Nightbirds on Nantucket

by Joan Aiken

  Strangely enough, although she was now nearer home than she had been for the last year, she felt more lonely and homesick than ever before. The sight of roofs and lights, the noise of wheels on cobbles reminded her almost unbearably of Rose Alley in London town.

  "Pen!" she whispered after a while. "Hey, Dutiful! Are you awake?"

  The only answer was soft, even breathing. Dido sighed and was about to climb down from her perch and go to bed, when she heard a faint splash, close to, and the creak of oars. Turning back, she was just in time to see Mr. Slighcarp, his foxy features visible in the light of a lantern, help a tall, veiled woman over the Sarah Casket's side into a dory, and row quietly away across the harbor.

  5

  Trouble with Cousin Ann. Captain Casket slips his cable.

  Arrival in Nantucket. The Casket farm.

  "We can't stay with your cousin Allerton," Dido said glumly. "And that's for sure."

  It had taken her less than ten minutes to reach this conclusion.

  Cousin Ann Allerton was a frail, erect old lady dressed in black silk with a white bib and cap. She almost fainted when her snapping black eyes first took in the untidy appearance of the two girls—even Pen's deck dress was fairly bedraggled by this time with oil and tar on its frills. And as for Dido—!

  "Don't stand on the clean doormat!" Cousin Ann said frantically. "Keziah! Keziah! Fetch an old sheet directly and put on a pail of water to heat. Mercy! Just look at that child's feet! And her hair! Bring some towels—every stitch they have on will have to be burned. Get out the tallow and kerosene—gracious knows how we are going to get that grease off. Fetch the sulphur and calomel—I don't doubt they need a good dose after eating dear knows what foreign truck on board ship. And when you've done that, run down the road and ask Miss Alsop to step up, they'll have to have everything new, I can see that—furs, flannels, merinos, poplins, and tarlatans. Bonnets, of course, and boots; mercy on us, what a pair of little savages!"

  "I'd druther keep my britches," Dido said, scowling.

  "Quiet, child! The idea! Pass me the bath brick, Keziah, so I can give them a good scrubbing."

  Dido had never been treated so in her life before and was almost too thunderstruck to protest; in no time they were put to bed in a spotlessly neat bedroom with white chintz curtains and fringed white dimity bedcovers, a braided rug exactly in the middle of the floor, and a square of oilcloth in front of the washstand.

  "Why've we got to go to bed in daytime?" grumbled Dido. "We ain't done nothing wrong!"

  "Oh, for the land's sake, will you hold your hush. You must stay out of sight of the neighbors till you've something fit to wear."

  Miss Alsop, the dressmaker, soon arrived, and with Cousin Ann's help, two brown calico dresses trimmed with white tape were hastily run up so that the children might put them on, get out of bed, and help to hem some more garments.

  "I won't stand for it," Dido muttered again and again, wriggling her neck furiously in her starched collar as she sewed under Cousin Ann's gimlet-eyed supervision. The only respite they had from sewing was when the gaunt and gloomy maid, Keziah, compelled them to swallow another dose of rhubarb or senna or sassafras tea; Cousin Ann seemed quite certain that they had brought the plague with them from abroad and must be physicked at frequent intervals to prevent it from spreading through the town.

  There seemed no escape from the torment. They were never allowed out by themselves, and so could not visit the ship and complain to Captain Casket; nor, for ten days, did they see anything of him. He was so absorbed in refitting the Sarah Casket with all possible speed that he had entirely forgotten their existence. When he did finally remember them, he reluctantly tore himself away from the wharf to call at the Allerton house for half an hour. He was mildly surprised at the transformation which had been wrought in the two children, when he caught a glimpse of them through Cousin Ann's parlor window. They were sitting on the back porch, enduring as well as they could a lesson in drawn-thread work from sharp Miss Alsop.

  "Penitence looks almost as she did when her dear mother was alive," Captain Casket remarked, sighing. "Thee has done wonders, Cousin Ann."

  "I hope you're not expecting me to keep 'em for good, Jabez?" Cousin Ann returned sharply. "It was one thing for the child to visit here when she was a little thing and that poor Sarah of yours was alive to look after her. It would be quite another to have her now. And as for that other heathen girl! I declare they make me quite nervous, the pair of them; I should always be expecting to find the house burnt over my head."

  She glanced grimly at the two children sitting on their upright chairs.

  "No, no, I thank thee, Cousin Ann," Captain Casket said mildly. "My sister Tribulation said she would be in Nantucket by now. She will look after them."

  "Hmm—well, that may answer," sniffed Cousin Ann. "Tribulation should be able to keep them in order. Why didn't she call on me if she's in Nantucket? She must have passed through New Bedford on her way. Downright uncivil, I call it."

  Captain Casket took his leave as soon as possible; he was on tenterhooks to get back to the ship. The children did not even see him until he was at the end of the road.

  "Quick!" Dido said then—Miss Alsop had gone indoors for more thread—"Let's go arter him and tell him we can't stick it here."

  "But Cousin Ann says we must not go farther than the end of the road!"

  "Well, nuts to Cousin Ann. What does she think we'll do, get lost in this one-horse town?"

  It was fine summer weather, with a fresh smell of lilac and honeysuckle. Cousin Ann lived in a big yellow-and-white house, set well back from the sidewalk in a quiet street, with a thick privet hedge on either side.

  "Ain't it slow here," Dido said, looking about the peaceful, sunny neighborhood with disapproval. "Dull, I calls it. Not a patch on dear old London. Don't I just wish I was there! Come on, I dessay your pa's gone back to the harbor. Let's run!"

  She dashed down the hill, impatiently hitching up her brown calico skirts, with Penitence in anxious pursuit. But they had only just come in sight of the Sarah Casket, where refitting was already well under way, when they were overtaken by the dour Keziah, who boxed their ears and marched them back to Cousin Ann's house. There they received another scolding and an extra large dose, a fearsome one, of salts, pennyroyal, and ginger balsam, all mixed together, "for fear of anything they might have picked up down by those nasty docks." And they were sent back to bed.

  "It was Dido's idea," sobbed Penitence. "She wanted to go."

  "Then it was very weak of you to follow her example," snapped Cousin Ann, rustling out of the bedroom and shutting the door sharply behind her.

  "Pen, I'm surprised at you," Dido said bitterly. "Don't you know you didn't ought to put the fault on someone else?"

  "But it was true! It was your idea!"

  "Oh, blame it, that ain't the point! Well, don't do it again, that's all. I'm trying to get you out o' whining, sneaky ways, Pen, don't you see?"

  "Thank you, Dido," Pen said in a small, miserable voice. "I'll try to remember."

  Dido had no chance to lead Pen astray again during the rest of the time they were with Cousin Ann. She badly wanted to tackle Captain Casket about the possibility of finding a home for Pen other than with Aunt Tribulation, and about her own passage to England, but he never came near Cousin Ann's house again, so busy was he with refitting and reprovisioning the ship, and asking all newcomers for news of the pink whale. Meanwhile the children were kept under strict supervision, and were only allowed out for a short walk once a day—to the end of the road and back.

  However, on the ninth day, while Keziah was at a missionary meeting, Cousin Ann found herself obliged to lie down with a headache brought on, she said, by the trampling of children's feet upstairs in the bedroom. No sooner had she retired than Dido was out of the house like a bullet.

  "You can stay, Pen, if you're scared to come," she said, "but I wants to see your pa and get things fixed up shipshape."

&
nbsp; Pen said she would remain at home in case Cousin Ann needed anything, so Dido flew down the hill to the wharfside. What was her horror, when she reached the berth that had been the Sarah Casket's to find it empty!

  "Hey," she said to a boy who was fishing nearby, "where's the ship that was here?"

  "Sailed this morning on the early tide."

  "She didn't! You're bamming!"

  He shrugged. "What d'you think she did, then? Walked away up the hill? The old skipper was raring to go—someone telled him that someone said someone else'd seen a pink whale off Gay Head. He was missing his first mate when he sailed, but he said he couldn't wait, so he up anchor and off; guess he's halfway to the Grand Banks b'now."

  "Oh, croopus," groaned Dido. She turned and walked wearily back up the steep hill; her legs felt as heavy as lead. "Now we are in the basket! What an old chiseler Cap'n Casket is. I mighta knowed he'd play us a trick like that—sneaking off on the quiet so's Pen couldn't make a fuss, I'll lay! One thing's certain, though—I ain't a-going to stop any longer with Cousin Ann."

  Luckily, Cousin Ann was of the same mind. She had had the forethought to collect money for their fares from Captain Casket when he first called, and the very next day they were dispatched to Nantucket, with their new clothes, on the packet Adelaide, a small schooner loaded up to her eyebrows with coal, cordwood, and watermelons. Cousin Ann left them in the captain's charge, but it was plain that that harassed man would have little time for them, since part of his cargo was a mother pig and her piglets, which kept escaping and darting about.

  "Mind and behave yourselves now," was Cousin Ann's tart parting injunction. "I wrote off last Saturday and told Tribulation to expect you any day, so she'll likely be waiting for you at the Straight Wharf. Give her my remembrances—though why I should send them I don't know, since she was so uncivil as not to call on me when she passed through New Bedford. And I'm sure I wish her joy of you!"

  With that, she turned and stumped briskly off up the hill.

  "Well," Dido said, heaving a sigh, "whatever your Auntie Trib's like, Pen, she can't be sharper than your Cousin Ann. So that's one comfort. And at least we can enjoy ourselves on the trip over."

  In this she proved wrong, however. The wind was rising, the glass was falling; the captain soon declared that if he'd had the sense to wait another hour or two he'd never have put out. Dido was heartily glad that he had not waited; even being wrecked on the way across to Nantucket was preferable, she thought, to another night with Cousin Ann. But poor Penitence, upset and miserable, retired below and stayed there, wedged as comfortably as Dido could fix her up between a coop of goslings and a barrel of tamarinds.

  They were not wrecked, but the rising gale delayed them considerably, and dusk had fallen by the time they rounded Brant Point and were safe in Nantucket Harbor. Salty, soaked, and shivering, they clambered onto the wharf with their bundles.

  "Hey!" the captain called into the gloom, "anyone here from the Casket place?"

  Nobody answered. The two children waited for more than half an hour until most of the other passengers, or people unloading goods from the packet, had left.

  "Well, it ain't no manner of use standing here all night," Dido said, clenching her teeth to prevent their chattering. "And it ain't half a-going to rain in a minute. What'll us do, Pen? Can we walk to your pa's farm? Is it far?"

  "N-nine miles," shivered Pen. "It's much too far to walk with our bundles."

  "Had us better put up at an inn?"

  "Oh, no! They're sure to be full of horrid, rough sailors."

  "Well, I ain't stopping here," Dido said, and led the way into Nantucket town, with Pen following irresolutely. "Maybe we'll see somebody you know if we wander a bit; maybe your Auntie Trib reckoned the packet warn't coming and went shopping or started home again."

  They walked along neat brick sidewalks bordered with trees. The bricks were now beginning to shine with rain, the trees were thrashing wildly. Few people were abroad at this hour; the other passengers from the ship seemed all to have melted away into the shadows. Doors and windows in the demure, white clapboard houses were shut and shuttered against the rising storm.

  "Bit of a dead-alive hole, ennit," Dido said shivering. "Give me lovely London any day." However, she cheered up somewhat when they reached the wide main street, where a few stores were still open and showing lights.

  "I can tell you one thing—I'm crabbish hungry," Dido remarked as they passed a chowder parlor and a heartbreaking smell of food drifted out to them.

  "Oh, so am I!"

  "Got any money?"

  "Why, no," faltered Penitence. "Cousin Ann only gave me the boat tickets."

  "Hum," Dido said. She hefted her bundle thoughtfully. Just ahead of them, on the corner of Main and Union streets, was a store with windows still brightly lit up and a sign that said, BRACY AND STARBUCK, SHIPS' OUTFITTERS AND GENERAL SOFT GOODS.

  "I'm a-going in here," Dido said, and did so, ignoring Pen's apprehensive squeak. She addressed herself to a man behind the counter.

  "Hey, mister, I've got a load of clobber here that I don't want, will you buy it off me?"

  To Pen's horror, the man was quite prepared to buy the carefully made dresses and frilly underwear considered suitable by Cousin Ann. "What do I want with 'em?" Dido said. "I'd sooner have a pair of britches any day." She bought herself a red flannel shirt and a pair of denim trousers for one dollar sixty-two cents, and still had two dollars left. "Come on, Pen," she said, "we'll go get us some prog. By the way," she asked the outfitter, "you don't know if there's anybody in town a-waiting for Miss Pen Casket, does you?"

  "Little Miss Casket for the Casket farm?" he said. "Why, yes, the old mule's been in every day this week. Guess he's still around; Mr. Hussey at the Grampus Inn knows not to loose him till the packet's been in an hour."

  "Old mule?" said Dido apprehensively. "Who the blazes is the 'old mule?'"

  "Why, old Mungo," the storekeeper told her. "Everybody in Nantucket knows Mungo. He's Captain Casket's mule. Old Mrs. Casket—Captain Casket's mother, that was—always used to send him into market with her eggs and farm truck and a list o' groceries she wanted, and Mr. Folger at the Stores would take the eggs and load him up wi' the flour and stuff and send him back. Old Mungo knows the way to Soul's Hill as well as a Christian—he's twenty years old if he's a day. Are you little Miss Casket, then? My, how you have growed!"

  Dido didn't wait to chat. "Which way's the Grampus Inn?" she asked. "Come on, Pen. Hurry!" Slipping and stumbling, they ran along the cobbled streets, scaring a number of sheep, who appeared to have come into the town to take shelter, and reached a building with a wildly swinging sign that showed a grampus in full spout. Below the sign was tethered a mule cart; the dejected mule, his coat sleek with rain, seemed trying to keep his head dry by hiding it between his forelegs.

  "Is that your pa's cart?" asked Dido.

  "I—I'm not sure," Penitence confessed. "I never took much note of the cart."

  "Well, is this Mungo?"

  "I was always too scared of him to notice what he was like."

  "Oy," said Dido, going round to the mule's front end. "Psst, you! Hey! Is your name 'Mungo'?"

  The mule made no response, except to give her a despising glance from one white-rimmed eye, backward, between his legs.

  "I'm going in and ask," Dido said.

  "Oh, dear, I'm sure you shouldn't go into an inn!" Pen lamented. "There will be dreadful people. It isn't ladylike behavior!"

  "Oh, scrape ladylike behavior!" Dido snapped impatiently. "If you want to get soaked and starved, I don't!"

  She marched into the inn. Having ascertained that it was indeed Captain Casket's mule and cart standing outside, she said, "Well, if he's waited for us every day this week, it won't kill him to wait another twenty minutes." And, to Pen's fright, she ordered three bowls of clam chowder. However, the chowder was so welcome when it came, savory and hot, full of tender little clams, that Pen at length overcame her qualm
s and consented to eat it.

  "Who's the third bowl for?" she asked.

  "Why, poor old Mungo, o' course," Dido said reprovingly. "If he's got nine miles to go through the wet, he ought to have summat to stay his stomach."

  "Will he like it?" Pen quavered.

  "We'll soon see, won't us? If he don't, I dessay you can do with a second help."

  However, the mule proved quite willing to accept a helping of chowder, and appeared to improve greatly in his spirits once he had snuffled it down. The dishes were returned to the inn. Dido helped Pen into the cart and wrapped her in a quantity of sheepskins which she found under the seat; then she untied Mungo's head, slapped him with the reins, and they were off.

  "Whizzo!" she said, as they rattled through the dimly lit streets. "This is something like, ain't it? I loves drivin'—if only it didn't rain and blow quite so hard. I say, ain't we lucky Mungo knows the way? We'd never find it in this dark."

  Pen assented faintly—she had soon left the box and was huddled down in the bottom of the cart, trying to keep herself from slipping about.

  In no time they were out of the little town and making their way along a high and exposed sandy track in open country. The wind and rain buffeted them, and it was too dark to see anything except some low-growing shrubs by the roadside. A distant, continuous roar could be heard to their right, and from ahead of them came louder, intermittent booming.

  "What's all that row?" Dido said.

  "It's the waves."

  "But we've just come from the sea."

  "Nantucket's an island, don't forget," Pen sighed drearily. "What you can hear is the breakers on the south and east shores. Oh, how I hate it!"

  "Cheer up," Dido said. "Don't you like swimming and paddling? Us'll have some bang-up times when this gale blows over. I used to bathe in the Thames, but this'll be far and away better. I say, I wonder where the old Sarah's got to now, eh? Don't you reckon it was a mean trick of your pa to slope off like that without a word? I'd 'a liked to 'a said goodbye to Nate; he was a real fust-class boy. And to old Jenkins. I hope I see them again sometime."