Kings of the Sea

by Van Every Frost, Joan

  Gideon said nothing, only squeezed her hand.

  “You understand how it would be,” she went on, “if I took you or anyone else sailing. I’d always be wondering if I wouldn’t kill you, too.”

  “But it wasn’t your fault — you weren’t even at the tiller.”

  “Tell his parents that,” she said bitterly. “Anyway, if we hadn’t always been daring each other to try impossible things, it would never have happened. He was one of the best sailors on the seaboard, and I was better than most.” She looked at him thoughtfully. “Faced with death, you become aware of your own mortality; it seems to give you the courage — or is it the foolhardiness? — to take from life with both hands, for you now know that for you tomorrow may never come. I couldn’t bear to die not knowing as much of you as fate will allow me.”

  Of course she did finally take him sailing, and it was the first time she saw his leather sleeve and hooks. She was so fascinated with how deft he could be with them that she forgot all about her superstitious dread.

  “Why, you can do just about anything I can do!” she exclaimed.

  “Damned right I can.” He grinned. “I’ll have to think up a new adaptation for lovemaking.”

  She laughed and then suddenly sobered. She had gathered her hair into a long single braid down her back, but as always strands escaped, and the wind whipped them about her face. “Oh, Gideon, I love you so. I keep wanting time to stop.”

  Without answering, he suddenly brought the boat up into the wind and hove her to.

  “Oh no, Gideon, not here! Someone might see us —”

  “The seagulls?” He laughed, and reached for her.

  He went to New York with Emily when he would ordinarily have come to Boston, and Elisabeth mooned about sullenly, making mistakes in the cataloguing and snapping irritably at Malcolm, who looked at her reproachfully but said nothing. It was frightening how quickly her whole life took on the rhythms of the handful of days — sometimes only one or two — that he was with her twice a month. When she looked up on an October day in the library and saw him walk eagerly in after all that time, she nearly burst into tears.

  He sat down with some of his shipbuilding material, for all the world as if he hardly knew her, but gradually she realized that whenever he thought she wasn’t looking, he would be watching her, the book lying open and totally forgotten in front of him. At last she caught him outright and muffled her laugh with her hand, for there were two old gentlemen sitting reading over by the window. He grinned and winked and with an obvious effort returned to his reading. She went hot and cold thinking about how they would go sailing and then come in chilled and tired to a hot drink — was it hot buttered rum time yet? — and a hastily cooked dinner with him perched on a stool with his drink watching her cook it, and then — oh yes, and then …

  As it turned out, they got no farther than inside the front door of her house before they fell on each other hungrily and ended up on the sofa in the parlor under the astonished gaze of the yellow tom. The rest of that brisk autumn sailing afternoon they spent in bed, alternately making love and talking eagerly, anxious to make up for all the lost time.

  “Lovey?” he said as he lay staring at the ceiling, her head on his naked shoulder.

  “Hmm?”

  “What are we going to do when you have a child?”

  “I won’t be having a child, Gideon.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Somehow I wasn’t made right. I never had a period, and the doctors I was taken to all agreed that I would probably never be able to have children. Certainly I never conceived with Tom, so I have to think they were right. That was another thing his parents held against me.”

  “I confess I’m relieved, but in a strange way I’m sorry, too. I would like to have a child with you.”

  “Look at it this way,” she said lightly, for she had already mourned that she would never bear his child. “I may be a rotten candidate for a wife, but what a splendidly naturally endowed mistress I make.”

  He turned to her in anguish. “Oh God, Elisabeth, if only —”

  She put her fingers across his mouth. “Hush, my dear. Be thankful for what we have. I am. So very thankful …”

  Though the snow didn’t come until late in December that year, it was too cold finally to sail, and with regret he helped her make the boat ready for hauling out of the water. They packed away the sails carefully in the boathouse she rented and unstepped the mast. The hull they winched up clear of the catwalks where they could scrape and paint and caulk at their leisure throughout the cold months. Elisabeth touched the keel with her fingers.

  “I always feel sad when it’s time to put up the boat,” she said. “It means that the dark and the cold and the snow are upon us, and a long, long wait until spring.”

  “The summer will never stop for me this year,” he said, pausing in his inspection of the rudder post. “As long as we have each other, the summer can never die.”

  “Gideon, how long can this go on? We’re stealing, you know, stealing time and happiness from fate, and one day we’ll have to pay it back. One day the summer will be over.”

  He walked over and put his good hand on her arm. “Listen to me, Elisabeth. We will be given whatever time God gives us, no more and no less. What we do with that time, though, is up to us. We can spoil it mooning over some future parting or we can live it fully and make each moment count. You must know I love you, and I will always love you, and they can’t take that from us. Ever.”

  She looked contrite. “I wasn’t trying to spoil things, Gideon, believe me. It’s just that sometimes the idea of ever leaving you panics me.”

  He pulled her to him and they clung together wordlessly.

  “Come with me, love, there’s someone I want you to meet,” Gideon said one day in January. “I’m going to check the Andromeda again — she isn’t often in Boston Harbor and New York is a far piece to go.”

  “But Gideon, do you think it wise to introduce me to anyone you know?”

  He looked at her. “Trust me, Elisabeth. We can’t live in isolation forever, and one day we may need friends.”

  She could perfectly well live in isolation, she thought. She didn’t need anyone else but Gideon. Men were different, though, weren’t they? She hoped she wouldn’t feel too embarrassed. As they threaded their way through the clog of wagons, handcarts, and piles of goods in the dock area, Gideon moving with an easy sureness that went with his long familiarity with loading wharves, she had to trot after to keep up with him. At last they came to the Andromeda lying broadside to the dock. Her passengers had been unloaded, and the crew were aloft taking down sails that would be taken to the sail loft for repair or replacement. The packets were always pushed to their limit, and it wasn’t unusual for one to go through an entire suit of sails and then some just on one trip, since there had to be a full gale blowing before a packet captain would order any reefing to speak of.

  Gideon mounted the loading ramp with Elisabeth right behind him, frightened silly of the upcoming encounter. He stopped a seaman staggering by with a staysail bundled in his arms.

  “Where’s the captain?”

  “There he be, aft,” the seaman said, pointing with his chin toward a group of men standing on the stem deck deep in conversation.

  As Gideon marched right up to them, they turned and greeted him, all of them seeming to know him.

  “You’re just the man we want to see,” the shortest of the men said. He was perhaps only five years older than Gideon and wearing a smart dark-blue uniform with all kinds of gold stripes on the sleeves. He noticed Gideon taking in his grand apparel and grinned. “All done up like a Christmas goose, aren’t I? Never mind, the ladies love it. Aren’t you going to introduce me to your friend?”

  For the first time Gideon looked discomfited, and Elisabeth surmised shrewdly that he was regretting his sudden impulse to introduce her into his other life. “Uh, Mrs. Bowman, may I present Captain Poulson? The captain is an ol
d friend of mine and a partner with me in the shipyard,” he explained unnecessarily, for he had long since told her all about Poulson. “Mrs. Bowman is one of the librarians at the Tilbury Memorial Ship Library, Dick.”

  Poulson raised his eyebrows. “Is she now? She looks much too pretty to be that smart.”

  Elisabeth realized that the five men had their attention riveted on her. She took a deep breath and held out her hand. “How do you do, captain. Gideon has told me a great deal about you, but you really don’t look such an ogre as all that.” She could only hope that her decision to acknowledge their relationship openly was the right one. Gideon looked stricken, the big oaf. Did he really think that this perceptive little man was going to be fooled for five minutes?

  Poulson gave an explosive snort of laughter. “Caught out, are you, Gideon?” That remark could have been taken two ways. “Damn if you haven’t got yourself a prize there. Now then, Gideon, we have a problem all right, a pretty pickle. Excuse us, Mrs. Bowman. You can either make yourself as comfortable as possible up here, or perhaps you’d prefer to tell Gideon where to meet you later on.”

  She knew that she should tell him where to meet her, but now that she had been examined, she wanted to know more about what Gideon did. She could never share more than a little of his life, but perhaps she could share something of his work. “If it wouldn’t be inconvenient, captain, I’d very much like to trail along. I spend my days handling the written materials on the theory, and now I’d really like to see a bit of practice. I won’t be in your way, I promise you.”

  “But of course, my dear,” Dick Poulson said, giving her his arm.

  Later on they were down in the hold examining the joins of the iron skeleton to the wooden planks, and Elisabeth was forgotten. “We could always tear them out and replace them,” Poulson was saying, “but it would cost the world and you’d have it to do over again in a few years.”

  “You wouldn’t have to go that far,” Gideon pointed out. “It’s only where the metal is actually bolted to the wood that the wood is rotting. We could take out just these small sections and replace them. What I’m wondering about now is if there isn’t something we can put between the iron and the wood where they join. Leather, maybe?”

  “What about rubber?” Poulson asked. “It’s waterproof, and leather would never hold up.”

  “I thought of that, but with heat it turns into a sticky mess, and you’d get sloppy joins that stress would yank right out of the wood. Glass would be perfect, but of course it would simply smash. What about a really hard wood like ironwood, for example? It would go eventually, too, but it would take longer than oak at least, and the way you packet boys load on the sail, the ship won’t outlast the iron-wood by far anyway.”

  “If I might make a suggestion, gentlemen,” Elisabeth’s voice sounded strange even to her ears. They all turned and stared at her. “A month ago we received a pamphlet by an American named Nathaniel Hayward, who has been experimenting with mixing sulphur with rubber to harden it. We received the pamphlet because it might concern seamen’s storm gear. Perhaps if you were to contact him, he might be of help.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Poulson said simply. “I wonder if the girl’s got something there.”

  Gideon grinned at her. “How would you like to write him for us, Elisabeth?”

  She smiled demurely back. “I’d be glad to.”

  Only Poulson failed to smile, and she sensed a hint of disapproval as he watched the two of them together.

  Chapter II

  When Gideon left the next day, he did not set a time for seeing her again, and though this was not unusual, she nevertheless took it as an ominous sign. The days dragged painfully by, and the nights were agonizing. At least during the day she had things to do, and she had plunged herself into the problem of finding out what had been done about hardening rubber.

  One day as she sat mooning at the desk in the reading room, Malcolm approached her. “What’s the matter, Beth?” he asked her bluntly. “Has that bastard jilted you?”

  Her first instinct was to say that it wasn’t any of his business, but she realized how it must have hurt him through these months to see her apparently happy with someone else. “I don’t know, Malcolm. And it wouldn’t be jilting anyway, only accepting the inevitable.”

  “Why won’t he marry you and have done with it?” Malcolm persisted.

  “Because he’s already married,” Elisabeth replied in an even voice.

  “Oh my dear, I’m so sorry,” Malcolm said surprisingly. “I know how you must be suffering.”

  “Do you, Malcolm?”

  “Listen to me, Beth. You aren’t the only one who has felt love frustrated.” His fine gray eyes narrowed slightly. “At least you have had some time to love and be loved, both with your husband and with this Hand fellow.”

  “Malcolm, believe me, if it weren’t for Gideon I can’t think of anyone I’d rather marry.”

  “Ah, but I began proposing before you ever met him.”

  “You’ve caught me out,” she said wryly. “Truly, I think I might have come to it in time. If I hadn’t been fond of you I wouldn’t have offered you all those dinners.”

  “Why don’t we have dinner together tonight? I’ll buy the wherewithal.” At her hesitation he said lightly, “No, never mind. He might turn up after all, mightn’t he?”

  She nodded miserably.

  Three weeks passed, then four. She went about feeling a constant ache like that of a bad tooth, and wondered how long she could stand it. Several times it snowed, and she mourned that she couldn’t sail, though she spent a lot of time sanding and scraping the boat. When she finished all that, she would paint it. She thought of when they had made love on the bottom duckboards right out there in the middle of the bay, and she leaned her head against the hull with the tears running silently like rain down her face. She felt as if she were dying inside. They had become somehow attached to each other, a single creature, and she at least might prove incapable of life without him. No, that was too melodramatic — life went right on, didn’t it?

  Thus when she came walking into the reading room from the workroom one morning and saw him standing there talking to Malcolm, she stopped dead in her tracks with her mouth open, speechless. At first she wondered if he wasn’t an apparition formed of her need and want, not a creature of flesh and blood at all.

  Gideon turned then and saw her. For a long time their eyes locked across the room, and she felt a great wave of heat break over her. She made herself walk slowly toward him, her hand out blindly as if he wasn’t to be believed until she touched him. He put his hand casually on her upper arm.

  “Hello, Elisabeth,” he said lightly. “How’ve you been keeping yourself?” Before she could answer, she saw him close his eyes for a moment, and his hand squeezed her arm until it hurt.

  “Why, I’ve been fine, Gideon. I wondered where you were.”

  “Would you mind the store for her for a while, Malcolm?” Gideon asked.

  “Take the rest of the day off, Beth,” Malcolm said. “You only had another hour to go anyway.”

  She touched his arm gratefully. “You’re a dear, Malcolm.”

  They walked through the snow toward her house, her hand on his arm. She had a feeling of unreality, as if this were some daydream in which she was indulging herself, that she would come to at any moment in the reading room of the library. She was conscious of the crunch of snow underfoot, still frozen in early March, the thin winter sunlight on their faces, the shouts of some children throwing snowballs on the Common as they went home from school to lunch, finally the rasp of the key in the lock of her front door. They had exchanged no word, had not even looked at each other.

  No sooner had the door closed behind her than he took her roughly in his arms, holding her so tight that she could hardly breathe.

  “Oh love, I thought this moment would never come,” he groaned.

  “I began to think you weren’t coming back,” she murmured.


  He held her away from him then. “You must have known I couldn’t stay away. Dick Poulson brought up the Andromeda and we had some ironwood shipped up from New York. We replaced the rotting sections of oak with sections of ironwood.” He dropped his hand from her shoulder. “I almost wrote you several times, but I didn’t want to mail a letter to you from Evanston, and I couldn’t get away to mail it from anywhere else. I had Poulson breathing down my neck and Elam asking my opinion, mostly both at the same time.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Gideon. Nothing matters except that you’re here.” She pulled his head down until their mouths were joined, and it was a long time until they spoke of anything again.

  The next morning as they were about to leave for the library, it was Gideon who saw it first, an innocuous-looking piece of paper shoved under the front door. He picked it up and glanced at it, then crumpled it into a ball in his hand.

  “What is it?” she asked curiously.

  “Nothing,” he answered shortly. “A child’s drawing. Not anything, really.” His face was expressionless.

  Something in his tone of voice caught her attention. “It’s something bad, isn’t it? Let me see it. I have a right to know.”

  He shrugged helplessly and slowly handed her the ball of paper.

  “Fornicators will be punished by the wrath of the Lord,” it said. “Beware!” Underneath the writing was a crude drawing of two people so filled with obscenity and malice that Elisabeth caught her breath.