Sea Jade

by Whitney, Phyllis A. ;

“Yes—it was I. And now that you know, what will you do? Do you think it will stop there? How will you escape from what is sure to come?”

  I looked into her bright dark eyes and saw that the delicate mask of a Chinese lady was gone. Lien was looking at me as a woman enraged. A woman who clearly meant me harm.

  I waited on no dignity but sprang up and fled the room. Behind me I heard her laughter ring out—high, silvery, scornful. And I heard her cry following me: “Run, little rabbit, run!”

  When I reached my room my heart was indeed beating like any hunted rabbit’s, and it did not quiet until I grew reasonably sure that she had not followed me.

  I sat for a long while, trying to think, to understand. I could see Lien with that pirate blade in her hands slashing savagely at the figurehead. I could see her as well in the hold of the ship pushing Tom Henderson from the ladder, her fury aroused. Because he had threatened her in some way? Because there was more to the matter of her meeting and talking with him than I understood? Where had she met him? In the hold of the ship, perhaps, on the day he had died?

  I got up and locked both doors of my room with the key Brock had given me. He had intended that I lock them at night, but the enemy he saw was a different one. Then I returned to my chair and sat rocking, rocking. I was increasingly afraid.

  It was necessary for Laurel to call to me twice through the door before I went to answer her. I had forgotten that I had told her to come to me here. I was glad to hear her voice, for now I must comfort her and assuage her fears and thus put my own aside.

  “You said you had something to show me,” she reminded me as she came in.

  I gave the captain’s confession to her and watched her read it with widening eyes and a dawning of new realization. When she had finished she came exuberantly to fling her arms about me in a show of affection I had never expected.

  “Now I can love you, Miss Miranda!” she cried. “Your father didn’t kill my grandfather after all! So there’s no need to hate you as my grandmother wishes.”

  I held her close to me. “Wait—you must neither judge nor forgive so quickly. Are you sure you must hate Captain Obadiah for what he did so long ago?”

  She drew away to look into my eyes. “No, of course not! I could never hate the captain.”

  “I cannot either,” I said. I could not tell her all the truth as yet. I could not yet tell her that I was Obadiah’s daughter.

  She turned abruptly to another subject. “When will my father come home?”

  I could give her no answer to that and merely shook my head.

  “I shall watch for him,” Laurel said. “Tomorrow I’ll go up in the lighthouse tower to watch. I want to be the first to glimpse the Sea Jade’s sails when they come over the horizon.”

  “You must call me as soon as you see them. I want to watch for her too.”

  She peered at me closely, though not with her former antagonism, and her words took me aback. “You love my father, don’t you, Miss Miranda?”

  I was altogether disconcerted. This, in so many words, was the thing I had wanted to conceal even from myself. There had been moments of longing, moments when I relied upon Brock for physical protection, as well as the realization that I must turn away from Ian. But I had stopped my futile dreaming and I dared not think of love between Brock McLean and me.

  “I love him too,” said Laurel softly, and slipped her hand into mine.

  In that close and gentle moment we sat before the fire together and there was growing affection between us. Laurel had flung wide a door I had been afraid to open. I knew it would not close again.

  Once more I was lost in dreams and this time I made no effort to stop the flood. The child beside me was dreaming too. Only once did she break the enchanted silence that lay between us.

  “We will watch for the Sea Jade together,” she said.

  I clasped my fingers tightly about hers in promise.

  EIGHTEEN

  For me the days that followed were filled with unrestrained longing and dreaming. But where former dreams had run through my head like a fog, without substance or reality, the new ones focused upon a core that was real—the person and mystery of Brock McLean, and my love for him. He was my husband and I wanted him. But how was I to win him? How was I to know what he wanted of me when our relationship had been one of contradiction and often of stormy conflict?

  Yet he had held me in his arms. This had been real, if only for a moment. My new dreams relied upon my heart, but now my mind was awake too and I turned from dreaming to planning. To plan was to dream with purpose.

  I began to take more of a hand with the house, helping Mrs. Crawford in quiet, unobtrusive ways that did not threaten her authority. She had relaxed her guard against me just a little, and she was not above commenting on the change I had brought about in Laurel.

  Nevertheless, these days were laced with uneasiness as well. There was a sense of our marking time, of awaiting the next move of that force that lurked beneath the surface and whose source I had begun to pinpoint with certainty. My last encounter with Lien had given me the deadly answer. At least Lien and I avoided each other for the time being and I was on guard against her.

  Sybil McLean had returned to having her meals in the dining room and she set her own mark of inner gloom and brooding upon Laurel and me whenever we were with her. She too was apparently awaiting the Sea Jade’s coming with a dread that was visible, even though she did not put it into words. I had the uncomfortable feeling that old hatreds were building within her toward some explosion, stirring about that irritant, that symbol of all she hated—the ship, Sea Jade.

  Of Ian I saw little. From afar I knew he watched me and there was a heaviness upon his spirit. Matters between us had been brought to no final resolution. Yet there was no way in which I could reach out to him. Brock stood between us and I knew I would not have it otherwise.

  At night I slept behind locked doors. During the day I sometimes remained in my room, pondering my identity. I could not think of Captain Obadiah as my true father. Yet now my own dear father, Nathaniel Heath, had slipped away into mists of obscurity and seemed lost to me. I felt lonelier than ever before, and I dreaded the moment when Brock must be told the unhappy facts of my identity. All this must come as a blow to him as well, for he had been devoted to Captain Obadiah. Now he must accept the captain in a new light with respect to Andrew McLean.

  At least when Brock returned he and I could go together to the Pride to seek my mother’s letter in the captain’s desk. Each day I grew more fearful of visiting the whaler alone. Tom Henderson was gone, but his murderer remained and I feared to offer myself as a target in that place of ill-omen. The thought even occurred to me that the letter, if it was really there, might be a bait to coax me away from the house, away from human company.

  Once at dinner, when Laurel had been excused from the table, Sybil prodded me concerning my mother’s letter. “Did you ever ask Lien if it was among the captain’s things?” she demanded abruptly.

  “Lien thinks the captain may have kept it in one of the drawers of his desk aboard the Pride.”

  “Have you gone there to look?” she asked.

  I wondered at her persistence. “Not yet. The ship seems an unpleasant place to me. I’ll wait until Brock comes home. Then perhaps he will go there with me and help me search.”

  This plan did not please her. “The letter is of no consequence,” she told me. “It will inform you of nothing you do not already know. Don’t involve Brock in this sordid story.” She seemed both interested in the letter’s whereabouts and at the same time anxious to warn me away from it.

  Her words made me all the more determined to read whatever my mother had written to Captain Obadiah in the time just before her death. But for the moment the letter could wait. I would not go to the Pride alone.

  Sometimes when the day was bright, I sat upon the rocks above the sea and watched the horizon, as Laurel watched from the lighthouse tower with the captain’s spyglass. So
metimes we watched from that high place together. But such sails as showed themselves on the horizon in nowise resembled the sails of a clipper ship.

  Then one afternoon, when I sat reading in the library, Ian came in and I saw the excitement that quickened him.

  “Come!” he said. “The Sea Jade is due this afternoon. I was in the village and the word has arrived by telegraph to Bascomb & Company.”

  I sprang up with an excitement greater than his own. “Then we must go to the tower at once!”

  “Yes, we must go to the tower.” There was a strangeness in his tone. He took my two hands in his. “The time is nearly here, Miranda. Are you ready? Ready to choose?” He waited for no answer, but dropped my hands and held open the door. “We must hurry so as not to miss her. This is a historic moment for the company, for us all, you know. It’s not every day in our time that a famous clipper ship sails home.”

  As a captain’s daughter, I could respond to this—though now the old, half-boastful label carried less pride with it. It was one thing to be the beloved daughter of Nathaniel Heath, who was a man of honor, and quite another to be Obadiah Bascomb’s daughter.

  As I went with Ian toward the lighthouse, the thought of seeing Brock became an increasingly exciting and troubling thing. When he returned I would be less afraid in the house than I was in his absence. Yet I could see no way for the two of us to come together as husband and wife, and I dreaded the tension, the rising of further anger between us. Longing and anxiety were intertwined and I did not know which was the stronger.

  Ian spoke only of the Sea Jade, so that I quieted a little, and tried to take heart.

  Laurel had brought Lucifer to the tower, as if he too might welcome a sight of the ship that bore his master home. From the gallery beneath the lantern they heard us coming and the dog set up a great barking until he saw who we were. He accepted me now with a certain resignation, more as one who had been thrust upon the family, than as a friend, but at least he no longer snarled at my approach, or shivered, as Laurel claimed, in terror of me.

  There was no need to tell Laurel of the message. She started a great screeching the moment she heard us on the stairs. “Come up! Come up quickly! The ship has just come into view. I know it’s the Sea Jade this time and not another ship to fool us.”

  I reached the top, breathless, with Ian close behind, and we went out upon the gallery where the sea wind tore at us. I tied my bonnet more firmly beneath my chin and took the captain’s glass as Laurel handed it to me.

  At first I saw nothing but small circles of sea as I turned the lens this way and that. Beside me, Laurel plucked at my elbow and tried to correct my direction. Then something focused in the glass, and I saw her—the beautiful white bird sailing gloriously, gracefully over the horizon and across the ocean toward Scots Harbor!

  I forgot all else in that moment, for I knew I was witnessing one of the miracles of the sea. As my father had often told me, most talk of a ship being under full sail was careless. Rarely did the right combination of fine weather and a light, steady breeze nearly dead aft occur so that all sails were set. Even when it happened, the men who sailed a ship never saw her dressed in all her glory, for the sight could never be seen from her decks. Once as a boy my father—Nathaniel Heath—had crawled out upon a bowsprit to a place where he could witness such a sight. Now here was I on this lighthouse tower seeing it for myself.

  Mainmast, foremast, mizzen—all flew their full complement of sail, from flying jibs, mainsails, and topsails, through topgallants and royals to the tiny sky sails at the top. A great pyramid of white canvas rose against a blue sky as the Sea Jade flew toward us over the water.

  Laurel grew impatient for the glass and we took turns after that. Once she even tried to press the spyglass to Lucifer’s reluctant eye, explaining to him over and over that Brock was coming home. He understood the name, and perhaps he caught something of our excitement, for he prowled the tower restlessly and would have gone downstairs if Ian hadn’t looped his chain around a bar of the railing.

  Before long I needed no glass to see the ship clearly. How marvelously she skimmed blue water, with blue skies and white clouds above her full white sails. My throat tightened and my eyes misted. After all her years of slavery, Sea Jade was coming home in full pride and beauty. And Brock McLean was sailing her! Brock, whose father had designed and built her in the first place. If ever there was poetic justice done, it was now. I surmised that there would not be a man aboard who did not serve the temporary master of this ship with all the respect and obedience due him—because he was wholly a man. The measure of a man did not lie in a halting walk alone, and now Brock would know that this was true.

  Ian touched my arm. He was watching me and not the ship. “Miranda!” he said and I caught the sudden tension in his voice. “Come back to shore, Miranda!”

  I did not want to hurt him, but I had long made my choice and at the sight of those sails everything had fallen into place. I could not hide my joy because Brock was sailing home, nor could I concern myself with Ian just then—even when he drew his hand abruptly from my arm.

  Laurel had tired of peering at the oncoming ship and she began waving her glass around, focusing here and there on nearer objects. Suddenly she turned it intently in the direction of the Pride, nudging me with her elbow.

  “Miss Miranda, look! Why do you suppose Grandmother is going aboard the whaler?”

  I took the glass from her and focused it on the smaller ship. Sure enough, Sybil McLean, still dressed in the black garments she had put on at the captain’s death, was mounting the gangplank.

  Ian watched her, too, puzzled by her actions. “Whatever is she up to? I told her that Brock was coming home today and she started getting ready for him at once, and giving orders in the kitchen. What can she want down there?”

  Suddenly I knew. There could be only one reason that would take Sybil McLean aboard a ship, when she so hated ships and the sea. From the moment when she had first mentioned my mother’s letter, she had not wanted it to come to light. When I had said that Brock and I would seek it aboard the Pride, she had been markedly anxious to discourage such a plan. Now she must have taken matters into her own hands, determined to retrieve Carrie Heath’s letter before anyone else could find it. I did not know her motive, but I knew that I must stop her before she could destroy the words my mother had written.

  “Help me, please,” I begged Ian. “Come with me to the Pride. Mrs. McLean told me of a letter my mother wrote to Captain Obadiah before she died. I’ve reason to think he hid it in his desk down there. It mustn’t fall into Mrs. McLean’s hands.”

  Ian hesitated and I sensed his reluctance. I had rejected him quite finally and I could not blame him for turning away from any demand I might make of him. But I could not face Sybil McLean alone.

  “Oh, please, Ian—please!” I said urgently.

  He gave me his old, mocking smile as he relented. “Of course, Miranda. We’ll go down to the Pride at once and see what the woman is up to.”

  Fortunately, Laurel did not complicate matters by begging to come with us. Once more her attention was fixed upon the wonder of that lovely ship. The Sea Jade’s sails were slackening now as she prepared for harbor sailing. I saw her hesitating between the sheltering arms of land, almost as if she curtsied like a lady about to make her entrance at a ball.

  Ian and I hurried down the tower steps. When we emerged below, Sybil McLean was no longer in sight.

  Anxiety spurred my feet and we ran together, Ian and I, around the Bascomb house, with a short-cut through the garden. We dashed through the little patch of woods that edged the lip of the bluff, and when we came into the open I paused in headlong flight, for Lien stood on the bluff’s edge. Her black cloak covered her and the hood was over her head. She turned at the sound of our footfalls and I glimpsed the pale ivory of her face, the bright, venomous darkness of her eyes when she saw the two of us together.

  “The captain’s ship comes home,” she said. O
ne arm was hidden beneath the cloak, as I was to remember later. She raised the other and made a wide dramatic gesture so that the black garment lifted like a wing in the wind. I knew that she meant no captain but Obadiah.

  As we left her and started down the bluff path, we could see the Sea Jade sailing into the harbor. The men were gone from the shipyard below us—gone to join the throng that crowded the waterfront. Already small boats were putting out from shore to welcome the sea queen home. Joyful hands had begun pealing the bell of a white steepled church, and soon other Scots Harbor churches were joining in the clamorous welcome. For this moment in time history had rolled back its pages and the great days were come again.

  Neither Ian nor I had spoken to Lien. Nor did we pause to watch the Sea Jade’s triumphant conquest of the harbor in our plunge down the hill. Ian took my hand when we reached the timberstrewn area of the yard and we ran together hand in hand, dodging barrels and piles of gear, zigzagging toward the dock. Only once, when I stopped for breath, did I look back up the bluff. Lien no longer stood like a black-winged figurehead above. She had started down and was halfway to the bottom. Somehow the fact made me hurry all the more.

  We ran up the steps of the dock, across creaking boards, and up the gangplank to the Pride. Ian sprang to the deck ahead and caught me about the waist to lift me down. I stood within his arms and suddenly all hurry fell away from him.

  “There’s still time to escape from Brock, Miranda. There’s still time to save yourself. Once I thought it was too late, but I was wrong. Come away with me now—before he sets foot on shore.”

  I felt the tightening of his arms and resisted with all my being. He understood at last that my choice had been truly made and his arms dropped from about me.

  “Come then,” he said. “We’ll look for Sybil McLean.”

  He went first down the open hatch nearest us in the stern. In a moment he had lighted a lantern and I followed him down. Beyond the stairs, in the after part of the ship, the door of the captain’s cabin stood open. Sybil McLean was there, as I had known she would be, going through the drawers of the captain’s desk.