The Rathbones

by Janice Clark

  I rubbed my eyes and looked up. Mordecai was standing by the foremast, his back to me. He had tied his hair, which the wind had been blowing all around, with a length of cord. The cord had passed around a stretch of rigging as well as his hair and he had accidentally tied himself to the foremast. He was muttering angrily to himself, trying to get free.

  “Mordecai?”

  “No more questions.”

  I glanced over at Crow, riding along beside the ship on the red hat.

  “I found something, too.” I held out my wrist, turning and turning the rope bracelet. It had been a long time since I last asked Mordecai about my missing brother or mentioned the singing voice, but I was sure he wouldn’t have forgotten.

  Still struggling with his knotted hair, his head twisted toward me and he saw the bracelet. He froze.

  “Don’t you want to know where I got this?”

  Mordecai stared at it a moment longer, then went back to working at the knot.

  “That’s just a common rope bracelet. Your crow, doubtless, dug it up from some bin or other.” He sniffed at the word “crow.” Though Mordecai was devoted to ornithology, he considered the common crow unworthy of study.

  “Have you seen knots like these on a common sailor’s bracelet?” I pointed out the little Turk’s heads, made from doubled cord so that they jutted up from the otherwise flat bracelet.

  Mordecai reached down to the deck and pulled a ribbon from a packet of letters. “Enough,” he said, fastening the end of his pigtail.

  I sighed. I threw my pen over the side and rubbed my eyes. The wind had picked up and the ropes were rattling against the foremast. I scrubbed at my brother’s face with a gum until it was only a faint smear of gray.

  The mate cried out from the rigging above our heads.

  “Hard abeam! Luff and touch, luff and touch.”

  We were drawing near the islands. Mordecai and I watched in silence as Captain Avery and his mate made ready to anchor.

  Mordecai had taken up the spyglass again and was busily scanning the islands. When a seabird passed overhead, he jerked up his glass, gasping.

  “Look, look!”

  I jumped onto the bottom beam of the railing, looking all around.

  “Is it a sperm? Do you see a whale?”

  “No, no, surely it’s Himantopus mexicanus! The black-necked stilt!”

  Mordecai’s glass was pointed straight up. I followed his gaze. A white seabird with black-tipped wings glided across the sky.

  Mordecai drooped. “No. No, it’s only a sooty tern.”

  I jumped back down, disappointed. “But when will we see the whales?”

  “Not just yet. They will not be in among the islands, the water is far too shallow; they will swim in open water, just past the archipelago.” Mordecai took his eye away from the glass and looked at me, his thin mouth drawn into a long firm line. “When we find the whales, we will find your father. And I will tell him everything. I will tell him all about your mama and that man.” Mordecai smiled bitterly. “I believe that is why the man in blue chases us. He knows what I intend to do and means to silence me.”

  I considered Mordecai, now standing at the rail, his glass raised to the Stark Archipelago. Had he really considered what would happen if we found Papa? Did he think that Benadam Gale, that any man, would welcome such news about his wife? Did he think that Papa would turn to him in gratitude and be for him the father that he lacked?

  I stood and joined Mordecai at the rail. Crow no longer floated off the starboard side; instead we saw a drab shorebird bobbing there. Mordecai brightened.

  “A least sandpiper! I wonder that it is so far at sea, they usually incline to the salt marshes. You see how the crest is darker, the legs stouter than the semipalmated …”

  He looked at me. I was standing at the rail, staring down into the water. He faltered, and stopped.

  I felt Crow’s weight on my shoulder, water dripping on my gown. The crimson captain’s hat dropped to the deck, sodden, its brim scored with beak marks. Mordecai leaned slowly and picked it up, shaking the water from it, turning it in his hands.

  “Shall we review the feeding habits of the humpback?”

  I shook my head, slowly.

  “Perhaps we have had enough of lessons for now.”

  With his penknife he snipped off a lace cockade trimmed in satin ribbon. He took a paper tack from his box of instruments and pinned the cockade to my breast.

  “Felicitations, Mercy, on your graduation from Mordecai Rathbone’s Finishing School for Young Ladies,” he said with a faint smile.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE STARK ARCHIPELAGO

  {in which Mercy and Mordecai encounter the in-laws}

  LATE IN THE day we reached the outer borders of the Stark Archipelago. We glided through a scattering of small islands as verdant as Mouse Island was bare. The sun hung low over a sea so smooth and glassy that we might have been floating across a still lake. In the distance we caught glimpses of long green lawns and bright buildings on the central islands toward which we sailed. Far beyond the archipelago, a hazy coast stretched into the distance: Long Island, the captain told us.

  Mordecai sat on a crate, bent over a map. “The main house is, I believe, Captain, just northeast of the—”

  “No need, Master Rathbone, I know my way.”

  The mate had been hoisting up crates from the hold for some time and was now prying one open. Crow was excited at the sight of the crate and tried to assist him, poking at the knots with his beak, but the mate preferred to work alone. Eventually Crow spied something of greater interest among the islands and flew off. I turned to see what had attracted him, spotting a flash of crimson against the green.

  I leaned over the rail and gazed down as we passed the first islands. The outermost seemed small enough to cross in a few strides. Though the shallow mounds were formed of the same rough granite as Naiwayonk’s shore, they were closely covered in thick grass, with a curiously neat appearance, smooth and shapely. As we passed I saw that the grass had been clipped and rolled to velvety perfection. A man in a gardener’s smock kneeled at the edge of one islet, digging away salt-browned sod and laying down fresh strips of grass, creeping around the perimeter. On nearby islands two other gardeners worked at the same task.

  As we approached the center of the archipelago, the islands became larger and the channels narrowed. The captain, concerned for his hull, asked for frequent soundings as the brig floated along under close-reefed sails. The mate leaned well over the side and swung his lead, calling out after each drop. “By the deep eight … by the mark ten … a quarter less ten … by the deep nine.” His words hung in the still air.

  Some islands had not been tamed into soft green mounds but left in their natural, craggy state. Between two such islands stretched an airy footbridge of brilliant scarlet, mirrored in the motionless sea. Structures of Oriental style appeared, like those in one of the colored plates in Papa’s atlas: on one peak a pagoda tucked among low twisted trees, on another an open pavilion with curling eaves and pierced screens. Inside the pavilion, two figures dressed in Mandarin clothing lolled on a couch. Above them, a monkey in a tasseled red cap swung from the branch of a stunted pine. The figures—whether male or female, I wasn’t sure—at first took no notice of us. It seemed impossible that they wouldn’t hear or see our passing. Then one figure raised hand to brow and peered toward us. I could have easily made out their faces if they were not hidden under enormous circular hats that rose to a point at the top. The brig glided on, and the pavilion slid out of view.

  We were nearing what appeared to be the main island, larger than all the rest. Unlike its craggy satellites, the central island was a single low dome of unnatural smoothness, probably filed down by an earlier crew of gardeners and smoothed with sod. A promenade of oaks, their dark crowns struck with crimson and yellow by autumn air, climbed the center of a long green swell of lawn that was as closely manicured as the outlying islands. At the summit stood a
large house of two stories surrounded by a high yew hedge. The house’s shape was familiar enough, a foursquare Georgian dwelling with a steeply gabled roof. It shared the same sober white clapboard form of many houses in Naiwayonk. But the yew hedge, familiarly clipped just at the sill of the lower windows, here towered above the upper windows, almost to the eaves. Only a few inches of the top pane of glass in each window was visible.

  We approached a long, slender dock of the same crimson red as the footbridges, its piers carved with Oriental glyphs. The mate stood at the port rail, holding a long staff to brace against the dock, to keep the Able’s hull safe from scraping.

  I leaned close to Mordecai and whispered, “Are we stopping here? Is the captain going into that house?” I wondered if we might go with him. I was excited at the prospect, though nervous, having never been in any house but my own.

  “Captain Avery has business to conduct here. He tells me there is a wondrous library.” Mordecai hesitated. “Also, I believe you may be interested in meeting the locals.”

  “Master Rathbone, lend us a hand, will you?” Captain Avery called to Mordecai from the helm. “Tie us off on the port side. There’s a lad. Handsomely, now.”

  Mordecai, who had been leaning idly on the rail, staring up at the house, jerked to a stand.

  “Oh, certainly, certainly.”

  He crouched, bracing his legs, holding his arms out rigidly. The captain uncoiled the bow-anchor lead and tossed it as we came alongside the dock. Mordecai lurched and missed, hands grasping air. He snatched up the rope end and began to fumble with it, trying to tie what looked like a strangle snare, ending up with only an unseamanlike tangle. Meantime, the mate had already made fast on the port stern. Now the bow began to drift away from the pier. I seized the rope from Mordecai, tied a quick timber hitch, and in one cast we were moored. Mordecai opened his mouth to make some ready remark, then closed it. He felt the captain’s eyes upon him from the foredeck and put his hand up to touch the stiff sailor’s cap he had put on again. Captain Avery, with a final glare, adjusted the brim of his own well-weathered cap and turned back to his task, making the foresail shrouds neat.

  Mordecai clambered down the ladder and I descended behind him. When I turned at the bottom I saw, between two islands, a painted barge floating in our direction. It was poled by a figure in a peaked hat. A seated figure within, shaded by a parasol, leaned toward us. One of the two occupants of the pavilion; I recognized the jade-green robe.

  “Say nothing, Mercy. I have all well in hand,” Mordecai whispered into my ear and jerked his head toward the house. A deputation made its way down the lawn, but not to welcome us. Two short men in familiarly plain shirts and breeches (we had not, as I had begun to wonder, drifted into the China Seas) rushed toward us, gesturing with their hands, waving us away. Both had rosy faces, hands dredged in flour, and smelled of warm spices. One man wiped his hands on his apron. As they arrived at the dock, the other man brandished a bunch of greenstuff in a threatening manner.

  “The house requires nothing, thank you. No visitors, no visitors. Cast off, if you please, and move on. You’ll be better off.”

  “Should ask your master first, shouldn’t you?”

  The men looked up to see Captain Avery standing on deck above them, smiling, one raised arm holding a chair aloft by its leg. It was a lavish chair of lustrous black and gold, its curved arms finished with the gilt heads of sphinxes of the Nile. The mate gestured with a sweep of his arm toward a full set of chairs in the same style, arrayed in a line on the deck beside a handsome table with feet ending in claws.

  “The latest from the Continent. Mr. Stark would be most disappointed to have missed us. And his daughter, too,” said the captain. Behind him, the mate now held up to his breast a gown of pleated white silk and minced along the deck with swaying hips and fluttering eyes.

  The two cooks hesitated, whispering to each other. The mate, having tossed aside his gown, suddenly flourished a brace of new copper-bottomed pans. The men’s faces brightened. They came aboard and began to rummage through a crate of cookware. Meantime, Captain Avery started to off-load the table and chairs.

  “Pardon me …” Behind me, I heard an unfamiliar voice. I turned to find the man in the jade-green robe hurrying along the dock toward us with long, stiff strides. The scarlet barge was docked behind our brig.

  Though the man was not Oriental, he wore wide scarlet silken trousers beneath the jade robe and pointed slippers of embroidered silk whose long tips quivered at each step. Mordecai stood beside me as the man approached. They were of a similar size and bearing, and each boasted a pigtail, one pale, one dark. The man bowed first to Mordecai, pausing for a moment with a troubled look. They might have been two sides to a single coin. He then bowed to me, sweeping off his pointed hat. The pigtail came away with it. Beneath the hat curled a powdered wig. Beneath the wig, a face that made Mordecai seem the fairest of men. It was all sharp angles and harsh planes, the skin rough and pale and faintly gray, though he was a young man. I judged him to be near Mordecai’s true age. It was a face that might have been hewn from the granite on the islands that the Starks had worked so hard to smooth. I thought that if I touched his cheek I might slice my finger open.

  The man paused before he reached us, stopping next to the Able and calling up to the mate. Though I could not quite overhear their conversation, it appeared that he was asking eager questions, pointing at various features of the Able and smiling at the mate’s responses. It seemed odd that a man dressed as he was and traveling in such a fanciful craft as a scarlet barge would have any interest in a merchant vessel.

  “Roderick Stark. May I know your names?”

  Though his manner was formal, his voice was friendly. His eyes didn’t leave me. They were by far his best feature, a clear, deep blue.

  Mordecai bowed in turn. “Mortimer Palmer, at your service. Permit me to introduce my sister, Miss Luna Palmer.”

  I stared at Mordecai—Palmer?—then dropped a silent curtsey. Mr. Stark bowed again and lifted my hand to his lips. I found it difficult not to shy my hand away. It was not so much the presence of the repulsive as the lack of something essential, a bleak and blasted look.

  “I beg your pardon for our unheralded arrival,” said Mordecai. “I am penning an article, ‘Great Houses of the Atlantic Seacoast,’ for Harper’s Monthly, and it would certainly not be complete without the Stark manse.” Roderick didn’t seem to be listening; his eyes were still on me. I turned away and tried to look absorbed in the movements of Captain Avery, who headed whistling up the lawn, a chair in each hand and one balanced on his head.

  “Might we be permitted to sketch the grounds?” Mordecai was asking, nodding toward the portfolio he carried under one arm. It was tied shut and filled with large sheets of paper, some of which stuck out from its edges. I recognized the corner of a drawing of a narwhal tusk from my lessons and furtively tucked it inside.

  Roderick finally turned to Mordecai. “Great houses, you say?” He thought for a moment and laughed, shaking his head back and forth. “I think, actually, that my parents would be delighted. You must stay to tea.”

  Roderick offered his arm to me and led us up the walk toward the house, Mordecai trailing behind. As we walked along the allée of oaks, I turned to look for Crow and saw him hopping from branch to branch behind me. He dropped down from the last to ride my shoulder.

  We entered the house through a narrow arched opening in the yew hedge, directly into a deep, broad hall of double height. The dense hedge admitted little sun. Daylight washed only the top of the room, from the high windows that peeped above the hedge. The room below was lit with candles in sconces along the walls. My eyes adjusted to the low light. If the style of the exterior had held true inside, we would have entered a sober hall of simple solid furnishings, unadorned walls, and bare board floors. Instead the room was awash in furniture. Tables, commodes, armchairs, bureaus, settees of every description, gilded and carved, tufted and swagged, filled the space
from wall to wall. Some items were arranged in groupings you might see in any house—divans and chairs facing one another to form seating areas—but with no space between and no one seated. The room was empty of people and had the air of a place not lived in for many years, though the furniture looked well dusted. Stacked side chairs rose here and there in towers; there were shoals of footstools and tea tables, reefs of bookless bookshelves that were crowded instead with bric-a-brac. Though I knew little of the decorative arts, only what I’d learned from a single page of etchings in our dictionary, I recognized several modes from decades past: the lavish curves of the Rococo; the restrained lines of the Neoclassical; Regency floral motifs and bronze chasing. The walls, too, were filled from top to bottom with portraits and landscapes in ponderous frames set hard upon each other and heavy mirrors that sent candlelight glinting along gilt surfaces. Crow surveyed the hall, selected a lofty perch on the frame of a large seascape, and lit there to tuck his head under his wing.

  Roderick swept his arm toward the door of a salon far across the hall.

  Mordecai bowed. “Too kind. But if I might beg your indulgence and remain outside? I noticed a perfect position from which to capture your magnificent façade with my pen: that charming garden seat among the oaks. And the light just now is perfect.”

  Roderick bowed, nodding, then turned back to me. Voices and the sound of cutlery on china carried across the hall. With a gesture, Roderick suggested that I should precede him across the hall. I began to struggle through the armoires and hassocks, sideboards and hat racks.

  Roderick noticed my faltering step and stopped, smiling.