The Rathbones (47 page)

I dipped my flickering candle into the flame on Mordecai’s table. He was looking up at me; I tried to allow no expression to cross my face. His forehead, where he had struck it on the ceiling of the cave, was swollen as though he had just struck it—it had been two days since I had seen him, though it seemed longer. The dark bruise had spread across his forehead and down one cheek, blotched black and purple; I couldn’t help but think of Erastus’s mottled sisters. He was otherwise as pale as he’d ever been before our journey. He had been so alive during our time on the
Able
, when we swam together, as though the sea itself had cured him of all his ills. Now his irises had washed nearly to white. His cloud of hair had flattened to a few thin white strands. He leaned heavily on his arms as he wrote, his pen rasping against the paper.

He looked up at me briefly, with a slight smile, and continued writing.

“I was not sure you would find your way here,” he said.

“The song.”

His pen stopped. He sat up straight, then slumped back in his chair, his eyes turned up.

“Oh yes. The song. How does it go again? ‘Father, Father, sail a ship …’ ”

Mordecai sang an octave higher than his speaking voice, in the high thin tone that I had taken for a boy’s, for Gideon’s. He sang the song, staring up at the hull over us, from start to finish. It had been Mordecai all along. I reached for a chair and sat heavily down. I waited to speak until I could keep my voice from breaking.

“Why? Why did you pretend to be him?”

He continued to stare up for a few moments more, then sat straight, picking up his pen, leaning again over his journal.

“Oh, that I could never do, Mercy.” He smoothed open the chart in the center of his journal, unfolding it so that it draped over the edge of the table and hung to the floor. “I did try, though. I was not permitted on the dock or on board to learn the necessary skills, but I studied them as best I could, in my books.” He picked up a seaman’s manual from the pile nearest him and flipped through its pages. Dozens of pictures of ships flashed by. “I knew the name of every part of the ship, each piece of rigging. I knew more of navigation than Gideon, as much as your papa, though I was never given the chance to employ it. I was not granted the advantage of invigorating exercise in fresh air, as was your brother, but I could have become as hale and strong had I been given opportunity.” He drew himself up and gave me a defiant look. “Captain Avery permitted me to handle the
Able
’s dinghy on the way here. Certainly it is no three-master, but nevertheless I am not entirely without skills.” I wondered how the captain had managed to let Mordecai think he had handled the boat.

He really believed that he could have thrived, given the chance. If he hadn’t, he couldn’t have flourished so in our time on the
Able
, however short. And I had half believed it myself. I’d believed he’d sailed with Papa to the Arctic and back.

“But when we were with Captain Avery, and you spoke of the icebergs, of the polar bear … I was sure you had been there yourself.”

He smiled, shaking his head, then grunted and put a hand gingerly to his forehead. “I begged and begged your mama to be allowed to go to sea, on those rare occasions when she came to the attic. She always denied me.” He cleaned his pen on a napkin and lay it down. “And Uncle Benadam clearly did not consider me seaworthy.”

Mordecai’s journal slid to the floor. He stared down at it, leaned stiffly and picked it up, and slowly closed the cover.

“I sometimes believed that I had been on every voyage, so clearly did I imagine them. I experienced each mile more than did Gideon,
though he was the one who sailed, he the one who took each trip for granted, who knew nothing of waiting and wanting.” Mordecai pushed away his books and pens and lay his head on the table, his face turned away.

I sat next to him and took his hand. It felt fleshless, dry and hot.

“Mama didn’t mean to hurt
you
, Mordecai.” I let go of his hand and looked away. “Or my brother.”

Mordecai turned his face slowly back. “What do you mean?”

“Don’t you remember what you told me, back in Circe’s cave?”

He looked at me blankly.

“Back at the cave. You told me my brother was in Mama’s way. That she had made a bed for him in a barrel. She had stuffed him in a barrel, you said.”

“Oh, Mercy.” Mordecai’s face sagged first, then his body followed. He slumped, defeated, over the table. “I should never have drunk from that stream.” He hesitated, then reached for my hand and awkwardly stroked it; his own hand was trembling. “I didn’t want you to ever have to find out. I tried my best to keep it from you, I thought I had. I thought I got you away before you saw.”

I stared back at him. Mordecai crossed his arms over his chest and squeezed them tightly, as though he were cold, and closed his eyes.

“I saw her. I see it all the time, your mama, standing in front of that barrel. Your brother’s face, staring up out of the brine. She put him there. She killed him.”

“No. No. She was taking him out.”

Mordecai’s eyes sprang open and he stared at me.

I reached into the pocket of my gown and held up the last thing Crow had flown down to me from the walk the night before. A packet of oilcloth, which I unwrapped to reveal a small thick book, sheathed in whale ivory.

“This house still hides a few mementos you haven’t discovered. I found this one under the bones, at the bottom of the trunk.”

Mordecai gazed at the little book covetously. Its covers were made from thin sections of a sperm tooth, tapering to a point. The pages
had been trimmed to the same shape. It was hinged with soft, knobby gray leather—the whale’s skin—and on its smooth face nothing was graven. Mordecai reached out for the book; I snatched it back and put it in my pocket.

I told him how Gideon had been salted and sent home. Not on Papa’s ship; the
Verity
didn’t return then, and never had since. The barrel had been passed to a merchantman at sea and delivered to Naiwayonk by a few of its crew, in a jolly boat.

I told him how, after Mordecai had taken me away, Mama had pulled Gideon out of the barrel. I didn’t know how she had gotten him up to the walk; perhaps Larboard and Starboard helped, though she was always so strong, she might have carried him herself. She did not describe every detail, but I could picture it all easily enough: Mama hauling my brother, grunting, from the barrel. The brine sloshing; a thud and a wet slap. Mama sitting on the floor in a pool of brine, my brother lying across her legs, wrapped in a length of cloth. Her hands are busy and she speaks to herself. She is sewing, stitching the cloth in a long neat seam up the front of my brother, with an awl and a length of line. At his feet, two round lumps under the cloth—two cannon shot Mama has put there to weigh him down, as men are weighted for burial at sea, so that their bodies will sink. The two shot must have remained at the bottom of the trunk on the walk, too heavy for Crow to carry down to me along with Gideon’s bones.

Mordecai sat back, sighing. He sat quietly for a while, fingering the rope on a crate that stood nearby, avoiding my eyes.

“Perhaps … perhaps I wanted to think your mama had killed Gideon. And wanted you to believe it, too.” He pushed a drift of hair from his eyes and looked at me. “She didn’t murder Gideon, but she murdered me.”

Crow squawked from his perch on the bust’s head, one yellow eye fixed on Mordecai. Mordecai felt among his papers, found a dried plover egg, and tossed it up to Crow, who deftly beaked it and swallowed it whole.

“I was happy when he drowned, happy to see that barrel, to know
that he would spend his days whitening in a box as I have all these years.”

He had begun to shiver. I pulled off my shawl and draped it over his shoulders. He lay his head back down.

“Mama did care for you, Mordecai. I know she did.”

“Oh yes. She held me in such high regard that she never troubled me with her company.”

I pulled a shriveled starfish from beneath a book and twirled it between my fingers. “Don’t you remember walking along the beach and playing in the surf when you were small?”

He raised his head a little from the table and squinted at me.

“Certainly I remember. One of the old ones used to take me. Bemus, I think.”

“It wasn’t Bemus. It was Mama. She walked you along the beach every day, when you were very young. She would have worn pale blue in those days, and she held a black parasol over you against the sun.”

A different light came into Mordecai’s eyes. I could see him reluctantly casting back, trying to remember. He wanted to hear something good about Mama, and yet he didn’t.

Mordecai turned his head and stared up at the hull. His expression had lost its wary look, his eyes had softened. The skin around the sockets was drawn and dark. He looked as old as I had once believed he was.

“I have a lesson for you, Mordecai.”

Without lifting his head, he looked up at me with a wan smile.

“The sperm’s favored diet?”

I smiled back, no more brightly than him.

“Squid and skate are preferred … No. A different sort of lesson. Are you sure you want to hear?”

His eyes flashed a little. He remembered, too, when he had asked me that question, when he had first told me about the man in blue and Mama.

“It would be better if I read to you.”

I led him to his berth and helped him lie down, tucking him tight
under the blankets. I set a beaker to boil for tea. Then I pulled a chair close and settled myself, smoothing the skirt of my gown and pressing the little book open so that it would lie flat in my lap. The pages were closely covered in indigo ink, in Mama’s long, impatient hand, the words slanting off and away, sometimes leaping off the page altogether.

I called Crow down from the bust to my shoulder, where he folded his wings and tucked his beak. I flipped through the diary and chose a few entries, and began to read.