The Bilbao Looking Glass (12 page)

“What will you do next winter?”

Sarah felt a bit giggly. “Who knows? No thanks, Bradley, I’ve had far too much wine already. I might just trifle with one more of those heavenly almond cakes, though.”

She might as well coddle herself while she had the chance. Sarah hadn’t been used to luxuries. Her mother hadn’t believed in coddling and her father had often appeared to forget she wasn’t another grown-up with whom he was barely acquainted. He’d never sent his only child to school, but hired someone to come in and give her lessons. After his wife died, he’d taken it for granted that Sarah would handle the housekeeping. She’d been twelve then, with only a cook and a part-time maid to help her. Her father had died when she was eighteen and she’d married a fifth cousin some twenty years her senior, who was saddled with a blind mother and an old retainer who’d managed to dump most of her responsibilities on the young bride. Then her husband had been killed and she’d been left with a fresh set of burdens.

Now here she was, moderately solvent, relatively free, almost but not quite ready to marry a charming man with a lucrative though offbeat profession, eating French pastry on a millionaire’s yacht. Despite the plague of relatives being visited upon her, despite the burned-out boathouse, despite a niggling suspicion that she was somehow mixed up in a particularly messy murder and robbery, Sarah had the distinct impression that she was happy.

She did wonder why Lassie Larrington kept eyeing her so oddly. No doubt Pussy Beaxitt had already been on the phone giving Lassie an earful about last night. Maybe Lassie was surprised that Bradley’d still cared to have Sarah aboard
Perdita.
Or perhaps the crowd had got together and decided Walter’s daughter was a brand to be snatched from the burning. It was an amusing concept. Sarah ate the last almond drop and announced that she for one was ready to go ashore.

“We can’t go yet,” Fren objected. “We haven’t drunk all the wine.”

“Want to heave anchor for me, Don?” was Bradley’s only reply.

Don obviously did not want to do that or anything else except curl up on the cockpit cushions and sleep off his lunch, but he couldn’t very well say so. He groped his way forward with his eyes half shut, managed the windlass deftly enough, and got the dripping flukes stowed in the bow. One thing about the yacht club crowd, Sarah thought, they did take their sailing seriously. She took pleasure in watching how deftly Bradley, taking the helm himself for this maneuver, set the big yacht right up to Little Nibble’s long but somewhat tumbledown wharf.

He’d gone in under power, needless to say. Docking under sail would have been more impressive but a lot riskier, and Bradley wasn’t one to take chances. He looked dapper as a tern, Sarah thought, in a dark Greek fisherman’s cap he’d picked up on his travels, a matching turtleneck jersey, and the white duck trousers that had been de rigeur for sailing when Bradley’d entered his first Beetle Cat in the children’s races. Bradley had never since then worn anything but white ducks aboard and probably never would, even if he had to get them tailor-made at fabulous expense by now. One could not possibly imagine Bradley Rovedock in blue jeans.

Of all the Ireson crowd, he was the one who’d worn best. Sarah couldn’t see that Bradley looked much different today than he had the first time she’d been aboard
Perdita,
back when her parents were both alive and Alexander, a young god in white ducks like Bradley’s, had been kindly concerned to make sure little Sadie-belle got to hold the wheel for a few thrilling moments.

Granted she’d been more interested that day in the luncheon hamper than in the host who’d provided the goodies, but there’d been many more of these day cruises since then. Each year she’d seen Alexander a shade older, a shade more careworn while Bradley stayed about the same except for a few more sun wrinkles around the eyes and now, she noticed, brown blotches that were not freckles on the backs of his hands.

Sarah couldn’t even notice any gray in Bradley’s blondish hair when he took off the Greek cap to old Mrs. Ganlor. The doyenne of the island was sitting on the dock with her crabbing net and her falling-apart copy of Emerson’s
Essays,
just as she’d been sitting every other time they’d come into Little Nibble Cove, wearing the same none-too-clean seersucker dress and the same droopy-brimmed, time-yellowed man’s Panama hat she’d always worn. She rose to greet them with the same affable dignity Queen Elizabeth the First might have shown Sir Francis Drake when he returned from defeating the Spanish Armada.

“How kind of you to call, Bradley. Won’t you come up to the mess hall? I think there’s something left from lunch, though I can’t recall what we had. If indeed I realized at the time.”

“Thank you,” he said, “but we lunched aboard
Perdita.
My cook, you know. She’s sensitive about her prerogative as chief provider.”

“Ah yes. She holds the power and bears the responsibility. Abraham Lincoln would have approved. But let me see whom you’ve brought with you. My other spectacles must be somewhere.”

Mrs. Ganlor searched her pockets, then retrieved her glasses from the crabbing bucket, wiped off a few strands of seaweed, perched them on her nose, and peered at the little group behind Bradley.

“The Larrington boys, to be sure. How delightful to see you together. Now I shall have the visual stimulus of trying to tell you apart. No, you mustn’t tell me. I’ll have you sorted out in a moment.”

Since Don was wearing his Porcellian tie over a paint-stained old sweatshirt, the sorting should not have been difficult; but Ganlors were not apt to be aware of sartorial details unless Thomas Carlyle had mentioned them first.

“And Lassie. I could never mistake you, my dear.”

It was unthinkable that Mrs. Ganlor had ever watched an episode of that television program, but barely possible she might have dipped into Albert Payson Terhune during her frivolous infancy. Lassie did look much like her canine namesake with her long, pointed nose and mop of tawny hair. The hair was now streaked almost white around the face, either from exposure to sun and wind or because Lassie, like the rest of the crowd, wasn’t getting any younger.

Alice B. had remarked only hours before her death that young pups tended to turn into old bitches and she’d been looking across the room at Lassie when she’d said it. They hadn’t got around to discussing Alice B. yet, but they would, no doubt. Lassie hadn’t talked much at all on the way over, but she’d chatter a blue streak all the way back. She always did. Even Alexander, who’d never been given to rude remarks, had observed the last time they’d been out in
Perdita
with Lassie and Don that he did wish Bradley had let sleeping dogs lie, Sarah remembered.

Mrs. Ganlor was remembering Alexander, too. She’d taken Sarah’s hand in both of hers, a compassionate intimacy she’d never shown before. There might even have been a tear or two behind those kelp-clouded spectacles.

“Little Sarah. So young to have experienced such a loss. You will feel it less as you grow older, you know. One does. ‘Time, like an everrolling stream, bears all its sons away.’ Isaac Watts. Dear me, now where have I put down my reading glasses? There’s a passage in Emerson—”

They knew better than to let Mrs. Ganlor get started on Emerson. Both Larrington brothers began talking at once. Lassie emitted a few preliminary yelps before Sarah, to her own surprise, captured the conversation. She began telling Mrs. Ganlor her adventures as a widow, eliminating the major troubles and making an amusing tale of her minor calamities; giving particular greetings from several aunts and imparting the interesting news that those two supposedly hopeless bachelors Dolph and Brooks were both happily married.

“Astonishing! ‘The day shall not be up so soon as I, to try the fair adventure of tomorrow.’ King John, Act Five, Scene One. One always does wonder whether it was really Shakespeare or Bartlett who wrote the plays, doesn’t one? The best bits are all in the
Quotations,
and the rest is such a bore. But do come up and say hello to Josephus. He and I are the only ones around at the moment. Charlie and Willie have gone off to Lesser Nibble to look at a rock they’re passionately excited about, though I’m afraid I can’t remember why. It will come to me, sooner or later. Nobody else is on the island yet, though I expect the clan will start flocking any day now.”

She was striding up the path as she talked, refusing to let anybody else carry her Emerson although she did entrust Don with the crabbing net and Fren with the bucket. Mrs. Ganlor must be eighty-five at least, Sarah thought, and her husband Josephus perhaps eight or nine years older. They found him mending a stone wall.

“ ‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,’ ” was his predictable greeting. “In this case it was Grandfather Frost, I expect. Not related to Robert, so far as I know. In any event, one must get on with the job. ‘For winter’s rains and ruins are over.’ ”

“My dear, not Swinburne,” his wife protested with a girlish laugh. “I’m sure you all remember that delicious passage in
Penrod
where the new minister is being entertained by the ladies of the neighborhood. ‘A book of verse held lightly between the fingers.’ Was that before or after Penrod poured glue into his hat? We thought we might use Tarkington for some of our reading aloud when the young people come out,” she explained to her guests. “Sheer fluff, I know, but such fun. What do you think, Fren? You see I have you now.”

The Fren she’d so confidently picked out happened to be Don, who couldn’t recall any Tarkington except some chap who played football but wasn’t about to confess that fact to Mrs. Ganlor. He said he thought Tarkington would be just the ticket.

Sarah, who knew her Tarkington back and forth from having spent so much time alone in her various relatives’ libraries while her parents were visiting, put in a pitch for
Gentle Julia.

“I adore that part where Julia lounges around eating candied violets and reading poetry about herself from a slim volume bound in limp purple suede,” she sighed. “I always thought it would be lovely to have someone come courting me like that, but nobody ever did. I don’t think I’ve even tasted a candied violet.”

“I wouldn’t know where to buy them now that the S. S. Pierce stores are out of business,” mourned Lassie, pronouncing it “Purse” so that the Ganlors would know what firm she was talking about.

“Sage’s Market in Harvard Square might have them,” said Bradley. “I’ll get my cook to call and find out. If they don’t, I’ll scour the seven seas to bring you some, Lady Sarah.”

“And what about the book of poetry bound in limp purple suede?” Lassie inquired more cattily than doggily.

“As to that, she’ll have to take the wish for the deed, I fear. What does rhyme with Sarah?”

Nobody could think of anything offhand, though Josephus gave it as his considered opinion that rhymes such as fairer and squarer might be allowable. “Especially since we in these parts do have that odd habit of omitting final ‘r’ except in words where it does not orthographically exist.”

He hefted the large rock he’d been holding while they chatted and his wife took the hint.

“Come along, everyone. Let’s go look for the goats and let this lazy man get back to his wall. Something there is that doesn’t love a laggard and Josephus, poor dear, happens to be married to her. You must all be feeling cooped up after your sail. Nothing like a brisk canter over the moors to perk you up for the return voyage.”

Fren and Don looked as if they could do without perking, but Lassie put her sharp nose to the trail and bounded off. Sarah was no less eager. She loved the moors and even liked the goats.

Years ago, the Ganlors had brought over a billy and a nanny with the idea of establishing thereby a ready source of milk and cheese. None of the family knew how to milk a goat, much less make cheese, but they’d had books along to teach them. The books, however, had not explained how one persuaded a goat to stand still long enough for one to practice on, and the animals themselves had not cooperated. They’d been too busy begetting more goats.

By now a sizable number of their descendants roamed Little Nibble. A walk on the moors was never less than a challenging experience. One might be tripped up by a group of frolicking kids, or knocked down by a charging billy goat. But, as Mrs. Ganlor always reminded their victims, they did keep down the poison ivy.

Sarah hoped they’d come upon one soon. She went hopping over the hummocks and boulders as though she’d been a kid again herself. Bradley Rovedock kept close to her the way Alexander used to do. She half expected to hear, “Watch out for a sudden charge, Sadie-belle,” but Bradley wasn’t saying anything. It occurred to her after a while that he might be having trouble catching his breath. She slowed her pace and Lassie forged ahead. A couple of minutes later, Lassie came running back.

“Mrs. Ganlor, I think one of your goats is in trouble. It’s making an awful racket.”

They all rushed after her as she led them to the source of the frenzied bleats. The goat was indeed in a bad way. A young male, it had somehow got its head and horns tangled in a roll of old barbed wire. In trying to pull free, it had gouged itself on the barbs. Blood was dripping down its front, staining the grass the goat must have been trying to reach when it was trapped.

Fren took one look, grunted, picked up one of the big lumps of granite that dotted the moor, and bashed the wretched beast’s head in.

“Only thing to do,” he told Mrs. Ganlor. “Might as well save the skin and meat. Tell Charlie and Willie to come out here and butcher it when they get back.”

“Oh—yes, of course. One must be practical.”

Mrs. Ganlor was too much a philosopher to show how rattled she was, but Sarah felt sick to her stomach. Couldn’t they at least have gone back for some wire cutters and freed the goat so they could make sure its wounds were really as bad as they looked? Did it have to be slaughtered so offhandedly as that?

Lassie didn’t appear to mind, and Don was in full agreement with his brother, especially about leaving the corpse for the Ganlor sons to cope with. Bradley must have taken a good look at Sarah’s face, though.