May: Daughters of the Sea #2 (7 page)

“But there’s a May Day dance in May, and of course you have to come to that one. I mean, May being your name and all. And another one in June.”

May tossed a beach pebble into the surf. “But I don’t want to jinx anything. I don’t want a line squall driving a ship onto The Bones.”

“Oh, I think except for that storm last month you’ve done pretty well out here on Egg Rock. I’d say you got Saint Anthony keeping an eye on you.”

An image flashed in May’s mind: the slightly tipped carved figure of the saint on that night of her father’s accident. Was it possible that this was where the key to the small closet had been hidden?

May jumped up.

“I have to go, Rudd. Just remembered that I haven’t trimmed the wicks … and — and —”

“Will you come to the dance?”

She was about to say she had to ask her mother, but then she remembered that Zeeba wasn’t her mother. What did she care what Zeeba thought? She would never forget how Zeeba’s eyes had gleamed when she had spat out those three words
“the devil—exactly!”
If she was a horrid girl she might as well start acting like one, and going to the dance without permission would constitute colossal disobedience. “Yes, I’ll come! But I can’t get home too late.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll get Gus’s skiff, the one I got to get out here today, and sail you there and back.”

“Gus?”

“Gus Bridges, captain of the
Sea Hound.
I’m working for him now.”

“You’re not with Captain Haskell anymore?”

“Not for now. He just lobsters. I like going offshore for sword. Whole different game.” His eyes glittered fiercely. “Going after swordfish—now, that’s fishing!

And that’s where the money is! Catching the big ones.”

“Oh,” May said. For some reason she found his words unsettling. “Well, I really have to go,” she said, thinking of the little closet in the watch room. She felt as if it were waiting for her.

T
HE FIGURE OF
S
AINT
A
NTHONY
was exactly as she remembered, tipped slightly to one side. And now as she stood just beneath it, between the Fresnel lens and the panel that separated the two east-facing windows, she could see something else she had never noticed. There was a faint seam in the panel. When she reached up and took down the Saint Anthony figure she saw that there was the outline of a rectangle with a tiny hole in the center. She narrowed her eyes. The hole was no bigger in diameter than an embroidery needle. She took out a hairpin and stuck it into the hole, wiggled it a bit, then gave a gentle tug. The rectangle came out and behind it hung a brass key.
This is it!
she thought. She took the key, and even just holding
it gave her a thrill. Yet as she crept down the ladder, the fluttering in her stomach hardened into a knot. Gar had gone to a great deal of trouble to hide the key. What could be the reason for all the secrecy?

She reached the service area and scurried over to the small closet. She fit the key into the keyhole, then turned it, praying that the door wouldn’t creak. It did not but seemed to glide open with very little effort on her part. A wonderful fragrance floated from the dark shadows of the closet. It reminded her of something, something she had forgotten entirely.

She had been barely conscious of squeezing her eyes shut when she first opened the small door and inhaled the wonderful rimy sea smell. Now she was almost afraid to open them, but she did and peered inside. There was a chest. It looked like an ordinary sea chest, but then she noticed the carving of three small mermaids on the front. Carefully she pulled the chest from the closet. She did not want to make any noise. She ran her hand over the letters carved on the lid of the chest—HMS
Resolute. It must be British,
May thought. HMS stood for Her
Majesty’s Ship.

May ran her hand over the carving of the three mermaids. As she traced over their tails with her finger, May felt a rush of feelings — a strange sort of peacefulness as if something had been found, and yet a deep pang of loss—something gone, irretrievably gone. She was engulfed by an impenetrable isolation, a feeling of being cut off from everything she had ever known or trusted and yet at the same time connected to something vital, hauntingly familiar, and intensely intimate.

Cautiously she lifted the lid of the sea chest and found herself peering into a disappointing emptiness. She was not sure what she had expected, but despite its depth there were only a few articles. A neatly folded, tattered-looking gray blanket, a piece torn from a newspaper, a yellow envelope addressed to Mr. Edgar Plum, and a folded navigational chart.

The emptiness of the chest shocked her, embarrassed her, mocked her hopes. These paltry articles seemed like shabby relics of the Plums’ mundane lighthouse existence. How could they offer clues into the great mystery that she felt at the very center of her being?

May took out the gray blanket first and pressed it to her nose. It was as if she were inhaling the scent that came from the very heart of the sea. Yet there was another scent there. Something warm and almost milky. She had not realized it, but tears had begun to roll down her face. She carefully unfolded the blanket. It had several holes and in many other places it had begun to unravel. She was just about to ask herself why anyone would keep such a thing when she spotted a red glint enmeshed in the threads of one frayed patch. She took the same hairpin she had used before and plucked at the bright red thread. “But it’s not a thread!” she whispered to herself. It was hair. Her own hair, yet it was infinitely softer. Baby hair! Was this the blanket her father had brought her back in from her dead mother down the coast? It must be. But why would he keep it locked away? Her face was wet with tears. “Why, Pa? Why?” she whispered to herself, and rocked back and forth, clutching the blanket.

Reluctantly she set the blanket back in the chest just as she had found it and took out the letter, dated
June 20, 1883. The return address was the Revenue Cutter Service.

May read the letter again, staring down at the words on the page, and wondered why Gar had written. Why did he want to know where the
Resolute
had sunk? Carefully, May replaced the letter, then reached in for the chart. When she unfolded it she realized that there were two charts. One depicted Georges Bank and the Nantucket Shoals. The second chart
went from Boston Light to Cape Ann: the coastline south of Maine. She saw faint pencil markings. There was an ? and a question mark on the first chart near a region in the Nantucket Shoals called Cultivator Shoals at 41°20’ N and 68°12’ W. She brought the chart closer and squinted. May was not ignorant of navigational charts. She understood that the tiny numbers marked the depths in fathoms and that the direction and the average velocities of currents were indicated by the purple arrows. Someone had drawn lines extending out from these arrows as if to suggest a continuation of a current.

On the first chart there were two more x’s without question marks—one on the Nantucket Shoals and one precisely at the longitude/latitude of 41°36’ N and 70°36’ W, the location referred to in the letter. From the position of these three sets of x’s, lines were drawn that followed the current arrows. It made a fairly tight circle. But then she saw another very dim line, hardly visible, that stretched toward the north and east. When she took out the second chart she could see that a similar line had been drawn picking
up where the line on the first chart had ended at Boston Light. The pencil markings suggested an invisible current that might flow down east, toward Maine. She moved her finger along the chart, and there she found a single ? on Simon’s Ledge. “Simon’s Ledge,” she whispered. “Why?”

She was sure the charts and the blanket were all somehow connected to her and her birth mother. It was a strange puzzle, but the central piece, the keystone, was the strand of red hair that wove it all together. The knowledge dawned on her slowly, like a radiance beginning to illuminate her brain.
All of these things are linked to me!

May put away the articles in the chest just as she had found them. She even poked the little strand of hair back into the frayed blanket. Despite the lack of real evidence, the very air within the chest seemed to swirl with whispers, with deep, rich secrets. She lay her cheek against the lid as if to listen. Then she got up and placed the key back into the panel behind the Saint Anthony figure and gave the saint a slight pat to thank him, although she was
not sure for what. The chest only compounded the mystery for her. She had to figure out the meaning of the things in the chest. Figure out where she had come from and where she might go. If she didn’t belong here with Hepzibah and Gar, she must belong somewhere.

After replacing the key, May set herself to washing the windows of the lantern room. It was one of those mindless tasks that freed her brain to think.

While she washed the panes, she reviewed the paltry information she had picked up. Why was her father so afraid of her entering the water? It was a real fear; he had threatened—albeit mildly—to send her to Bridgeton or Augusta. Her second question—the most important one—Who was her birth mother? Was it some woman who had died down the coast or beyond Winter Harbor? And this led to the third question—Where was she born?

Her mind went back to the sea chest, beguiling in its emptiness. Gar must have been figuring out the path, the tracks that the wreckage of the
Resolute
had taken. Her father hadn’t lied exactly when he had said she had been brought from down the coast—but it was far beyond Crockett Cove. And far from land. If she wanted to discover where she really came from, she needed to find the wrecked ship.

N
O ONE WAS AT THE DESK
when May came through the door of the library. She’d picked up the new chimney and rushed across town.

“Miss Lowe,” she called out. She was impatient. She had thought all night about how she would go about her research and was eager to start. It was exciting. For the first time ever, May was embarking on a voyage—she who had never gone any farther than Bath.

She heard a rustling in the back.

“Be right with you!” A few seconds later Jean Lowe came through a door behind her desk, carrying a stack of books.

“May, how good to see you! I heard about your father’s injury. Quite a night you had out there when that schooner snagged on The Bones!”

“Yes, quite a night.” Although May was not so much thinking of that evening but of yesterday. The list of questions in her head seemed so big and unanswerable. But she had awakened that morning with a new set of questions, specific questions about the faint pencil marks on the charts.

“Miss Lowe, do you have any books about currents?”

“Currents?”

“Yes, ocean currents and winds?”

“Now, how odd you should ask.” Miss Lowe pushed up her spectacles, which had slipped down her nose, then scratched her head. Her fingers disappeared into the frizzy gray mass of hair that was pinned up and seemed to hover above her head like a storm cloud suddenly rolled in from offshore. “There was just a young man in here earlier asking for books on the same subject. I directed him to Bowditch’s book of pilot charts over at the chandlery and got him a few other volumes. But I entirely forgot
about one that would have been helpful to him and I guess to you.” Her blue eyes sparkled from behind the lenses of her spectacles. “Maury!”

“Who?”

“Matthew Fontaine Maury, really much better than the pilot charts I recommended for that young Harvard man. He’s here conducting some research—tides, stars, and many things I don’t understand.” She waved her hand as if to dismiss an immense body of knowledge that was hopelessly beyond her. “Follow me.” Miss Lowe scurried around the end of the desk, and May followed her to the far side of the library. Miss Lowe turned into an aisle and began threading her way through two tall rows of bookshelves. She was talking a mile a minute as May followed.

“You see, Matthew Fontaine Maury was a Christian naval officer from somewhere down south. Virginia, maybe. He loved to read the Bible. But he had some doubts about how accurate it really was, particularly when it came to matters of the ocean and the winds. Could you rely on it word for word? You know, the
biblical references to the sea.” She paused and began to walk slower as she looked up and ran her hands lightly over a row of books at shoulder height, whispering softly to herself—“Celestial navigation, compass boxing.” There were indeed dozens of books on both sides of the aisle pertaining to maritime subjects.