By The Sea, Book Four: The Heirs (33 page)

Quinta drew the palm of his hand to her lips
and kissed it. "Maybe so, but not one of them has asked me to marry
him," she said, her eyes shining with emotion.

"Will you?" he whispered. "At least think
about it? While I'm away?"

She nodded.

"Can I kiss you?"

That made her smile. "I'm wounded, Alan, not
comatose."

He lowered his mouth to hers in the kind of
kiss that some say has gone out of fashion: a kiss of devotion and
respect, of trust and companionship, of passion barely but
stoically controlled (they were in a hospital, after all). They
poured their souls out to one another after that, and talked about
everything they'd gone through, together and apart. They talked
about Mavis and Cindy and the chances of good old Shadow. They
talked about Laura Powers and Colin Durant and the shipwreck and
the missing gems. They talked about Neil.

They talked about the America's Cup.

"I wanted to ask you that day at Mergate,"
Quinta began, holding his hand in hers. "Why are you going? For the
challenge of it? For the glory? Every man who is willing to give up
several years of his life has got to ask himself: why?
"

He stood up and began to pace the room. "You
were there at Marble House when the Cup was handed over to the
Australians," he said. "You heard the cry of triumph; you felt the
pain of defeat. I'd be lying if I said that patriotism wasn't a
motive." He stopped his pacing and shrugged. "The Cup is the grail
of seafaring nations; it would be practically unchivalrous not to
pursue it."

"So your motives aren't at all
personal?"

"They're damn personal. Part of it is the
Mt. Everest syndrome: I'm going because it's there. I'm going
because I flubbed the last time. I'm going because I want to win.
There's only one thing—"

"And that is?"

"I won't go, I can't go, if it threatens
what we have together."

For a long moment Quinta held his look,
considering. "It won't happen," she answered at last. "Trust me,
Alan."

At the end of the visiting period Alan
slipped quietly out of the hospital. The night was warm. He paused
outside, unwilling to leave. The sound of rich and melancholy
honking made him look skyward. A hundred geese in flight, their
v-shape sprawled across the evening sky, pointed the way for him:
south. South, and half a world of west besides. He was going as far
from Newport as he could go without actually leaving the planet. As
far from her .... He put the thought, so full of bright pain,
carefully aside. But a line came back from his Freshman year to
torment him as he walked across the street to his car:
Whither
away, fair rover, and what thy quest?

Half-way up the hill from Newport Harbor and
towering over the tallest masts on the largest sailboats, a Gothic
spire rises up from the church where Tess Moran went to mass as a
young girl in the 1890s; where a dashing young senator married a
beautiful heiress in 1953 and later went on to become President of
the United States of America; and where, thirty-six years after
that, Quinta Powers—wearing an ivory silk gown a bit more
restrained than the one that Jacqueline Bouvier wore when she
married John F. Kennedy—walked down the aisle to be wed to the man
she had loved since the day they got lost in their search for a
puppy.

St. Mary's was full, which was not
surprising. For all its sophistication, Newport was still a small
town, and small-town people liked to pay their respects, whether to
say their final farewells to friends and family, or to congratulate
newly wed friends and family. Today's mood was one of joy (the
bride and groom were made for each other) and relief (it took them
long enough to make it down the aisle).

But make it they did, attended by a large
party of wedding attendants that gave their wedding great
poignancy. The ushers and the groomsmen were comprised of Alan
Seton's old
Shadow
crew, dressed in their
Shadow
blazers, cream flannels, and deck shoes—but some of them minus
their socks, a sailor's tradition. Alan's best man was
Shadow's
tactician, which everyone said made perfect sense:
who else could have managed to spring a bachelor party on Alan that
was a complete surprise?

The bridesmaids were Quinta's four sisters,
Eddie, Georgie, Bobbie and Jackie, all of them delighted for their
youngest sister. (How had they not noticed before that
she
was the fairest of them all?) The ring boy was Eddie's little
hellion Tommy, and the flower girl was Jackie's little angel Sadie,
who unfortunately was still a very young angel: she forgot to
scatter rose petals as she walked with great concentration in front
of the bride, and when she did remember, half-way down the aisle,
she dumped the entire basket onto the white linen carpet to make up
for her oversight.

Laura and Colin Durant were there, sitting
ramrod straight in the first pew, determined not to show their age
despite the arthritis that made their backs ache, beaming with
pride for their youngest and most beloved granddaughter.

Alan's parents were there, of course, down
from Boston, and so was his Uncle Dexter from Hampshire, England,
where he lived happily with his wife in Seton Place, the lovely
estate that would have been Alan's if his grandfather Geoffrey
hadn't just as happily renounced his claim to it in favor of his
younger brother Henry, Dexter's father. After all, Geoffrey had his
American spitfire Amanda. She was all he had needed to keep him
busy.

As for the rest? The aunts, uncles, cousins,
cousins of cousins, and in-laws to all of them? They were mostly on
Quinta's side. Alan's family, smaller by far, hardly made a dent in
the assembly. His guests were the men and women he worked with in
his Connecticut shipyard, and the ones he had worked with on the
sturdy but not quite fast enough
Shadow
.

Poor
Shadow.
It seemed that she
herself was destined to be always a bridesmaid, never a bride.
Though she had been sailed expertly by Alan and his crew, and
though she had managed to defeat several other contenders, she had
not earned the right to challenge Australia for the America's Cup.
That honor went to Dennis Conner, the skipper who lost the Cup to
Australia in the first place, breaking a one hundred and thirty-two
year winning streak, the longest in the history of sports.

Alan Seton was one of many who considered it
supremely fitting that Conner went on to reclaim the Cup he lost
and then haul it back to the United States; only the most envious
and meanest-spirited skipper could have begrudged him his
triumph.

And besides, Alan had Quinta. Like his
grandfather Geoffrey before him, Alan Seton was able eventually to
appreciate what mattered in life, and what mattered to him was the
woman he loved and the shipyard where he learned virtually every
skill he possessed. Let other men chase after fame and glory. It
turned out that Alan cared not a whit for it. Anyone who saw his
face as he watched his bride glide through a pile of bunched-up
rose petals on her way to meet him at the altar could see that. The
man was utterly in love.

Mavis Moran saw it, perhaps more than most.
She had slipped unobserved into the last ornately carved pew just
as the bride reached the head of the aisle of the soaring church.
Mavis gave Quinta and her gown a cursory glance, but it was Alan
Seton who commanded her attention. This was not the Alan Seton she
knew. There was a tenderness in his look, a sense of wonder, even,
that he had never shown for Mavis. She had been to plenty of
weddings and knew that grooms always looked smitten, but still. It
hurt more than she wanted to admit that not once had she ever got
that look.

Why had she come? She considered getting up
to leave but instead found herself absorbed by what occurred next
in the ceremony: Neil Powers, seated in his wheelchair next to Alan
at the head of the long aisle, began making an effort to rise from
his chair. Clearly it was a struggle—it seemed as if the
congregation, as one, were holding its breath as it watched—but he
managed it. Supported by crutches, one of them tucked securely
under his arm, he lifted the veil from Quinta's face with one hand,
kissed her cheek, and then pivoted slightly toward Alan and shook
his hand. After that, still on his own, he seated himself back in
his chair. Everyone sighed. Mavis, too, had to brush away a
tear.

Really, she should go. There was nothing
beyond heartache to be gained by staying; nothing to soothe the
unexpected void she felt. And yet she remained, her thoughts
drifting back to a time when she was thirteen and full of romantic
dreams of being a bride herself one day.

Suddenly she was back at Beau Rêve as that
young girl, reliving a single conversation between her grandmother
and her that she realized had altered the course of her life. Tess
Moran was eighty-seven by then, still beautiful, with remarkably
smooth Irish skin and fine-spun silver hair piled high on her head.
Her beauty was enhanced by the perfectly fitted clothing she always
wore and that she designed herself to minimize her limp; the
clothes were sewn by the most expert seamstresses that money could
buy. Young Mavis was in awe of her and in her sway.

The summer of her fateful thirteenth year,
Mavis's parents had given her the choice of touring Europe with
them or spending it at Beau Rêve with her grandmother. As it
happened, Mavis had developed a huge crush on the
seventeen-year-old who had been giving her riding lessons, so it
was no contest: she wanted to stay in Newport. Her parents were
pleased—no bored teenager to have to drag all over the
continent—and Tess Moran was pleased as well, because she still
mourned the loss of her sister Maggie more than a decade earlier.
It would be nice, she told her son Aaron and his wife, to have
family living with her in the house again.

It was a wonderful plan, but the romance
between Mavis and her riding instructor was not to be. Aiden went
on to another job in the Hamptons without so much as a
by-your-leave. Mavis felt tragically betrayed, as
thirteen-year-olds do, and in a vulnerable state, which may be why
she came down with a terrible cold that left her weak and with a
wracking cough that made it hard sometimes to breathe.

On a wet and dreary afternoon, after a fit
of coughing so bad that Mavis's ribs hurt afterward, Tess Moran
came into her bedroom to check on her.

"Mavey, you poor thing; I feel so bad for
you," her grandmother said in a tremulous voice.

Her grandmother never talked in that tone!
Mavis, frightened by her grandmother's obvious concern, immediately
fell to coughing again, and when she finally calmed down, said, "Am
I going to die? Like great-Aunt Maggie?"

Her grandmother sat beside her on the bed
and began smoothing her hair back from her face in gentle strokes.
"For one thing, Aunt Maggie lived a long, long time, much longer
than most people with tuberculosis. Which, by the way, you do not
have," she added with a reassuring smile.

"But I've never coughed like this!"

"I know. I know. But you've had all the
tests, and you don't have a fever, you don't have pneumonia, you
don't have asthma." She added softly, "You do have a broken heart,
though, I think."

Embarrassed to be caught out, Mavis turned
away from her grandmother and stared instead at the porcelain
Sèvres clock on the marble nightstand. "I never said anything to
anybody about Aiden," she mumbled.

"You didn't have to!" her grandmother said
with a laugh. "Every time you came back from riding, you looked as
happy as could be. And you did go on about his riding skills." With
a sympathetic smile, she said, "He's gone, then?"

Mavis nodded into her pillow. "He never even
said he was leaving."

"They do that, sometimes."

"But he said he liked me!"

"They do that, too."

"I wish I'd never met him!"

"No, Mavis. Don't say that. Experience is
the best teacher; you learned something from Aiden."

"What did I learn? I didn't learn
anything!"

"Yes you did. You learned that when it comes
right down to it, the only one you can trust completely is
yourself. You might meet someone you
think
you can trust—but
one hundred per cent? Only yourself, I am sorry to say."

Mavis thought about that for a long moment,
then turned back to her grandmother. "What about Doctor Whitman?
Didn't you trust him?"

"Very much. More than anyone I've ever
known."

"Then why didn't you marry him? He spent so
much time here."

"That's why," Tess answered, and when Mavis
looked confused, she added, "He was married."

"I still don't get it."

"You will. When you're older, you will."

Again Mavis pondered. Then she said, "I
think you should have married him anyway. He could have got
divorced. People do."

"It wasn't quite so simple as all that.
Doctor Whitman's wife became quite ill—"

"—with TB, right? I bet it was TB."

Tess nodded. "She probably contracted it at
the sanatorium that Doctor Whitman ran. And then, of course, he had
the fatal stroke two years ago. So that was … that."

"I remember when that happened! The
ambulance and everything. Mother wouldn't let me look; she
practically locked me in my bedroom. This bedroom, actually. But I
could see them lifting Doctor Whitman onto that stretcher thing, I
could see right through that window."

"Ah. I never knew that," her grandmother
said. She was in another place now, and in pain.

To distract her, Mavis said quickly, "Who's
taking care of Mrs. Whitman?"

"They have—she has—two sons. Wonderful
children; I know for a fact that they're seeing to her needs very
well."