16. Flemish Feathers
NATHANIEL AND AZUBA WERE SEATED AT A CAFÉ overlooking the River Scheldt. Wild ducks skimmed low over the water; blackbirds clung to sedges tossed by the wake of passing ships. Azuba wore a cobweb grey dress sprinkled with tiny red, blue and green flowers. She lifted the silver coffee pot. Prisms sparked from her diamond.
“Sometimes,” she said, filling Nathaniel’s cup, “I can’t believe I’m not hungry. I find myself thinking that soon I’ll start to be hungry again . . . That’s such a dainty cup! It looks like a thimble in your hand.” She reached across the table to put a hand to his wrist, felt a sear in her belly as their warm skin touched.
He smiled at her and set down his cup without drinking. He took her hand and looked away. She saw pain in his eyes.
“I have something to tell you,” he said. He looked at a barque being towed upriver by a sidewheeler. Captain and mates stood at the starboard rail. She saw a muscle move in his cheek, the narrowing of his squint lines.
“I’ve booked passage home for you and the children. I’m taking a cargo of coal to Hong Kong. I’ve engaged a new crew, although I’ll keep my officers, my steward and Mr. Lee. You’ll leave from here on the London-bound steamer. I’ve secured rooms in one of the best London hotels. I’ve booked passage on the Liverpool, the same ship that Mr. Walton came on, as you recall. She’s bound for New York on September 15. From New York, you’ll take the schooner to Saint John. I’ll leave for Hong Kong shortly afterwards.”
She stared at him. “I can’t believe you would do this,” she said. “I can’t believe you would decide on all of this without one word to me.”
A woman at the next table glanced at them.
“How can you,” she whispered. She began to mash her blackberry tart with the back of her fork.
He reached over and lifted the fork from her fingers, laid it on his own plate. He took her hand and turned the ring on her finger. “I thought of the children,” he said.
“I think of the children, too. We could discuss them together, you and I.” She pulled away her hand. She felt a sickening feeling sweep over her, her own diminishment—as if she had lost everything she had gained and were once again the girl she had been when she married him.
“Well. We’ll discuss it now, then. I know that parting will be hard. But you must understand, now, why I did not want a family on board my ship.”
Through her fury, she caught a cast in his eyes, like pleading, begging for her understanding in spite of the harsh tone in his voice.
“I can’t be both things—captain and father, captain and husband. I’m divided in my attention, in my responsibilities. Sometimes I have to act in ways I’d rather you didn’t see.”
“But on the other hand, Nathaniel, you’ve seen that I have a role to play on your ship. I might not be Mrs. Marshall, but had I not been there, you might—”
“I would not have killed him,” he said. Belligerent, a flush of colour burning beneath his eyes. They both glanced at the next table. “And for Carrie to have seen Andrew Moss lying dead on the floor of the cabin, laid out on the same place she played with her doll; for her to have been present when they stormed into our quarters; for my family to go without food—it was intolerable. Intolerable. I don’t know how other men do it.”
She watched the barque, now nearing the stone-walled Grand Basin. Her yards were festooned with men, as Traveller had been festooned with birds on the night that they waited for Nathaniel to return from the Isle of Wight.
He took her silence for acquiescence, and his voice lightened. “After a short, comfortable trip, Azuba, you’ll see your family. Bennett and Carrie will be with their grandparents and their cousins. You can open up the sail house. You can . . .”
He opened his mouth to continue, but she leaned across the table, her voice so low that it became like a musical phrase, low and dark. “You may be accustomed to loneliness. I’m not, nor do I ever wish to be. I don’t see it as an honourable attribute. Now I can picture your life, but you still can’t picture mine. At first you’ll be alive in the children’s minds—Carrie’s, anyway—oh, yes, and we’ll talk of all the wonders we saw, and the things you taught her, and what you did together. Her shining father. Then, after months have passed, I’ll show them your picture. This is your father. Remember him? But after a while they’ll barely remember. Bennett will never truly know you. As years go by, they’ll humour me. You’ll become nothing but a story. I’ll take them down to the cove. They’ll stand with me on the shore. I’ll gather feathers. I’ll point with them. Your father, I’ll say, is somewhere out there. Maybe this bird flew over his ship.” She paused, took a breath. “You know there’s a position waiting for you in either of two fine shipyards. You could live in the most beautiful house any couple could wish for. I had hoped that we would go home together and start our life as a family.”
His lips twisted downward within his beard. “Azuba, I am a sea captain. I know nothing else. I have no other skills. I have worked since I was a boy to become who I am today. Have you no knowledge of what I am capable of?”
“Yes,” she said. “I do. I do. But some men change their—”
“Ah,” he interrupted. “I see once again you are thinking of your admirable Mr. Walton.”
Contempt made his face ugly. She rose to her feet, lifting her skirts with both hands. A sparrow flew up from beneath the table, a crumb in its beak. She walked away, reckless with agitation, knowing that every person at the café watched her.
He did not follow her. She walked the few blocks back to the hotel, holding her parasol tipped to hide her face.
Lisette sat with her embroidery hoop. Bennett lay on a white blanket, pedalling his legs in the air as if seeking escape from his starched gown. Carrie knelt at the window. She rolled a toy horse and carriage along the sill.
Azuba shot her parasol into the elephant leg stand. Her hands were still shaking. “We’re going home.”
Lisette’s hands went to her chest. Carrie left her toy on the windowsill and slid from the window seat. “Are we going home to Whelan’s Cove, Mama? To our house?”
Azuba nodded.
“With Papa?”
“Papa is not coming with us. He is taking a load of coal to Hong Kong.”
Lisette covered her face with her hands, fanning her fingers so she could see Carrie from between them. Her eyes filled with tears.
“Mama! Why is she crying? She’ll meet everyone.”
“She won’t be coming with us, Carrie.”
And this, Azuba saw, was the end of the small, happy world assembled in the Hotel Antoine—the sunny, flower-filled rooms, the sound of church bells and carillons, the blue monkeys, the toy shops and clean dresses, Lisette’s warm voice with its French lilt. Carrie ran to Lisette. Lisette took her hands from her face and reached for Carrie.
“We can’t leave her, Mama!”
Azuba picked up the baby and walked to the window, her hand making circles on his back, comforting him although he was the only one not upset. The sunny square below was warped by her tears as she thought how Carrie’s sympathy for Lisette, and protest over her loss, was like a sketch whose faint shape would be filled with the full-coloured absence of her father.
Their trunks, hat boxes, carpet bags and sea chests were delivered to the suite.
“There,” Azuba told the porters, pointing. She stood in the middle of the room, arms crossed, watching the men as she had been used to observing Slason, or Mr. McVale. “And there, please.”
The calf-hide trunks darkened the elegant rooms, as if Traveller’s stuffy saloon had come into the suite. For days, the trunks remained opened, unfilled.
Azuba sat at her writing table.
“What are you doing, Mama?” Carrie asked, coming to lean against her, watching the pen’s nib cutting the paper.
“Just trying to make order of all this,” Azuba said. Her voice was tight. “What to take in the cabin, what to take with us but put in the hold . . .” What was to come later, but on another ship. What of Nathaniel’s should accompany him to Hong Kong, and what of his could be shipped home. Occasionally she would rise and begin making one pile, and then would change her mind and crumple her list and stand at the window, looking down on women walking in the square, bone-handled parasols held in gloved hands, the nets of their chignons glinting, skirts animate in the dust.
At the end of the day, Nathaniel was weary from the work of provisioning the ship. They avoided one another’s eyes, and he occupied himself with the children.
One evening, Carrie and Nathaniel sat at a low table, playing checkers. The air was warm, dense with carriage dust reddened by evening light.
“And then what?” Carrie said.
“Then I’ll be homeward bound, with a cargo of silk and rice and tea.”
“And tea sets!”
“And tea sets.”
“Toy tea sets?”
“Those, too. Coming home, I sail back down the South China Sea, across the Indian Ocean, around the cape of Good Hope and up the coast of Africa.”
Lisette came into the room, carrying Bennett. Azuba unbuttoned her dress and Lisette lowered the baby. He began to suckle, tiny hand spidered against the plump flesh, fingers flexing. The young woman paused; there was nothing left for her to do, and yet she lingered. Light from the window lay in the weave of her white cotton cap.
“Bonsoir,” she whispered. Her eyes were on the baby, and her lips were parted.
Nathaniel glanced up. His eyes, like Azuba’s, followed Lisette as she left the room, soundlessly save for the shiver of her skirt.
“And then I come home in time for Christmas.” He hitched himself closer to the table, propped his elbows on his knees as he squinted at the piece Carrie held. “Now if you put down that piece there, missy, your papa will be in terrible trouble.”
“Christmas?” She tilted her head and quirked her eyebrows. His pipe bobbed from the corner of his mouth.
“I meant next Christmas. The Christmas after this one.”
What was to happen next, Azuba saw, was something that Carrie understood but which had no meaning: as remote, as story-like, as any event in a child’s future.
Carrie, Azuba and Simon walked decorously, their feet unimpeded by muddy ruts or grassy hummocks or puddles. Simon’s walking stick tapped on the paving stones, and Azuba thought how accustomed she’d become to city life: the rumbling rattle of wagons, carriages and omnibuses; women’s skirts so voluminous they could barely pass one another without stepping into the street.
Simon was gazing up at the mullioned buildings, using his stick to mark the place he would next step. “I’m storing up my impressions,” he said. “Saint John will seem like a very small city.”
Azuba watched the tips of her shoes snouting from beneath her hoop skirt. They were on their way to visit the church of St. Jacques, which had over a hundred different kinds of marble and twenty-three altars.
“I’ve written to a studio in Saint John, requesting a position as an assistant.” He said. His steps quickened as he imagined his future. “I’ll be sailing back on the same ship I came over on.”
“The Liverpool? ”
On a balcony, a maid was holding the corners of an eiderdown, shaking it vigorously. A cloud of feathers came pouring from it, and she leaned over the balustrade. There was a tear in the fabric. Another maid appeared. They bundled the eiderdown and dragged it back through the window. Feathers circled on the air.
Simon reached up, made a snatch, but did not succeed in catching the feather. He thrust his walking stick at Azuba and rushed forward, picking feathers from the air, and then went down on one knee to pluck up a few more. People paused to stare. Azuba saw him, for the first time, from Nathaniel’s point of view.
“To draw,” he said. “Flemish feathers.”
And seeing him on his knees, she felt a spear of nostalgia, remembering Mr. Perkins, at Nathaniel’s command, gathering the knives that had clattered to the deck, and how she had been standing, panting, at the captain’s side.
Simon returned with a handful of feathers. He reached for his walking stick. “Thank you.”
“Simon, are you leaving on September fifteenth?”
“Yes, from London.”
“Oh, but . . . we’ll be on the same ship. Nathaniel won’t be with us. He’s going to Hong Kong, but we’re returning home. Me, Carrie and the baby.”
He stared. “Ah,” he said. “I don’t think . . .”
She saw his doubt. It rushed upon her what Nathaniel would feel, knowing that she and Mr. Walton were together on the Liverpool, spending evenings in the reading room, where pools of light fell from lamps with tasselled shades.
Simon looked away, tucked the feathers into his breast pocket, patting them. “I . . . ah . . .” His face was preoccupied, as it had been in the botanical museum when he had conducted an interior conversation. And she felt as distant from him as when she had been alone in her bed on Traveller and had summoned his image to assuage loneliness or fear.
He began to walk. “I actually didn’t mean . . . I haven’t purchased my ticket. The fifteenth would be a possibility, and it would be nice . . .”
She wanted to stop him, embarrassed for the ineptness of his lie.
“But I also have a plan to return to Paris for a time. I may wait, just a bit.”
He will change his life to avoid being alone on that ship with me. Why? Is it because he fears Nathaniel? Or the gossip once we reach home?
“I understand,” she said. Her voice was dry, and she could hear the pinched sound of hurt.
She no longer wanted to visit the church. Neither did she want to return to the half-packed trunks. She wanted to be somewhere where she would be whole, happy, her life unfolding—and could not imagine where such a place might be.
She took Carrie’s hand. It was warm, smooth as eggshell.
Comforting.
Later that day, after they had returned to the hotel, it began to rain.
The windows were open. Rain seethed on the cobblestones, and she could hear horse hooves and the chitter of sparrows. She and Lisette sat over their sewing. The air smelled of wet leaves and roasting coffee. Lisette clucked her tongue, picking at a piece of torn lace.
Azuba made a savage stab with her needle. Nathaniel and now Simon had chosen paths that did not include her. She felt superfluous, humiliated.
She looked out the window at the rain, watching the colourless drops spinning earthward. And remembered the life that did, in fact, await her. Her carriage in the shed, protected by canvas. Linens and quilts packed away in the attic. Her silver coffee set in Mother’s dresser drawer.
Return home, she thought, leaning forward to peer up at the rain-darkened cathedral. Accept my situation, make the best of it. Even, if she wished, live in luxury, as Nathaniel urged. She could hire another maidservant, another man. She could befriend the other captains’ wives.
And who would she become? Cosseted? Obsessed with quilting bees, tea parties, Flower Sunday? Afraid to move for fear of tearing a bit of lace? Sour-voiced and demanding?
She remembered what they had said, those other wives: “Want to sail with your husband? Oh, Mrs. Bradstock! Have you met any of those women? Seen their skin? Observed their manners? And think of what we read in the papers . . .”
She slid her needle into the pink-flowered cotton and tugged the thread gently so as not to make a pucker. Now she knew—was forced, in part, to agree with them. It was not her sister sailors she objected to; it was the voyage itself, and its terrors, and what she had subjected Carrie to.
She thought of who she had been before her disgrace, when she had longed to join Nathaniel. She saw herself striding on the headland, the hood of her cape tossed back. Picking berries, planting seeds, driving her horse, visiting Grammy. Kneeling with Carrie, walking the little animals through the dandelions. It had not been so bad.
This is who I am. A married woman who lives without her husband. Loves him, writes letters to him, and enjoys his furloughs.
She stitched steadily, making an effort to visualize herself as this woman. To see how she might be strong, happy.
Then she pictured the sail house on the day of her return. She imagined herself walking up the stairs and going into the bedroom and finding Nathaniel’s coat hanging in the closet. And then she saw the world she was homesick for collapse and blow away like a rent spiderweb. Without Nathaniel, it had no heart. It was without reason, or joy. It was as monotonous as small surf—washing forward, drawing back.
In the next stitch, she realized the stark fact. She had no choice. Nathaniel refused to take her and the children on board his ship, and he refused to return home. And she no longer knew what she wanted. She felt a frustration akin to fear, the abject sense that she had gained nothing from her travails.
She summoned the energy of self-respect. There was nothing else to do but raise her chin and do Nathaniel’s bidding with wounded pride. I will go home, yes. And I will make my own good life. Without him.
“Lisette,” she said. She bit her thread. “I’ve done making lists. Today we’ll begin packing.”
She tossed down her sewing, turned towards the half-filled trunks. She felt a grim energy, and sensed that she would learn to replenish it at a cost to herself.
The waiter set down tureens: potato soup, sprinkled with parsley; islands of melting butter; a smell of pepper.
“We’ve grown plump again,” she said. “Even you, Nathaniel.”
He cast a significant glance. She bit her lips, chased the butter island with her spoon.
Last night, he had slid his hands beneath her gown. They had run up her spine and caressed her shoulder blades, then come over onto her shoulder, pressing until she rolled onto her back, her arms thrown up against the pillow. He had slid his leg over her and kissed her, while his palm circled her belly.
He smiled, putting spoon to lips. “And you,” he said. He wiped his moustache with the thick linen serviette, lifted his wineglass. The wine was the colour of sun-bleached straw.
A breath of air came over the table from the open window. It smelled of rain-washed stone and woodsmoke, and a vision rose in Azuba’s mind of the city with its walls and towers, and how she would soon be alone, without Nathaniel, in the formless space of the sea.
“Azuba.”
Last night’s intimacy displaced his captain’s sharpness. All day, he had seemed like a man basking in sun—loose, peaceful. They sat in silence as the waiter removed the tureens.
“Perhaps after a few more years, I’ll consider hanging up the anchor.”
She put a hand against a spear of pain in her throat.
Carrie and Bennett. The baby was oblivious of his fate. Carrie, bravely cheering her father with assurances of how quickly time would pass, could not imagine the days, weeks and years that stretched ahead.
“Having you sail on a ship like the Liverpool makes it bearable.”
Lamb, flaking crust, a quiver of red jelly. She wondered if food would forever be imbued with wonder and a degree of disbelief.
“I’m glad that Mr. Walton told us of the wonders of steamship life.”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m glad to know there are surgeons aboard.”
“He may well need one, next time he sails.”
“Who?”
“Your Mr. Walton.”
“What do you mean ‘my’ Mr.—”
He raised his palm and lowered his voice. “A man may be forgiven a bit of jealousy when his wife has befriended another man. In this case, however, I’m not overly concerned.”
“You are so exasperating, Nathaniel. You know that my friendship with Simon Walton stems from the time after my miscarriage. When he was my pastor, and I—”
“Azuba. Azuba, please. I’m sorry. Please hush.”
“—and I was alone, and he took the time to have enough concern for my well-being to—”
“—spotted,” he interrupted, “is all I meant to say, by Mr. Dennis.”
Her heart was pounding so rapidly that she felt stifled, her cheeks flaming. They sat staring at one another. He, too, was agitated. She felt a flash of fear in her belly.
“What did you say?”
“Mr. Dennis, I said, informed me that, for several weeks now, he has spotted Mr. Walton visiting a boarding house notorious for its popularity with sailors. He has been seen with one of its lovely ladies, taking the air of an evening.”
He busied himself with his knife and fork. His iceberg eyes darted up.
The red jelly on her plate, heated by the lamb, quivered and slid sideways. Nathaniel speared a forkful of food into his mouth. His moustache rose and fell.
“Mr. Dennis does not know Simon well enough to know that it was him,” Azuba said. “There are many men who look the same.”
Nathaniel raised both eyebrows and made a stirring motion with his fork as he swallowed. “No, no, it was him. Mr. Dennis was not mistaken. He saw him several times.”
“What was ‘your’ Mr. Dennis doing in the vicinity of such a place? More than once?”
“Perhaps the same thing as Mr. Walton. Lonely men look for comfort wherever they can find it.”
“So what you condone in Mr. Dennis you condemn in Mr. Walton?”
“I didn’t say I condoned or condemned either man. I simply observe that they both take a grave risk and may at some point in the future need attention from a medical man.”
He chewed. He lifted his wineglass and looked away as he drank.
She set the tines of her fork on the cooling slice of lamb and drew her knife along the grain. She lifted the meat to her mouth.
She tasted nothing.
Nathaniel ordered a third glass of wine. And when the waiter brought the custard, Azuba did not lift her spoon but stared at her dessert. It swept over her that she had wanted Simon to remain single and lonely so that she would be the most important woman in his life—the person he would turn to, confide in. By rekindling this friendship, she had crushed the intimacy that had sprouted between her and Nathaniel in the last days of the voyage. And she saw, clearly, that it was not so much Simon she wanted as the control and stability she could never have in her marriage. For this illusion she had already, once, changed the course of her life. And now, this time, she risked destroying both the respect she had earned from Nathaniel, and the woman she had been on the brink of becoming.
The bells began to chime the hour. Nine o’clock. Dusk spun its forgiving veil, and waiters went from table to table, lighting candles. Nathaniel rose, came to her side, and held out his arm. She did not meet his eyes.
She woke in the night, words clear in her head.
This is my time. My time to sacrifice.
Nathaniel lay with his back to her. During the day, he carried himself straight-backed, his body unyielding. But at night the quilt followed the curves of his body as he slept, his knees pulled in toward his chest.
She slid to a sitting position against the headboard, and reached over quietly to light a candle.
She thought of the words her husband had said, over and over. “Azuba, I am a sea captain. It is what I do. I know no other life.”
He had foreseen that it would not be a simple matter for her to come with him, the difficulty of her learning who he must be on board his ship.
She saw, now, that she must understand and embrace the man in his entirety. And match him. She must fight beside Nathaniel in her own way, become the steady, courageous woman she had been when the chicken flew at Carrie. When she had dropped Carrie’s animal buttons into the mortar. When she took the gun from Nathaniel’s hand.
She listened to Nathaniel’s deep sleep-breathing. Simon. She dropped her face in her hands picturing Simon and his lady friend. She had loved the part of him that she could not find in Nathaniel. The part of him that did not object to her tender instincts, and shared her appreciation for the world’s beauty: sunsets, shells, feathers, wildflowers. But she was more, far more, than these things. And if she was more, then so was Nathaniel. Ah, that terrible day in the Chinchas when the men had jumped from the cliff—and she thought of how he had sung, and the song he had chosen, “Shule Agra,” and how it had brought tears to her eyes.
On the Liverpool, with its hot baths, reading room, and men walking the decks in India-rubber coats, heading west while Nathaniel sailed in the opposite direction, she would begin her slow reconciliation to her life alone in Whelan’s Cove. And she pictured the house as they would find it upon their return. It would exhale dampness, no matter how long Father had kept on fires. The wallpaper would have loosened from bulging plaster. The roses would be overgrown and hanging from the trellis, and shingles, blown from the roof, would lie like bones in the grass.
Years would pass, and she would become another sort of woman—unsmiling, with the stripped, unvoiced sorrow of a woman who is never caressed.
Her mind raced with the fierce thinking of nighttime.
This is my last chance. Else the marriage will wither. There will be only a storied half-stranger, returning. Gracing us, for a while.
She lit a candle on the bedside table, then gently shook Nathaniel’s shoulder. He rolled over violently, forearm raised against a blow.
“Shhh.” She reached for his hand, drew down his arm.
He pushed himself up, eyes wide, instantly on guard. He wore a white cotton nightshirt with blousy sleeves.
“What is it?” he said.
“I need to talk to you.”
The candle flame guttered, thwarted by an impurity in the wick. He disentangled his legs from the covers, sat on the edge of the bed. The headboard’s shadow loomed.
“What?”
“If we don’t come with you on this voyage it will be the end of our family.”
“What do you think would happen to our family?”
“It will never again be the same as it is now. Tonight we’re here, together. And if we rip ourselves apart . . . I can’t say . . . I don’t know what will happen.”
“Are you wanting another husband? Someone more like Mr. Walton?” He spoke in a straight tone, as of something he had pondered.
She was silent. It might become true, should she live alone on the headland.
“I want to try again to come on Traveller. I think we paid a price, with the first voyage. Surely, the next will be blessed.”
He reached forward and passed his finger through the candle flame.
“I’m going into the tropics, Azuba. I may encounter typhoons. The heat will be unbearable.”
“We won’t run out of food this time.”
“No.”
“We will not fall into the doldrums.”
“Probably not.”
“We’ll take Lisette. She can have the storage cabin, she won’t mind. She’s longing to come with us. Bennett will be in a sailor’s cot in our cabin. We’ll leave you to your devices, Nathaniel. I understand, now. How it is for you, on the ship. ”
He said nothing.
A carriage passed on the square, the horse hooves like a clock, separate and tired.
She touched his shoulder, felt the muscle beneath wash-worn cotton.
“Look at me, Nathaniel,” she whispered. “Look at me.”
He studied her. Then he cupped her face with his hands. In his eyes, she saw sadness tempered by relief.
“All right, my dear,” he said. “All right. Perhaps it is our fate.”
A half-smile touched his lips, and he gathered her to his chest.
August 30, 1864
My dearest Mother and Father,
It is with deepest regret that I take up pen to write you this letter.
I feel that I have caused you more anguish than I am worth, but hope that you will think otherwise when I explain my circumstances. I will not be returning on Liverpool. Nathaniel has had a change of heart, and has decided that it will be best to keep our family united, and I am in agreement with this decision. He and Carrie have forged a bond that is beautiful to behold, and while I know she would accept his absence with the good humour with which she is heartily endowed, her heart would ache, and we fear the damage to her spirit over time. Bennett, also, is at an age where to be in his father’s arms has more import than we may think.
It will not be long, I dearly hope, for Nathaniel has agreed that, after delivering this consignment of coal to China, we shall return via Liverpool, and so be home in another year, all of us, himself included, for he acknowledges that he needs a furlough.
Mother, please be happy for me, for our nursemaid, Lisette, is going to accompany me to help with the children, and will, of course, provide the female companionship that I sorely missed on our last voyage.
I am writing this on the morning after we made our decision so that I can send the letter on today’s steamer. I shall soon be in a frenzy, for since our plans have changed so abruptly, there is much last-minute detail to care for. Carrie is sad not to see you, and has told me so, yet time, for her, has as yet little reality, and so she feels it will not be long until she is home again. In the meantime, she is filled with excitement. I am afraid your granddaughter is a real sailor, and she cannot wait to move back into her own little cabin.
In truth, my dearest parents, this decision seems to me to be the right one. I have heard that the trip to Hong Kong is not difficult, and you may be assured that we will not be tempted to continue on and go ’round the Horn again, but shall return to England via the Cape of Good Hope.
She lifted her pen. It nodded, minutely, registering her heartbeat.
One day I hope that all those I love may be together, but as of now, I beg you to forgive me for setting sail, once again, on seas I hope will be calm, and with winds to blow me quickly home to you.
With all my love,
Your daughter,
Azuba
August 30, 1864
Dear Simon,
Nathaniel has changed his mind.
He has decided that we should keep our family united, and so we will set sail with him. I have enjoyed our visits, and I thank you for making the time to accompany me and Carrie. I wonder if you have found what you desired during your time in Europe. I hope that you will be happy and profitably engaged once you have returned to Saint John.
I, too, shall be too busy for any more visits, and so I bid you adieu and bon voyage.
I do not know when I shall return.
With sincere best wishes,
Azuba G. Bradstock
She laid down her pen, tented her hands over nose and mouth. She read over her words and thought that he would never know how, as she wrote, memories burst like sparks in darkness: his hand, helping her climb a seaweed-slippery rock; his socks, steaming over the stove; Carrie, absorbed by the furled, twitching tip of his paintbrush.
They reached the sea by the early afternoon of September 5, 1864. The tug turned back at the mouth of the river. Traveller lifted to the swells. Cold, salty wind displaced the earth-scented breeze. Lisette, white-faced, went to her cabin, promising to attend to Bennett if he woke. Carrie and Azuba climbed to the quarterdeck, where they watched the crew scramble up the ratlines, cast off the gaskets and set loose the sails. Every man on board—including Nathaniel, the mates, Mr. McVale and even the cook—tallied on to heave up the main topsail.
Carrie gazed up at the billows of canvas, bent and taut as the necks of horses.
“She’s happy, Mama,” she said. “Traveller is happiest out at sea. She’s back home.”