Young Woman in a Garden

by Delia Sherman

  Compared to being second mate on a clipper, it was an easy berth. No long watches, no standing perched on an icy yardarm hauling at wet canvas with numb and swollen hands. No captain to curse at him, no first mate to lord it over him, no seamen to get uppity. No yarns, no songs, no jigs amidships. An easy berth. But a lonely one.

  In October a carrier pigeon brought the news that the White Goddess had been cleared for San Francisco, and that Captain Mayne sent his kind regards and was counting on seeing Mr. Saltree and his light again sometime before midsummer. Though as a rule he wasn’t a drinking man, Saltree locked himself in his attic that night with a blanket thrown over the window and dined on Tully’s rum. He drank until his head spun and his leg no longer pained him. He drank until he liked to have drowned, but the liquor, whistling in his ears like wind in the rigging, could not drown the pain of the Goddess skimming the wave crests without him.

  By November, Saltree had polished every oil carrier, honed every knife and scissors blade, arranged all the tools and glass chimneys in gleaming ordered rows, and generally overhauled the watch room until everything about it was entirely shipshape and Bristol fashion. The days were dull, though they went by quickly enough. Lighthouses take a good deal of keeping, what with swabbing the lens with spirits of wine, greasing the clockwork of the turning mechanism, dusting and trimming and winding all the gears and wicks, rollers and fittings of brass and iron that together create the forty-second beam and twenty-second eclipse.

  But the nights were long and filled with dreams.

  No sooner did Saltree lay his head on his pillow than he was aloft on the rigging of the White Goddess or striding down her deck. His legs were strong, and under his bare brown feet, the timbers shone clean and white as flax. His watch—the larboard watch—set up rigging, tarred down spars. The sun was warm on his shoulders. Gulls and terns wheeled in the wide sky, blue, then gray, then black with clouds foaming and churning like the black water that licked at the crosstrees. Rope between his hands, saltwater to his waist, clutching his feet, chilling his bones, his heart pounding fast and hard, Tom Harris beside him, grinning wider and wider until his whole face was teeth and bone and wisps of rotted hair.

  Other dreams rang with cries of “Man overboard!” and Captain Mayne at the leeward rail, pointing down at the heaving waves. “For God’s sake, man. He saved your life!” Making for the rail, laboring on one leg, lurching. Tom below, laughing, and in his arms the Goddess, carved lips parted and smiling. Wood and living flesh entwined, they rolled upon the swell like sleeping birds, then she drew Tom down, down below the black water.

  Saltree awoke from these dreams half strangled with unuttered shouts. He’d rub the sweat from his face, then sit at the edge of his bed and watch the light’s signal pattern. beam. Eclipse. Beam. Eclipse. Forty seconds’ light. Twenty seconds’ dark. Steady, sure as a heartbeat. The Land’s End Light.

  The first day of the New Year, Tully went ashore to buy provisions. The sky threatened snow, but they were down to their last mouthful of salt beef and moldy bread, so off he sculled. He left just after daybreak, in plenty of time to buy what was needful, raise a tankard or three at the Mermaid’s Tale, and row back to the Rock again before dark.

  Midafternoon, the wind rose and the sea with it. It grew bitter cold and Saltree stopped puttering with the clockwork to climb out on the parapet and rub the windows with glycerin and spirits of wine to keep them from icing over. Before he was half done, heavy flakes of snow began to slap at his cheeks. Tully’d be a fool to row back in this, when there was beer and company and a warm bed at the Tale.

  Tully always kept a hammock rigged in the watchroom, and about midnight, Saltree climbed into it. The storm had settled into a steady blow, nothing that should give any trouble to a captain worth his brandy. He couldn’t sleep, of course, but he had to rest his leg, which was aching like billy hell from the cold. In an hour or so, he’d get up and rewind the fog bell.

  Within the granite tower, the sound of the storm was muted to a whistle and a far grumble of breaking waves. Saltree climbed the mainmast in a brisk wind with all the canvas shown. Saint Elmo’s fire danced ghostly on the crosstrees, and a flight of petrels canted and mewed above the skysail. Tom Harris clung one-handed to the topgallant yard.

  “Land ho!” he cried, and pointed into the gathering clouds. A cheer below, and all the sails bellied full as the Goddess rose above the swell and flew over the wave-crest like a skipped stone. It was snowing now, with rocks ahead, and nothing to say exactly where. Perched among the shrouds, Saltree squinted into the blizzard. Where were the lights? Every coast had lights. Did the snow hide them? Where were the fog bells? And why was Captain Mayne running blind before a gale into land?

  A crash and a shudder spilled Saltree from his hammock, dazed and half convinced he was still aboard the Goddess and she was breaking up on the rocks of some unknown coast. The waves made a deafening roar, and a cold wind flooded down the turret stairs. He shivered like a beaten dog and blinked. Was that snow, coming down inside the tower? And what was that hullabaloo?

  A good sailor leaps to what needs doing, and Saltree leaped now, swarming up the stairs like rigging. Wind and snow eddied in the dome, blinding white, then ghostly as the lens turned slowly on its carriage. It took Saltree a full two cycles of beam and eclipse to see the broken pane of glass and the bird that had broken it flapping through the shards.

  “Bloody stupid bird,” Saltree muttered, and lunged. The bird was farther away than he’d thought, but his hand closed on one powerfully flailing wing. It whipped its head around to peck at him with a bill like a marlinespike, and he ducked. Big gull, he thought. Looks like—the wing jerked from his grasp—an albatross.

  “Devil take it!” It was almost a prayer. There were tales of shipwreck and sudden death caused by killing the bird that brought fair winds and guided ships blown off course to safe harbors. Saltree knew that the greater part of theses tales were nothing but so much rope yarn spun on the off-watch by bored seamen, but there was no denying that albatross were uncanny birds. He had seen them asleep on the water off Cape Horn, riding the swells from crest to trough. He had seen them perched on the masthead, so white in the sun that they seemed lit from within. The sight of this one, bedraggled and blood-splattered, frightened him more than a twenty-foot wave.

  While Saltree hung fire, the albatross flapped and heaved its way inside the glass cage of the lens and up onto the lantern base. Briefly, it mantled with the light behind it, and the lens distorted it into a giant thing with wings like sails and an eye like the moon in eclipse.

  Gears ground. The carriage, slowed, strained; and the albatross, screaming, battered its wings. A chimney broke. One wick went out; the others flickered wildly. Saltree found the trimming knife and crawled toward the bird. He was a lighthouse keeper now, he told himself, and his light was threatened. It didn’t matter whether a gull or an albatross or a mermaid or King Neptune himself was sitting in that lantern. It didn’t belong there, and it was up to him, Saltree, to get it out.

  Saltree crooked one arm across his face to protect his eyes, and wormed his way into the lens.

  Inside was a second storm of feathers and blood. The albatross’s feet were entangled in the turning mechanism, and it attacked the clockwork with wings and darting beak. Shadows and light bewildered Saltree’s eyes until he could have sworn that a thousand albatross were trapped in the prisms. He thrust blindly with the knife. A final scream, a convulsive flutter. The light flared, and a thousand albatrosses scattered into the snowy darkness.

  The last wick went out.

  Moving painfully, Saltree crawled out of the lantern and toward the door, cursing himself for not bringing up the extra lamp. It should have been instinctive, like carrying rope up the rigging. Crews were counting on him: it took no time at all for a ship to run aground.

  Downstairs at last, Saltree snatched up an extra lantern, lit it with trembling hands, settled the chimney on it, and pulled himself up
the stairs again, hop-and-heave as fast as he could go. It was only a small flame under a glass chimney, hardly bright enough to reach across the dome. But when he slid it into the empty holder, a clear, strong beam leaped into the darkness.

  Saltree sighed in relief and turned his attention to the dead albatross. Its wings were singed and bloody, tattered as an old shawl. Carefully, so as not to endanger the lamp, he disentangled the yellow legs from the clockwork. They were thoroughly caught in the gears, and his sweater and hands were slimy with blood before he worked the bird free. He dragged it out of the lens, hoisted it up into his arms, and limped to the window with its feathers trailing against his knees. Under his cold fingers, the body was warm and yielding. Saltree shuddered and threw it from him, out the broken window and into the treacherous wind.

  Clearing blood and feathers from the clockwork and the lens took him the rest of the night. Just before dawn, the wind dropped to nothing, but the snow continued heavy and the seas rough. Tully’d not come back today.

  Alone, Saltree tacked in a temporary window, cleaned as much of the apparatus as he could without dismounting the frame, and oiled the carriage so it could turn again. He drove himself to wrench the heavy gears apart, strained his back and his legs manhandling wooden boards up the narrow stair. If he hadn’t fallen asleep, if he’d killed the albatross right off, then the light wouldn’t have gone out. Sure, there was no harm done this time. But what if the Goddess had been out there? What if other keepers were as careless, as unfit, as he?

  By nightfall, Saltree was wet through and more dog-tired than he’d ever been on ship. He knew he’d have to spend another night in the watch room, but he thought he’d get himself a dry shirt. Then, once he got to his attic room, he thought he’d change his socks. He took a pair from the sea chest, sat on the edge of the bed to put them on, leaned wearily against the wall. He frowned. What if the Goddess had been out there?

  He woke after moonset, feeling oddly peaceful. From the sound of the waves on the rocks, it was ebb tide, with a light sea running. He was lying on the bed, fully clothed. “Son of a bitch,” he said. But his guilt was as dead as the albatross. His stolen sleep had been deep and dreamless.

  A scrape, like a heavy object being dragged over the roof, brought Saltree upright. Silence. The window was luminous with the snow light and the lantern’s intermittent dazzle. He shrugged. Maybe, as long as he was awake, he’d best get to the tower. He swung his legs to the floor. Between one flash and the next, he caught an odd shadow drifting down the window.

  Saltree blinked. Too slow for a gull—and even an albatross wasn’t that big. Another—a strange shape. Long, heavy, with strange knots and bulges. Another.

  As a fourth shadow swam across the window, Saltree limped painfully across the rough planks. His hands met and clutched the window frame; his face approached the glass. Eclipse: he saw his own reflection staring back at him out of shadowed eyes. Beam: his gaze focused on the dome.

  Figureheads: dripping seaweed, some far gone in decay, others still bright with paint. They clustered around the lantern like wingless and awkward moths, yearning toward the light. Some were headless, and stretched only their long necks, questing eyelessly for comfort. Some were snapped off at the waist. Most pathetic of all were the ones that retained their faces, for they were openmouthed, drowned, and their wooden eyes stared at the light with a dreadful and accusing intelligence.

  One of these figureheads was not so sea-changed as the rest. She hovered between Saltree and the lantern so that at first he saw only her back and the dirty front of her clothes. Then she drifted outside the crowding school of figureheads and showed Saltree her profile. Straight nose; high, round, naked breasts: the White Goddess.

  There was a swath of seaweed draped around her shoulders and tossed across her throat like a bedraggled feather boa, which gave her a rakish look, like a dockside whore. Saltree’s hands tightened on the window frame. The Goddess drifted farther around, and he saw that half her wooden head had been sheared away, one breast and shoulder splintered.

  Saltree threw open the sash and leaned far out the window. “Goddess!” he shouted, and held out his hand to her.

  The White Goddess floated nearer, bobbing with a long swell. Dark water dripped from her like blood. Her eye glittered wetly. Her hand that had held back the carved folds of her drapery released them and reached for him.

  Beautiful. She was so beautiful, and as she drew near Saltree, she brought with her the smells of salt and sun-warmed tar and varnish and newly scrubbed decks. His breath came fast; his fingers trembled.

  The revolving lens flickered slowly. Forty-second beam: twenty-second eclipse. The figurehead hovered just out of his reach, stretching her fingers to him.

  Saltree flung his good leg over the sill, braced the other against his sea chest, and hung from the sash by the length of his arm.

  Beam. Eclipse. Beam.

  An inch, no more, separated their hands. Eclipse. In the brief darkness, Saltree touched the slick coolness of varnished wood. Beam. His fingers closed on hers, and his muscles strained to pull her into his arms.

  Eclipse. Beam. Eclipse.

  She was his now, wild sea smell, smooth breasts and all, clinging to his neck like kelp and smiling into his eyes. He felt her body yield to his hands like flesh, but cold, so cold. Entwined, buoyant as gulls, they rolled upon the waves, sliding from crest to trough out to the open sea. They sailed beyond the breakers to black water, and then she drew him down with her, gently down to her cold ocean bed.

  The Parwat Ruby

  Whether the disaster of the Parwat Ruby would have taken place if Sir Alvord Basingstoke had not married Margaret Kennedy is a matter of conjecture. Given his character, Sir Alvord would undoubtedly have married a woman like Margaret even if Margaret herself had never been born. He was a gentle man, slow to talk, devoted to solitude—in short, the natural mate of a woman who talked a great deal and loved society.

  Margaret Kennedy had been much courted in her youth, being not only mistress of three thousand pounds a year, but lively and clever and very well dressed as well. Over time she grew domineering and unpleasant, but as Sir Alvord spent the best part of the next thirty years exploring uncharted wildernesses, it is likely that he did not notice. When ebbing vital forces put a period to his travels, Lady Glencora Palliser prophesied a speedy separation. But months passed, and still the reunited couple showed every sign of mutual affection, demonstrating that even the most skillfull hunters of human weakness must sometimes draw a blank.

  A certain coolness having arisen between Mrs. Mildmay and Lady Basingstoke, Mrs. Mildmay had seen little of her brother since his last journey abroad. Consequently, she was much astonished, one evening as the Season began, to hear her maid announce the name of Sir Alvord Basingstoke. Althought it was time to be thinking of changing for supper, she had him shown into her sitting room, and received him with a sisterly embrace.

  “So here you are, Alvord,” she said. “Handsome as ever, I see.” It had been a schoolroom joke that they looked very alike, although the heavy jaw and pronounced nose that made the brother a handsome man kept the sister from being considered anything but plain.

  He pressed her hands and put her from him. “I have something very particular to say to you, Caroline. You are my only sister—indeed, my only living blood relation—and I am an old man.”

  Somewhat distressed by this greeting, Mrs. Mildmay bade her brother sit and indicated her readiness to hear what he had to tell her, but he only sighed heavily and rubbed his forehead with his right hand, which was decorated with a ring set with a large cabochon ruby. The ring was familiar to her, as much a part of Sir Alvord as his pale blue eyes and his indifferently tailored coats. He had brought the stone back from a journey to Ceylon in his youth and it had never left his hand since. Massy as it was, it had always looked perfectly at home on his broad hand, but now it hung and turned loosely on his finger.

  The white star that lived in its depths
slid and winked, capturing Mrs. Mildmay’s eye and attention so fully that when Sir Alvord spoke, she was forced to beg him to repeat his words.

  “It’s this ring of mine, Caroline,” said Sir Alvord patiently. “It’s more than a trinket.”

  “Indeed it is, Brother. I’ve never seen such a fine stone.”

  “A fine stone indeed. Your true, clear star is very rare and very precious in a ruby of this size. But that is not what I meant. There is a history attached to this ring, and a responsibility.”

  He seemed to experience some difficulty in continuing, a difficulty not remarkable in a man who all his life had been accustomed to let first his mother and then his wife speak for him. Mrs. Mildmay sat quietly until he should find words.

  “This is unexpectedly difficult,” he said at length.

  Mrs. Mildmay looked down at her hands. “I have often wished us better friends,” she said.

  “I have wished the same. But my wife had a claim upon my loyalty.”

  Mrs. Mildmay flushed and would have retorted that she hoped that his sister had at least an equal claim, but he held up his hand to forestall her, his ruby glowing as the star caught the afternoon sun.

  He continued, “I have not come to quarrel with you. Margaret has been a good wife to me. However, I don’t mean for her to have this ring. I had hoped to leave it to a son of mine”—here he sighed once again—“but that was not to be. I have it in my mind to put in my Will that you’re to have it when I die, and that it must pass to Wilson after you.” Wilson was Mrs. Mildmay’s oldest son, a likely young man of four-and-twenty.