The Rathbones (20 page)

Mordecai waved the gardener away impatiently. “No, no, thank you, there is no need, I have his bearings exactly.” He peered closely at the red line on his drawing and poked at it with a dry twig. “Let me see … he has by now passed Wellfleet, perhaps is even now looking into Cape Cod Bay.” He went back to his map, chuckling to himself.

The gardener felt for my arm and led me down the temple steps, away from Mordecai. “Beg pardon, miss,” he said in a low voice, “but Wellfleet ain’t in it. Captain Gale, he’s on an island just up the coast. Not a morning’s sail away.”

My heart slammed in my chest.

“Benadam Gale,” I said.

“Yes, yes, Benadam Gale. My people live out on the peninsula, a few miles inland from the island. Benadam, that’s the name. All the Gales used to live there. My brother mentioned seeing him on Arcady when he passed, let me see … a month ago, give or take.”

“Arcady?”

I was sure I had misheard. He couldn’t mean the island of Mama’s bedtime stories.

“Lovely place. Tall bluffs, I remember, rosy pink. Never seen rocks that color before; wish I could see them now. Pine and balsam thick as Eden, and a waterfall springing right off the cliffs into the sea.”

He began to scratch out a map on a paving stone with the point of his shears, feeling along the line with his hand, warning me of the shoals and explaining the channels, speaking of how he had known the coast and all the islands from boyhood, before his eyes failed.

“Yes, Gale was there, on Arcady. My brother used to see them, Gale and his boy, coming and going. Whaling. Didn’t mention the boy this time, though, wonder if he was along?” The gardener stopped his scratching for a moment and tilted his head up at me. “Mr. Gale a friend of yours?”

A face swam up in the air, so bright I blinked: a young boy’s face,
ruddy and forthright, green eyes shining, so near I put my hand out to touch his cheek. His lips were moving, but no sound came. The image shimmered for an instant, then wavered and disappeared.

I turned away, my hand over my mouth, waiting for my breath to slow. I felt again as I had felt that first night when I heard his song sound out true and clear. My wrist felt suddenly bare. My hand went to my wrist, but my brother’s bracelet wasn’t there. I had been wearing it since we left Rathbone House and had shown it to Mordecai on the
Able
, but couldn’t remember having noticed it since then.

I questioned the gardener eagerly about the boy he had seen with Papa, asking when he had seen him, what he had looked like, was there anything else he could recall. The old man tried to call up a clearer memory, then shook his head slowly.

From across the water came the soft slap of oars. The dinghy, rowed by the mate, was on its way to fetch Mordecai and me. It was nearly twilight, and the
Able
hovered out in the sound.

“Come, Mercy. Greenland ho!” Mordecai caressed his map, folded it, put it in his breast pocket, and began to gather his things. He had heard nothing of my conversation with the gardener.

Mordecai hoisted his bags and we said our farewells to the gardener. The water that encircled the little temple had grown with the tide from a narrow ribbon to a gurgling stream; we jumped over it and headed back to the main island.

Installed once again on the
Able
’s deck, we looked over the rail, back at the Stark Archipelago, squinting against the sun that hung low in a dusky sky. With the making tide, the temple on its mound had become a true island. The gardener had moved on, to tend some other Stark folly.

I felt Mordecai’s eye on me. Glancing up, I found him looking at me curiously. I held the image of my brother close and said nothing. Something about the cant of Mordecai’s head reminded me sharply of Roderick and of the elder Starks.

“Mordecai.”

“Hmmm?” He was deep in his stack of books again.

“Why did the Starks react that way to the Rathbone name?”

Mordecai, looking up, sniggered. “If the old ones had seen me it would have been far worse. They detest the Rathbones.”

“But I don’t understand. Why should they hate us?”

He put his nose back in his book.

I pulled the book from his hands and held it behind my back. He started to reach for it, then his eyes drifted to the stack of books he had not yet touched. He picked up the next and was instantly absorbed.

Captain Avery, who had been in the foretop with his glass, slid down a backstay. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and mopped his face. Leaning on the taffrail, he looked back at the Stark house and shook his head.

“A handsome family, they were, you have only to look at those old paintings. But all the looks drained out and never came back again.”

I looked back, too. The main island was by then shadowy, though the house, high on its hill, glowed in rosy light from the setting sun. Through the trees I saw a movement at a window high up in the house. A curtain moved aside, a tall figure stood looking out: Roderick, watching us sail away. I saw him as clearly as though he were beside me on the deck. He stood stiff and still in the jade-green robe, his powdered wig askew above his pale face.

“All hard to look at. Not like your mother.”

I had pulled out Mordecai’s journal and was attempting to draw my brother as I now knew he looked, while the image was still strong in my mind. I looked sharply up at the captain’s words.

“Captain Avery, do you know my mother?”

Avery looked at me, startled, for once speechless, though only for a moment.

“No, no. That is to say, I’ve seen her up in the house, just from deck, you know, close enough to know she’s a handsome woman.” He mopped his face again, then folded his handkerchief and folded again until it was a tiny square, which he popped in his pocket.

I drew him by the arm along the railing, away from Mordecai.

“Was there ever … did you ever see her with a boy?” I whispered.

“Boy? Don’t remember any boy.” Avery rubbed his chin, hitched his pants, and looked up at the rigging. “That topsail could use another reef or two. I’ll lend you a hand,” he yelled to the mate. He ran up the rigging and passed behind a stretched sail and so out of view.

I went back to Mordecai and bent over the map with him, tracing our route north toward Greenland, a route that would take us past an island with tall pink cliffs.

Something shifted in the pocket of my skirt. I reached in and pulled out the bundle of envelopes I had stuffed in my pocket. I had meant to put them back but in the rush had forgotten. The writing on the outermost envelope was too faded to make out. I pulled out a letter of several pages and unfolded it. The salutation read “Dear Mother.” I turned to the last page; the signature, in a tall, elegant script, read “Lydia.”

Avery’s voice floated down from the foretop.

“Now, let me see … the old man, the one with the mustachios, Percival Stark? His aunts, I believe, married into the Rathbones. So that would be, what, three generations back. There were three girls, now what were they called? Lydia. Lydia was the eldest …”

Captain Avery talked on. As with my great-great-aunt’s account of Hepzibah, it was an incomplete tale, one whose bare stretches I would later weave with all that I found in Lydia’s letters.

I called Crow to me and sent him off, over the water.

{in which the Stark sisters meet their matches}

1800

L
YDIA
S
TARK DIDN
’
T
at first notice the unfamiliar boat. Her eyes were fixed instead on the dock where her brothers’ ship was making ready to sail on the morning tide. The
Venture
had begun loading before dawn. She and her sisters had been watching since first light, leaning over the parapet at the end of the lawn, looking down at the harbor.

The three sisters stood long and golden in the warm light slanting across the water. The skirts of their gowns rustled and crackled in the still air, silk gowns the same hue of gold as their hair. A gift from their brothers, from their last voyage to the Indies, the silk had been sent to tailors on the mainland some weeks before, and the finished gowns had arrived only yesterday. Each time the sisters moved, the silk sent out whiffs of the spices near which it had been stored on the ship: nutmeg and cardamom, bitter mace and vanilla, wafting through the clean air of the rising tide.

The strange boat floated in the little cove below the lawn, under the willows along the shore that stretched their limbs out over the water. Lydia shaded her eyes with one arm against the low sun, but in the shadows of branches could see only dark forms in the boat, hear only the creak of wet wood. She wondered vaguely why it lingered
there. The harbor was filled with vessels, all coming or going but for this one. She turned away, back toward the
Venture
.

Stevedores hurried back and forth on the dock, loading the last provisions for the voyage. Sailors swarmed over the rigging against a slate sky. The deep-laden brig, a sturdy and well-founded two-master, rode low in the water, heavy with pine milled from local woodlands. On its next crossing to the Indies the ship would also carry oak and maple from the great forests to the north. Lemuel Stark, Lydia’s father, had in recent years made a name for fair dealing and swift passages, and word had spread; traders in timber and fur had begun to bypass larger ports to stop instead in the Stark Archipelago.

Lydia watched her brothers cut across the crowded dock, each with a crate on his shoulder. It was easy to find them; their fair heads rode high above those of other men. All the Starks shared the same long bones and sunlit beauty. Silas and Caleb had been more at sea than at home since their voices had broken and had taken readily not only to living afloat but to trading. Lydia read in their quick movements and ready bearing their excitement about departing. They would leave not a few girls sighing for them when they sailed. The brothers, crossing the gangway to get another load from the dock, caught sight of Lydia and waved.

Grandfather Stark, too, was there among the hurrying men, his own golden head gone white but still held as high as those of his grandsons. Solomon Stark, tall and straight, walked slowly around the perimeter of the ship, running his hand along the railing, checking seams, gazing up with a critical eye at the masts. He had built the brig himself a dozen years ago, much of it with his own hands, when the harbor was a boatyard and the tight, swift ships were built by the Starks for other men. He leaned over the port railing and gazed at the long sheds that lined the dock. Stacked earlier that morning with corded timber, the sheds were now empty but for the sharp lingering smell of the pine planks, all of which had been loaded on the
Venture
. Solomon Stark remembered when he and his sons and crew had worked the wood in those sheds, had built the great ribs and spars, not passed the wood on
to other men. Now ships and harbor alike belonged to the family, but the ships were made in distant boatyards by other men’s hands.

Lydia forgot the strange boat for a time, talking with her sisters, comparing their latest beaux—for the Stark daughters were much sought after—and wondering what gift her brothers would bring from the islands this time. Though she already owned a crested cockatoo, Lydia longed for one of the bright-plumed birds that lived higher among the palms: a bird of paradise or a blue macaw. The creak of an oarlock brought her eyes back to the boat. A breeze stirred the branches of the willow and between the leaves she saw green eyes staring at her. Along the side of the hull six oars hung dripping above the water.

Lydia frowned and glared at the boat. It was of a type she had never seen before: small but broad, single-masted, and pointed at both ends. She wouldn’t have recognized it as a whaleboat. Her parents had distanced their daughters from the mercenary taint of the sea and, though she had viewed many other types of craft docked below the house or passing through the bay, no whaling ship had ever docked in the Stark Archipelago before.