May 1764
Block Island
Twelve-miles off the Rhode Island coast
THE SEA was still angry, showing its anger with its white foam spitting at all comers.
Caty admired it as she stood there on the ruined beach. It was just the way she wished she could be sometimes, if she hadn't been doomed to be a lady.
It was a noisy sea, too, something she wasn't allowed to be, which was why she admired it so much more than when it was quiet. And now, after the storm, it was strewn with the wreckage of a ship. Broken masts and spars, pieces of bunks, the captain's own spyglass floating about, baskets of fruit, and, on a crossbeam, a black cat sitting there meowing out its distress.
"Oh, you poor kitty," she said, and without thinking, or taking off her shoes, Catharine Littlefield, all of ten years old in this year of 1764 and always willing to take charge of things, waded in, sloshing about in the warmish water amid splinters of wood, colored stones at her feet, and the bright green moss that usually clung to the pilings that stood in the normally clear water. She picked up the cat.
"What are you going to do with her?" her friend Sarah, standing by at the shore, asked.
"Take her home," Caty answered.
"I thought you weren't going home today."
Caty paused for just a second. "I suppose I have to go home sooner or later. Though," she added, "if not for Pa, I'd just as soon wait here for the next pirate ship that comes by and go with them wherever they're going. I'd even help them look for my great-grandfather's trunk full of gold."
"Caty, you're so full of fantasy, you sometimes don't know the truth."
"It'd help you to have some fantasy in your head."
The cat purred and nestled against her. She stroked it and wrapped her shawl around it. She looked about. Some of her elders who lived on Block Island had already been to the beach this morning and rescued any survivors.
Now, except for two curious women in riding breeches who lingered (all the women on the island rode astride, to the horror of visitors from the mainland), there was no one about. Caty and Sarah had already bade these two women good morning. They were Mrs. Garfield and Mrs. Heron, sisters who had both lost their husbands and now occupied the old Warren house near the meeting hall on the island.
Once again Caty looked down at the spyglass floating near her. "Here, take Puss," she directed Sarah, who did. And so she reached out and grasped the spyglass. "For Pa," she told her friend. And this, too, she wiped dry on her shawl.
Then she reached again for the cat, and with it and the spyglass in her arms, she stepped out of the water while Sarah went sloshing about in it.
For a moment Caty turned to enjoy the view of the island, Block Island, with its rows of stone fences and its rough terrain. She knew every tree, every path, every twist and turn of it. Her eyes caught the straight lines of the houses drawn against the now bright blue May morning sky, the New England houses standing unafraid before all the winds and storms. More than fifty houses!
Imagine! Imagine what the island had looked like in 1600 when the colony of Massachusetts Bay "acquired" it from the Indians. Though she'd never been to school, Caty knew all about the history of the place. Wasn't she helping her father to write a book about it?
The island was then sold to a private syndicate and eventually ended up in the hands of Simon Ray, Caty's great-grandfather.
Twelve miles off the Rhode Island coast, belonging to Rhode Island now. See? I know my lessons. Who says I need a tutor?
This is my world, she told herself.And that's why I don't want to leave it.