The Rathbones (31 page)

I thought I was ready to be disappointed but was surprised by how my heart sank. It must have been merely coincidence that some of the details of the old man’s description had matched Mama’s, if they truly had. I began to doubt my own memory, wondering whether I had heard what I wanted to hear to make Arcady real.

The
Able
had been for some time approaching a rocky point. The captain cleared his throat and began to rub at his beard.

“Well, look at that. We’re nearly to Esker Point. Maybe I’ll pull in for a bit. Just a small delivery to make. Won’t be long. Would you mind taking the wheel for a minute or two, miss?”

As soon as I had my hand on the wheel, the captain hurried off below. The mate had disappeared earlier. Many minutes later they emerged, scrubbed and dressed in clothing that fairly shone compared with their usual dingy ducks and jackets. Captain Avery wore a fresh white shirt with a frill, tucked into laundered trousers. He took the wheel from me with an embarrassed air. The mate wore my great-great-aunts’ woolen jumper over clean breeches, and both had shaved their whiskers so that their jaws were raw and pink. They kept sliding their eyes toward shore as they made ready to anchor, avoiding catching my eye.

It was a soft night, the weather having held warm for the season, with light breezes. Plump, rosy clouds gathered around the setting sun, and the sky overhead was deepening to indigo. Along the darkening coast the scattered lights of a village winked, and as we sailed closer I heard laughter over the water and saw a cluster of docked boats—dories and baiters, other small craft—silhouetted against the sky. The
Able
approached the dock faster than seemed prudent to me; the mate’s always carefully preserved paintwork scratched as we bumped alongside the dock, but he seemed not to notice. In a wink he had splashed the bower anchor home, leapt onto the dock, and was trotting toward town. The captain checked his reflection in the polished brass of the binnacle.

“Just keep an eye on those forecourses if the wind rises.” He dropped down the side after the mate, as brisk as a boy, and hurried away.

I leaned over the poop rail and watched the lights of the village, my eyes adjusting to the deepening dark. A particularly brightly lit house stood close to shore, a small seaman’s dwelling of weathered planks on which hung a multitude of lobster traps and glass buoys. I could make out a line of men, starting at the door and winding around the house. There was a sudden flash of light and a pair of men shot out the open door, ejected, and fell sprawling in the street, greeted by hoots of laughter. In the doorway, limned by the light, stood a woman, hands on hips. Her shape was like the plumpest figurehead in Mordecai’s attic but considerably less stiff. Breasts bared, hair streaming, she turned her head to and fro as she reviewed the line of men. She chose a new brace of sailors, hauled them in by their neckerchiefs, and slammed the door. I caught sight of Captain Avery and the mate near the end of the line. I couldn’t help but picture the inside of the little house and wonder how the woman accommodated the seamen, and where. I pictured Mama, stretched out on the floor of the walk.

I hadn’t thought of Mama in many days. Now, standing there in the dark, it felt like our carefree hours were ending. The captain had told me earlier that day that Mordecai and I must give up our swimming, as we had entered waters frequented by sharks. I sighed. At least the captain and his mate were in good spirits. And Mordecai still had his dream of finding Papa. Perhaps I would find my missing brother yet. The old man may have made up Arcady, but he had no reason to lie about his brother having seen a boy with Papa.

I walked the length of the ship to the stern. The mate had strung a dinghy astern to tow behind the ship as we sailed so that Mordecai could view the riches of the sea at close hand. Though Mordecai was by now a useful hand on the
Able
—plotting charts with Captain Avery or splicing rope or reefing sails—he still loved to sit in the dinghy, looking down into the water, studying what fish passed by. I usually joined him in the early evening, after I had fulfilled my shipboard duties.

I dropped down the companion ladder, ran down the line stretched taut from stern to bow over the water, and stepped into the dinghy. Mordecai was fast asleep, his head tucked into the point of the prow. I meant to wake him so that we could have our dinner together, but he looked so peaceful, and I was fairly sure that it would be some time before the captain and mate returned to the ship. I curled up beneath the bench, under Mordecai’s knees, and called Crow down from the mast to join me. A light breeze sighed among the sails, bellying the fore and mainsails in soft swells, making them strain against the masts, creaking the stays. Soon I, too, slept.

The lively pitch and roll of the hull woke me, along with Mordecai’s voice.

“Mercy. Are you certain you secured the lead line?”

I sat up. A league or more of sea now lay between us and the little town. Its lights were far astern and blurred by rain. Ahead of us only blackness and stronger squalls of wind, the rain thicker. The lead rope that had tied us tautly to the
Able
lay slack in the bottom of the boat. I pulled it up to find its end frayed, though I had secured it myself earlier that day in a stout bow hitch. I turned to where Crow perched on the tip of the prow behind Mordecai’s head. His beak was deep in the fresh mackerel he clutched in one claw. I noticed that the torn flesh of the fish was strewn with little fragments of rope.

I jumped up, suddenly fully awake, and began to struggle with the sail, my braids snapping in the wind, stinging my face. I was grateful that the little vessel was equipped with a stub mast and sail, such as it was. With only oars, we would have soon foundered in such strong winds. Mordecai pointed to the tiller and took hold of the sail so that I could steer.

I tried to bring the boat nearer to the wind, but each time I tried she threatened to broach to and capsize. All my newfound seaman’s skills were not equal to the buffeting wind and the sail blew clear out of its ringbolt. Mordecai leapt up to snatch it, but it had already sailed high away. All I could do was keep my hand on the tiller and
try to hold steady through sheets of rain, driven by the wind, hurtling through the dark.

I didn’t realize for some time that we had stopped. The wind continued unabated. There had been no grinding, no sudden lurch when the boat met land, but somehow we were still. I strained to see in the darkness, tuned my ear to the wind and heard it drop a tone, and another. Crow nipped at my neck. The moon slipped in and out of a dark scrim of clouds that showed me only the gleam of his eye, a faint gloss of feathers.

“Mordecai!” I called out.

“Cousin, I am here,” came a muffled voice close by.

I stepped from the boat, Crow on my shoulder, onto a thin, rippled strand of sand, scarcely wider than our craft, Mordecai beside me.

Crow had led us there, I knew. Though I couldn’t be sure how far we had scudded along in the storm, I could calculate fairly well. The wind had been roughly north-nor’east, and, factoring in time and speed, I knew that we must be at or near the coordinates on the map that the old gardener drew. At the coordinates, but clearly not Arcady, only a flat, empty strand. It would have been hard to conceive of a place more unlike the high pink island, verdant and teeming with life, of Mama’s bedtime story. It was the wrong island, but surely the right one was nearby. Maybe we would be able to see it from the other end of the strand.

The firm sand in which we walked quickly deepened and softened. Soon my ankles ached from struggling through dunes shaped by the sea into high, billowing drifts. We had walked for perhaps half a mile when the terrain began to alter. The sun was by now nudging over the horizon and the air was keen, blown clear by the wind.

“Remarkable. I had no idea sand could be such a color.”

I had been so intent on what lay ahead that I hadn’t looked down. Mordecai was standing behind me, straining sand through his fingers. Pink sand.

“Coral exoskeletons, ground fine? Or perhaps iron deposits in the underlying stratum?”

It couldn’t be. I looked back the way we had come, and ahead. The shape, the footprint of the island was essentially right, long and thin, though far, far smaller than the island the gardener had described, and seemingly lifeless. But there were those coordinates. And the sand was pink.

We continued on. It felt as though we were walking uphill, though it was hard to judge, the high drifts having smoothed into long swells that rose and fell under our feet. Here and there, among the rounded ridges of sand, square edges began to appear. I soon realized that I walked through a cluster of dwellings, hewn of stone, sunk deep in the sand, and set in a rough circle. The square edges were the tops of roofless walls; whatever roofs had protected these rooms had blown away or lay buried elsewhere in the sand.

Between the sunken dwellings, what I at first took for pieces of driftwood proved to be the silvered limbs of trees that, though dead, still stood where rooted, their topmost branches stretching just beyond the sand. Next to one house, the upended bow of a fishing smack protruded from a drift, pointing skyward. I walked around the smack, running my hand over the planks; the hull was still sound, though sun and sand had worn away all but a few patches of its red paint. A stand of what looked like sedge grass sprouted through the sand. What I at first took for blades of grass were in fact slender poles of wood. I took hold of one pole and pulled; the wood, dried and hollow from its sleep in the sand, snapped in half. It was a fishing rod of finely whittled pine, a broken line trailing from its eyelets.

One dwelling, near the center of the circle, stood higher than the others, its walls jutting up from the sand so that the tops of window and door openings could be seen. From this house I heard Mordecai calling to me. As I approached, the house seemed to gather girth and heft. I walked off the length of a wall and measured it as thirty feet end to end. Around the house stood a broken circle of fencing. Coming closer, I found the pickets to be made not of wood but from the broken-off spears of swordfish, jammed in the sand side by each, their sharp tips pointing up. Crow scrawked, launched off my shoulder,
and skimmed through the empty window. I stepped through a wide, low doorway whose bottom half was submerged in sand, bending over to avoid bumping my head.

I stood inside a single large room. The dunes had drifted through the doorway and window openings in foot-thick walls of rough stone. A sea of sand filled the room. Here a skeletal perch seemed about to leap, there a swirl of kelp traced the pattern of a wave. I wasn’t sure whether the sand had risen—it looked too deep to have only drifted in—or whether the house was sinking.

Mordecai stooped in the far corner of the room, his head bent under a beam of worked stone. He leaned to extract abandoned belongings from the dry swells: a crumbling book, a tin coffeepot that poured a stream of sand. A few chairs jutted up at odd angles from the sand, as though bobbing in the sea. The top of a brick chimneypiece showed where the hearth had once been.

At the far end of the room four finials thrust through a drift of dried seaweed, the posts of a bedstead sunk beneath. I lay along the sand above the bed and stretched my arms high, my legs long. Two of me might easily have slept end to end.

Captain Avery had told us of the great cities where men melted not the flesh of whales but metal in vast cauldrons, and with it built new cities. Fishermen of some kind had lived here, judging by what remained. But maybe they had suffered like other local fishermen when the once boundless fish had dried up along with the whales on our coastline. Maybe they had chosen to leave the homes of their ancestors and go to the cities to work in dark iron and cold steel in a dry world, a world in which nothing shifted under their boots. My great-great-aunt had spoken of the families that tried to compete with the Rathbones in the early years of whaling. This island might have belonged to such a family.

I lay on my bed of sand, braiding two strands of sea palm, staring out the window at the dunes. It may have been only the way the clouds were gliding slowly to the west, but it felt as though the island were drifting eastward. Crow dropped down and stalked about
on the bed, plunging his beak at intervals in the sand, prodding for clams. I spread my arms and legs on the sand to make a larger me.

“Mordecai.”

“Yes, Mercy.” Mordecai sat cross-legged on the sand above the spot where the chair was buried, his nose in a tattered book. I pulled a clamshell from the sand next to me and with it drew circles on the surface.

“What will you do when we find Papa?”

“I shall sail with him, naturally. I shall take my place by his side.” He looked up at me keenly, patting the ditty bag around his neck, which held his wind and current chart. “I will be his navigator.”

“And what about me?”

“You shall be lookout, of course.” Mordecai smiled at me.

I looked around the sunken room and out the window at the long strand of sand. Maybe Benadam Gale really had been seen here by the old gardener’s brother. Maybe this really was the island of which the gardener spoke, with thick woods and high bluffs, and it had dried up along with all the fish in the sea around it. He could have stopped here to rest in his pursuit of Mordecai and me. It was not impossible that he had lived here, in those years when I’d pictured him far away on the sea, though what few objects remained in the house had clearly not been used for many years. The roofless house would provide poor shelter against rain and wind, and nothing grew on the island. He would have had only fish to eat. If Papa had been living here, I’d been right about one thing: He had, after all, chosen a desert.

The wind sighed through the empty windows, bringing with it a swirl of sand.

“Mercy.”

“Hmm?” I had been half asleep on my bed of sand. I turned my head to find Mordecai still staring into the book he had found.

“I believe we know someone with the initials ‘B.G.’?”