Kings of the Sea

by Van Every Frost, Joan

  “Did you really think you needed an excuse like that to see me?”

  “After what you said the night of the fire … and Dick Poulson said you’ve become very hard …”

  “Preachers to the contrary, suffering doesn’t ennoble one in the slightest. There hasn’t been a day I didn’t think of you, wonder how you were and what you were doing.”

  “It was the same for me.”

  “I never thought to see you again. Dick said you had moved away, he wouldn’t say where.”

  “We went to Switzerland. Malcolm died a year ago — over a year ago.”

  “I’m sorry, Elisabeth, I truly am. I know he loved you very much.”

  “I made myself stay away this long, Gideon — until I couldn’t any longer. I thought that perhaps I was hoping for something that no longer existed.”

  “I have too much to answer for now — more than I can ask anyone to share.”

  “I have already shared it, my love, and will to the end of my life. That poor tormented soul …”

  He looked at her silently for a moment. “That some good might come of the horror after all,” he murmured. He leaned down to the boy. “This is Elisabeth, Christian. I hope you’ll be seeing a great deal of her from now on.”

  Christian, a sturdily built little boy of six, gravely put out his hand to the lady, who for some reason seemed to have tears in her eyes.

  “You don’t know how glad I am to meet you, Christian. Your father and I are very old friends. I feel as if I had come home at last.”

  PART TWO

  Christian

  1852-1864

  Chapter I

  The last time I saw her was also the last time we engaged in that excruciating form of lovemaking in which everything was permissible except the most natural form of connection between a man and a woman. These encounters left me physically sated in one way, but anguished and unfulfilled in another.

  For even at the gawky age of eighteen, I understood that until she allowed me to penetrate her, she would never belong to me.

  “I don’t understand you, Arabella, I’ve said I’d marry you whenever you say. Why must you continue to torment us both this way?”

  She looked at me and laughed and I heard as always the peal of golden bells in that laugh. We were lying naked on the cool, shadowy sand of our cave, and she was sensually stroking the whole length of my torso, teasingly avoiding that erect and throbbing piece of anguished flesh between my legs, perversely I was refusing to so much as touch her.

  “I’ve told you and told you, Christian, I love you, but I’m not going to marry for love. The name Arabella Hotchkiss is a game to you, but not to me, my love. One day I’ll have all of the money and position I shall ever require. But to get it I must be a virgin. I will give you everything except the maidenhead that is going to assure my place in the world.”

  “For God’s sake, that’s all only a dream. You aren’t the maiden I lashed to the mast to save you in the storm, you aren’t the damsel in distress whose dragon I killed, and you aren’t and never will be Arabella Hotchkiss.”

  “I know very well who I am,” she said, angry now, “and I don’t intend to be Moishe Levy’s daughter much longer, let me tell you,” she stopped abruptly and stared at me, tears standing in her eyes, as I thought, tears of anger, “Oh Christian, let’s not fight, this time least of all.”

  She then proceeded to do something she had never done before, an act that I would never dream of asking her to perform. I could feel those glorious breasts on me, inside of my legs and her long black hair lying silkily on my stomach and she took me in her mouth and made love to me there on the cool sand, and with a cry I exploded into her warm, moist, wonderful place, my hands clutching at her shoulders.

  She raised her head then, her dark eyes, liquid obsidian, and lay down beside me. “Love me. Christian, love me as I’ve loved you.”

  As I addressed my mouth and hands to that marvelously responsive body that leaped so readily under my touch, it never occurred to me that by tomorrow she would be gone.

  We were the outcasts, Miriam and I. She was an outcast because she was Jewish, and I was an outcast because my mother had gone mad. Her father, Moshe Levy, ran a ship chandlery and sail loft that served the shipyards along our river. Moshe, called Moses by everyone except Elisabeth and me, was a gnome of a man who was crammed full of the most amazing fund of miscellaneous knowledge; there was no one at Harvard who could touch him. He could tell you about the tides and the planets, why the theory of humors was poor medicine, about the Lost Tribes of Israel, of the theory behind the cantilever bridge, about plants that ate meat, and of beasts mythological and real. There seemed to be no subject upon which he was unable to discourse.

  I didn’t begin school until I was nearly six and a half, but soon after she and my father were married, Elisabeth began taking me to see Moshe, for she said that he was the wisest and best-read man she knew. Thus I had met his only child, Miriam, even before I went to school. We began school together and we went through our trials together, since if one of us was not being tormented by our schoolmates, the other was. Without Miriam and Elisabeth, I might have gone mad as did my mother.

  “Your mama was a loony!” they would chant endlessly, and I soon learned to emulate Miriam and appear to ignore them.

  Elisabeth knew what was going on, but she never spoke of it to my father. I certainly didn’t, though I don’t know why. There was plenty of opportunity during those years he taught me the shipwright’s trade, beginning as soon as I could walk. Sometimes I used to dream of my mother who was always wandering palely down long empty corridors wringing her hands. I didn’t know what she looked like, of course, and all I could feel was sadness. Dear Elisabeth, she was mother and sister to me, even teaching me to sail. My father? My father loved me in his own way, I’m sure, but he really lived for the shipyard and for Elisabeth. Sometimes I would catch him watching her as she went about some household tasks, and it was as if he were looking at the well-loved being who was about to depart forever. I know that children raised by parents who dislike each other have a real cross to bear, but the opposite can bring an equal cross, for any children are shut out of magic circles that surround the fathers and the mothers. There were times when I almost felt as an intruder in my own home.

  Even as a small child I was stocky and strong. Not in the least like the lean whippet build of my father. And where his hair was a fiery red only now beginning to go gray, mine was a kind of tawny color, not as dark or as brown as Elisabeth told me my mother’s was. Where his eyes were a brilliant piercing blue, mine were more or less the color of my hair. When I was with him, I always felt shadowed by his vivid coloring and confident graceful movement. In short, he made me feel like a clod, and I found that I worked far better under Elam’s tutelage. Elisabeth supported me when I announced that I wanted to go to university and become an engineer and afterward apprentice to one of the British firms that were building marine engines.

  “Look at it this way, Gideon,” she said reasonably as he worried the subject. “If the lad is right that steam will replace sail, you will be making the ships and he designing the engines. If he is wrong, marine engines can’t be all that much different from other engines, and he can make a decent living, perhaps even become a famous designer of bridges or locomotives. I remember how Tom always wanted to design racing sailing craft.”

  My father went on grumbling, but he could never deny Elisabeth anything it was in his power to give. I often used to marvel at how the none too gentle tyrant of the shipyard turned into such a tame pussycat at home. She could have told him to reach for the stars or to walk on the water, and he’d have done his damnedest to obey her. When I grew older, I began to understand it, for I felt the same way about Miriam.

  I think of her as Arabella now, for it was I who named her that. We were thrown together naturally in alliance against the other children, who were cruel as only children know how to be, and though I spent my hours out of s
chool at the shipyard, there was always Sunday. To Moshe, of course, Sunday was not the day of rest of his religion, and my parents were not religious in a time when everyone else was, another black mark as far as my classmates were concerned.

  Sunday was therefore the day I always spent with Miriam, and I was more than willing to suffer what further taunting my contemporaries might invent for my lack of religion to be able to pass the entire day in her company. We spent years playing at games of pretend to escape the situation in which we found ourselves in the real world. We discovered the North Pole, we were Maccabees fighting the Romans to a standstill and at last killing ourselves rather than surrender, we captained clipper ships around the Horn, we followed Alexander to India, we rescued damsels in distress and sent the giants’ heads back to King Arthur.

  In those early days Miriam was an awful tomboy, and all of our adventures were equally shared.

  It wasn’t until I was sixteen that I looked at her one day and saw that she was turning into a woman. Her breasts strained at the shirt she was wearing and her narrow little tomboy face was filling out into the soft lines of a woman’s mysterious and beautiful countenance. We never touched each other then, though there were times when I went home aching at the groin, but our games changed. Now I was always rescuing her from one peril or another while she stood by and laughingly encouraged me in my endeavors. It was only in the last year that the games had changed once again. In the mysterious shadowy coolness of the cave I tasted her mouth at last, and the whole world shifted for me. She had brought a clipping from a Boston newspaper announcing the coming-out of the years’ debutantes, among them a Miss Arabella Hotchkiss, whose father’s business was not mentioned — was it thought too crass to be in trade? — but whose uncle was some high muckymuck in the British government, Sir Anthony Hotchkiss.

  Miriam’s eyes shone. “Oh, Christian, that’s what I want more than anything. Can’t you just see me dressed all in white lace with long white satin gloves, a diamond tiara, and marrying a lord? Just think, I would be Lady Miriam — they always use first names with titles, you know.” She stopped. “That doesn’t sound right, does it?” she asked at last in a dispirited voice.

  “Never mind.” I laughed. “I hereby christen thee Lady Arabella Hotchkiss. With a name like that, you’re bound to marry a lord.”

  I fully intended to go on to christen myself Sir Anthony Hotchkiss, but I never had a chance, for her face lighted up and she threw her arms around me exuberantly. “That’s it, Christian! Oh, that’s perfect!”

  Finding her face so close to mine and holding her in my arms, I pressed my lips to hers, trembling, and was wildly excited when instead of drawing back she tightened her arms and kissed me enthusiastically if clumsily in return.

  “No matter what happens, remember that it is you I love,” she said, and innocents that we were, we kissed until our mouths were tender and swollen. I realized that before this I had had no idea what an aching groin was all about.

  At the time, my father’s shipyard was turning out clipper ships by the gross, and only Donald McKay was better known for building those loveliest of all sailing vessels. Gideon Hand’s Morning Glory, Sprightly Elisabeth, and Blazing Star all at one time or another held records for the San Francisco or the Australia and China run. Gold had been discovered in California and not long afterward in Australia as well, and as fast as the clippers came off the ways, they set sail with gold seekers and mining equipment for San Francisco and Melbourne, and returned with hides and tallow and grain and wool and, above all, gold bullion. Some of the ships went on across the treacherous China Sea and picked up at Canton cargos of tea and silk and jade for the homeward run around the Cape of Good Hope via England to Boston and New York. My father’s old friend Dick Poulson finally couldn’t resist and came out of retirement to captain the Coral Strand and later the Jade Queen, whose name harked back to his old vessel the Beryl Queen.

  There was no more stirring sight than a clipper ship under full sail knifing through the water with hardly a wake behind her, and yet even at the age of sixteen I knew that though they were beautiful, they were also doomed.

  At seventeen, I went off to Harvard. Moshe, of all people, had been corresponding with several of the faculty there, and I think it was his recommendation that got me in, for in those days Harvard was a school for young gentlemen, and God knows my father was no gentleman, nor was I. However, I soon managed to assume the appearance of one, and you couldn’t have told me from any of the rest of those useless young prigs. Oh, some of them were all right — after all, that’s where I met Sam — but for the most part they were a spoiled lot of ne’er-do-wells. On the other hand, as long as you pretended to think as they did, you got along fine, and I was ever thankful that none of them knew my mother had died mad. You who have never been persecuted for something that was not your fault, you will never know the torment of having all your fellows turned against you nor the blessed relief when the tormenting stops.

  Arabella had finished school when I did, but of course wouldn’t be going on to any university. Moshe was in the midst of complicated negotiations for her to marry a boy belonging to a wealthy family of greengrocers in Boston when she was eighteen. Meanwhile she helped her father in the chandlery and he tutored her. I venture to say that she received an education far superior to mine, and I wondered at Moshe’s being so narrow as to marry her off to a greengrocer. That was until I met the boy. He was like Arabella, dark-haired, intense, and incredibly handsome. I turned positively green with jealousy the first time I laid eyes on him.

  “Oh, don’t worry about Danny,” Arabella said almost indifferently when I asked her about him. “He’s terribly good-looking, but I have no interest in being a greengrocer’s wife, I don’t care how handsome and well read he is. I’m going to find the equivalent of a Hotchkiss or break myself trying.” She laughed scornfully. “Can’t you just see me as Mrs. Daniel Rubenstein?”

  I heaved a sigh of relief. “No,” I said, “I really can’t. What I can see you as is Mrs. Christian Hand, wife of the head of a shipping empire.”

  “Oh, Christian, that’s nothing but a daydream. You’ll end by taking over your father’s shipyard, see if you don’t, and I don’t much prefer being a shipyard owner’s wife to being a greengrocer’s wife.”

  “You wait and see,” I promised her. “One day you’ll be christening a ship called the Arabella, and it won’t be all that far in the future, either.”

  She kissed me gently. “No, Christian. By the time you or I know how far you’re going, I’ll be too old to make any other choice, and I would eat you alive.”

  I didn’t really take her seriously, however, any more than she took my shipping line seriously. The golden days of that first summer after I went to Harvard seemed in retrospect made of Sundays. I worked in the shipyard during the week, of course, but every Sunday I set off with my fishing tackle and no one questioned me. On my way home I would stop and buy a few fish from old Billy Blane to make things look right.

  The cave now became a place for society dinners, high-style weddings, and being presented to the queen. I must say I felt a bit silly playing the part of that dumpy little monarch, Victoria, and would far have preferred even at my advanced age to be still killing giants and sending their heads to Arthur. However, I put up with it all patiently, for only thus did I earn those magic hours of holding her naked in my arms and pleasuring that marvelous body. I was so besotted that I never for a moment imagined that she meant every word when she said that she wouldn’t marry me.

  The night after she had made love to me in that wonderful fashion that I had never before experienced, I was awakened rudely from a pleasant dream by pounding on my door. Cleon, our marmalade cat, leaped off the bed with a startled yowl.

  “Christian! Are you there?”

  It was my father, and as I stumbled sleepily to open the door, he burst in with Moshe and Elisabeth at his heels.

  “Thank God!” my father exclaimed.

&
nbsp; Moshe looked stunned. “Then where is she?” he said waveringly.

  “Where is who?” I asked stupidly, still not fully awake. “What are you doing here, Moshe?”

  “Miriam, of course,” he snapped impatiently. “Who else would I be asking after in the middle of the night?”

  Who else indeed? Arabella’s mother had died when she was five, another link between us, and the housekeeper went home every night. Arabella! “Miriam’s missing?” I was still trying to take it all in.

  “She’s gone, and so are some of her clothes.” It was the first time I had ever seen him at a loss.

  “But where would she go? She can’t be far,” Elisabeth offered. “She had no money.”

  “I — I had money hidden, quite a bit of it. She took that and left a note saying only that she would repay it one day.” I thought he was going to cry.

  “Oh, Moshe!” Elisabeth said sadly, putting her arms around him.

  “That’s what banks are for,” my father made the mistake of saying.

  “I’ve seen banks close their doors, their paper money worthless,” Moshe replied. “We Jews have had to learn to keep some valuables aside in case we ever had to flee. This was all in gold coins …”

  “Do you suppose she ran off with anyone? With a man, perhaps?” my father asked then.

  Moshe looked right at me. “No,” he said slowly, “now I don’t think she did. Do you, lad? You knew her better than most.”

  Until that time I had been so confused, and so unbelieving, that her disappearance hadn’t really touched me. The anesthetic of shock and disbelief wore off when my opinion was asked, and I felt as if a loving hand that had cupped my heart had suddenly clenched into a hurting fist that squeezed me dry of all feeling except pain. It was all I could do not to groan aloud. I couldn’t answer him, only shake my head.