Sea Jade

by Phyllis A. Whitney

  “So you can see,” I finished, “that it was not, after all, my father who shot yours aboard the Sea Jade. By his own words it was Captain Obadiah who fired the shot.”

  Brock was looking at me strangely, almost benignly. Had this story meant so much to him? Could he now forget whose daughter I was and abandon old bitterness against anyone who bore the name of Heath?

  “Miranda!” he said, and the name, astonishingly, could be a caress on lips I had never dreamed could speak with so tender a cadence.

  Moving in his quick, light way, he took me up in his arms again and then sat in my chair, holding me cradled against him. My head fell all too willingly into the hollow of his shoulder and my arm went about his neck. In a moment he would have kissed me and I would not have turned my mouth from the touch of his lips. But at that instant the hall door to his room was flung open with a crash and a woman stood there in her flowing night robes, a tall pewter candlestick in her hand, its taper lighted. Sybil McLean was staring at us with wild, accusing eyes.

  As deftly as he had picked me up, Brock put me aside and rose to face his mother—all in a quick, smooth gesture without shame or awkwardness in it.

  The fixed cold mask was gone from the woman’s face. It looked alive enough now, with every line distorted in anger. “I heard you in here together!” she cried. “I knew you’d brought her to your room! Do you think I will allow this, Brock? Do you think I will permit you to be false to your father’s memory?”

  Under the effect of an anger that verged on madness, I curled into my quilts, pulling them around me, as if for protection. But her words had no effect on Brock. He went straight to her, took the candlestick from her hand and set it on a bureau.

  “Miranda is my wife,” he said. “What goes on behind our doors is no concern of yours.”

  She took a step toward me, as if in threat, but he held her by the forearms and after a moment of struggle she went limp in his grasp.

  “It’s time for you to look at what you are doing,” he told her sternly. “I’ve understood and sympathized with your suffering, but this cannot go on. It isn’t my father’s memory that troubles you. It’s your jealousy of Miranda’s mother. It is because of Carrie Corcoran that you’re eaten with hatred. The time has come to return to your senses.”

  Drawing her with him by one arm, he came to where I cowered in my chair. Before I knew what he intended, he reached out his free hand and pulled the quilt from about me, ripped the top of my gown from my shoulder to reveal the scar he knew was there.

  “Do you see?” he said to his mother. “Are you reminded of a murder you nearly committed? Do you see the brink you’re verging on, if something doesn’t stop you?”

  Once before, since I’d come to this house, Sybil McLean’s eyes had rested upon my scarred shoulder with a gloating satisfaction I had not understood. But now she stared as if in fear and shrank from the sight—or would have if Brock had not forced her to face me.

  She began to whimper a little wildly. “I never meant to hurt the babe! I only meant to look in and see why she was crying. I never meant my candle to touch the muslin of the crib. It went up in flames before I knew. But I screamed then. I screamed for help. And you came, Brock, and snatched up the babe and beat out the flames that were burning her garments. So she lived, did she not? I called for help and she lived. The girl has no more than a scar to show for what happened. I never meant her death.”

  Brock looked at me. “Go back to your room, Miranda. I’ll quiet her. I know what to do.”

  I caught up my quilts and fled from the warm chair and fire, back to the chill of my room. I closed the door behind me and stumbled in a darkness to which my eyes were now unaccustomed till I found the mantelpiece. There my fingers searched for the key on icy marble. My hand shook as I locked the door to the outer hall. Then I crept between cold sheets and thrust the key beneath my pillow.

  The door to Brock’s room I did not lock.

  His voice went on beyond the door, softly, so I could not hear the words, but with a note of sternness in the sound. After a time I heard him take his mother back to her room. When he returned to his own, he stood beyond our closed door and spoke to me in a low voice.

  “Are you all right, Miranda?”

  I told him I was all right. I did not tell him that I was cold again, chilled now with fear, yet all the while longing for him to open his door and come for me again. From his room came the sounds of a man packing for a trip, and sometimes the clink of the fire dying. He did not speak to me again. Nor did I to him. I lay thinking, not of the events of the day, not even of the frightening fact that as a baby I had nearly died at the hands of Sybil McLean, but only that Brock had regarded me with unexpected tenderness, that he had held me to his heart, with my head upon his shoulder. I ached to be held so again, longing anew with all my being for the inevitable caresses that would have followed. But longing went unassuaged. The door between our rooms remained closed, and I had no confidence that the moment of promised fulfillment would ever come again.

  As time passed, longing subsided and fear returned. I wished that I dared plead with Brock to take me on his journey to Salem tomorrow—not only because I wanted to be with him, not only because I could wish to return in his company aboard the Sea Jade, but also because I was afraid to remain in this house when he was no longer present to stand between me and the forces of evil. Strangely enough, in this man of dark moods and uncertain temper I had found a trusted protector. Tomorrow he would be gone and I would be left to deal with that half-mad woman across the hall. A woman who had once nearly caused my death, and who had perhaps thrust Tom Henderson from a ladder in the hold of the Pride.

  Yet I could not bring myself to plead with Brock. His mood had already changed and I dared make no such appeal. I must deal alone with whatever might beset me, and with only the key beneath my pillow to offer me protection.

  Because there is no better aid to wakefulness than one’s own teeming thoughts, I slept little that night. When Ian’s light flashed on in his lighthouse room, I lay for a long while watching the oblong it made on my ceiling. And I thought once more of Ian and the affection he offered me. What if I were mistaken about Brock? What if I had been right in the beginning and was utterly wrong now?

  The light on the ceiling was blocked by shadow. Then it dimmed and vanished. Some lines I had read of Bulwer Lytton’s returned to my mind:

  “Two lives that once part are as ships that divide

  When, moment on moment there rushed between

  The one and the other a sea …”

  Already, in the very pulsing of my own blood, I could hear the sound of that rushing, dividing sea. Suddenly I wanted to plunge into its tumult and swim for my very life to the haven that was Ian Pryott. It was Ian who spelled safety, not Brock. Yet I knew I would not make the plunge. I had already chosen dangerous waters.

  In the early morning hours I fell at last into slumber. When the sound of Lucifer’s howling brought me wide awake, Brock was already gone.

  SIXTEEN

  The next day was frightening and ominous from first to last. I will always recall it under the name I gave it at the time: The Day of the Dog. The animal must have known that Brock had gone away, for he kept up the hideous sound of his howling for hour after hour.

  Once, in the early morning, the sound quieted for a time and I walked among the bare bushes of the rear garden toward the kennel. There I found to my surprise that Lien was feeding the beast. She seemed unafraid of him and he took meat from her hand and allowed her to fill his water dish without threatening her with so much as a growl. Somehow I was not reassured by this friendship.

  She did not see me, but when she had finished and returned to her kitchen in the old house, I moved closer to the fence, watching Lucifer tear at his food with those strong teeth and jaws. He looked up and saw me there, and at once he began his wild cries again. The sound seemed a portent of disaster to come. I left the garden hurriedly and went back to the house,
followed by the dreadful howling.

  Somewhat tardily I thought of Laurel, wondering if she had discovered the destruction of the figurehead as yet. Probably not, or she would have come running to Ian and me. I had seen her at breakfast and she had said nothing. When I asked Mrs. Crawford where the child was, the woman said she had gone to the village on some errand. I resolved to catch her when she returned and tell her what had happened.

  Ian was working in the library, but I did not seek him out. For one thing I feared that he might read in my face some evidence of the night’s happenings, and attempt to question me. The thing I dared not betray was the fact that Brock had asked me to say nothing of those footsteps I had heard in the ship. This restriction lay uneasily upon my conscience. What Brock intended I did not know, or whether he would give the murderer over to the law if he was convinced of—her?—identity. However strong an attraction he might hold for me, I did not truly know the man who was my husband.

  How empty the house seemed with Brock gone! How uncanny the howling of the dog! I could not sit quietly in my room with my door locked, but found myself wandering upstairs and down aimlessly, my senses alert for any untoward detail, for any hint of threat to my person.

  Nothing disturbed me until I was climbing the stairs for the dozenth time and looked up to see Sybil McLean in the hall above. I stifled an impulse to turn and run in order to avoid her at all costs. But I would not allow myself to retreat in terror.

  For once she gave me no blank stare. There was a certain avidity in her gaze, and I liked this expression even less than the other. Her smile was paper thin, as artificial as a cutout.

  “Come visit with me for a while,” she invited, and made a slight gesture toward her room.

  After last night, there was nothing I wanted less than a tête-à-tête with Sybil McLean. I said nothing as I finished my climb and came even with her in the upper hall. She must have sensed resistance coming, for she put out a hand that was almost coy in its uneasy gesture of friendliness.

  “You mustn’t hold that old accident against me, child. I never meant you to know. Brock should not have blurted it out as he did.”

  I regarded her in astonishment. Could she wipe from her mind so easily her actions of the night before? Could she forget the way she had burst in upon her son and me in wild anger, indifferent to decent privacy, intending harm to me?

  “What happened when I was a baby doesn’t matter any more,” I said. “But what happens now does.”

  “Of course!” she agreed with greater animation than I had ever seen in her. “This is what I mean. We must begin to be friends, Miranda, you and I. My son wishes it. He is all I have now. I must not make him angry with me.”

  Had Brock told her of my hearing steps that ran away on planks overhead the day Tom Henderson had died? Did this unconvincing gesture of friendship mean that she knew she must coax for my silence with a pretended change of attitude?

  As I hesitated, the dog bayed wildly, mournfully, and Mrs. McLean reached out and laid a hand upon my arm. Through the cloth of my sleeve I felt the deadly cold of her fingers, as though warm blood no longer flowed in her veins.

  “Come,” she said again.

  I could not escape her grip without snatching my arm away and revealing my own fear. To show courage was to be safer than I might otherwise be. However unwillingly, I was drawn through the door of her room and seated before a smoky fire.

  The woman picked up a poker and stirred the embers until flames licked up to her satisfaction, cutting through the smoke. When she had added more wood, she seated herself opposite me and looked at the portrait of Andrew McLean where it hung above the mantel.

  “My son has told me something very strange,” she began. “He gave me some tale I think he scarcely believed himself about your finding a letter—a confession, he said—written by Captain Obadiah.”

  “It’s true.” I felt relieved if this was all she wanted to speak about with me. Perhaps if she knew the truth, she would cease to hold her husband’s death against my father, perhaps her attitude toward me would really change. I hurried to tell her more of the letter and of how I had found it.

  She listened with that bright, avid gaze that was so different from her blank staring, and which reassured me not at all.

  “So it is by this means that you hope to win my son over,” she said when I had finished. “But you are wasting your time, you know. There’s something else that changes everything. Something I have known since the time your mother was brought here. Perhaps I guessed it even before.”

  I listened uneasily, though never suspecting the direction her words would take.

  “I’ve decided to tell you the truth,” she announced abruptly. “The secret should be kept no longer. If it was Captain Obadiah who shot and killed my husband, then you are still the daughter of a murderer—for you are the daughter, not of Nathaniel Heath, but of Captain Obadiah Bascomb.”

  I stared at her, neither comprehending nor accepting her words.

  She went on almost cheerfully. “I always suspected as much. I could see what was going on between your mother and the captain. He was the only one who could lead her down that road willy-nilly. She played with the others and she teased them. But she lost her head over Obadiah. He had a fascination for women in those days. And she resisted him no better than the rest. He was the father of her babe—yet he would not marry her. Always he said he was never the marrying kind, that he liked his loves in every port. So she waited for him through the years and would not marry any other. He was the father of her babe, though I think he did not know the child was coming. She had that much pride, at least, so she wouldn’t beg him to marry her in her need. No—it was to Nathaniel Heath—that soft, gentle man who could be easily used—that she went with her trouble. And of course he married her.” The woman’s voice rang with scorn.

  I could not speak—I could not believe her. She must have taken satisfaction in my stunned expression, for she gave me her paper smile and went on in the same falsely animated way.

  “Captain Obadiah was fit to be tied when Carrie up and married Nathaniel Heath. He never believed she could give him up, or that the time might come when he couldn’t do with her as he pleased. He knew well enough the baby was ahead of its time and that he was the father. When it was about to be born Nathaniel was at sea and Carrie was in a bad way. So Obadiah brought her here to give her care that came too late. As you know, she died in this house, a few days after you were born.”

  Listening to her, it was as though all my childhood, all my early life, all the love between my father and me, between my aunt and me, had been torn into scraps like old newspaper and flung to the winds. I could almost feel my life blowing about me in scraps—a paper thing with no solid existence of its own. My doubting of her words had begun to fade. There was the ring of truth in all she said.

  “I guessed the truth,” she repeated, “but I didn’t see it set down in black and white until Carrie wrote a letter a day or two before she died. It was a letter to Obadiah, but I found it in her room and read it before he did. In her own words she told him that he was the father and that Nathaniel had married her knowing this. So the captain had it down in her writing, as well as in his knowing. I’ve kept silent all these years. Even when I knew he was bringing you here because he wanted to see his daughter grown, I kept quiet—even with Brock. But I didn’t think Obadiah would ever go so far as to leave the bulk of his fortune in your hands.”

  Now I could see why Captain Obadiah had wanted me married to Brock. He could have changed his will over to Brock then and left me well cared for—or so he thought. But in the meantime, to safeguard me, he had made his secret will with me as his heiress. But I could not think of him as my father—never, never!

  “When Nathaniel’s ship came home, he hurried here at once and took you away,” Sybil said. “Not even Obadiah could stop his doing that. Nathaniel knew Carrie had not wanted Obadiah to raise you. By law Nathaniel was your father, so Obadiah
could not block him without admitting everything and sullying Carrie’s name and yours. In his mule-headed way the captain had principles that wouldn’t let him do that. As if she had any name to worry about—that one! But Nathaniel Heath took you to his sister in New York and raised you there.”

  Still I could not believe, could not accept. I could only sit looking at this woman who had torn up all my safe and happy past life and flung it in my face.

  Suddenly her expression lighted with a new thought. “If this matter you’ve been telling me about a confession is true, then Obadiah must have had his revenge on Nathaniel. He let him take the blame for something Obadiah did. Maybe he even hoped to get you back by making Nathaniel yell for help.”

  This I could see. Perhaps Captain Obadiah had said to Nathaniel, “Give me my daughter and I’ll save you.” But Nathaniel Heath had quietly stood his ground and given up the sea rather than put me in Obadiah’s hands. In the end, of course, Obadiah had saved him from a prison sentence—he had not been able to carry through what must have been a bluff. Nathaniel had come to live with his sister and me in New York and had never sailed on a ship again.

  “Mr. Osgood mentioned a letter the captain told him would explain everything,” I said. “I wonder if he meant not only this confession that he wanted me to find, but also the letter from my mother. Do you know what has become of it?”

  Mrs. McLean stiffened perceptibly. “The letter no longer matters. It has long since served its purpose. I should think the captain would have destroyed it.”