3
Eleuthera
From Boston, round the curve of Cape Cod, they lost sight of land and flew south to the Caribbean Sea, straight down the globe Thea had screwed into the lid of the saloon piano for Kay’s lessons. Coal was the Morning Light’s usual cargo for Governor’s Harbour, Eleuthera. Francis had been loading in Glace Bay while Kay was dreaming at Aunt Lydia’s, before she ever knew she would be sailing with them.
On the globe, Eleuthera lay like a long bird with a beak, an outer island of the Bahamas that formed a barrier between the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. It grew closer each time Francis took the morning sights.
He was teaching Thea to use the sextant. After Boston, she perked up enough to come up on deck for most of the morning, to lie in a shaded hammock Francis got the deckhands to set up for her below the fo’c’sle. She smiled and seemed herself again, if a little depleted. She and Kay sketched seabirds and the rigging and from time to time each other, in watercolours and in charcoal, until Kay grew frustrated with her lack of skill and turned to a book instead. None of the books on board were interesting. Francis read nothing but naval histories, and Thea (even worse) only spiritual improvement. Kay’s own books, quickly gathered from Aunty Bob’s shelves, had lasted the first three days; now she was rereading Treasure Island.
Most of all, she looked: at the sea, at the sky, up into the laddered maze of sheets and tackle, up, up to the perspective-vanishing point of the crow’s nest, up where Jacky Judge or Arthur Wetmore scampered at Francis’s bidding. Kay wished she could climb there, so free, so high. Her arms were pipe cleaners, and as much use. At night she tried to pull herself up on the inside of her cabin door, scrabbling with her bare toes for purchase, fingers aching, but it was no use, she was floor-bound. At least she was not land-bound—bounding as she was, they were, over the main.
Persistent pain on the left side still troubled Thea, and she found certain foods unpleasing; but it was true that she felt a deal better now, out in the sea air and the temperate-flowing breeze. Francis’s regard for her, and the hammock, gave her a feeling of safe refuge she had not known under her father’s glacial rule. Kay too was more cheerful, less likely to wear that frozen face that was Father’s legacy, or to split like him into a rage. And no dreams, all this time. The rocking of the sea must be good for her poor head.
Thea put out a foot to the ledge of the fo’c’sle and set the hammock gently rocking too, the two motions and then a movement within her combining into a kind of ecstatic swirl, so that when Francis appeared to check on her, it was all she could do not to pull him down so their mouths could meet, how sweet his mouth, how cool on her mouth and on every secret part. She clasped his hand instead, and he held hers too long, yet not long enough for her desire. An unexpected fillip of her condition!
On the ocean side of the island the water was dark Atlantic blue, but as they rounded the point to Eleuthera’s inward side, where Governor’s Harbour lay, the sea changed colour. Blue melted into sheer turquoise, a pale, translucent window to the bottom of the sea. At the railing Kay looked down, down—sixty feet, perhaps? ten fathoms, that was—past iridescent schools of fish, past shadow and shoal, to the sliding gold-green bottom of the sea. It took effort not to leap over the side, the water looked so delicious.
“Miss!” came a shout from above, and there was Jacky Judge, the quick, dark one, pointing down—where silver-grey things came leaping and sidling alongside the ship.
“Dolphins,” Francis told her, gesturing Thea to come to the railing too.
A company of blunt-headed grey dolphins swam effortlessly beside them, teasing the ship, easing along the blue way faster, faster, faster than the Morning Light could ever go, keeping them company and arching in melodious rounds in and out of the ever-foaming sea, as if they felt the same thrill themselves that they produced in Kay. “Oh, let me—” she cried, leaning over and over to see better, until Francis laughed and Thea caught at her waistband.
Twenty silk-smooth dolphins played along for a league, and then romped off in another direction, doing their tricks, leapfrogging and whirling through the waves like—like— No, they were like nothing except themselves.
Then more surprise, more shouts—a score, thirty, fifty silver bird-fish leapt from the water in formation, flying, flying, stretching the flight as long as they could, poor wingless winging things. The small heads daggered out beyond small fins that whirred like toy-mills, like tops. The fish seemed to go forward by sheer wishing it so.
So much effort toward the air—but then Kay thought, do they fly from?
She looked down again as they sank, only to rise again in frantic flight, and tried to see. Arthur Wetmore, going by with a rope coil, pointed and she saw—she thought she saw—nothing. A darkness.
“Shark, likely,” he said. “Something big.”
Then he was off, at a shout from Mr. Wright the first mate (always so quiet in the saloon on the occasions when he came in, but he had the biggest voice on deck), and the crew surged around them, around Thea’s hammock even, because Francis had ordered them to reef the mainsail, tie it up so they would not go too fast in the increasing breeze.
Although the pale water seemed so clear, still you could not see what was happening under the surface, only the result of it—the flying fish that leapt, leapt, fiercely forward, arrows out of the water, not exulting in air as Kay had first thought, but driving away from danger. When they fall back, do they fall into the mouths of sharks? You cannot see, even in this glass-coloured Caribbean blue.
Kay stood looking down, down, into the sea and through it. The dolphins came again companionably along, leaping for joy—for joy this time. No shark could threaten them.
From the wharf at Governor’s Harbour they went for a walk—Kay’s and Thea’s legs, amusingly unused to land, were unsteady at first—on the white road through the little town, past a tempting pink-stuccoed library, up over the hill-spine of the narrow island, then down to where Kay could just see a long stretch of pinkish sand. Everything was pink in this little place. But Thea stopped in the roadway and said that was a long-enough walk, they must turn round now.
Kay pulled on her hand to tell her how badly she wished to go on, but Thea closed her eyes and shook her head, her face as closed as her eyes.
So Kay could not argue and they turned away again, back into the shade of overhanging orange flowers. The day was advanced and Francis had the last of the unloading to see to; tomorrow the sugar would load. He told them as they walked just why it was most important to see that the stevedores put two-thirds of the new cargo in the ’tween decks for the best stowage, and embarked on an involved tale of cargo once shifting so that some ship or other “nearly foundered, save that the crew shovelled rock salt uphill for three days to right her!”
Thea nodded, not speaking. Kay thought her own thoughts and wished she could go back to the pink-sand shore.
They had a duty to call on the Anglican rector and his wife; Thea had a letter of introduction from Mr. Archibald at the church in Yarmouth. As Francis carried on around the little harbour back to the Morning Light, they stopped at St. Patrick’s sign and went through the white lych-gate to a substantial grey church with sea-green doors.
The right-hand door was slightly ajar. Kay pulled on the great iron ring to open it more fully. In the tiled entry they found a woman just getting up from washing the floor, pushing herself erect with beautiful long hands that she lifted in greeting. She did not answer Thea’s inquiry directly but called out through a side door in a strong, free-flowing voice, “Susannah! Tell Rector! Lady to see him, two ladies,” and then turned back with an open but unsmiling face. “She tell he,” she said.
Kay was happy to be thought a lady. Thea stepped forward, though, and Kay’s heart cramped a little, knowing that Lady Bountiful would appear next. “Thank you,” Thea said, over-precisely. She opened her little purse to find a coin, but the woman was busy wringing her cloth and taking up her pail and did not seem to notice, and indeed Kay could not say herself why she thought Thea’s gesture was so rude.
A plump white woman came through the side door saying, “Yes, Rhoda?” and then, to Thea, “Oh, I am Mrs. Judd—you must have come on the Morning Light—I’m told Captain Grant has brought a wife with him.”
Behind her followed a man, younger than Francis, but not a boy. He had an over-boned face, with a long chin and wide cheekbones on a head that appeared to take up half his body. Seeing Thea, the man bowed and smiled. To Kay he smiled more widely—the split of his mouth widening until she thought his jaw might detach. His eyes almost disappeared in the creases of his face.
“This is Mr. Brimner,” said Mrs. Judd, saving Thea from the error of thinking he was Canon Judd. It appeared that Canon Judd was occupied, and had asked Mr. Brimner to give them a tour of the church—Mrs. Judd did all the talking, still. “Mr. Brimner is soon to be leaving us, in Mission to the South Seas. You will have to get some pointers from Captain Grant,” she told Mr. Brimner. “I hope you will stay to dine with us after Evensong, Mrs. Grant? We will give you a taste of Bahamian victuals, if you are willing?”
Thea agreed with proper thanks, and Mrs. Judd said she would leave them to the tour and see to supper.
Mr. Brimner led them through the tiled porch into the nave, where the floor was pale-grey stone and the walls white-grey smooth plaster.
Gathering his thoughts, he began, his wide mouth over-articulating the words. “What do I know to tell you…Well! This church is not very old, 1848, but the parish of Eleuthera and Harbour Island dates from 1768, and the diocese from the 1600s, so you see they feel themselves to be quite Established, no New World upstart. I have been favourably struck by the clergy’s scholarship and independence of thought in my short—though they may feel not short enough!—time here, I promise you.”
He did not require comment, but led them halfway up the aisle before turning to point above to the organ loft at the rear of the church. “The truly glorious pipe organ—I’m told it cost a hundred pounds. I do not believe there can be another so fine in the whole of the islands. The pipes, delightfully painted with flowering vines, as you see, make a tremendous noise to the Lord.”
The church windows stood open to the wind. It was peaceful in the shaded interior, open and uncluttered. Stained glass windows, oblong and round, made strange dollops of colour on the pale stone floor.
“Where in the South Seas are you going?” Thea asked.
“I have a missionary post at Tonga, south of Fiji, for a year or two. Chiefly a teaching post,” he said. “My arrival in Eleuthera was—a stagecoach stop, as it were. Unforeseen circumstance (well, a sinking!) delayed the ship on which I was to proceed, and I have been here three months now awaiting another. They will grow weary of me soon, and my post will weary with waiting.”
Thea was about to speak, but above and behind them the bell began to ring for Evensong. They took their pew as Mr. Brimner directed them and the congregation came flowing in, dotting the other pews with their hats and coats, spots of gorgeousness like stained glass on the grey stone. In the mass of people, only a few colourless blots stood out, grey British ladies with small mouths, and a man or two in corporation clothes.
The organ swelled, indeed making a very loud noise, as Canon Judd processed into the church from the vestry door, spectacles flashing, vestments swaying, lordly in the pomp of a magnificent stomach.
“The nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time,” he said, and pointed to the hymnal board. “God who sets us on our journey!”
Canon Judd was not as good a preacher as Father. He was of the brimstone variety and gave a homily on sin that Kay had no inclination to make head or tail of. Starting with a discursive tour through Nineveh, he roamed on in rolling British accents, and Kay laid her head on the high pew-back and let her mind drift until Thea gave her arm a tender pinch. Then she tilted her chin downward to look attentive, but she still was thinking of other things. Not of the bad things that she sometimes turned to in her mind, of Mary hanging, or Annie lying in the dirt under the wolf willow, but of blunt-headed dolphins racing the ship, easing along the blue way faster, faster, faster than the Morning Light could ever go, of silver bird-fish flying, flying— Oh, it was over. Thea was rising for the hymn.
“I suggested to my wife that in the circumstances she might remain at home and rest after the exertions of this last year,” Francis said, taking the chair that Canon Judd indicated, across the dining table from Thea and Kay. Thea had not wished to telegraph her condition to Mrs. Judd, but Francis seemed to be an old favourite with her, and Canon Judd too.
“But she wished nothing more than to accompany you, I’m sure,” Mrs. Judd said, beaming at the happy pair. “Very proper in a captain’s wife.” She made her face smooth again and closed her hands together for grace to be said, which Canon Judd did at length in careful Latin. Thea pressed Kay’s foot to make her sit more still.
“And was it a great blessing to leave the frozen North?” the Canon asked, to start the conversation again once he had finished reciting and left a suitable pause for reflection after their amens.
Thea felt Kay stiffening beside her, but she smiled for Canon Judd. “Not so far north. You must think we lived in harsh conditions, but the region is subject to melting winds, and snow is only rarely troublesome. We were very comfortable in the principal’s quarters—and of course the students much warmer and better fed than they would have been in their teepees.” But even saying this, she thought of the Stoney camp downhill from the school when the Elders came to talk while Father lay dying, the wood-smoke warmth of the women’s tent, bright-faced babies tucked up together; and those two old women who walked up to the school, plaid blankets wrapped tight under belts, the fur on their beadwork mitts lifting in the wind. She thought of the children shivering in their dormitory cots last winter, even with two blankets. Twice the blankets, because half the beds were empty.
She looked to check: Kay had bent down her head and was stolidly eating, using the fish fork just as she ought.
Thea picked up her own, and said, “We stayed at Blade Lake until Father’s replacement could arrive, in March, then another while to acquaint him with the running of the school, and finally we set off—and were delayed by a snowstorm at Calgary for three days.”
“How I disliked that telegram,” Francis put in.
“Oh, but it was spring from then on, across the country, the train moving through bare fields and into new leaves by Ontario. And then—well, then we were married, as soon as we were able after Kay and I arrived in Yarmouth.”
“O happy day!” Francis was performing the courtly lover for the Judds, but also for her. If she had not felt so low, Thea would have blushed.
“You had served seven long years for your bride?” Canon Judd asked.
“Ten, Sir!” Francis smiled across the table. “I ought to have ridden to fetch her, but I’m only a man of action on the sea.”
Thea said, “My father needed me, when his wife fell ill—his second wife. Kay was an infant, and I felt a strong duty to go. I was born in the West, at Fort à la Corne, you know, my father’s first parish in the diocese of Rupert’s Land, and only came home to the East to finish my schooling. I was glad to be of service in the school.”
“But to wait, to be kept apart for so long—ten years!”
Careful not to let Mrs. Judd’s overblown sympathy make Kay feel like a burden, Thea said, “I missed Francis, of course. But he was away at sea most of that time. I was happy to be back in the landscape I had loved as a child, and to come to know my stepmother and my little sister.”
“It must always be a privilege to bring light to the darkness of the Red Man, but I credit Mr. Brimner’s choice of climate over your father’s,” Canon Judd said, returning stubbornly to the weather. “A sojourn in the tropics will do you good, as it will him. If his ship ever does put in, eh, Mr. Brimner?”
Taken aback, Mr. Brimner’s mobile eyebrows jumped. “Again I am forced to apologize, Sir.” He put down his knife and fork to make praying hands, and the tall woman took his plate away and replaced it with another.
She put another plate of fish in front of Thea and offered the sauceboat. Mrs. Judd had very fine china, Thea thought, trying to distract her unruly stomach. Pretty, two birds on a branch. Meissen? One could not turn it over to look.
Mr. Brimner had turned to her. “My destination is a fledgling mission school in Tonga, Mrs. Grant. I must take instruction from you on how the education of native children may best be managed, and what errors to beware. My heart is willing, but my skills untested.”
Not knowing what to tell him, Thea said, “I had no skills to speak of, Sir—one year of normal school, training to teach obedient boys and girls in Nova Scotia.”
“Quite a change, going to a wild Indian school!” said Mrs. Judd, warmly approving. “Christian service in action, indeed!”
“They were not wild,” Thea felt obliged to say, at Kay’s quick diamond glance. She tried to smile for Kay, but found her face no longer willing to obey. She rose, and said confusedly to Mrs. Judd, “Is there, may I—?”
“Oh, of course, of course, my dear, I ought to have thought…Come with me, right along this passage…”
Shut in the water closet, blessedly aware of Mrs. Judd’s feet tapping away to the dining hall, Thea leaned her forehead on the wall beside the commode. She felt a sudden sweat start up on her forehead as her interior cramped and twisted, unused to and ungrateful for Bahamian victuals.
Thea had been talking a great deal, and was tired perhaps from the long walk. So was Kay tired. These people were stuffy and there was too much to eat and too many different glasses and forks, as if they were out-Empiring the Empire. There was a long course of conch soup and then more fish, and Thea came back from the toilet and Kay thought she might go but could not make up her mind to bother Mrs. Judd.
More fish with lovely smooth slices of orange fruit around it, and after that a powdery potato stew with strange vegetables in it that Kay did not at all like, and then plum duff, brought in with a steaming gravy boat of rum sauce even on this hot day.
But Thea was standing, and then dropping, bowing, hands to her skirt as if to hide something—her face gone white looked up, caught Kay’s eyes, jerked on to Francis and on again, still searching—
Mrs. Judd came around the table at a run and caught Thea from behind, putting an arm around her waist, and almost swung her to the door, saying come come my dear come now and then they were out of the door and gone.
Canon Judd and Francis and Mr. Brimner looked around the table as if they thought to find some answer there in the empty seats, and Mrs. Judd’s voice in the distance calling, “Rhoda! Rhoda, come quick, will you?” rang clearly through the quiet night.
Nobody spoke. The wind had risen and the sound of the waves lapping at the pier was louder now, crash and ripple repeated over and over.
After a minute or maybe ten, Canon Judd sat down at the table again, nodding slowly, his heavy body making his chair squawk along the wooden floor. Mr. Brimner subsided silently into his own chair.
Francis, almost as white as Thea, said, “I should—may I go and find my wife, Sir?”
“I wouldn’t,” said the Canon.
Kay felt she was invisible now and wondered if anyone would hear if she opened her mouth.
The kitchen door behind her opened a crack and the soft, dark head of a little girl poked through. “Come,” she whispered, reaching long fingers to tweak Kay’s skirt. “Come, girl.”
Mrs. Judd, coming in through the other door, nodded to Kay to go along.
Kay stood up and set her napkin on her plate, careful to make it an elegant fold. “Please excuse me, Sir,” she said, but it was as she had thought, nobody moved or answered, or seemed to have heard.
As she went out, Mrs. Judd was saying, “Well, Captain Grant, you will have to brace yourself, my dear.”
The girls took Kay to a long white room in another part of the house, where they were finishing their own supper on a deal table: a bowl of sago pudding. There were three cots at the other end of the room, with mosquito nets over them.
Kay stood in the middle of the floor, not knowing what to do. The littler girl stayed with her, one arm around her now, running the other hand down Kay’s long braid.
“Mamma say you are to go to bed here,” the second girl said, the older girl. “Your mamma not too good and so she does not go on the ship tonight.”
No one else came. Francis did not come, nor Thea. Nobody told her what was happening to Thea. If she was dead, perhaps.
After some time waiting, Kay took off her boots and stockings and her new white dress and lay down where they told her to. The older girl undid the netting and set it over the bed, and after another blank gap of time Kay fell asleep, still not knowing anything at all.
Thea heard her own voice saying, I know, oh no, I knew, I know. Perhaps not out loud, she hoped not. Hard pain like a mass of stone slammed into her from behind. Sharp pain breaking over that, again and again, really dreadful pain. She could hardly tell where the pain came from, it was in every place, her back, her legs, her chest, her arms, folding tight around her as she tightened into a fetal curl around herself and her burden, her treasure.
Nothing made sense. Mrs. Judd stood aside from the bed where she had fallen, pulling away the skirt of her Delft-blue dress, wet and dark with blood, and the other woman put a thin hand to her forehead. Dark eyes, no smile in them. Thea felt sense leaving, again and again, but then pain came again and the darkness surged away so she could not be blessedly unknowing, unknown. This was not good, this was not the way.
If only she could faint. More blood, and the woman taking blood away. She waved her hand and asked for a pot to sit on, and made another great evacuation of the bowels—so much humiliation, with this woman she did not know, and Mrs. Judd coming in and out; but she had lost the ability to care about such nonsense as pride or civility, and only rocked in the bed waiting for it to pass, this thing that was happening. More blood, in great gouts—the bed would never be clean again. “Oh my dear,” Mrs. Judd said from the doorway. “Rhoda, is she—” and the dark woman said, “More to go, but she progresses.”
Nothing was progressing, there was no—hours and hours, nothing but a black blade scraping inside her and the clamping cramp of her body trying to get rid of it. Of the baby, the darling, already gone, she knew it must be. A punishment, she felt most deeply. But it was not, she told herself. Oh God—she told herself again that God’s justice was not man’s, that she was not at fault, or that she was forgiven—and then the cramping took hold again to twist her so she rose up grossly in the bed, panting on all fours and groaning like an animal in pain. Because she was an animal in pain.
At one moment she heard herself say, “Thank God I am not on the ship.” The inner mouth of her mind that still could think said, Yes, indeed, you see, that would have been worse. The outer mouth said no no nothing nothing could be worse.
She opened her eyes but could not see. She put out her arms and there was a basin put in them and she vomited.
When she next noticed, she was sitting on the pot again, Rhoda holding her arms, or was it Mary, is she, am I taking Mary down from the doorway? Poor dead weight, poor girl.
No, no—she would lose her mind. This was insupportable. She forced her brain back and got up to walk, going from side to side of the room three or four times, but could not carry on and so she lay back down and turned, coiling in the effort to be still and quiet.
After some hours or some days, the woman came again to peer between Thea’s legs, then pushed a hand down hard on her stomach so Thea cried out in shock and hurt. Holding her there, the woman slipped long fingers into her, right inside where it was—everything—flaming with blood, and there was a sliding rip and more wet, more blood in a stranger’s house, this bed would never be unstained.
The pain diminished at once—a relief of spirit and body to be only hurting, only dragged to pieces, not cut right in two. And there was a little sac, lying in the woman’s pearly palm, all reddened now, a red, transparent sac, and inside it a mite, a thumb-sized child, a tragedy of waste.
Wake up, Kay heard. Wake, wake, wake up, girl, whispering, then a tweedling humming, wake up wake up again, all very soft and almost sleeping in her ear. The air was cool and sweet. She had been dreaming, running along a path after Annie as the dark was coming, and where was Thea? Lost, as the dream was lost on waking too.
It was the little girl Sally and her sister, Susannah. When Kay opened her eyes, they took her hands and pulled her from the bed, smiling and whispering. “Come come come,” they said, and Kay pulled her white dress back on over her shift, leaving her stockings where they lay, and went with them. They went in bare feet and so did she, as if it was the old days at Blade Lake. Her feet were soft after a long summer in boots, but she did not mind the round stones or occasional prickles on the path. They went ahead of and behind her, laughing in their yellow dresses now they were outside, and Susannah said her mamma (“my sister,” Kay said) was still asleep and would be most like all day so their mamma said to play along the sand instead of getting underfoot.
Susannah must be her own age, Kay calculated from her height and seriousness. Sally was only little, six or so, tagging along with Susannah as Kay and Annie had run along beside Annie’s sister Mary whenever they could.
The morning was still pearly-early, only faint sounds from the town below them as they climbed on a long white path through tangled brush and hunkering flower-bushes, ducking or leaping branches as they went. A bleating, bell-dangling goat ran past them once and Sally turned to smack its rump with a stick as it went by. The path went downhill then, and left, went right, and opened up as if through an archway.
And there was the sea again, the same particular green-white-blue-white glass that begged you to come in.
They did. The girls dropped their sacks and dresses, and ran down the pink slope shrieking. Kay took off her white dress and ran with them just in her shift, her bare feet on the bare sand, glorious.
The girls were in the water. They would drown! But no, of course they would not. They were laughing and jumping, leaping to meet the waves and leaping back, dancing into the shining water and back.
Sally ran up to where they’d left their clothes, and pulled from one sack a big glass jar. She raced back down the sand—oh! do not drop it!—and into the long, calm shallows past the waves where Kay and her sister stood. Susannah took the jar and showed Kay how to use it, waiting until the wave had passed and the surface quieted: she pressed the bottom of the jar gently into the water and bade Kay look.
She bent over and looked through a clear eye dipped down into the sea—look, fish! Transparent small fish, a school of them, flitted through Kay’s and Susannah’s legs and arms, invisible in the waves until the glass revealed them all. They almost made Kay want to jump back, not to be bitten, but they were small fish, after all. But when a long striped fish swam into her glassy view, Susannah said, “Run!” and they went splashing through the spray, away, away from whatever that bad fish was. The curling surf came racing up the sand so strongly, and pulled back so strongly, that you could only stand sideways and wait for it, almost shivering with the thing that was coming, and would you live?—and then pound, pound, the wave pummelling you over into a great unknowing mound, lost in sudden silence and green motion—and then you were set free and could jump up again. And again, again.
They ran along the water’s edge till they were tired, then back along the sand, wet shifts clinging and sticking to their legs. Susannah’s sack held oranges and plums and bread. They ate, and there was water in another jar to take the taste of salt water out of their mouths. Sally fell asleep with her head in her sister’s lap, and the older girls sat drawing pictures in the sand with a stick until they got hot again. Then Susannah woke Sally (bright eyes clear as marbles, the lashes tangled black velvet) and they ran back down into the purling, constant, ravelling-unravelling sea.
The surf was higher now, and they went straight through it to walk in the chest-deep water past its edge, Sally leaping up to ride Susannah’s jutting hip. This time the best thing happened. Susannah pointed and pulled Kay’s arm to turn her to the south. Not twenty feet from them she saw two long grey shapes slide shining through the shining turquoise surf—two blunt, brainy heads, silk-grey skin, one fin with a notch out: two dolphins, strayed into the little bay. How long were they? Nine feet, ten—and they swam close, so close!—their bulbous foreheads, the sweet long line of mouth and nose. The notched one’s face looked up, his eye intense in focus, then away again—her existence did not impinge on his.
Susannah went closer, closer, both sisters sidling nearer and nearer to swim beside the dolphins, wanting to be closer, as Kay did herself. Susannah waved come on!
From the ship she had wanted to jump in and swim with them—but now it felt impertinent to think of touching that grey flank without an impossible permission. The dolphins were not like a fish that you might want to eat, but like a big dog coyote looking back at you from a stubble field. His coat the colour of the grass, as the dolphins were deep-sea-coloured.
But this was Sally and Susannah’s place. Maybe by living here always and knowing the place, they had the right to touch, to swim along with the dolphins.
No place was her place, it seemed to her for a bleak moment. Everywhere was places she had been taken to, or barged into. Even the Morning Light.
Thea lay all day in Mrs. Judd’s guest chamber, still bleeding. The world was made of blood. Still more was coming; they said it would go on for another day or so, like the worst of one’s womanly time. Solid clots like portions of fresh liver ready for the pan, sliding smoothly out as if it was an ordinary month, no pain to speak of.
Mrs. Judd said one must not repine; God’s will, she said. She said she and the Canon had been disappointed time out of mind—four times, that she knew of.
She left Thea alone so she could think again, but Thea did not want to.
Francis came and sat on the end of the remade bed, clean-looking now so he could be spared her pain. He stroked his hand along her leg. “Never mind,” he said, “never mind, my dear,” and she nodded, to relieve him. But of course they minded.
Nothing was said to Kay, that morning or ever. Rhoda said Thea was still too sick to talk and for they girls not to be at her, and continued going to and fro with bowls and basins. She did a great bustle of washing in the hut past the kitchen: a bower of sheets and cloths hung swaying, bleaching in the sun. Kay stayed with Susannah and Sally in the back kitchen, and Francis did not come.
Kay thought, not knowing what to think, that Thea might have had an apoplexy, like their father, but survived; they would say if she was dead, wouldn’t they? Not tuberculosis—Kay had seen many people die of that, and it took a long time before they wasted into death. She had not died from the baby, since there was no baby crying or demanding. Kay would have looked after it, if Thea died, as Thea had looked after her when her mother died.
Lying in the little white bed that evening, Kay reasoned it out, from the sadness in the house and the noise and now the silence. The baby itself must have died, as a calf will sometimes die and be pulled dead out of its mother.
On the third day, able to carry herself without showing weakness, Thea went into the empty church in the afternoon. She knelt to pray, but found the usual words sticking in her throat.
After a time Mr. Brimner appeared at the pew’s end. He bowed minutely, in his over-formal way. “I fear Canon Judd has ridden out over the island…But if it would help you to have spiritual counsel, or simply company, I am at your disposal.”
Thea moved her stiff mouth to courtesy, and said she was very well, thank you.
He nodded. “This morning I found myself refreshed by the words of a collect in the early baptismal service—the 1549, you know—which I thought might be of use to you. Of course, all stillborn children are welcomed into the sight of God, there can be no question otherwise, but still, the language here…” He waited, as if for permission, and at her silence dipped his head and took a card from his vest pocket. “Receive them, O Lord, as Thou hast promised by Thy well-beloved Son, saying Ask and you shall have: seek and you shall find…”
Mr. Brimner looked up again, as if to be certain she was attending and allowing him to continue. Receiving no stop from her, he did so. “Saying, Ask and you shall have: seek and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. Give now unto us that ask—let us that seek, find. Open Thy gate unto us that knock, that this infant may enjoy the everlasting benediction of Thy heavenly washing, and may come to the eternal kingdom which thou hast promised, by Christ Our Lord, Amen.”
At “heavenly washing,” Thea felt her eyes open and tears flood briefly out. She had a fresh hanky but could not find it in the unfamiliar pockets of the skirt Mrs. Judd had lent her. Mr. Brimner waved a large white one at her nose, and she caught it and turned away for a moment. Only a few tears, quietly shed. Like a deposit on her grief. It was not true release, it was not that she had forgiven God.
Walking down the gravel path beside the church, Kay heard someone weeping. She stood on tiptoe to look in the window, but it was too high. Instead, she slipped into the vestry porch, silent in bare feet, shadowy against the white walls in her white dress, no longer spotless, softened by sun and salt water. Thea was praying and crying, a hanky pressed to her face. It must be hard to have a baby inside you and find that the baby died, and perhaps Francis would be angry.
Mr. Brimner looked up and saw her standing there, and he smiled again at her as he had the first day, face creasing into an excess of kindness. He waved a hand at her as to a friend, an equal. She nodded back and went on cat feet, out again.
There she was still, wandering in the graveyard, when he came out. She saw him casting about for a glimpse of her. He started over the grass, stepping over graves just as if a person was not rotted away to white sticks under each one.
“Miss Kay,” he said, when near enough.
“Mr. Brimner,” she said in turn, since he kept waiting for her to speak.
“I have been— Well, do you know, Captain Grant was so kind as to suggest that I might take passage to Tonga on the Morning Light, and I wished to say—I have been accustomed to earn my keep. Your brother says your schooling has been neglected. He thought we might study together, as we go, to lessen the burden for your sister. And perhaps increase your skill in algebra.” At her grimace, he said, “Hm! Or we could study the English poets—Spenser, Donne, Milton? I am myself now engaged on a work of— But no, I see you are unmoved by poesy. The Latin tongue, then? I could benefit from polishing my Catullus.”
Kay looked at him. Her father’s Hebrew Bible, thick and backwards, blackest ink on thinnest paper, lay in the bottom of her trunk. “Could you teach me Hebrew?”
He smiled again, lesserly, without the creases. “Sadly, I am no hand at Hebrew. What would you think of Ancient Greek?”
Her heart leapt.
“Cyrus and Xerxes, the three hundred— I believe I saw a First Greek Book on Canon Judd’s shelves. We might persuade him to part with it…”
Kay said, “Would I learn the other letters?”
“The Greek alphabet? Necessarily.”
“My father did not have time to teach me yet, and then he died.”
“Well then, I believe it is a bargain.” Mr. Brimner put out his hand, and Kay took it. His smile as usual broke his head in two, this time the neck jutting out to add emphasis to his pleasure. Kay took her hand back, but she was pleased.
Mrs. Judd gave them a sad fare-thee-well, sobbing into her lace-edged cuff; her tears lent Thea stoic resolve. She was grateful for the care that Mrs. Judd had given and caused to be given her, and thanked her as warmly as she was able to do—not very well.
That morning Rhoda had brought her a small box, six inches long and three across. Inside, on a piece of satin, lay a wrapped clump of matter. Thea did not unwrap it. She pulled the white ribbon from the hem of her trousseau petticoat, from which the stains would never be got out, and tied it round and round, seven or eight times, with a tight knot and a careful bow. Making the bow became the only job she had.
When Francis came, bringing Jacky Judge and Hubbard to carry her bandbox and Mr. Brimner’s trunk, she asked him to walk with her down the beach before they went aboard.
They walked as far as Thea could manage, and at the end of the long pink spit, Francis dug a deep hole in the sand, where it would be some time before the beach wore away, and buried the box. No marker. Thea put a stone on the heap of sand and prayed for a moment, and then they left that place.