I closed the drop leaf and opened a deep lower drawer. Inside was a large flat tin box with a padlock slipped through the tongue. Lettered in fading purple ink on the lid was the name Sea Jade. Excitement stirred through me. The name alone would have been enough to catch my attention, but there was more. In the lower righthand corner of the lid was a less noticeable stamping—the outline of a whale.
The padlock had not been closed and I raised the tin lid of the box and looked inside. The contents consisted of a stack of old maps and sea charts on which appeared to be marked the routes which clipper ships must have followed on their way to China. Mr. Osgood had said that a certain box of sea charts was to be placed in my hands. By lucky chance I seemed to have come upon the very box.
As I fingered the yellowing contents, my attention was again arrested, for a series of tails had been stamped upon the face of one map after another. The tail alone—of a whale. But why such a symbol should be used in connection with the course Sea Jade might have followed, I had no idea. To hunt whales in a clipper would be like tracking elephants with a greyhound. Yet the captain had told me to follow the whale stamp—“on the China run!”
Hastily I shuffled through the charts and maps, finding on each one the same marking—only part of a whale. Then, in the bottom of the box I discovered a sea map that had been matted, as if for framing. And on this, full in the middle of the route around Cape of Good Hope, the complete outline of a whale had been stamped in the same, now faded, purple ink.
There was surely significance here—something the captain had tried to inform me of, warn me of, in his last moments. Around me the ship creaked and whispered and I knew this was not the time or place to puzzle the matter out. I drew the matted chart from the box, and chose several of the others at random. I would take them back to the house and study them at my leisure. Perhaps Ian could help me fathom the mystery of the whole and half whale stampings.
When I had retrieved the lantern from its hook and tucked my findings under one arm, I reached for the knob of the cabin door. The door seemed to have jammed in closing and it did not respond to my tugging. Panic rose in me at the thought of being shut into this place, with no one to know where I was, and the air growing closer every moment. As I stood with my hand on the resistant knob, I experienced again one of those strange moments of ordainment, of prescience. It was as if I had been brought step by step to this moment in time—as if, now that I was here, some dreadful use was to be made of me. I did not then sense danger to myself. That was to come later.
Before I could shake free of this eerie feeling and exert myself to open the door, the sound of a loud and ringing crash came to me from beyond the cabin. It was the sound of a heavy weight falling, sliding, clattering. I wrenched again at the door. This time it came open in my hand and I stumbled over the sill in my haste to be out of that tight, close little room. My lantern sent nearby shadows leaping, but the forward end of the ship lay in pitch darkness. Though not in quiet.
There were sounds near the forward ladder that descended to the lower hold. Sounds of labored breathing, of a groan, the clatter of stones rolling one against another. Then silence.
I wanted to drop my lantern and run to the safety of darkness myself. But I dared not abandon my light. The stern ladder to the upper deck was near and I started toward it, wanting only to flee this dreadful place and escape to the upper air. But before I could reach the steps, the groaning sound came to me again, and with it a weak call, as if for aid. The voice came from the lower hold beneath my feet and was so faint that I scarcely caught it. Yet it was a desperate cry, perhaps the cry of a life that was ebbing.
On my own level all was silent and I stilled my impulse to panic. This was no desperate deed, but an accident and I must go to the aid of whoever had uttered that feeble cry.
Even as these thoughts raced through my mind, I was finding my way down the nearest stairs. Once more the damp smell of ballast stones and ancient timbers rose to meet me. As I descended into that place of fearsome shadows, I held up my lantern and peered along the boards that made a walk fore and aft between ballast on either side. At the foot of the forward ladder something lay across the stones—a dark figure that did not move, but moaned faintly in pain.
I ran along the walk as swiftly as I dared, fearing to stumble and drop my lantern, fearing the flash of blazing oil about me if I were careless. The fear of fire was an atavistic thing in me, like my fear of flashing lights—the two seemed always connected. Only the need of the moment sent me to the aid of the man who was slumped across walk and rocks.
He lay upon his back where he had fallen and there was blood upon the stones where his head had struck. His eyes were open and staring and the shine of teeth was visible in the nest of thick black beard. The man was Tom Henderson.
I knelt beside him and spoke his name, calling to him urgently. His eyes rolled sightlessly and words came faintly from the open mouth. I bent to hear. He seemed to be wandering, not fully conscious.
“Paid … paid … to do it …” The voice faded out.
I bent over him. “Who paid, Tom? For what? Tell me what you mean!”
His mouth went slack in the bush of beard and his eyes rolled back in his head. I had never seen a man die, but I knew he was gone.
Nevertheless, I tried frantically to call him back. “Hold on, Tom. Just hold on and I’ll go for help!”
I knew it was too late even as I rose from my knees. I stepped back, looking helplessly down at the sprawled figure. At the same instant I heard a running on the planks above my head, the thudding of feet moving in haste—then ceasing to run, as though an escape had been made. Now there was only silence overhead.
I sprang for the ladder nearby. Up from the lower hold I went, and then a second ladder to the deck and open sunlight. I flung myself toward the rail of the ship and looked over—to see Brock McLean standing on the dock at the foot of the gangplank. Whether he had been going up or down, I could not tell.
I called to him nevertheless. “Come quickly! It’s the seaman—Tom Henderson. He has fallen from a ladder. I—I think he is dead.”
Brock came up the plank at a run, scarcely limping when he hurried. He caught up the lantern I still carried and hurried to the forward hatch. I could not go down there again. My knees had turned to water and I sank upon the planks of the deck and sat there trembling.
Brock came up again almost at once. “That was a bad fall—backward off the ladder. The man’s dead. I’ll get help to bring him up.”
He stepped into the prow and cupped his hands about his mouth, roaring out, “Ahoy down there!” in a quarterdeck voice. I heard men in the shipyard answer him and in a few moments several came aboard and ran down to the hold. Brock came and raised me to my feet, and there was no gentleness in his touch.
“What were you doing down here? Must I forbid the ship to you, as I have to Laurel? Go back to the house, girl. It’s not a pretty sight they’ll be bringing up from the hold.”
“I know,” I said weakly. “I saw. The back of his head—he—”
“Stop it,” he ordered. “Get ashore and out of this. The fellow must have died at once.”
I pulled myself free of his touch. “No,” I said, “he did not.”
Brock was suddenly intent. “What do you mean—he did not die at once?”
“He tried to speak. He was mumbling something when I found him.”
“Mumbling what? What did he say?”
I drew back in dismay from so ominous a questioning. “I—I don’t know. I couldn’t make out the words.”
He shoved me toward the gangplank and forgot me. When I looked back, I saw that he had followed the others below. My legs recovered their ability to move me from one place to another. I went down to the dock and sat on a low piling, while the gulls wheeled about me. Work had been disrupted in the shipyard area. Men stood about staring at the Pride, waiting to hear what had happened. I looked upward past yardarms, watching mizzen and main and foremasts
tilt gently against the blue of the sky. So peaceful it seemed—that sky. But there was no peace in my thoughts.
While I stood beside Tom Henderson, in the hold, someone had run along the planks over my head. Someone who knew very well what had happened. And when I came out on deck, Brock McLean had stood at the foot of the gangplank. Coming up, or going down—which had it been?
They were carrying Tom Henderson from the ship now, and Brock followed. If he saw me sitting there on the dock as they went by, he gave no sign. Only one of the workmen, a foreman, perhaps, noticed me and came to ask a question.
“Good morning, Mrs. McLean. You were below just now, I take it? Did you see what happened?”
I shook my head. “I heard him fall. I was in the other end of the ship and up one level. I went down to see what had happened.”
“A bad fall,” he said. “A nasty crack he got on his head, old Tom did. Funny thing—with him used to running up and down ships’ ladders all his life. Hard to see how he’d lose his hold and go over backwards like that.”
I concentrated on a gull lighting at the far end of the dock, and watched it settle its wings after flight.
“You didn’t happen to see nobody down there, now did you, Mrs. McLean?” the man pressed me. “Could be somebody pushed old Tom off those stairs.”
“No,” I said, “I saw no one but Tom himself.”
“Or heard nobody neither? Who could’ve run away, let’s say?”
I managed to answer firmly, clearly. “No, I heard nothing at all. Only Tom moaning.”
The man shrugged and stepped away from me. “’Twas just a thought.”
He went after the others and I left the dock and found my way slowly back to the bluff path and climbed it to the house. I saw no one as I went upstairs to my room. There I lighted the fire and sat before it in a rocker. I was terribly cold. Huddled in my mantle, with the several charts I had brought from the Pride stacked on my lap, I sat rocking, trying to gain some order in my thinking. The wedding ring upon my finger seemed loose, as though my very flesh had shriveled, and I slipped it up and down aimlessly.
Why had I not said at once that I had heard someone running away after Tom had fallen? Why had I not told whoever asked of those footsteps thudding on the planks over my head? If there had been someone there who ran guiltily away, then Tom had been pushed and what had happened was no careless accident. The word for it was—murder.
I tried to remember how the running had sounded. Had there been an irregularity in its beat? Or would that be likely in any case? An uneven gait could be wiped out when steps were hastened.
I wrapped my arms tightly about myself and rocked in my chair, back and forth, back and forth—trying to banish thought from my mind. The effort was futile. My thoughts ran on of their own volition and took me where I did not want to go.
It was my duty to report the sound of running I had heard. Yet because I had seen Brock at the foot of the gangplank when I came up on deck, I could not bring myself to do so. I had not told him what I had heard, or what I guessed. I had not dared to after he had questioned me so intently about the words Tom might have spoken before he died. Brock’s interest in Tom’s words had seemed too intense, too rough, too frightening, so that my only impulse had been to deny any knowledge of their meaning.
That I lacked understanding of such meaning was true. But I had indeed heard several words of what Tom had tried to say—that he had been paid by someone. Paid for what information? Paid to do what? To whom might his words apply? To whom might they be dangerous?
No one summoned me to lunch, and I was not hungry, in any event. The afternoon slipped away and I did not stir from my room. No one came near me until Laurel scratched softly at my door.
“What is it?” I called.
The child took this as an invitation to enter and opened the door, slipping sidewise through it, a small, thin shadow in her black frock, her limp black hair falling tangled about her shoulders.
“I’ve been in town,” she said, watching me with a sly, knowing look. “I’ve heard about Tom Henderson—that he’s dead. You were there when it happened, weren’t you, Miss Miranda?”
There was no point in my trying to speak delicately with this all too knowing child. “I found him after he fell.”
Laurel kicked the door shut behind her with an unladylike foot and came further into the room. There she stood staring at me with an avidity that reminded me of her grandmother.
“Did you really push him off the ladder, Miss Miranda? Did you kill him, the way your father killed my grandfather?”
I gasped. “How can you be so ridiculous? How can you think such a wicked, unkind thing?”
She seemed pleased that she had so upset me. “I didn’t think it first,” she said, tossing back her lank strands of hair the better to view me. “It’s what they’re whispering about you in town. There are people who say your coming to Bascomb’s Point is very strange. Even Mrs. Crawford says that. Strange considering whose daughter you are. Why should the captain leave you all that money? Why should my father be pushed into a marriage with you? That’s what everyone is asking, and they think maybe it’s you who shoved Tom Henderson off that ladder because he knew about things you aren’t telling.”
Her words left me aghast. “Your father will stop such talk,” I said. “He knows what happened and he will tell them that what I’ve said is true.”
“Will he?” She allowed an ominous silence to follow the words while she curled herself upon the hearthrug at my feet as if she had come to stay. The flames gave an unaccustomed rosiness to her pale little face, but they hardly lighted the dark depths of eyes that were like her father’s.
“I don’t think my father will care one bit what happens to you,” she went on. “Perhaps you’re a witch, like the ones who lived around here in the old times. Perhaps the townspeople will stone you and drown you in the harbor.”
“I think that unlikely,” I said, and pretended great interest in one of the maps I held on my knees. “If you’ve come here merely to say unpleasant things, I think you’d better go. I don’t enjoy your company.”
She paid no attention to this. The leaping flames seemed to absorb her full attention for a few moments, as though she saw demons and witches dancing among the very coals.
“Lien would like that,” she went on in the same sly voice. “I mean if they drowned you as a witch. If it weren’t for you, she might have posed for the Sea Jade figurehead, the way she wanted to. Now Ian likes you best and he’s going to use you as his model instead of Lien. He told me so. But Lien loves Ian. She’d like to marry him, now the captain is gone.”
I stood up so quickly that the maps and charts scattered upon the floor. I went to the child and pulled her abruptly to her feet. She turned her head as she had once before, intending to sink her teeth into my hand, but this time I was too quick for her. I twined my fingers through a handful of hair at the back of her head and held on tightly so that any movement she made would hurt to the very roots of her scalp. She gave a yelping, animal-like sound and would have kicked at me if I hadn’t kept free of her feet.
“If you stand still I won’t hurt you,” I said.
Abruptly she went limp, perhaps in surprise. I did not release my grasp, but using it as a lever I marched her to a straight chair and sat her down.
“Don’t move from there,” I said. “Stay right where you are.”
Strangely enough, so commanded in a voice that I hardly recognized as my own, she sat quite still, staring at me. I went to a bureau drawer and drew out a clean hairbrush. At sight of it she made a horrible grimace at me.
“Nobody can spank me except my father!” she shrilled. “If you try that I’ll—I’ll—”
“I’m not going to spank you,” I said. “I’m going to brush your hair. I’ve had all I can stand of looking at that dreadful bird’s nest you wear around your head. Your mother would be ashamed of you. If she saw the way you look now she would probably burst into tears o
f despair.”
Laurel ducked a quick, startled look at me from under the fall of hair. “What do you know about my mother? How do you know how she’d feel?”
I separated a long strand from the rest of the tangle and began to brush out the snarls as best I could. “You have lovely hair,” I said. “It’s fine and soft. But that makes it hard to care for. We must find a different way for you to wear it so it won’t tangle so easily. I have some sassafras bark that I’ll wash it with soon. And if I start giving it a hundred strokes a day it will begin to shine beautifully.”
She winced under the tug of the brush, but she did not forget her question. “How can you know how my mother would feel? You don’t have any mother of your own.”
“We have that in common,” I agreed. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t know what mothers are like. Often I’ve looked at my friends’ mothers and wished they were mine.”
“Have you done that?”
“Of course. Haven’t you? I expect anyone would. I’ve seen a picture of your mother and I’ve heard about her. She must have been a kind, gentle, loving person. If she were here she would never let you go around with your clothes torn and your hair wild—as if you were a little animal. Who looks after your things?”
“Crawford is supposed to,” Laurel said grudgingly. “But she thinks I’m a nuisance and she’s afraid of me besides. Grandmother doesn’t want to bother. She says I’m a changeling.”
“Of course you’re not a changeling, any more than I’m a witch. Turn your head a little—and hold onto this piece I’ve combed out. What does your father say about the way you look?”
“He doesn’t care anything about me,” Laurel said. “The only time he talks to me is when he scolds me.”
“I don’t believe that either,” I said. It had seemed to me that Brock often regarded his daughter with helpless concern. Being father to such a child, with so little help from the women in his household, would be far from an easy task. Nevertheless, it was not the child’s fault that she was allowed to continue like this.
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