The woman made a small, courteous obeisance to me. “If you please,” she said in surprisingly good English, and offered me a cup. The captain dropped my hand and I rose from my knees to sit on a nearby hassock and take the fragile china from her hands, thanking her as I did so.
“This is my wife, Lien,” the captain said.
I said, “How-do-you-do,” looking at her with interest, for I had never before seen a woman of China. In spite of her strangely painted face, she was lovely to look at, with dark eyes that tilted exotically at the corners and full lips curved in a faint, courteous smile. Her age I could not surmise, except that she was no longer a young girl.
She returned my greeting softly and at once withdrew to the room’s far shadows, not partaking of tea with us.
The captain drew my attention impatiently back to himself, as if he did not willingly share the center of interest with others for long. Though he had accepted a cup of tea from his wife, he did not sip it in a properly polite manner, but seemed able to drink it scalding hot. He drained his portion greedily and held his cup out to me to fill from the flowered pot on the tray before I had more than sipped my own. I found it a precious brew, pale green and fragrant.
“It was for the conveying of teas like this that we drove our ships to the limit back in the forties and fifties,” he told me. “It took a ship with wings to deliver fine tea before the flavor faded. The company with the swiftest ships could command its own price.”
I nodded agreement. “I know. My father has told me often of those voyages. And I’ve read about them in published accounts.”
The captain’s bright blue eyes studied me. “Did he tell you perhaps of the first voyage the Sea Jade ever made?”
The forbidden name had been spoken again and I tensed. “Not a great deal. Her first trip was my father’s last and he never liked to talk about it.”
“Hmph!” The exclamation emerged explosively. “He might well have felt that way! You and I need not talk of it either.” The roar faded from his voice and he spoke to me more gently. “So you’ve come here at last, Miranda? Do you know how much this means to me—to have the old partnership drawn together once more under my own roof, close as it used to be? Ah, Nathaniel and I should never have quarreled!”
As I listened, a strange thing began to happen to me. It was as though the eyes and the voice of the man before me recreated the strong, stormy essence of all he had once been. Wrinkled brown skin and wizened body became irrelevant as I listened to him tell of the great days of Bascomb & Company. Of the days when the partnership of Bascomb, Heath and McLean had thrived and the company had rivaled the very trade of the British Indiamen on the seas. Those were the days when the three young captains had sailed the oceans of the world, continuing as partners the comradeship of experience they had known as boys in Scots Harbor. As I listened, the old spell came over me and the very room, with its ship’s instruments of brass, its treasures of teakwood and jade from the Orient, the silent, exotic woman in the shadows and the fragrant tea steaming in my hands—all these wrought the old magic for me with a new, heady strength.
“Do you understand what I mean, Miranda?”
He bent toward me and held out his thin claw of a hand. But he did not snatch at me now. He waited until I put my own hand into his, giving him the trust I no longer wished to withhold, feeling myself—how foolishly!—safe at last.
“Do you see how it is?” he went on. “Old Obadiah Bascomb is still on deck. You are here and so is Andrew McLean’s son Brock. There are some who say that Bascomb & Company is a name that has lost its power. The more fools they! With my help, the two of you who are its rightful heirs will bring it back. You’ll do this for all our sakes, won’t you, Miranda? For the sake of Nathaniel and Andrew and me?”
I had no idea what he was talking about, but I saw that he grew excited and I remembered Mrs. McLean’s warning. Wanting only to soothe and quiet, I smiled at him warmly.
“I’ll do whatever I can to help you, Captain Obadiah,” I said.
The Chinese woman made a soft sound, as if of remonstrance, and came out of the shadows to stand near his chair. “This young person does not know what must be promised,” she said in her high, light voice that carried an unfamiliar cadence, a faintly singsong quality, for all that the English words were correct.
Captain Obadiah looked at her with something of pride, speaking as if she were not there.
“That’s prime English,” he noted. “I wanted no pidgin from her, so I taught her the beginnings myself. With some polishing up of my own speech, of course. I wouldn’t have her talking like an old sea dog. Ian Pryott did the rest.”
“The young person must understand the promise she gives,” the woman persisted.
“Go away, Lien!” The captain flashed in sudden anger. “You know better than to tell me what to do! Miranda will give me her promise. What else is there for her?” He turned to me impatiently. “How else can you live? What sort of life awaits you in New York? Working yourself into spinsterhood as a governess? Scrubbing floors for some female who’ll not appreciate you or give you a home? Is that what you want?”
“It’s not what I want,” I said mildly, seeking only to quiet this rising excitement. “But I don’t understand what it is that you ask of me.”
The Chinese woman had not returned to her shadows. Instead, she went to a nearby cabinet and drew something from it. In her two hands she bore the thing back to the captain and knelt before him, offering it to him with her head bent as if in supplication. Firelight touched a golden gleam from the filigree pin in her hair, and sent red light down the broad steel blade in her hands.
The thing she held toward the captain was a sword, with a wide, curved blade on the order of a cutlass. The gesture, the vision of this kneeling doll-figure in green tunic and trousers seemed like something out of a play and once more I lost all sense of reality and personal involvement. What was happening seemed too much of the theater to be believed. Often, as I was to learn, Lien seemed to impart this sense of a performance. Or perhaps it was only the beholder’s lack of firsthand acquaintance with far Cathay that resulted in this feeling of something unrelated to the everyday world. Perhaps this very fact played into her hands so that no one took her quite seriously and she could accomplish what she wished all the more easily for being considered a China doll.
Certainly the captain seemed undisturbed by the small figure kneeling so dramatically before him. He had calmed a little, for he was smiling now.
“You haven’t done this in a long time, Lien,” he mused and winked at me surprisingly.
I did not smile, for I could see Lien’s face, hidden from the captain’s view by her bent head. Her skin seemed faintly greenish beneath the rice powder and her eyes flashed a dark look, quickly hidden by the lowering of pale lids. I had a feeling of shock, and was no longer a mere spectator. Lien was far from acquiescent to all the captain’s wishes.
The captain took the wicked blade from her by its hilt and held up the steel blade.
“This is a Malay cutlass, Miranda my dear. A pirate’s sword. It came into my hands when my ship happened upon a mandarin’s junk drifting aimlessly off the islands around the Canton estuary. The junk had been set afire and all aboard were dead except the mandarin’s wife, who had hidden herself in a sea chest and thus escaped with her life. Never had I met a highborn Chinese lady before. It was a rare privilege to rescue her. Later she did me the honor to become my wife.”
The woman raised her head and looked at him and at once his gentler mood vanished.
“I must do what I must do,” he told her brusquely. “No one is going to stop me. Not you, Lien, or anyone else.” He was in command of himself, and of us again. There was no tremor in his voice, though dangerous excitement stirred in his eyes.
“I will explain clearly what I want of you,” he said to me. “Brock McLean is like my own son, as his father was like my brother. My family is gone, as your family is gone. I have no children
by my marriage. Brock is the only one left who can take hold of the company after me and make it again what it should be. He cares about it as I have cared about it. He must be my heir.”
This was all clear enough. I sipped the last of my tea and continued to listen. Lien reached courteously to take the empty cup from my hands. She did not go away but continued to kneel beside the captain’s chair, her eyes downcast.
Captain Obadiah dropped the ugly blade with a clatter to the hearth beside him and went on. “Unfortunately, Brock is an embittered man. He has the curious notion that nothing will ever come right for him again. Whatever he touches seems to attract disaster. Or so he believes. He has determined never to marry again because he thinks he has nothing to offer any woman; nothing, in fact, to offer himself. If he will not marry, the future of the company will end with him. His child, Laurel, is a girl; and it is a grandson, at least by adoption, that I must have to carry on the line. So Brock must marry.”
Still I did not see where he was heading. I sat on my hassock with my hands clasped about my knees, listening to a tale that was fascinating, but had little to do with me. Then the old man turned his clear blue look upon me and shattered my safe remoteness with his next words.
“I’ve brought you here to marry him, Miranda. This will be the solution to all our problems. Through you the dynasty of Bascomb & Company will continue. You will bear Brock a son to carry on our fortunes. I knew from the moment Nathaniel came here to see me that you held the solution in your own two pretty hands.”
I must have gaped at him blankly. I know I gasped and could not speak at all for a moment. Then I protested in dismay.
“I don’t even know Brock McLean! And he doesn’t know me. What you suggest is impossible. Of course he will refuse and of course—”
“Don’t waste my time with such nonsense,” the captain broke in. Once more he reached out and grasped me by the wrist so that I felt the steel grip of his fingers, strangely frightening in a man so weak and ill. “You will do as I say—you and Brock. I have only a little while to live and I must see this settled before I go. Even if Brock should refuse, you are the one to bring him to his senses. You’re pretty enough. And you aren’t Carrie Corcoran’s daughter for nothing. The three Captains will continue their rule of Bascomb & Company and Scots Harbor through the two of you.”
He had begun to shake with the fervor of his eagerness. The tremor of his lips as he tried to form further words alarmed me.
“Give me a little time,” I beseeched him. “Until tomorrow, at least. Let me think about this. Let me meet this man you want me to marry. I’m not a pawn on a chess board to be moved without regard for my own feelings.”
He gave up then, as he might not have done in the old days. He dropped my hand and fell back in his chair exhausted. At once Lien bent over him, wiping his brow with a handkerchief, motioning with her head for me to go.
I sprang up and ran for the door and neither of them spoke a word to stop me. I found my way to the newer part of the house and fled along the upper hall to the little room where I could shut the door and be alone. The contrast between the two sections of the house was extreme. Here in the newer part there was an aura of austere elegance and good taste. There was no wizened tyrant of a man, no scent of sandalwood, no exotic woman in Chinese garb, no savage blade to be offered in strange ceremony.
Yet the tenacity of the old man’s will reached me even here. Within this small space I felt stifled and unsafe. I stepped to the window and looked down through the curtains. Though the late afternoon was still gray and lowering, the darkness of false night had lifted and it was no longer raining. The outdoors beckoned me. I flung my mantle about my shoulders and found my way quickly downstairs, slipping outside before anyone could question me. I wanted no encounter with Brock McLean, nor with his mother at this moment.
A stiff wind was still blowing, but it was a clear wind and I walked into it, past the lighthouse with its two chunky granite wings, and on to the very heights of the headland itself. Here scrubby juniper thinned its wild growth and gave way to a stubble of brown grass strewn with rock. Wild flowers would abound in this place in the spring, but now it was a dreary expanse of dead grass and barren out-croppings of rock.
Bascomb’s Point was one of two opposite arms of land that nearly met at the opening to the harbor. To my left lay the calmer waters within, sheltered by land arms and by the long granite breakwater beyond. On my right lay the ocean. Its seas were running high in the wind, the white manes of the waves foaming as they raced toward the foot of the rocky barrier where I stood. I raised my face to the gale and let it tangle my hair and whip back my garments.
In what dusky light was left, I could make out a deeply indented, well-protected cove below the bluff on the harbor side. A fairly level ledge of land reached toward the water, its entire area strewn with piles of lumber that surrounded great wooden ribs standing up exposed, like the skeleton of a whale, to give evidence of a ship in process of being built. So this must be the place from which Bascomb & Company vessels had been sent down the ways for the last hundred years and more. On the far side of this ledge of beach several wooden docks ran out into quickly deepening water, beside one of which a small ship was tied up.
Still farther around the inner shore of the harbor I could see the clustered houses of Scots Harbor, with the white steeples of its churches rising among the lower rooftops. Alongside docks on the waterfront a forest of bare masts gave evidence of ships at permanent mooring. A scene that my father had told me was being repeated all up and down the coast now that the day of the tall ships was winding to its end.
The forests that had promised endless wood for wooden ships were thinning out. More and more iron ships were supplanting them, while steam supplanted sail. Across the continent steel rails were turning men’s minds to quicker inland transport. Today, my father had said, Scots Harbor subsisted mainly on the efforts of its fishing vessels.
Below me the incoming tide sent white wavelets into the cove, while on the other side the stormy gray ocean churned and heaved. Directly opposite across the harbor entrance, the new white lighthouse pointed its slim tower to the sky. The lantern had already been lighted and was flashing its intermittent signal, while the unused lighthouse on this side stood dark. Once, through these two arms of rocky land, the Sea Jade must have sailed in all her maiden beauty. When I thought of how she must have looked, my very skin prickled at the imagined vision of billowing sails. How could iron ever replace the breathing, supple wood of a ship? How could clumsy funnels supplant white sails on the sea?
The sight of the water and my own imaginings had calmed me and quieted the alarm the captain’s words had aroused in me. I could think more collectedly now. Many aspects of my lack of welcome at the Bascomb house were coming clear. Now I understood why Sybil McLean had looked at me with antipathy, wanting no forced marriage for her son. I knew why Laurel, picking up the angry contagion from her elders, had tried to frighten me away. The single glimpse I’d had of Brock McLean had told me how little he was willing to do as the old man wanted. But of course I could quickly set all doubts at rest. I knew now why my father had not wanted me to come to this place, and I would not stay. I would not allow Captain Obadiah Bascomb’s highhanded notions to trap me into such imprisonment. I would leave as quickly as I could and never come back. By the first train I could catch I would return to New York.
And there I would face—what?
The challenge of that question made me catch my breath as though the very blast of the wind had snatched it away. But it was not the wind. It was my own dread of the struggle for existence that awaited me anywhere else but here.
I walked back along the cliff, trying to see the crescent curve of town more clearly in the gray light. There had been promise once that Scots Harbor would turn into a great shipping center like Salem or New Bedford. But the time of the tall ships had passed too quickly, and the whalers had moved farther north up the coast. The cluster of houses
that made up the town had not spread out a great deal.
My mother, I knew, had been born in a small cottage down there. My grandmother had run her own little bakery shop, while my fisherman grandfather was away at sea. Carrie Corcoran had grown up among humble, hardworking people who had not always known what to make of her. “Like a nightingale in a sparrow’s nest,” my father had once said. Now my grandparents on both my mother’s and father’s side were dead, and there was no one to whom I might turn for help. There was no one who would lift a finger for me except Captain Obadiah Bascomb.
The treacherous thoughts came again, seeming to move of their own will. What of that dark-browed man who was Brock McLean? What right had he to dismiss me without knowing me? What right had he to judge and despise when he had never so much as spoken to me? Indignation brought with it a good leavening of courage. I, at least, would wait and see. I would withhold judgment until I had met and talked with this man. I would make no impulsively quick decision as he had made about me.
Thus, smugly virtuous, I opened a door in my thoughts—not to an acceptance of the captain’s plan, but not to a total rejection of it either. I would simply wait and see. In spite of myself, a faint flicker of hope had stirred within me. It was not that the promise of wealth and family meant a great deal to me. It was the cotton batting of safety and love that I cared about. In that dream world to which I was accustomed, magic transformations were always possible. In the flicker of an eye the unknown figure of Brock McLean was taking on a certain romantic appeal.
The captain had said I was not my mother’s daughter for nothing. But I was myself as well, and I had not been unpopular with what few young men I had known in New York. They were young men who had paid court to me decorously under my father’s eye, with only playful encouragement from me. They had always seemed young and callow compared with the man I could imagine in my dreams. He, I suppose, was based on the pattern of my father, with a good lacing thrown in of Captain Obadiah’s stronger brew. It was even possible that the unknown Brock McLean might fit into that dream. In my swift imagining it was not impossible that at the sight of me he would forget about never marrying again, that he would find himself willingly enough at my feet.
Sea Jade Page 3