The Rathbones (29 page)

As I finished sketching little Claudia under her mother, my eye went to the faint gray smudge next to me on the chart, where I had erased my brother. I now tried to draw that bright face I had seen so clearly when the gardener told me about Papa and his boy. When I had finished, I held the page away from me and squinted at the drawing; he looked much like me.

“If you ask me, they should never have married those girls … no offense to you, of course, miss.” The captain tipped his hat. “Greedy, they were. That’s when things started to go bad for the Rathbones. And for the Starks. They sold all that beauty away and have been trying to buy it back ever since. Cursed, is what I’d call it.”

“Nonsense.” Mordecai’s voice floated down from above, startling me. I hadn’t realized he was listening. He waved an open book at me. “I’ve been reading more of this Austrian fellow, Mendel, and his pea plants. The Starks look the way they do because of inborn characteristics that emerged, not the workings of fate.” He sniffed and turned back to his book.

“But what about the Rathbone daughters? What about Claudia and Julia and Sophia? What happened to them, Captain?”

The captain considered, finishing a seam and knotting it off. He tugged at the brim of his hat.

“I suppose one of them must have been your grandmother. Not sure which one, though. You’d have to ask your mother.”

“Captain Avery, do you know any of my family … of my living family, that is? Have you met my mother and father?”

I was sitting next to the captain as he mended the sail. He looked down at the seam he had just finished and ran a thumb along it, then looked up at me. His sharp mariner’s eye softened and he laid a hand on my head.

“No, Miss Rathbone. No, I don’t know them.”

He seemed to want to say more but didn’t. He stroked my hair for a few moments, his eyes staring off. His arm was warm against mine, smelling of wet wool and pipe smoke. He straightened up and, briskly patting my head, folded his mended sail and went off to his cabin.

I sat watching the mate at work in the rigging. The weather was fair, the cold autumn winds that had wound through the Stark Archipelago having given way to some warmer surge of the Gulf Stream from the south, and the mate whistled as he clambered spiderlike over the lines above me. He moved so easily in his cotton shirt and wide sailor trousers, leaping from mast to top or running up and down the lines. I watched him for a while, then descended to the hold, to the little cabin the captain had curtained off for me, returning with a thick woolen jumper the wives had woven for Mordecai.

“Mr. Beebe? Mr. Beebe, wouldn’t this look well with your trousers?” I held up the jumper, a deep blue, by its sleeves. The mate paused in the middle of winding a line around a clamp and slid down the mainmast. He pulled his cap off and nodded at me, one eye on the jumper, the other on Crow, who sat, as usual, on my shoulder. The mate didn’t like Crow. He said it was unnatural for crows to go to sea, that they feared the ocean, but Crow had shown no signs of discontent. He had, in fact, become as deft a marksman as the seabirds that wheeled
around the ship, plummeting straight down and pulling up at the last instant a squirming herring or mackerel in their beaks.

“Call me Zeke, miss.” The mate grinned and ran a hand repeatedly over a cowlick that only popped up again.

“Mr. Beebe, would you be willing to make a trade with me?” I pointed to his trousers of salt-softened blue duck.

The mate began to unlace the front of his trousers.

“No, please … don’t you have another pair?”

He shrugged and made his own trip down to the hold, returning with a clean pair of ducks. I held them up against the skirt of my gown; he was somewhat taller than me, and the legs of the trousers were several inches too long and far too wide.

“May I, miss?” The mate pulled a piece of chalk from his pocket, squatted, and marked several quick lines on the trousers. He straightened up, produced needle and thread from another pocket, and dropped cross-legged to the deck. He stopped for a moment, considering something, then jumped up and ran to the hold, returning with a spool of red ribbon. Then he sat again and in a trice he had hemmed the legs higher and neatly taken in the seams, at the same time sewing along them lengths of the ribbon, which gave them a more feminine air.

I thanked him and went below to change into the trousers and a light calico shift that I normally wore under heavier gowns. Back on deck, I stood looking up into the mainsail, curving away in a great white arc, the blue shadows of a thousand lines and shrouds webbing it. Above, the topsails and topgallants filled the rest of the sky, a vast, many-layered dome of white stretching up and up.

Free of my bulky skirts, I ran up the swaying stairs of rope as easily as though they were solid wood. I was soon sitting on a yard, one arm around the mast, among the sails themselves. Below me, the captain stood at his wheel. The mate moved about in the rigging, changing the trim of a sail, adjusting a stay, both men alert to every creak of rope on wood, every minute shift in the wind. I stayed up until the last light faded and stars began to prick the sky.

The next day I was up the foremast at first light. I ran straight up a ratline, balancing easily on the single thick cable stretched taut from deck to mast, past the foretop, up and up to the fore-topgallant yard. Sitting on the yard at the front of the
Able
, feeling the sway of the mast under me and the wind streaming on my face, I felt like a figurehead placed too high. The
Able
was under a full press of canvas, cutting a fine strong furrow through the waves.

I sat there, plaiting and replaiting my hair, naming all the sails I could remember: “Foresail, mainsail; fore-topsail, main topsail; fore-skysail, main skysail—”

“That sail’s a royal, Miss Rathbone. No skysails on the
Able
.” Captain Avery’s face appeared above the yard, smiling. “Know a thing or two about ships, then? You climb like a sea monkey, at any rate.” He eyed a rope bolt on the yard and gave it a rub with his sleeve until it shone. “Maybe I should hire you on, I could use an extra hand.” He winked and, clutching the nearest backstay, slid down to the deck.

That afternoon, I found a spare length of line in a dinghy and sat tying all the knots I could recall. I made a bowline and a cleat hitch, sheet bend, eye splice … I couldn’t help but think of Mama as I tied, of all those nights when I practiced my knots, lying on her bed. I wondered if she missed me. I wondered if she had even noticed I was gone. But it was easy, cutting through the sea on the
Able
, to soon put Mama out of my mind. When the captain came by, I presented him with my knotted rope and made the small speech I had rehearsed.

“Captain Avery, would you consider teaching me how to help? You’d be gaining an extra hand at no cost. And I hope that I’d be repaying you a little for the kindness you’ve shown in carrying us.”

The captain’s eyebrows shot up, and he put a hand to his mouth to cover a smile. But he saw that I was serious.

“Well … maybe you could learn a few tricks. Maybe I could teach you how to hand, reef, and steer? Then you’d know enough to run off and join the Royal Navy and be rated able. They’d have to take you then.” He winked.

“I could try.”

“Well, well.” He chuckled. “Maybe we will, maybe we will.” And with that he returned to his duties.

I lingered on deck that afternoon, watching the sky. I felt the weather changing, and soon the wind shifted a point to the north and blew harder. The captain and Mr. Beebe climbed to the topsails and began to shorten sail on the main topgallant. I came up beside Mr. Beebe, took up the end of the sail, and neatly secured the reef point. I had watched the two men do it a few times before and it was easy enough. The mate gazed openmouthed at me and looked over to Captain Avery, who shrugged and smiled. After the mainsails and topsails were reefed, we climbed higher and furled the topgallants tightly to their yards. The mate scowled at me as I slid down a line; the captain only laughed.

In the days that followed I was entrusted with a few minor tasks: swaying the lead and paying seams with slush. Eventually, as the days passed, and the captain came to trust my abilities, I vied with the mate over weightier tasks. I could trice up the tack and scandalize the mainsail faster, fish anchor to cathead neater, and polish a head-nut brighter, feats about which the mate seemed less than pleased. Mr. Beebe, besides his other duties, served also as cook, and he now tended to short my porridge and served me only salt horse at supper, and no plum duff for dessert.

Mordecai, when not engrossed in his observations, proved useful, too, assisting Mr. Beebe in the galley, a dab hand at jointing seafowl and shelling shrimp—skills acquired from his long hours of dissecting in the attic.

When I was not busy, I ranged along the rigging or crawled out along the bowsprit and clung there, riding above the waves, savoring the spindrift that soaked me.

Having had until then only Mordecai’s limited vision for comparison, I now realized how acute my own sight was, for not only could I see farther and more clearly than any man on the ship, but I also had a certain premonitory knack. I often pointed to some imminent sight—a flock of birds, a storm front—and met with a blank look
from the mate or captain, followed by a look of perplexity when the flock or storm became visible to them, too. One day the captain asked me to take a watch, an honor I didn’t treat lightly. When the mate had some trouble with his stomach for a few days, I kept double watches, and stood through a squall one long night, only coming down on deck when the sea had calmed with the dawn. Mama might have been proud of me. I, too, could wait.

I learned the nameless equations of water and wind, cloud and light. I soon knew before the captain when and how the wind would shift and the clouds form. I sensed the presence of sea creatures large and small. I felt the friendly rise of dolphins far astern, the lively spark and twitch of blenny and hake, and the slow, heavy swirl of plankton deeper down.

I wondered if what I saw and felt was what Moses had felt and seen, and Bow-Oar and his brothers, before they lost their sympathy with the sea. I had never seen a living whale, only its bones. I had never paid much attention to Mordecai’s careful diagrams, those dry and scratchy depictions of a creature I had heard described only at second and third hand. Now I wondered if I’d ever be lucky enough to see a live sperm.

One calm clear afternoon, I joined Mordecai in the crow’s nest. Our sailing had been so smooth that day that there was little to do, and even the captain and his mate were taking their ease, leaning back in chairs on deck, each with a pipe in his mouth, while Mordecai and I swayed high above the wide blue world.

Mordecai had shed his headgear altogether. His white hair billowed behind him, perhaps not quite glossy but with more of a sheen than before—doubtless from all our healthful exercise in fresh air. He exclaimed at some new sight every few minutes, for there were, besides mistaken whales, other wonders correctly identified: flying fish arcing over our stern; immense schools of shad and silverside split by our bowsprit and streaming down our flanks. However deep in such pleasures, Mordecai still glanced now and then at a particular point on the horizon, straining, I thought, to see in the pattern of
waves the path Papa had taken, repeatedly consulting his migration map.

“Soon now, Mercy, you will see the whales streaming northward. You will witness not mere humpbacks but the great sperm himself in grand profusion.” He swept an arm across the horizon, as though it was all his to offer.

I listened silently, nodding. It pleased me to see him so lively and taking such an interest in living creatures after his long preoccupation with the dead and desiccated.

I tried to imagine the Far North toward which we sailed, tried to remember that page of Papa’s atlas, but could recall only the southernmost tip of Greenland, a brief protrusion of icy blue at the top of the Atlantic, cut off at the top of the page. I pictured the sea stiffening as we pushed northward, the ship slowing, crunching through crystals of ice until we were trapped in a trough between two frozen waves, our sails yearning northward, timbers straining, going nowhere.

But for now the air was warm and soft. It was that hour of early evening when the sky quiets to a blue that might be either dusk or dawn. I was weary from an afternoon of shifting ballast in the hold and leaned, drowsing, in a corner of the crow’s nest, chewing a strip of cuttle jerky and absently mending a tackle block. Mordecai still eagerly scanned the horizon with a spyglass, borrowed from the captain and chained securely around his neck. He took great pleasure in viewing the world through an uncracked lens.

Mordecai collapsed his glass and I untied him from the mast, discreetly attaching a short lead from his ankle to mine for safety. He folded his long legs and sank beside me. He had clearly been rummaging in his bag again; the squid eye that usually accompanied his reveries had been replaced by a relic of the Arctic: not the crudely carved walrus tusk that I had seen in the attic but the silky white fur of an ermine, its lush tail tipped with black. Mordecai spread the skin over his knees and stared to the north, where the blue sky was draining to white.

“Above the sixtieth parallel nothing ever thaws. I remember the
log of the
Houqua
 … she was driven off course in a storm in the year eighteen and eight, and happened upon a whaleboat frozen into an ice floe. All hands were frozen at their oars, shrouded in snow. The captain wrote that an old mariner had told him that such a boat had gone missing from a whaler thirty years earlier.” Mordecai draped the ermine skin around his neck and began to stroke it, eyes still lifted skyward. “Whalers never used to venture so far north, not until the herds close to home began to thin in your father’s time.” He slipped lower, arms folded behind his head, staring at a fleet of fat gray clouds riding above the horizon. “The log told of how the night sky shimmered with fractured light. Of mountains of floating ice that glowed like turquoise or jade. The polar bear challenging the ship from his icy throne …”