Sea Jade
Phyllis A. Whitney
ONE
It was fitting that I had my first glimpse of the house at Bascomb’s Point during the flash and fury of a violent thunderstorm.
The storm had not yet broken when my train from New York stopped at the Scots Harbor station. As the conductor helped me to the platform, a gusty October wind whipped at my skirts and mantle. I clasped my portmanteau in one hand and stood looking about me—eagerly and without fear.
My father’s warnings had touched me not at all and my mind was filled with a romantic dream that I fully expected to become reality. Since my father’s death some months before, the state of my fortunes had grown very nearly desperate. Unless I threw myself upon the charity of friends, I had nowhere to turn. Only Obadiah Bascomb could help me now. He had written to me in response to an appeal of my own, and I had come running, given wings by a sense of adventure, of expectancy, eager to meet the life counterpart of a legend with which I had grown up.
I know how I must have looked that day when I first set foot in the little New England town where my father, my mother, and I were born. Since I am no longer so tenderly, so disarmingly young, I can recall the look of that youthful Miranda Heath as if she were someone else. Slight and slender she was, with fair tendrils of hair, soft and fine, curling across her forehead beneath the peak of her bonnet. Her eyes were tawny brown, with quirked, flyaway brows above them. The wind undoubtedly added to the illusion of her flyaway look; the look of a fey, winged creature straight out of a make-believe world where love and pampering were taken for granted. A creature unaware that she was about to stray into dark regions for which nothing had prepared her. I could have scarcely been more ill-equipped to face the household at Bascomb’s Point.
So I can see myself, and my heart aches a little with pity, because I know now what was to come, and what fearful changes would be stamped upon that guileless innocence before it was banished forever.
For a few minutes that afternoon, as I waited on the station platform, it seemed that no one had come to meet me. I was about to look for help, when I saw a tall figure in a coachman’s rain cape bearing down upon me.
“You’re Miss Miranda Heath, for the Bascombs’?” he asked, and already sure of me, did not wait for an answer. “If you will go along to the carriage over there, miss, I’ll fetch your trunk.”
The need for haste under that lowering sky was evident, yet the whistling threat of the wind only exhilarated me. I cast a quick, identifying glance at my trunk standing alone on the platform, and then let myself go blowing down the wind like a small craft under full sail as I ran toward the carriage.
It did not trouble me particularly that only a coachman had come to meet me. Captain Bascomb’s letter had been cordial in its invitation, and in my feckless way I anticipated no lack of welcome from the others of his household. My father had told me little before his death. I knew only that he had made the trip to Scots Harbor two months before his illness came to its inevitable end, and had called upon his old friend and partner, Captain Obadiah Bascomb. He feared to leave me alone and the plan had always been that I should write to Captain Obadiah for help if ever my need was great. Yet when my father returned to New York he was visibly shaken and his mind had been completely changed.
Under no circumstances was I to turn to the Bascombs for assistance, he told me. The captain was growing old, senile perhaps, and he had tried to drive some fantastic bargain. My father had refused unequivocally, wanting no such incarceration as might await me there. He used that very word, though it had no meaning for me then. In fact, so steeped was I in tales of Bascomb & Company and lore of the sea—my father’s own doing—that I paid little attention to his words of warning when he insisted that the house at Bascomb’s Point was one of ill-omen and that I was not under any circumstances to go near it. He did no more than identify the people who now lived there, and he would not discuss them with me. The captain’s housekeeper, Sybil McLean, was the widow of a former partner who had died at sea. Her widowed son and granddaughter lived in the house as well. The captain had married fairly late in life and had no children, but when I plied my father with questions about the captain’s wife, he shook his head sadly. A strange woman, he said—out of her own place and often set upon by others in that household. He had seemed sorry for her, but he would say no more. It was as if by keeping everything shadowy and unrealized, he could shut the Bascombs out of my life from then on, forgetting that he himself had contributed to the legend that had fired my youthful imagination as no story book had ever done.
Perhaps I might have listened to him had life ever touched me with a heavy hand. Under the circumstances, my father’s words only whetted my curiosity and did not penetrate meaningfully through the rainbow of my romantic dreams. All my life I’d heard of the Bascomb family, with its history of ships and sailing. I’d grown up spoonfed on heroic tales of the tall ships—those winged ships that were the heart-catching clippers of the China run.
We were now in the late 1870’s and the great days of the clippers had ended with the war between North and South. The queens of the sea had been reduced to ignoble duties on the oceans they had ruled for a brief ten years. Steam was replacing them in practicality, yet tales of their gallant reign would live forever.
My own father was Captain Nathaniel Heath, who had in his day been master of some of the swiftest craft to sail around the Cape of Good Hope and across the Indian Ocean toward the heights of Java Head. Once he had been a full partner in Bascomb & Company. I knew him as a man of fine intellect, with broad horizons, and a wide knowledge of the world.
Though my mother had died shortly after I was born, and my father had taken me from Scots Harbor as a baby and put me in the hands of his widowed sister in New York, I had grown up with only love and protection about me. I had undoubtedly been spoiled and coddled by my gentle aunt, protected in my self-centered illusions by the devotion my father had poured out upon an only child. No harsh sea gale had weathered me. Even my aunt’s death a few years before had not destroyed my safe harbor because my father, long since retired from the sea, was always dominant in my life and I was content to make a home for him. In those days there was no impatience in me. I was still dreaming, still waiting for all the lovely things in life that were inevitably to be mine—simply because I’d been told that I was pretty and intelligent, and that everyone loved me. I had only to open my hands and wait, ready to give my own love and trust when the right time came and brought me—not a knight in shining armor, but more likely a brave sailor from the sea.
Then suddenly, at twenty-one, I was alone and almost penniless. Genteel positions open to women were few indeed. No one wanted to hire a governess who looked hardly more than a child herself. Yet when I tried to find work as a domestic, each interview ended quickly the moment the mistress of the house set eyes upon me. She was sure to consider me too slight and fragile for the work required. There was even one who told me bluntly that I was too pretty.
Unprepared to deal with reality, I did what my father had forbidden. I wrote to Captain Obadiah and told him of my plight. He responded at once. Nothing would give him greater happiness than to have the daughter of his old and dear friend come for a long visit. Surely a way would be found to solve my problems once we had talked together. My despondency fell away at once. Of course there would always be someone to love, advise and take care of me. How foolish that I had doubted it for a moment. My father, in his illness, had been unnecessarily alarmed. Captain Obadiah would rescue me and all would be well. To say nothing of the fact that in Scots Harbor I might even gain some knowledge of the mother I had never known.
Thus I was here, newly arrived, with my heart beating in eager anticipation. For was I not shortly to
meet the personification of all the great sea tales my father had told me—Captain Obadiah Bascomb himself? Not that my father had ever portrayed the captain as thoroughly admirable. He had simply emerged as a hero in my own imagination in spite of the less than flattering picture my father sometimes painted of him. I could remember my father’s very words: “Ruthless, iron-willed, stubborn, dynamic, lusty, unscrupulous …” Surely the strong stuff of which heroes were made.
Nevertheless, in spite of my own eagerness to meet Captain Obadiah, I knew I could not yet mean to him what he meant to me, so it did not trouble me that only a coachman had ventured into the storm to meet a stranger. The captain and his household would like me when they knew me, of course. They would help me, as it was my right to be helped. I never for a moment doubted this simple philosophy.
The barouche was before me and I opened the door and put my foot on the step, thrusting my portmanteau into the rain-curtained, leathery-scented interior. At once there was a burst of eerie laughter from within the carriage and a small figure squirmed away from me into the far corner of the seat.
“Ssh!” she warned, and put a finger to her lips. “Joseph doesn’t know I’m here. I had to come secretly to meet you. You’re Miss Miranda Heath, aren’t you?”
This air of conspiracy appealed to me and added to my sense of adventure. I climbed in after my portmanteau and sat beside the little girl, glad to be out of the chill onslaught of the wind.
“I am indeed,” I said. “And if you’ll tell me your name I can thank you properly for coming to welcome me.”
“My name is Laurel,” she informed me. “But I didn’t come to welcome you. I only came to see what you are like. After all the quarreling about you last night, I had to see you for myself.”
Her words were startling and I saw now that her small face, sallow-complexioned in the gloomy interior of the carriage, bore me nothing but animosity. But while her words and manner puzzled me, I was not particularly distressed. I have always liked children and been at ease with them. This child, I judged, was about ten—an age toward which no adult should make quick, clumsy advances. Given time she would come around. Then I would understand such flights of fancy.
I settled back without answer for her taunting words and pretended to pay her no attention. My first glance had told me much about her appearance. She had huddled herself into an unbuttoned coat, but had troubled with no proper cover for straight black hair that hung in limp strands below her shoulders. Her eyes were nearly as black as her hair and they continued to stare at me unblinkingly.
When she saw that I would not pick up the conversational gambit she had flung at me, she cast a practiced eye at scudding clouds seen through an isinglass patch of window.
“We’ll never make it home before the storm breaks,” she told me. “Likely enough, we’ll get blown right off the point into the sea, carriage and all.”
“That will be rather uncomfortable for the horses, poor things,” I said cheerfully.
The child thrust her black-browed countenance close to my own, staring at me through the gloom. “You aren’t afraid,” she said almost in wonder. “Why aren’t you afraid?”
At that moment Joseph brought the trunk. There was a thud and the carriage swayed as he heaved it up to his seat, climbed aboard and flapped the reins. Wind blew through crannies in the curtains and the barouche shuddered under the impact of repeated gusts. The clopping of the horses’ hooves had a purposeful, reassuring sound, however, as though our destination would be safely reached, whatever the elements might devise.
“Why aren’t you afraid?” Laurel repeated, oddly urgent.
There was something almost touching about the child’s antagonism, about the very limpness of unbrushed hair upon her shoulders, about a mouth that did not know how to smile and dark eyes too large for the pale oval of her face.
I smiled at her. “I’m not afraid of storms. I like them. Except for thunderstorms, perhaps. It’s very silly, I suppose, but I’ve always been afraid of lightning.”
She blinked once or twice and then returned to her steady, disconcerting stare. “I don’t mean why aren’t you afraid of the storm. I was only fooling about that. Joseph won’t let us be blown into the sea. I meant—why aren’t you afraid of them when they hate you so? They don’t want you here, you know. You’ll be sent away at once if they have anything to say about it. Or, if you stay, it will be the worse for you. I heard Grandmother say so.”
How could I take her seriously? She was a child whose imagination had run away with her. This I could understand myself, being gifted with a fanciful imagination of my own. Though mine, fortunately, took a happier, more optimistic turn.
“Do you hate me?” I challenged her.
This time she turned her head away and looked out the window, not meeting my eyes. There was a moment or two of silence within the carriage before she answered me.
“I hate you most of all,” she said. “I don’t want you to stay! I’ve already put stones in your bed. If you don’t go away, I’ll put a witch’s spell upon you. I’ll put snake venom in your tea.”
This outburst, so intense in its passion, so dismaying from the lips of a ten-year-old child, chilled me in spite of myself. I folded my gloved hands, one above the other, and spoke quietly, evenly.
“Will you tell me, please, why you are so ready to hate me when you don’t even know me?”
“My father hates you!” she cried. “Oh, I heard him last night when they all gathered in the library after the captain told them his plan. I listened in the hallway when they thought I was in bed asleep. My father hates you and so does my grandmother.”
“But neither your father nor your grandmother knows me,” I protested.
No words of mine were going to change her mind, however, and I sought another subject to coax her from this obsession with hating.
“You haven’t told me your last name. What do you put with Laurel?”
“It’s McLean,” she informed me. To a degree I had succeeded, for now there was pride in her voice. “I’m Brock McLean’s daughter. I’m Laurel McLean.”
Again I smiled at her, on safer ground now. “Then you must be the granddaughter of the great Andrew McLean. I’ve always heard about him.”
“I am!” said Laurel. “My father is a son of one of the Three Captains, just as you’re the daughter of one of them.”
For the first time her words struck a responsive chord in me. All my life tales of the Three Captains had been legion. My own father, like the other two, had sailed to Canton in the early days when that was the only port open to foreigners in China. “The Captains Three,” the Scots Harbor cronies had been called: Captain Obadiah Bascomb, Captain Nathaniel Heath, Captain Andrew McLean. All were masters of their own ships early in life, and thus ready to captain the great American clippers they had sailed when China was opened to trade with the outer world. They were partners, too, in the Bascomb enterprises. Captain Obadiah was always mentioned first because the once-great dynasty of whalers and merchantmen had long been sailed by Bascombs, built in Bascomb shipyards, run by Bascomb merchants at home and abroad. A dynasty that had died as the family died, and clippers themselves vanished from the seas, though the name lived on.
“My grandfather, Andrew McLean,” Laurel went on pridefully, “was more important than any of the Bascombs, really. Our family came from Aberdeen and settled Scots Harbor in the very beginning—before there were any Bascombs here.”
“I know that,” I acknowledged. “He designed a good many of the Bascomb clipper ships, didn’t he?”
The child tossed her witchlike strands of black hair and something of a glow came into her eyes. “He designed the Sea Jade, and he built her too! She was the fastest of them all, and the most beautiful.”
My attention quickened at the sound of that name, so long forbidden in my father’s household, and I waited expectantly for her to go on. But Laurel flung me a sidelong glance and fell into sudden, unresponsive silence.
The wind had stiffened and rain clattered across the top of the barouche, drowning out all other sounds. The carriage rocked ominously, but we plodded steadily ahead. When thunder rumbled in the distance and there was a flicker of lightning, I could not help but wince. Gales I loved, strong winds that blew cleanly from the sea. But not the treachery of a thunderstorm.
Laurel reached out with a suddenness that startled me and touched a wisp of hair that had blown across my forehead. “It’s like gold filigree,” she said. “Like the filigree of a pin the captain’s wife wears in her hair.”
I laughed softly, for there was a wistful appeal in her tone and I thought she had softened toward me. Compliments warmed me and kept the cotton batting of love about me soft and intact. The child’s seeming hostility had begun to distress me and I welcomed this apparent change.
“If it was a pin of gold filigree I would give it to you,” I said.
At once her grasp tightened. She twisted the lock of hair about her forefinger and gave it a cruel tug. I cried out with the sudden pain and took hold of her wrist. I loosened the strand from her finger and tucked it beneath my bonnet.
“That hurt me,” I told her, shocked and resentful.
Black eyes flashed triumph. “I know! And I’ll hurt you worse if you do what Captain Obadiah wants.”
“What does he want?” I demanded impatiently. The child had spoiled my sense of adventure, taken away from my eagerness to reach Bascomb’s Point. I withdrew all effort to be friendly with her.
“I know what he wants,” she said, the corners of her wide mouth turning upward in a wickedly impish grin. “But I shan’t tell you. Anyway my father won’t let you do what Captain Obadiah wants. And it’s my father who will have the last word. There are some who call him a black Scotsman and say he has all the stubbornness of a Scot. My mother was Scottish too, you know—Rose McLeod she was before she married. She could always coax my father to listen. But my mother has gone to her ancestors.”
Sea Jade Page 1
