By The Sea, Book Three: Laura (10 page)

"How do you want me to address you?" he
asked bluntly. "Captain? Cap? Skipper? Skip?"

"'Laura will do fine," she said, annoyed by
his detachment. "We don't stand on formality around here. If we
did," she murmured, turning away from him and leading the way aft,
"I'd have given you the best berth."

Back on deck they found Neil, who'd just
returned from the chandlery with a replacement shackle for the
boat. Laura introduced the two, and Durant stuck out his hand.

"Pleased to meet you, mate."

"Yes, sir, Mr. Durant."

"I hear we don't stand on ceremony around
here. Call me Colin."

Neil stared. "Colin?" Neil didn't know any
Colins in real life. "Are you from the U.S.?"

Durant glanced at Neil's mother with an
ironic smile. "Depends on who you talk to. Hey, pal, how about
showing me where to stow my gear?"

Before Laura could object, Durant and her
son had disappeared below. Just like that. It was obvious to her
that for all his experience, Colin Durant did not care a bee's
stripes about authority on board a ship. It was implicit in his
tone, his smile, the arbitrary way he had just about-faced. Had she
said she was going to show him the mechanics on deck, or not?

Laura gave them five minutes, then went
below after them.

She found them in the forecastle again. Neil
was looking transported with excitement as Colin, his face
animated, was telling what appeared to be a fish story of some
kind. There was no excuse for the boy's look of enthrallment. He'd
seen whales breaching and dolphins gamboling around the bow of the
Virginia;
what fish could possibly beat that?

"Mama! You'll never guess! Colin caught a
great white shark when he was sailing off Western Australia! It was
eating a seal and he shot it with a 30-30, and it swam away, but in
a little while it came back for the seal, so he shot it again—"

"Mr. Durant sounds a little bored with
life," Laura interrupted, wondering at the wide-eyed look in her
son.

"—and again and again," the boy finished
breathlessly. "Finally, after he emptied all his rounds into it
they gaffed it aboard, but it still wasn't dead! It thrashed and
thrashed and nearly took out the mizzenmast and did all kinds of
damage before it died. And look at this!" he said gleefully. "It's
a ditty bag made of
shagreen.
That's what they call
sharkskin." He whipped the bag from Durant's berth and held it out
to his mother. "Feel it, Mama. Feel how sharp it is!"

She humored him, touched it, found it
repulsive. "Since when are you so fond of sharks?" she asked with
little amusement. "I seem to remember you thought they were
terrifying."

"Oh, Mama," he replied, embarrassed. "I was
just a
boy
then." His last sighting had been a month
ago.

"Well, who knows?" said Laura, aware that
her son seemed to have grown up since she saw him on deck a few
minutes ago. "Maybe
we'll
get to see a beautiful seal being
torn to shreds by a ferocious shark." She shot a look of reproof at
Durant. "With any luck."

Immediately she felt the air chill and Neil
withdraw, which made her sorry. It wasn't fair to take it out on a
boy of eight. She tried to lighten up a little. "So. Have you
straightened out who stows what where?"

"Oh sure. That was easy," said Neil. "I
wasn't using the top drawer anyway."

Laura saw that the once-empty bottom
drawer—which stuck and sometimes collected water from deck
leaks—now had a few of Neil's things in it. It was petty to resent
Durant for having accepted Neil's little offering, but resent him
she did.

"I hope you didn't tell Mr. Durant that
you're not using your berth to sleep in, honey," she said, with a
smile that she hoped would pass for friendly.

Why she expected that to make Durant give up
the drawer, she had no idea. He didn't, of course, but merely
smiled and said, "Thanks, mate. I'm getting a little stiff to be
crawling around on all fours."

What a selfish man
.

"It's time for lunch," she said without
looking at either one of the conspirators, and left.

By the time all of them gathered around the
table for a meal of boiled cabbage and potatoes, Laura had composed
herself. She was aware of two things: that the balance of power had
suddenly shifted aboard the
Virginia,
and that as a result
she was acting irrationally. She prided herself on being
mathematical. At the moment it was one of her against two of them,
with Billy's loyalties unaccounted for.

She wanted Neil back in her corner. "Good.
You remembered to wash your hands," she said to her son by way of a
rebuke to Durant, who hadn't bothered much about his.

"Oh,
Mama,
" chided Neil, pinking up
to the roots of his sandy blond hair and glaring at her with a look
that said, if you can't think of anything but motherly things to
say, please say nothing at all.

Foiled, Laura decided to take a shot at
being captain. "Mr. Durant, I'd like you to look at the
donkey-engine after lunch. Billy got it to run, but it doesn't
sound right."

"Can you be more specific?" Durant asked
politely. He'd taken off his watch cap for lunch, and his black
hair tumbled in curls over his forehead.

Distracting her. "It sounds ... odd," she
explained vaguely. "It goes pitter-pitter instead of thump-thump.
Sometimes it dies, when you least expect it to."

"Pitter, not thump," Durant said, barely
suppressing a smile. "All right. I'll look at it."

Billy watched the exchange in silence as he
shoveled his mouth full of cabbage. He rarely had space for words
at mealtime.

Neil, on the other hand, had scarcely
touched his food. His eyes—wide-set, piercing blue, the eyes of his
father—were focused firmly on the new guest at the table. "My dad
got that donkey-engine for nothing, you know, Colin. He traded some
hootch we ran bootleg last year," he confided eagerly.

"Neil! For pity's sake!" said his mother. So
he'd known exactly what they'd been doing, after all. Seven years
old.

Durant looked across the table at the boy
and said blandly, "I' m sorry, mate, I didn't catch that. Come
again?"

"Can we move on to the business at hand?"
demanded Laura, and she proceeded to outline the workload for the
rest of the day, shifting the burden of cleaning the galley trap
from Billy's shoulders to Neil's. She was piqued.

By
evening Durant had got the donkey-engine purring like a suckling
cub and the windlass to repent and stop slipping its gears. Laura,
a farm woman at heart when it came to provisions, had stowed food
enough to take them down to Rio and back. Neil, who'd spent the day
working (and chafing) belowdecks under his mother's watchful eye,
had picked over every last spud for growths, separating the
wrinkled ones from the fresh, and had greased every egg with
petroleum jelly. Billy had scrubbed out the inside of the new water
barrel with baking soda and had through-bolted its mounting pads.
They were ready.

When Laura came up on deck, soaked through
with perspiration, it was to see Colin Durant high up in the
rigging, climbing up each ratline in turn and—to her breathless
horror—jumping up and down as hard as he could on each one. Without
thinking she cupped her hands and yelled, "Are you crazy? Get down
from there!"

Considering that he wasn't familiar with the
rigging, his descent was impressively fast. He landed like a cat in
front of her, and she hissed, "Skylarking is one thing, but that
bordered on vandalism!"

"That bordered on common sense," he
corrected her. "I'm not about to trust my life to ratlines I
haven't tested."

"He's right, Mama," chipped in Neil. "How is
he
to know they're safe?"

Laura retreated, chastised. Colin Durant had
won another round.

****

The next morning was filled with the
craziness that preceded any passage. Last-minute stowing, frantic
trips to the chandlery, short tempers and misunderstandings—the
mood and tempo aboard the
Virginia
were about par for the
course. When at last she gave the order to Billy and Durant to
hoist the mainsail, Laura's heart was leapfrogging over her ribs
from the adrenaline rush. This was it, her first command; pray God
she distinguish herself.

Billy jumped into the yawl-boat to ease the
Virginia
away from the dock; Durant threw off the bow line
while Billy began pushing the bow slowly toward the channel. Then
the stern line was handed over to Neil, who staggered under its
weight but managed to bring it aboard. Durant jumped back aboard,
and by the time the
Virginia
was clear of the dock he was
hoisting the foresail, his arms bulging from the effort. Billy
brought the yawl-boat around to the stern to nudge the old girl
along; there was little wind.

Once they cleared the inner harbor, Laura
began to relax. So far, so good. Little sailing yachts scattered in
their path like so many toys; they knew and respected the real
thing when they saw it. Billy climbed aboard, and he and Durant
hoisted the yawl-boat on her davits. Next stop: New London. Laura
was feeling relieved enough, and mellow enough, to offer a "well
done all around" to her crew. When her eyes met Durant's she did
not try to conceal the warm regard that she felt; he had done his
job well and she was fair-minded enough to admit it.

Billy brought up the last of the morning's
coffee. Durant declined, but Laura hadn't had any, so she let
Durant have the helm while she enjoyed a cup and savored the
morning. "I think you'll find that the boat is well-balanced. I've
never had any trouble handling the wheel," she said to Durant,
smiling with pleasure because she knew it was so. She noticed that
he wasn't wearing his watch cap, and she wanted to ask him why.

He nudged the schooner up into the wind
until her sails began to luff, then fell off a little, feeling his
way through her course. "Feels good. Feels right," he said, his
voice low with satisfaction. "It's been a while."

"When were you last behind a wheel?" she
asked, curious.

Instead of when, he answered where. "The Red
Sea, I guess."

"You've sailed on the Red Sea?" she said,
amazed. "Where
haven't
you sailed?"

He thought about it. "Great Salt Lake," he
replied at last.

He was looking out for a string of lobster
pots buoyed in the bay, and she had a chance to study him as the
boat lifted and fell to the filling breeze. As usual, she didn't
know whether he was lying through his teeth or not. He looked like
a liar. Maybe it was the stubbled beard; maybe it was the restless
eyes. There was something about him that she'd never seen in
Minnesota, or even out East. She wondered whether he was running
from the police.

"Don't you miss your family?" she asked,
trying to surprise him into some sort of admission.

"Why? They don't live on the Great Salt
Lake," he replied, deliberately inserting logic where she had
intended none.

She laughed self-consciously, dragging a
strand of hair that had blown across her eyes out of the way. "No,
I meant, with your traveling everywhere all the time."

He took a quarter-turn on the wheel to avoid
the string of buoys, then turned to her and said softly, "I'll ask
a similar question: how does a beautiful, smart woman submit to a
life without roots, without comfort, without any but her immediate
family?"

She ringed the edge of her coffee mug with a
forefinger, then answered, "I don't submit. I choose."

"Choose, then," he said, amiably
corrected.

She shrugged. "Why not? My father died when
I was a girl, and my mother a few years ago. I've never much seen
eye to eye with my two brothers. And I found farming very
predictable. Every year you plant the same thing in the same
rotation at the same time, and the only variety comes from the
weather. It might be a hot year, or a wet year, or a dry one—I
guess this last year has been the driest on record—but, don't you
see? Even the disappointments are predictable. Ask my brothers. But
on the
Virginia,
I never know what's next. Never."

Laura brought herself up short, wondering
how it was that she was babbling her heart out, and all she'd
managed to find out from him was that he may or may not have sailed
on the Great Salt Lake. "I'm sure I don't have to give you a speech
on the attractions of a life at sea," she said, more coolly than
before.

"You want to be the captain of your fate,
the master of your soul," he said without irony, not looking at her
as he squinted into the sun ahead. "In that we are one, you and
I."

It was an acknowledgment, an invitation, and
it had her reeling with the thrill of it. It wasn't what he said—it
never seemed to be what he said—but how he said it. She opened her
mouth to say something, anything, but it would have broken the
spell, so she said nothing and sat back a little way, out of his
peripheral vision, and studied him as he stood behind the
Virginia's
spoked wheel.

She no longer believed that he was an
American, and she scarcely believed that he was human. A scruffy
reincarnation of Adonis, perhaps, or Eros in an earthly form, with
his thickly lashed eyes, his straight Roman nose, his graceful and
powerful build. Perhaps he was simply French. She sat quietly
behind him, her body automatically bracing for the rise and fall of
the schooner through the swells that squeezed down the east and
west passages of Narragansett Bay—and mused.

After a while Neil came up on deck, finished
with the breakfast dishes which in the ship's routine were always
stacked in a pan until the
Virginia
got underway. His face
split into a cheerful grin when he saw his new friend at the
helm.