The Rathbones

by Janice Clark

  “How would you like to chase them again? From a ship, a whaleship.”

  Benadam stared at him, openmouthed. Erastus began to talk. The two sat long over the fire, the boy’s eyes shining as Erastus offered his bargain. At some of the details the boy frowned and hesitated; after a long silence, he stood and grasped Erastus’s hand.

  Now, the day after he had brought the men back to Naiwayonk, Erastus watched them begin to settle into their cottages. His eye went again and again to Benadam. He was not like the other men Erastus had gathered; he had not been very interested in how much gold the bargain included, like the others had. His eagerness was all to do with details about the ship and about going after the whales. Though Benadam stood idly in his doorway like the other men, looking out to sea, Erastus regarded him uneasily.

  There had been little for the seven men to do since they arrived. Rathbone House was swabbed spotless each day from top to bottom, its floors slippery not with the blubber of whales but with fresh polish. Conch swabbed in broad strokes, Crab following behind flogging the wood dry. The new cottages were equally well maintained, though by Fourth-Oar, not Conch and Crab; they were afraid of the sea and would not go so near it.

  Each cottage was provided with furniture in the reborn classical mode, shipped from Philadelphia: oval tables of polished mahogany with slim, fluted legs; narrow chairs with backs carved like lyres; beds anchored at each corner by slender mahogany columns and piled with snowy linens. Each cottage was fitted with beautifully joined cabinetry built flush into the smooth plaster walls by the crews of carpenters, cabinets in which the men’s meager clothes took up little space. No sooner had each man risen from his bed than Fourth-Oar made it up. No sooner had he seated himself at table than a hearty breakfast appeared, to fortify his flesh for the tasks ahead, cooked by Bemus: basins of steaming burgoo, stacks of toasted soft tack, platters of grilled smelt.

  When the sun sank low and the sea calmed to a smooth sheet of silver, Erastus, who had retreated to the house during the brightest part of the day, returned to his chair on the broad lawn overlooking the water and seated himself, eyes on the horizon. Behind him stood Bemus and Fourth-Oar, watching too.

  In the red disk of sun on the edge of the sea a dark speck grew. A whaleboat glided on light airs toward Naiwayonk harbor from the southwest. The boat moved slowly, its sail barely stirring, aided by the oars of the boatman. It moved in a series of jerks, favoring its starboard side, before at last gliding onto the shingle.

  A group of girls stepped from the boat onto the strand. Steersman stepped out after them, his twisted torso accounting for the craft’s irregular rowing. Enough light remained for Erastus and the men to see them, silhouetted against the sky: seven females, all tall and pale, in gowns loomed of undyed wool. Their skin was not white but rather the pearly colors of shells found in dimly lit water or trapped beneath a reef. If he had not known them, Erastus would have been hard-pressed to guess their ages. Their faces had a watery, shifting appearance and a faint abalone sheen; their bodies were all slender in the same ageless way, though Erastus knew them to range in years from nineteen to twenty-one.

  Some were Erastus’s cousins, some his sisters—which were which, he didn’t know. Eleven infants all told had been born in the barracks of Rathbone House. They hatched in clusters each winter, like cod. They were brought upstairs in batches to the cradle in Lydia’s room, where Bemus looked after them all. Lydia had named Verity and Erastus—the only two babies she could bear to look at—before she drowned. Bemus had named all the rest: the twin boys were Conch and Crab; the girls Abalone, Wentle, and Limpet arrived the next winter; followed the next winter by a third batch: Scallop, Periwinkle, and the twins Cowrie and Coral. Their mothers were Claudia, Julia, and Sophia. Who their fathers were, Erastus didn’t know, other than that they were his uncles or cousins.

  The young women trod slowly up the beach with different degrees of lurch and sway, their gaits as varied as their hues. They moved as creatures might who lived far under the sea, where the pressure is great. One girl’s stride matched that of the sailor who accompanied her. She shared the same leeward twist, though his infirmity was due to an encounter with a whale, hers an outcome of inbreeding. Still, each girl was pleasing in her own way: one with thick white lashes and a smooth skein of pearly hair to her waist, another whose skin had a coral tinge that complemented her rosy irises.

  The last two girls stepped from the rear of the boat, trailing behind the others. They wore long capes with hoods that shadowed their faces. Their skin was pied, like dappled light on water. Erastus was not sure whether the mottled appearance of their skin was caused by the clouds now scudding past the rising moon or whether they were more sea tortoise than girl. He hoped it was only nervousness that caused the judder of their eyes, the tremor in their steps as they crossed the sand.

  Bemus, who had been busy in the house until now, went down to greet the girls and walked with them, giving one his arm. A few other girls cried out and clung to him; he petted them all, smiling. He was fond of them, though they had been so much trouble as infants—always fretful and ill, slow to walk, slow to understand. Though Bow-Oar had decreed after the birth of his golden daughters that henceforth all Rathbone girls would live, Bemus had been sorely tempted to revert to the old ways. The first batch had been different. Erastus and Verity were quick, healthy, no trouble at all. The twin boys Conch and Crab were a little slow but not difficult. Their mothers had had nothing to do with any of the children, staying downstairs with the men. After the third batch was born, Bemus had realized he couldn’t take care of any more. He’d put Claudia, Julia, and Sophia on the packet to Boston one spring morning, their purses full of gold, and they hadn’t been seen since.

  As the babies grew, Steersman and Fourth-Oar glimpsed them on the stairs or in the garden, and began to grumble to Bemus. They were afraid of the white children. They began to whisper about a curse. Fourth-Oar said it had all started years ago, when Bow-Oar and his brothers brought home those Stark girls.

  Bemus decided to move the girls out of the house. He thought of a little cove on the coast a few miles west of Rathbone House, tucked out of the wind and out of easy sight from sea or land, with a freshwater spring among its rocks. When Bemus was younger, the Rathbone ships had sometimes stopped there on the way out to sea to gather eggs from the nests of the white birds that sheltered in the caves that pocked the rocky cove. He moved the girls there and hired a woman from Stonington to help care for them. When the girls were older, and the more capable could take care of the less, the woman had gone back to her village, and Bemus had visited the cove once a week, bringing what the girls needed, or sent Captain Avery in his stead. The first, healthiest batch—Verity and Erastus, Conch and Crab—stayed at Rathbone House.

  Erastus glanced back at the house, at the windows on the top floor, but all were dark. Verity had not known about her cousins for as long as he had. The girls had all been moved to Birch Rock when Erastus and Verity were still babies themselves. The girls had been a secret for many years before Erastus, when he was ten or so, caught Bemus off guard one day. Bemus was loading supplies in a boat to take to the island, and Erastus had made him tell the whole story. Verity had not known about them until she was fourteen. She had seen Bemus pressing a dozen linen shifts, too small to be her own, and had made him tell her, too. She had wanted to bring all the girls back to Rathbone House and wouldn’t listen to any of Bemus’s arguments; the girls wouldn’t have liked it, he said, in the bright house, after the quiet and dark of the caves; they had everything they needed and were quite content; they would miss their birds. Verity begged to at least be allowed to visit the girls, but Bemus was afraid it would be far too upsetting for them.

  Verity had tried to get Erastus to help her convince Bemus to bring the girls to live in the house. “They’re your cousins,” she had said, crying. “Some of them are probably your sisters.” But he had felt little. He did not know them at all. Any more than he knew h
is own mother, whichever she was of the three. He had no memory of any of them. Verity had pleaded with Bemus for months, but he wouldn’t be moved.

  As much as she had wanted the girls to come home when they were younger, Verity had refused to come down to greet them now that they had finally returned. She wanted nothing to do with Erastus’s plan, and had not left her room since morning. A wave of doubt ran through him. Maybe it would have been better to leave them on their island. But no. This needed to happen, before it was too late.

  Now the seven suitors leaned out from their doorways over the water, straining for a clearer view of the girls in the sinking light. Instead of their normal jerseys and corded trousers, the men were all dressed in fresh white shirts with brocade waistcoats and moleskin trousers, with hair brushed neatly back, beards trimmed. Each held a nosegay of beach plum and glasswort. The seventh suitor, Benadam Gale, wore his work clothes of old blue cotton bleached by sea and sun; none of the clothes Erastus had ordered were large enough to fit him.

  The seven girls, weaving their way across the lawn, were briskly herded by Steersman into a neat line facing Erastus. Bemus, in a guernsey frock, gray pigtail freshly braided, trolleyed a tea tray across the lawn and offered a cup to each of the girls. They stood quietly, sipping from their cups, nibbling at ship’s biscuits. A few turned their heads to stare at the suitors in their cottages. One, tired from her short journey, sank to sit on the lawn. Erastus rose and greeted each girl, taking her by the hand, speaking a few words of welcome, regarding each thoughtfully. He took a frail young woman with coiled white braids by the shoulders and gently moved her from the end of the line to a place between the coral-tinted girl and the taller of the two in capes.

  “Welcome, Limpet, Abalone, Wentle, Scallop, Periwinkle, Cowrie, and Coral, welcome.”

  One girl smiled, her eyes rolling back; the others only stood quietly.

  Erastus examined the line of girls once more. Finally he moved one, the sturdiest in appearance, to the ocean-most end of the line. She stood straight and still, though her gaze wandered. Bemus followed as Erastus went down the line of girls, indicating to each to bend her head, placing on each a chaplet woven of sea oats and sandbur. Erastus studied the gowns in which the girls were dressed, which Bemus had ordered from Mouse Island. They were made from plain, undyed wool but finely crafted. Erastus briefly regretted not ordering true chiton robes, such as the temple virgins wore in the friezes of ancient Attica, but it would have taken longer than he wanted to wait. He was, however, pleased that his timing had gone according to plan, so that the suitors would first behold their brides in the gentle light of a fading day.

  Bemus led the line of girls back to the whaleboat on which they had arrived and helped seat them on the benches, in the order determined by Erastus. Steersman pushed off from the beach and the boat turned to glide alongside the dock, toward the cottages. Dusk was falling. In each cottage a lantern had been lit; each of the seven doorways glowed warm against a violet sky. As the boat reached the first cottage, Steersman lifted the first girl to her suitor, who was waiting on his steps. The tide was full; each man, standing on his top step, stood a few inches above the sea. The boat, not stopping, moved on to the next cottage, and the next. In a minute or so all the girls had been delivered and all the doors closed.

  All but the last. The seventh suitor stood in his doorway, so large that he blocked the light of the lantern inside. The boatman began to hand up the seventh girl but Benadam held up a huge hand. The girl faltered back into the boat. The suitor looked straight at Erastus and pointed up at Rathbone House.

  Erastus turned to follow his gaze. Though the bottom of the house lay in shadow, the top was lit by the long warm rays of the setting sun. Another girl, an eighth girl, leaned out a window.

  If the seven brides had been whole and healthy, had their thin veins swelled, they might have resembled Verity Rathbone. She was the bright counterpart to the girl who swayed back into the boat, who could have served as her shadow: tall, slender, her hair not white but of the palest blond, her skin a healthful pink. Anyone who saw her would have thought her flawless. Her eyes were as green as Moses’s in his prime.

  The seventh suitor, still pointing at Verity, said in a clear, loud voice, “That one.”

  Erastus lurched from his seat and began to thump with his canes back and forth along the dock. He frowned, shook his head slowly, and stopped, looking keenly at the seventh suitor.

  “No, Mr. Gale. She wouldn’t suit you. Would you care, perhaps, to trade with another man? Your neighbor’s bride has a more pleasing form by far.”

  The seventh suitor only kept pointing.

  Erastus paced, removing his hat and running a hand through his thin white hair.

  “The fourth maiden, what of her? Surely you observed her lovely coloring.”

  The seventh suitor shook his head and kept pointing. Erastus stopped pacing and sat down again, folding his arms across his chest and speaking firmly.

  “You have signed, you know. It’s too late.”

  The seventh suitor didn’t move.

  Erastus leaned forward in his chair and called out in a loud whisper that carried across the water. He need not have worried that the other men would hear or, if they did hear, in the now-dark cottages, would care.

  “What if I were to double the gold? Triple it?”

  The seventh suitor still pointed.

  Erastus looked up at the window and back at Benadam. He sank into his chair. He shook his head.

  Benadam slowly lowered his hand and stared at Erastus, his arms held tense, his body still. He stood in thought for a long moment, then looked toward the skiff that still hovered nearby, the rejected maiden sitting quietly in its stern. He held out his hand. Steersman brought the skiff neatly alongside. The girl placed a timid foot on the step and, when she was sure that she wouldn’t again be expelled, gave her hand to Benadam. Together they entered the cottage and the door closed behind them; a moment later, the lantern was doused. Bemus and the other old whalemen headed up the hill to the house, whose windows now glowed with lantern light. Erastus sat for some time in his chair, his eye on the seventh cottage. Then he, too, headed for the house. The sun sank, the dock was silent, and dusk deepened to dark.

  In the morning six doors opened in six cottages; six men stretched and yawned; six brides kept to their beds. The door to the seventh cottage didn’t open. The seventh girl, her mysteries unplumbed, lay alone. Erastus’s sleek schooner, the Argo, was missing. Benadam Gale, the seventh suitor, was gone. And so was Verity Rathbone.

  • •

  Summer came and went. A brief autumn flared among the trees in the thin woods above the shore, then faded; the air grew chill. The six suitors stayed in the cottages with their brides, though they were ill at ease in the cool white rooms, away from their boats and tackle. They treated their dwellings with the deference of man to virgin, perching on the edges of fragile chairs, carefully scraping their boots on the shells at their thresholds, reluctant to enter their own houses. When it came to their wives, however, the men didn’t falter. They relished rocking back and forth on their pale brides, eyes closed, dreaming of being at sea. Erastus, who had kept to the house in the weeks after Verity disappeared, emerged at last to patrol the dock, craning up to peer through the little windows at the white girls laying on their beds or lingering at the sea doors, their bellies slowly swelling.

  As winter came on, the men wearied of the cold white walls of their cottages, a white that, against the hot blue Mediterranean sky, would have served as relief. Hungry for color, they stained the walls with what they could find, with fish blood and sea cows’ milk, with blueberries from a nearby bog, so that their rooms grew rosy, or creamy, or the blue-white of the skin of the fifth wife. Though nervous at first (their bargains with Erastus included strict confinement to the cottages), the men soon realized that Erastus was not keeping close watch; he spent little time outdoors in the sunlight. They slipped out for driftwood, scavenged fo
r timber in the dwindling pines above the shoreline, and passed the time building rough chairs and sturdy bedsteads to replace the delicate furniture in their rooms. Over time, the cottages began to resemble, rather than the temples of Greece, the fishermen’s cottages of those islands. In the early mornings the men stood in their doorways and looked longingly out to the few small craft that trawled the shoals, their fingers itching to be at work.

  As the brides’ due dates drew near, Erastus called back a few of the crews of carpenters who had built the cottages to add a third story to Rathbone House. Above the Georgian red brick of the second story, in the ever-cooler autumn air, rose a top floor like a Greek temple, with fluted columns and capitals of the Doric order. Along its front, under the peaked cornice, a man perched on a scaffolding wielded chisel and mallet, carving a frieze of Poseidon. The sea god wielded his trident above the waves, his great scaly tail curling behind him, his Nereids leaping and gliding about him, though somewhat stiffly, being carved not from fluid marble but from sturdy oak by a Boston man renowned for his ship figureheads. His nymphs resembled tavern trollops more than a god’s handmaidens, Erastus thought, but he was pleased with the austere white of the painted wood. Erastus never knew that the original friezes on which his were modeled had been as brightly painted as any ship’s figurehead, and the temples within which they stood, too. Within the shining white walls, all along the perimeter, the carpenters began to frame out a series of rooms. As the work progressed, Erastus would stand at the top of the landing, turning in a circle, envisioning each of the small white rooms as it would look when finished, each with a crib, each crib with slats like thin white columns and soft new quilts stuffed with the down of young gulls.