The Rathbones (37 page)

“Bemus.”

Bemus didn’t look up from his work.

“Bemus.”

“You know he can’t hear you, leave him alone.”

“Oh, Mother …” Erastus called to Bemus.

Verity sat up straight and stared hard at Erastus, frowning.

“Well, he’s the closest we’ve got, isn’t he?” Erastus smiled slightly.

He lay down again and pulled a narrow book with soft green covers from his waistcoat pocket. He flipped through, then ran a finger along one page.

“Bemus, would you like to know what your name means in Greek? Here it is. ‘Bemus:
foundation
.’ A worthy name. Solid. Strong.”

Verity rolled over and looked at him.

“That’s not really his name, you know.”

“What do you mean that’s not his name?”

“It just sounds like that. His name is Beam Ends.”

“Beam Ends?”

“He told me, once, years ago. It’s because of the way he walks.”

Erastus looked at her blankly.

“Beam ends. When a ship lists, she tilts on her side. On her beam ends. His whale took part of his thigh, when he was fifteen. He said he used to walk straight enough before …” She looked at Erastus and her voice faltered.

He closed his eyes and smiled.

“Perhaps that should have been my name, too.”

Verity stared down at her brother. Making herself smile, she grasped an end of the bed curtain and drew it across Erastus’s face. He brushed it away and she drew it across again.

“Tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“What do I always ask you to tell me? About Moses.”

“Ask him to tell you.” He gestured at Bemus, who had just finished
making the second bed. Bemus straightened up slowly, hand to his back. First looking vaguely around the room, he bent over and began to strip the bed again.

“He won’t remember anymore. Please.”

Erastus sniffed, frowning. “Aren’t you ever tired of those old stories?”

“Just one more time.”

He sighed and swung his legs carefully over the side of the bed, then sat looking out at the sea. His hair, as pale and long as Verity’s, was tied neatly back. He wore a thin white shirt and old buff breeches cinched in with a belt.

“All right, if you must hear it.”

Verity lay back on the bed, her hands behind her head. She could just see the edge of the sea out the windows, rough with whitecaps, deepest blue under a clear gray sky. She closed her eyes as Erastus began.

“It was always Moses who spotted the whale, not the lookout in the tops but Moses, down on deck. All the men could see far enough, and most of them could sense the whales, knew when they were close, but none could see in the way that Moses could. He saw them swimming beneath the surface. He watched them rise slowly from the deep. He knew just where each whale would breech, how high his spout would blow. He knew how many sperm were in each pod, and which was heaviest with oil.

“When they gave chase, the harpooners in other boats stood with a leg braced against the thigh board, but Moses jumped up on the bow, right up on the rim, balancing like it was dry land. His spear shot out so fast it set the line afire; the crew kept a bucket ready to douse the flame.”

Erastus raised his arm and mimicked the thrust of a harpoon. Bemus caught the movement and turned from his sheets. His face brightened and he made his own weak thrust toward the sea.

“He never missed his mark, no matter how far he threw. Just as Moses knew the whales, the whales knew Moses. When a sperm,
fleeing from the boats, looked back and saw Moses standing up there on the bow, harpoon poised, it would stop in the water and wait for him, knowing it could never escape.”

“How many spears did he need to kill the whale?”

“One. Only one.”

Verity was silent, her eyes bright.

A door opened and closed at the far end of the corridor, loud in the echoing space.

Verity hurried to the doorway and peeked around the corner. Two tall pale youths were walking toward her from the end of the hall. They wore faded sailors’ slops that rode high up their legs and arms. Their jaws preceded them, and their heads wobbled on thin stems as they walked. One held a pair of Erastus’s boots and a polishing cloth. He saw Verity and began to hurry, holding the boots out toward her, his tongue working in his jaw but making no sound.

Verity seized Erastus’s hand, pulled him up and out into the corridor, down to the end of the hall, and into Moses’s room. She latched the door behind them and stood with her back to it, Erastus panting beside her.

There was a flurry of knocks on the door, then the footsteps moved off.

Verity scrambled up the side of the bed and reached down to help Erastus up. They lay side by side on the high blue bed. The blankets were damp and smelled of mildew. She unlatched the porthole window and opened it, hinges creaking. There had been no window in the little pine room until a few years ago, when Verity asked Bemus to put it in, so that she could watch the sea from there. A soft breeze moved across the bed. On the pine walls, bleached and dull, the pegs were empty. In the rack above the head of the bed a harpoon rested.

“You’d think they’d get tired of following us everywhere,” she said.

“They’re just trying to help me pack.”

Verity looked up at the ceiling. Watery reflections rippled across the pine, brightening and fading as the wind pushed clouds across the sun.

Erastus reached to touch her hair.

“Your hair is wet. Have you been swimming already this morning?”

She moved away and pulled her hair around from her back to her breast. Her back was wet where her hair had been, a dark patch on the bronze silk.

“Yes, but I want to go again. Come swim with me.”

“How amusing you are today, Verity.”

“I’m sorry. Truly I am,” she said. She leaned over and began to massage his legs again; he winced and turned away. She took up his hand and held it to her cheek.

“The packet leaves at noon from New London. Fourth will be getting ready to go, and I can’t be late.”

She let go of his hand and turned to stare out the porthole.

“I don’t understand why you have to go.”

“Yes, you do. You know you do.”

He flipped through the little book again.

“I’ve read all the books, all ten of them. I know all the stories; I’m sick to death of them. There’s no one to talk to, nothing to learn, nothing new to see or hear or know. Nothing but this house and the sea. I’d do anything just to get away from the sound of the sea.”

He reached for her hand.

“You could come with me.”

She turned around with a half smile, then turned her back again.

“We’ll start in London. Then cross the channel to Paris and head south to Venice, then Florence and Rome. And finally Athens. We’ll stand together on the Acropolis, surrounded by the temples of the gods.” He flipped through his book, tilting it toward Verity so that she could see its small engravings. “We’ll see the Erechtheum. Its roof is held up by giant maidens of white marble, so straight and strong.” Erastus’s eyes shone. “Everything in Greece is like that. Clean and straight and pure.”

“You know I couldn’t leave the ocean.”

“This isn’t the only ocean, you know. The Aegean isn’t green like
here, it’s blue. It’s bluer than the bluest sky you can imagine … I have to go now, while I still can.”

Verity, still turned away, began to braid her damp hair.

“I wish Moses still sailed. I wish …” Verity reached up and pulled down the old harpoon, and turned it in her hands. “You have to stay.”

“All right, I will.” Erastus took the harpoon from her and ran a cautious finger along its dulled edge. “I’ll become a new lord of the seas. I’ll kill two sperm with every cast to Moses’s one. The whale will dance around me in a great circle before he dies.”

“Don’t leave me.”

“You won’t be alone.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“This isn’t right. I have to go.”

The harpoon fell from Verity’s hand. She threw back her head and howled. She twisted around and wrapped her arms and legs around Erastus. He buried his face in her hair.

After a while Verity let go. They lay side by side, looking up at the light rippling across the ceiling. She reached over the side of the bed and picked up the harpoon, and lay the shaft lightly across their bodies. She moved closer to Erastus and ran a shaking finger over his pale arm, along the thin blue veins.

“The sea is in you too, you know. You say you hate it, but that’s like saying you hate me.”

Erastus began to sit up. Verity grasped the harpoon tighter and held it down across her chest and his.

“Tell me again. What Erastus means.”

“It means ‘beloved.’ ”

“And Verity?”

“
Veritas
. Truth.”

“Stay. Stay.”

{in which Erastus’s plan goes awry}

1841

O
N A SPRING
morning soon after Erastus Rathbone returned from the Continent, seven crews of carpenters congregated on the lawn of Rathbone House. They shuffled their boots uncomfortably on the broad expanse of smooth green, checking the edges on their tools and glancing up at the windows of the big house on the hill, waiting for instructions. They had come from as far as Baltimore and Providence, having seen the oversize notices with gilt edges that Erastus’s agents had posted in guild halls and taverns all along the coast, promising fat purses to crews willing to leave within the week, seasoned crews who had built the solid merchants’ houses that lined those cities’ harbors. A few men had abandoned half-built houses, unable to resist the money, substituting second-rate crews or leaving angry merchants high and dry.

The town of Naiwayonk had no carpenters of its own; there was little business for them. The few fishermen who still lived there had built their own ramshackle houses of rough pine and tar paper, and what little furniture they owned they had knocked together themselves. Though the carpenters were told by the fishermen that other large houses had once stood on the hills above the harbor, only Rathbone House remained, on the highest hill, its original builders long
dead. The carpenters wondered what sort of craftsmen those men had been, looking at the low, dark wood lodge that formed the first floor, and at the second story of red brick, not wholly unlike those their fathers had built but oddly unfinished—windows without pediments, gables without dormers—a house seen through fog.

The men stirred as two figures made their way down the lawn. They were at first confused; they had been told they would meet with the master of the house, a young man of twenty-two, but the figures approaching both appeared to be aged. Erastus walked with a rolling gait unrelated to the rise and fall of ships at sea, his back bent, leaning heavily on two canes. He was accompanied by an old sailor in faded middy and ducks, holding a parasol to shade Erastus from the sun. Though bent, Erastus was still taller by a head than his companion. He wore an embroidered waistcoat over pleated mole trousers, and slender polished shoes. His white hair was trained with pomade into a wave that sprang from his forehead.

With a brisk smile and a general nod to the men, Erastus unfurled and laid on the lawn a large set of plans. A crow dropped down from a tree onto the plans and stalked across them, claws clicking on the paper, until waved away by the sweep of a long arm. The carpenters squatted around the blue-inked drawings, murmuring and scratching their chins. A few stood and squinted against the sun or looked down toward the dock, where neat stacks of seasoned lumber stood ready.

The next morning, on the empty pier where Rathbone House once stood on its pilings above the sea, seven cottages began to rise. The structures grew at impressive speed; the first crew to finish would earn a handsome bonus. Enough whaling gold remained from the glory days of the Rathbones to build seven mansions, little having been spent since Lydia’s time and so few Rathbones left to spend it: the surviving sons of the worn wives, Bemus, old Fourth-Oar, and Steersman; Erastus and Verity; Conch and Crab (later known as Larboard and Starboard)—the white children, grandchildren of the golden wives.