The Rathbones (49 page)

She had been so lonely. If she lay with every sailor who knocked at our door, she was little different from those old Rathbones who bedded the worn wives so generously, but for her sex. Maybe it was less a choice she made than a map written in her blood. Fish, after all, thoughtlessly scatter their spawn in the sea; they must be profligate to make sure something sticks in their watery world to make more of them. There’s a kind of comfort in knowing that it’s not all up to us, that we must swing to and fro with the tides. We are all still subject to the ocean’s coming and going.

Watching her go, I hoped I was made more from the stuff of my great-great-aunts than that of Mama. Like those early Rathbone men, the wives, too, borrowed of the whale, not in any showy gleam but in their mute fortitude. My great-great-aunts passed each day from dawn to dusk at their loom; Mama, too, spent her time in making, but where my aunts brought together, she scraped away, trying with her blade to plumb the mysteries of the sperm. I think it made her feel closer to Papa, in keeping close to what he had loved more than her, or me. Close not to that vast creature that swam the oceans, huge heart pumping, breath spouting, strength unreckonable, but to that which remained when all else had been hacked and burned away, reduced to irreducible bone, quiet and still. Then she moved into it, under the surface, looking for what was lost.

Watching Mama sail away, I didn’t notice when he arrived; when I looked out Papa was just there, standing in the bow of a whaleboat, balancing easily, rising and falling with the waves, a ship’s length away. He wore the blue jacket, salt-crusted, buttons missing. He wasn’t the giant in the attic dangling me from one hand, or the colossal shadow on the sinking island, or Talos, bestriding the harbor of Crete. He was just a man in an old blue coat.

He raised his arm to me.

I could see the longing in his face. Gideon must have looked so much like me.

I knew the longing was for my brother, not for me. But I raised my arm, too.

When Mama’s boat had slipped over the horizon, I looked out again to find Papa gone. I reached around and touched the place on my back where the birthmark shaped like a ship had so long floated to find that it had sailed.

{in which the tide swings back}

I
T WAS ONLY
after the knocking had gone on for some time that I made my way down the stairs. Even then I hesitated before opening the door. The sound was so loud in the empty house, and I had not spoken a word in a month; I liked the silence. I opened the door a crack and peered around its edge. Roderick Stark startled me, standing at the door, dark against the glare of the sky behind him. In shape and bearing he looked, as he had when I first saw him, much like Mordecai. Crow, too, was startled; his claws sank into my shoulder and with a loud croak he flew off and up the stairs. When Roderick stepped closer I saw that he had shed his Oriental garb for a sober coat of dark wool and a soft felt hat, though his face was no easier to look at.

“Miss Rathbone.” He pulled off his hat. The powdered wig was gone. I was surprised at his hair, a dark gold, thick and wavy, tied simply at the back of his neck. His face had lost its gray cast, his cheeks reddened by the wind. “Forgive me for just showing up like this, I only … I wondered if there’s anything I can do for you, any service I can offer?”

I opened the door a little more and stood blinking at the glare.

“How did you know?”

“Captain Avery happened to mention—”

“Of course.”

It would be polite to invite him in, I thought, standing there. He took a step back and put his hands behind him.

“You’re alone here?”

I nodded. Larboard and Starboard had disappeared the day after Mama died.

We both stood in silence.

“Well. If there’s anything, anything at all I can do.”

I watched him walk away, down to the landing below the rocks. Beached there was a craft that strongly resembled a barge of ancient Egypt, with a gilded hull and long striped oars. Its crew were walking back and forth on the strand hugging themselves, bare-chested men in pleated skirts, shivering in the winter air. The Starks, I saw, continued to plunder the epochs of history for fashion, though Roderick seemed by his plain clothes to now be following some other course. He climbed into the barge, looking back at the house as the oarsmen pulled away.

He didn’t knock again in the months that followed, but I would often wake to find packages on the stairs outside. I knew they came from the Stark kitchen by the dishes inside, which were patterned with jackal heads and lotus blossoms. They held not useless bric-a-brac but wholesome food for which I was grateful, being an indifferent cook: fruits and vegetables from the Stark gardens, still-warm bread (those oarsmen must have rivaled my ancestors in speed to come such a distance with bread still warm), nourishing soups unembellished with birds’ nests.

•  •

It was a year later when I next opened the door to Roderick. I watched him arrive from the window of my room, this time not in a royal barge but in a handsome little cutter crewed by men in warm pea coats and watch caps. It was an icy morning, early in the new year.
The sound was a pale frigid green, like the sky; an easterly wind beat the sea into whitecaps.

Roderick was dressed like his crew. He pulled off his watch cap.

“You look cold, Mr. Stark. Would you like some tea? I’ve just made some.”

I led him up the stairs, through the round hall, and into one of the parlors. His step slowed as he took in the golden walls, tarnished but still dully gleaming, and the room’s sparse furnishings: Lydia’s settee; the spinet on which Claudia had played. I gestured at the settee. On a small table next to it I had already placed the tea tray.

“I’ll just get another cup.”

When I returned from the dining room, Roderick popped up from his seat. I sat at the end of the settee and poured our tea. He lifted his cup tentatively, sniffing at it.

“My aunts make it. Rose hips, mostly, a little nettle.”

Roderick took a few polite sips and set his cup down.

“It must be healthful. You’re looking very well.”

I looked down doubtfully at my musty gown, the algae-brown one my aunts had made, and put a hand to my hair, which was loosely coiled on my neck.

“Oh. Well. If I do, I have you to thank, Mr. Stark. If it weren’t for your kind gifts, I’m not sure how I would be surviving this winter.”

“I’m so glad. I mean, not that you’re barely surviving. It’s just, is there anything else I can do for you?”

“No, I manage quite well. Thank you.”

I looked at him sidelong as he fumbled with his teacup.

“You’re looking well, too, Mr. Stark.”

I was surprised that it was true. His grim face could now be better described as rugged, browned by sun and smoothed by wind. His lank frame had acquired muscle, his thin hands, sinew. Those dark blue eyes, sad before in his gray face, now sparkled.

“Please, call me Roderick.” He looked down at himself. “If I look well, it’s my turn to thank you. If you hadn’t started me thinking about what I wanted to do, what I really wanted to achieve—”

“Me? What do you mean?”

“When we were looking at the old portraits that day, you spoke of my returning to the family trade, of doing something useful. It struck me that I’d never allowed myself to think of doing something I actually wanted to do. But not being a merchant, buying and selling. I wanted to make something useful, something real.”

To his family’s chagrin, he had given up his studies in the arts in Boston and now spent his days in the warehouse on the wharf, teaching himself woodcraft with his great-grandfather Calvin’s old saws and adzes and plumb bobs.

“The old Rathbone ships were built by Starks. Did you know that? The
Misistuck
was built by my great-grandfather and his brothers in 1772, the
Sassacus
and the
Paquatauoq
 …”

We talked of the ships, and how they were rigged, and how it felt to be out there on the sea, and the hours slipped by.

•  •

“What are you reading, Mama?”

“It’s only an old journal.”

“Can I see?”

“Maybe later.”

Little Mordecai shrugs and runs down the lawn and off and away to the point. He shimmies up a tree, a young pine springing from among the charred trunks above the tide line, where the sheds burned. He clings to the top of the tree, swaying, fearless, waving to me and shouting; his voice is carried away to sea by the wind. He’s brown from the sun, nimble and hardy, as keen-eyed as me. In him live the Rathbone gifts and the golden beauty of the Starks. It seems the tide has finally swung back; I hope it has. I fold the chart and close his uncle’s journal.

Mordecai lies in Circe’s cove, in a grove of slim white birches, where the stilts nest each spring. Circe lives on in her cave and keeps Mordecai’s grave free of droppings. Captain Avery helped me bury
him there. I considered sending him to sea with Mama but there wasn’t room for more than one on her boat of bones. And Mordecai wouldn’t have wanted to go with her.

A warm arm comes around my shoulders and squeezes them. Roderick still, sometimes, reminds me of Mordecai. His way of striding stiffly, hands clasped behind his back, when he’s thinking; the light that comes into his eyes when he’s excited about discovering some new, better way of pursuing his craft. I like to imagine that Mordecai, given a different path, might have been as content.

“Is it that time of year again?” Roderick smiles at me, brushing wood chips from his hair, taking the journal gently from my hands. “Maybe you should put this away for good.”

“Someday, maybe.”

We watch as the first of the skiffs and dories arrive down at the dock for the day’s work. Little Mordecai Stark also watches from his tree. And now my name is Stark, too. I’d never carried my father’s name. My mother had christened me Mercy Rathbone, after her forebears, but I’ve decided to strike out on my own path.

“Two new orders this week!” Roderick shouts down to the men now striding along the dock toward the boat shed.

The men raise their arms and cheer—local fishermen, who have been learning shipbuilding with Roderick in the off-season. With the new orders, Roderick will be able to take on a few of them full time. A saw begins to whine from the boat shed and the sharp scent of pine wafts up to the house. The first new brig is being built on the Rathbone dock—not the dock of the elder Starks, who still cannot bear to hear my family’s name. Maybe they will relent when they know that soon there will be a new little Stark (a girl, I know) who will likely look much like her brother, and so may remind the elder Starks of their own lost golden girls and warm even their chill hearts. Euphemia and Thankful will come to help, as they did when Little Mordecai was born. There’s a nursery now on the third floor. We moved curtains from the hall of beds—my favorite pair, those woven with twin octopi—to hang from the crib, and my aunts have made
bedding of fresh-loomed wool and soft rugs of sheepskin. The nursery is next to Mama’s old room, where Roderick and I now sleep. The long black table is back in the library, where the shelves are slowly filling; Captain Avery brings us a box or two of books each time he visits.

The workmen’s wives head up the lawn, chattering, greeting me as they pass into the house. They come each morning to help me in the kitchen; the men breakfast with us. My cookery improves, though I would still prefer to stand atop a cold crosstree than before a hot stove, and the house fills with pleasant aromas and lively voices. It pleases me to see all our china and silver shining around the table, and a man at each place. All nine of my great-great-aunts come once a month for dinner, rowing over and back in a single whaleboat, three to each bench. I visit them often.

Crow flies out of the house and lands on Roderick’s shoulder. Crow has taken to Roderick, perching on his head or napping in a corner of the boat shed while he works. Roderick enlists him to carry small tools or blocks of wood, though Crow soon tires of the work and carries off bright nails and hinges to his nest. He visits the attic now, too, where I still keep all of the things that Mordecai so long preserved, those that were not lost on our voyage.