The Rathbones (5 page)

{in which Mercy and Mordecai flee}

W
HEN
I
WOKE
, it took me a moment to realize where I was, and why. My skin prickled and I gripped the blanket at my throat. The man in blue. Had Mordecai heard him? Had he come this far looking for me? But the way to the attic was not easy to find. A stranger would have had trouble finding it in bright daylight, unpecked by crows. The man had dropped to his knees, clutching his eyes. Maybe my crow had wounded him gravely enough that he couldn’t go on; maybe my crow had blinded him. Mordecai was still standing at his worktable, as he had been when I arrived—how long ago I wasn’t sure. He was hunting through a stack of books, rapidly scanning the pages of first one, then another, snapping the pages to and fro, talking to himself all the while in an excited whisper. I realized he was behaving oddly, but I didn’t care; I was only relieved that everything seemed otherwise normal. I fell back against the pillow.

My face was hot, my body stiff. The cool cotton sheet soothed my skin. Mordecai had tucked me in with nautical precision, the sheet neatly turned down at my throat, over a worn woolen blanket stamped with an anchor. My hair had been brushed back, my face scrubbed clean. A steaming bowl of broth stood on a table by the cot. I glanced
up at Mordecai’s worktable. A beaker bubbled over a low flame, surrounded by shells from shellfish and vegetables from the root cellar.

The room was still dark, though faint gray light slanted down from the knotholes in the rafters. Then the bell clanged five times, and I knew it was near dawn. Larboard and Starboard never shirked their duty, rising each day before dawn to strike the bell that stood at the top of the stairs, as they did at the turn of each hour throughout the day.

Mordecai had not changed my frock; the stain was still there on the bodice, the cloth dark and stiff. I felt for the gobbet of flesh that my crow had dropped on my shoulder, but Mordecai had cleaned it away. I put my hand to my breast; my crow wasn’t there. I sat up straight.

“Where is he?”

I started to get out of bed.

“Lie down.”

Mordecai pressed me down and pointed to a corner cabinet once used for storing linens, now an infirmary for weary specimens. My dead crow lay next to a tray of crustaceans, wrapped in a napkin and guarded by cutlery, a tea towel neatly folded beneath its head. A low caw came from outside the attic. I turned my head to see my other crow clutching the outside of the doorframe, only his head protruding into the room. One eye was fixed on the tray where his companion lay.

I waited for Mordecai to question me, but he was back at his blackboard, intently working on the drawing I had noticed when I came in, referring repeatedly to the books and papers spread out around him. He had finished chalking his lines and was now plotting points on the grid.

I pulled my blanket tighter and stared up at the ceiling. Mordecai appeared to be ignoring me, but I could feel him look at me now and then. Once when I glanced up at him our eyes met and he looked away, back to his blackboard, but not before I saw a feverish spark in his pale-green eye. I was glad that he wasn’t questioning me. I wasn’t yet ready to talk about what I’d seen on the widow’s walk. I wished
it had been a dream, but the rope burns on my hands were stinging proof that it had been real. I burrowed deeper under the blanket, grateful to be warm and safe. The attic was, after all, where I spent most of my time.

Cousin Mordecai had lived in the attic as long as I could remember, under the hull of the
Sassacus
. One of our ancestors had installed her there, the bottom half of a square-rigged brig of fifty-odd feet, her upper decks stripped off and her hull turned and bolted down over the top of the house in place of a roof. Perhaps our ancestor couldn’t bear to abandon her to rot in the sea after her long years of fruitful service had ended. Where the hull’s halves joined, at the top of the attic, the wood was ringed from the slow seepage of the ocean, stained where barrels of beef and rum once rested. Mordecai knew the details of each voyage of the ship, gleaned from his trove of old logbooks and journals. The side of her hull had been stove in by a sperm a few generations earlier. Paler planks showed along one curve where the wood had been patched. A whisper carried easily from one end to the other. Dried strands of seaweed dangled from the rafters. As a child, I’d believed that a sleeping mermaid was trapped in the timbers.

Mordecai passed his days among his treasures, curiosities acquired by generations of Rathbone mariners. Eagerly bargained for in foreign waters, the souvenirs had soon been forgotten, their charms diluted by distance. Mordecai found them around the house, abandoned in unlocked sea lockers or fading on windowsills where curtains were no longer drawn at dusk. His collection was installed in the tall glass-fronted mahogany cabinets that lined the sides of the hull. In one, a cluster of casts of mutant hands seemed to wave gently to me as I passed, plaster fingers bloated or shriveled, some like sea slugs, others anemones. On a shelf above the hands, stuffed birds of several species perched, moldering, on branches of coral. The eye of a giant squid shone from one cabinet. In another, the heart of a sainted prelate who’d perished among the Maori endured in a coconut shell.

Each morning Mordecai tutored me, supervised by a row of
salvaged plaster busts. Two heads of Socrates, large and small, flanked a startled Lord Nelson in full uniform; the chipped head of a horse who had lost a nostril observed us with a cold white eye. Other, more retiring busts hung back in the shadowy recesses of the rafters. All gazed down at us from perches that my crows would have envied if they could have forgotten their fear of the attic. They didn’t care for the overturned hull. They believed, I thought, that the ship had been turned only for bailing, or had capsized in a storm, and would soon be righted. Or they were afraid that Mordecai would add them to his collection.

I had mastered most of what Mordecai knew of the arts and sciences, drawn from our scanty collection of books. An incomplete encyclopedia provided us with a thorough grounding in those subjects starting with
G
,
H–I
, and
U
. I was fully familiar with Unconformity, Ungulates, and the Underwing Moth. A few French volumes on natural history shared a shelf with Catesby’s
The Purple Grosbeak with Poison Wood
and
Hooping Crane
. There were as well a few-score books of interest to the seaman: flag books, almanacs,
The Oriental Navigator
, books of charts, and narratives of voyages to distant lands.

I first practiced writing at five, in a salvaged logbook, copying out entries: lists of men and provisions (60 barrels of s-o-r-g-h-u-m, 30 of s-o-w-b-e-l-l-y), the name and number of whales taken on this voyage and that. We dissected creatures that washed up on the beach, or burrowed in the sand, thinking themselves safe, though these were rare; few fish swam in the waters off Naiwayonk, and I seldom saw crabs and other shore life. When I couldn’t find fresh examples on the shoreline, we applied our knives to the pickled specimens that bobbed in jars of formaldehyde, whose organs, though shriveled, retained enough of shape and position to teach me the basics of anatomy. The mounted skeleton of a spider monkey surveyed our dissections from a corner of the worktable, eyeing us reproachfully from under a little sailor cap.

Mordecai had erased our lesson from earlier that day, but it was still just visible on the blackboard under his newly drawn grid, the
legend still there in the bottom right corner: “
The Anatomy of the Sperm Whale
.” The details of its massive body—its carefully labeled bones and organs, rendered in white chalk—had all been rubbed into one large and ghostly smear. Next to the blackboard, nailed to the neck of a headless figurehead, an aquatint showed a whale rolled on its back, impaled on all sides by men in whaleboats with lances and harpoons. With a flourish of his pointer Mordecai had indicated the whale’s blowhole on the aquatint and asked me about its angle (
sharp, leftward, identifiable at a great distance
). He had often drilled me on the sperm’s diet, nodding at my answer (
squid and skate are preferred, though he will, if pressed, eat commoner fish
), had often informed me that a lucky few evaded the whaling ships and lived to be as old as eighty, then drifted down to the ocean’s bed, where smaller creatures ate them away.

I could see that Mordecai was ready for our next lesson. Lined up on his worktable was a row of jars filled with murky liquid. Pale tentacles curled in some jars; in others rows of suckers pressed against the glass. We would be reviewing the cephalopods, he had said, with particular attention to anomalies in the chambered nautilus.

How could I go back to my lessons after what had just happened?

I sipped my broth and stared up into the rafters, where the busts all dozed, trying to ready myself to tell Mordecai. Clearly he knew something had happened to send me, bloodied and fainting, to his attic in the middle of the night, my dead crow tucked into my dress. And clearly he was no more anxious to talk than I was.

Though I spent all of my time in the attic, we never discussed anything other than our lessons. Mordecai was just my tutor, who happened to be my cousin too. Besides tutoring me, he had in recent months also instructed me in those graces a mother should teach her daughter, consulting the encyclopedia entry on “Gentility” for details. Each day I improved my posture by walking the attic with a large volume balanced on my head:
An Epitome of Navigation
or
The Eventful History of the Mutiny at Spithead and the Nore
. On days when I drifted, tired of some lesson I had long since memorized, Mordecai would
mutely hand me a stack of small red missals and watch me struggle along the attic, the little tower of books teetering, my walk as stiff as his. Or he would disappear under a beam into his galley and presently I would hear spoons clinking against china. Mordecai would emerge with a tea tray. “And now, show me how you can pour with decorum,” he would say, while the crows squawked outside the attic door, longing for a taste of the biscuits Mordecai had arranged on a plate.

When I was younger I would ask him to come to Mama’s room with me, to choose bones from her stores, odd pieces for which she had no use; I knew he coveted them. “Your mama is busy with her own bones,” he always said, with a dry little cough, and never came with me.

Staring up at the busts, something red caught my eye. At the end of the row, past the larger Socrates, stood the head and shoulders of a woman, her narrow, delicate face framed by lush marble curls. That day, her hair, until then unadorned, sported the cocked red hat of a ship’s captain.

With Mordecai still busy at his board, I moved my chair under the bust, stepped up onto the seat, and lifted off the hat. The stiff red felt was trimmed in blue ribbon and boasted cockades. I held it to my nose: salt, tobacco, and another scent—more feminine, one plaster didn’t produce. Mordecai looked up and, seeing what I held, snatched it away and returned it to the bust’s curls. He turned back to his blackboard.

“Cousin. Where did this come from?”

He didn’t turn around.

“I found it in a drawer,” he said.

“A drawer?”

I frowned down at Mordecai from my chair, for once taller than him. He perched on the edge of a stool, turning a piece of chalk in his hands, not meeting my eye. One knee jittered up and down; the heel of his boot tapped on the floor. He seemed to be considering some other, more acceptable answer to my question. Then he looked sharply up at me.

“Where did those burns on your hands come from? What happened to your crow?”

Now I looked away. Mordecai said nothing else. When I looked back he was running his hands through his hair, trying to smooth it down; it drifted up again in a white haze. His hair looked bleached by sun and sea, though he never went outside. His skin, too, was always pale; it looked lightly powdered, as though it wore a thin brine crust. He turned on his stool to face the blackboard and added a point to his grid. He took a deep breath and said, “He was looking for you in the night. I heard him.”

My legs buckled. I dropped down onto the chair and gripped the edges of the seat.

“Calm yourself, he is gone. I heard him out there, after you came in, searching up and down the halls, but there has been no sound for hours. He must have given up.”

I pulled my knees up, locked my arms around them, and hid my face. A coppery smell rose from the bodice of my frock, where my crow had been.

Mordecai’s stool scraped on the floor and I heard him tiptoe over to my chair. He attempted to pat my hand, tapping it lightly a few times with three long white fingers. A few moments later I heard him begin to pace back and forth.

“Mercy …”

I lifted my head slightly and peered up from between my knees at Mordecai. He was standing with his hands clasped behind him, rocking on his heels, the hectic glint in his eye even brighter.

“I had planned to tell you later, but now …”

Mordecai flashed out a book from behind his back and thrust it in the air—a logbook, bound in frayed green linen, salt-stained.

“I have found it! The missing link!”

I looked at him, waiting.

He laid the book down and turned to his board. I saw that he had drawn more points on the grid since I last looked, a scattering of white circles, and that he had labeled the lines of his grid with numbers.
With a series of quick twitches, he now connected the white points with his chalk. He stood aside and swept a trembling hand across the surface of the blackboard, glancing eagerly at me.

I looked more closely and saw that the numbers on the grid were latitudes and longitudes. The connected points now described a rough shape.

Mordecai picked up his pointer and tapped it here and there on the map as he spoke, his voice coming faster and faster.

“Certainly there were some troubling incongruities; allowances must of course always be made for slight deviations in the lunar tables, not to mention the”—here Mordecai snorted—“predictable inaccuracies of the seaman’s less than keen observations … nevertheless, I have long suspected that the aberration in the southern loop was not a singular deviation but a periodic recurrence, mirrored in the northern portion … and we must certainly not neglect the effect of the currents at forty-one degrees and thirty-four minutes north, seventy-one degrees and ninety-five minutes west, owing to the Doldrums Trench—”