Kings of the Sea

by Van Every Frost, Joan

  “He never complained of you, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Then how did he explain his affair with you?”

  “I wouldn’t tell you, only I don’t think he’d mind. He said that you and he weren’t suited but that he respected you and his wedding promise to you until such time as you might ask for your freedom, which he didn’t think you would ever do.”

  “So he spoke of wedding promises, did he? How did he explain the part about forsaking all others?” I felt betrayed. Without waiting for her reply, I went on, “And did he say how we weren’t suited?”

  “Mrs. Hand, please believe me, he never discussed you in a derogatory manner. In fact, he hardly discussed you at all.”

  “When did he admit he was married?”

  “The very first day we met.”

  “And you allowed yourself to be seduced anyway?”

  “I won’t be bullied, Mrs. Hand, because I can’t think that what we did was evil no matter what judgment you and society put on it. He was honest with me from the beginning. The details of what has been between us are none of your business, nor anyone else’s either, but I will say that we love each other and because we love each other we will give each other up.”

  “Are you going to tell him I came?”

  “For his sake, no, I’m not. He has respect and fondness for you now, but if he knew you had come here he might begin to hate you. I couldn’t bear it for him to be bound to someone he hated.”

  “So you think I was wrong to come?”

  “If it had been me, I would like to think I would have had the courage to talk to him, not to his mistress.”

  “I have my reasons,” was all I said. She obviously didn’t know what had driven Gideon and me apart, nor that the rift was of a kind which precluded that sort of discussion with him.

  “Now if you’ll excuse me, I was on my way to go sailing.”

  “Then you will let him go?”

  “What choice have I? What choice did I ever have? I love him too much to destroy him between us.” For a moment then she let down, and her face took on the lost, helpless look of someone drowning. “Please go,” she said in a low voice.

  I regretted not feeling more satisfaction at her suffering. After all, she had taken what didn’t belong to her and wasn’t sorry for it, either, only that she had to let it go. I saw that I had probably interfered just in time, for soon neither one of them would have been capable of letting go.

  “Goodbye, Mrs. Bowman,” I said. “Someday you’ll thank me for this.”

  She looked at me with eyes blind with shock. “That I will never do. Good day, Mrs. Hand.”

  That night I watched Gideon’s face and wondered how it would change when she told him they must part.

  Chapter V

  It wasn’t long before I found out. The light went out of his face and his cheerful, affectionate manner with me turned into a grave politeness. I took some pleasure in telling Sally that I had indeed discovered who his mistress was and had put a stop to it, but that he had left Sally months before he could possibly have even met this other woman. She looked at me as if she had been struck, then turned and fled upstairs, leaving me to find my own way out.

  I found no little satisfaction in meditating on the fact that my father had been punished and now Gideon as well. There was only one problem: Gideon never by expression or word let on to me that he was suffering, and at last I began to wonder if he was, trying to reassure myself by visualizing his face when he looked into Elisabeth Bowman’s eyes. I rather thought that at least he would go through a period of heavy drinking, but instead he only put in even longer hours at the shipyard. They had two packets and one of the fast opium clippers on the ways, so there was as much to do as he had time to put in. He became even leaner and harder, his face like the carved wooden figurehead on one of his ships.

  I’m sure that he would have become reconciled, and we would eventually have been able to arrive at the kind of relationship I knew was best for both of us, had he only left me my one real enjoyment. Actually it was not so much an enjoyment as a necessity now, but a dear necessity nonetheless. While I never again was able to attain the ecstatic vision, I happily floated through thousands of hours cushioned from any of the harsher realities of life.

  One fatal evening, however, he came in totally unannounced with Dr. Smedley, of all people. The old man shook my hand and peered into my eyes shrewdly, then nodded at Gideon with what seemed like sadness. We sat down in the drawing room while they pulled my compromises with existence all to shreds.

  “Nellie came to me,” Gideon explained, “with some story about empty bottles in your closet. She was upset that she might be blamed in some way, and she wanted me to know that she had nothing to do with it. I thought at first she meant liquor bottles, and I was sure that someone on the household staff must be secreting them there, because I had never seen any signs of your drinking too much.” He paused. “Except once,” he said almost to himself. “But she showed me one of the bottles, which of course didn’t say what was in it. I smelled it, and from my days on the ships I would know that smell anywhere. I wrote Dr. Smedley to ask him the symptoms I should look for, and later I invited him here. He is a family friend as well as a doctor, Emily, and I think you are going to need him badly for a while. I’m sure that you no more than I would want this spread about Evanston for the delectation of the gossips.”

  I had sat absolutely frozen during this recitation, not really believing that this was happening to me. “How dared you pry into my room?” I blustered finally. “How dare you stand in judgment on me, you who are a fornicator and adulterer with your scarlet women stashed away from here to Boston! I deny your right to say anything about what I do!”

  His face went absolutely white as the full impact of what I was saying hit him. He glanced at Smedley, who looked, poor soul, as if he wished himself anywhere but here. In the end Gideon said in an absolutely even voice, “Emily, that is tincture of opium you’ve been taking. You have got to be stopped. If I stood by and watched you do this, I’d be no better than a murderer, and you’ve given me enough to feel guilty for as it is.”

  Thus began by the next day for me a hell that must have recompensed Gideon somewhat for what he now knew I had done. He couldn’t help realizing that if I knew about Elisabeth Bowman, I would surely have done something about it, and since I hadn’t talked to him, I must have talked to her. Yet he was never anything but gentle and patient when he was with me. They hired two private nurses, big strapping women who held me down as I convulsed and cleaned up after me as I erupted from every orifice and drowned in icy sweat. I screamed and wept and cramped and begged and pleaded. I called down the crudest sort of imprecations on Gideon’s head. Far from being uplifting, as Job and the other scriptures would have it, pain made me into nothing more than a hurting animal. The only thing that seemed to keep me going was that I vowed I would have my revenge. Gideon obviously had not been punished enough to purify him, or he never would have done this terrible thing to me.

  At last after what seemed weeks, the symptoms abated and I was able to hold down tea and toast. I’m sure much to Gideon’s surprise I spoke to him in a friendly manner and thanked him for saving me from what was not only bad for my body but bad for my soul as well. Dr. Smedley took his leave, as did the two nurses, nor was I sorry to see them go. Smedley had become a bird of ill omen for me, coming as he always did when I was in dire and embarrassing straits of one sort or another. Before he left, however, he had another of his distressingly frank talks with me.

  ‘To save you possible embarrassment, Emily, I am telling you that Gideon and I have been to every pharmacy hereabouts and even spent a day in Boston at it, requesting them not to sell you anything unless Gideon is with you. I know you’ve promised, but when the spirit is willing, the flesh can sometimes still be weak.”

  I literally couldn’t speak, for I had already determined that in the near future I was somehow going to get hold of the elixir a
gain. They wouldn’t take Michael from me that easily. The only thing that gave me any comfort was that it must have hurt Gideon terribly to be going about the city that had once been a scene of such joy to him on so painful and tawdry an errand. Yet that was only the beginning, I promised myself. Before too much time had passed, Michael and I would bring him to his knees and make a godly man of him after all.

  Was it a month later? Two months? I really don’t know. It was very cold, the ground hard with frost, though no snow had fallen, so perhaps it was even later, in November or early December. Finally unable any longer to bear my newly acquired clarity of vision and understanding of the hopeless nature of my circumstances, I had sneaked out and taken the train, north this time, to Leighton, where I attempted to purchase a bottle of elixir. Gideon and Dr. Smedley must have been uncommonly persuasive and very thorough, for the clerk refused to sell it to me. I tried two other towns and then in a rage gave up. I knew then that the time had come to wreak God’s vengeance on the sinful creature.

  I had already determined what I would do, but the circumstances and the means for it eluded me for some time. Ironically fate played into my hands in the person of Elisabeth Bowman. For the fiftieth anniversary of the official founding of Evanston, Boston had sent as a gift a letter from the city archives written by John Adams on the occasion of his having been invited to christen a brigantine built in a nearby shipyard. This historical document, which had been reposing in the Tilbury Memorial Ship Library, was to be presented to the city fathers of Evanston at an anniversary dinner by Mrs. Elisabeth Bowman Greene — the newspaper typically had mixed her up somehow with Malcolm Greene — of the library staff representing the mayor of Boston and the governor of the state. The town officials and leading businessmen were expected to donate fifty dollars a plate, the proceeds to go for a team of horses and a fire pumper wagon. Until now, the townspeople had had to form bucket brigades as best they could while waiting for the firemen to show up from Marsh.

  I knew that Gideon would be unable to stay away from the banquet and further that his mind would be on other matters besides my whereabouts. He certainly wasn’t suspicious when I volunteered that I didn’t think I cared to go; it was natural that I didn’t wish to be placed in any kind of awkward juxtaposition with my former rival. With beating heart but outward calm I kissed him on the cheek and told him to have a good time. He patted me absently on the shoulder, took up his evening cloak, hat, and cane, and set off impatiently on Dasher instead of in the carriage despite the cold. I watched the horse and rider caracoling off down the street, the horse’s breath white in the frosty air.

  I had made it my business to visit the shipyard frequently in recent weeks, much to Gideon’s surprise and subsequent pleasure when I told him that I was interested. He had Billy Foreman show me about everywhere, and I took special note of what I would be needing. This night I bolted the dinner in my room and told Mrs. Simmons that the servants could go to bed when the dinner things were cleaned up, since Gideon would be getting home late and I would retire early. When I thought they were safely occupied in washing up and gossiping in the kitchen, I dressed hurriedly and threw on a dark cloak of Gideon’s. After tiptoeing downstairs, I let myself out the front door. It would be locked though not bolted because of Gideon’s expected late return, and I had a key.

  It was ordinarily an hour’s walk to the yard, but I think I did it in far less time, for the cold was intense and it was necessary to hurry just to keep warm. The watchman recognized me, and I told him I’d come for some papers that Gideon had forgotten he would need at the banquet. Though it would have been curious behavior indeed on Gideon’s part to send his wife on foot on a nocturnal errand such as that, night watchmen are night watchmen instead of something better for a reason, and this old man who otherwise would have been sent to the workhouse would have questioned God before he would have questioned his employer’s wife.

  He lit me a lantern, and I told him that as I knew my way, it wasn’t necessary for him to come along. He was thankful enough to go back out of the cold into his shack with its glowing stove. I picked my way to the supply shed I wanted and for the next half hour sloshed containers of lamp fuel and turpentine over everything I could think of, even the keel of the ship on the ways. It was a pity that all but the one packet were already launched. With the lamp I managed to light a stick and proceeded to go about touching off the prepared areas, while keeping an eye on the watchman’s shack.

  A shipyard is a veritable treasure house of inflammable material, strewn as it is with sawdust, shavings, scrap planking, lumber storage piles, paint, varnish, and the like. By the time the old man realized that anything was happening, the yard was ablaze in fifty different places. I hid behind a wagon as he came stumbling out and ran toward the cistern to get water, then I strolled out the gate very pleased with myself. Michael’s flaming sword couldn’t have done better, for the chill wind off the river was making an inferno of the whole place.

  Before I was halfway back I heard a running horse behind me and dodged off the road to let him by. I was at the outskirts of Evanston when I stood aside yet again for a large body of horsemen followed by a number of carriages, all heading out toward the new spectacular ruddy glow in the sky above the trees. I let myself into the house quietly, returned Gideon’s cloak, and got ready for bed. Elated, I lay back on the pillows and visualized the scene a few miles away. The men would be fighting a losing battle with the devouring flames, and Gideon would see everything he had worked so hard for become as worthless as the clinkers left over in a dying furnace. I smiled contentedly.

  It must have been near daylight that I heard him come stumbling up the stairs. Instead of passing on to his room, he threw open the door to mine and stood swaying there in the doorway. I calmly lit a lamp, for I wanted to see his face. Nor was I disappointed: his shirt was full of burned holes and soaking wet, his visage was black with soot, his eyebrows and hair were scorched, and there were tear tracks down his cheeks, though whether because of the smoke or because of his loss I had no way of knowing.

  “Why, Emily? Why? You never wanted me. Did it hurt so much that I should turn to another woman for what you had no intention of giving me?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I replied calmly. I wanted to wring every last drop from this encounter.

  “The watchman saw you, you must have known that.” He had been sounding tired, but now his voice began to pick up a tone of anger. “What have I done to you that you should murder my love and destroy my life’s work? Well, I’ve had enough and more than enough. I won’t go on living under the same roof with you. Spawn of Satan, I wouldn’t give you the satisfaction of seeing me every day as I contemplate the ruin you’ve made of my life.”

  This I hadn’t foreseen, and it drove me wild, to have him slip out from between my fingers just as I had him where I wanted him. “All right, go off with your Jezebel, you adulterer! She’s nothing but a cheap whore and all you deserve!”

  His face became a mask of rage, and he strode over to the bed and fetched me a clout on the side of my head that made my ears ring. I remembered his saying of my father that a man who would strike a woman was no better than an animal. In his fury he looked like Satan and Michael all in one, and with a cry I held out my arms to him.

  “Why, you miserable bitch,” he said almost wonderingly. “You like being struck, don’t you?”

  He hit me again with his open palm, and I whimpered and held out my arms again imploringly. With a strangled oath he yanked off the bedclothes and tore my nightgown clear off. Still clothed himself, he dropped heavily upon me and kissed me savagely until he drew blood, and I could feel the hooks on his arm hard and cold behind my neck. As he impaled me cruelly then upon his incandescent sword, I cried out, “Michael!” and screamed with pain and ecstasy just before I swooned dead away.

  When I opened my eyes, I found to my surprise that Gideon’s mother of all people was sitting by the window reading a book. The w
indow was open, and a warm, blossom-scented breeze fluttered the curtains. She closed the volume, only then looking over at me to find me watching her.

  “I wonder what you’re seeing, poor soul?” she murmured.

  “What should I be seeing, then?” I asked. “How long have I slept?”

  I might have slapped her, she started so. She didn’t bother to answer me, but hastened out of the room calling, “Rachel! Rachel!”

  I wondered who Rachel was but hadn’t long to conjecture, for my mother surprisingly came running into the room, followed by Gideon’s mother. “Emily! Emily, speak to me! Sarah says you spoke intelligibly. Say something, anything.”

  “Of course I spoke intelligibly,” I snapped. “I’m hardly in the habit of doing otherwise.”

  The two women looked at each other, evidently astounded. My mother drew a deep breath. “Tell me, Emily, what do you think happened? Do you remember anything?”

  I blushed a fiery red and was silent. I had no intention of telling them about last night and Gideon.

  “The fire, Emily. Do you remember the fire?”

  I laughed weakly with relief. “Of course I remember the fire,” I said. “It burned the yard to the ground, didn’t it?” I went on with some satisfaction.

  “Then you did do it,” my mother breathed, near tears. “And I kept telling them you couldn’t have. You were always a biddable child — I didn’t think you had it in you.” She had said that before about my having a lover.

  Somehow the fire seemed very far away. “Is that why I’m tied like this?” My hands were bound, one to each bedpost, and my feet tied together. They must have been like that for a long time, because I hadn’t even noticed it at first.

  “Emily,” Gideon’s mother said, “you’ve had to be tied much of the time for five months. I can’t think what brought you out of it so suddenly unless there is something about your condition —”

  “Five months! You’re joking, surely. What condition?”