The Rathbones (19 page)

Mordecai peered more closely at the paper. His smile faltered.

“I see, however, that there are a few slight variances. Could I have neglected to adequately account for the equatorial currents? No, no, but certainly this declivity at forty-one degrees and thirty-three minutes north, seventy degrees and ninety-two minutes west may have …” He muttered over the route for a minute or two more, pulling a pencil from his pocket and jotting tiny notes on the edge of the map, then looked up, eyes shining. “We have only just missed them! According to my adjusted calculations, the whales are now some fifty-five leagues north of us, no more than sixty. We will catch them up! Surely Captain Avery will not object to carrying us a bit farther … ah!” Mordecai jumped up, squinting at the sky. “Could that be
Himantopus
now? I was sure I spied one earlier, this may be a straggler from the flock.”

A bedraggled gull passed over us. I remembered Mordecai scanning the sky over the
Able
each time any seabird flew by.

Beyond the island, the twilight sky was the color of lead, the sea flat and oily. Not a whitecap was to be seen, let alone a whale. My skin began to tingle and a heaviness settled into my limbs.

Though Mordecai could name any fish or seabird’s rank in phylum or species in a flash, I was beginning to understand that he knew nothing of what they swam in and flew over. He did not account for those things that could not be mapped: the vagaries of the wind or a sudden storm that might force a pod of whales deeper, slower; a freak of cold threading up from the deep to send a school of squid spiraling away from the whales, the whales hurrying after, away from Mordecai’s precious route. Having lived indoors his whole life, he was so untuned to the sea and its ways. Though I had only rowed my skiff
along the shore, I had, I thought, more sense of the sea. I would never believe, as Mordecai seemed to, that a ship would stop and wait for us, would stand still in the sea; that the whales, too, might stop and tread water, waiting. There was one more thing for which Mordecai did not account, which trumped all the others: how a man could choose to leave his family alone for nearly ten long years. Who was to say he was on the sea at all? Or that any whales remained?

It was easy now to wonder how I could have ever believed that Papa was on his way home. I had wanted to believe, allowed myself to believe.

I reached over and picked up the book of birds and looked inside the cover; it had been published in 1836. Maybe whales had filled the sea twenty-three years ago; maybe stilts had flown over them in a shadowing host.

Mordecai opened another book, smiling, marble dust drifting from the temple’s ceiling to powder his hair as he flipped the pages. He looked so happy. In his head was a misty picture of Papa sailing straight through gentle seas, a herd of sperm swimming ahead of him in a neat line within easy reach, eager for the lance and the harpoon.

I thought of the last crates my father had sent, which had held only pieces of land-bound creatures: the tusk of a pachyderm born deep in Rhodesia; the wing of a condor that, when spread, covered me. No trace of the sea, no sand, no wisp of kelp. I looked into Mordecai’s earnest face.

“Cousin, have you ever considered that Papa may have given up the sea? Think of the crates. The pachyderm’s tusk. The dik-dik.”

“Nonsense.” Mordecai sniffed. “He might easily have purchased such specimens from other sailormen in his rovings, or in ports. He couldn’t, wouldn’t, forsake the worthiest of foes.”

I looked across the dry little isle. The tide had by then begun to encircle it. I remembered how the latter emperors of Rome had sent their enemies and unruly daughters away to such places as this, accompanied only by one idiot or deaf-mute servant instructed to slowly starve or poison his charge.

The traced map lay on top of Mordecai’s stack of books. I picked it up and lay it in my lap, smoothing the thin paper carefully. I thought of the map Mama and I had made in her room, many years ago. Her face had been lit by candles, a softer light than that of sperm oil, which burns a clear, bright white, and the fire had glowed warm in the hearth. She wore a gown of sunlit blue, and her hair lay pale and loose on her shoulders. She pulled my chair close to hers and leaned in to show me a running stitch on the sampler on my knee, patiently correcting my meandering lines of thread. Her skin smelled of sharp lavender and the piney soap she liked. She took me up on her lap and held me close, my back against her breast. I leaned and ran my fingers over what she stitched on her frame: an image of the globe, the kind that is like the skin of an orange, cut and spread flat—glossy continents of silk thread, green and sand and russet, oceans chain-stitched in long smooth waves. She spoke the names of the places to which Papa had sailed.

“The Marquesas.”

She took my hand in hers and we pricked the place with her needle.

“New Caledonia. Fiji. Tonga.”

On each island we made an
X
of thread.

Mordecai plucked the map from my hand, startling me from my reverie. He placed the map carefully between two pages of
Birds of Stream and Shore
and slapped it shut.

“I will make all of the arrangements. Captain Avery will carry us north. I will need to inquire as to our current speed, but certainly we will make up the lost time in a few days.” He shot me a bright, triumphant look. “Then we will join your papa in pursuit of the whales! We will sail with him all the way north, to where the route of the sperm turns to circle back again: the southwest tip of Greenland, just off Qaqortoq.” He slid his stolen books into the portfolio and started to tie the strings.

Watching his hands, I began to see another pair of hands, tying not strings but a rope, large hands guiding my own through the turns of some complex knot. I had always thought the sailors on the dock
taught me, but now I was sure it had been Papa. I remembered how I’d sat in his lap, his arms wrapped around me to guide my hands. The hard skin of his palms, brown arms whitened by salt. How he smelled of the salt sea with a tinge of burned tar, and a clean oily smell, like the inside of the empty shells that wash up on the beach. Running my finger along his hand, tracing a deep line on the map of his palm. Now, sitting next to Mordecai, I felt a finger touch my own palm. My heart turned over in my chest. I jumped up, rubbing my hand, and began to pace back and forth in the temple.

I wanted only to be distracted from that touch on my hand, to keep Mordecai talking. “Greenland.” I tried to remember the entry in the
G
encyclopedia at home. “Isn’t Greenland where the tides race in so fast that ships are thrown onto the rocks and broken to kindling?”

Mordecai eyed me sidelong.

“Actually … I believe you’re thinking not of Greenland but of the Bay of Fundy, in the province of Nova Scotia. They are not all that far from each other. Scarcely two thousand miles, a perfectly understandable error. The sea rises from, I believe, 2.4 feet at low tide to 23 feet at high. Astonishing. In fact, during the 12.4-hour tidal period, 115 billion tons of water flow in and out. The indigenous people, the Mi’kmaq Nation, claim that the tides are caused by a vast whale splashing in the water.”

My hand was itching and sweaty. I ran down the temple steps, into the trees.

Another image came then, unbidden: the man in blue, chasing me through Rathbone House. I squeezed my eyes shut but there he was. Grasping the collar of my gown, holding me up to examine me. He had gasped at something he had felt while running a broad finger along my spine. The birthmark that floated among the freckles on my back, shaped like a ship. He’d recognized it, because he had seen and felt it years before, on infant skin. He wasn’t some strange man. He was my papa.

My legs turned to water and I sat hard on the ground. The bright landscape around me turned to black.

One time when Mama let me undo her hair, when I was much younger, she told me that I was born at night while the owls were out hunting, when Papa was far out at sea.
He was so far away that it was day where he was, and he tried to look beyond the sun, into the dark behind it, to see you
. Later, in the atlas, Mordecai showed me where my father’s ship had been when I was born, pointing to two lines crossing in the deepest blue deep of the Indian Ocean, on the far side of the world. I used to dream that if I could have dropped a line straight from my cradle with a lead plumb, down through the center of the earth, that the molten core might transform it into an anchor that would catch his ship and hold it fast, and I could draw him home to me, pull by pull, hand over hand.

I lay down and buried my face in my hands. Crow landed on my shoulder, pushing a soft wing against my neck. That voice in the hall, calling out for me to wait—remembered from a dream, I had thought. Bawling out my name from the sea, as Mordecai and I struggled to get away. I must have heard it at least once before. My father must have visited me, to know the ship that floated on my back, must have spoken my name at least once for me to remember the sound of his voice.

I didn’t recognize him that night on the walk. He hadn’t known me either, at first. Maybe he was shocked at the way I looked, not like Mama but like one of the old Rathbones, and thought I was someone else’s child. Or surprised that I was so old and still so small.

After a while I walked slowly back to the temple and sat on a step, staring down at the map, which Mordecai had laid aside while he eagerly paged through other books. On the right of the map, across the Atlantic, only a narrow strip of the western coast of all the great expanse of Africa was visible. I wished I could see farther into the interior, could slip under the border and find some dark and coastless place. I wished Papa had gone there and stayed there, far from the ocean, far from the walk where he rutted Mama and left again. And not just once. Mordecai said he had spied on them many times over the years. Papa had been in the house again and again and never
stayed, never spoke to me. Why had he come back now? I wished that he had stayed away altogether and found a desert whose dry swells would make another kind of sea, one from which he could never sail again.

I knew then that I must tell Mordecai about Papa. That he had found his uncle after all, not on some distant misty ship but in Rathbone House. I would crush Mordecai’s triumph at having discovered Papa’s true and noble path.

What would he say when I told him that the man in blue was not some mysterious stranger but Benadam Gale himself? It must have been hard enough for Mordecai to think that Mama had put him in the attic so that her husband wouldn’t know of her adultery. But there was no Captain Tayles. I couldn’t think why Mama would have called Papa that. Mordecai must have misheard.

Mama had no real reason to have put Mordecai in the attic and left him there, alone. And his uncle Benadam knew and didn’t care. Or maybe he was ignorant, since he never visited either Mordecai or me. It was hard to say which was worse.

Mordecai snatched the map away, prattling on again about longitudes and latitudes and the details of his route. Through his drone I heard a clipping sound and saw a movement on the other side of the temple. A man knelt there among the fallen columns, snipping the tufts of grass that sprouted between the paving stones with a pair of shears. Rather than a gardener’s smock, he wore a short toga such as the Greeks wore, and on his head a garland woven of mountain laurel. He lifted his face to us and I saw by the white cast of his irises that he was blind.

“Visitors, am I right? I’d know your voices, otherwise. Family never comes anymore, they’re usually at that Chinee gewgaw now. This one was always my favorite, so I keep it up. It doesn’t take much to keep it in trim.” I watched him work. With his free hand he constantly felt what he couldn’t see. He didn’t clip the tufts of grass smooth but worked to make them more unkempt. After a few minutes he put aside his shears and lifted a basket full of dead leaves, scattering them
over the stones. “The Italian Grotto, though”—he gestured with his shears back toward the main island, toward a dark opening in a cluster of jagged rocks near the shore—“I’ve let that go. Never liked crawling around in them caves. Too damp.” He stood to feel along a twist of the vine entwining a column, his fingers running over a few wizened fruits. “Besides, I’m fond of the olives. Though there’s few enough I can coax out of this soil, and the birds take most all of them.”

“Birds? What sort of birds?” Mordecai’s head snapped up.

The gardener jerked his head back over his shoulder, toward a tall poplar nearby; among its branches I could see dark forms and hear munching sounds and low cackles. “Oh. Those.” Mordecai snorted and returned to his map.

Crow, who had been napping on my shoulder, was now wide awake and uneasy, shifting from foot to foot, speaking to himself in a low chatter, and flicking his wings. From between the branches of the poplar a large glossy crow emerged, in its beak a fat olive, and stepped onto a low bough that began to bounce. A female, I thought. Crow hopped down from my shoulder, snatched a lizard from a tuft of grass, and flew to an unbroken stretch of pediment at the top of the temple, along which he began to strut, the lizard dangling from his beak.

The gardener clutched his vine. “This is all they’ve left me. Not even a jar’s worth.”

Mordecai looked up with an absent air. “It is simple enough to keep them away. You need only scatter the droppings of a natural rival, such as the starling, or the jackdaw, any of the
Gracula
, on the stones, and they will keep well away from your vines.”

The man rose, brushed his hands on his toga, and made his way along the columns to where Mordecai sat. He felt for Mordecai’s hand, grasped it, and pumped vigorously. “Sir, I’m very grateful. Very grateful indeed.” Mordecai, looking a little startled, smiled, then turned back to his book.

Crow flew up to join the female on her branch, whether in hope of an olive or her favors I wasn’t sure.

“Beg pardon, I couldn’t help overhearing, sir. You mentioned looking for a Captain Gale? I may be able to lend you a hand.”