by Rosie Thomas
When there was no response she tried, ‘Can’t we talk about adoption?’
‘We have talked about it. I don’t want to adopt.’
It was true. Through sleepless nights and dry-mouthed car journeys, and dinners that turned into a wasteland of crumbed table-cloths they had followed the same thread. Now they had wound their way into the heart of the labyrinth only to find there was no heart. There was only a blank wall and nowhere to go beyond it.
The desire for a fight had gone out of her. She was left with little except an aversion to the stink of rockweed and the boneyard of dead trees. A fisherman in his lobster boat puttered across the middle distance, turning a furrow of white water as he rounded in on his floats. ‘Okay,’ she said flatly. As an ending it couldn’t have been less of a whisper. ‘I think I’ll walk back now.’
Leonie stood up, straightening her back because sitting hunched over had put a crease in it. Above her she saw a woman steadily climbing the slope away from the shore. Her pale-coloured clothing showed like a shaft of light between the dark verticals of the spruce trunks. It was uncomfortable to think that she might have overheard them. ‘There’s someone up there. It must be one of the Kellys.’ She remembered the name of the people who owned the isolated cottage set up on a ridge above the inlet.
Tom didn’t look. ‘No, the Kellys never come up here in August. They think it’s too crowded.’
‘They must have let the place, then.’ The woman had moved out of sight now.
‘If they have, it’s the first time in living memory,’ Tom said coldly, as if it was a matter of importance.
Leonie bent her head. After a minute she scrambled away from him up the ledges of rock and began the walk back to the beach.
There came a day not so long after the Dolphin crossed the Line when Captain Gunnell ordered the boats down. The look-out had sung out at the sighting of a pair of good whales, a cow and a calf, about a mile to leeward of the ship. It was a bright day with a good sea running and the oarsmen soon brought the boats to the spot where the cow had sounded.
Matthias Plant gave the order to his men to rest easy. At the prow the boat steerer was ready with his harpoon and all was silent as they waited upon the whale.
Of a sudden there came a great boiling of the water to the stem of the boat as she blew, and it seemed but a second after that her great head reared up and Matthias’s boat was caught dead in her eye. Her jaws were open wide but Heggy Burris the boat steerer did not delay an instant in hurling the iron true to the flank, where it lodged fast. Some blood ran from the wound but the beast seemed not to feel it, for all her attention was fixed on the fate of her calf.
Another boat had got the calf fast and it thrashed pathetically enough in the swell, its head dipping beneath the water as its life faded and a great wash of its blood darkened the sea.
The sight launched the mother whale into a transport. Her back arched into a mountain standing proud of the water between the boats and the dying calf. Then Burris was forward with his second iron, thrown as true as the first and the lines made a great run as her flukes went up and beat the water into a torrent of spray, which left the men blinded for an instant.
Matthias shouted, ‘Forward, forward all!’
The line begin to whip out of the tubs and the experienced hands knew for sure she was going away, an ugly whale that might lead them the dance of all their lives.
Then there was a scream that would sound in every man’s dreams until his dying day, as the line fouled and a loop of it caught around the body of Martin the bowman as he bent over his oar.
In an instant he was snatched overboard, gone after her as the whale dived, and his companions were left in the boat staring like stone men at the smoking line about the loggerhead, until William Corder tremblingly cooled it with water from his bailing bucket as Mr Plant had reminded him to do a dozen times.
The whale plunged many fathoms, taking the bowman down with her and boat careening in their wake.
Heggy Burris began shouting like the devil, with his lance at the ready, ‘Pull one, pull all, for here she comes again,’ and they readied themselves to haul on the line as their only chance of seeing Martin again. William bent to the frantic work like the others, giving the sum of his meagre strength to the task.
The whale broke the water not one hundred feet away and every man gave his all to bring the boat round to take her head and head.
It was this turn of direction that slackened the line for a brief moment, so releasing Martin from his terrible noose. He rolled up, to surface like a log, and Matthias roared the order to row to his rescue. The men did not need to be told twice. Even as the craft flew across the width of water the whale went flukes up again and for all the two harpoons lodged deep in her side she was going at an even greater rate than before. The line flew out once more but there was yet enough in the tubs to allow them to reach Martin where he floated and to haul him over the stern and into the boat.
It was a terrible sight.
The line had bitten through coat, shirt and flesh alike, and was near to having cut the poor man clean in two. As it was, his chest was hacked open as if with a butcher’s knife and the rib-bones laid bare. A mess of blood bubbled and welled out – it seemed to William’s horrified eyes more than a man’s veins could hold – and ran into the bottom of the boat to crimson all their feet. The poor fellow gave a cough and his eyelids fluttered, and Heggy Burris cried out, ‘Dear God, he lives.’
But even as the words were spoken Martin’s mouth opened and a groan and a great spout of blackened blood and sea-water spilled out of him together, and he lay still. He lived no longer.
William Corder watched all of this with staring eyes and the back of his hand pressed up to his mouth.
‘Hold hard,’ Matthias bellowed at him. There were other matters to attend to if they were not all to end up in the same way as Martin the bowman. The whale was still running away from them and they were fast being drawn from the other boats in the wake of this leviathan. The boat steerer was calling for the drags to slow her rush, and Matthias saw to it that William and the other two men worked the line regardless of the grim cargo they bore with them.
The whale flew on like an arrow and at such a speed that the water rose up in a wall on either side of the boat. The tubs would soon be empty of line and there was no other boat within reach to bend on with her own lines and help save them, and the fine whale.
William Corder cooled the flying line with water from his bucket, but his face had no more colour than the dead man’s.
At length Matthias had the bitter choice between giving the order to cut the line and thus surrendering whale, whaleline and two harpoons, as well as his bowman, or to risk being dragged under, and losing the boat itself and the lives of five more men. He gave the command, the lines were cut and, freed of her tormentor at last, the vessel wallowed in the swell like a porpoise.
The Dolphin rode three miles off to their stern. It was a bitter hard row back to her, with Martin lying cut almost in half at their feet. The sight of William Corder’s face touched some chord of pity buried deep in Matthias Plant’s hardened heart and to hide it the mate let out a great bluster of rage. He cursed the boy squarely for his softness, so that William bowed his head over his oar to conceal the shock and grief that racked him.
The men carried the body of their companion back on board the Dolphin and that night it was William Corder who sewed him into his sailcloth shroud. The last stitch was made through his nose, in the whalemen’s way, to be sure that the man was truly dead. Yet no man could have lived an hour with wounds like Martin the bowman’s. Before his body was given back to the sea William Corder tenderly kissed the cloth over the man’s face. Matthias Plant was the only one of the men who witnessed this last tribute, and that because he was secretly watching the boy and wondering what had led such a tender-hearted creature into the cruel chase for whales.
Captain Gunnell read out the funeral service and the corpse wa
s slipped over the side. William turned away from the rail as soon as the water closed over it and silently sought his bunk down in the forecastle.
May was sick of reading, sick of her bedroom, of every mute piece of furniture and spider crack in the walls, and when she left it and went outside she felt like a snail winkled out of its shell to perish in the heat. The beach was a place of glaring light and intrusive happy voices, and the house was full of shadows that frightened her because they were impenetrable. She crept restlessly from one place to the next, never finding a refuge in which to be comfortable.
The three books lay on the bedroom shelf. She didn’t bother to replace Doone’s diary in its hiding-place any longer. It refused to give up its secrets to her, so she retaliated by leaving it in the open. Voyages of the Dolphin was significant because it had been in Doone’s possession, but she couldn’t fathom what it meant or why it mattered. What she had read of it was gruesome or boring, in equal parts
The other book Hannah Fennymore had lent her, In the Country of the Pointed Firs, she had read in a couple of sittings. It was quite short and easier than the whaling book. There was a lot about picking wild herbs and going visiting, but two stories from it stuck in her mind even though she tried not to think about them.
One was about the grave of a young woman who had cut herself off from the world because of some secret sin, and had lived the rest of her life and died alone on one of the bay islands. The image of the deserted place and the grassed hump of ground in the corner of a field was too vivid in May’s mind. One of the characters said of it, ‘A growin’ bush makes the best gravestone. I expect that wormwood always stood for somebody’s solemn monument.’ May had no idea what wormwood might be, but it spoke eerily of worms and coffin wood.
The other story was to do with a woman, quite an old woman herself, rowing out to visit her mother on some remote island. As soon as the boat drew near enough to be seen the ancient mother was at her cottage door, her handkerchief a white speck fluttering in the distance. The daughter smilingly said to her companion, ‘There, you never get over bein’ a child long’s you have a mother to go to.’
The words had made May buckle with grief. Even when she thought about them now and about never having a mother to go to, her mouth stretched and saliva flooded her tongue.
She hadn’t got past being a child, and now she was stopped dead, stuck in some midway place where nothing seemed to be within control nor ever to change. No talking to a tree, even one that reminded her of Alison, was going to help her. May was afraid and the worst of it was that she was frightened of herself, because she didn’t understand what was happening to her.
She left the books again and walked out of the house. From the land side of the porch she could see across the gardens to a corner window at the rear of Elizabeth’s house. Suddenly she remembered that she had told Elizabeth about the woman on the island and Elizabeth had responded with some embarrassing question about love, before telling a long story about sneaking out to meet some guy here in the Captain’s House.
Listening to anything would be better than going round in circles alone.
‘Hi,’ May said, when Elizabeth opened her door. ‘I, um, I thought I’d just, kind of, come by. Is it okay?’
Elizabeth thought how sad the child looked. Her chin and bottom lip jutted out, ready for a rejection, but her eyes were imploring. ‘Come on in.’
The girl followed Elizabeth through the house. In the evening room she marched to the window and stared out at the garden. ‘What’s wormwood?’ she asked abruptly.
‘It’s a plant. Artemisia is the botanical name. Why?’
‘Does it grow on graves?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose it could do, but I’ve never heard of it. Look, there’s a bush outside.’
It was a silvery white mound, dotted with yellow flowers. Just a garden plant, nothing more. May studied it in silence; then, without turning to look at Elizabeth, she said in a low voice, ‘I want to know about the woman I saw on the island. I can’t forget the way she looked at me. You know something about her, don’t you?’
‘Yes,’ Elizabeth said. The softness of her voice made May shiver. ‘I saw her fifty years ago.’
‘But…’
‘I can tell you the story, if you like.’
May did turn pleading eyes on her now. ‘Do you have to make it a story? I’d kind of like to know about things for real.’
‘How do we know what’s real, May? Anyhow, I don’t know any other way. I was told it as a story myself, by my grandmother, Elizabeth Page Freshett.’
May understood that she wasn’t going to get any matter-of-fact explanations. This old woman with her milky eyes looking back into the past, and her forebears and their murky, staring portraits, were all a part of this place, wound up tight with it, and she was delivering herself up just by being in the house with them. Daring a glance around the room she saw that everything in it was old, and looked as if it had sat in the same place for ever, regulated by the ticking of the clock and the crawl of sunlight across polished wood. The door of the room was shut tight. She thought the old woman might see her shiver. ‘Go on, then,’ she ordered in a loud voice.
‘I told you how I fell in love,’ Elizabeth began. She wasn’t looking at May any longer, but away to one side, at a little army of photographs in silver frames, drawn up on the lid of the piano. ‘I was unhappy because I couldn’t marry him. I wanted to, and I should have gone ahead and done it, but I was a coward.
‘I was going away to Europe for a year. I didn’t often go out on the water, but I wanted to get to Moon Island and look back at the beach and the houses to get a picture in my mind, one that I could carry with me, do you understand?
‘I took my father’s little rowboat. It was a misty day, not a regular fog but one of those light, silvery mists that lie in wreaths over the water. I drew the boat up and sat down on a rock. I don’t think I can remember feeling such desolation before or since.’
There had been a seductive shimmer to the sea. The implacability of the water’s fall and rise was soothing and Elizabeth watched until she felt she had become a part of it. Slowly, she had stood up and drifted to the water’s edge. The bluff and her father’s house looked a long way off, and the pain of her indecision receded too.
Dreamily she’d thought, I could lie down in the water and let it carry me away.
Her shoes were already wet, and her ankles.
Then the certainty that she was being watched had made her turn away from the hypnotic rolling of the waves.
A woman was standing at the edge of the trees. She had a pale oval face and her eyes were sunk deep in her head. Her hair was pulled cruelly back, so her skin seemed stretched over the bones. She was wearing wide trousers, which covered her feet, and a pale-coloured coarse shirt that hid the lines of her body. She was a stranger, Elizabeth knew she must be because she had never seen her before in seventeen summers, but she seemed to belong absolutely to the place. She had held up her hand and beckoned, and Elizabeth had begun to walk up the slope of shingle towards her, glancing back over her shoulder to the distant windows of her father’s house and the dark Captain’s House next to it.
When she’d looked up again the woman had gone. Elizabeth reached the spot where she had been standing and searched between the trees, even calling out Are you there? but there was only the sound of her own voice, the sea-birds and the waves. Her feet and legs were soaking and the cold had made her shiver.
‘That was her. That was the woman I saw,’ May cried. Then she stopped short and chewed at the corner of her mouth as she took a reckoning. ‘But I don’t believe it. It was fifty years ago?’
Elizabeth understood that to May it was an aeon of time. She nodded her head.
May sneered bravely, ‘So you’re saying this woman is, like, a ghost, right? Like The X-Files or something?’ Only she couldn’t disguise the flash of fear in her eyes.
‘The Passamaquoddy Indians believed that the is
land was haunted, or possessed. It was one of their sacred places. Then, in the nineteenth century the whalemen had a small settlement on the seaward side, just a few rough huts for shelter and a tavern. The only building here on the bluff in those days was yours. The Captain’s House.’
‘Yeah?’ May shrugged. But she knew she was caught. She didn’t want to be, she wished she could unlearn what she had already seen and discovered. But Doone and the white-faced woman were much too close to her now; she didn’t know who would step which way, whether they would slip into her ordinary world or whether she would mistakenly break through a membrane and become part of theirs. The boundaries of normality were dissolving, fearfully, as if they were no more solid than a morning’s fog. She wished with all her heart for them to be in place again.
Elizabeth Newton was waiting. Her chair was placed with its back to the light, so May couldn’t see her face properly. She was afraid of Elizabeth, too, and of the other spectres of old age and resignation. She wanted to jump out of her tapestry armchair with its feet like claws and run out of the house, but she didn’t move.
Instead, she sat still, listening to the clock ticking. ‘What did you do after you saw the woman?’
‘I asked my mother first of all. She was a very rational person, May. She believed in everyone and everything having their proper places in the world. If anyone had lived on the island after the whalers were gone she would have known about it. And she didn’t know, therefore no such person existed.’
‘And so you went to your grandmother, right? What was her name?’
‘Elizabeth Page Freshett. I was named for her.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Come into the dining-room with me. I’ll show you her picture.’
Reluctantly, May followed the old woman into the next room. The dining-room was a gloomy place with high-backed chairs ranged down a long table in expectation of guests who would never arrive.
‘I think I told you that her husband was Senator Freshett, my paternal grandfather. That’s his portrait above the sideboard.’