The Rathbones

by Janice Clark

  A sudden shrill sound from the crows, a sound I knew. I closed my eyes and saw the harbor, a flash of gold braid, a line of men. The crows copied the bosun’s whistle, blown whenever a captain boarded his ship, his crew at attention and ready for review. The crows knew the notes well; how often they must have heard such a whistle, in how many ports on their way from Papa to me. They flapped to the wheel and lit there, then squared their shoulders, side by side, wings closed crisply, breasts out, beaks high. I hurried to the well and peeked over the side. No captain climbed the rope ladder. It was Mama, mounting from the dark below. There was the crown of her head, pale braids coiled tight, flashes of her feet, her gloved hands opening to catch each rung. She had dressed again; the wide white collar of her gown floated above her dark shoulders. The rope creaked and swayed under her. I felt the urge to salute. My hand snapped smartly to my brow and my heart beat hard.

  Where could I hide? The sea chest looked too small, but it might be deep enough and there was no other choice. Mama mustn’t see me; she would be so angry. I motioned to the crows, opened the lid, and jumped inside, curling myself tight. I barely fit, slight though I was. The crows swooped down. I clutched one in each hand, stuffed them inside, and pulled the lid closed.

  At first I heard only my breath, my heart pounding so loudly I was afraid she would hear it too. I kept as still as I could. Mama’s boots began to click on the floor of the walk, back and forth, back and forth. As my eyes adjusted to the dark I could just make out the crows, tucked tight behind my knees. Each turned a beady eye to me and cocked its head, listening. The ladder began to creak again, the rope groaning and squeaking. Mama’s boots stopped. The clump of a heavy step; loud breathing. Something bumped and rustled on the floor. Someone gasped. The sound I’d heard many times in my sleep began again, but stronger this time. Not a soft shuffle of sand but a harsh scraping, like a sailor swabbing the deck, down on his knees.

  I opened the lid a sliver. A huge man rode Mama, his wide back arched over her body. A blue jacket stretched across his shoulders, but he soon tugged it off and threw it aside. His bare back was slashed with rows of pale scars that swelled with his ribs as he moved. Mama’s body yawed beneath him, corset cracked open, breasts rolling on each rise. Faint crunches came from beneath her; on her lifted thighs shells had pressed their shapes: the spiral of a whelk, a cowrie’s teeth. Through skin scraping against sand, I heard a faint click-click: At her neck bobbed a little trio of jointed bones on a thin chain, the chain she kept always hidden under her collar. With each new wave the bones moved in and out of the hollow of her throat, now sliding straight, now bent, beckoning.

  The crows hopped up to my thigh, heads hunched low in the tight space, and leaned to dip their beaks into a deep bed of kelp under me, its bladders popping softly as the crows rummaged. They pushed something into my hands, a shape my fingers recognized: a long, smooth shaft, knobbed at both ends—a bone. I gasped and flinched. Something shifted beneath me, a soft crunch like a bird’s nest compressing. My hand closed on a small warm body. A crow, crushed.

  I heard the singing voice again. Not just a scrap of the song, this time, but all of it.

  “Father, Father, sail a ship,

  Sail it straight and strong.

  Mother, Mother, make a bed,

  Make it soft and long.

  Sister, Sister, listen close,

  Listen to my song.

  For it was Father sailed the sea,

  For it was Mother murdered me,

  Sister, Sister, come and see,

  Come see and sing with me.”

  I held my breath, heart hammering. The scraping sound outside the trunk had stopped.

  A heavy step moved toward me, then halted. Along the seam between lid and trunk two slices of leather appeared. Knees creaked; I caught a flash of white breeches, gold buttons glaring on blue, then the shine of two eyes. The lid lifted. A broad hand reached in with the light, clutched a handful of frock, plucked me out, and held me up by my hem. My head dropped and I spun, squinting in the glare. My mother’s lover inspected me, dangling upside down at the end of his thick arm. Pale eyes flared in his wide brown face. In my hand I clutched the crushed crow tighter, feather and bone squeezed between my fingers. Below me, Mama’s skirts still frothed on the sand, her skin still flushed with blood. She lifted her face from the floor and held her arms out, but not to me, to him. Her legs spread wider. Her neck swelled. Her mouth opened in a croak.

  When he turned away from me, to her, I reached up and smeared his face with crow. Twin stripes shone across his eyes and down each cheek. He blinked and roared, then pulled me close to his breath, to his nose black with blood. When I kicked out he couldn’t hold me. I dropped and found my feet, then lurched across the walk toward the well. I reached down for the ladder, first stuffing the crushed crow into the front of my frock, and called out for the other. I saw it circling above, beating against the dome. When its eye found mine, it swooped down and buried its claws in my hair. I started to sink, the rope burning my hands, and before I dropped below the rim, looked back up to see Mama; her skirts settled, hissing as she slid away. The rope jerked above me. I jumped for the floor, ran to the door, and heard the man fall heavily behind me.

  I started running along the hall, toward my room, but my crow, tugging hard on my hair, pulled me down the main stair, to the bottom and into the hall of beds, my boots skittering along the boards as we turned. I heard someone behind me and looked back as I ran, but the dark swallowed everything. I kept running through the doorways, the rooms rushing by me, all the same, bed after bed, I felt my lungs would burst, until I finally reached the end of the hallway, the room farthest from the sea. I fell, gasping, onto the last bed. Legs shaking, pulse pounding in my ears, I turned and pulled the curtains closed.

  My crow, just visible in the faint starlight that washed through the curtains, dropped down from my head to lumber along the bed. He first peered into each shadowed corner, then turned to me and pushed his beak at my breast. The stain there spread, a dark, wet patch on the cloth. The crushed crow’s warm body turned cold against my skin. I pressed my face further into the pillow. Still I heard no footsteps, only the beat of the sea, weaker now.

  I raised my head at the sound of cloth tearing. I heard a few footsteps, then again the ripping sound, closer. My crow tugged at my gown, squawking, nipping at my hands. The man in blue was there. I felt more than saw him, a great bulk in the gloom. He walked to the bed across from mine and stripped the curtains down in one motion. Dust billowed up, and the smell of salt and mildew.

  I was shaking now, hard. The bed quaked under me, its legs chattering on the floor. The curtains ripped down. The man groped in the bedclothes and his hands found me. He reached behind my neck and lifted me, this time by the collar of my gown. His body seemed to fill the room. When I tried to push him away, my hands slipped on sweaty skin and I felt his stiff hair, matted with my crow’s blood. My frock started to slide up my neck and over my mouth. The dead crow rustled at my breast, squeezed under the cloth as it slid by. The buttons popped, and the crow and I slipped through the frock and dropped to the bed. The man’s hot hands came again, this time around my waist.

  Then my crow was there, screeching, his wings beating in my face. His claws dug deep into my shoulder and I felt him strike out with his beak, once, twice. The man bellowed and his hands let go.

  I scrambled off the bed, tripped over the curtains that lay in a heap on the floor, and fell. Fingers scrabbled along my thigh and tried to grasp my ankle, but I was too quick, I pulled away, struggled up off the floor, and lurched into the hall. Then I was running again, back down the long chain of rooms.

  Only when I was almost to the main hall did I dare to turn around. In the faint light I could just see the man, far down the hall, his arms thrown over his face, see my crow swoop at him, squawking and hissing, beak flashing to peck his face again and again. The man groaned and clutched at his eyes, hunching away from the blows, trying to look
up at me from under his raised arms. He dropped to his knees and called out in a deep, cracked voice.

  “Wait, wait!”

  Something in that voice thrummed through me, like a voice I had heard in dreams. I turned back around and kept running. As I reached the stairs and started up, my legs began to shake and I struggled, panting, slowing to catch my breath, hurrying again. At the second-floor landing I stopped, trying to hear over my thudding heart: nothing, only a thin whistle of wind from some window. Then my crow was flying up the stairs to me, wings beating black in the gloom. He landed on my shoulder and dropped something warm and wet there: a slice of nose, or a bite of tongue, I couldn’t tell.

  When I had caught my breath a little, I pushed on, up to the third floor. At the top, I hesitated. I almost turned right, toward Mama’s room. For just a moment I let myself believe that I would find her there, warm, smiling, that she would take me in her arms and comfort me. But when had she ever comforted me? I pictured her on the floor of the walk, her arms held out to the man in blue. I headed for the attic.

  I turned left, toward the narrow switchback at the north end of the house that led up to the attic, stopping to rummage in a cabinet for a stub of candle, striking a flame and hurrying on. My crow’s shadow flared and faded on the walls in the guttering light as we made our way. Between the rows of white columns that flanked the halls, dreary seascapes gleamed from the wainscoted walls. I had lost the way to Mordecai’s attic before, with all of its turns and twists; when I finally reached the base of the square tower that housed the last stair, I felt a wave of relief. The door stood open, and a silvery light drifted down.

  When my crow realized where I was going, he hopped off my shoulder, croaking, onto the newel post at the bottom of the stairs. I half ran, half stumbled to the top.

  I didn’t see Mordecai right away. Under those beams it was always dark, except for the worn knots in the wood here and there, where sunlight or moonlight entered in slender shafts. One such beam lit up a shock of white hair. There was Mordecai, standing at his blackboard with his back to me. My cousin always moved slowly, stiffly, his long thin limbs reluctant to bend, but that night he moved feverishly, his hand dashing out with its chalk in swift little jerks. He was drawing something, a diagram of some kind, ruling off lines with a yardstick, intently focused on what he drew, but he must have heard me come in.

  “Mercy, what are you doing here? It’s long past your bedtime.”

  He turned around. His cross expression softened and his eyes widened. He was so pale that it would have been hard to say whether he went whiter.

  “What has happened?”

  I wanted to tell him about the man in blue. But Mordecai’s face began to slowly spin, and then the room was spinning too.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ROUTE OF THE SPERMACETI

  {in which Mercy and Mordecai flee}

  WHEN I WOKE, it took me a moment to realize where I was, and why. My skin prickled and I gripped the blanket at my throat. The man in blue. Had Mordecai heard him? Had he come this far looking for me? But the way to the attic was not easy to find. A stranger would have had trouble finding it in bright daylight, unpecked by crows. The man had dropped to his knees, clutching his eyes. Maybe my crow had wounded him gravely enough that he couldn’t go on; maybe my crow had blinded him. Mordecai was still standing at his worktable, as he had been when I arrived—how long ago I wasn’t sure. He was hunting through a stack of books, rapidly scanning the pages of first one, then another, snapping the pages to and fro, talking to himself all the while in an excited whisper. I realized he was behaving oddly, but I didn’t care; I was only relieved that everything seemed otherwise normal. I fell back against the pillow.

  My face was hot, my body stiff. The cool cotton sheet soothed my skin. Mordecai had tucked me in with nautical precision, the sheet neatly turned down at my throat, over a worn woolen blanket stamped with an anchor. My hair had been brushed back, my face scrubbed clean. A steaming bowl of broth stood on a table by the cot. I glanced up at Mordecai’s worktable. A beaker bubbled over a low flame, surrounded by shells from shellfish and vegetables from the root cellar.

  The room was still dark, though faint gray light slanted down from the knotholes in the rafters. Then the bell clanged five times, and I knew it was near dawn. Larboard and Starboard never shirked their duty, rising each day before dawn to strike the bell that stood at the top of the stairs, as they did at the turn of each hour throughout the day.

  Mordecai had not changed my frock; the stain was still there on the bodice, the cloth dark and stiff. I felt for the gobbet of flesh that my crow had dropped on my shoulder, but Mordecai had cleaned it away. I put my hand to my breast; my crow wasn’t there. I sat up straight.

  “Where is he?”

  I started to get out of bed.

  “Lie down.”

  Mordecai pressed me down and pointed to a corner cabinet once used for storing linens, now an infirmary for weary specimens. My dead crow lay next to a tray of crustaceans, wrapped in a napkin and guarded by cutlery, a tea towel neatly folded beneath its head. A low caw came from outside the attic. I turned my head to see my other crow clutching the outside of the doorframe, only his head protruding into the room. One eye was fixed on the tray where his companion lay.

  I waited for Mordecai to question me, but he was back at his blackboard, intently working on the drawing I had noticed when I came in, referring repeatedly to the books and papers spread out around him. He had finished chalking his lines and was now plotting points on the grid.

  I pulled my blanket tighter and stared up at the ceiling. Mordecai appeared to be ignoring me, but I could feel him look at me now and then. Once when I glanced up at him our eyes met and he looked away, back to his blackboard, but not before I saw a feverish spark in his pale-green eye. I was glad that he wasn’t questioning me. I wasn’t yet ready to talk about what I’d seen on the widow’s walk. I wished it had been a dream, but the rope burns on my hands were stinging proof that it had been real. I burrowed deeper under the blanket, grateful to be warm and safe. The attic was, after all, where I spent most of my time.

  Cousin Mordecai had lived in the attic as long as I could remember, under the hull of the Sassacus. One of our ancestors had installed her there, the bottom half of a square-rigged brig of fifty-odd feet, her upper decks stripped off and her hull turned and bolted down over the top of the house in place of a roof. Perhaps our ancestor couldn’t bear to abandon her to rot in the sea after her long years of fruitful service had ended. Where the hull’s halves joined, at the top of the attic, the wood was ringed from the slow seepage of the ocean, stained where barrels of beef and rum once rested. Mordecai knew the details of each voyage of the ship, gleaned from his trove of old logbooks and journals. The side of her hull had been stove in by a sperm a few generations earlier. Paler planks showed along one curve where the wood had been patched. A whisper carried easily from one end to the other. Dried strands of seaweed dangled from the rafters. As a child, I’d believed that a sleeping mermaid was trapped in the timbers.

  Mordecai passed his days among his treasures, curiosities acquired by generations of Rathbone mariners. Eagerly bargained for in foreign waters, the souvenirs had soon been forgotten, their charms diluted by distance. Mordecai found them around the house, abandoned in unlocked sea lockers or fading on windowsills where curtains were no longer drawn at dusk. His collection was installed in the tall glass-fronted mahogany cabinets that lined the sides of the hull. In one, a cluster of casts of mutant hands seemed to wave gently to me as I passed, plaster fingers bloated or shriveled, some like sea slugs, others anemones. On a shelf above the hands, stuffed birds of several species perched, moldering, on branches of coral. The eye of a giant squid shone from one cabinet. In another, the heart of a sainted prelate who’d perished among the Maori endured in a coconut shell.

  Each morning Mordecai tutored me, supervised by a row of salvaged plaster busts. Two heads of Socrates, large and small, f
lanked a startled Lord Nelson in full uniform; the chipped head of a horse who had lost a nostril observed us with a cold white eye. Other, more retiring busts hung back in the shadowy recesses of the rafters. All gazed down at us from perches that my crows would have envied if they could have forgotten their fear of the attic. They didn’t care for the overturned hull. They believed, I thought, that the ship had been turned only for bailing, or had capsized in a storm, and would soon be righted. Or they were afraid that Mordecai would add them to his collection.

  I had mastered most of what Mordecai knew of the arts and sciences, drawn from our scanty collection of books. An incomplete encyclopedia provided us with a thorough grounding in those subjects starting with G, H–I, and U. I was fully familiar with Unconformity, Ungulates, and the Underwing Moth. A few French volumes on natural history shared a shelf with Catesby’s The Purple Grosbeak with Poison Wood and Hooping Crane. There were as well a few-score books of interest to the seaman: flag books, almanacs, The Oriental Navigator, books of charts, and narratives of voyages to distant lands.

  I first practiced writing at five, in a salvaged logbook, copying out entries: lists of men and provisions (60 barrels of s-o-r-g-h-u-m, 30 of s-o-w-b-e-l-l-y), the name and number of whales taken on this voyage and that. We dissected creatures that washed up on the beach, or burrowed in the sand, thinking themselves safe, though these were rare; few fish swam in the waters off Naiwayonk, and I seldom saw crabs and other shore life. When I couldn’t find fresh examples on the shoreline, we applied our knives to the pickled specimens that bobbed in jars of formaldehyde, whose organs, though shriveled, retained enough of shape and position to teach me the basics of anatomy. The mounted skeleton of a spider monkey surveyed our dissections from a corner of the worktable, eyeing us reproachfully from under a little sailor cap.