Sea Jade

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

  When the door opened suddenly and Ian came in, I nearly dropped my book. So had everything in this house begun to startle me.

  “I hoped I’d find you here,” he said.

  He swung a straight chair about and straddled it, facing me with his arms resting across its back. The look of strain was still there in the set of his mouth. He appeared weary, with a discouragement, perhaps a hopelessness upon him, that I had never seen before. The destruction of his work was taking its toll.

  He sat for so long in silence that I questioned him gently. “You saw Lien? What did she say?”

  “Only that the cutlass has been missing from the captain’s rooms for two days. She went to the village, she says, and when she came home it was gone. She meant to tell me when she saw me—but I had not visited her recently.”

  I could sense that there had been reproach in Lien’s words. “Then she denied destroying the figure?”

  “She did indeed. Most vehemently. Whether she was telling the truth or not, I don’t know. I have heard her lie to the captain glibly enough when it served her purpose. Her mood is not a good one. She is hurt and angry.”

  “Angry with you?”

  He gazed at me then and I saw in his eyes the look I could not meet. I lowered my own to the meaningless pages of the book. From Ian I wanted friendship but not love and I knew this must somehow be made clear to him. There was in him a quality I had always sensed—an inner vitality that he had been forced to suppress in this house. Given release, it might sweep everything before it. Ian might be a quiet man, but he was no weakling. Yet I still shrank from hurting him further when so severe an injury had been done him.

  I repeated my question, avoiding his eyes. “Is Lien angry with you?”

  “She is angry with me, and she is angry with you as well. I think she senses what has happened to me—because of you. And she’s angry as well because of the trick she feels the captain has played on her about the estate. Until shortly before his death she had expected the whole, and she is not without greed. Yet I can blame her for none of this.”

  I did not want him to explain his meaning. “Brock believes it was his mother who destroyed the figurehead’s face,” I told him.

  His look sharpened, as if he considered for the first time this new idea with all its ramifications. Apparently he had been so convinced that Lien was behind the act that he had thought of no one else.

  “It seems a possibility,” he said at length. “Our glowering Sybil would have every reason for the act because of her feeling about Carrie and the ship, and about you. Still—it is more likely to be Lien. I think your husband has not hit upon the true answer, Mrs. McLean.”

  “Don’t call me that!” I cried. There was a tendency in Ian to twist the knife at times, and to mock himself as he did so.

  He left his chair to move about the room—up and down, pacing until I turned unhappily to watch him. He caught my look and came back to the fire.

  “What a fool I was!” he cried. “If I’d had an ounce of sense the day you came, I’d never have waited to get you to that train. I’d have kidnapped you at once, galloped us both away from this place and from all Captain Obadiah has done to you. But I waited. And now it’s too late. A step is taken, a direction is pointed. A path is beaten—and there is no turning back.”

  I could wish it had happened that way too. Then I would never have felt Brock McLean’s strange spell. I would never have been both drawn and repelled as I was by the man who had become my husband. But none of this could I say to Ian.

  While I sat in silence, staring into the fire, he went to the desk where he had worked for the captain. “I’ll return the sea charts to you,” he said. “I’ve been able to make nothing of the markings.” He spoke indifferently as he laid the maps in my lap and I suspected that he had been too concerned with other matters to give attention to a quest he did not wholly believe in.

  I set the chart that had been matted for framing on top and studied it for the dozenth time. How romantic sounding were the lettered names: the Horse Latitudes, the Doldrums, the Variables of Capricorn, the Northeast Monsoon. And of course the Roaring Forties, where ships rounding Cape Horn for Australia took advantage of the “brave west winds” on both outward and homeward passages. Around Cape of Good Hope ran the way to China, and there, set boldly below the tip of Africa, was the stamped outline of a whale that so puzzled me: “on the China run,” as the captain had said.

  I shook my head despairingly at Ian. “I’ll take them to my room and study them further. Perhaps some inspiration will come to me.”

  Ian was not concerned with the charts. He came behind my chair and dropped his hands lightly on my shoulders.

  “Good night, Miranda,” he said. I held myself very still until the hands upon my shoulders lifted. From across the room I felt the draft as the library door opened and Ian went away.

  Had my mother felt like this long ago when she was young? Perhaps loving one man—my father, yet not wanting to hurt others who loved her, and thus hurting them more than she intended? I must make Ian understand that no matter how kind to me he had been, or how grateful I was, I could not love him. Love would not turn as one might wish. Had I loved Ian, I could have better accepted my own feeling. As it was, I was drawn in unhappy fascination toward another man, only to resent that very fact.

  I gathered up the charts and went to my room. In the hall I cast a fearful look at Sybil McLean’s door before I closed my own. At least no open crack indicated that I was spied upon. If Brock had come upstairs while I was in the library, I had not heard him. Beyond his door there seemed the quiet of emptiness.

  When I dropped the sea charts on my bed, the one with the cardboard mat fell face down and I saw that the whale mark—the outline of an entire whale—had been repeated on the backing. I knelt on the bed, my fingers moving idly over the cardboard, over the face of the chart. Then I began seeking with intent. The mat was well glued but I pried up one edge and ran a hatpin beneath until it was fully loosened all around. Working carefully, I drew the chart itself from the backing sheet. Beneath it lay a thin sheet of rice paper, face down.

  Knowing the fragility of such paper, I picked it up with delicate fingers. Across the sheet ran faded brown script that I recognized at once. It was the same bold hand that had invited me to come to Bascomb’s Point. The writing was Captain Obadiah’s.

  A heading in slightly larger script than the rest brought my own name leaping to my eyes from the page:

  For Miranda Heath when she is grown, in the hope that this will be found after my death. I write these words to clear my conscience of an old wrong, and so that the truth may be known.

  I carried the single sheet of paper to my chair and sat down to read the brief, terse words that stated again the well-known fact that the three captains were aboard the ship; that the storm which broke in fury over the Sea Jade was one of Good Hope’s worst; that there had been a quarrel among the captains. So far I knew all this. There was nothing new—no explanation of the quarrel. Then, in conclusion, a statement, bald and unadorned:

  Nathaniel Heath did not kill Andrew McLean. It was I, Captain Obadiah Bascomb, who shot Captain McLean.

  That was all. I read the words over again with my blood pounding in my ears. Apparently these lines had been written while I was still very young and because the captain had wanted me to some day know the truth. It seemed that it would have been a more valuable gesture had he spoken out during my father’s lifetime. But at least Captain Obadiah had now cleared his old friend’s name.

  This was a confession, though without detail. It might be enough to exonerate my father in this house, yet it did not tell me all I wanted to know. Then I saw that something had been added as a sort of postscript in smaller writing at the bottom of the page. Again a name leapt to meet my eyes.

  Tom Henderson of Scots Harbor was first mate on this voyage. He was witness to all that happened. He will corroborate this confession.

  But Tom Henderson
would corroborate nothing. Tom Henderson was dead—as the three captains were dead. It was possible that Tom had been murdered. But who could have such a stake in what had happened aboard the Sea Jade all those years ago that it had been necessary to silence Tom Henderson? As far as I could see, there was no one.

  Unless …? A new thought occurred to me. What if something about Andrew McLean was being hidden—something that his son would not want revealed, even at this late date? Certainly Brock’s feeling for his father was one of such fierce and loving pride that he was willing to carry his hatred for his father’s murderer down through the generations—even to me.

  Realization on another score broke through my bewilderment. Truth lay in these starkly simple words—a truth the captain had hidden all his life, but which fully justified my belief. Nathaniel Heath had never committed murder. Thus there could be no further reason for Brock, who was Andrew’s son, to continue his resentment of me on this account. I would now be able to vindicate my father’s name with this statement, and I would remove the largest, most sinister block that stood between my husband and me.

  For the first time since that night in the captain’s room I had accepted Brock McLean as my husband in my own thoughts. The realization unnerved me. It was as though one weight that had long thrust me down had been suddenly lifted and left me free. But free only to take on a new weight.

  Free to put myself in mortal danger perhaps? I saw again in my mind’s eye the ravaged face of the figurehead. That deed, with all its wicked implications, returned disturbingly to haunt me. And the far worse memory as well of Tom Henderson muttering his life away in the hold of the Pride. He had tried to tell me something and I had not understood. Who had paid Tom Henderson—and for what? Why, if he knew the truth of what had happened aboard Sea Jade, had he kept silent for all these years? If he had meant to blackmail the captain, why had he waited? It would seem that his return was the catalyst that had brought all these stormy elements into motion, from the moment when his sudden appearance had so startled the captain, to the fall that had caused his own death.

  I was dreadfully cold. I had not troubled to replenish the fire and I shivered as uncontrollably as I had the first night I had gone to bed in this room that had once been Rose McLean’s. With fingers that seemed stiff and fumbling I worked myself free of hooks and drawstrings and put on my nightgown. Then, still shivering, I slipped beneath the sheets.

  What was it that I feared so terribly? Was it the ominous threat that had seemed directed at me in the slashing of the figurehead? Or was it more than that? Was it always, always, that my mind returned to the sound of guilty footsteps hurrying overhead—and the sight of Brock McLean at the foot of the gangplank when I had come out upon the deck of the Pride? Tears burned at the back of my eyes and I blinked them away desperately.

  It was a long while later that I heard Brock come up to his room, heard the crackling of his fire next door, heard him whistling softly to himself as though no worry of any sort had marred this day for him. As well might be, since his wife had perjured herself to protect him.

  Now I began to weep in earnest. I did not want him to hear me, so I gulped and sobbed into my pillow, choking back the sounds. The force of my weeping frightened me, yet I could not stop myself. There was so much that was dreadful to think about, so many frightening pictures to turn round and round in my mind, and I seemed to have lost all ability to stop them.

  In the midst of my weeping a knock sounded on the door between Brock’s room and mine. I knew I couldn’t bear it if he came in and found me with all defenses down.

  “Go away!” I wailed and buried my face in my pillow again.

  I might as well have said, “Come in,” for he opened the door. Light and warmth from his room spread in a broad shaft into mine. He came to my bed and I turned my head away so that he could not see my face. His words when he spoke astonished me.

  “I’ve brought you a key,” he said. “It will lock both the door to the outer hall and the door to my room. While I’m gone, see that you use it.”

  “Gone? Where are you going?” I choked.

  “Word has just come that Henderson’s claim about the Sea Jade’s presence in Salem is true. I’ve decided to go there and look the ship over.”

  My attention was caught in spite of my other concerns. “Then you’ve changed your mind? You’ll bring her back to Bascomb’s Point?”

  He answered me curtly. “She was my father’s ship. If she’s seaworthy, I’ll bring her home myself.”

  I was still shivering, but my weeping had been arrested. He crossed the room and I heard the metallic click of a key dropped upon the marble mantel. Then he turned to consider the quaking of my bed.

  “What’s the matter with you? That sounds like chattering teeth.”

  “What isn’t the matter! Everything is wrong that could be—everything!”

  He came to put a hand on my shoulder and felt my shivering, my chill. In his usual ungentle way he turned my head so that I faced the light from his room and he could see my swollen, reddened eyes, and my cheeks puffed with crying. He asked no “by your leave,” but simply gathered me up in his arms, quilts and all. I could not even struggle as he carried me to his room and kicked the door shut behind him. Again with his foot, he jerked a big armchair before the fire and plumped me without ceremony into it. With a careless hand he picked up one of my trailing quilts and tucked it around me. I found myself in a warm nest with the firelight hot on my face and the tears drying upon my cheeks. Brock leaned toward me and pushed wet locks of hair back from my face.

  “Now then,” he said, drawing up a second chair next to mine, “suppose you tell me what this is all about.”

  I peered at him and saw that he looked more amused than sympathetic. In his obtuse way he probably understood nothing of the emotional turmoil I had experienced since coming to this house. The fact made me angry. I wanted to rub that smug amusement from his face. If he thought of me as a weeping child, I would show him otherwise. So—for all the wrong reasons—I finally told him the truth.

  “I heard your footsteps on the deck the day Tom Henderson died! I heard you running away overhead after you’d pushed him off that ladder!”

  I had the satisfaction of seeing all amusement wiped instantly from his face—though the expression that replaced it was far from reassuring.

  “What are you talking about? What footsteps?”

  “Yours!” I wailed. “When I went to see what had happened and found Tom, I heard you overhead. When I came up on deck and looked over the rail, there you were going down the gangplank.”

  “I could hardly go down it when I hadn’t been up it,” he said in exasperation. “Why didn’t you bring up this matter of someone running away before now?”

  “Because I thought it was you,” I said bleakly, and all my anger ebbed futilely away.

  He stared at me. “Despising me as you do, you still kept silent about what you thought? Why?”

  “I—I wanted to tell you first. But there was never an opportunity. I thought you ought to—to have a chance to answer before I simply went around making accusations.”

  “Thank you,” he said gravely. “I would have expected less mercy at your hands. If it’s of any reassurance for you to know this—and if you can believe me—I was not in the hold of the ship until you called me and told me about Tom. I happened to be approaching the gangplank because one of the men in the shipyard had seen you on the way to the dock and mentioned the fact to me. I came over to find out what you were up to. I’d reached the foot of the gangplank when you looked over the rail.”

  A relief that was like weakness spread through me. For the first time the quaking inside me stopped.

  “You should have told me at once that you’d heard someone running,” Brock went on. “Then I could have investigated. Since no one came off the ship while I was there, whoever it was could have hidden in any dark place below decks and been safe enough. There was no talk about Tom having been
pushed at that time. Later there would have been ways to leave the ship and slip away in the direction of town, with no one any the wiser.”

  “Then—who do you think it could have been?” I asked faintly.

  He did not answer directly. Instead, he leaned toward me and took one of my hands in his. “That’s better. You’ve stopped shivering at least. Your face is a sight, and your nose is red, but your teeth aren’t chattering. I find it hard to believe that you were weeping all those tears because you thought I was a murderer and you were afraid to face me with the fact.”

  His words made my suspicions seem all the more absurd. He had some justification for thinking me an utter idiot. Then he spoiled my new sense of relief.

  “Since you’ve said nothing so far, I’ll ask you to keep silent a little longer,” he said. “Will you promise me to say nothing of this matter, at least until after I return from Salem?”

  “But why?” I asked. “If there has been a crime, then we shouldn’t let the trail grow colder. I should think—”

  He reverted at once to sharp command. “You’d better do no more thinking. You’ve done enough damage by not coming to me with this at once. Now you’ll leave it to me to deal with. Don’t you think you’d look pretty foolish if you reversed your story with Officer Dudley? He might suspect that you really have something to conceal.”

  All this was true, but it was what lay behind his words that troubled me. For if Brock chose now to keep silent, it would only be because he was protecting someone. If not himself—then his mother? But I lacked the courage to fling this new suspicion in his face. Instead, I did something that had not been in my mind at all five minutes before. I told him of the captain’s dying words that had directed me to follow the whale stamp. I told him of finding the charts in the hold of the Pride and of my search for meaning that had culminated only a little while before in the finding of Captain Obadiah’s confession. In what detail there was, I told him what the letter said.