Heir To The Sea

by Danelle Harmon

  “I understand.” Matthew Ashton smiled and turned his steady gaze on Rosalie. Up close, she could see lingering strands of red in his hair, freckles popping out through the lines on his face. “Don’t you worry,” he murmured, glancing forward at his nephew. “It’s been hard on all of us, but he’s home now and with family. We’ll all take care of him together. And Connor, too.”

  “I hope so,” she said bleakly, but the older man laid a hand on her arm and she felt everything inside of her relax. Kieran’s uncle understood. He, and what was left of her husband’s family, would surround him with love and support and help him through the difficult hours and days ahead.

  “Now, go get that man of yours and let’s go. ’Skeeters are starting to come out and so are the midges, and I don’t fancy being bitten up any more than need be.”

  * * *

  The Ashtons were talkative, brash, loud, and overwhelming, and they embraced both Rosalie and her grieving husband with force.

  The family lived in a big white house within sight of the river, the rooms well appointed and filled with Chippendale, fine china, nautical paintings and rugs from the Orient. There was Matthew and his wife Eveleen, a rotund Irishwoman with thick, graying hair, smiling eyes much the same color as Kieran’s, and a warm and welcoming manner that instantly made Rosalie feel at home. She had a maimed hand, the remaining fingers smeared with what looked like paint, but it didn’t seem to impede her as she bustled about, making sure the food arrived hot at the table and that everyone had plenty to eat. The relationships between Rosalie’s new family turned out to be a bit confusing; not only was Matthew the blood relative of her husband in that he was the brother of Kieran’s mother, Mira, but so was his Aunt Eveleen, who turned out to be his father Brendan’s sister.

  If your mother and father were anything like these two, then I am all the more saddened that I never got the chance to meet them.

  The Ashton offspring were a handsome bunch. The eldest son, Nathan, was steady and quiet, with thick, sandy-blond hair, brawny shoulders and an air of solid dependability about him. His brother Toby was red-haired and freckled, still gangly with youth and sporting a pair of spectacles much like his father’s; his was a sensitive face, but there was a core of strength and scrappiness about him that belied such a gentle countenance. Twin girls on the verge of womanhood, both blonde, both with their mother’s warm amber eyes, were full of questions for Rosalie about how she’d met Kieran, quizzing her tirelessly about the details of their wedding, the fashions in Baltimore, and what famous people she might have met. Did she know Dolley Madison? Her husband the President? Had she been to Washington? Laughter abounded, the evening wore on, dogs wandered freely through the downstairs and Kieran eventually relaxed into the familiar bosom of his family.

  It was dusk when the meal was finally finished and cleared. The twins took turns playing the harpsichord that dominated the great candle-lit parlor, and old Liam Doherty arrived during the thick of it with his fiddle. The genteel elegance of the entertainment turned to a more raucous bent and within an hour, Liam was pounding out sea chanteys, the furniture had been moved back, and everyone was dancing.

  Everyone but Kieran, who stood off to the side, his thoughts his own.

  Rosalie went to him, quietly taking his hand. “Time for bed?”

  He nodded, wordlessly.

  They made their excuses, and retreated to a guest bedroom upstairs. Breezes drifted in through an open window. The night was cool compared to Baltimore; summer came much later to New England. They made love in the great tester bed, and afterward Rosalie fell asleep in her husband’s arms. Some time later, she awoke to find Kieran’s side of the bed empty. She looked up and saw him standing at the open window, silhouetted against the night.

  “Kieran?”

  “There’s a light burning over there,” he said quietly.

  Rosalie got up and joined him at the window. She said nothing, just took his hand and stood next to him as he gazed out at an elegant mansion across the road.

  “That’s my parents’ house,” he said tightly. “And I’ll bet that’s Connor over there.”

  “Come back to bed, Kieran. You’ve had a long day, and you’re only tormenting yourself. Whatever must be confronted there can be faced in the morning.”

  “As if I could sleep, knowing he’s over there. In there.” His voice was hard, a dam meant to stop a rising tide of emotion. “I wonder what he’s doing. What he’s taking. He’s not sentimental, like I am. He’s probably going through Da’s and Mother’s possessions, claiming what he wants, throwing stuff away. Disturbing things.” His jaw hardened and she felt the coiled tension in him, the anger that he was losing the ability to control. “He should just leave everything alone. Leave things exactly as they were when we closed up the house and set sail for Barbados.”

  He turned from the window and stalked across the room to the bed. There he sat for a long moment, tense, quietly bristling, that rising emotion as palpable as if he’d actually let it loose in an outburst. Beyond the curtains, the orange gleam of light shining from the window across the street was still visible.

  There was nothing for it, then.

  “Do you want to go over, Kieran?”

  He bent over, locking his hands around the back of his neck as he stared at the floor. “I’m not ready.”

  She sat next to him on the bed and wrapped an arm around his back. “You may never be ready. But sooner or later you’ll have to do it, and the longer you put it off the harder it will be.”

  “I know.”

  He got up, stalked back to the window, and stared hard across the street to the house.

  The dim glow, wavering slightly, still pushed through the night like a beacon.

  Wordlessly, he found his trousers and pulled them on. Tucked his shirt in, raked a hand through his thick mop of hair, looked bleakly at her, and headed for the door.

  Rosalie followed.

  Chapter 29

  Journal of Captain Kieran Merrick, 11 June, 1814

  We got home to Newburyport this afternoon. I had hoped for a strong east wind and a contrary tide, but of course it was just the opposite, making it all too easy to sail up the river. Indeed, I could’ve done it with my eyes shut and my hands tied behind my back while being strung upside-down from the topsail yard. Good to see Uncle Matt, Aunt Eveleen and my cousins. Nobody said anything at the supper table about the shipwreck; nobody mentioned Mother and Da, which made me both sad and relieved at the same time. And yet they are here, somehow. I don’t have the Sight like Maeve or even her little son Ned, have. I don’t mean that I can feel their presence; it’s more that I can feel their absence, and where there’s a void, something must fill it…just as the incoming tide will fill a footprint in the sand, and after two or three breaking waves, the footprints are blurred, blunted and then gone, as if they had never been. I think death must be like that. I think loss must be like that, but I’m not ready for the incoming tide of time and its inevitable washing away of the footprints…the life-prints…of Mother and Da. But Connor is here, and he is the first crashing wave of that tide. His tide moves faster than mine; it always has. Confrontation with him awaits and I neither seek nor welcome it. But Rosalie is here as well, and she is my refuge. I can do this. I just don’t want to.

  Gripping his wife’s hand, Kieran led her across the lawn and toward the street. An onshore breeze drove in off the Atlantic, rustling the leaves of maples and oaks overhead and cooling the night. The stars pricked through their branches. Somewhere, a dog barked.

  And still, that light burning in the downstairs room just across the street. Beckoning him.

  Mocking him.

  Imploring him to hurry before Connor disturbed memories that could never be restored, took things that weren’t his to take, changed things from how Dadai and Mother had left them.

  Kieran’s heart drummed against his chest. His palms were sweating. It was getting hard to draw breath, harder yet to keep his anger under contro
l and he stepped up his pace.

  I can’t go in there.

  I have to go in there.

  Nausea filled his gut, and he made the conscious effort to release his crushing grip on his wife’s hand.

  They passed the old anchor at the bottom of the drive that had been there ever since he could remember. The breeze tickled the tall grasses along the side of the road. The house loomed above them, big and white and familiar, looking much the same as it ever had even though the heart and soul of it were gone, buried in the hull of a sunken schooner fifteen hundred miles to the south. It’s just a house. Just a house, he reminded himself. He sucked in a ragged breath, the light in that window now lost from sight as he moved up the steps to the front door. Emotions assailed him. Fear of confronting his grief. Dread over what he’d find. Seeing his brother and facing the onslaught of feelings that doing so would raise.

  Connor.

  Connor, going through Dadai and Mother’s possessions, moving things that had belonged to them, disturbing the house from the way they had left it. Blurring, blunting their footprints. Building anger crushed his fear and dread. He gripped the latch, yanked the door open and found himself in the front hall with the sound of the ages echoing in the dark stillness all around him.

  He froze.

  Memories. Of being a little boy and standing here looking up to Da as he was about to head into town and then Da laughing, picking him up, swinging him so that his feet almost touched the great chandelier overhead until he squealed in childish delight and his father’s laughter drowned out his own shrieks. The smells wafting in from the kitchen as old Abigail had made supper, and then, after Abigail had finally passed, the burnt roasts and breads as Mother had tried to cook while they’d looked for a new housekeeper. Grandpa Ephraim’s clocks all going off at once. Dogs running down the stairs to greet you as you came in, cats winding around your ankles, a house of merriment and activity, loud, boisterous, active, alive.

  Now….

  Nothing. Just thick, dark, quiet. Memories, stitched into the quilt of time, fleeting, gone. Not even a clock ticked. There was nothing but stillness.

  Nothing.

  He trembled and shut his eyes. Emotion brewed beneath his eyelids and stung the back of his sinuses. He thought of when he had last stood here in this very spot. Dadai cheerfully saying goodbye to the house, all of them with their ditty bags and trunks loaded into the carriage outside to be taken down to Kestrel, the jokes about leaving the New England winter behind for Barbados’ warm climes, the silent thud of the door behind them as Da had pulled it shut and locked it—

  For what would be the last time.

  Kieran was tempted to reach out and put his fingertips to that door latch, to savor the bittersweet memory, to absorb the touch of the one who had last had his hand there and pull it deep into his skin, his blood, his soul. Dadai. A tear leaked down his cheek, hidden in the gloom. He furiously slashed at it, trying to stay in control. But no—Connor had been here since, perhaps many times, wiping away the touch of their father’s hand with uncaring abandon, wiping away the last of their parents’ presence in the house simply by being here, and Kieran felt the anger that had begun outside now building into a blinding rage. Rage, that Connor with his problems, with his needs, with the amount of worry that he’d put them all through, had had so much of Mother and Dadai throughout their lives. Connor, who’d had so much more of them than he, Kieran, had ever had, who had not only been the cause of their deaths but who had been there at the end when he, Kieran, had been denied even that and was left with nothing but his mind’s own horrible imaginings of what it had been like for his parents aboard the sinking Kestrel in those last awful moments.

  What it had it been like to drown.

  He began to shake, Rosalie’s concerned voice seeming to come from far away.

  “Kieran?”

  All Connor’s fault.

  The candlelight was coming from the library. His body trembled with rage, and he was just about to storm into his father’s domain when Connor himself came striding out, a lantern in one hand, the other brandishing a pistol.

  “Kieran?” He lowered the weapon in relief.

  “Connor.”

  His brother grinned and moved forward, arms outstretched, obviously happy to see him. “I didn’t know you were back in town.”

  “No, obviously you did not.”

  Connor’s face changed then, his grin fading. He put the pistol down on the table next to the door. “What’s the matter?”

  “What do you think is the matter?”

  “I honestly have no idea, but something’s obviously bothering you. And who is this? Aren’t introductions in order, Kieran?”

  “This is my wife, Rosalie. Rosalie, my brother, Connor—”

  “Wife!”

  “That’s what I said, isn’t it?”

  “Well, this is a surprise. When did you get married? Why didn’t you invite any of us? Hell, when did you actually meet? I’m so sorry—begging your pardon, ma’am, but I’m glad to make your acquaintance. Welcome to the family, Rosalie.” He moved forward, bending low over Rosalie’s hand, and Kieran saw—or thought he saw—a blush spread up her cheeks and touch the roots of her hair. He bristled with fury. Not even his own wife was immune to Connor, Connor who’d always been one to turn the ladies’ heads with his confident charm and ready smile, his careless good looks and inborn charisma. Damn him. Damn him!

  “Thank you, Captain Merrick.”

  “’Tis Connor. We’re family. Right, Kieran?”

  Kieran made a noise of assent. He clenched his hands and stiffened, the anger beating through his blood, painting his vision and Connor’s damnable, smiling face behind it, in red.

  “Speaking of wives, where is Rhiannon?” he asked tightly. “Or did you already tire of her and dump her back in England?”

  “Kieran, what the devil is wrong with you?”

  Rosalie’s hand was on his arm. “He’s just exhausted, and this house—”

  “You’re what’s wrong with me,” Kieran snarled, the floodgates of his emotions bursting open at last. “You could’ve waited to go through Dadai’s papers in the library, you could’ve waited ’til I got back before you started going through things, a task we should be doing together, but no, you couldn’t wait, could you?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Your impatience and lack of respect! You should have just left things as they were, not touched anything until we could both be here, but—”

  “Did you think I’d actually steal something from my own house?” Connor shot back, his face darkening.

  “This isn’t your house, your house is across the street and down one, and since you already have a house and I was still living here before Kestrel went down, I guess that makes this my house.”

  “I grew up here just as you did, and as the oldest son—”

  “I don’t give a damn if you’re the oldest son, if it weren’t for you we wouldn’t even be standing here shouting at each other!”

  “What the hell are you implying?”

  “You know damn well what I’m implying!”

  “Why don’t you just say it then!” Connor’s countenance was thunderous, twisted with pain. “Say it, and say it to my face!”

  “I’ll say it to your face!” Kieran roared back. “And I’m glad to, because I’ve been holding it in all these months, trying to be the reasonable one, trying to be understanding and forgiving when it was killing me inside, building up inside—”

  “Say it!”

  “You killed them! You, with your stupid, reckless, prideful decision to go after that ship, a ship that Kestrel could never have matched, a ship that destroyed her because you couldn’t be bothered to keep up the maintenance on her, and it’s all your fault that they’re dead—”

  With a strangled cry, Connor threw himself at Kieran, shoving him backward. Kieran slammed up against the wall, bounced off it and lunged for his brother, and in the n
ext moment fists were flying and the two were down and rolling on the floor, pounding the stuffing out of each other.

  “Stop it, both of you!” Rosalie wailed. “Stop it this instant, you’re going to break something!”

  Fists collided against flesh. Connor sprang to his feet, turned, and fell hard as Kieran grabbed him by the knees. As he went down, his body hit a little table on which stood a Delftware bowl; too late, Rosalie made a grab for it, catching a glimpse of a beautiful schooner’s likeness before the table went over, hurling the bowl to the floor, shattering it and the schooner’s image into dozens of pieces.

  The two brothers, fists flying, never heard it; briefly, Rosalie thought about kicking the both of them soundly in the ribs but Connor was back up on his feet again, bleeding from his nose, his eyes crazed with grief.

  “I didn’t kill them, damn you, if I’d known what was going to happen I’d never have sent Kestrel in against that ship!”

  Kieran lunged to his feet, breathing hard, blood running down his knuckles where they’d collided with his brother’s teeth. “I don’t want to hear your excuses! All my life you and Maeve had the best of Mother and Da, in fact, you had all of them really, all their attention because the two of you were always in trouble, always in need, both of you, all the time, every day and even when they died it had to be you there, you who got the last goodbye, you who got the last glimpse of them, you, you, you!”

  “I never got to say goodbye!”

  “You got a helluva lot more chance than I ever did, damn you!”

  “Stop it, both of you!” Rosalie shouted. “I won’t have you doing this to each other, one or both of you are going to get hurt!”

  She went unheard and a second later, Kieran had slammed his fist so hard into Connor’s jaw that the older brother went over sideways, hitting the wall and knocking a painting from its hook, and before he could even get up and go back at Kieran, Rosalie had snatched up the pistol to keep it out of angry hands, shoved it into the garter beneath her skirts and fled the house.