Ren looked at her then with such love in his eyes, such great and enduring love, that she felt herself start to cry and would have, but for Hitty nearly falling overboard. She had dropped her doll and reached over to try to retrieve it. With one hand remaining on the tiller, Ren reached out, grasped her, and pulled her back in, but the doll was lost to a watery grave.
“I told her,” Henry said, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “I told her it would sink but she didn’t believe me.”
Hitty wailed, and Henry sat smugly, and the sea wind swirled around them, and Ren and Daphne shared a smile that bridged sorrows, disappointments, and grief, and went past all that, even further, to a moment of pure, unadulterated joy.
In Nantucket they called it “the time of ripening.” That time of the year when the sea breeze loses its bone-chilling cold, when marshes fill with the music of spring peepers, when crocuses poke their noses out of the earth and daffodils are soon to follow, when cranberry bushes are covered with tiny white flowers, when bright green leaves on trees begin to unfurl and birds return to build their nests.
Daphne was alone in the Centre Street cottage on this morning, for Ren and Abraham had taken the children to the Endeavour, to see the ship one last time before it was to set sail. Patience went along because she worried the men would forget the children, and Daphne decided at the last minute to stay home. There wasn’t enough room in the dory for all of them, and she had been feeling a little under the weather of late. The last thing she wanted to do was to get on a rocking rowboat.
A rap came on the door, light at first, then more persistent. Daphne opened it to find a bonneted woman standing there. “Mother!” she said warily, unsure what to make of Lillian’s visit, then added, “Would thee . . . like to come in?”
Her mother looked past Daphne into the small keeping room, pausing a moment, as if she’d become lost in thoughts, or memories. “Nay,” she finally said, and did not make any motion to cross the threshold.
Lillian looked the epitome of grace and refinement, and Daphne realized that she must have just come from the wharf, for she was in her brown traveling dress. “Thee was off island?”
“In Boston.” Her mother smoothed the lace fichu that draped her shoulders. “If thee must know, I was amending my will.”
Ah, Daphne thought. Of course. Most likely, she was ensuring that Daphne, as Ren’s wife, would be excised from it. She was not particularly surprised, nor disturbed by the news. She’d expected as much.
With hands in kid gloves, Lillian presented Daphne with an envelope. “My attorney gave me this to pass along. ’Tis a letter from thy father, addressed to thee and thy . . . late sister.”
Daphne took the envelope, noting the seal was unbroken. “And thee didn’t open it?”
Her mother pursed her lips. “What a wicked thing to say. Thee has always made me out to be cold and heartless.”
“Not completely heartless, Mama. Not quite yet.”
Her mother turned away, putting distance between them, and Daphne realized that it was she who had let that moment go. “Mama!”
Lillian stilled, and cocked her chin slightly so that Daphne knew she was listening, though she did not turn around. “Thee is welcome here, any time. Thee is always welcome in our home.”
Daphne thought she saw a barely perceptible nod from her mother’s black bonnet, but that was all, and she wasn’t certain. Maybe she only hoped for it. Her mother walked away, up Centre Street toward her grand house, and Daphne gently closed the door.
She made a cup of ginger tea, a seaman’s trick Ren had taught her to settle a stomach, before she sat down to read her father’s letter. She spread a linen napkin across her lap and drank a swallow of tea, stalling. Her hands trembled as she fingered the script where her father had penned her name, and Jane’s, on the front of the envelope. She so wished Jane were here, to read this last word from their father together. Carefully, so carefully, she broke the seal, opened the envelope, and unfolded the letter.
My darling daughters,
I am not a perfect man, but I do believe God can take our imperfections and bring great good from them. I have a gift for thee, one that I had wanted to give thee years and years ago, but thy mother would not permit it. Under the circumstances, I did the best I could with this gift, though that was not much, and surely what I did do was not enough. ’Tis up to thee both to decide how to handle this gift. I know my girls well enough to know thee will do well by it.
I trust thy hearts are large enough to encompass one more sister. Her name is Patience.
With love from Papa
1
There was no more beautiful sight in the world to Hitty Macy than the one in front of her now, approaching Nantucket Island by schooner as it emerged through the mist. The Grey Lady, the island was fondly called, and today was a fine example. She wore the fog draped over her shoulders like a Quaker lace fichu.
Hitty and her brother Henry leaned against the railing of the schooner as it sailed through Nantucket Sound, barely mindful of the bracing salt air that stung their faces, or the people who milled around them on the deck. They were still dumbfounded by the news they’d just received from their late grandmother’s attorney in Boston: Lillian Swain Coffin had made Hitty and Henry sole heirs of her vast estate. And it was truly vast.
Hitty gathered her bonnet strings with one hand to keep them from whipping against her face. “Why us, Henry? She didn’t even like us!” They’d been going round and round on the inheritance since the schooner left Boston Harbor.
Henry shrugged. “Grandmother Lillian didn’t like anyone. She’d kept changing her will to disown relatives. Mayhap she died before she could cross out our names to add someone new.”
Hitty felt as if someone had taken her insides and shaken them up. She and her brother were now full owners of the Grand House that their grandmother had built on an exclusive cove, held investments of stocks and bonds, cash and cattle, as well as deeds to multiple properties. Why, even a small island! For most of their lives, Grandmother Lillian had scarcely acknowledged Hitty and Henry, never without disdain or criticism, yet she bequeathed them her entire fortune.
And they didn’t want it.
Henry turned around, his back against the railing, and crossed his arms against his chest. “We didn’t sign anything yet, Hitty. We don’t have to accept a single pence.”
She pivoted around, heartened by the waffling sound in his voice. The crusty old lawyer had told them they must accept the inheritance together or refuse it together. He was a stickler for details, that Oliver Combs. “What did Oliver mean when he said there were conditions to the will? And why couldn’t he have just told us what they were? Why wait to send a law clerk to Nantucket?”
“Transferring titles can’t just happen overnight, Hitty. Paperwork takes time. Oliver said that the law clerk would finalize all the estate holdings. It could take a long, long time, he said. And forget not,” Henry swept the deck with a distracted gaze, “Oliver’s an old man. He must be sixty. He doesn’t want to spend months on a fog-drenched island copying over documents. A law clerk can handle it.”
“Still, those mysterious conditions he alluded to. What were they called?”
“Codicils.”
Hitty made a sour face. “It sounds like a rare and foul-tasting fish.”
A laugh burst out of Henry, and Hitty’s spirits lifted a little. How she had missed her twin brother! Henry had returned just days ago from coopering on his father’s whaling ship, the Endeavour. He’d shipped out three years ago in a great hurry, without confiding to her the reason for it, though Hitty knew his haste had something to do with Anna Gardner, his childhood sweetheart.
Ironically, Henry had sailed back into Nantucket Harbor on the very day of his grandmother’s funeral, only to be promptly summoned to Oliver Combs’s office in Boston. Her brother barely had time to catch his breath, much less be welcomed home with any fuss or fanfare.
“Henry, this .
. . fortune, this sudden wealth . . . I fear it will change our lives. And I don’t want my life to change.” That wasn’t entirely true. There were a few things she’d like to change, but they didn’t have anything to do with money. She would like for Isaac Barnard to declare his love and propose marriage to her, for one. She frowned, mulling over how barely conscious Isaac seemed of her. But that deficiency, she believed, was part and parcel of being a genius . . . and Isaac was indeed a genius. She had a unique insight into brilliant people because of her enduring friendship with Maria Mitchell, also a genius, also not terribly sociable.
At times Hitty wondered why the Lord God had placed so many overly intelligent people into her life, and why she felt such a fondness for them, as they could be immensely frustrating. She considered her brother Henry, in his own way, to be one of those overly intelligent types.
Hitty assessed the changes she noticed in Henry, how much broader and bigger his shoulders had grown, how the creases were etched into the corners of his eyes. A result of squinting from the sun, she thought, like all seamen. A very handsome man, she realized with surprise, as he turned to face the wind, elbows on the railing, his legs braced in the mariner’s wide stance. He’d left Nantucket as a grown boy and returned as a grown man.
She wondered all that was running through Henry’s mind. He’d always been slow to speak, careful with his words. Although twins, they were opposites in that way. In nearly every way. He was tall and thin, bookish and brainy; she was petite and curvy, and she kept her distance from books. Why waste precious time reading about people who never were, doing things they never did, when her own imagination more than sufficed? Life was to be lived, not read about.
Aunt Daphne had tried to turn Hitty into a reader, like Henry. It was so easy for him, and so difficult for Hitty. The more words jammed onto a book’s page thrilled Henry and horrified Hitty. Each letter took a malevolent turn, upside down and inside out. It was a double helping of the Starbuck curse upon Hitty, she heard her grandmother say of her more than a few times. Nathaniel Starbuck, one of the first to settle on Nantucket Island and a direct relative to Hitty, was known to be illiterate.
When Hitty had turned eight years old, Grandmother Lillian had hired an expensive tutor to work with her, an odd man who claimed 100 percent success in his ability to teach anyone to read. That was before he had met Hitty. The reading sessions were pure torture, every bit as much to the tutor as to Hitty.
One rainy day after a particularly frustrating reading session, Hitty found an old book on her aunt’s bedside table and, purely out of spite, cut out as many pages as she could—snipping them into tiny bits—until Aunt Daphne walked into the room, saw what she was doing, and burst into tears. The tutoring sessions ended.
Grandmother Lillian declared that Hitty’s stubborn ignorance would send her to the poorhouse, but she was wrong. She was wrong about so many things. Hitty loved her life. She was the headmistress of the Cent School, a private education for children who weren’t school age yet. Ideal for Hitty, as the little ones weren’t expected to read. Instead, the children played, talked, drew stories, started friendships, and nourished their imaginations.
Hitty much preferred the ways of children. So many questions arose when one spent her days with children. Last week, four-year-old Josiah Swain peered deeply into her eyes, then asked her, since she had brown eyes, did that mean everything she saw was brown? And then there was the little girl who wondered how Hitty had felt on the last day she was a child.
The Congregational Church’s bells chimed and the sound floated over the water, snapping Hitty back to the present. The schooner’s sails were getting reefed as they drew close to Nantucket Harbor. She tugged on Henry’s shirtsleeve, wanting to settle this conversation before they made land. “What about thee, brother? Does thee want this money, along with Grandmother Lillian’s conditions?” Whatever they might be.
What trick, she wondered, could Grandmother Lillian have had up her sleeve? No doubt it had to do with the Society of Friends, of keeping it intact and firmly grounded. The young had grown weary of the nitpicky behavior of the elders. For goodness’ sake, so many were read out of meeting that Hitty was astonished anyone was still left to attend.
Grandmother Lillian was the chief instigator of disciplinary action. Every single week up to her untimely death, her grandmother had a list of grievances—one man’s hair was cut too long, a woman’s dress was the wrong shade of blue, a Friend had been spotted coming out of a tavern. And then the most outrageous of all—Maria Mitchell had coughed excessively in Meeting. She had been ill with a cold! Maria was furious with Grandmother Lillian and gave serious consideration to quitting Meeting altogether. (Hitty talked her back into it.)
Henry’s silence concerned her. Was he, indeed, waffling? He was a born waffler. “Has thee given thought to how this inheritance might affect thy friendship with Anna Gardner? Thee knows how stridently she feels about excess.” How stridently she felt about everything. Anna held many strong beliefs. “She has not settled on any other man in thy absence. I believe she has been waiting for thee to return home.”
As Hitty said the name of Henry’s sweetheart, a frown came over his face. “Candidly, sister, I have thought of little else. But what to do, that I do not know.”
Well, Hitty knew exactly what to do. Refuse the inheritance. If Henry did not agree, she would just have to convince him.
So much had changed on Nantucket Island. Henry Macy could see evidence of change even before the anchor was dropped. For one thing, the anchor dropped much farther out in the harbor than it had three years ago, when he’d sailed off on the Endeavour. The hidden sandbar continued to build up, creating a dangerously shallow harbor. And then there were the new buildings that cradled the harbor—tall church steeples that scraped the sky. If steeples had been built in his absence, that meant the Society of Friends was no longer the dominant religion.
By all outside appearances, Nantucket was not the island he’d remembered.
Or maybe it was him. Maybe he was the one who had changed. Three years spent chasing whales felt like three years lost. He’d only agreed to sign on as cooper because he didn’t know what else to do with his life and his father insisted he give the seafaring life a fair try. He did. He hated it.
It was strange how life went. As a boy, Henry wanted nothing more than to crew on a whaling ship, like his father and his grandfather Jeremiah. But that was when Nantucket was the wealthiest seaport in the world, whales were plentiful, seamen of any and all rank were considered heroes by beautiful maidens.
It was a different story today.
Fewer and fewer ships came to Nantucket because of the emerging sandbar, New Bedford had begun to emerge as the center of whaling, and the whale population had grown scarce. Ships had to seek new whaling grounds in the Pacific to fill their hold—which meant painfully long durations.
Henry found the reality of the seafaring life to pale far below his expectations. Most of the crew’s time was utter boredom. Only a fraction of time at sea was spent pursuing whales. Henry’s mind needed more to fill it—books and spirited lectures and intellectually stimulating people. Sailors, he had found, had little on their minds.
And then there was Anna Gardner.
Anna. Henry hoped to see her waiting at the wharf alongside his father and Daphne as the dory brought them in, but alas, she was not. Hitty told him that Anna now taught at the African School, and no doubt that was why she hadn’t met the schooner. It didn’t surprise Henry to hear Anna was teaching. She had a passion for learning, for fairness, for equality for all. It was a Gardner trait. When Anna was only six years old, her parents had risked hiding a fugitive slave, Arthur Cooper, in their attic. That experience, coupled with her broadminded parents, left a permanent mark on Anna. She was fierce in her feelings, his Anna, if she was indeed still his Anna.
Moments later they were on Straight Wharf, heading home. His father, Reynolds Macy, carried their bags under his arms. Hitty
walked alongside him, chattering at full speed. Henry and Daphne trailed behind them, talking quietly to each other. “Just like it’s always been,” Daphne said, tucking her hand around his elbow.
Daphne was as near a mother to him as a woman could be. She was actually his late mother’s sister, married to his father. Some Friends snickered that she was a poor replacement to Jane Coffin Macy, but Daphne had never tried to replace his mother. Daphne was Daphne. He and Hitty adored her, as did their father.
“It’s so good to have thee home.” Gently, Daphne squeezed his elbow. “But I suspect there is much weighing on thy mind.”
Indeed, there was a great deal on Henry’s mind. Including the news his father had just greeted him with on the wharf—announcing that he and Daphne would be heading out to sea as soon as the ship could be outfitted. “Why does Papa want to captain the Endeavour? Why now? At his age? And why in the world are you going along on the journey?”
“He’s wanted to take to the sea again for many years. When he received Abraham’s letter that he wanted to retire, and that the Endeavour was in surprisingly good condition after this voyage, it seemed the time was right. As for me, Henry, I am eager for an adventure.”
“I know there is more to the story than wanting an adventure. Please, Daphne, I want the truth.”
Daphne dropped her chin to her chest. She did not speak for a long moment, as if gathering her words. In a voice so quiet that Henry had to lean in to hear her, she said, “We are penniless, Henry.”
Henry’s mouth fell open. “Penniless?”
Minding the Light Page 25