Servants of the Map (27 page)

Then, not because Nora had asked, but because Michael looked frightened and pressed silently up to his side, Ned told them a little more about his voyage north. On a wooden ship, in the company of fourteen other men, he had sailed from Philadelphia. Past the mouth of the St. Lawrence, past the same cliffs he and Nora had first seen on the ship that brought them from Ireland; past Labrador and across Davis Strait to the coast of Greenland. On the
Narwhal,
which was the name of his ship, he’d crossed Baffin Bay just a few years after Nora had settled in Detroit,
and then had sailed down long empty sounds, in and out of ice-choked bays to a barren land where the expedition had met Esquimaux and where they’d found traces of the lost English expedition they’d been looking for. The captain had been difficult. But two friends had protected Ned: the ship’s naturalist, Erasmus Wells, and the surgeon, Dr. Boerhaave.

“They taught me the names of some animals and plants,” Ned said to Michael. Michael’s face had relaxed; the puppies’ heads peeped out from his collar. While the wind howled Ned talked about those men, who had given him books and shown him how to prepare and mount animal skins. Later the ship had been frozen into the ice.

The doctor died, Nora learned; Michael was asleep by then. The one Ned had liked so much. The captain disappeared. In a little boat, not much larger than the guide boats here, the naturalist had led Ned and the remaining men out of the arctic.

“I was sick the whole way,” Ned said. “We didn’t have anything to eat, and I had a fever. A piece of my nose rotted off.”

“How old were you then?” Nora asked.

“Twenty-one. Almost twenty-two.”

“I was twenty-three when I got to Detroit,” Nora said. “I missed you and Denis the way I’d miss my legs.”

“What journeys we made,” he said; while Nora thought,
How calm he is.
When they were young, when he was three and four and six and she was thirteen, fourteen, sixteen, she’d often known what he was about to do before he knew it himself. Time and again she’d reached for his collar before he fell into a stream, knocked a poisonous berry from his hand before he brought it to his mouth.

“After that,” she said, “why would you settle here? If I’d been where you were, I would have wanted to move someplace with palm trees.”

Ned spread his hands before him. “How can you explain these things? I love it here, it feels like home.” With his left hand he stroked the robe
protecting them from the icy drift. “I was so young when we left Ireland, I don’t remember that place like you do. I know this doesn’t look like home. But it
feels
right. In the winter it’s like the arctic, except that I’m safe.”

He stepped outside their cave to check on the horses, returning entirely cased in white. “The wind’s down,” he said. “The horses are rested, I think they’re ready to try the hill again. We’ll put Michael in the sleigh with his new friends and you and I can walk.”

Because Ned always refused to raise the inn’s modest rates, their summer earnings went largely to pay the staff and keep the buildings and boats in good repair. Everything else depended on what Ned made in the winter, when he went to work on the specimens he’d rough-cleaned earlier and stored in his shop.

Lumber, barrels of salt, heaps of tow and bales of straw, screws and bolts and wax and sperm oil. Behind Ned’s workbench a half-finished pheasant was wired to a sawed-off branch; a varnished board supported four partial deer legs, the hooves bent up to form a line of coat hooks. An owl, wings half spread, pounced on a mouse near a moose head awaiting its eyes, which hung in turn above an opossum suspended from its tail. Ned was particularly proud of the infants clinging to the mother possum’s fur, and of Mr. Hartley’s cherished hunting dog, which sat obediently, as it had so seldom sat in life.

“Making the mounts look good, making them look
real,”
he said to Nora, “—if I could, I’d keep them all here, instead of sending them off to some wealthy sportsman’s parlor.”

He smiled at Michael working beside him. Michael had shown a real talent for this and they spent long hours together, passing tow and hemp and scrapers and knives, hardly talking but both content.

“You don’t like your customers?” Nora asked.

“Some are better than others.” He wound another twist of twine
around the excelsior padding the neck of a deer. “But I wouldn’t work for most of them if we didn’t need the money. They’re too noisy. Too busy. Too rich.”

From the tray of eyes Michael held out to him, round pupils with irises tinted shades of gold and brown, he chose a pair.

“Pretty,” Nora said, plucking one from his palm and holding it up to the light.

“I need that,” he said, taking it back.

Even when they annoyed each other, they shared their love for Michael, as well as a sense of how much you could lose in a life and still survive. As they grew older they also agreed that they missed more and not less all the people they’d lost. Walking in the woods, Michael galloping far ahead of them after the hounds, Nora would recollect for Ned what their mother had looked like, stirring a pot of porridge with a baby on her lap and her hair folding over her face like a shawl. What their father had said when the first of the harvests failed.

“How do you remember those things?” Ned would ask.

“I had ten more years than you did,” Nora said. “With all of them.”

Ned pressed her hand but still couldn’t explain how much he missed not only his family but also his friends: Dr. Boerhaave, who’d drowned beneath the ice, and Erasmus, who’d gone back to the arctic. Copernicus, who had simply disappeared. In the space where he might have spoken, Nora thought how much she missed Francis, still, and the men she’d watched over in the hospital—Colm Larkin, particularly—and Fannie. She’d left Fannie in such a rush, she’d hardly told her good-bye. The letters they’d exchanged since then were little comfort; Fannies written words were terse and unrevealing, while Nora tended to run on too long, circling without ever quite reaching what she meant to say.

Trying to describe Fannie’s strength and good sense, and the pleasure of the afternoons they’d spent collecting herbs and roots together, filled Nora with a longing to learn what grew in the woods of her new home.
She found a little book, which helped her identify plants she hadn’t known in either Ireland or Detroit. The guides taught her others. Luke and Asa and Charlie and Fiske, Daniel, Reuben, Hubert—the men who looked after the thick-set sports who came, with their guns and rods, to the inn—were Nora’s first new friends. It pleased her to bring their dinners out to the table in the boathouse, where they ate separately, and to watch how kindly they treated Michael.

Moving among them, listening to their tales and watching them teach her son how to tie fishing lures, she’d sometimes think of the life she’d had so briefly with Francis. She was strong and healthy, her body alive although she was nearing fifty. No one touched her now but Michael and—a kiss on the cheek, a hand brushing her shoulder—Ned. Baffling to think how the rest had disappeared. Instead she had the respect of the guides, who noticed her cooking up poultices and began to come to her with their sprained wrists and smashed fingers and sore throats and boils. They saw her, she slowly realized, as she and the people in Cork-town had once seen Fannie. After a while she grew so busy doctoring them and their families that she neglected her work at the inn.

The invalids beginning to winter in the village kept her even busier; Ned had to hire an extra girl to pick up what Nora could no longer do. She bought a notebook, two good pencils, a little satchel in which to carry her supplies. She kept track of the invalids’ progress:
The young man on Harriet’s porch, still at an early stage but sent here by his parents after both his sisters died, has a little fever, every night, which has been going on for months. A dry cough that comes and goes; sometimes a sore throat, sometimes pains in his chest.

There were men who were worse, whose fevers seemed to be burning them up; and men who looked better, and coughed less, but who felt so tired and melancholy that they’d forgotten what it was like to anticipate something with pleasure. Once in a while someone hemorrhaged bright blood, foaming and terrifying. Then one of the women would come running
with ice chips to suck and a cloth packed with snow, which would lie heavily on the sick man’s chest: so cold.

Nora tried to explain her new work to Ned. “This is what I’m meant to
do,”
she said—although the swiftness with which it came about had taken her by surprise. “It’s what I learned while we were apart, it’s how I make use of myself.”

“As opposed to this, you mean?” He gestured ruefully at the room filled with mounted heads. “I won’t argue, if it’s what you want. But I wish …”

What did he wish? What she wished, perhaps: for the dead and vanished to return. Once, during a spring cleaning, she caught him staring out the window while holding a woman’s walking boot in his hand.

“What is that?” she asked. It looked as old as she felt; the black calf was so worn it was almost limp, and one of the buttons was missing.

“Isn’t it obvious?” He turned back to the window. “Erasmus left it with me,” he added, as if to keep her from asking more questions. “For safekeeping, the last time I saw him.”

By then she knew that, after their arctic trip, Erasmus Wells and a few other people had stayed for some months in the neighborhood of Ned’s first cabin. Then they’d headed north again, leaving Ned behind. “His wife’s?” she asked.

“His mother’s,” he said. He dropped the boot into her hand. “It got so damp over the winter, I thought I should set it outside to dry.”

Mold had grown on the tongue, beneath the laces. “I can sponge this off,” she said. “Does he want it back?”

“How would I know?” Ned said bitterly. “All I ever knew was that the mother’s name was Lavinia, and that she died when the boys were young. But I said I’d keep this for Erasmus, and so I have.”

“You’ve never heard from him?”

“Not from him, not from Copernicus. Not once in all these years.”

It was with them, she thought, as it had been for her with Francis and
then with Colm Larkin. Never a word. Where had all of them gone? Only she and Ned had returned to each other from the past.

Elizabeth enters the inn, as she always does, by way of the kitchen door. Through the empty room, past the draped chairs and appliances, the cold stove, the dim cabinets full of glassware; up the stairs to Ned’s private apartment.

“Elizabeth,” Ned says, stepping back to let her in. Still he holds himself quite straight, although he’s shrunk several inches. Next to the stove in the front room is the armchair where he spends much of the winter months. She sits across from him, in what used to be Nora’s chair.

“How are you feeling?” she asks.

“Very well.” He’d say this, she knows, unless he were dying.

“Your hands?”

“Not too bad.” He holds up the twisted joints for her inspection. “I worked all yesterday on a vixen for Mr. Claremont. And still they didn’t hurt much last night.”

“That’s good,” she says. She doesn’t ask to see the stuffed fox; for the last few years, since Ned’s vision began to fail and his arthritis has worsened, his mounts have been painfully shabby. The skins gape at the seams, the eyes don’t always match. Michael praises them, thanks Ned for doing them, and then destroys them secretly, substituting specimens of his own.

As Ned continues to describe his projects, she nods, remembering the quiet celebrations they used to hold in this room on Nora’s birthday. A ginger cake with lemon icing; mittens and a book as gifts. Surely Ned remembers these as well—but still he says nothing about his sister, talking instead about his new curved knife. When he pauses, she asks the
question that has brought her here: where might she seek a replacement for Mrs. Temple?

“I don’t know,” he says. “No one is ever going to be Nora.” Such a relief, the way he understands what she’s actually asking.

“No one seems to know anyone suitable,” she says. “And one of my boarders is failing, I’m going to need help soon.”

“Who is it?”

“Martin,” she says. “Martin Sawyer.”

“Oh, what a shame.” For a minute Ned stares past her. Then he says, “Why not look in New York again? You could have Clara do some preliminary interviewing for you, and send up the most promising, like she did with Mrs. MacDonald. That worked out fine.”

“It did,” Elizabeth says reluctantly. “But I hate to ask for her help unless I really need to. She gets so involved, and then she wears herself out.”

“She likes to feel useful,” Ned says. “When’s the last time you wrote her?”

“October, I suppose. Maybe September. She wrote me back right away.”

“Doesn’t she always?”

Ned and her mother, Elizabeth knows, have been corresponding for almost twenty years. Both of them over seventy now, but still Ned sits down at least once a week and describes for Clara everything interesting that’s happened at the inn, or at the cottage next door, or—when he’s privy to it—within Elizabeth’s boardinghouse. Clara responds, or so Ned claims, with reports of her daily life among what’s left of her family in New York. Elizabeth has never been sure what lies behind this long exchange of letters. Simple affection, loneliness, some romantic urge?

“If Martin—” she begins to say, but Ned swiftly interrupts her.

“I can’t believe things have gone so fast with him. We were fishing together in May.”

“I remember that,” Elizabeth says. Martin had been so proud of the new lures hung from his handsome vest. So delighted to present her with his pack-basket heavy with trout.

“I wish …” Ned says, before he falls silent. As he gazes out the window, Martin, in his room at Elizabeth’s house, gives up all pretense of sleep and squirms against his pillows until his head and shoulders are raised and his knees sloped sufficiently to support his writing board. Next to him are several pencils and a tablet of paper. Although this is strictly forbidden—one is not to read during the afternoon rest hours, not to chat, not to write, not even to turn the pages of a magazine—Martin has decided to write a letter.