The Rathbones (30 page)

I looked up sharply from my mending. Mordecai’s description was so vivid, he might have sailed there himself.

“The polar bear was observed by Palliser to be a retiring creature, without the fierce aspect with which he is endowed in popular literature.” Mordecai tossed the end of the ermine fur over his shoulder, eyes shining, and raised his hands like fearsome claws. “But no, oh no, not when threatened. He reared, like this, half again as high as me—”

Mordecai leapt up, lost his balance, and fell off the edge of the crow’s nest. In the moment after he dropped, the moment before I, still tethered to his ankle, plummeted after him, I realized that he had read no log, that he had been on that ship himself, had himself beheld
Ursus maritimus
. But before I could challenge what he’d said the deck hurtled up to meet me. I closed my eyes, bracing for the impact. But the ship tilted a point in a breath of wind, and instead I struck the sea. Icy cold pierced me. I shot gasping to the surface, just long enough to take a gulp of air and to see Crow spinning in circles above me, and was jerked back down.

I was pulled deep and deeper. The rope at my ankle burned, the water froze, and the light above me shrank. I looked down, through icy water, to see Mordecai sinking straight into the dark below me, boots flailing, arms spinning, with me whipping along at the end of
the tether. I wanted to gasp at the cold and had to force myself not to draw breath. I steadied myself as best I could and pulled myself along the rope stretched between us until I could grasp Mordecai’s shoulders. I put my hands to his face and tilted it toward mine, trying to calm him. His eyes were wide, his hair a nimbus of white. A thick stream of bubbles poured from his mouth. I turned my back to him, wrapped his arms about my neck, and began to struggle up toward the surface with him in tow. At first, still flailing, he only dragged me down, but soon I felt his body relax and lighten, felt a surge as his legs kicked out behind us, and in a few moments we burst to the surface. I kept him close—grateful for the air, which was much warmer than the sea, and took in several great breaths. Then I ducked below the surface to sever the tether between us with my dirk (a welcome gift from the captain, which I kept tucked in the waist of my trousers). I was afraid Mordecai would panic again. But instead, though he still took long rasping breaths, his eyes shone through plastered hair, and he smiled wide. He kicked his boots off, turned, and dove back down into the cold sea. I drew a deep breath and dove after him.

When we came up for air, we spotted the captain and mate at the rail, not far ahead, calling out our names; as soon as he realized what had happened, Captain Avery had turned the
Able
into the wind and eased the mainsail.

“It’s all right!” I shouted, treading water. Mordecai bobbed up beside me, sent a spout of water high into the air, and laughed. The captain watched us doubtfully for a minute before going back to his chair and pipe. The mate stood there longer, then turned away, shaking his head.

We swam together through the deep. Mordecai stroked confidently through the water. He swam smoothly, powerfully, so unlike the way he moved on land that he seemed a different person. We swam and swam, until it was nearly full dark, and we called to the mate to put a ladder over the side. We climbed up with our teeth chattering, laughing.

We swam each day after that, staying under longer each time. The
captain indulged us, since we didn’t slow the ship down—not that she was hurrying. We matched the
Able
’s leisurely pace, a steady two to three knots on a long sea under a pure sky. We stroked side by side through brisk swells, then lay on our backs and drifted in the ship’s wake. Though the deeper sea was bitter cold, a warm band lay just below the surface and we swam along in it slowly, savoring all that we had not seen in our first plunge. Some days it seemed like all the creatures in the ocean congregated around us. Sea worms and comb jellies danced close to the surface, while larger companions escorted us below: great hosts of tuna, streams of mackerel and cod, haddock and hake. We witnessed the cichlid spitting out her new-hatched young and the king of the herrings leading his column, a host that streamed behind him for many leagues. We passed through colonies of glowing polyps clinging to reefs. We plunged into the half-lit world below, where the moray peered from his watery cave. Once I felt a larger presence, and thought that, at last, I was about to see a whale, but it passed so far below that I couldn’t see it clearly, only feel its size, before it slipped into deeper water.

Mordecai grew more agile day by day, and though I sometimes couldn’t keep up, I felt my stroke stretch longer as the days passed. Sometimes I locked my fingers around his neck and lay along his back and we swam along as one. The joint pain and swelling that had troubled him earlier on our journey eased more and more each day. It was strange to feel his body below me. He had never seemed to even have a body before. Now his back moved under me, long and sinewy, the bones of his shoulders poking into my stomach as he stroked through the water. I recalled a broader back, a stronger neck; it must have been Papa’s back I remembered clinging to, Papa teaching me to swim. I wanted to stay beneath the waves forever. I wanted to gallop with the sea horses, to scuttle sideways with crabs, to sleep on the seabed.

When the
Able
sailed closer to shore, in shallower water, we skimmed along reefs, stopping to gather what bounty we could carry. We came up streaming seaweed, our hands fat with mussels, scallops
stuffed between our toes. The mate smiled to see us and added our offerings to the stewpot.

We sat in the crow’s nest after our swims, drying in the sun. The mate whistled, busy in the rigging around us. The captain chattered companionably below. Mordecai suffered me to brush out his hair and tie it back in a manly queue. I would hold up the chronometer I was polishing so he could see himself in its shining case. He would turn his head from side to side, admiring my work. He looked reconstituted, as though our plunges in the sea had swelled his veins, and his skin had acquired a faint golden sheen.

“I look a right jack-tar now, eh, me matey?” he asked, and the mate, passing by, rolled his eyes.

But soon the mate had less to roll his eyes about. Before our long days of swimming, I had relied on Zeke to climb behind Mordecai as he crawled cautiously up the ladder to the crow’s nest, to guide Mordecai’s feet so that he wouldn’t fall. Now Mordecai could skip up the ropes almost as quickly as me. One day as I was climbing aloft I saw Mordecai and the captain on deck, chatting together like old shipmates. I moved nearer and saw what they were leaning over: a chart unfamiliar to me, a complex pattern of swirling lines and dense notation. In the days that followed I would sometimes see Mordecai standing at the wheel, guiding the ship, his hair blowing back, a proud smile on his face. Captain Avery would hover behind him, making furtive course corrections when Mordecai was distracted by some fish.

At night our bodies glowed from the phosphorescent creatures we had swum through. I wondered what wan beacons we two made, lying on deck in the dark. When I stretched out on the sun-warmed wood my muscles felt pleasantly sore from so much swimming, and my bones ached. We slept in each other’s arms under a wherry, like Mordecai’s attic in compact form. Small chinks in the wherry’s planks were like the worn knots in the rafters, admitting, rather than shafts of sunlight, the beams of stars. Under its dome we slept soundly.

On one such night we lay on deck in the last dogwatch, watching the moon empty out, staring up at the stars’ slow wheel.

“The seas move like that, too,” said Mordecai, swirling his finger at the sky, “in great gyres. They are all one vast body of water, you know, they are all connected, though we give them separate names. The North Atlantic Ocean to the Arctic; the Arctic to the North Pacific; the North Pacific to the Indian Ocean; the Indian to the Southern Ocean …”

I sat in front of Mordecai so that he could comb out my hair and rebraid it. Where before I wouldn’t have let him near my hair, now he could deftly weave the hundred braids my aunts had first plaited, adding along their lengths new knots he had learned from the captain.

“Where would you sail to, if we could sail on forever?”

Mordecai looked up at the sky. “I would stop at each speck of land and gather two of each creature. I would be a new Noah.” He traced the shapes of those constellations formed like animals: the Greater and Lesser Dogs; the Sea Goat; the Winged Horse; the Two Fishes. He sat quietly for a moment. “I should sail with your papa through all of the seas and back again. I shall sail with him this time. And with me he will miss no sperm …”

Mordecai hesitated, then reached into his ditty bag—he kept it around his neck all the time now, with his precious migration map inside—and carefully withdrew another piece of paper. I recognized the chart he and Captain Avery had been poring over.

“The original is back in my attic, but I knew your papa would want to have this as soon as possible, to augment his pursuit of the sperm. It is my wind and current chart of the North Atlantic. With this, any sailor may harness the might of the ocean’s currents and winds to speed his passage—considerably, I might say, with all due modesty.” Along with his plotting of the whales’ migration, Mordecai had pored over his collection of old logs and assembled data on currents and winds in all weathers.

If the old gardener was right, my father was only a few leagues away. We might very soon achieve Mordecai’s dream of finding him,
and in so doing destroy it. If Papa was so near, he was far from any sperm.

I wondered if he had come after me, not Mordecai, when he swam after us that day. Maybe he had wanted to try to explain. But I could think only of all of the times he had been at Rathbone House, times he could have seen me, been with me, and yet had not.

“And you, cousin? Where would you sail to?”

I compared Mordecai’s dreams of sailing with Papa to my own far less ambitious fancies: Papa reading with me in the library, one more populated with books; dining with Mama and my brother and me at a table laden with homely fare. Papa’s mere presence in the house while I slept was dream enough when I was a child.

I considered the kingfisher we had sighted earlier that day, bobbing along in her nest on the open water. She was said to have the power to charm the waves and winds into calmness—on the peaceful water the hen-halcyon then builds her nest and hatches her young. I watched the clear horizon that receded as we advanced, unchanging, a serene circle. I wished only that I might add my own charm to the kingfisher’s and linger here forever.

{in which Mordecai too begins to founder}

O
NE MILD EVENING
a few weeks into our voyage, the
Able
stood in for land. We had until then kept well away from the coast, clear of reefs and breakers, sending the mate ashore from time to time in the bumboat to trade with merchants in the towns we passed.

I had secretly been tracking our route each night during the last watch, studying the ship’s charts under the binnacle light. I knew we were nearing the island that the gardener had spoken of as Arcady. Maybe there were several Arcadys. Among the many little islands within rowing distance of Naiwayonk, I knew of three Belle Isles (none of them, I thought, particularly belle) and at least four Gull Rocks, generally free of gulls. Nevertheless, I found myself scanning the sea for a high piney island, pink in hue. I took Captain Avery aside and asked if he knew of the island.

“Who told you of such a place?” the captain asked.

I explained about the old man pruning weeds in the Starks’ temple. I didn’t mention Mama’s story.

Captain Avery chuckled. “Why, that’s old Enoch. He’d say anything to keep a body talking, lonely old fellow. Loony as a blue booby.
Probably told you how he used to sail, too?” He saw by my expression that he had guessed correctly, and nodded. “Blind since birth.”