputation made its way down the lawn, but not to welcome us. Two short men in familiarly plain shirts and breeches (we had not, as I had begun to wonder, drifted into the China Seas) rushed toward us, gesturing with their hands, waving us away. Both had rosy faces, hands dredged in flour, and smelled of warm spices. One man wiped his hands on his apron. As they arrived at the dock, the other man brandished a bunch of greenstuff in a threatening manner.

“The house requires nothing, thank you. No visitors, no visitors. Cast off, if you please, and move on. You’ll be better off.”

“Should ask your master first, shouldn’t you?”

The men looked up to see Captain Avery standing on deck above them, smiling, one raised arm holding a chair aloft by its leg. It was a lavish chair of lustrous black and gold, its curved arms finished with the gilt heads of sphinxes of the Nile. The mate gestured with a sweep of his arm toward a full set of chairs in the same style, arrayed in a line on the deck beside a handsome table with feet ending in claws.

“The latest from the Continent. Mr. Stark would be most disappointed to have missed us. And his daughter, too,” said the captain. Behind him, the mate now held up to his breast a gown of pleated
white silk and minced along the deck with swaying hips and fluttering eyes.

The two cooks hesitated, whispering to each other. The mate, having tossed aside his gown, suddenly flourished a brace of new copper-bottomed pans. The men’s faces brightened. They came aboard and began to rummage through a crate of cookware. Meantime, Captain Avery started to off-load the table and chairs.

“Pardon me …” Behind me, I heard an unfamiliar voice. I turned to find the man in the jade-green robe hurrying along the dock toward us with long, stiff strides. The scarlet barge was docked behind our brig.

Though the man was not Oriental, he wore wide scarlet silken trousers beneath the jade robe and pointed slippers of embroidered silk whose long tips quivered at each step. Mordecai stood beside me as the man approached. They were of a similar size and bearing, and each boasted a pigtail, one pale, one dark. The man bowed first to Mordecai, pausing for a moment with a troubled look. They might have been two sides to a single coin. He then bowed to me, sweeping off his pointed hat. The pigtail came away with it. Beneath the hat curled a powdered wig. Beneath the wig, a face that made Mordecai seem the fairest of men. It was all sharp angles and harsh planes, the skin rough and pale and faintly gray, though he was a young man. I judged him to be near Mordecai’s true age. It was a face that might have been hewn from the granite on the islands that the Starks had worked so hard to smooth. I thought that if I touched his cheek I might slice my finger open.

The man paused before he reached us, stopping next to the
Able
and calling up to the mate. Though I could not quite overhear their conversation, it appeared that he was asking eager questions, pointing at various features of the
Able
and smiling at the mate’s responses. It seemed odd that a man dressed as he was and traveling in such a fanciful craft as a scarlet barge would have any interest in a merchant vessel.

“Roderick Stark. May I know your names?”

Though his manner was formal, his voice was friendly. His eyes didn’t leave me. They were by far his best feature, a clear, deep blue.

Mordecai bowed in turn. “Mortimer Palmer, at your service. Permit me to introduce my sister, Miss Luna Palmer.”

I stared at Mordecai—Palmer?—then dropped a silent curtsey. Mr. Stark bowed again and lifted my hand to his lips. I found it difficult not to shy my hand away. It was not so much the presence of the repulsive as the lack of something essential, a bleak and blasted look.

“I beg your pardon for our unheralded arrival,” said Mordecai. “I am penning an article, ‘Great Houses of the Atlantic Seacoast,’ for
Harper’s Monthly
, and it would certainly not be complete without the Stark manse.” Roderick didn’t seem to be listening; his eyes were still on me. I turned away and tried to look absorbed in the movements of Captain Avery, who headed whistling up the lawn, a chair in each hand and one balanced on his head.

“Might we be permitted to sketch the grounds?” Mordecai was asking, nodding toward the portfolio he carried under one arm. It was tied shut and filled with large sheets of paper, some of which stuck out from its edges. I recognized the corner of a drawing of a narwhal tusk from my lessons and furtively tucked it inside.

Roderick finally turned to Mordecai. “Great houses, you say?” He thought for a moment and laughed, shaking his head back and forth. “I think, actually, that my parents would be delighted. You must stay to tea.”

Roderick offered his arm to me and led us up the walk toward the house, Mordecai trailing behind. As we walked along the allée of oaks, I turned to look for Crow and saw him hopping from branch to branch behind me. He dropped down from the last to ride my shoulder.

We entered the house through a narrow arched opening in the yew hedge, directly into a deep, broad hall of double height. The dense hedge admitted little sun. Daylight washed only the top of the room, from the high windows that peeped above the hedge. The
room below was lit with candles in sconces along the walls. My eyes adjusted to the low light. If the style of the exterior had held true inside, we would have entered a sober hall of simple solid furnishings, unadorned walls, and bare board floors. Instead the room was awash in furniture. Tables, commodes, armchairs, bureaus, settees of every description, gilded and carved, tufted and swagged, filled the space from wall to wall. Some items were arranged in groupings you might see in any house—divans and chairs facing one another to form seating areas—but with no space between and no one seated. The room was empty of people and had the air of a place not lived in for many years, though the furniture looked well dusted. Stacked side chairs rose here and there in towers; there were shoals of footstools and tea tables, reefs of bookless bookshelves that were crowded instead with bric-a-brac. Though I knew little of the decorative arts, only what I’d learned from a single page of etchings in our dictionary, I recognized several modes from decades past: the lavish curves of the Rococo; the restrained lines of the Neoclassical; Regency floral motifs and bronze chasing. The walls, too, were filled from top to bottom with portraits and landscapes in ponderous frames set hard upon each other and heavy mirrors that sent candlelight glinting along gilt surfaces. Crow surveyed the hall, selected a lofty perch on the frame of a large seascape, and lit there to tuck his head under his wing.

Roderick swept his arm toward the door of a salon far across the hall.

Mordecai bowed. “Too kind. But if I might beg your indulgence and remain outside? I noticed a perfect position from which to capture your magnificent façade with my pen: that charming garden seat among the oaks. And the light just now is perfect.”

Roderick bowed, nodding, then turned back to me. Voices and the sound of cutlery on china carried across the hall. With a gesture, Roderick suggested that I should precede him across the hall. I began to struggle through the armoires and hassocks, sideboards and hat racks.

Roderick noticed my faltering step and stopped, smiling.

“I do apologize, Miss Palmer, it’s something of a challenge, getting through this hall … permit me.”

He struck a path, his legs deftly nudging light boudoir chairs and heavy breakfronts out of the way. I started to follow in his wake, but Mordecai held me back.

“I will just have a quick look at the library. You will be fine without me. Engage them in witty banter. Repartee,” he whispered, with a flourish of his hand.

“But I don’t know them, I have nothing to say.”

“Constrict your conversation to the mundane. The weather. Cookery.” He considered. “Crustaceans. I will have the merest peek and then we’ll be off to see the whales.” He cast a hungry look toward the library. “Perhaps a bit longer. Meet me on the east side of the house in, let us say, half an hour.” He began to creep away, then stopped and turned around.

“Oh, and by the by, you do know them, in a manner of speaking. This is where your mother’s people came from, generations ago. Your mama is descended from the Starks, on her mother’s side, and so are you. And I.”

Descended from the Starks? I stopped short and knocked up against a tallboy; a porcelain shepherdess and her flock fell from a shelf and shattered. Roderick, not hearing, or used to such accidents, given the ornaments that cluttered every surface in the hall, forged on.

I had never really considered any ancestors but those whose portraits hung on the stair. If asked, I might have said that the first Rathbone was begotten by the sea itself.

In a loud whisper Mordecai called back, “Oh, and this is important: Do not mention the Rathbones. Or Naiwayonk. I’ll explain later.” He skirted an unstable stack of footstools and scuttled away toward the southeast corner of the house.

I looked with fresh eyes at Roderick as he strode on. His tall, slender form reminded me so much of Mordecai’s. I hurried to catch up with him and soon we’d reached the dining salon.

We entered between two crouched dragons of glazed green porcelain, each taller than me. The room and its occupants were in thrall to the same Oriental airs as Roderick. The walls were hung with pale green silk figured with court scenes from an ancient dynasty, lit at intervals by hanging lanterns with garnet paper shades. The floor was cushioned with thick fringed carpets in rich patterns that I thought my great-great-aunts might have admired. In the center of the room a peaked tent of persimmon silk sheltered several low couches around a low black table laden with dishes. The tent was lit by more of the hanging lanterns, whose light shone through the translucent silk walls so that the tent glowed scarlet in the dim twilight, as did the faces of the robed diners who reclined within. Roderick parted a silk panel and we entered into air that swirled with smoke of a heady but pleasant odor. I collected myself, smoothing my braids and the front of my gown, and looked around me. Roderick spoke to an old man on a low brocade settee.

“Grandfather, allow me to present Miss Luna Palmer of …”

I thought quickly. “Of Narragansett Bay.” Narragansett was many leagues east on the map; I hoped that the Starks knew no one there. I wanted to blurt out who I was and ask a hundred questions, but Mordecai had been so insistent.

The elder Mr. Stark peered at me from under a flat silk hat with long fringes that swung back and forth over his brow. He was just visible through a blue haze of smoke from a long-stemmed pipe lodged in a corner of his mouth. His face had the same harsh cragginess as Roderick’s. Was he some old uncle of mine, Mama’s great-uncle? He wore a saffron robe over embroidered pantaloons and had a long thin mustache of gleaming black. His eyebrows, plucked into a surprised arch, were the same youthful black, at odds with his aged face. He reached for a delicate teacup, but his fingernails were so long that they curled back in a circle and he couldn’t grasp the tiny handle. His nails clicked uselessly against the china for a moment, then he leaned over and slurped directly from the cup.

“From near Newport, are you then, Miss Palmer?” he asked in a thin, quavering voice. I tried not to notice the way his mustache trailed in his tea.

“Quite near.” I knew a little of Newport from Captain Avery’s chatter. He said it was a summer residence of wealthy city people.

The elder Stark’s eye had a wary gleam. I was afraid he saw something familiar in my face, but my appearance would in no way suggest Rathbone to anyone who knew our family, such of it as remained. I was so small and dark compared to Mama and Mordecai.

“Palmer, you say? And your mother’s family?”

I lunged for a tea biscuit, stalling, then blurted out: “Have you frequently visited Newport, Mr. Stark? There are so many fine homes on the hills above the harbor, though none surpasses yours.”

The elder Stark’s sharp look softened. With a gratified air, he turned his attention to a tureen of soup in which a bird’s nest floated. I breathed out.

I continued to make my way around the table with Roderick, curtseying at each introduction, wondering if I might be expected instead to prostrate myself, as one does before the Eastern potentates.

“My grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Percival Stark. My parents, Mr. and Mrs. Lemuel Stark, and my sister, Miss Lucretia Stark.” Each nodded his head in vague recognition, then returned to his tea.

There was no doubt that all were of Roderick’s family: each had the same grim look, including an infant Stark, attended by a nurse. All wore richly worked Oriental garments and glossy black wigs that only made their faces look more barren. The elder Starks had attempted to adorn their faces with paint and powder, but nothing comfortably adhered; through lead-white the forbidding cheeks still showed, like the guano-laden cliffs west of our docks at home. All were alike but Roderick’s mother: She had a fair complexion and wore her heavy golden hair twisted up in a comb, disdaining a wig. She was quite pretty, though nowhere near as lovely as Mama. Clearly it was Roderick’s mother who had married into the Stark family. But the mother’s beauty had not found its way into any of her three children. In the
infant Stark, who was wigless, though in a little frogged coolie suit of blue silk, I saw some faint evidence of the mother’s fairness. But a glance at Roderick’s sister, near to him in age, showed me that the ugliness had only been lying in wait like an eel in its cave.

Roderick led me to a silk divan. “Please, sit down.”

He saw that I hesitated; the seat of the divan was as high as my waist. He hurried out the door, returning moments later with a chair of the correct proportions, fished from the hall. I tried not to mind its childish pattern of nursery figures. Roderick sat close by me, on the silk divan.