The Rathbones (12 page)

A roar went up from the bow. Moses swung into the rigging from a window, breeches half laced, chest and feet bare, shouting orders. Boys and men ranged over the ropes, the cheeks of some still striped with shaving soap, coffee cups in hands, losing no time. Their compact bodies moved with economy and grace, swarming nimbly up the masts, forming lines in no time atop the yardarms. In one motion they let go all along the line. The thick white rolls dropped down, the rigging drew tight, and the sails swelled in three great arcs, straining against the anchor toward open sea.

On the foredeck a circle of boys squatted around a low fire that flared up blue, sparkling each time one of them dropped something into the flames. Hepzibah couldn’t see what it was from her window. They rocked on their heels in unison, chanting low, then stood as one body and stretched their arms up and sent a whoop into the sky. From the thick pine woods along the shore Hepzibah heard an answering whoop, and another, then spotted small fires flashing here and there among the trees. She heard the hoot of an owl and felt the pines exhaling warmth into the cool dark air.

Fish leapt around the ship. The sky was full of birds. On the horizon, far out at sea, spouts arced, gleaming, in the dark water.

The anchor streamed up over the stern, trailing long gouts of sea
wrack. The ship drew away. Across the open water Hepzibah could now see, halfway down the shore, what the ship had hidden, what made the glow she had mistaken for dawn: a great dark shed hunkered over the water, its mouth gaped open. The dull red glow came from inside. Two new ships were drawing near it in the dark, towing behind them two great black shapes.

To view a full-size version of this image, click
HERE
.

{in which Mordecai spills his story}

T
HE WORN WIVES
all waved goodbye, their faces a line of small moons against the gray rocks. Soon fog had covered them all, hiding Mouse Island, though I still heard the bleating of sheep.

We sailed this time on a sturdier craft, a merchant brig out of Pawcatuck, a two-master called the
Able
. Her captain, a bluff, cheerful seaman of middle years named Samuel Avery, traded up and down the coast, he told us, touching at Mouse Island once each season. We were fortunate that he had arrived so soon after we were marooned there.

Though only Euphemia and Thankful really talked, the others plying their shuttles mutely, I had been happy just to sit among my aunts with a lamb in my lap while they wove, which they did from first light until dusk every day. Mordecai had slept through much of our time on Mouse Island, exhausted by our escape from the man in blue, and I kept Euphemia’s stories of Moses and Hepzibah to myself. I relished having my own secrets to brood over, as Mordecai always had, though I knew I wouldn’t be able to resist telling him sooner or later.

Over the two weeks we spent on Mouse Island, I had carved out a
happy little niche for myself. I’d learned to card the heavy, oily wool that stood in baskets at one end of the loom, combing out lodged strands of weed and sea moss. Some days, when my aunts left their loom for a few hours to do necessary chores, I wound the wool for Amaziah as she spun on the wheel that sat by the hearth. Her small, nimble fingers coaxed glossy filaments from the unruly wool, which, like my aunts, had a silvery sheen. Other days, I fed the sheep in their little houses, pouring grain into long wooden bins into which they dipped their dark heads, and lingered to listen to them munch in the warm, close air of the houses. I shared breakfasts of tea and ship’s biscuits, and modest dinners of poached fish, which left my stomach still rumbling. I wondered where my aunts’ energy came from, with so meager a diet, but they rose (or, I should say, descended) every morning with the same steady vigor with which they completed each day’s work, the shuttles passing back and forth as quickly at dawn as at dusk.

I would have liked to stay longer on Mouse Island. But my cousin didn’t want to linger. Mordecai spent little time in the worn wives’ house, preferring instead to wander the shores of the little island, observing the birds that passed overhead. He developed a brief enthusiasm for the sheep, extracting a measuring tape from one of his bags and taking note of cranial diameters and abdominal girths, noting each measurement in a little book. Mordecai grimaced each time he scribbled; his wounded arm healed slowly and was still painful, the elbow swollen, the joint a purplish-black.

Now Mordecai and I sat high atop the forecastle, in the point of the bow, which afforded us a full view of the waters through which we sailed. A keen wind sprang up and blew the fog away, leaving a washed blue sky. Mouse Island was a few miles astern. Straight ahead, some ten miles south, lay our destination: the chain of islands that formed the Stark Archipelago. Mordecai had taken the captain aside before the
Able
unmoored and asked him to alter his route slightly. The
Able
would normally have stopped at Fisher’s Island first, he said, but this small change was no inconvenience at all. Mordecai had yet
to explain why we were heading for the archipelago, but I was happy to be sailing farther from Naiwayonk each moment. Behind us, due north, at the deepest point of the curved shoreline, I could just make out the shape of Rathbone House and the docks and masts of the harbor.

The air had a wintry edge, though it was still early autumn. Sharp gusts of wind blew Crow from perch to perch. He first hunched on the aft rail, then clung to the fore shrouds or the mizzenmast, making short sorties at my head to worry my hair. He didn’t care for my coiffure. My great-great-aunts had plaited my hair into a hundred braids, stiffened with sea salt, each end caught up in a shell. They had woven me gowns the green of sea bladder and sponge weed, one of algae-brown, one the blood-dark red of a sea urchin, and a pearly gray close to that of their own gowns. Considering that my normal dress had been a pin-tucked frock of no particular shape and a mouselike hue, I was more than pleased with gowns whose bodices were fitted to my own form and whose skirts spread wide. They’d also given me new boots of sheepskin with soft black tongues. Before we said goodbye, my great-great-aunts had taken me to a tide pool and shown me my reflection in the still water, my face strewn with starfish, my braids speckled with the small mollusks that clung to the rocks at the bottom of the pool. I felt myself color when Euphemia and Thankful spoke teasingly of suitors for me. My aunts’ smiling faces formed a ring around mine. Now, when I raised my arm to wave once more, I saw that the sky was the same shale blue as my sleeve; a storm was brewing in the north.

“Just last month the
Sabine
broke up here,” said our captain. “But do you see aught of it on those rocks?” On the eastern tip of Mouse Island the sharp rocks on which we had nearly smashed in the skiff disrupted the smooth curves of the island. My eye searched not for the flotsam and jetsam of a wreck but for a broken body in a blue coat. Nothing moved among the rocks except a few gulls poking between stones for stray smelt.

Captain Avery traded supplies for the wives’ fine wool (much in
demand, he said, among the ladies of Boston), such necessities as their austere ways required that the sea didn’t amply meet: fodder for the sheep, a few tools, fresh water. Their only extravagance was the satisfying of a craving for little seed cakes like those they’d eaten in girlhood. Someone in Avery’s village still remembered how to bake them. Apparently Rathbone House had once supplied the worn wives with what they needed. Euphemia told me that Mama used to bring treats for the wives—eggs, fruit from the mainland, and other small comforts—and sit with them, before I was born. I wondered at the idea of Mama visiting the wives. The picture it suggested was so unlike the Mama I knew. I imagined her pressing her gifts into my aunts’ little hands, chatting about the weather or the spring lambing. The gifts Mama had given me could be numbered on one hand: barrettes for my braid; a set of knucklebones; and a ring scribed with a simple pattern of waves, the last a gift on my twelfth birthday.

I had, not long after I turned twelve, begun my monthly courses. Mama had not told me what to expect. I had woken one night, the bed wet beneath me, and when I had seen that I was bleeding I ran to Mama’s room. I had long since learned not to bother her when I needed anything, but I was frightened enough that night to forget. I stood in front of her bed, twisting my nightgown around to show her the dark stain.

“Take it off.”

She took my nightgown in her hands and, sitting up straight in her bed, tore the gown into long strips from hem to neck and handed the rags back to me.

“Put those between your legs,” she said, and returned to sleep.

“Shake a leg, there. Bear off, bear off.”

I realized Captain Avery was speaking. He was giving orders to the mate, a small round man in faded ducks and a striped jersey, who hurried aloft. The captain peered toward the rocky point receding behind us, shaking his head.

“No, not a stick left of the
Sabine
. Your aunties have salvaged every scrap. They pick each ship’s carcass clean as crabs.”

I thought of the scarlet boards burning in the fireplace, warming my frock and my feet when we first arrived on Mouse Island. I remembered the partial letters on the painted wood: an
A
and part of an
S
, letters that must have once stood in the name
Sabine
.

“Have you … has anyone been recovered more recently from these waters?” I asked. I glanced toward Mordecai, but he sat with his head bent over some book, paying me no mind.

The captain considered his answer, running a hand over his whiskery face. Though the
Able
was as neat as it could well be, the captain was not particular about his own appearance. He shook his head.

“No, but ships have broken their backs on these rocks once or twice each year for as long as I can remember. The entire crew of the
Sabine
showed up in the village next day, down at Lord’s Point. Said they lost their bearings in the fog. That they were pulled out of the water by a passing sloop from Gloucester—what business, I ask, has a sloop from Gloucester this far south?—and set down again on their own dock. Don’t know how they all survived. None dead—not even cut up on those rocks. And not a mark on them. I asked them myself, not two days later, down at the alehouse. They only went red and shook their heads, the lot of them.”