19

Two weddings were planned on Nantucket Island during the winter of 1821, but only one wedding actually transpired.

Jeremiah Macy and Lillian Swain Coffin set a wedding date for early January, with a large and luxurious reception planned at the grand house.

The day before her mother’s wedding to Jeremiah, Daphne learned some disturbing news from Ren. She sought out her mother and found her upstairs in the bedchamber, with the seamstress finishing up a few small adjustments on the dress Lillian would wear tomorrow. The door to the bedchamber was partway open and Daphne paused on the threshold before going in. A pale winter sunlight slanted through the window directly onto her mother, washing her in sunlight. She was exquisite, Lillian Swain Coffin was, like an ice carving. Daphne asked the seamstress to give them a private moment, which irritated her mother.

“What is of such utmost importance that it could not wait ten minutes until a task is completed?”

“This matter is of utmost importance.”

Her mother stepped off the dress box and sighed. “What is it now?”

“Why are Ren and Henry and Hitty not invited to the reception tomorrow?”

Her mother ignored her question, and focused on smoothing out her blue silk dress.

“Why are they excluded from this silly party?” Daphne said.

“Silly party? Silly party! ’Tis the reception I had planned for thee and Tristram!”

“Answer my question, Mother. How can thee persist in not acknowledging thy own grandchildren? Jeremiah’s son, his very own grandchildren!”

Her mother said something in a low voice, so calm and cold that Daphne decided she hadn’t heard her right. “What did thee say?”

“I said,” Lillian’s voice projected boldly, “that they will always belong to her. They even look like her.”

“Angelica? Oh Mother! Jeremiah has given thee a second chance at love. Can thee not forgive the past and receive it with open hands and an open heart?”

“I am receiving it!”

“Not with forgiveness. Thee is still aiming arrows at Ren. That’s why thee won’t include them tomorrow. That’s why thee did such a horrible thing to Abraham. ’Twas not thy conscience that led thee. ’Twas revenge.”

The door pushed open and a man’s voice spoke out. “Lily, what did you do to Abraham?”

“Jeremiah!” Lillian exclaimed, a wary surprise in her voice. “I didn’t hear you announced.”

“I brought you lilies.” In Jeremiah’s hand was a large bouquet of white lilies. “Had them imported from the Azores in time for the wedding. I remember how you liked them.”

“Oh, I do. I do love lilies! How sweet of thee, Jeremiah. Let’s take them to the kitchen and get a vase for them.”

“Hold on. First, Lillian, I want to know what you did to Abraham.”

“Nothing. Thee knows how dramatic Daphne can be.”

Jeremiah looked at Daphne. “What did she do?”

Daphne pivoted around to her mother. “Tell him. Or I will.”

Lillian crossed her arms against her waist and tucked her chin to one side. Like a stubborn child, she was not going to speak. Daphne swallowed. She couldn’t bear to look at Jeremiah for the shame she felt for her mother’s actions. “While in Boston, Mother sought out the bounty hunter, that Silas Moser. She brought him to Nantucket with the intent to capture Abraham. Later, she informed him that Abraham was hiding on the Endeavour.”

“Lily, why?” Jeremiah’s voice cracked with emotion. “How could you do such a thing to another human being? A man who did you no harm?” He lifted his hands. “He’s done no man any harm.”

Belligerent, Lillian refused to face him. She went to the windows, looking out at the water in the bay, smooth and gray under the winter sky, though Daphne didn’t think she really saw it. She knew her mother well enough to know she was focused inward, to a place deep inside her.

“Do you know why I chose Angelica over you? It wasn’t her beauty, for there’s no one on this island or anywhere else who can hold a candle to that impossibly perfect face God gave you. But Angelica was kind, Lily. So very, very kind.”

With that, Lillian shuddered, breaking her stillness. She spun around, hissing, “But she was a half blood!” She cast a dark glance at Daphne. “And so is Reynolds.” In a voice thick with anger and disgust, she added, “As are those mongrels of his.”

Her words—that one word, mongrel—fell into a heavy silence. The room became so quiet Daphne could hear the ticking of the grandfather clock in the downstairs foyer. Outside, a gust of wind blew through the leafless trees. A storm was coming, Daphne realized, both outside and in.

Jeremiah’s eyes glistened with tears, which pierced Daphne’s heart, for it was not at all like him to show feelings. He lifted the bouquet of lilies a few inches, looked at them, and gently set them down on top of the seamstress’s box, almost in a bow. “Ah, Lily, and here I thought that after a few hard blows from this life, your heart had changed.” He shook his head sadly. “You’re the same selfish girl who crowned herself queen over the school yard.”

Lillian was looking at him now in silence, as though dazed. He started toward the door. “But thee made me a promise! Thee can’t just—” Her voice broke.

“Oh, but I can.” He dropped his chin to his chest and quietly left the room.

Lillian picked up the skirts of her wedding gown and hurried to the top of the stairwell. “Jeremiah, don’t be like this!”

But it was too late. He was already out the door, his boots crunching quahog shells on the path. Daphne slipped around her mother and went down the stairs. At the newel post, she put her hand over the mortgage button for the last time, a habit she and Jane had always done, “for good luck,” they told each other, and looked back over her shoulder. She saw her mother standing at the top of the stairwell, with her hands hanging empty at her sides.

“Daphne, if thee leaves now,” her mother said, her face hardening, her words all the more cutting because they were said softly, not shouted, “if thee plans to carry out this folly and marry Reynolds Macy, do not ever come back.”

Daphne stared at her mother. She felt a sudden desire to cry, and she had to swallow hard to hold it back. So much of her relationship with her mother circled around mending the ruptures Lillian created. Her mother coped with life by pushing love away, and Daphne countered with efforts to coax her back into the clan of family. But in that moment, a wall the size of a mountain rose between them. “Thee knows where to find me, Mama.”

Daphne walked out the door and down the porch steps, onto the drive paved with crushed shells. She only stopped once, when she reached the street, to look back at the grand, barren, cold house. She felt a sad wrenching to leave this place, the house where she and Jane had been raised, where her father had come and gone on his sea voyages. She knew she would never return to it.

The second wedding did transpire, just a few weeks later, in late January. Captain Reynolds Macy took Daphne Coffin as his bride, and mother to his children. After the simple ceremony during First Day, Ren and Daphne celebrated by taking the children for a sail in Daphne’s sloop. The day was bitter, the cold bit at Daphne’s nose and cheeks, and the wind in her face felt wonderful.

She watched Ren hoist the sails and cast off, turning his face to the sea breeze, and she thought again how handsome he was, how fine and noble a man. She let her head fall back and closed her eyes, listening to the creak of the hull, the flutter of the sails as they filled with wind, the tilt and pitch of the deck beneath her. When she opened them, she realized Ren had moved to sit in the cockpit, his hand on the tiller. She smiled at him. “This sloop must seem so small after the Endeavour.”

“Small, but just large enough to fit our family.”

Our family. She looked over at Hitty and Henry, heads together, peering over the stern of the sloop. They were a family. Such a realization filled her heart, nearly to the point of overflowing.

“The Centre Street cottage, now that is small quarters.” His gaze searched her face. “Thee is certain we should remain at Centre Street?” He had moved to Jeremiah’s after Daphne left her mother’s home, so that she could settle into Centre Street until the wedding. While he was eager to return, he complained the cottage was not much bigger than his father’s cooperage.

“Small,” she said, “but large enough to fit us, for it is our home.”

“And the Cent School?”

Last fall, with Ren’s encouragement, Daphne had integrated the Cent School with black and Indian children. Nearly all the white children had been promptly disenrolled by their parents. Integration was a concept that Nantucket Island was not ready to embrace. While Friends championed political freedom for blacks, their enthusiasm dimmed when it came to interacting socially with black Nantucketers. “The Cent School must continue,” Daphne said. “I am determined to grow Jane’s garden.”

Ren looked at her then with such love in his eyes, such great and enduring love, that she felt herself start to cry and would have, but for Hitty nearly falling overboard. She had dropped her doll and reached over to try to retrieve it. With one hand remaining on the tiller, Ren reached out, grasped her, and pulled her back in, but the doll was lost to a watery grave.

“I told her,” Henry said, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “I told her it would sink but she didn’t believe me.”

Hitty wailed, and Henry sat smugly, and the sea wind swirled around them, and Ren and Daphne shared a smile that bridged sorrows, disappointments, and grief, and went past all that, even further, to a moment of pure, unadulterated joy.

In Nantucket they called it “the time of ripening.” That time of the year when the sea breeze loses its bone-chilling cold, when marshes fill with the music of spring peepers, when crocuses poke their noses out of the earth and daffodils are soon to follow, when cranberry bushes are covered with tiny white flowers, when bright green leaves on trees begin to unfurl and birds return to build their nests.

Daphne was alone in the Centre Street cottage on this morning, for Ren and Abraham had taken the children to the Endeavour, to see the ship one last time before it was to set sail. Patience went along because she worried the men would forget the children, and Daphne decided at the last minute to stay home. There wasn’t enough room in the dory for all of them, and she had been feeling a little under the weather of late. The last thing she wanted to do was to get on a rocking rowboat.

A rap came on the door, light at first, then more persistent. Daphne opened it to find a bonneted woman standing there. “Mother!” she said warily, unsure what to make of Lillian’s visit, then added, “Would thee . . . like to come in?”

Her mother looked past Daphne into the small keeping room, pausing a moment, as if she’d become lost in thoughts, or memories. “Nay,” she finally said, and did not make any motion to cross the threshold.

Lillian looked the epitome of grace and refinement, and Daphne realized that she must have just come from the wharf, for she was in her brown traveling dress. “Thee was off island?”

“In Boston.” Her mother smoothed the lace fichu that draped her shoulders. “If thee must know, I was amending my will.”

Ah, Daphne thought. Of course. Most likely, she was ensuring that Daphne, as Ren’s wife, would be excised from it. She was not particularly surprised, nor disturbed by the news. She’d expected as much.

With hands in kid gloves, Lillian presented Daphne with an envelope. “My attorney gave me this to pass along. ’Tis a letter from thy father, addressed to thee and thy . . . late sister.”

Daphne took the envelope, noting the seal was unbroken. “And thee didn’t open it?”

Her mother pursed her lips. “What a wicked thing to say. Thee has always made me out to be cold and heartless.”

“Not completely heartless, Mama. Not quite yet.”

Her mother turned away, putting distance between them, and Daphne realized that it was she who had let that moment go. “Mama!”

Lillian stilled, and cocked her chin slightly so that Daphne knew she was listening, though she did not turn around. “Thee is welcome here, any time. Thee is always welcome in our home.”

Daphne thought she saw a barely perceptible nod from her mother’s black bonnet, but that was all, and she wasn’t certain. Maybe she only hoped for it. Her mother walked away, up Centre Street toward her grand house, and Daphne gently closed the door.

She made a cup of ginger tea, a seaman’s trick Ren had taught her to settle a stomach, before she sat down to read her father’s letter. She spread a linen napkin across her lap and drank a swallow of tea, stalling. Her hands trembled as she fingered the script where her father had penned her name, and Jane’s, on the front of the envelope. She so wished Jane were here, to read this last word from their father together. Carefully, so carefully, she broke the seal, opened the envelope, and unfolded the letter.

My darling daughters,

I am not a perfect man, but I do believe God can take our imperfections and bring great good from them. I have a gift for thee, one that I had wanted to give thee years and years ago, but thy mother would not permit it. Under the circumstances, I did the best I could with this gift, though that was not much, and surely what I did do was not enough. ’Tis up to thee both to decide how to handle this gift. I know my girls well enough to know thee will do well by it.

I trust thy hearts are large enough to encompass one more sister. Her name is Patience.

With love from Papa