“WHAT DO YOU know about Jake Ross, Cordelia?”
“What do I know, or what is generally known?” Cordelia didn’t miss a beat as she turned down Abbey’s bed that evening, rolling the big coverlet onto the blanket chest at the bed’s foot and fussing with the pillows.
Ordinarily Abbey would have stopped her from this service, preferring to turn down her own bed just as she’d done all her life. Sometimes there hadn’t even been a proper bed to turn down. Blankets and bedrolls with no pillow were the best to be had on the open range. Having done this since she was a child, Abbey could sleep hanging from an andiron if necessary. But tonight she wanted—needed—someone to talk to . . . a rare commodity where she came from.
Abbey hiked herself up onto the bed on one folded leg. “You yourself.”
Cordelia paused in her work. “Not much to be known,” she said. “Not by me, leastways. Folk on this island come and go, those without families. Mostly the permanent folk are the business owners, the captains, and the owners of the ships. Sailors and men like Jacob Ross are often the drifters, in one year, out the next.”
“Have you ever been inside The Brotherhood?”
“Me? Lord, no.” Cordelia brushed back a strand of her dark hair and smiled. “Been curious about it, though. Mostly that’s for the men, whalers usually, and dockers.”
“Is that the rule of the place?” Abbey asked. “No women?”
Cordelia pursed her lips for a thoughtful moment, then shook her head. “I don’t suppose so. Never heard that it was. Just how things evolved there. Women don’t care to go in. Got our own things to do to keep busy.” She surveyed the pillows and decided they were sufficiently fluffed, then helped herself to a seat on a needlepoint vanity bench. “You like to quilt?”
“I’m not very good at it,” Abbey admitted, “but I’ve pushed a needle about from time to time. We had a quilting bee two winters ago, myself and the ladies of four surrounding ranges.” Her mind traveled back to the memory. “Miles Crawford’s wife had four daughters herself, so there was a fair number of us. We got together and all winter we made quilts of patch squares and stitched in the names of every one of the cowpunchers on our ranches. If they worked our stock even one day, they deserved a square. We made a quilt for every ranch that way. Someday, folks will know the names of our cowhands, our cooks, our branders, and our foremen. Even the driver who came by with the chuck wagon that one January got his name on a square. Hubbards. I stitched that one myself.”
“You rode the ranges yourself, I hear tell from the boys,” Cordelia mentioned, curiosity flashing in her eyes.
Abbey laughed. “I see news travels fast in Nantucket. Yes, I’ve done my share of bull-whacking. Of necessity, I would say. My husband and I started with nearly nothing and built a ranch. It didn’t succeed in the long run, but I’d say we did our part in building that corner of Wyoming. We fed a few cowhands and trained a few more and set up some decent relations with the Indians that I daresay won’t fall away too soon. When there’s no one else to do the work, the women just pick up and do it.”
“Most women do that out west?” Cordelia looked surprised.
Abbey chuckled. “Not most. Most women—what few there are—serve as laundresses and cooks and teachers. Lots of them teach. In fact, if it weren’t for the women, we’d have a mighty ignorant frontier. One woman I knew took half a summer and handwrote three copies of a geography book so the children of her settlement could have them. She even copied maps. She’d carried the book tucked in her bodice, all the way from Indiana on a wagon train.”
“My,” Cordelia breathed.
Abbey nodded nostalgically. “All that, and still some women manage to keep a fluting iron warm to put ruffles in their skirt hems. But I admit to you,” she said, “I’ve never seen as many women in my whole life as I saw just on that one dock when I stepped off the boat. Where I’m from there’s just one woman for every twenty men.”
“That’ll narrow as the years pass,” Cordelia predicted.
“Oh, it narrows with every wagon train that migrates. There’s land to be homesteaded and profit to be made, cattle barons and sheep barons coming every new day, building and investing, and with them come more and more folk to do the jobs that need doing. It’s for the stout of heart, but women are stouthearted when they need to be. I knew one rancher who’d gotten old and crippled and had naught but his five daughters. Those girls shoveled irrigation ditches, branded steers, hunted wolf, and drove stock with the best of them.”
“And so did you?”
Abbey laughed again and said, “Well, I’m not one to be left behind!”
Cordelia clapped her hands together once in delight and nodded with her lips approvingly pursed.
“What about you, Cordelia,” Abbey asked. “Where are you from?”
The housekeeper abruptly got to her feet and said, “Oh, me. I’m hardly as interesting as all that. Sounds like you’ve got good stories to tell the children.”
“And they’ve got good stories to tell me,” Abbey said. “I’d never seen an ocean before a few days ago, or a ship, or even a big town. I never imagined so many people could cram into so small a space as Boston.”
“Grass is always greener,” Cordelia said. She appeared to be leaving, then paused and lowered her voice. “You got the eye for the Great Point keeper, don’t you?”
Reluctantly, Abbey grinned a self-conscious grin and nodded. “He’s got my eye. But for some reason, I don’t think he’s flattered.” She inched herself forward a little on the brushed woolen blanket. “Do you know anything about him?“ Why he might be so reclusive?”
She held her breath. Could Cordelia know about Jake’s being under suspicion for smuggling? Was that common knowledge on the island, or was Dominic Nash—as Abbey suspected—too gallant a man to allow a rumor to spread, even an official one?
Cordelia glanced out into the corridor, then lowered her voice even more. “Hear tell he’s done some crime, when on the Continent, but there’s no proof. So far he’s done nothing here, but the magistrate’s having him watched.”
With more than a hint of irritation in her voice, Abbey burst out, “Yes, I know. And so does Jacob Ross. I wonder what good it does to watch a man who knows he’s being watched.”
“Fair little, probably. But if he’s a criminal, it’ll surface in time.”
“If he is,” Abbey repeated, hope rising even as her voice slid away to a whisper. “The magistrate has ordered me to keep away from Jake Ross.”
Cordelia took a step back into the room. “And will you?”
For several seconds, even Abbey didn’t know the answer. But as she parted her lips to speak, the words formed themselves without hesitation. “If I do,” she said, “it will be for my own reasons, not the magistrate’s.”
Dominic Nash’s warning, if that indeed was what it was, hadn’t fallen entirely on the hard part of Abbey’s common sense. Prudence told her to give herself time and Jake room to move. For days she neither saw nor heard about him. Yet that absence only intensified the plaguing thoughts that came between waking and sleeping, the errant gazes down the long, curving northwestern coast of Nantucket Island toward Great Point. Her only real distractions were lunches with Lucy Edmonds in the back of the Geary Hat Store, listening to Lucy’s disarranged point of view on all issues and events. If somewhat ill-bred, Lucy provided the liveliest entertainment on Nantucket, for Abbey at least. She’d found herself a steadfast—if unorthodox—friend. And Lucy Edmonds had a ringing talent with language, despite her mutilation of it. When she spoke of her husband’s duties out on the whaling grounds in distant seas, Lucy imbibed those stories with an eagerness that engrossed Abbey. If only the cowboys could have heard such tales around the campfires on those long cattle drives.
“Ee’s aboard the Nancy Ames, a sweet little bark wot whales the grounds of Greenland for the North Atlantic right whales.” Lucy spoke past a mouthful of yesterday’s cranberry pie. She eyed her infant daughter, who was rolling about on the floor on a patchwork quilt. “It’s a fine crew of blubber hunters that Billy’s been sailin’ wi’ for nigh onto foive years now. Ee’s got two skills, so’s ee’s valuable to ’em.”
“And what are those?” Abbey prodded, as it had become her habit to keep Lucy talking—not much work to that, though.
“Ee’s a cooper, for one, an’ a blacksmith for the other. Ee’s the mug wat tends an’ mends the casks they pour the oil in. After the whale’s all sectioned an’ the blubber’s minced an’ tried out into oil, they pours it into these great casks—”
“Oh, barrels!” Abbey interrupted, realizing the look on her face had caused Lucy to try to explain.
“Barrels, right enough,” the scrawny girl yelped, licking off a piece of cranberry that had slipped down her lip. Her enthusiasm alone was catching. “An’ ee’s apprenticin’ to tend the whale irons wot they use to kill and strip them beasties. It’s a better payin’ job than cooper.”
“How many barrels come off a . . . what did you call it?”
“A right whale, mum. Because it’s the ‘right’ whale t’catch. Yer get like a hundred casks of oil off a usual one o’ them, that be why they call him that. You also get baleen off ’im.”
“I’m afraid to ask.”
“Toothy stuff. They strains wee fishes through it fer food. Ain’t got no teeth, that kind of whale don’t.”
Abbey held her tongue at Lucy’s terse expression as the girl tried to appear an expert on such an odd subject. But at this she leaned over the small, round table and asked, “No teeth? But whales do have teeth. I’ve seen them in store windows here. Carved and inked with some kind of drawings.”
“Right you ’ave, but thems the teeth of sparm whales.”
“Sp . . . arm?”
“They got long bottom jaws an’ fine poky-up teeth that’s good for carvin’ when things get slow combin’ the sea for whale pods. They got oil, too, better stuff than the right whales, but not as much.”
Abbey had to force down her next swallow of pie, and put down her fork. “Sounds like a grimy business.”
“Oh, twice that, Abbey. Dirty, stinky, greasy. Oh, Wilma, love—”
Lucy jumped up and dashed to the quilt in time to rescue her baby from rolling under a rack of dresses. She expertly replaced the child in the center of the quilt and rattled a toy over the baby’s smooth, round face. Wilma’s eyes widened, her arms straight up and flailing, spindly fingers trying to find the right muscles to grab the rattle. After a period of enticement, Lucy folded Wilma’s fingers around the rattle’s shaft and came back to lunch. She sat down, still gazing at her daughter. “Wot a dumplin’ I got there, Abbey. Ain’t she somethin’? I dunno ’ow Billy an’ me ever put out this beau’ifful baby. Me bein’ plain as potatoes and ’im bein’ ugly as the captain’s dog.”
“Oh, Lucy, shame on you!” Abbey derided, smiling.
“True enough, mum, ee’s a mug. Wee round eyes an’ a patch of mushy ’air, and a scruffa fuzz on his chin . . . but I loves ’im pretty good, anyway. I keep on tellin’ ’im some day that beard is gonna grow and cover up most of that face. Then I’ll let ’im leave the lamp burnin’ at night!” She leaned conspiratorially toward Abbey, and they laughed out loud.
The town clock rang three times then, alerting Abbey to her duties. She took a moment to lick her fork before maneuvering out of her chair and putting an end to their late tea. “Oh, that’s my call. I’ve opened a kettle, Lucy. I told the Nash children and their friends that I’d finish telling them about life on the range. They nearly climbed down my throat when I stopped the story last night and made them go to bed.”
“I don’t wonder, Abbey. Kids in Nantucket don’t ’ear such stories much.”
“And its all they want,” Abbey said. “Strange, isn’t it? All I want is to hear about life out east, and all they want is to hear about life out west. Like Cordelia says, grass is always greener. Lunch again tomorrow?”
“’Morrow’s Saturday, Abbey,” Lucy pointed out.
“Already? Saints . . . Monday, then.”
“Monday like clockwork,” Lucy beamed.
By Saturday, when there was no school, Abbey had acquired an audience of at least a dozen town children, besides David, Adam, and Luella, who crowded at her feet on the Nash front porch, eyes bulging at her stories as though she was making them up from her wildest imagination. Which she wasn’t.
“The wolves needed our cattle as much as we did. Every winter was an endless wolf hunt. We had to keep watch in the blizzards, because the wolves would come upon our cows from behind and bite their hamstrings to cripple them, so the pack could bring them down. In a good Wyoming blizzard, you could be five paces from a wolf and not see him.”
“How big are they?” Adam asked. “As big as horses?”
“No, but they’re as big as big dogs,” Abbey told the smooth young faces that peered up at her. “And twice as fierce, being wild and all.”
“Couldn’t the cows run away from them?” one of the town girls asked.
Abbey rolled her eyes, making the children laugh. “Well, let me tell you something about cows,” she said. “You can go far and wide and not find creatures as stupid as cattle. They’re tasty and they make fine milk, but they’re not brainy. They’ll shiver in the blizzard, starving and thirsty, and die where they stand rather than move along in search of food. We had to find places where the wind had blown the snow off the grass, then drive the cattle there to graze—and that’s only if we could find the grass at all. We had to chop through iced ponds so they could drink. Cattle won’t break the ice themselves like wild horses and deer will. Many’s the time my gloves were frozen to my lariat while I lassoed one after the other and dragged them to water.”
“What’s a larry-hat?” Luella demanded, coming up onto her knees.
“It’s a long rope with an eye tied in one end and a loop pulled through the eye. . . . “ She tried to demonstrate with her empty hands, but saw complete noncomprehension in the wide, round eyes of her audience. So she clapped her hands on her knees and said. “I’ll just show you. Come on!”
She felt a bit like Pied Piper as all the children bounced to their feet and followed her around the house. “Adam, bring out Maribelle,” she called out. David, find me a length of rope. You other children, you’ll all be the cows!”
Even the older children, those right on the verge of sophistication itself, dropped their propriety and began milling about the yard, mooing. Adam appeared, hauling Maribelle from her shed by her bridle, and a moment later David appeared with a length of hemp rope and handed it to Abbey before he, too, began mooing merrily.
“David, I need a roundup dog,” Abbey announced as she gathered her skirts between her legs.
David immediately stopped mooing and started barking. For someone who’d never seen a roundup or a roundup dog, he figured out the logical necessities of the job almost immediately and began yipping the “cows” into a smaller and smaller bunch. The cows, of course, began to delight in trying to evade him.
She smiled at them as she hauled herself up onto Maribelle’s bare back, then took a few moments to tie a honda in the rope and pull a lariat loop through it. “Cork the mooing and pay attention for a moment.” When she’d gotten their attention she held up the rope, loop in one hand and coils in the other. “This is the loop. These are the coils. The eye down there is called a honda, and the loop is called the main line. This rope is pretty short, though. Usually they’re about sixty feet long. And not this loose—rawhide or braided grass tend to be stiffer. This doesn’t want to loop quite as well, but I’ll make do.”
“Why does it have to be stiff?” David asked.
“It has to be stiff enough for the loop to stay flat and open while the rope pays out. And even more, it has to be strong, much stronger than this, if it’s going to rope a thousand-pound steer and yank taut without snapping. Then it has to hold while the steer plunges and wrenches. I never found a steer yet who liked being roped. We call this contraption a catch rope, because we catch with it. I’m going to do a head catch. Go on and moo now.”
The yard was so small that Abbey couldn’t even get Maribelle into a decent trot, much less the grueling gallop Abbey was accustomed to on the range during branding time. The children giggled between moos and did everything they could to outrun David as he pinched and yipped them into a bunch.
“H’yah, yearlings! Branding time!” Abbey whooped as she narrowed in on the herd, the lariat loop singing above her head. Roundup was never this easy. She cast an overhand throw. The loop sailed through the air, tilting toward Luella, and dropped neatly around the child’s red curls. Luella grabbed for the rope and dropped into a huddle in the middle of the grass.
“Creepers . . .” Adam gushed in respectful amazement.
“Now, if I had a saddle,” Abbey explained without a pause, “I’d throw a few dallies around the horn and yank the rope tight. But since Luella is a sweethearted calf and doesn’t fight, I can just walk right over there and brand her smartly. I do that about fifty more times, and my days work is done. Till morning, of course, when I start again right after breakfast.”
“What’s for breakfast?” one of the girls wanted to know.
Abbey laughed. “Same as yesterday. Sowbelly, sourdough biscuits, coffee, and grits. It’ll be the same tomorrow, too. For dinner, we get liver-and-heart stew, red bean pie, and more sourdough. Lots of sourdough. Sourdough up to here and out the ears.”
The children laughed, and for the first time Abbey discovered herself feeling almost at home on Nantucket.
“Can I try it?” David asked tentatively.
“Well, of course you can try it.” She retrieved her coil as Luella shook off the catch loop. The children, tall and small alike, watched with fascination as Abbey drew the lariat in and it snaked back across the yard toward her.
Abbey slipped off Maribelle, then shook the coil free of her skirts. “Might just try that on the charming Mr. Ross one of these days,” she muttered to herself. “All right, David, up you go. You be the cowpuncher. I’ll be the cattle baron and supervise the roundup. You over there—”
“Zeke.”
“Zeke, you’ll have to take over as the roundup dog.”
She arranged the coil and main line in David’s hands, showing him how to hold the reins and steer his mount even as he roped a calf. He wasted no time, of course, going after his twin brother. The other children fell into the pattern of mooing and milling, trying to confound the cowpuncher in his task. Lanky Zeke made an odd dog indeed.
This roundup soaked up the entire morning, until every child had been roped at least once, and several had tried their hands at the lariat. Maribelle was unflagging in her tolerance of having child after child up on her back, her reins pulled and twisted, and her flanks kicked without purpose. Lariat after lariat flew across the small yard, and more than once a fence picket, a tree branch, or the pump handle was caught instead of one of the herd.
It was a silly business, but Abbey found herself having genuine fun for a change. Until this moment, her only enjoyment had been those lunches with Lucy, and even those had been plagued with glances out the window toward The Brotherhood. The roundup might have gone on all day.
Might have—had it not been for one of fate’s nasty twists.
It was Adam’s turn to master the lariat. He sent it looping across the yard with more power in his arm than Abbey would have guessed—unfortunately. The loop flew majestically into the air, then dropped in a perfect circle . . . right onto magistrate’s Nash’s red head.
Abbey and the children froze solid in their tracks. Mooing died away as the rope settled nicely on the big man’s shoulders.
Abbey held her breath, her lips tucked inward, her eyes stinging from the stare. This could hardly be considered teaching Luella about being a lady. . . .
Magistrate Nash stood on the other side of the picket fence, stock still, glaring.
She might have been incinerated by that stare, had she not been saved by the sudden knell of the church bell ringing in the clear spring air.
Dominic Nash took his harsh eyes off her and turned toward the sound, something entirely new crossing his squarish features. The children spun about also, their heads all turning toward the open sea—or at least in that direction through the town.
“Ship!” David cried.
He led the dash for the street, and Abbey found herself standing alone on the open range.
“What is it?” she called, drawn into a run simply by the children’s enthusiasm.
“Somebody sighted a ship!” Adam tossed back as he tilted into a faster pace toward the warfside of town.
“A whale ship?” Abbey called back, but the children were swept away by the bell’s frantic chiming. Of course it must be a whale ship. They wouldn’t be so excited if it was just another transport vessel from the mainland, would they? Or would they? She hadn’t been there long enough to know for sure. But she could see it in their faces . . . all those children were hoping it was their father coming home.
Nash grasped the rope at his shoulders and threw it off. His eyes widened at the flurry of children flying by. Then he reached for Abbey’s elbow. “Come on. There’s a whaler coming in.”
Abbey didn’t have time to respond—they were already running. And so was half the town. Well, perhaps the whole town. There didn’t seem to be a door left unopened as the church bell rang furiously. The only people not running toward the wharf were those clutching the rails of the hundreds of roofwalks throughout Nantucket Town. A chill ran down Abbey’s spine as she glanced up at them and remembered Jake’s description of the widow’s walks.
They ran down Ash Street to North Water Street, came to Broad Street and swung along the jog to South Water Street toward Old North Wharf, never once slackening their pace. Townspeople flocked around them, all heading in the same direction. Abbey caught the flame of excitement and realized what this meant to these people. Not only were the ships their staple source of income and their link to the outside world, but these were their husbands and sons and brothers returning, perhaps for the first time in months upon months. If nothing else—and there was much else—the ship brought with it stories of its adventures and songs of its toils.
“Abbeeeeeeee! Abbeeeeeeee!”
She twisted around, breaking her stride, and saw Lucy wobbling toward her at an awkward run, arms wrapped around little Wilma. The baby bobbed in her mother’s arms, and Lucy was gasping by the time she got to Abbey and Nash.
“Abbey! It’s the Nancy Ames! It’s the Nancy Ames! It’s Billy’s ship! Ee’s comin’ back! Oh, ee’s comin’ back!”
“How do you know?” Abbey grabbed Lucy’s hands while Dominic chivalrously scooped Wilma from her mother’s arms and carried her the rest of the way to the open docks.
“They told me! They told me!” Lucy babbled.
“That’s wonderful news!” Abbey laughed, realizing it was pointless to ask the frantic girl just who had told her. “Lucy Edmonds, you know Magistrate Nash—”
“Mrs. Edmonds, good day,” Dominic said to Lucy in midstride, nodding past the curls of Wilma’s tousled head.
“Yes, sir, righto, sir,” Lucy gasped, craning her neck at the horizon, anxious to show Billy Edmonds the baby he hadn’t known was coming and had never seen.
They came up to the edge of the dock amidst a crowd of onlookers, and Abbey had to hold Lucy back from the edge. She seemed to be thinking about swimming out to meet the ship.
On the blue-gray sea to their upper right, there was indeed a ship. Bluff-bowed, clunky, without a hint of comfort or speedworthiness, the whaler carried heavy masts built straight up, without the graceful angle of schooners’ and clippers’ masts. Even at this distance she could see the great bulbous hull bobbing in the sea, lumbering home with its cargo. Then, confused, Abbey realized it was sailing crossways to the island instead of toward it.
“Why doesn’t it turn in?” she asked.
Dominic sighed. “There’s a shoal. The scourge of Nantucket. It’s a great task to get deep-draft barks and brigs like that one over the sandbar. We have to use the camels.”
“Camels?”
He nodded once, shifted Wilma in his arms, and pointed.
Abbey sucked in a quick breath. Far out at the mouth of the harbor were two great rectangular chunks of . . . well, they looked for all the world like docks on the tops of two hulls. Even from here she could tell they both were huge, each almost as big as a whole pier. “What are those?” she blurted, her voice rising almost to a squeal.
“Camels,” Dominic repeated matter-of-factly. “Steam-driven drydocks. They’ll meet the bark and fasten to her, then lift her up over the shoal and escort her in.”
“Amazing!” She squinted at the chugging camels.
“Yes, it is. Someday that sandbar will be the death of Nantucket. New Bedford’s already surpassed us as a whaling port simply because our harbor has that bedamned shoal blocking it. We’ve petitioned the federal government time and again to build a breakwater, but so far they’ve not done it.” He squinted at the incoming ship. “The spouter looks heavy-laden, too.”
She leaned toward Dominic. “Will it have whale meat on board?” she asked, not too loud lest she look foolish in front of the other onlookers. It was a stupid question, she knew. She realized then that she’d only half listened to Lucy’s cockney explanations of duty on board a whale ship. Among a crowd of people to whom this was commonplace, she wished she had paid heed.
“Oil,” he told her. “Fully processed.”
“Processed on board,” she attempted, forcing her memory to work. If Billy Edmonds was a cooper . . .
Dominic’s red brows lifted. “Yes, of course. You’re looking at a floating factory out there. The whale meat is stripped from the carcass, sectioned, tried out, and casked within hours of the whale’s capture, right on board the ship.”
“Wouldn’t I like to see that,” Abbey murmured.
“We also make use of the parmaceti here in Nantucket at the candle factory, if they’ve caught a sperm or two, that is. This ship’s a Greenland packet for now. She hunted Atlantic rights this voyage. May not’ve seen sperm at all.”
Abbey battled with her memory to absorb which whale had which kind of oil for which purpose, but it was eluding her. “Its right to catch ‘right’ whales, but it’s better to catch sperm whales. . . .”
Falling into a pose of endless patience, Dominic leaned toward her and explained in simple terms. “Essentially, yes. The Atlantic right gives much more oil than a sperm, but a sperm’s oil is purer and fetches two or three times the price of right oil. Even more valuable, they supply white parmaceti wax, which is mixed with the junk fat—head matter. It results in the brightest burning candles available. We make the candles right here on the island and turn a good profit. Occasionally, if the whale is ill, we’ll get ambergris for perfume—”
Dominic stopped speaking.
At nearly the same moment, a disturbing hush had come over the crowd. Some of the women clasped their palms to their lips. Others simply fell silent. The men murmured quietly among them, selves. They all continued to stare out at the Nancy Ames as she lumbered heavily down the coastline toward them, but the mood had decidedly changed.
“What is it?” Abbey was driven to ask.
Dominic remained silent for another few seconds. Then he cleared his throat and spoke slowly.
“She’s bearing a black flag.”
The hulking whale ship lolled through the briny waters off Nantucket Harbor with a slowness that now was agonizing. The ship nodded through the water with determination, a few sails raised to carry her through the last leg of her long journey to the camels, which would bring her in. The camels steamed resolutely toward the ship and finally overtook her, but the process was damnably long. Ever since Dominic had mentioned it, Abbey saw the little flicker of black fabric more clearly than she saw the huge sails themselves. For many long minutes no one spoke; then Abbey had to.
“What does it mean?” she asked, still keeping her voice down.
Beside her, Lucy had grown quiet.
“Usually,” Dominic said carefully, “it means that the captain has died during the voyage.”
“Did you know him?” she asked, looking up at Dominic’s blue eyes to find the sky reflected in them.
Dominic held his breath for a moment before responding. “Yes,” he softly said, “very well.” He stepped around behind her to hand Wilma to Lucy, and said, “If you’ll excuse me . . . I must speak to Mrs. Whiteside.” As Abbey watched, he moved through the crowd. Finally he came to a stop beside a woman in her midforties who was gazing painfully at the approaching ship. Two teenaged girls hugged the woman, and a boy of about eighteen stood staunchly beside her. Abbey realized the woman must be the captain’s wife. How sad for her, she thought, knowing how she must have felt.
As she watched Dominic speak to the captain’s family, the tall boy put his arm around his mother’s shoulders and the other around one of his sisters, already prepared to take his place as head of their family.
Abbey wondered if the flag flew only if the captain died. Could it also mean the first mate, or any of the crew?
She opened her mouth to ask Lucy, then clamped her lips shut. This wouldn’t be the right time nor the right question to ask her friend. That was confirmed in the way Lucy clutched little Wilma against her.
All this scurrying around we do in life, Abbey thought, makes us forget what’s really of value. There’s Dominic, who can’t be with his wife . . . the captain’s wife who hasn’t seen her husband in more than a year . . . and Lucy. Poor girl’s still on her honeymoon, considering the little time she’s been with her Billy. And I can’t be with the man I’m attracted to. . . .
She let the thought drift away. But something did strike her as she watched the crowd’s sad anticipation ripple across the wharf. She’d been burying her head in the sand, ignoring her own nature. This hiding behind Dominic’s orders was getting her nowhere. She would have to confront Jake, if for no other reason than her own peace of mind. They wanted each other. That was right. But something held them apart that wasn’t right. She should at least be told what it was. This vague business of smuggling . . . what did it really mean?
A tingle of awareness ran up her arms then. Thoughts of Jake had set her nervous system on alert, and she found herself looking around the dock area for no reason. While everyone else was watching the incoming ship, Abbey was scanning the water below the docks and the many workaday vessels moored along the wharf and throughout the harbor. Masts short and tall speared the sky all around her, rigging like the tangled webs of drunken spiders confused her glimpses from boat to boat. The dockside sky was a mess of yardarms and halyards and rigging and timbers, the water broken by the decks of a hundred ships and boats of every size. Eerie, in its way. Exciting in another.
All they could do was wait. Wait the long, interminable minutes as the Nancy Ames crawled through the waters, over wave after wave, one at a time, toward the camels.
Abbey continued glancing around the dockyard, her arms still tingling with that strange sense of . . . what? Presence? Yes!
And there he was!
She pushed past a stout woman and craned her head for a better view of one dirty little sandbagger with its extra-long boom poking out over its stern. On its deck, Jake Ross crouched. He was peering down into the hold. He was talking, but glancing about in a manner that seemed self-conscious and wary to Abbey.
She couldn’t see who he was talking to. Someone was in that hold, though. From time to time, Jake handed down one of a stack of smallish crates that crowded the port side of the sandbagger. He continued talking as a pair of hands came up for each crate and was time after time swallowed back into the hold. Abbey got the unfounded but definite impression that Jake was doing more than helping someone load his cargo. The brim of Jake’s cap was drawn low over his eyes—as though anyone wouldn’t know who he was from that mop of blond hair and that perfectly recognizable sea coat!
Abbey huffed through her nose. She decided to go over there right then and ask what he was up to. Right there in front of everyone.
Across the port, Jake glanced to his right, then straight ahead. That forward glance, a skillful one that said he did this often, put his eyes right on Abbey’s. The formless magnet pulling at them had worked yet again. Jake stopped talking, frozen where he knelt. He stared at her through the network of rigging and masts and yardarms, and slowly came to his feet.
She would have excused herself, but one glance at Lucy told her the girl had no interest in politeness at the moment. Nearer now on the harbor seas, the Nancy Ames was brought slowly toward them, nestling between the hulking camels.
With a shrug, Abbey squeezed through the crowd on the wharf in the direction that would take her to that sandbagger. People moved between her and the open port, and she lost sight of Jake for those few moments.
She broke out of the crowd and raced down the wharf, rounding the pilings toward the sandbagger, then she stopped short.
He was gone!
But how?
She hovered for a moment, then hurried down the dock to the sandbagger, which bobbed placidly in the water, straining its ropes and creaking against the pilings.
“Excuse me!” she called, hammering her foot on the dock. “Excuse me. Are you in there? Excuse me!”
Moments passed. Finally a black tuft of coiled hair appeared from the hold. Then a brown forehead, and two white-ringed eyes.
The Negro was afraid of her, that was plain. Certainly no northern Negro would give her that look. She knelt down on the dock. “Are you a slave?”
“Uh, no, ma’am, ah’s free,” the skinny dark fellow said, keeping low in the hold.
“Good. What happened to the man you were talking to?”
“What man was I tawkin’ to, ma’am?”
“The blond man—you know exactly who I mean. You were just talking to him. Where is he?”
“Uh, ma’am, I sho’ don’ know nothin’ about no man. Sorry, ma’am . . . I gats t’get below and stack these here crates. Sorry, ma’am.”
“You come back up here,” Abbey ordered as the Negro disappeared into the hold.
But he refused and wouldn’t come back up. Evidently he was more afraid of someone else than he was of her.
She put her fists on her hips and thought about climbing down onto the sandbagger and looking into the hold for herself, but that might not be wise. She’d heard enough lately about how rude it was to set foot on someone’s vessel without permission—it just wasn’t done. All right, for now. She’d catch up with him soon enough. She’d be sure of that.
Fuming, she made her way back along the wharf to Lucy’s side, but she never fully stopped looking for Jake’s face through the long wait for the Nancy Ames.
Nearly three quarters of an hour passed before the camels and the whale ship came abreast of Old North Wharf. Despite the black flag, several sailors aboard her were waving frantically at their families on the docks before they all had to settle down to the business of docking the massive vessel. Lucy kept scanning for Billy Edmonds’s face among the men, but there were too many sailors and too much rigging and too much work to do to get the big ship up to the dock and tied up.
Abbey watched silently, wrinkling her nose at the smell that accompanied the ship into the harbor. It was an oily, rank, smoky odor—whale oil had soaked through every plank and rope on the ship, along with the cloying scent of hundreds of barrels of oil in her hold.
Terrible long minutes plodded by before the gangplank finally dropped with a clunk to the wharf. Squeals of relief and delight began to spread through the crowd as, one by one, sailors raced down the plank into the arms of their families. Even men without families were welcomed like old friends. Some people were weeping; Abbey wondered if it was the joy of homecoming or the sadness at the sight of the black flag.
Only a handful of men had come off the ship when Dominic Nash suddenly left the captain’s family and dashed up the plank to meet a tall, bearded man in a heavy coat. At the same moment, the captain’s three children gasped and broke away from their mother to run up the plank and into the arms of the tall man—Captain Whiteside, apparently. As he held his tall son and young daughter, the captain spoke solemnly to Dominic.
On the wharf, the captain’s wife stood among her friends, tears of silent joy streaming down her face.
Group after group of sailors came down the gangplank—Abbey lost count after twenty-four—while other crew members continued to furl the sails and do finish work aboard the ship. Cargo crates were even being taken off the vessel already. Lucy stood beside Abbey and watched each face that appeared from the whale ship, bouncing Wilma in her arms. Abbey noticed again, as she had before, that the baby looked nothing like Lucy. The baby’s round face, oval eyes, and dark brown hair must belong to Billy Edmonds. He couldn’t be all that ugly to have such a pretty baby. Abbey found herself watching for a young man with those features among all those who filed from the whale ship with their sea bags over their shoulders.
There was none. No young man came off the plank and headed for Lucy. But finally, after the last man had walked down the plank, someone did head for Lucy Edmonds.
Dominic Nash and Captain Whiteside.
Abbey had stopped watching the gangplank and now watched Lucy. The girl’s delicate face looked grief-stricken as Dominic and the captain approached. Lucy buried her mouth against her baby’s lacy dress, and small sobs began to gush out. She never took her eyes from Dominic and the captain as they drew nearer. Tears dropped onto the lace of her baby daughter’s sleeve.
Abbey touched the girl’s hair. “Oh, Lucy . . .”