Kings of the Sea

by Van Every Frost, Joan

  “How strange,” she musingly said, “I married him because I thought to make at least someone happy, and now it seems I’ve spoiled that, too.” Her eyes filled with tears.

  “What is it about me, Bob? I killed my first husband, denied my love, and now am like to destroy the man I want most to make happy. It’s as if I were cursed.”

  Bob patted her shoulder. “It’s only tragic coincidence, my dear, believe me. He’ll get over this and with time he’ll come to trust you. You are finished with this other man, aren’t you?”

  How odd that Gideon, forever a part of her, should be so casually referred to as “this other man.” She nodded miserably. “I’m finished. I’ve tried to convince Malcolm of that, but it seems I’ve failed there, too.”

  “He’ll come around, but you’re going to need your courage, Beth. Invalids — and for now that is exactly what he is — are notoriously difficult to get along with, often downright cruel. They fear their own condition and resent the healthy, and they say things they would never say if they were well. Make allowances and don’t let him hurt you. One day you’ll look back on this as an invaluable testing time for your marriage. On the other end of it you should find your relationship stronger than ever for the ordeal.”

  “You don’t make it all sound very enticing, do you?” She smiled wanly. “I hope you’re right about our future relationship. I would do anything not to go on hurting him.” The next morning a capable, motherly-looking woman appeared at the door as Elisabeth was eating her breakfast, and announced that she was the nurse.

  “My name is Mrs. Robinson, and I don’t stand interference with my duties. While I’m here, I’m not a scullery maid or a cook or an errand-runner or a washer woman, I’m a nurse. Don’t take offense, I make this speech for every case I’m on. Clears the air, so to speak, and saves a passel of unpleasantness later on.” She checked the kitchen cupboards and the icebox thoroughly, humming to herself. “When you come home for lunch, bring a dozen eggs and oatmeal for gruel,” she said. “Oh, and put in an order for enough milk for him to have a quart a day. Myself, I’m especially partial to mutton chops and fish fillets, and I hope you’ve plenty of tea.”

  Elisabeth had already raised her eyebrows, for Malcolm detested milk.

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Mrs. Robinson said cheerfully. “There’s more than one way to skin a cat. Gruel with salt and butter can be mighty tasty, and as for the milk, he’ll get it in custards and soups and the like and never know the difference. Now then, if you’ll just coddle some eggs, two for me and two for his nibs in there — and a bit of toast would go well, too — you can toddle along to your job and leave the rest to me.”

  Elisabeth could see that for as long as Mrs. Robinson graced them with her presence, the household would not be the same. One thing about it, she doubted that Malcolm would be able to get around her. When she went into the bedroom later to say goodbye to Malcolm, Mrs. Robinson was sitting in a rocking chair knitting, with a fascinated Pericles tentatively swiping at the yarn, and Malcolm was asleep again. When Elisabeth would have kissed him gently on the forehead, the other woman raised a warning finger and shook her head emphatically. Elisabeth shrugged, smiling, and left.

  She sent Malcolm’s message to John Rowdy, but was surprised to see him that afternoon at the library.

  “Hello, Beth, how are you? Doing any sailing lately?” They got through a bit of small talk, then he said, “I checked with Mathews and Edgerton, and they agree with me that since Malcolm can’t do the presentation, we think you should.” When she made to speak, he held up his hand. “It’s high time the library got a bit of publicity — helps for fund raising, you know, and a pretty girl will do better in that department than one of us old codgers. Nothing to it, really. Just a short speech and hand it over.”

  “But Mr. Rowdy,” she managed to interject finally, “hand what over? What is the presentation?”

  “Didn’t Malcolm tell you? He must really be ill, poor chap. The library has in its possession a letter written by John Adams which describes a ship launching in a nearby town back in 1790. The Boston city administration decided that it should be presented to the town on the Saturday after Thanksgiving as a goodwill gesture toward the towns’s hundredth anniversary. They want to combine it with a fundraising banquet for a team of horses and a fire pumper.”

  “What town?” Elisabeth asked, though Malcolm’s behavior suddenly fell into place as her face went hot and then cold.

  “Why, Evanston, of course.”

  Chapter V

  She decided not to tell Malcolm right away, because she didn’t want to worry him. Time enough when he was stronger, and the presentation was still almost three weeks away. She had tried to talk Rowdy out of her doing it, but short of out and out refusing, which there was no gracious way to do, she was stuck with it. Happily Malcolm himself was too preoccupied with his own illness to ask her about it. The bronchitis worsened, complicated by an agonizing pleurisy, and Bob took to coming by daily.

  “I’ll be honest with you, I don’t like it,” he told her a week later. “He should be well on the road to recovery, and yet he’s if anything much worse. It’s as if he has no resistance, no will to get well.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” she replied sadly. “I’ve asked him if there’s anything wrong, anything preying on his mind, but he insists not. There couldn’t be anything else physically wrong with him that we don’t know about?”

  “Of course it’s impossible to be sure, but I don’t think so. I told you that I brought Stanhope over the other day from Massachusetts General, and he agreed with me.” Bob frowned, biting his upper lip. “I hope he takes a turn for the better soon — he can’t stand going on like this for long.”

  “He’ll die, won’t he?” Elisabeth said then, her question half a statement.

  “Damned if I’ll let him.” Bob smiled at her reassuringly, but she knew that he thought so, too.

  That night she sat up with him for hours as he raved deliriously. Over and over again he would call her name and beg her not to leave him. She would reassure him while holding his hot hand in hers, only to have him cry out the same thing minutes later. Around three in the morning he broke into a drenching sweat but at last slept quietly, his face gaunt and pale except for a smudge of beard.

  The next morning as she came in for her coddled eggs, Mrs. Robinson remarked, “You know, I think he’s better. I’m going to try him on an eggnog — he’s eaten next to nothing for the better part of a week. I didn’t think he’d make it there for a while, and that’s a fact. Funny, there’s them that fights and them that curls up their toes, and up until this morning I’d have sworn he was a toe-curler.”

  As the date of the presentation drew nearer, Malcolm’s strength began to return, though very slowly. For several hours each day they would bring him into the parlor when the fire was lit, and after Mrs. Robinson went home, Elisabeth would read to him before helping him back to bed. At last she saw that she could remain silent no longer without making him think that she was hiding the presentation from him deliberately.

  “Malcolm, on Saturday I’m doing the presentation of the John Adams letter. I’ll catch the early train back the next morning.”

  He looked at her with gray eyes burning in his wasted face. “Why you? I told Rowdy it should be a board member.”

  “Oh, Malcolm, what difference does it make?” she asked carelessly. “Mrs. Robinson says she can stay over Saturday night, so you won’t be alone.”

  “You should have told him no,” Malcolm insisted. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “I know nothing of the kind. John Rowdy was very insistent that I do it, and without giving the details of my private life it was impossible to refuse without seeming rude and uncooperative.”

  “You could have said that I was too sick for you to leave me.

  “He’s had Bob reporting to him. He knows perfectly well how sick you are.”

  “And you want to go, don’t yo
u?” When she shook her head, he went on, “You want to see your lover, that’s it. How will it feel to take him in your arms again and kiss him and —”

  “Stop it!” she cried. “In heaven’s name, stop!” She remembered what Bob had said about the cruelty of invalids. “I had no idea you would take it like this or I would have told Rowdy no. I’ll do it tomorrow. I’ll say you’re too upset at the thought of my leaving you alone.”

  “No,” he said perversely. “I want you to go. I want you to see Gideon again and decide between us once and for all.”

  Now she was arguing against going and he for it. “I’ve already decided long since,” she pointed out. “I decided between you when I decided to marry you.”

  “Did you indeed? Then why are you afraid to see him again?”

  She saw that there was no reasoning with him and finally managed to change the subject. When she saw Bob the next day, she told him about it.

  “Perhaps it’s for the best,” he offered. “If you go and then come back to him, he’ll have to see that your love for him is to be trusted. Suit yourself, but my advice would be to go.”

  When Saturday dawned, she was still of two minds, but realized that it was far too late to back out. She sat in the library for the half day it was open on Saturdays and tried to be honest with herself while Captain Blodgett rattled his newspaper over in the comer. Had she really made a determined attempt to talk John Rowdy out of her going? After all, Malcolm’s illness even now was serious enough to require her presence. Rowdy had taken it upon himself to find out how things were going with Malcolm. She passed her hand wearily over her face. Admit it, she thought, you do want to see Gideon, don’t you? Not to talk to, just to know that he is alive and well. Just for old times’s sake, that’s all. And just to find out how she felt about him now, perhaps to settle old ghosts.

  Malcolm said nothing as she left, but held her to him fiercely. “Come back to me, Beth. I know I’ve been a beast lately, but it’s only for love of you.”

  “I’ll come back, Malcolm. You must believe that.”

  On the train she stared unseeing out the grimy window, taking no notice of the shying horses and frightened cows that marked the locomotive’s passing. She made herself think of Malcolm, of how he had always stood by her but never pressed her, never made a nuisance of himself. He was always there when she needed him, and she had never felt it necessary to apologize for asking for his services. Yet lying behind these thoughts was the feel of Gideon’s mouth on her breast as if it had been yesterday. She shifted uncomfortably on her seat as the train chugged inexorably on toward Evanston.

  She was met by a small delegation of town officials and businessmen who welcomed her and took her to the house of Ames Barr, the head of the town council. She smiled and nodded and, judging from their expressions, said the right things, but all the time her entire attention was fastened on the possible sight of the flaming red hair, the steady blue gaze that turned her bones to water. Though her eyes darted here and there, however, he was nowhere to be seen.

  When she came downstairs after freshening up, it was still the better part of an hour until the banquet. There was quite a gathering of town notables in the drawing room, but not a red head among them. She seemed to go on and on endlessly about the weather, the ship library, Evanston, the weather again, never seeing the person with whom she was talking. A feeling of such unreality gripped her that she wondered if she wouldn’t waken to find that she had been dozing on the train.

  After a hundred years they all got into carriages and made their way to the meeting hall, where trestle tables covered with white tablecloths had been set up for the banquet. She was seated in the place of honor with the mayor, George Fairway, on one side of her and Ames Barr on the other. Trembling inside, she looked around the hall and realized that he wasn’t there and probably had made it his business not to be there. He was wiser than she. The sense of unreality fell away from her then, and she turned toward the mayor to ask about Evanston’s early history, a subject upon which he was only too anxious to discourse.

  They were nearly through the first course, a tomato consommé, when she looked up to see him come striding in with that easy, self-confident walk of his. Even as he sat down at his empty place and picked up his napkin, his eyes were fastened on hers. She heard the mayor’s voice as a dim buzzing in her ears as she sat there with a spoon half raised to her mouth, and stared and stared and stared, the appearance of that remembered face burning itself into her brain. She was conscious of her beating heart and his blazing countenance and that was all. Gone was the banquet hall, gone the people, gone Malcolm even, so that they were mysteriously alone in a huge empty room. Then someone tapped him on the shoulder and shook hands with him, and the spell was broken. The spoon with its cooled soup was on the way once more to her mouth as if it had never stopped, and she was listening halfheartedly to the mayor’s description of Evanston’s brilliant future.

  The mayor made an interminable speech about some rather tenuous links between Evanston’s past and future, and then he introduced her. She made the rehearsed presentation speech to Gideon as he sat there watching her, and she wondered if he knew what she was really saying, that she still loved him, that she had been only half alive until this moment, that at least they would have this brief glimpse before going their separate ways never to see each other again.

  She was handing the letter, framed and under glass in two panels, to the mayor when there was a commotion at the doorway and a disheveled old man who looked as if he had been rummaging in a coal pile ran up a line of tables calling, “Mr. Hand! Mr. Hand, sir! The yard’s afire and even with the yard folk already at it, you’d need an army to put it down!”

  Gideon leaped up and ran for the door, followed by a good part of the audience. The mayor hastily put down the framed letter and made for the door himself, crying, “Toby! Ride for Marsh and tell them to send the pumper. Look smart now!”

  “Gene and Bob Watkins have already gone!”

  Elisabeth made her way hastily to the door and pushed into the nearest carriage she could find that looked as if it was going to the fire. She found herself squeezed in with two fat ladies who looked like sisters, a gaunt old man in evening clothes who must have been a giant in his youth, and a little girl.

  “Oh, how exciting!” one of the fat ladies crooned. “I just love a good fire, don’t you, Constance?”

  “Shut your mouth, Agnes,” the old man snapped unexpectedly. “A man’s being ruined, and all you can talk about is how you love fires!”

  “Well, why are you going, then?” Agnes asked sulkily.

  “I’ve a part interest in the Demeter that’s sitting unfinished on Hand’s ways, that’s why. God willing, she can be saved.”

  They bickered on unheard by Elisabeth as she took in the concept that Gideon would be ruined. She knew how he felt about the yard and about his work, and she could have wept for him. She had seen his face light up too often when he was talking about a ship in the process of being built not to realize what this fire would mean to him. He had put so much of his profits back into improvements in the yard that she doubted he had the cash to rebuild. She wondered how he would take it.

  It wasn’t long before they could see the ominous ruddy glow over the trees, turning the leaves and the road before them the color of copper. The glow soon resolved itself into billows of firelit smoke interspersed with columns of sparks and glowing embers, and even over the sound of hoofs and the creaking of the carriage they could hear the roar of the flames.

  “It’s gone!” Agnes shrieked happily. “Not the Archangel Gabriel himself could stop it now.”

  Elisabeth threw herself out of the carriage and ran toward the conflagration, elbowing her way through a throng of bystanders. Everyone was so enthralled with the spectacle that they made no attempt to halt her as she ran through the gate into a wall of heat and turned toward a line that had formed at the cistern to hand buckets. Most of those in the line looked like
yard workers and their families, plainly dressed folk who sweated in the heat and looked desperate as they watched their livelihoods go up in flames. Soon Elisabeth looked not much different than they. She had thrown off her flowered hat and like them was covered with flying soot and ashes streaked with perspiration. Grimly they passed the slopping buckets from hand to hand while several little urchins ran back to the cistern with the empty ones.

  “It’s no more use trying to save the timber!” shouted a tall man with gray hair and a blackened face who from Gideon’s description she recognized must be Elam. “Shift the line to the Demeter!”

  The line wavered and reformed until it made a tenuous join with the half-finished ship riding the ways. A line of fire ran up her bow and disappeared over the gunwales onto her partly planked deck. The puny buckets of water hardly seemed to have any effect at all. Men began knocking out the blocks and timbers that held the ship on the ways, but when she rested free, she still didn’t move, hung up by her own weight. All then began desperately prying with wooden levers until with a groan the ship began to move, slowly at first and then faster, the buckets still being slopped on the bow though the fire there was all but out, the wet blackened wood leaving an ugly scar like a misplaced figurehead.

  The ship hit the water with a splash and drifted out onto the river before they saw that the bow flame had done its work after all and was eating at the inside of the ship, for they could see a glow from inside her, reflected in the dark water where she floated. There was a muffled whump! that blew debris into the air as the gases from the bubbling tar exploded in an enclosed part of her hold. Soon the entire ship was enveloped in sheets of flame, and they saw she would burn right down to the waterline. There was a groan from the onlookers that echoed the groan the ship had emitted as she started down the ways.

  Next came a shed that was smoking in the intense heat but not in flames yet. The firefighters discovered that they had more luck dousing structures that were not yet on fire than ones already burning. Their skin dried, their lips cracked, their clothing smoldered, their hands blistered, but still the heavy buckets came sloshing down the line, to be poured on a smoking shed or pile of timbers and run back to the cistern.