Kings of the Sea

by Van Every Frost, Joan

  The delay was granted, and I wasn’t surprised when Sam got hold of me in my rooms just as it was getting dark to tell me that they had agreed to settle for thirty thousand pounds.

  “Thirty thousand! I would have thought five was nearer it, what with the discrepancy in stories and the like.”

  “They knew perfectly well that with the shady circumstances surrounding a witness’s death in conjunction with what you actually did to save the ship, any court awarding salvage would have given you twice that. As for discrepancies, Tolliver and his two mates I think would have tipped the scale of belief well onto our side. I think we should treat Tolliver to a grand dinner and see that he is adequately rewarded.”

  “I’m not sure he’d feel comfortable with a grand dinner, Sam. Why don’t we see to it instead that he gets a good berth on another ship and give him enough money to have fun without foundering himself? I’ll make a deal with the captain of his new ship to hold back half the money until he gets into port again.”

  In the end, we gave Houser a thousand pounds that we had to argue with him to take, Sam eight thousand, Wight-man and Cumings five thousand. After all, Sam had done all the work for them, and they seemed happy enough with the award. If we had had to go to court, it would have been different. Sir Aubrey Markham we did invite to a grand dinner, with a bit of lively entertainment afterward to boot, and you’d never have guessed the old bastard was crowding seventy. The remaining sixteen thousand? That was the beginning of the Blue Hand International Shipping Company, Inc. and Ltd.

  Chapter IV

  Jack was taking me step by step over the innovations that were going to make the Cassiopeia the fastest, most modem, most comfortable passenger vessel afloat.

  “The bathhouse is separated into men’s and women’s sections, with separate shower stalls for six people to bathe simultaneously on each side,” he boasted.

  That was the height of luxury at the time, for it hadn’t been long before that the only way a passenger could get a bath was to persuade some compliant seaman hosing down the deck to squirt him with seawater. The women, I thought, must really have become rather ripe by the time the three-to-six-week Atlantic crossing by sailing packet was completed.

  I made careful mental notes of everything he told me and everything I had experienced on the Medea, which was considered a comfortable ship of her time. My ship — or rather, my ships — would put her to shame. Yet all the time like a canker sore was the thought of Arabella. The few inquiries I had been able to make had come to nothing, not surprisingly, since I did not know what name she might have taken, though I felt certain that somehow she would hold on to Arabella. I scanned the society sections of the London newspapers, and at last the name Arabella Worthington sprang out of the page and stopped my heart. “Lady Arabella Worthington will be holding an intimate at-home on Tuesday next for friends on her country estate, Edgemore Manor, Perks, Lancashire. Among those attending will be Lord and Lady Sutton-Wadsworth …

  “Jack,” I said, the newspaper actually trembling in my hands, “I’ve got to go to London for a few days.”

  He raised those black hairy eyebrows of his in surprise, for I had cut him off literally in midsentence. “Of course, my boy. Nothing in the way of bad news, I hope.”

  I might have saved myself a good deal of time if I had asked around about Lady Arabella Worthington while I was in London, but I was in too much of a hurry for anything as sensible as that. Edgemore Manor turned out to be one of those buildings that seemed as if nature had placed it where it was, all softly glowing yellow brick broken up pleasingly with ivy, and a vast expanse of lawn perfect even at this time of year and dotted with decorative large oak trees. This was only a day or so before the intimate at-home that the newspaper had described, and I was quite certain that Lady Arabella would be there seeing to the details of the preparations. Intimate her at-home may have been accounted in her circles, but from the length of the guest list it sounded to me like a full-blown gala.

  It was four in the afternoon when I arrived, totally unannounced, of course. The gates were wide open, probably to accommodate the comings and goings of various tradespeople necessary to the proper setting up of the social event. Arabella must have made a spectacular marriage, I thought, though I wondered that there had been no mention of a husband. Might I suppose …? Perhaps, just perhaps, she wasn’t married. Could she have made a propitious investment with her father’s money? There were fortunes being made and lost all the time on the clipper runs for tea to such exotic ports as Fuchow, Canton, Wusung, and Shanghai. I myself was counting on this trade as well as on the passenger packets to increase my money from the Medea settlement to an amount respectable enough to be the basis for attracting funds to build two ships of my own.

  A harried-looking butler in his shirtsleeves answered the door and looked me up and down as if I were some kind of not very attractive insect. I resented his attitude, for I had dressed with no little care to give the impression of possible if not certain wealth. When I told him that I was an old friend of Lady Arabella’s from America, his look as much as said, “Not bloody likely,” but he grudgingly told me to wait and disappeared into the interior, leaving the door only a little ajar. After a time he even more grudgingly told me that her ladyship would see me in the morning room. I followed him through a bewildering series of rooms bustling with maids and workmen to a small room with a nice view out over the back garden and containing a lovely old desk at which sat a very elegant gray-haired woman in her fifties who was apparently ticking off items on a list. The housekeeper, no doubt, who would decide if I was to see the lady of the manse or not.

  The woman looked at me momentarily with raised eyebrows and a puzzled air, but them smiled graciously and held out her hand. “I must have misunderstood Albert I am Arabella Worthington — what can I do for you?”

  I’m afraid my face fell and I gawked at her like any country bumpkin. “I — I beg your pardon, I shouldn’t have presumed. You see, I thought you were someone else.”

  “Indeed?” She smiled broadly then and I noted that she must have been a real beauty in her youth. “Albert thought you were probably a confidence man. I’ve never seen one, and I was intrigued. Who did you think I was, if I may ask?”

  To this day I don’t know what prompted me to take her into my confidence, but I suppose it must have been my embarrassed disappointment and in addition my instinctive recognition of her as a person of charm, humor, and sensitivity. I found myself wishing she were thirty years younger, she would have given even my Arabella a run for her money. I poured out to her the circumstances of Arabella’s running away, and while I understandably didn’t go into all of the details, I made it plain that we had been lovers.

  “Gracious,” she said when I had run down, “I can see now why you were so precipitate. If she hasn’t already made an advantageous marriage, she is sure to be on the eve of one if she is as intelligent and beautiful as you say.”

  She thought for a moment. “She must also be passing herself off as American landed gentry. Her accent would never pass in our circles otherwise. Anyone that exotic I would certainly have heard of, but the only other Arabellas I know are, first, a lady in her forties whom I’ve known for years, and second, the daughter of an old colonial family in India. Handsome girl, too. Could your lovely perhaps have changed the name Arabella for another?”

  “Perhaps.” I was gloomy. I was still so sure that she had kept the name Arabella that I began to wonder if she had come to grief after all. She could have been killed for the gold she carried, sold into white slavery, any of a number of unpleasant possibilities.

  Lady Arabella put her hand on my arm. “Don’t take it so hard. Girls like her have a way of falling on their feet. To be honest with you, it sounds to me as if she wouldn’t accept you any more now than she did in America. She wouldn’t marry you then, and I doubt she would marry you now.”

  The everlasting plaint of rejected lovers came automatically to my tongue. “But I
love her!” I yelped, as if this alone should open all doors, soften all hearts.

  “That may be,” Lady Arabella replied inexorably, “but does she love you?”

  “Of course she does! We grew up together. Neither of us will ever be as close to anyone else.”

  “My dear, it often happens that people to whom we think we are very close are in reality complete strangers. She tried to tell you that she wasn’t who you thought she was, but you wouldn’t listen. You are in love with someone who doesn’t exist, the most terrible kind of love there is, because the myth is of a perfection that no flesh-and-blood woman or man can ever achieve. A form of La Belle Dame Sans Merci, if you will, and like Keats’s knight you will be palely loitering for the rest of your life if you refuse to settle for reality.”

  “You’re wrong, I know you’re wrong. If I could only see her, talk to her …”

  She shook her finely coiffed silver-gray head sadly. “I can see you won’t be put off. Very well, if I should come across her, I shall let you know. Perhaps it would be as well for you to meet her again and see that there is something she wants far more than she wants you. Where can I reach you?”

  I gave her the address of Jack’s shipyard. “I’ll be there for another six months, and after that I suppose I’ll return to Massachusetts.”

  She regarded me with shrewd eyes. “Should the mood strike you, you will generally find me at home here or at my town house in London. Near Hyde Park anyone can point out the Worthington house to you.” She smiled. “I should very much like to hear about your country. We are so insular here that there seldom occurs the opportunity to hear about far places from one of their own inhabitants.”

  Looking back on that conversation, I can still be embarrassed: young, gauche, how foolish I must have seemed to that graceful lady. I must also have touched her, though, because I remember how her eyes softened. “I wish you good fortune, Christian Hand. If only I could still want something that much …”

  I hadn’t touched Albert, however, for he wasted no time letting me know by the very way he showed me out that he was glad to see the last of me.

  I should be able to say that I moped for all of that time, but it would be a lie. It was as if talking about Arabella had lanced a boil, and I was able to plunge enthusiastically into the work at the shipyard and forget sometimes for days at a time that a piece of me was missing. For Arabella was a piece of me, and I would never be whole until she was at my side.

  The Cassiopeia was launched on a blowy day in April, and I remember how the swiftly moving cloud shadows kept darkening her bright paintwork as she waited to slide down the ways. I watched every stage of her growth from the skeleton of the launching to the well-appointed luxurious passenger vessel she finally became. With her smart black-and-yellow funnels and a cloud of sail, she was a sight to behold. Jack involved himself in every detail, cursing, cajoling, demanding. In the end, her cost exceeded the allotted investment by nearly a quarter, but when the owners remonstrated, Jack only laughed.

  “No half-assed job is going to have my name on it, gentlemen. If you can’t cough up the bloody money yourselves, consider me a part owner.”

  I had already booked passage on her maiden voyage, scheduled for July, when one day I received a brief note from Lady Arabella Worthington, whom I meant to see again before I left in any event. I had already had two very pleasant visits with her at the Hyde Park house, but Albert had never become mollified. There was a kind of strange, instinctive understanding between that lady and me, and though it might be years before I got back to England, I knew we would take up where we left off. The note said only that if I was still interested in my inquiry, I should attend her at her town house in London at my convenience.

  Having sent a message on ahead, I took the train down to London and presented myself at a great stone building with a forbidding exterior, a place as unfriendly as Edge-more Manor was inviting. Reluctant as ever, Albert showed me into the drawing room where the lady of the house awaited me.

  “I am so glad to see you again, my dear,” she said as if we were old and close friends. “An old lady like me all too seldom has the opportunity to enjoy the company of younger people.”

  “Surely your children —” I began, having noticed the last time I was there a painting of a boy and a girl of around twelve that hung in the sitting room.

  “I’m afraid not,” she broke in gently. “You see, they and my husband were killed in a carriage accident many years ago now, not long after that portrait was painted.”

  I stared at her, mortified. To look at that serene, all but unlined face, one would have thought that nothing bad had ever happened to her. Perhaps it was because she knew her own loss so well that she sympathized with mine.

  Recognizing my discomfiture, she went on, “You get used to it, believe me. You think you never will, but you do, and you continue to carry on with whatever grace you can muster. Remember that, Christian. You will know suffering, we all do one way or another, but don’t allow it to spoil you as a human being.”

  “Why did you ask me here?” I asked bluntly, seeing that she had probably let down her reserve enough to confide in me about her own tragedy in order to prepare me for what she was about to tell me.

  “I’ve found your Arabella. She calls herself Barringould, and she was clever enough to build up a story about having been raised in India instead of being sent home to England in really incredible detail, considering that she never laid eyes on the place.” She held up her hand when I would have spoken. “Let me finish, Christian. She is due to be married next week to Sir Geoffrey Fotheringay, a man highly placed in government. He is said to advise the Prime Minister himself and to be received frequently by the Queen.”

  In my ignorance, I was undaunted. “Then there is still time! Where is she? I must see her.”

  “It is against my better judgment, but I understand that you will have no rest until you talk to her. She is staying with some of Geoffrey’s relatives at 322 Hardwicke Place. As you must realize, a tête-a-tête with a single man would compromise her utterly, so I’ll have to leave it to you as to how to winkle her out alone.”

  We talked for quite a while then about America and other subjects. I was now in no hurry, because I knew that I would have to make some kind of ingenious plan, not only to gain admittance to the house, but to have an interview with her in private. Her face swam before my eyes and my heart was thumping fit to choke me.

  Two days later I presented myself at the tradesmen’s entrance of the Hardwicke Place house carrying a valise and holding various swatches of brightly colored material over my arm.

  “Mademoiselle Barringould asked madame to send around these samples, something to do with a last-minute change in the sashes of the bridesmaids’ frocks,” I told the maid who opened the door, and then repeated it to the butler.

  “Whatever is Bartraud’s doing with an American on the staff?” he asked almost suspiciously.

  “Oh, I’m only the errand boy,” I said cheerfully. “Madame tells me to fetch and carry, and that’s what I do. She’s a proper dragon, I’ll tell you. You can check with her if you’ve a mind to, but she’ll be breathing fire at the waste of time. The girls are going to have to work Sunday as it is to get everything ready.”

  He lost interest then and put me in what looked like a sewing room while he went to speak with Arabella. I could hear her remonstrating some time before she swept into the room.

  “They must have gotten an order mixed up,” she was saying in an annoyed tone of voice. “There hasn’t been a thing said about bridesmaids’ sashes. I do hope those wretches haven’t made a botch of it all. The entire wedding color scheme is keyed to those dusty-rose gowns —” She saw who waited for her then, and for a second I was afraid she would give me away. “Oh yes,” she said smoothly, “I remember now, but it was sashes for the flower girls that were to be changed, not the bridesmaids. Thank you, Joseph, that will be all. Now let’s see, what would go with light-blue
tulle?”

  When she was sure Joseph was gone, she hissed, “What are you doing here? You’ll spoil everything.”

  I grinned at her. “That’s exactly what I mean to do. Look at you, corkscrew curls and all, gotten up like one of those brainless gigglers I see around in the fancy carriages. Why in the hell did you run off like that?”

  “Dammit, Christian, why did you have to turn up now?” I noticed she had suddenly dropped her fancy British upper-class accent which in spite of Arabella Worthington’s convictions had apparently passed muster as appropriate for a well-bred English woman raised in India.

  I drew her away from the direct line of the open doorway. “How could you even think of marrying that old fart? Really, Arabella, your play-acting has addled your brains.”

  “That old fart, as you so gently put it, happens not only to have an enormous amount of money, but he practically is the British government.”

  “But my God, Arabella, he’s in his sixties. You can’t tie yourself to someone like that.”

  “Oh, can’t I? I’ve been preparing for this for four hard years, and I’ll thank you to keep your nose out of it. I’m very fond of you, Christian, but not fond enough to throw away this one big chance.”

  I took her in my arms then and kissed her thoroughly, never doubting for an instant that my suit would in the end prove irresistible. “Come away with me, Arabella,” I said insistently as I felt her respond to my embrace. “I’ll never run the British government, but I’m going to be rich —”

  She pushed me away, but I was pleased to see that she was breathing hard. “How can I convince you? I’ll never forget what you once meant to me, but those days are gone forever. I don’t want to be the wife of a shipyard man and spend the rest of my life playing bookkeeper the way your stepmother does. How many years is it since she went to the theater or to a musicale? I want to entertain and be known for the fascinating dinner guests I am able to command, I want to wear diamonds and emeralds at formal balls, I want to preside over a literary salon, I want to go to the races at Ascot behind the best-looking team of horses there. Don’t you see, I want to live, not molder away in a provincial town with all the gentry looking down their noses at me.”