The After House
Page 15
“I will always be with you,” she heard him say as he vanished upward. “Go, Marum. Georgia is waiting to hear from you.”
Marum looked at the endless horizon, the sun on one side of the lapis-colored sea, the moon on the other. Boundless stars covered the heavens, and Marum smiled with happiness. Life was good.
The End
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I hope you enjoyed reading The After House as much as I enjoyed writing it. The town of Cold Spring Harbor was indeed an important whaling town, where the Jones brothers did run a successful fleet of ships. It became a sort of boomtown as the whaling trade took off. There is no record of a cholera outbreak on Long Island, but Manhattan suffered a major epidemic due to the incoming immigrants and the cities’ inability to keep up with rapid urban growth.
Hugh, Remy, Captain Eli, and, of course, Georgia and the rest of my characters are all figments of my imagination. While there is a Spring Street in Cold Spring Harbor, the house described in the book does not exist. The church described is loosely based on the church right in town, and it is now a museum. The whaling museum provided not only a wealth of information but also a charming afternoon for my family.
According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the term afterhouse is used as one word to describe a haven on the stern of the ship for sailors to escape the elements. The After House became two words as their story continued on land.
There is a legend of a sperm whale that attacked a whaler, taking all hands down, sometime in the nineteenth century. They say Herman Melville used it as the inspiration for Moby Dick.