Then the aunts began telling Thea about boarding schools in Nova Scotia where Kay might be very happy. School was what Kay was not allowed to talk about—or what could only be talked about in a certain way—and she sat growing cold while they discussed nourishing meals, teaching philosophy and suitable study for young ladies, such as Home Economy or Pitman’s Course in Shorthand. The aunts talked on as the room greyed into evening (no fire lit to cheer them, no matter how chill the rain, because it was August) about difficult eventualities, and twelve years old, oh dear me…At last Aunt Queen brought her mouth into a line and pushed the bottom lip out, and said that hospital treatments had been found efficacious for—ahem…
At that, Thea stood up so sharply that the tea cart jittered across the shining floor. She put out her hand to Kay.
“Please excuse us,” she said to the aunts. “I must give Kay her drops.”
“Mastoiditis,” murmured Aunty Bob, who did not often align with her sisters against them.
Thea shook her head without looking back. “Only the earache. She has a proclivity.”
Kay said nothing. Anything she said would be wrong.
Thea bustled with the drops and made Kay get straight into her nightgown, though it was only six in the evening and they had not had their supper, and turned down the coverlet on the cot Aunty Bob had put up in the dressing room, and knelt beside her to say prayers. She kissed Kay and said, “We have not been happy for a long time. But now we will be.”
The night and day had been so jolting that, without wanting to, Kay slept.
In the cool darkness of the Yarmouth night, Thea heard her sister gasp. Then a tight impending silence. She slid her feet from the quilt, darted across to the cot and touched Kay’s face to wake her. “All right, dear heart,” she said. “All’s well. Just a dream, just a dream.”
Kay’s eyes were open, but she was not seeing this room at Aunty Bob’s. She looked frantically to the wall, and away, and back again, staring. After a minute, she whispered, “I try not ever to think about things, but sometimes I can’t help it, Thetty. I think it will escape and I will break open bleeding and die, or run away and lose you.”
“And leave me, you mean.”
“Yes, but then I would lose you too.”
“I will always find you.”
“You could not find Annie when she ran away.”
(Thea saw again the bent form beneath bare branches—too late.)
“Do not leave me,” Kay begged her.
Thea opened the bedcovers and climbed in beside her sister in the narrow bed. “No, no, I will not leave you. I will never leave you, or lose you, or let you be hurt,” she said, murmuring and whispering into Kay’s ear, into her hair and the nape of her neck, as Kay turned in the cot and gradually her shuddering stilled.
At breakfast next morning, Thea announced that Kay would not stay with Aunty Bob either. There was nothing for it but Kay must sail with them. Someone (it was Aunty Bob, the one Kay had almost liked) said that some might say it was a sad thing to have a younger sister tagging along on a honeymoon, especially one ten years awaited. That was also Kay’s fault, although nobody said so, because Thea had had to come out west to care for her after her mother died. Anyway, Thea and Francis had had a proper honeymoon in Halifax four months before, in May, when they first arrived. When they were first married, and Kay had first been sent to stay alone with Aunt Lydia. She had kept her dreams clamped up that time.
There was only one day left before the Morning Light was to leave, not enough time to assemble her kit, but Thea took Kay down Main Street to Milady’s Up to Date Shop for boots with soft soles that would not skitter on the deck. Thea mourned the lack of a better clothier, but Kay yanked her braid so her neck hurt and said her middy blouse was fine, if she was to be a sailor. She was afraid of being on the boat (the ship, she must always say), but she would not let them see that—not the Forrests or the Wetmores or hateful old Aunt Lydia, not Thea or Francis.
Francis did not look at her askance. He nodded, as to a sailor he was taking on, and said he had a cabin saved for just such eventuality, although she would have to sleep with a crate of china at one end of the bunk. Thea laughed and put her hand on Kay’s arm and said no such thing, it was only his joke.
“I meant on the way home, of course,” Francis said, his eyes calm. “We don’t take china to China, that would be coals to Newcastle.”
But they do not want a child with them. They want to be by themselves.
It was foolish to think that, by themselves, because the ship was full of people, almost all of them men, and some very rough at that—so there was another lecture from Thea, about whom Kay was and was not to speak to. The crew was lined up to greet them that morning when they first came aboard: the tall, thin first mate, Mr. Wright, and the stout little bosun with the strong black beard; the third mate with thin pinkish hair who was a gentleman from England come down in the world. She did not remember their names, but Thea had a list to study from.
The huge second mate frightened Kay. His beet-red nose, terribly pocked from some old disease, had grown beyond the usual to take up most of his face. She looked too closely, and wished she had not, and feared that he was angry to be stared at.
Then they met Hubbard, the steward, and his wife Lena, who would see to her and Thea; and the rest of the crew, and the cook, down to the least idler, the ship’s carpenter, Seaton, who was very old and lay smoking his pipe in the lifeboat when Francis did not shout at him. And the ship’s boys, three of them: George and Jacky and the shy youngest boy, with light-brown eyes, who smiled at Kay: Arthur Wetmore from Port Maitland, one of Thea’s hundred cousins, whose father knew Kay’s own father—had known him, before he died. Arthur leaned against the foremast to talk to her, until he was shouted for, because he was new himself, only on his second voyage. So now she knew that the bitter end of the rope goes in the scupper, when making the ballantine coil of three circles in a piling, untwisting, circling round and round…
Roused by some change in the rocking movement of her bunk, Kay woke. She had been asleep, after all. But not dreaming.
She lay quiet. But the change in motion gave her a galvanized wakefulness that could not be ignored. The porthole only showed blank darkness.
Kay pushed back the blankets and stood, careful with the rolling, to pull on her skirt and shawl over her nightdress and slip bare feet into new brown boots. The cabin door opened without creaking. She shut it carefully, silently, and made her way along the dark corridor to the stairs and up to the deck like a cat creeping up to look out—except a cat could not hold so tight to the rope handrail—onto the deck.
Everything was moving.
Great swells raised the ship and sent it cracking and creaking down and forward, forward. As she came up on deck, the wind caught her hair and her skirt, so her bare legs felt the bite above her boots before she lifted her head to the tempest. But it was no tempest—it was only speed.
The ship was scudding fast through the darkness, everything bent forward, an italic hand racing over miles of blue-black paper sea. Sails filled the air around her, ropes taut and now shining, because now the blackness of night was broken in a blaze of moon beating down through the sails. The clouds had parted and the moon, the moon—full, splendid, huge.
The beauty of it! She was confounded, turned from a frightened, whining cat into a much larger thing, an angel of awareness. Beauty beauty beauty—she wept with it for a moment and then left off, merely accepting. The wind of their going lifted her hair and ballooned the sleeves of her nightdress.
Along the port side of the ship came the second mate, lurching around the wheelhouse. He was the one who had frightened Kay that morning—only that morning! at the dock in Yarmouth—with his blood-coloured bulbous nose and shambling gait. But now, in the rush of the elements, in the star-jangling wind of the night and the full moon shining ahead of t
hem, he came rolling up beside her and said, loud enough to be heard over the wind, “Isn’t it marvellous, Miss?”
She looked up to his small eyes and scurfy straw hair, the nose receding in importance in this elemental air.
Grinning like a great fool, he said, “Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, to ride before the wind on a night with a moon?”
Kay nodded and nodded. “Yes. Yes, beautiful.”
2
Boston
The ship became the world. They had a house to live in, the long skylighted saloon and their cabins, Aft; and the deck for their outdoor walking path, as long as they kept out of the way of the work. Another flight of stairs down from the Aft saloon, they were allowed to visit the trim galley, fitted out like a carpenter’s bench with every needful tool on its hook, all polished copper and wood and steel-lined bins. The crew lived farther down, where Kay was not to go. Deepest below in the hold it was all case oil and coal, but Kay loved the orderly smell of the upper cargo deck: tea and mahogany, the familiar church-reek of tallow candles and sweeter beeswax, pine and cedar and other woody smells, spices she did not know. It was dark, but once one’s eyes grew accustomed, the rows of pillars between boxes were like the great roof posts in the stable at Aunt Lydia’s; and that was the other smell, the bleached stable smell of chickens and three well-kept young pigs, waiting to be roast pork. Sunlight slanting down through bulkheads lit upon nothing grimy or rank. “A tidy ship, no slatternliness about her,” Francis said—not bragging, but assuring Thea that she would be comfortable and safe.
Still, it was a little lonely, to walk through this world a few steps behind two people who were mostly focused on each other. And not what Kay was used to, having had all Thea’s attention until now.
Over the long ocean day, broken into portions by meals and the brass bell that rang to indicate changes of the watch, Kay wandered this new world, alone among the crowd of crew, shy to speak to the men but not wanting to be in Thea’s pocket all day. She found a hiding place or two; in that way she was like old Seaton the ship’s carpenter, dreaming in his lifeboat. In the afternoon, when the wind rose and they put on sail and the ship began to slant into true motion, Francis asked Mr. Best (that was the name of the lump-nosed second mate from the beautiful night) to show her the wooden seat tucked in at the starboard side of the fo’c’sle, where she might be safe out of the hubbub but still look out and perhaps spot land as they came closer.
Kay felt a softening toward Francis, almost tender; prickling back to caution whenever he shouted orders or was brisk with Mr. Wright or made one of the other seamen grovel or snap-to and say, Aye aye, Sir! He was easy in command. When he came down to supper, he began training Kay in the way of the sea, but he was never Father’s sort of schoolmaster, and she understood his instruction was directed more to Thea than to herself.
“A barque can outperform a barquentine at any run, far better at sailing to windward than a full-rigged ship might be, at rising to the wind—well! Easier to handle in all seas. Perhaps the Morning Light is not the best runner, but we make compromise our servant and take the best elements of the fore-and-aft rig and the full, to be the most efficient rig at sea—and with a much-reduced crew—” In his enthusiasm, Francis had moved to boastfulness, which came oddly from his mouth; he was usually inclined to understatement. “Twenty-two this trip, well in hand, allowing for mishap or illness. Let’s see the Flying Dutchman race round the Horn with less than seventy!”
Thea smiled for his keenness, and Kay saw that she held her tongue from saying fewer to correct him.
Kay did not care for this new entity, Francis-and-Thea. She worried over what it might mean, how her own life would be changed, or Thea’s. All this time out at sea, yet her sister had not recovered her usual quiet vitality, but still sat sopping and drooping over the teapot at breakfast, and more often than not went back to lie down white-faced in their cabin, eyes shaded with one hand and her mouth in a wavering line.
Their bed was over-large for a ship; Francis had had it made especially. Carved edge boards kept the featherbed from shifting, but made it uncomfortable to sit on the side to comb Thea’s hair or pat her hands with rosewater or any other thing that might be nice for her. If only Thea would get up and come out on deck into the delicious wind, she would feel better.
Nausea did not stop her from nagging Kay about lessons and her sampler and the various ways she ought to be spending her days, and demanding to be shown a page of conjugations. “Amo, amas, amat…” Thea said, not in a loving voice, and, “Amamus, amatis, amant,” Kay mouthed back, clacking like a ventriloquist’s dummy, but she sighed and fetched her books. She was of course eons past the baby verb to love; she wondered if that was the only Latin verb Thea recalled.
* * *
—
Another long day slid like water through water, but the next morning was different. Kay dreamed in the early dawn, a quiet dream of a sick woman in a metal bed: white-faced, blue shadows under her eyes, a bald head. The walls were green behind her and the sheets yellow; the colours of the dream were strangely clear. Was it her mother, in heaven? She had a sweet face, not like Kay’s. Perhaps if Kay were kinder. Thea said one’s face only became beautiful through good deeds and loving thoughts.
The dream did not frighten Kay, but it made her worry about her sister dying, as both their mothers had died, so instead of dressing and running up the ladder to the deck, she went into the saloon.
Thea was in the saloon already, drinking tea, looking very ordinary. Kay must have slept late. The strangeness of the morning puzzled her still, until she realized—it was the stillness that puzzled her. The ship rested at anchor, tossing only lightly in the harbour’s swell and seep. They had come to Boston in the night.
After she had eaten and drunk her tea and redone her copybook from yesterday to Thea’s cross-grained satisfaction, Kay waited at the rail by the ladder to the boat for Francis and Thea to be finished their farewell. Thea was to have come to the shops to fit Kay out with the necessary clothing but Francis said she should lie down this morning. They were debating it still, Kay could hear through the open skylight—what Francis was to buy, and whether he should bring Thea a poultice or a tisane or something from the pharmacist.
Perhaps Thea would feel better on dry land again? Kay did not care, she only wanted to get on with it or begin to shriek like the gulls that wheeled about the ships. Her head hurt, and her throat hurt too. Nobody bothered about her, only about Thea. They had only come to Boston harbour because they were forced to keep her with them, only because of her unwelcome presence. If only Thea had not had her half-sister coming along so inconvenient, they would be on the rolling main with the wind set fair for Africa.
Kay’s spirit reared a little within her chest, because she was a person, and if they did not see and understand her, she might jump off this ship into the dinghy and row to the wharf and walk the tilting wooden walkways into Boston, looming behind the dark warehouses, and disappear in its alleys never to be seen again by those who did not understand her anyway.
But Francis came up behind her, saying, as if she had not been waiting and waiting, “Now, young Kay, off we go, and smartly—Mr. Best must make the chandler’s office before noon.”
The dinghy went over the waves in quite a different movement from the ship, plunging and backing as the oars ploughed on, Mr. Best (he gave her a wink with one kind piggy eye) and Jacky Judge at the oars. The back of Jacky’s neck and his arms had a matte smoothness Kay did not mind looking at, but not when he could see her. She dipped a hand into the harbour water and let it run along, cupping the moving wave. Behind them the Morning Light, all her sails stowed, receded into a low shape in the water, a collection of black sticks against the foggy sky.
The usual commotion of ropes and mooring held them up at the little wharf, and then Francis went striding down the shaking boards so that Kay had to run to k
eep up. Her legs were used to tilting now. They walked (too quickly, Francis never slacking his pace) up to the tramline. The tramcar came and plunged them down and then up into the great walls and crackling, energetic depth of the city.
Francis was not one for talking as they went, and neither was Kay, so that suited them both. But she was still caught between fright and fury at being sent off alone with him—whom she hardly knew and was half-scared of, although she would not say so to Thea. He was older than Thea, who was nearly thirty now, quite an old spinster to be new-married, Cousin Olive said, and how sad that she wasted her youth raising Kay.
As the tramcar turned onto Summer Street, Francis pointed to Filene’s, the big store Thea had said they must visit. He ordered Kay to look sharp and hopped off as the tram lurched to a stop, turning back to give a hand to Kay.
She scorned to take it—oof, the pavement was farther than her legs had thought. They hustled to the curb through the welter of traffic and looked up at the brown bulk of the building, great glass doors glowing with brass and interior golden light. Beautiful doors, sectioned like an orange in a skin of brass hoops, went round in a glass drum. It was like skipping rope, to find the right moment to enter the carousel, and then take tiny, rapid steps inside the moving wedge of floor, all your feet were allotted. Inside, the light was startling, rays and beams sparking off myriad edges of glass and brass. The brilliance sent Kay back a step upon the threshold, almost back into the revolving swirl.
The Difference Page 2
