Unwept

by Tracy Hickman

  When she had cried herself out she pushed her curls away from her face and stood up, brushing her crumpled dress with her hands.

  During the torrent of tears a thought had broken like a lightning storm in her mind: What if I don’t really belong here at all? What if someone out there, beyond Gamin, is looking for me?

  Alarm spread to her limbs. Rummaging through her closet, she found an overnight case. She opened a dresser drawer and savagely stuffed the little case with clothing. She began forming a plan, a plan to leave. She’d been brought to this place, but she didn’t have to stay. It occurred to her that if she could just get to the train station she could leave. She pinched her fingers trying to close the too-full case as she realized she would need a train ticket. She grabbed her little purse and emptied it. No money. She looked through the dresser drawers, the pockets of her green traveling suit and then her trunk. The search yielded no paper money, nor any coins. Her legs weakened and she sat down on the bed, shoving at the overnight case that obligingly slid to the floor with a satisfying thud. Her hands shook.

  She felt physically ill as fatigue swept over her body. If I left this place which way should I go? And how would I explain who I am when I got there? She was homesick for a place and people she couldn’t remember.

  The doctor hasn’t said it, nor the nurse or Jenny or Merrick, but it is in their eyes; they all think I’m not quite right—that I am frail in body and spirit.

  The world no longer makes sense and I am too weak to leave this place. She was filled with a mountain of unanswered questions that felt unscalable. She closed her eyes against the pink light of sunset as a few tears of defeat fell and then dried upon her cheeks. She chose not to sleep.

  She realized she disliked napping at sunset. She plucked up this thought and held it like a small, precious diamond.

  At least that’s one more thing I know about myself. I’ll gather all my pieces together yet, she thought.

  She heard a door open down the hallway and footsteps on the stairs. She sat up and slipped on her shoes. She knew that she and her cousin needed to discuss Merrick’s rather scandalous offer from this afternoon and they had avoided it long enough.

  Ellis slipped back downstairs. She could not see where Jenny had gone, but her eye caught something new resting behind the bell jar on the table down the hall.

  It was a sheet of music.

  Ellis was drawn to it. She picked it up and smiled as she read the title. Jenny must have put this here for me, she thought. A peace offering.

  With relief, Ellis moved quickly into the music room. She settled onto the piano bench, placed the sheet music before her, set her hands to the keys and began to play.

  The keys responded to her hands. Music flowed from the instrument and into the house. Ellis felt the ecstasy of the motion and the sound, peace flowing into her like cool water quenching a desert thirst.

  “It’s beautiful,” Jenny said quietly from behind Ellis.

  “Yes, it is.” Ellis smiled as she played. “And I am most grateful for it. Thank you, Jenny.”

  “Oh, but it isn’t from me,” Jenny said, her voice at once guarded.

  Ellis faltered through a measure. If it isn’t from Jenny, then where did it come from? Ellis concentrated on the notes before her, the music spinning perfection into the room once more. It had brought them both to talking again, which was the important thing at the moment. “Never mind. I’m talking nonsense.”

  “What is it?” Jenny asked.

  “The music?”

  “Yes.”

  “It says its Liszt’s Liebestraum number three.” Ellis nodded. “I’m sure I’ve played this before, but I feel like I’m hearing it for the first time.”

  The music flowed around them for a moment, filling the silence.

  “We used to play the most beautiful duets together.” Jenny sighed. “You and I.”

  Ellis stopped, drawing her hands away from the keyboard. Silence fell between them.

  “I’m so sorry, Jenny,” Ellis said. “We should have stayed home, as the doctor asked.”

  “No, Ellis,” Jenny said, looking away. “I should have trusted you.”

  Jenny held her arms tightly across her chest, her head bowed as she stepped back out of the room. Ellis followed Jenny out onto the back porch and breathed in the early-evening air.

  “Jenny?” she said gently, crossing to the girl.

  Jenny was leaning against the porch railing gazing out over the water. She turned a tear-streaked face to Ellis and whisked the tears away with the back of her hand. “I’m sorry, too, Ellis. It’s all so confusing.”

  Ellis nodded and looked at the painted planks of the porch in the gathering dusk. “What Merrick offered this afternoon, it’s not right. You understand why I said no, don’t you?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so. Ellis, you know that he is supposed to be mine. Did you see how much attention he pays to Alicia and, now, to you? Everything was different before … before.” She held up her crippled hand and dropped it by her side.

  Ellis began to comprehend that Jenny’s poor mood was about more than a spoiled sunset cruise. She had noticed Merrick’s attentions to Alicia and herself. Ellis had seen a gentle pity in Merrick’s eyes when speaking with Jenny today. And it was pity, not the ardent carefulness of a suitor. If he bore Jenny more feeling than that, Ellis had not seen it this afternoon. And she could not remember life beyond it. To her eyes, he behaved like any unattached male. She had no way to advise Jenny. Ellis admitted in her heart she had enjoyed dancing with him today and the way they had moved so easily together. It was a bit of the unremembered but familiar. Ellis wondered briefly if Jenny had made more of Merrick’s past courtesies than she should. Ellis brushed this thought aside, realizing that it had sprung to life as a hope.

  “I’m sorry, Jenny. I’ll—”

  “You’ll what? Make him pay attention to me?” Jenny’s words were clipped as she turned back to the railing. “Maybe we—you—should reconsider his offer.”

  Ellis exhaled, considering her words. “I won’t deny that the stories in the papers are unsettling. I find it … unusual that we are out here in this large house alone. Are there no older people we could stay with or who would come here? Perhaps we could go to my relations in the city until the culprit is caught.”

  Jenny reasoned aloud, “You can’t go home right now and I can’t imagine who in Gamin would welcome us. The Disir sisters, perhaps. But you have already met Finny and the other two are as peculiar as their sister. They are fine company for afternoon tea, but more than that? No. Gamin is suddenly different now that trouble is so close by. It could come here, Ellis. This is the first time I have ever felt unsafe at Summersend. It’s my haven, you know. It’s all I have, really. I wish you would reconsider Merrick’s offer. I’m sure it is kindly meant. And it might just give me a chance.…”

  Ellis realized that in her present state she felt alone and vulnerable and would like a champion to lean on. But she had to tread on that thought carefully. Now that she glimpsed Jenny’s feelings for Merrick, she was unprepared physically and mentally to engage in this conversation.

  “I’ll think about it; I promise.” She knew it was a poor answer but breathed out the relief of letting it go.

  “If trouble comes to Gamin”—Jenny smiled tentatively and squared her shoulders as she walked to the back door—“then the matter will be out of our hands.”

  “Careful what you wish for,” Ellis chided. Jenny’s desire seemed childish and a little frightening. For her part, Ellis ardently wished for peace.

  The golden beam from the lighthouse on the island in the bay splayed itself across the water in the misty blue evening light. She leaned against the porch railing, one hand reaching out as she steadied herself against it.

  Her hand met with a cylindrical object.…

  A spyglass.

  She picked it up and, extending it out, placed her eye to it.

  She found the beam upon the water
and followed it back to the lighthouse and the brightly lit little cottage adjacent to it. To her surprise she saw a woman carrying a basket near the cottage. It was the same size as the one the baby had been in. She wondered about the nurse’s mysterious little companion. The expanse of her vision widened. Ellis felt as though she were being pulled through the lens of the spyglass to the little scene. She was disappointed as the woman put the basket down at the foot of a wash line and began pulling in linens that had blown dry in the afternoon breeze. No baby. As the woman worked, a little boy tugged at her skirts and scampered about, his hair blowing in the ocean air. Ellis saw that he was chasing large pink moths that were attracted by the cottage lights and, no doubt, the beam of the lighthouse itself. He chattered and romped, trying to coax the flitting beauties into his hands. After the woman filled her basket the little fellow came to her. She swung him around high in the air. Ellis smiled, thinking she could hear the sound of his laughter as he flew in his mother’s arms. Ellis felt as though she’d been drawn into their small scene and that she stood only a few feet from them. The woman then tucked the basket under one arm and took the boy’s hand. Together they opened the cottage door. Light spilled out and was quickly gone.

  Ellis ached to knock on the door and join them.

  A sudden gust of wind whipped about her, pushing her slightly off balance. She recovered at once, lowering the spyglass as she gripped the rail and was once again on the porch at Summersend, alone.

  A black storm was driving across the waters of Penobscot Bay. Lightning flashed behind the veil of dark and menacing clouds.

  The little island in the bay seemed serene and untouchable by the outside world. Ellis collapsed the spyglass and felt renewed shame in being unable to get into the little boat that afternoon. The cottage at the lighthouse seemed to hold all that Ellis’s heart desired. She longed for home, family, laughter, peace and the memory to go with it all. The evening air was chill, stirring into a gale as she went inside.

  “The storm is coming,” she said as she latched tight the door behind her.

  9

  WRECK OF THE MARY CELESTE

  Capt. Isaiah Walker staggered out of the woods to the shoreline. The storm had called him out of his hiding place like a siren. Through the driving rain and the roll of thunder somehow he sensed more than heard the banshee keening of the wind through the rigging of a ship in trouble at sea.

  The beam of the Curtis lighthouse flashed through the gale on his right, the sweep of its brilliant rays cutting through the tempest. At first Isaiah saw nothing but the sheets of water cascading down from the angry darkness overhead and the lace-like spindrift whipped from the capping waves in the bay.

  The captain tried to keep his feet under him in the rain. The ship was out there. He could feel her in his bones, struggling against the storm, desperate for the harbor and home.

  He knew because he had been there, too.

  Capt. Isaiah Walker was not actually a captain in any official capacity of the word, though everyone in the town called him that and, indeed, most of the inhabitants believed him to be of that rank. He had arrived in Gamin under circumstances that he had never fully explained. His dark, weary eyes with the glint of desperation looked with a piercing gaze from over his baggy lower eyelids and the drooping of his hound-dog face. He styled his narrow beard along the edge of his jaw and chin, an extension of his sideburns. His hair was always neatly trimmed—”too neat for a seaman,” those in the town murmured among themselves in disapproval of his affectation.

  He did not care for or seek their approval or their company. He longed only to leave the mistakes of his past behind and think upon which wind he should follow next. He did not know where he was going, but he certainly knew the way by which he had come and dreaded that it might be happening once again.

  The captain tried to steady his footing on the rocky shore, the soles of his boots shifting on the uncertain ground. His peacoat was soaked, as was the broad-brimmed hat both held and tied firmly to his head. He peered again out from the shore.

  She was there. He knew it.

  He could hear the scream of the wind through her rigging, cutting above the roar of the storm and the crashing waves against the shore. He had to do something. Had to somehow stop the calamity, although he realized in that moment he had no real means to do so. He reached up and wiped the pouring sheets of rain from his face and looked again into the darkness.

  The beam of Curtis Light again swept over the water, its shaft cutting through the darkness in its path.

  “There!” the captain cried out with a start, his words swallowed immediately by the gale. “There she is!”

  He had only glimpsed her in the swift beam from the lighthouse, but he took her all in at a glance. A schooner, three masted and gaff rigged. Her sails, however, were in tatters, their shreds flailing from the yards. She had heeled over, too, perhaps as far as twenty degrees on her starboard side. Her gunnels were close to the waterline and she rolled sluggishly with the waves.

  “She’s lost headway and her rudder,” the captain murmured to himself. “She’ll founder for sure.”

  Lightning cut across the sky just as the lighthouse beam flashed past the scene once more. The bow had shifted with the wind to starboard, rolling the ship heavily on her port side. The brilliance of the lightning flash blinded him for a moment. He reached up once more, wiping the water from his face, then stared again into the darkness.

  The lighthouse beam again swung past.

  The captain’s eyes grew suddenly wide with fear.

  The waves along the shore had caught the hull of the schooner, driving her toward shore in concert with the wind. In a moment the bow was surging with the waves directly toward the spot where the captain stood onshore. The bowsprit was already rushing over him, the masts towering above as lightning erupted in the clouds directly overhead.

  The captain leaped aside, hurling his body out of the way of the onrushing bow. The bow smashed against the rocks, splintering and groaning as the waves caught the side of the hull, carrying it against the shore. Isaiah clawed at the wet sand, struggling to get his footing as the hull rolled menacingly toward him with the surf. The stern cracked against the jutting rocks, water pouring through the gaping hole into the stern bilge. The ship groaned again, the stern settling firmly into the sand just offshore as the aft hull filled with water. The hull settled backward, nearly righting itself for the last time as the schooner grounded, her keel broken.

  Isaiah lay with his back against the sand, staring up at the awful scene. The tangle of masts, stays, ratlines and flapping canvas shreds he could see now only in silhouette against the turn of the lighthouse beam from the other side of the point. He perceived the vague outlines of the ship’s name on the prow above him, but he could not make it out in the darkness. The wind shrieked through the taut rigging, an assault on his ears that was like a siren’s call to death.

  Isaiah pushed himself up off the sand quickly, peering through the driving storm. He cupped his hands to his mouth, calling out against the raging wail around him, “Ahoy! Ahoy there! Ahoy!”

  Just like before, he thought. But there is something different this time … something has changed.

  He glanced up and down the shore. The captain certainly did not expect to see anyone out on such a violent night. He had only come because something about the ship had called him. Yet he wished that someone was here—anyone—who might somehow take the burden of the captain’s knowledge from him and let him sink back into obscurity.

  That was when he saw the man.

  He was lying facedown on the shore. He wore a long coat over wide shoulders and was struggling to push himself up from the sand. Even as the captain watched, the man collapsed back down, his boots milling in the silt without effect.

  The captain rushed toward the man, kneeling at his side. He turned the figure over. In the darkness, however, it was impossible to see any details of the man’s face beyond a frighteningly dark stain
that could be seen covering his forehead and right eye. “Easy, mate! You’re ashore now.”

  “I … I made it,” the man coughed.

  “Aye, you made it, though I don’t rightly know how many others were as fortunate.” Isaiah nodded. He glanced up the black side of the hull toward the deck above him. The lines continued to shift and the ragged sail canvas snapped and flailed in the tempest, but he could see no movement of any crew. “I’ll just take a look about for your mates and see how they be faring. You seem to be in one piece after all. You stand fast right here until I get back.”

  The man nodded his ascent, rolling away from Isaiah to face away from him lying on the sand.

  The captain stood up and turned his attention back to the ship. The waves continued to crash about the hull, but the timbers were barely moving. Isaiah knew she was grounded solidly and would be going nowhere for quite some time—if ever again. Several of the ship’s rigging lines had come loose and now hung over the side. Isaiah tested several and found them shifting free but on his fifth attempt discovered a line that was secured to the deck rail. With practiced ease he used the rope to clamber up the side of the hull. He swung his legs over the gunnel and set foot on the slanting deck.

  The deck was littered with debris but deserted. A forward transom was completely dark inside. The main cargo hatch was tightly battened into place, although he could see the pronounced buckling of the deck on either side of the hatch where the ship’s keel had snapped. Farther back Isaiah spotted a flickering light swinging beyond the portholes of the cabin transom, but not a single crewman was on deck. The helm twisted eerily on its own on the poop deck.

  “It’s just the waves working the rudder,” Isaiah reminded himself, but the absence of a crew unnerved him. “It’s just part of the game is all.”

  “Hallo!” the captain yelled into the raging storm as he stepped back carefully along the deck toward the stern, feeling his booted footfalls beneath him. He was more cautious still where the deck planking was buckled. The bent and snapped planks were the surface sign of more mortal wounds to the ship beneath his feet and the deck was less certain here. At last he slipped past the hatch cover to the aft transom. There was a short gangway down to the closed doors of the cabin.