By The Sea, Book One: Tess

by Stockenberg, Antoinette

  Even before his form was swallowed up by darkness, one of the maids, young, rippling with envy, sidled up to Tess. "Aiming our bow a bit high nowadays, aren't we? Peter Boot will be interested to know of this little tit-a-tit, I think."

  "I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about."

  The maid laughed. "That's funny. In the halls they say you're too smart by half. But I guess I can tell them different, then."

  "I don't see that it's your business to tell anyone anything," Tess answered, distressed. "I don't even know your name."

  "Name's not important, miss. What I just seen is. Well, if you'll excuse me, miss. I have to get back to my own kind." The maid dropped into an exaggerated curtsy and hurried back to a small knot of servants. Her sneering giggle sliced the darkness between Tess and them.

  Newport. What else could you expect from a town devoted to idle pursuit? Everyone, from the wealthiest mistress to the lowliest scullery maid, was contaminated by the atmosphere. Tradesmen, shopkeepers—no one was immune. Everyone was jealous of everyone else, and a meanspiritedness seemed to lie over the town like a damp July fog. It's because Newport is in America, Tess decided. Castles and servants in breeches belonged in England, but not in Newport.

  "It's unnatural," she whispered, and re-entered the mansion. She had hours still to think about it.

  ****

  It was five in the morning and Tess, sleepy-eyed and nursing a secret and quite irrational happiness, was removing the last of the pins from Cornelia's honey-blond hair.

  Cornelia was even happier than Tess.

  "Perfect! It was a perfect, divine evening, the best ball I've ever attended. Poor silly Isabel, having to pass it up. Oh Tess, it was wonderful! Could you hear the orchestra? Some said Alva Vanderbilt's ballroom at Marble House was grander, but that's ridiculous. What could possibly surpass perfection? If I snapped at you, Tess, I didn't mean to. But I was so nervous, and with good reason. I met—well, the most extraordinary—well, he's just—oh! So handsome, with such wonderful manners, and he dances—his eyes are piercingly blue—and wavy hair. Well! Everyone just—stared at us, Tess. He claimed every waltz! Just tore up my card! I suppose we behaved scandalously," she finished with delicious satisfaction.

  In Marie's absence Tess seemed to have been suddenly promoted to confidante. "He sounds quite wonderful, Miss Cornelia," she agreed, amused by her own new status. "Has he been in Newport all season?"

  "Of course not! I would've noticed him instantly. And I daresay I wouldn't have escaped his attention either," she added coyly. "No, he's just arrived from—" Her eyebrows tilted in a beguiling effort to repeat the name of his birthplace. "—from ... Nasdrovia? Is that how he pronounced it? It was rather hard, you see; his accent is enchantingly thick. Anyway, it's someplace in a northern Baltic country, I think. He owns millions of acres or whatever they measure land in. Oh Tess—I've got myself a baron!"

  Chapter 7

  Tess felt a keen disappointment the next day when Mrs. Bracken informed her that she was to be relieved of her temporary duty as a chambermaid. Now there was virtually no chance of her ever seeing Edward Hillyard.

  Maggie, to whom Tess had blurted the events of the night before, was sympathetic. "It's a crying shame, if you ask me, when a decent woman can't have two minutes' conversation with a gentleman that's interested in her simple welfare without folks staring. Is this America or isn't it?"

  "You know, I thought that last night, Mag. In Wrexham everyone was kinder, more relaxed about who they were. But here! Everyone walks around all puffed up, and they'd as soon boot you off the hill as let you come up and share the view."

  "It's true, it's true," Maggie said with a sigh. "That's why your Mr. Hillyard is so to be revered. Tess," Maggie said, taking her sister's hand in her own, "you must see him—just as he asks."

  "But how, Maggie? Where? And most important of all—why? Last night was a fairy tale, no more true than—"

  "Than the pretty stories you make up about me? Oh no, Tessie; last night was real. No one can ever take it away from you."

  "Take what away, Mag? A few kind words? I've seen a gentleman more worked up about an injury to his favorite hunter. And yet …."

  "Tell me, Tess. And yet what?"

  "And yet I want to know the ... nature ... of his interest. I'm sure I'm a fool, and yet I have to know."

  "Tessie, anything's possible. Wasn't it no more than three hours ago that Bridget told me Mrs. Ellerhaus's eldest son has fallen madly in love with his youngest sister's governess and taken her away?"

  Tess had been peeling an apple for her sister with a pearl-handled purse knife that Lady Meller had given her for her sixteenth birthday. Shocked, Tess stopped mid-peel and said, "I don't believe it! To marry?"

  "Well—not to say marry, necessarily. Although, who knows? This is America, Tess. Anything can happen in America. Isn't that why Father brought us all here, after all?" she finished timidly.

  The fact was, Maggie, like their mother, had never felt comfortable with her family's emigration. She had allowed herself to be persuaded by her younger sister's enthusiasm: Tess, their father, and young Will had among them carried the day. And now that they were here, each of the Morans was reacting predictably to the pressures inherent in a land of opportunity. Emigration had killed Mrs. Moran and crushed Maggie; but it had fascinated young Will, seduced Mr. Moran, and ensnared Tess in ways she never could have imagined.

  The week after the Morans were processed through Ellis Island, Tess's father, cocky and ebullient, had taken his children to see the Liberty Colossus in New York Harbor. High up inside the statue's torch, the Morans had been presented with a vista that had inspired thousands upon thousands of newcomers before them. But Maggie had shut her eyes and refused to look out, convinced that the torch was going to break off from all their weight and fall into the ocean. Tess herself had remained captivated and profoundly silent, while her father and young Will had jabbered on about ships and states and foreign trade. The males, at least, were ready for anything.

  "I miss Will," said Tess suddenly to Maggie as she finished coring the apple and handed her sister half. "Margaret Mary Moran! What if I were to sweet-talk Bridget into giving you the afternoon? Would you like to come see Father and Will with me?"

  "If you can do that, Tess, you've got the gift of blarney sure," Maggie answered with a grim smile. Bridget wanted everything done yesterday; Maggie was methodical and careful, but she was slow.

  "You just watch me, my timid little turtle." And Tess flew off to negotiate two hours' freedom for her sister. The price was high: a fine lace handkerchief. But Tess didn't care. She craved a dose of her father's anything's-possible optimism.

  "There now!" Tess's voice was triumphant as she flung open the door to their little garret room.

  The smile died on her lips. Maggie had crawled between the covers, flushed and exhausted.

  "What's happened? Mother of God, what is it?"

  "Just a little ... fit, is all," said Maggie with a faint smile. "It will pass. Bridget …?"

  "Bridget said fine to the afternoon off."

  Maggie cleared the phlegm from her throat. "I don't believe it."

  "Well, you'd better believe it. A cup of tea, and away we go," she said gently but without much hope. Maggie wasn't going anywhere that afternoon.

  "Fine ... yes, tea …."

  Her eyes fluttered closed, and in another moment she was asleep. It was the best thing for her, Tess knew, so she left her asleep to make her way down to the waterfront. The weather was fine, the distance not far. Less than half a mile separated Bellevue Avenue from the waterfront, but every foot down the hill marked a drop of several thousand dollars' annual income for its inhabitants as the widely spaced Bellevue mansions of the great financiers quickly gave way to the comfortable clapboard houses of Newport's captains and merchants. Still farther down, the series of streets that connected Spring Street to Thames turned into little more than lanes, along which the shingled cot
tages of fishermen and mill workers were packed cheek to jowl. No carriage houses here; day workers couldn't afford horses. Nor had the fishermen any use for them; their boats—their first loves—were a mere spitting distance away.

  The fishermen's cottages and shacks were home to the wives, but not to their men, obviously. Curtains were clean, but chimneys needed tucking; windows were washed, but roofs needed shingling. If any hand tilled the bits and patches of soil under the marigolds and herbs, it belonged to a woman whose man simply passed through their bed between trips to sea.

  The fishermen without families sometimes rented out their houses while they were away. William Moran had managed to find such a place for young Will and him, and that made it possible for the elder William to find a job.

  Tess dropped down to Thames, a crowded, bustling street lined with boat shops and bakers, cigar stores and bookstores, hat shops, liquor stores and produce marts, newspaper offices, druggists and dry goods shops. If you had money to spend, borrow, or deposit, you could probably do it on Thames Street.

  Crossing Thames, Tess made her way toward Waite's Wharf and her father's place. The house was less a cottage than a shack, less a home than a shelter, tucked between a dark, ill-equipped chandlery and a small fish market and cordage shop. The shingles on the weather side had been blown off long ago, and sheets of tin had been hammered over the skeleton. The roof quite obviously leaked; Tess could see that the south-facing eaves beneath it had rotted away. If the shack had ever been painted, it was not in Tess's lifetime.

  Lifting her skirts slightly, Tess treaded gingerly over a load of quahog shells that had been recently spread but not yet crushed by the wheels of passing wagons into a ground cover of small white pieces; the area reeked of the decaying shellfish. Fishermen passed Tess, staring; a wagon driver whistled and smacked his lips provocatively. Tess had got clear directions from her brother a few days ago, but he had not prepared her for the coarseness of it all, and she winced.

  I have grown used to the splendor of Bellevue Avenue, she thought critically. I would rather not know that this part of town exists. There was nothing so wrong with the waterfront, but it was a man's part of the world, without either glamour or softness. She wasn't afraid, but she felt out of place.

  The door to the shack was of tongue-in-groove pine, warped and peeling and with a broken latch. Tess knocked and it swung inward.

  "Father? Will?"

  From within a pleasant baritone said, "Tess, is it? Come in, girl. And about time too."

  Tess opened her eyes wide, trying to adjust to the dimly lit room—for it was no more than that. A cot and a straw mat placed end to end along one wall, and a table and two rickety chairs along the other, justified the landlord's claim that the house came furnished. A small filthy window let in just enough light to let Tess see, after a while, that her father was finishing his midday meal in a chipped and battered bowl. The dogs at Beau Rêve ate from better crockery.

  Tess kissed her father shyly on his cheek and asked, "Where's young Will, Father?"

  "Ah-ha! Wouldn't you just like to know," he said with the childlike good humor that she associated with him. "There's news at this end, girl. Will has got employ as a ball-boy at the Casino. What do you say to that now, hey?"

  "I say that's good news indeed," said Tess, drawing up the other wobbly chair and sitting down gingerly on it. "Because I don't think Maggie will be kept on much longer as laundry maid."

  "Well, if you get down to it, I never should've left you two up there, any more than I'd leave young Will to fend for hisself in the streets. A man's obliged to his family, and no mistake." He rubbed the back of his neck with a huge, calloused palm the way he had of doing whenever the world outside did not conform to the one inside his head. "Ah, well, no matter, really. Things'll work their way through. So you think Mag will be coming home, then?"

  "Home?" The word sat like a stone on her tongue as she looked around her.

  "It's true, the place needs a woman's touch," her father agreed sheepishly. "Knicky-knacks and such. But girl, I've been damned busy at the smithy's. It's uphill work, all the way. Still, the place has a future for me, Tess." He folded one massive arm over the other on the table, which immediately disappeared. "I see me own business down the road a piece. Maybe a partnership; then, someday, all mine. See if I'm wrong."

  She stared at him. Here we go again, she thought. "Oh? How will you manage it, Father?" she asked him aloud. Always before, Tess had humored her father's sanguine moods, falling in with his endless happy forecasts of prosperity and good times for the Morans. For the first half of her life he'd convinced her that they would one day own a dairy farm; for the last half, he'd had his heart and high hopes set on being master of a river barge. He knew nothing of animal husbandry and less of navigation, but who cared? There was time enough to learn, time enough to save, and meanwhile—plenty of time to dream.

  But the sands were running low; somehow Tess had to make her father see the peril they were all in. "How will you manage it?" she repeated, nearly shouting. "Has Mr. Needham given you a raise? Or promised you a share? Has he given you a man to work under you, or started teaching you to keep the books? Has he adopted you or made you his heir?"

  William Moran, taken aback by his daughter's vehemence, said, "What's this now? Am I in the dock for some crime I didn't commit?"

  "But you are guilty, Father—of putting stars in my eyes, and Will's. Now we must flush them out as best we may, and get on with the ... the everyday of our lives. Maybe Maggie was right; we should never have left Ireland. There's nothing for us here."

  Tess listened to her own voice and heard something in her heart snap, like a twig underfoot in a dark, needle-lined forest: it was her dreams of Edward Hillyard.

  "Don't you understand, Father?" she went on, determined to get through to him this time. "You can't slice a dream the way you would a loaf of bread; you can't cover yourself with a dream on a cold night, the way you would with a blanket. Not another word of partnerships or ownerships or anything else! You and Will and I are the able ones; we must among us feed and care for Maggie. Three to care for one. We can do that. We must!"

  "Maggie's no better, then?" he asked timidly, as if reality were just dawning on him.

  Tess felt as though she'd thrown a pail of water over a songbird in its cage. "It comes and goes," she lied, and in a kinder, softer voice: "The work's too much for her at Beau Rêve. Without it she would get better."

  "She's too damn good for that crazy house, anyway," her father muttered, making a fist. "We'll have her back where she belongs. And what about you, Tess? Come home, girl. You can find work as a casual. Or you could take in a little laundry of your own. Or be a nurse! There's money to be made—"

  "Stop, stop!" Tess's laugh was half a wail. "Until we find that pot of gold, we'd best stay where we are and save what we can. I want you to promise."

  She took hold of her father's huge hand, with its permanently blackened and crushed thumbnail, its scars from hundreds of flying embers. "Promise me," she repeated, lifting her gaze to his face. His hair had lately become shot with gray, and she noticed that one eyebrow was scorched.

  He looked uncomfortable, then looked away. " 'Tisn't right to make me promise. If something came up—"

  "Then at least promise you'll talk to me first."

  He sighed. "What a meddlesome female you are, Tess. What a hard woman. All right. My word. But it isn't right for a father to have to answer to his daughter. I can't say I like it and that's the God's truth."

  Tess smiled her most distracting smile. "Tell me about young Will."

  Her father took the bait. "Have you not heard about the trouble at the Casino, then?"

  "Nothing at all," she answered. "Has something happened to the Tennis Tournament there?"

  "It was very nearly canceled, is all. Here's the most important match of the tournament all set to go, and them heathens who calls 'emselves ball-boys demands a raise or out on strike they go. That very
day! So the manager throws the lot of 'em out, and rightly so, and then hurries the word to Father Timothy among others that he needs replacements. It was a blessed hour that found young Will playing stickball behind the convent. Not thirty minutes after, off he goes to a paying job."

  "Good for Will! But ... won't there be trouble with the striking ball-boys?"

  "My very thought! It don't pay to fool with the radical element nowadays. But Will says except for a cry or two of 'scab' when he went in, it was peaceable enough. Well, you know how boys are." He chuckled to himself. "I did my share of name-calling back in old Eire. Oh, yes."

  "Well, then," Tess said, relieved, "that's good news to offset the bad. It's like the other week, when you were let go, but I was moved up, and now you're up and so is Will. Well—it all balances out, doesn't it? I suppose there are times I worry too much." She looked around her. "I do wish I had time to clean this place up before I go off to see Will," she added. "Really, Father, it's such—"

  "Don't say it. A mess."

  "A big mess! I'll bring rags and soap and some newsprint to clean the window. Do you have a bucket? And for heaven's sake, fix this broken floorboard. Rats can come and go like travelers on a train," she said, peering into a dark hole under the floor.

  "Lord, you truly are meddlesome. Where do you get it from, I wonder?"

  She looked up at him and grinned. "Straight from your sister Teresa."

  "Ah, there may be something to that," he said, surveying his daughter carefully for the first time in a long while. "Same high cheekbones—funny as I've never taken notice before—but your eyes are brighter, though that may be youth. Your hair's thicker—again, youth. Your mouth's quite your own, in more ways than one, o' course. Turn to the side, girl."

  Tess did. "Ha! There 'tis. Teresa all over. Same damn belligerent chin. The Lord preserve us all."