The Rathbones (27 page)

Bow-Oar sometimes wished he could go back to the time before the golden wives. He wished that, when his men had rowed past the Stark Archipelago on that long-ago day, he had asked the men to tie him to the mast, to blindfold him and stop his ears with wax so that he wouldn’t see the long and golden bodies of the Stark girls. Though he was busy with the training and wanted only to fall into a cot in the barracks at night, he was still drawn to Lydia like sea to sand, still rocked her each night until he sank exhausted into sleep.

But she had given him such beautiful sons that he couldn’t truly regret having married her. Sons as long and golden as their mother and as strong as their father. Besides the three boys on trial, Lydia and her sisters had given their husbands five more boys in as many years: Lydia bore Parmenas and Philo one after the other, then came Miriam’s twins, Lanman and Layman, within a month of Priscilla’s little Silas.

Bow-Oar couldn’t keep his heart from leaping at the thought of the next voyage of the
Misistuck
. Whereas the whaleboat ranks would be determined by the trials, Rathbone ship captains were chosen by vote, and Absalom had already been voted in as next captain of the
Misistuck
. The ship had made do without a captain since Bow-Oar had come ashore to supervise the training. Absalom, who led his two cousins in the trials that day, would soon turn thirteen. He would be joined the next year by his younger brother, and in the years to come by his youngest brother and cousins, all in training. The crews would be replenished in the coming years and the Rathbones’ primacy restored.

•  •

The three boys blazed with beauty. The early sun that struck gold on the sea suffused their skin and hair. The light seemed to spill off them into the water. The boys drew back their arms. They held their
arms high, angles exact, sinews taut. Gulls gathered and wheeled above, among them a black bird, a crow that dropped and lit on the mast of Absalom’s boat. Though the whales were not yet visible, their voices began to sound over the water.

•  •

“There’s Jeroboam,” said Miriam.

Priscilla leaned out farther.

“No, that’s my Ezekiel. Do you think I don’t know my own son?”

Lydia squeezed between them and held her hand over her eyes.

“There’s Absalom, at the front. He still holds his head that same way.”

The golden wives stood at an open window, watching the trials. Their whaleboned gowns bumped and scraped as they maneuvered for space at the open sash on the seaward side. Their shawls snapped like signal pennants in the stiff breeze. They were still slender and just as lovely when seen from a certain distance. They wore gowns of silvered bronze and dull pewter and mercury, in styles long out of fashion.

“Are you sure that’s him? A year. It seems even longer since we’ve seen them. Look how tall they’ve grown!” Priscilla leaned out, squinting at the glare of sun on water. It was difficult to focus on such a distant point, her eyes being used to the near at hand: to the point of a needle, to spinet keys, to the dimmer rooms at the rear of the house where the wives passed their days.

“One year and nine days,” said Miriam.

Priscilla blinked and rubbed her eyes. “I don’t understand why we can’t see them more often.”

Lydia smiled and squeezed her sister’s hand. “They’d grow soft. Don’t you listen to your husband?”

“Just for a few minutes, now and then. On their birthdays …” Priscilla returned to staring out the window.

If they could have seen the boys more clearly, the sisters could still
not have easily told which son was whose. Though the boys had been living at home all this time, they never came upstairs, and the wives were not allowed to visit them. Only when ships departed or returned, or during the spring trials, did the men and boys gather on the dock, only then did they stand still long enough so that the sisters could catch more than brief glimpses: bright heads hurrying down the hill to the docks; hurrying back again when the dinner bell was struck below; rowing far out in the sound with their cousins. The sons in the boats that day, the eldest sons, looked much alike in any case, all born a few months apart, thirteen years ago. Still, the golden wives squinted at the horizon, trying to match their scant memories with what broad gestures were visible from so far.

The golden wives would no more have thought of descending to the lower floor than they would think to wield a harpoon. Lydia had tried a few times, long ago, in the first months after Absalom had gone down to live with the men, had pleaded with Bemus, but he only shook his head. Bemus still held his post at the top of the stairs, sleeping each night in his hammock strung across the door.

Lydia still remembered those nights, before Absalom was born, when she woke to the sound of voices outside the door, like the voices she had heard outside the bedroom on her first night in Rathbone House. Bemus had spoken in a low voice, and the men had moved away. Once, when the voices raised in anger, she heard the thud and crash of a body tumbling down the stairs. But no man had tried to climb for many years.

Occasionally the wives did descend the staircase halfway to the landing. A door on that level led outside to the gardens at the back of the house. They walked outdoors on fine days, though no trees shaded them and no roses scented the air. A few of the older seamen continued to prune and weed the few hardy bushes and the tough little beach roses that persisted; the flowers and fruit trees planted for the golden wives’ arrival had died long ago from too much salt air and water. The house stood on the highest ground of Naiwayonk, but the sea found its way up through the earth like a spring. The empty
furrows of the garden’s formal geometry had become a watery maze along which fish swam.

The wives passed much of their long days with needlework, stitching delicately petit-pointed signal flags and braiding satin lanyards for their husbands. They sewed clothes copied from catalogues from abroad that found their way to Naiwayonk, already years outmoded, from such fabric as made its way there too. Bow-Oar and his brothers wore waistcoats and frock coats and breeches of thin Indian paisley in which they shivered, or thick felted wool from some northern climate that, once wetted by whale’s blood, never dried. The wives walked the golden rooms not in the fresh Regency on display in city salons north and south but in tired Empire silhouettes.

Lydia stared out at her son, standing strong and sure in the whaleboat. She thought she saw the bright head turn, caught a glimpse of his pale face. She reached her arm out the open window and waved. If her son returned the gesture, she couldn’t see it.

She no longer felt the great pain in her heart she had suffered when Absalom had first gone to live below. For her two younger sons, who had descended to live with the men at six months old, she felt a similarly diluted love. It may have been the distance at which she always viewed him or the long intervals between sightings. Whatever the cause, she was grateful to feel that day only a thin wash of pain. She looked down at the girl who stood beside her and hugged her.

“Besides, I have you, dearest, don’t I?”

After the boys had all descended to their lives below, after the wives had begun to sigh at the empty cribs and quiet rooms, each began to swell one more time. Three more golden Rathbones were born, and this time they were daughters, the first girls to grow up in Rathbone House. Lydia and her sisters, whatever they knew or did not know of the fate of girls in earlier generations, would not have suffered their daughters to be spirited away. Bow-Oar and his brothers did not object. After their sons were taken from them, the wives were less unhappy with their daughters for company, less troublesome to their husbands. The girls, now all in their ninth year, stood by their
mothers at the window, looking out at their brothers. Their hair, in infancy the same shade of gold as that of their mothers, had paled to a shade nearer white. Their names were Claudia, Julia, and Sophia.

Claudia looked up at her mother. Her eyes, Lydia’s soft blue when born, had lately shifted hue and brightened to a vivid aqua.

“Mama, I want to go with Absalom next time.”

Lydia smiled, and hugged her daughter close.

“Why would you want that, dearest?”

“I want to talk to the whales.”

The wives all laughed.

“And what would you say to them?” asked Priscilla.

“I would ask if I could swim with them.”

Priscilla and Miriam smiled at their niece and looked at each other, laughing.

“Claudia, you don’t want to swim with any smelly old whales.”

“Papa says I shall marry a fisherman.”

Lydia smoothed her daughter’s pale hair.

“No, my darling, you shall marry a prince.”

•  •

The sun rose higher, light spreading across the water and striking the dock. The fathers raised hands to brows; the golden wives squinted through their fingers. At the edge of the sea a line of spouts rose and shimmered. The boys crouched lower. They raised their arms as one. The harpoons flashed out together and in a single swift arc the blades struck home.

Three whales, their smooth glide checked, churned the water with their heads, thrashing the sea with their flukes. The whales soared straight up and dove down again, disappearing under the surface.

The men on the dock roared. The women at the window clapped their hands. Bow-Oar and his brothers didn’t move at all, or take their eyes from the place in the sea where the whales had sounded.

Such a seemingly small thing: the distance from minor valve to
major artery, barely the span of a man’s hand in a body of forty feet from end to end. The difference between a slow trickle of blood and a deluge; a huge heart that pumped on, only nicked, and one that burst and emptied into the sea. The women didn’t know, nor did the younger Rathbone men, the significance of that small difference.

Bow-Oar, watching his son, tried to find excuses for that hand’s span of error: a freak of wind; a slippery hull. But deep within he knew, if the blades had struck where they should have, just above the root of the left fin, that the whales would have breached in a fount of spray and blood and died within moments. Instead they rose smoothly to the surface, their backs bristling with shafts, their pace unchecked, lines loose and trailing, and surged away.

•  •

Katurah finished spooning the thin porridge into Moses’s mouth and set the bowl aside. She knelt on the end of the bed and stripped down the sheets and blankets, then turned Moses over to change his soiled bedclothes. He was by then light as hollowed bone. She remade the bed with fresh sheets, tucking them neatly under Moses’s chin, and sat next to him. She smoothed the blankets over his shrunken body, and sat looking down at him.

It had been five years since she’d come to Rathbone House. She had stayed longer than any of the other barren wives. Those who had not become pregnant within a year of their arrival had been replaced. But Katurah, though she had borne no children, had been allowed to stay on to keep the old man company and, in the last few years, to take care of him as he grew frail. Caring for Moses, she thought, as she wiped a drool of porridge from his chin with a corner of her apron, was little different from tending to an infant. She was glad that she had borne no sons of her own. She had seen enough men die at sea.

Katurah had grown up in a fishing village to the south. Her brothers and father were lost at sea in a storm when she was a young girl. Five years ago, she had, like Hepzibah, like Euphemia and Beulah
and all the sixteen wives before her, seen a whaleboat one morning—the same long slim hull, oars flashing in unison against a bright sky. She had, like her predecessors, reached for a boy’s hand and stepped in and glided away. But unlike so many previous wives, she felt no irresistible urge. She was compelled not by fresh boys in blue middies, bright ties flying, but by necessity. There were few men left in her little town. The plentiful cod and haddock in the sound that had sustained them for generations had thinned in recent years. Some men had joined the merchant marine to feed their families, while others moved inland to work in the new factories there. She and her widowed mother lived off their kitchen garden and shellfish gleaned from the shore. When Katurah saw the Rathbones rowing toward her, she knew who they were. Even the smallest, most isolated villages knew by then about the Rathbone wives. She had already decided to go with them. When she stepped into the boat, she was not, like the wives before, in thrall to bright springing hair, to hypnotic strokes or rippling brown backs. The Rathbone boys’ hair was now more greasy than gleaming, their strokes less than perfectly matched, their broad backs narrower. They had by then lost that unity with the sea that shone in earlier Rathbones, and no bright haze obscured them from Katurah.

She looked down at the frail old man and thought how much harder her life could have been. Other than watching over Moses, she had only to lay with a few of the men in the barracks now and then, which was easy enough.

There were no babies in the nursery to care for. The youngest had already been taken to live in the barracks with the men before she arrived. So had the sons of the women who lived upstairs. Now and then, on her way to Moses’s room down the long passage, she looked out a window and caught a glimpse of one of the women, staring out an upstairs window.

They were pretty, of course, the women upstairs, and Bow-Oar and his brothers must take pleasure in bedding them, but they were of little other use that she could see. They would do better to walk along
the shore, she thought, and take the sea air, such pale, jittery things they were, cooped up in the house all day. They must have come from some inland place, where people didn’t understand the sea. And their boys. She had seen them in the barracks and watched them training out in the sound. There was something not right about them, though they were as pretty as their mothers.

Moses was restless next to her. He had begun to moan and click, and turn his head from side to side.

From its peg on the wall Katurah took down the necklace that had so long hung there, a whale tooth strung on a length of braided hair. Lifting Moses’s head, she put it around his neck. His breath slowed and steadied. She searched among the sheets for the length of knotted rope that was always close by and lay it in Moses’s hands. His fingers found the knots and stopped twitching. He turned his head away from the window.