The Rathbones (34 page)

My mouth went dry.

“Didn’t you hear it? The song?” Mordecai asked.

I got up from my place in the sun and approached the cave, stopping where bright sunlight abruptly ended and the dark began.

“Don’t you remember, Mercy? The barrels?”

“Barrels? Do you mean the crow’s nest?”

“No, no, the bed your mama made. A bed in a barrel …”

Mordecai was confused. He couldn’t know what he was saying.

“He was in the way, you see. Of her … recreations.” Mordecai turned over, stilts shuffling out of his way, so that he faced away from me, his voice muffled. “Your brother. Gideon. She stuffed him in a barrel and left him there …

He fell silent and his head dropped back into the woman’s lap.

“Mordecai!” I screamed.

The woman smiled at me, her eyes executing a slow somersault, and petted Mordecai’s head. He didn’t stir again.

I had to wake him, had to get him to explain. I rushed up to him and pushed and prodded and slapped his face again and again, but nothing would rouse him. Crow lay languid and uncaring among the woman’s soft skirts. One glazed eye opened. I snatched him up and ran out into the light. Slinging Mordecai’s bag over my shoulder, I headed for the boat. I looked back once more, despairing. I didn’t know what else to try. I didn’t want to leave without him but I couldn’t stay. I had to get away from there.

I ran to the cove and set off across the little lagoon, rowing across its glassy, windless surface, rigging my sail only when I reached open water. I sat on the stern bench, took a deep breath, and started to cry.

Crow crawled from my pocket, stretched his wings, and hopped to the top of Mordecai’s bag, which lay on the bench beside me. He cocked an eye at the opening, where a peak of white cloth showed, and with his beak tried to pry the opening wider. I gently pushed Crow away and pulled out Mordecai’s journal. I opened it to the chart and stared at the drawing I had made only a few weeks ago. I’d had such a clear, strong picture of my brother in my head as I drew and
was so pleased with the likeness. Now I saw only a vague jumble of line and shadow.

I had, at least, at last, a name. Gideon.

My brother. After all this time. Mordecai had lied, just like Mama. I tried to grasp that fact, while my mind ran ahead: Stuffed in a barrel? Mordecai was delirious; it must have been the bird woman’s water.

I slammed the journal shut. I tried to picture my brother the way I always had, until Mordecai and I ran away. I imagined my favorites among the images I had used to assemble him. I chose his head from among the bronzes of the Greeks. I tried
Victorious Youth
and
Ephebe of Marathon
, their curls turned verdigris by the sea. I tried my favorite,
The Charioteer of Delphi
, with his thick bronze lashes, the bright whites of his eyes startling in sea-green flesh. I chose a marble, the
Torso of Miletus
, for his body, and tried to attach each head to it, but none would stick.

I wiped my eyes and stood to trim the sail. Cold wind whipped my calves; the hem of my gown now rode above my ankles, no longer soaked by the sea when I stood in the bow.

Why hadn’t Mordecai ever admitted I had a brother? Why? He had heard the song, too. He had spoken for so long in half-truths that I didn’t know what to believe. I was little better; I had dawdled as long in lies small and large. I had loitered on the
Able
and delayed going home. If I had known what I would find there, I might have begged the captain to sail on to the Davis Strait after all, and beyond, to that point so far north that the ship would have halted, frozen between two waves. Or I might have returned to the Stark Archipelago and found the jilted grotto of which the gardener had spoken, and become another Circe, attended not by many snowy stilts but by one dark crow.

A flash of white caught my eye; a single sail, on a familiar craft—there was the
Able
’s dinghy, not a mile behind me, bearing west toward Circe’s cove, with Captain Avery at the tiller. I was glad that he had already recovered the dinghy, but surprised to see him in these
waters, miles south of the
Able
’s northward course; then beyond the dinghy, a mile or so to the north, I saw the
Able
herself anchored off a point, saw the glint of a cable curving down into the sea.

I was not far from the dinghy; I waved, but the captain didn’t notice, intent on his destination. I changed course and tacked back, until I was only a few boat lengths away.

“Captain Avery!” I shouted.

He whipped around, his mouth dropping open. I ran the smack neatly up alongside and tossed out a line; he automatically reached for the line and made it fast, but said nothing, only stared at me.

“Captain, I’m so sorry about the dinghy. We never meant to leave the ship. The wind came up and Crow had chewed through the line and …” I faltered and stopped. I steeled myself to be reprimanded. But instead he reddened and began to chatter.

“Never you mind. Found her all snug and sound.” He patted the side of the dinghy briskly. “Wasn’t hard to guess which way you went, I knew the wind was north-nor’east, and there’s no other landfall for miles and miles. Never you mind, she’s fit as a fiddle.” While holding my eye, he fumbled behind him for something: a canvas tarp, which he was trying to spread over a group of crates that filled the dinghy. There was also a woven basket full of vegetables and another of apples. Nestled among the apples were a few smaller baskets filled with the same dark, prickly berries I had seen in Circe’s cave.

“Is she my aunt, then?”

The captain’s hands froze on the tarp; his mouth opened and closed. He stood up, heaved a deep sigh, and nodded.

I thought of the second bed I had glimpsed in Circe’s cave.

“Are there others?”

The captain slowly pulled the tarp off the crates and folded it.

“There were. She’s the last of them. Name of Limpet.” He sat on a crate, lit his pipe, and pulled his collar closer around his throat. A keen little wind had sprung up; the hulls of the boats bumped against each other. He looked sidelong at me.

“Limpet? How did you know that?” I asked. In my mind I had
named her Circe, though the Circe of the Greeks had charmed Odysseus’s men not into stilts but swine.

“Maybe I did visit Naiwayonk a time or two. And I might have known Bemus, a little.”

“What about my mother?”

He shifted on the crate. “Well, now, her I never knew.”

I realized I was shivering. I pulled my shawl tight and looked toward the island; the white cove was just visible, and behind it the dark rocks.

“Captain, why didn’t you tell me about my brother? When I asked you, back at the Starks’? I know about him now. Mordecai told me.”

Captain Avery looked keenly at me, then looked down at the hull and sighed again.

“Well. I don’t know anything much, miss, really I don’t. I’d heard there were two youngsters up at the house, twins, and that the boy disappeared along with his father. There were a few stories about what happened to him. Just gossip. Nothing that would do you any good to hear.” He glanced up at me. “He’s just gone, has been a long time.”

I was tired of all the questions, tired of asking them. I gazed across the water, toward Circe’s cove.

“Don’t worry, I’ll keep an eye on him.” The captain winked gravely at me. “Going back?”

I nodded. He took up an empty bucket and put in a few apples from one basket, carrots from another. From his breast pocket he took a flask and, unscrewing the top, tipped it into his mouth and took a couple of long drafts. He rinsed it over the side and filled it with fresh water from a cask, then put it in my hand.

“Best to keep a good two miles or so off Napatree Point on your way back, the shoals there …” He looked up at me, chuckling. “But then you’ll not have any trouble handling a boat, will you?”

He cast off my line and leaned to push our hulls apart, then stopped and reached out for my hand. When I put my hand in his, he pulled me close and hugged me.

“Try not to think too poorly of her.”

“What do you mean?”

The captain sighed and looked out across the water, toward Naiwayonk.

“Perhaps it’s time you knew about the rest …”

I pulled Crow close to me and stroked his feathers, and felt his strong pulse of warmth in the ever-colder air. He struggled from under my hand and launched off and away.

{in which Lydia again fails to understand}

1819

L
YDIA LOOKED UP
at the clock, then returned to her letter. She had already read the response from Miss Marylbone’s Academy earlier that morning, but she reread it with satisfaction and relief. The school’s answer to her first inquiry had not been encouraging.

Lydia folded and unfolded a corner of the letter. She had no relations in Boston who could satisfy Miss Marylbone’s curiosity. Her mother, even if she had answered her letters, would have been able to offer little additional claim to social standing of an ilk that would satisfy Miss Marylbone. Lydia had occasional news of the Starks from Bemus, who had it from some merchant who visited the archipelago from time to time. Though the Starks’ wealth continued to grow with their thriving maritime trade, they had climbed no higher in society’s ranks, having squandered their most valuable social currency on the sale of herself and her sisters, who might well have married into the very preeminent Boston families that would have impressed Miss Marylbone. The Starks had, with their growing wealth, lured a few young ladies of good family to marry Lydia’s brothers, but the offspring of those unions were so alarmingly unattractive that their grandparents and aunts, one of whom did in fact live in Boston, were reluctant to present them in society, let alone invite them home for the holidays.

So Lydia had spoken to Bemus, and a cutter had sailed up to Boston with a heavy satchel, returning a day later with Miss Marylbone’s reply.

Lydia was relieved to have the girls’ future finally settled. The three girls—her own Claudia, Miriam’s Sophia, and Priscilla’s Julia—had
been without a tutor since early the previous winter. She had considered advertising for a new teacher, but the last one had been such a disappointment. Few tutors of good credentials were willing to leave positions elsewhere to accept a situation in a private home, especially one so far removed from the more stimulating life of the towns and cities. Mr. Phipps, a bachelor of late middle years with excellent credentials, had arrived at Rathbone House in the late spring. Previously a master in a boy’s boarding school to the north, he had answered Lydia’s advertisement and accepted her offer in the happy expectation of light duties with biddable young ladies (after the rigors of many years of teaching willful young men) and anticipating healthful walks along the shore. Lydia ordered books and instruments for the girls’ studies and had Bemus ready one of the golden parlors as a schoolroom. Mr. Phipps would teach French in the mornings, mathematics and music in the afternoon.