The Rathbones (24 page)

Lydia turned to look at Bow-Oar, who was still sleeping. His bright bronze skin had dulled down to cold metal. She had been afraid to
look at him when she first woke, afraid that she would begin to feel again the fear she had felt on the boat. Instead, when she looked at him she felt the same strong surf she had felt the night before.

She heard a faint voice; it sounded like someone was calling her name outside. The sawing noise of the night before vibrated through the house. She crept quietly from the bed, wrapped herself in her limp gown, and leaned out the window. The light drizzle was dispersing, blown away by a wind off the sound. The voice again; there was Priscilla, leaning from a distant window along the side of the house, toward the water. Behind her, Miriam’s head appeared at another window, then both were snapped back inside and she heard sobbing. Near Lydia’s window, the sawing and pounding sounds were loud; around and above her, boys were clambering over the house, mallets tucked into their belts, levels balanced on their shoulders. She had not, being half conscious, noticed much about the house on her arrival. She now took in its stance on the long pier, on pilings high above the surf. She felt dizzy, looking down at the dark water below. The room in which she stood was part of a second story that was perched, half built, atop the long low bulk of the house. Closer to land, more rooms like the one she stood in were framed in timbers against the sky, their walls not yet in place. Far below, in the half-light, men were bent over great stripped logs in long rows, chanting together, heaving to shove the logs under the house, which stood on blocks above the long dock. At the end of the dock the
Misistuck
floated, silent and dark, all its sails furled tight to their masts, rigging taut and creaking.

Against the western sky, Lydia saw a great black building at water’s edge. Its tree-high door was rimmed in red, smoke seething into the sky from its edges. In the dark water a fleet of darker shapes floated slowly leeward, the three young whales that the
Misistuck
had towed. Atop one a boy stood, driving a long blade into it. On the others seabirds clung, gorging. Along the shore thin stands of pine barred the paling sky.

Lydia felt a deep creaking and the floor under her groaned and jolted. The house began to move beneath her. The stripped logs under
it screeching and rumbling, the house headed up the hill, breaking branches off trees with loud snaps. She unwrapped the golden gown from around her, shivering, leaned out, and dropped it to the water below. She watched it twist on the surface in the lightening green sea, then sink.

{in which the Rathbones overreach their grasp}

1801

B
OW
-O
AR PACED THE
dock, smiling in satisfaction at the neatly furled sails and fine new flemished rigging. He had commissioned new suits of sails for all the Rathbone ships from a Boston sailmaker, to replace the dozen home-sewn sails that had long served each whaler: full sets of thirty-seven sails, of finest No. 10 canvas, every studding sail, every staysail, skysail, and spanker. He’d trained the men, who had always navigated by observing the stars or by dead reckoning, to observe the sun at noon with a sextant to find their latitude, precisely timed with a chronometer. He watched the men move around the deck and up and down from the hold; they were due to sail the next morning on a cruise to the South Seas and the men were making ready. As he walked along the dock, Bow-Oar put out a hand to caress the hull of the
Misistuck
, now painted in broad stripes of scarlet and gold, and admired her new stern chasers of gleaming brass. The
Sassacus
and the
Paquatauoq
had been fully refitted, too, and were both away, whaling.

Bow-Oar was anxious to sail, to watch the fresh white sails climb into the sky like clouds. And he missed the whales. His arm ached to hold the lance, to feel its weight and balance, its smooth iron. But he ached more for his long and golden wife. He wasn’t ready to leave
her to go to sea. He turned at the end of the dock and, glancing at the position of the sun, quickened his step and headed for the house.

Rathbone House now stood well away from the sound, on the highest point of land. The pines that once thickly clothed the ground down to the sea had been clear-cut when the house was moved, so that it stood exposed on all sides to sun and wind. Below the house, deep ruts—made by the great logs on which the house had been rolled from dock to hill—could still be seen, though covered in thick green grass. Each spring the ruts were filled with new earth and planted with grass seed; each summer the earth sank again and filled with salt water. The first floor of the house was unchanged from its original form, the wharf-long lodge of rough pine built by Moses two generations ago. It squatted, smoke-black and pine-pitched, beneath the second floor built by Bow-Oar and his brothers when they brought back their golden brides.

If Lemuel Stark had seen Rathbone House from a league’s distance, if he had stolen away and sailed to Naiwayonk a year after he sold his daughters, regretting his bargain (and who can say he didn’t?), he might have been startled at the resemblance of the second floor to his own house: the same mellowed red brick, the same pediment windows shuttered in deep gray. As the distance decreased he may have become uneasy about the details: six panes where there should have been twelve, moldings with neither egg nor dart, details foggy and uncertain, as though he were moment by moment more distant rather than closer. Bow-Oar had modeled the new second floor on the appearance of Lemuel Stark’s house from afar, to provide his bride and her sisters with familiar comforts. Though none had eyes keener, Bow-Oar’s had been focused, when he and his crew rowed past the Stark islands, not on the house but on the girls for whom it served only as a dim backdrop against which they glowed.

Bow-Oar hurried up the granite steps that climbed from the beach and through the front door. He could hear Lydia’s light step somewhere above, and the voices of her sisters. At the top of the stairs was a bolted door. Next to it a grizzled sailor sat on a stool, smoking a pipe.

“Good day, Bemus.”

“And to you, Bow-Oar.”

Bemus got up from his stool and pulled a key chain from his pocket. He unlocked the door, lifted out the heavy slab of wood, and opened the door, nodding to his captain.

Bow-Oar ran up to the second floor, calling out as he headed toward the bedrooms.

“Wife, are you ready yet?”

The rooms into which the golden wives had settled were, like the exterior, a foggy copy of those in which they had been brought up, each room radiating off the circular central hall that Bow-Oar now passed through. The floor’s crude parquet pattern mimicked the floors in the Stark house, but without their gloss; Rathbone floors were swabbed and flogged dry each day by a crew of sailors, always clean but dulled by water.

Intended to make the wives feel at ease, the rooms had instead confused them. The parlor and hall were similar in scale to those in the Stark house but with different proportions: a ceiling too high, a chair rail too low. In their first days in the house, the wives wandered among the rooms as though half asleep. Priscilla walked the perimeter of the central hall and found herself stooping to look out at the sea. Though twelve tall windows pierced the wall as at home, all were smaller and set lower. Miriam woke in the morning and swung her legs over the side of her bed to step into her slippers and instead tumbled to the floor; the beds, like that of Moses, were twice as high as those of the Starks. Though covered in fine cloth and with rich hangings, the beds were made less with the wives in mind than their husbands, who preferred high berths that afforded them the longest view over the ocean. Each night, after coupling with their wives, Bow-Oar, Second-Oar, and Third-Oar returned to the bottom floor to sleep in their narrow cots.

Bow-Oar opened the door to Lydia’s bedroom and leaned in, squinting against the morning light that streamed in and bounced from every surface. The blue silk paper, unsuccessfully hung on the
walls when Lydia and her sisters were first brought back, had been replaced with sheets of thin beaten gold so that the wives’ glow, in these rooms, never dimmed.

Lydia sat at her dressing table, holding a swag of pearls across her breast, regarding herself in the mirror. She frowned and dropped the pearls onto the table, into a tangle of other necklaces. She next drew a strand of amber to try against the bodice of her topaz silk gown. A dozen other gowns spilled from her closet in shades of lemon and daffodil, goldenrod, bright copper, and pale gold.

Lydia glanced up at Bow-Oar.

“Only a moment more.”

She dropped the strand of amber and picked up a choker of filigreed gold.

Bow-Oar sighed and walked to the window. The gardens behind the house were nearly complete. Fruit trees and shrubberies were laid out in stiff symmetries, copied from a design on a pamphlet from France. Espaliered pear trees spread their branches among box hedges trimmed into cones and spheres. Gravel walks progressed to marble benches where the wives would soon be able to stroll on long summer days.

“Which do you think looks best?”

Bow-Oar went to his wife, pulled the strand of amber from the snarl of necklaces, and fastened it around her throat. He leaned, hands on her shoulders, to look at her reflection, which glowed as brightly as when he had first seen her, the amber a deeper gold against Lydia’s honey skin. Her eyes met his in the mirror and she smiled.

In the year after he brought Lydia and her sisters to Rathbone House, Bow-Oar’s attention had turned away from the sea. He had stayed ashore for a full year with his bride, a honeymoon on which he traveled only to her golden cove. He had urged Second-Oar and Third-Oar to return to sea in the
Sassacus
and the
Paquatauoq
; none of the other men were as capable of commanding. But they, too, preferred to continue to sleep beside their brides, and other brothers had captained the
Sassacus
and the
Paquatauoq
on their latest voyages.

Bow-Oar had taken the
Misistuck
out on a training run a month ago with a crew of novice whalemen. As they passed other ships, he noticed that the captains’ spyglasses were always focused on the
Misistuck
’s fine rigging. He could see, too, what the captains wouldn’t have known he could discern at such distances: envy written clearly on their features, envy not only on whalemen’s faces but on those of captains of loftier vessels, of swift clippers and elegant barks. Bow-Oar longed to see such men’s faces when they beheld not flemished ropes but golden tresses. And tonight they would. He kissed his wife and went off to dress for the party.

Miriam and Priscilla appeared in the doorway, arm in arm.

“Aren’t you ready yet?” They pulled Lydia up from her chair, laughing.

The wives stood together in the hall, chattering about the party. Miriam and Priscilla, in gowns of pale gold silk chiffon that floated around them as they moved, were as lovely as Lydia in her topaz.

“I can’t wait to see! Let’s peek.” Priscilla giggled.

“No, we promised. We don’t want to ruin the surprise,” said Lydia.

Lydia had the invitation list in her hand. Miriam and Priscilla crowded close, eagerly scanning the names, as they had so often in the days leading up to the party. The invitations, ordered from Boston and engraved on heavy cream stock, had gone out three weeks ago:

M
R. AND
M
RS
. B. O. R
ATHBONE
request the honor of your presence at a soirée
Rathbone House, Naiwayonk
Saturday, September 26
7 o’clock in the evening

“Do you think the Packer boys will come?” said Miriam.

“I’m sure of it! You don’t really think they could have fallen out of love with us so soon, do you?” said Priscilla. “They’ll be so jealous!”

Lydia smiled at her sisters. She was excited to see who would be at the soirée, but she didn’t really care if any of her old suitors came. She
hadn’t wearied of Bow-Oar’s embraces; she relished them more with each passing week. Priscilla and Miriam felt the same about their husbands. If only her mother were there to see how happy she was. She had written to her mother once a month since leaving home. Her mother never wrote back.