Francis barked, “Ladies’ haberdashery?” at a nearby girl in a dark skirt and a trim blue shirtwaist with a pretty collar that Kay wished she might have. The girl (whose hair was perfectly swept into a Gibson, whose teeth were jagged, whose little boot toes peeped beneath her skirt) pointed to the moving stairs.
Kay held tight to the handrail, one step up from Francis. He had ushered her on in front, as if he was perhaps afraid of the motion himself. Or to catch her, if she panicked at the step-off and fell. But she had been on moving stairs before, in Montreal, on their way from Blade Lake; she knew to lift her foot and hop as the treadle-step approached the end. It was Francis who stumbled a little.
A fearsome woman, shaped like a prow and jacketed up to the throat, took Francis’s order from his hand. “Serge skirts, two; white waists, two; middy blouses, four—yes, yes…” She ran her eye down the list Thea had written and turned to inspect Kay’s legs. “Stockings.”
“Very well,” Francis said, like he said at dinner to excuse Mr. Wright from table. “All that you think fit. We had time for nothing but her boots before we sailed.”
Kay stood it. In the close dressing room, people put blouses over her head and measured her waist and her bust, which she did not like. She told them she had no need of camiknickers, but the prow-fronted woman paid no mind and set aside six plain, ugly ones and a number of vests. The middy blouses were fetched and stacked. One of the serge skirts fit; an underling took a seam-ripper to another to let the waistband out, squatting on a stool in the corner. Then she hemmed both skirts quickly, with long, slanting stitches Thea would not have let Kay set.
The last item on the list was white muslin dresses, two. The underling rolled in a rack of mixed whites, embroidered or plain, sleeves small and large. The manageress picked out one that had nothing nice about it at all, and one Kay liked, which almost felt comfortable. She did not see why she could not have two just the same, and said so, and the manageress nodded. The dresses went over her head and back again too, and then two plain shifts that needed tucks taken, until she thought she might screech. But she did not let herself, because she had won over the dresses.
At last it was done. While the packages were wrapped in blue paper, Francis stood by the counter, legs wide-braced, jingling coins in his pocket. He reached over to tweak Kay’s cheek and said, “Luncheon? Cake? Come, sprogget, we might as well amuse ourselves.”
Because Thea was not there, he meant. His humour and his kindness were both too heavy for Kay to help him with.
Down the moving staircase, taking the view of the marble hall below; then they burst out into the street, afternoon sun now lighting the other side of the cobbles. Francis hailed a horse cab and stowed the package behind. He told the man they were starved, and the horse gee’d up. The cab jiggled over the stones, in a quiet way, to the Westminster Hotel, where the rooftop restaurant had gay striped awnings attached to a set of Grecian ladies holding up their spears. First of all, per Francis’s orders, petits fours; then a dainty plate of cut sandwiches. Francis had a bowl of chowder—to test the Boston version, he said. He was pleasant company. Kay wished she did not feel a sense of caution. But she remembered how careful they had always to be with Father, who as principal of the Blade Lake School also held a position of authority. And she did not know Francis as Thea did.
“If only your sister was not having so hard a—” He stopped.
Kay took another sandwich: chicken with a spiced yellow dressing, and raisins. Francis did not start again.
“Hard a what?” Kay asked, at the end of her sandwich, which was delicious.
His face had gone stiff. Was he angry with her? “Well, perhaps she will tell you herself, when she thinks it time,” he said.
He seemed to think she was seven years old instead of going on thirteen.
There was one last yellow sandwich, and a pity to waste it, so Kay took it. Before she bit, she said, “I have not had a moment’s queasiness. I have my mother’s strong stomach.”
“Thea’s mother was more delicately reared.”
Thea’s mother Maria was, had been, Maria Wetmore. She was Francis’s second cousin—all those Yarmouth people were related—so he would not hear a word against her. Kay’s own mother, Eliza Warner, was just a country girl from the land north of Battleford. But she died too, when she was about to have another baby. Kay thought about that other little babe sometimes, the dead brother or sister. And of her young mother, whom she could not remember at all. Perhaps it was her sweet face that Kay had dreamed of that morning.
When they had finished, they took the brass elevator back down to the street and the uniformed man gave them the package with Kay’s clothes and whistled for another cab. They were bowling along the street when Francis leaned forward and tapped the man.
“Stop a moment,” he told him, and the cab pulled up, the horse blowing wetly through his mouth as if disgusted.
They went into a little shop with gold lettering on dark-glassed windows. Francis walked up and down the glass-topped counter, peering into the black velvet depths. At last he pointed, and the clerk took out a pearl pin shaped like a new moon. Plain, but pretty. Kay approved.
“Do not tell Thea,” Francis said when they were back in the buggy. “We’ll keep it a secret until later.” He looked confused and mysterious.
In a cascading shuffle of thinking and discarding—Thea’s birthday long past, and Christmas too long ahead, until later when?—Kay saw that of course Thea must be going to have a baby, as people almost always did, once they were married. Once vague things had been done to them that did not bear thinking of. While Francis was paying the driver and hailing Mr. Best, Kay turned her head to the salt-smelling sea and blew through her mouth like a horse.
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 che
erful, 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 believ
e 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.
The Difference Page 3
