“Tell me about your father,” I said as I went on with my brushing, hearing electricity crackle in her locks as I worked. “What happened at the time when he was wounded? Have you heard the story?”
“Of course! Everybody knows how brave he was. Captain Obadiah asked Ian to write down an account of the battle. I’ve read it lots of times. Father was aboard the Congress, one of the ships in the blockade off Norfolk, Virginia, when the Merrimac made her first naval attack.”
I had read of how the sunken United States ship Merrimac had been raised and rebuilt by the Confederates, who had armored her with railroad iron and sent her into battle to break the blockade. When Laurel saw she had my interest there was no need to urge her to continue. She went on eagerly.
“The Merrimac sank the Cumberland, and then she came after the Congress. My father was a Union officer on board. None of our ships could hurt the Merrimac. I guess those old cannon balls just rolled off her iron sides. She almost destroyed the wooden Congress. Most of the Congress’ guns were damaged and men were dying all over her decks. Our men had to run their ship ashore and raise the white flag. But when the Merrimac sent tugs to remove the prisoners, the men opened fire on them with small arms and drove them off.”
Laurel pulled away so she could turn her head and look up at me. Excitement and pride glowed in her eyes as she went on with her story.
“My father was badly wounded, but he wouldn’t give up. He held himself erect at the rail and fired his pistol at those tugs that wanted to board the ship. When the Confederates called on the men to surrender—since the white flag was up—General Mansfield said, ‘I know the damned ship has surrendered, but we haven’t.’ So the Merrimac couldn’t take the men. She drew off and began to fire incendiary shots until the ship was on fire in lots of places. But the men never gave up. When it grew dark that old Merrimac had to haul off. So the crew of the Congress escaped ashore and took their wounded with them. My father was saved, and he didn’t have to go to a Southern prison. But he was very sick for a long time after that and he could never walk properly again.”
I think my own eyes were shining a little as I listened to Laurel’s spirited account. There was nothing I liked better than a tale of heroism and I could well imagine Brock in the role he had played aboard the Congress.
By now Laurel’s hair was brushed into a gleaming mass, with all the snarls gone. I found a length of red ribbon and tied it at the nape of her neck.
“That’s a wonderful story,” I said. “Thank you for telling me.”
There was a lump in my throat as I watched the child cross the room to the dresser mirror and stand on tiptoe to look at herself almost shyly. She was a wild little thing, but perhaps she could be tamed. I would need her father’s help, need his authorization if that was to happen, however.
The hovering memory of footsteps returned to my mind. What of Laurel’s father? A man who had known violent action in the past might know it again. Had he been acting out some secret revenge in the depths of the old whaler? What of Laurel if this were true?
Already she had been badly hurt by her elders and there could be no telling what might result if she knew her father had been involved in murder. There was a growing urge in me to protect her, to comfort and strengthen her against the future. Perhaps to comfort myself a little, as well. There was nothing more soothing and quieting to the young than physical contact, than being gently held and loved with the warmth of another human being. Dare I offer this to Laurel?
As she continued to stare at herself in the glass, I spoke to her quietly. “Do you know the thing I missed most when I was little and had no mother?”
The child’s dark, reflected eyes moved toward my own, looking at me out of the mirror, though she said nothing.
“Sometimes,” I went on, “I would see mothers rocking their children. Because they were sick, or hurt, or tired, or just to show them love. My aunt never rocked me because she thought rocking wasn’t good for children and she wasn’t a demonstrative sort of person anyway. She loved me very much and I always knew that, but sometimes I wanted that one little thing that I’d always missed.”
Laurel turned from the glass, her eyes surprisingly soft. “My hair looks nice,” she said. “You didn’t hurt me as much as Crawford does.”
I wondered if I dared take the next step. I wondered if I might coax her to sit on my lap, big girl that she was. Just to lean against me quietly while I rocked her back and forth. As I thought of how to bring her to me, she did a surprising thing. A little hesitantly she crossed the room and came up behind my rocker, so that I did not know what she was about until I felt the chair move. There she stood behind me, gently pushing my chair so that it moved smoothly on its rockers. The lump in my throat made it hard to swallow. I leaned back and closed my eyes, permitting the rocking to soothe me. Not until I felt she might tire did I stop the chair and look up at her, and I know my eyes were moist and alight with tenderness.
“Thank you,” I said. “I feel much better now.”
It was not in the child to be wholly friendly at once, and she recovered her normal manner by giving the chair a slight push and scowling at me, as though she disclaimed her own moment of weakness. The charts still lay upon the floor where they had scattered when I had jumped up earlier, and perhaps to hide her embarrassment, Laurel knelt to look at them.
She recognized them at once. “You brought these from the Pride!” she accused. “They belonged to the captain.”
I nodded. “Yes. I thought they might be interesting to study. I wonder why those tail stampings are on them?”
Laurel picked up the map that had been matted for framing and sat cross-legged, her head bent, studying it. “This one has more than a tail. The whole whale mark is here.”
“I know,” I said. “What do you suppose it means?”
“I found these aboard the Pride a long time ago,” Laurel said. “Captain Obadiah used to put things there sometimes. Things he wanted to hide from Grandmother Sybil. He told me he didn’t want anybody to know about these charts for a while, but he wouldn’t tell me what the whale marks meant. Afterwards he used to get mad when I wanted to talk about them.”
“So the marks do mean something special,” I mused. “I think Captain Obadiah tried to tell me about them before he died, but he never finished his words. There was something about the China run—”
Laurel pounced with her forefinger, as if to pin down the mark of the whale off Cape of Good Hope. “I know one thing! This is the place where my grandfather died in a storm. It was off Good Hope that awful thing happened aboard Sea Jade—when your father shot Grandfather Andrew.”
For a moment longer she stared at the marking and when she looked up at me her face had changed.
“I almost forgot about that!” she cried, jumping up. “I can never be friends with you—never, never!”
Before I could stop her or call her back, she ran out of the room, banging the door loudly behind her to emphasize her words. I made no effort to follow. A small beginning had been made, and for the moment I could hardly ask for more. I bent to pick up the matted chart she had dropped and sat for a while longer puzzling over it, wondering what it had to tell me. Half whales and whole whales—why? Why the complete marking of a whale across this particular part of this particular route?
What was it the captain had whispered with his last gasping breath? Something about only half a story, about my looking for the whole story. Had he meant that the whole whale stood for the whole story of what had happened aboard the Sea Jade—a story that had never been fully told?
But I could decipher nothing by staring at the map. When I had an opportunity I would show it to Ian, and tell him of my search for an answer. Perhaps he could help me to discover the key, if there was one.
I felt restless now. I could sit here no longer wondering what might be happening outside this room, wondering what might have been discovered by now about Tom’s fall in the hold of the Pride. I could put no stock in the things Laur
el had told me about mutterings in the village. As I’d learned in the short time I’d been at Bascomb’s Point, very little that she said could be trusted. Often it was difficult to tell whether she dealt with fact or fantasy. I found it hard to believe that anyone would seriously think me guilty of such an act. On the other hand, I remembered the questioning of the foreman, as well as Brock’s urgency. Was it really possible that I was being regarded with suspicion?
My restlessness grew. The room had darkened with early twilight, so that only the flare of the fire lighted it, falling with a rippling golden sheen upon the charts strewn across the hearthrug. I gathered them up and put them safely away in a drawer. It was time for me to face another problem.
TWELVE
I went downstairs and out to the kitchen to speak to Mrs. Crawford. I found her sitting at the kitchen table, her hands resting idly before her. At an hour when pots on the big kitchen range should have been steaming and bubbling with supper preparations, its black top was bare and cold. Not even a kettle was aboil with water.
She looked up at me bleakly as I entered, neither rising, nor replying to my greeting. I drew up a chair and seated myself at the table opposite her.
“Could we talk a little?” I asked.
Her apathy and indifference were clear. She fell to staring at the red, swollen knuckles of her roughened hands. I stared as well, thinking of Sybil McLean’s smooth, beringed fingers—the fingers of a woman who had withdrawn in all but name from the necessary work of running a house, leaving most of it to this thin, bony, hostile woman. A possible approach occurred to me.
“Do you think it would be a good idea to get in a hired girl to help you, Mrs. Crawford? From the little I’ve seen, you appear to have more work than you can comfortably handle.”
At once she removed her hands to her lap, hiding them beneath the table’s edge. Her words when she spoke were surly.
“So you’re already complaining, miss?”
She had a way of putting me quickly at a disadvantage. “I only wanted to help,” I began, but now she cut in on me quickly.
“As I told you once before, miss, I wouldn’t work for that heathen Chinese woman. And I won’t work for the likes of you either. Coming here and taking over from your betters, putting on airs!”
I held onto my fraying temper and managed to speak evenly. “You are leaving us then?”
I think she had not expected counterattack from me. Her hesitation in answering told me the truth. Mrs. Crawford did not really want to leave. She wanted to lash out at me with her tongue, to put me, as she felt, in my place.
“I’m sorry that you wish to leave,” I went on. “Sorry because I am in great need of your help.”
“I can see that.” She glanced with faint triumph at the cold stove, with its absence of cooking food.
“That’s not what I mean,” I told her. “If you don’t want to get supper tonight, I don’t blame you. You’ve had two long days with all that company yesterday and everything different today. There must be a good deal of food left over and I don’t mind fixing supper. I can manage well enough in a kitchen. My need for help concerns Mrs. McLean. But since you are leaving—” I pushed back my chair to rise.
“What about Mrs. McLean?” she snapped, her attention caught in spite of herself.
This was what I wanted—her questioning interest—and I stayed in my chair. “Mrs. McLean is an unhappy woman. I can understand that her son’s marriage and the possible results of the captain’s will are difficult for her to face. She will be increasingly unhappy if management of the house is taken from her. You have been doing the actual work, I know, but she has felt herself completely in charge.”
“She wants none of that with you here. She said so herself.”
“That is why I need your help. You are the only one she might listen to. The only one who can help her to understand that her supervision and planning talents are still needed. I know you’re her friend. Will you stay long enough to persuade her? Everything could go on as before if you can change her mind. There’s just one duty I might take off your hands at present—the care of Laurel. I can see that you’re too busy for that, and it’s the one place where I could help immediately.”
She was listening to me now and there seemed a certain relaxing of the stern New England set of her face, though she made no comment.
“You must have worked in this house for a very long time,” I went on. “You must be a very old friend of Mrs. McLean.”
The woman sighed heavily. “I was a girl when she brought me here. She was always a fine lady, but circumstances made things hard for her after her husband died—” Mrs. Crawford darted a quick, knowing look in my direction. “Mrs. McLean comes of a good family and she knows how to behave. You’d not find her coming here in the kitchen to sit at the table with me.”
I could see how persistently she circled round to cut at me whenever she saw an opening. Boldly I gave her further opportunity.
“Did you know my mother?”
She sniffed, her resistance breaking simply because she would not miss a chance to hurt me if she could. “I knew her all right. A baggage she was—flirting with this man and then that, keeping them all guessing, instead of settling down like a decent woman should.”
“But she did settle down. She married my father.”
“She wasn’t a young thing by that time. She’d had the village tongues wagging for years. She was past thirty when she married, and the three captains were close to ten years older, more or less. It put Captain Obadiah’s nose out of joint when she married Nathaniel Heath. Andrew McLean’s, too, though he had a wife of his own by that time and he’d no business casting eyes at Carrie.”
I kept very still. Whether I liked her point of view or not, the woman was willing to talk about things no one else would tell me.
“So she married my father.” I prodded her.
“She married him, and right away he went off to sea, the way a sailor must. He meant to build her a house when he came home, but for the time in between he put her in rooms over in town. And better than she was used to, I must say.”
“Can you tell me where her rooms were?” I asked. “I’d like to see the place where I was born. Perhaps I can meet some of the people who knew my mother then.”
A glimmer of surprise crossed Mrs. Crawford’s face. “Born? In town? That’s a queer thing to say, seeing as how you’re here at Bascomb’s Point. You weren’t born over in town, goodness knows. Though you might have been, if Captain Obadiah hadn’t got wind of how Carrie was having a bad time. He’d never got over the witch-spell she set on him. With Cap’n Nat away, he came storming over to town and brought her back with him, to have her baby born at Bascomb’s Point. I remember very well. It was here you were born, young lady. And here in this house that your ma died a few days later.”
I could only stare at her in astonishment. My father had never told me that I had been born in the house at Bascomb’s Point. I had been allowed to take it for granted that my birthplace had been the village of Scots Harbor. It seemed strange that no one here had mentioned the fact either.
Mrs. Crawford watched me with relish, eager to satisfy her greed with any sign of pain or distress on my part.
“You’d like to know all about that time, wouldn’t you?” she asked, leaning toward me across the table, her bright, darting eyes studying every shade of expression I might betray.
“I don’t know that any of it matters now,” I said, stiffening against her prying eyes. “You haven’t answered the question I’ve asked you. Will you help give back to Mrs. McLean a feeling that this house is in her charge? After all, it must be while I go away.”
She pounced upon the words. “You’re going away?”
“When I am able,” I said. “Perhaps not for a little while. There are certain things I must accomplish first. But I won’t stay here a moment longer than I have to.”
“What will he say about that? Your husband, I mean.”
“I believe that lies between him and me, Mrs. Crawford. Would you care to trouble yourself getting a cold supper for us? Or shall I manage alone?”
She pushed herself back from the table. “I want no outside woman in my kitchen,” she said and I knew she had decided to stay. This small victory I had won and it gave me some satisfaction. Never before had I tried my mettle in just this way. It was good not to come off in defeat.
I left the kitchen and stepped into the hall at the same moment that the front door opened and Brock came in, bringing a man in uniform with him. He saw me at once.
“Come here, if you please,” he said and his tone brooked no opposition.
With rising alarm I went into the front parlor as he held the door for me and gestured me into the room. Then he and the stranger followed. I busied myself with the lighting of a lamp and found my hands awkward and uncertain. The man was the town policeman and his coming here returned Laurel’s words full force to my mind.
We sat in the cold, solemn elegance of the parlor, where Captain Obadiah’s body had lain, and where Mr. Osgood had read the will that had so affected all our fortunes. Officer Dudley took his duties seriously, albeit suspicion of murder was not often his province. In Scots Harbor’s busier days, when ships were often in port and seamen came ashore, there had been more trouble and a larger police force. Of late years the inhabitants of what had dwindled to a village were well enough behaved and caused little disturbance. Even the jail was not often used in these times.
Now it appeared that Laurel had been right. There was talk about town to the effect that Tom Henderson was not a likely one to fall down a ship’s ladder. Especially not with such force that he went sailing backward through the air and cracked his head on ballast rock. It would take a push to do that, people were saying. And who had been aboard the Pride except that young woman from the outside, to whom the captain, undoubtedly in his dotage, had left most of his money? That daughter of Carrie Corcoran, who had so suddenly and queerly married Brock McLean.
Sea Jade Page 17