by Anya Seton
“It’s a funny thing—” said Amos suddenly. “I could swear these papers aren’t in the order I put them.” Following his own train of thought, he had unlocked the built-in strongbox drawer, in his desk. Here he kept all private papers, deeds, policies, mortgages, and now he placed with them the new contract.
“Well, ain’t you the only one has a key?” answered his foreman without much interest.
Amos nodded. “I’ve got the only key.” He glanced at it as it dangled from his heavy watch chain. Thank God, I won’t have to sell this watch chain now, he thought. Hes would have noticed that all right. “I wouldn’t want anybody to get a look at those papers—” he said with a spark of grim humor. “Between you and me, Sam, they might give the idea Porterman’s is a bit shaky.”
“Well, there ain’t nobody had a look at ’em—” said Johnson, “so quit frettin’, sir. You forgot how you placed ’em. Anybody’s apt to do that.”
“I guess so—” said Amos. He slammed and locked the drawer. “I suppose the night watchman’s all right?” He knew it to be foolish but he was still a trifle uneasy. Queer about those papers, queer that memory should be so mistaken.
The foreman frowned. “Oh, Dan’s honest as daylight, but he’s gettin’ on. Don’t hear so good no more.”
“Fire him,” returned Amos promptly. “Get a younger man.”
Johnson nodded. “I’ll look around next week.” Reckon he’d been lax in keeping Dan on, but the old man had a wife and a feeble-minded grandchild to support. Well, he could go on the town, like many another, only Dan was an old Marbleheader, and prouder than Lucifer, had been captain of his own fishing schooner once, donkey’s years ago. Still there was no use being soft.
“I’ll be off now, sir—if there’s nothing else. Got to get after them sole cutters.”
“I won’t be back here this afternoon—” said Amos rising and pulling down the roll top on his desk. “Doctor Flagg said Mrs. Porterman’d be able to risk an airing, now the weather’s turned so good. I’m going to take her down to see the Regatta.”
“Well, rather you than me, sir,” Johnson remarked, opening the door. “Can’t see no point to watchin’ a lot o’ boats chasin’ each other around rocks in the bay.”
Amos was inclined to agree with him. He had no interest in sailing or fondness for salt water, but this regatta interested him for other reasons. It was held by members of the Eastern Yacht Club which was composed of wealthy Bostonians, and Amos considered that it would be very good business for the town if the club decided to settle permanently in Marblehead. During the seven years since the club was founded it had shown a regrettable fickleness in its choice of waters for the annual regatta, and the last three years the race had been sailed from Swampscott. Now it was back in Marblehead again, and the town’s more progressive citizens earnestly hoped that the club would buy a site on the harbor side of the Neck, and settle down.
Amos mentioned this viewpoint to Hesper, as Tim drove them carefully down Pleasant Street toward the town. At first she had not at all wanted to go out on this expedition, but her health was better than it had been during the last months, and in the face of Doctor Flagg’s recommendation and Amos’s persuasion, she could find no excuse for refusing.
“So you think they’ll put a clubhouse on the Neck?” she answered Amos politely. “I guess there’s quite a few foreigners’ve bought over there, lately.”
“Foreigners!” repeated Amos. “Frenchies and Russians and Japs, I suppose!”
“I’m sorry, dear,” said Hesper, touching his gloved hand with her gloved one. The Marblehead term had slipped out, though she knew how Amos disliked it, and with reason. “It’s a beautiful day—” she added quickly. “I’m so glad I came.”
The matched bays walked slowly and evenly under Tim’s able driving, and Hesper found the motion of the open Victoria soothing. She was conscious of looking well in her best summer hat—a golden leghorn straw, adorned by two bronze bird’s wings and an edging of blond lace. It had been bought in Boston last year for the holiday in the White Mountains, and was becoming and fashionable enough. Under the blended golds and yellows, her hair repeated the bronze of the bird’s wings on a redder note, and beneath the lace-edged brim her skin lost its excessive pallor and glowed as it did in her girlhood. An embroidered taupe plush mantle covered her bust and shoulders, falling in long fringed points to her lap and concealing the distortion of pregnancy. Though, in truth, considering that the baby was due in five or six weeks, she had not gained excessively. That was the advantage of height, and a well proportioned, long-boned frame.
The carriage emerged from the shade of fresh-leafed elms and maples along the upper part of Pleasant Street, into the glare of hot sunlight in the business section, by the depot and shoe factories. Here between the newly erected monument to the Revolutionary hero Captain Mugford, and the flimsy old Marblehead Hotel, the Porterman carriage was impeded by a crush of Friday noon traffic—a procession of Payne’s Express wagons loaded with cases of shoes, and bound from the factories to the depot for shipping on the afternoon train.
“We’ll have to wait a bit, till they get by,” Amos said. “Better put up your parasol, Hes, you don’t want to get a headache in this sun.”
Hesper had been enjoying the sunlight, had been gazing around her with a freshness of interest long unknown to her, thinking that the Mugford shaft of granite was really imposing, that it was good to see people again, and that the loungers in front of the Marblehead Hotel and adjacent Glover firehouse looked contented and kindly as they basked in tipped-back chairs, some smoking, some chewing on wads of tobacco, some merely gazing up into the blue sky.
“You don’t want to take any chances—” continued Amos, surprised that she had not obeyed him. “Your first outing in so long. You feeling quite all right, Pussie?”
“Oh yes—” she said, but as she said it her head startled her with a dull throb, and she was conscious of a faint return of the giddiness which had afflicted her all winter. She put up the parasol.
The carriage began to move again, and both Amos and Hesper leaned forward to look at his factory around the corner on School Street. The four-story frame structure towered above the Rechabite building next to it and loomed impressively against the sky behind. Big, thought Hesper with satisfaction, biggest factory in Marblehead except the Harris’s. Through the open windows there came the whir and clatter of machinery, they could see figures passing and repassing inside.
“To think I ever worked there—” Hesper burst out involuntarily, moved by the extraordinary changes life could offer. “I hope you’ve a better forelady in the stitching room than Miss Simpkins was.”
Amos’s lips compressed; he turned his head from contemplation of the factory and stared stiffly between the near horse’s ears. “I don’t know of any objection to Miss Simpkins. As a matter of fact, I believe we’ve taken her back. She’s most able.” And cheap. Didn’t fuss if her pay check was overdue, like the last woman.
“But she wasn’t honest—” persisted Hesper, aware that she was annoying him, but unable to stop. “At least she used to extort fines from us for the stupidest things. I told you about it, and she—”
“Hesper—” cut in Amos, “I may be presumed to run my business as I think best?” Had he spoken in anger, her own temper might have flared, but she heard a genuine note of hurt. She understood that, from her he could bear no criticism. She was aware, too, that his antipathy to remembering that she had worked in the stitching room ran deeper than snobbery. Something to do with his picture of the ideal wife. Something to do with Lily Rose perhaps. And Hesper had never been jealous of Lily Rose. Justice had prevented that from the beginning. For had not she and Amos each come to the other scarred by an earlier marriage? And how much greater than hers his forbearance had been in cherishing a woman tarnished by divorce, as well as by an irrational and ill-omened passion.
For it was thus, in shame and revulsion, that she now thought of her marriage to
Evan.
“Why, of course, you know best, dear,” she said gently with a faint smile. “Oh, I thought we were going over to the Neck to watch the race from the Point!” she added, surprised, as the carriage turned down Washington Street.
“Thought we’d stop and ask your folks did they want to drive over with us,” answered Amos accepting her change of subject. “There’s plenty of time. Thing won’t start till two, it said in the paper.”
“Oh, of course,” she answered. “That was thoughtful of you.” Amos had always been a good son-in-law.
They drove down Washington Street over the hill of the old training field, crowned now by the huge, nearly completed red-brick Abbot Hall. Across the Square, Charity emerged from her house and waved to them before climbing into her little surrey, flicking the horse and driving herself briskly off to Lynn. Hesper waved back, feeling a sudden warmth for Charity who had called a few times throughout the winter, and though her complacent optimism was trying, her visits had been a distraction. And I have no other friend, thought Hesper; not that it matters, my family’s enough.
The horses slowed to a walk as they descended the hill past the sea captains’ Georgian houses, built a hundred years ago in the day of Marblehead’s greatest prosperity. Hesper, gazing up at them from beneath the flounced brim of her parasol, suddenly saw her town with new eyes. She did not see the architectural beauty which a later generation was to discover in these stately houses, with their characteristic corners quoined like checkerboards in panels of lighter wood, their delicate fanlights, their carved cornices and Ionic porticoes, but she did feel for the first time in her life a thrill of objective pride.
“The Town House—” she said musingly to Amos, as the carriage squeezed along the narrow street beside the little yellow wooden building which had been Marblehead’s Town Hall for a hundred and fifty years. “There’s been a lot of history made in there, it’s heard the declara tion of three wars, and Marbleheaders made their mark in all of them.”
Amos snorted. “You sound like your father, Hes. Darned old shack wants a coat of paint if you ask me. Be a good thing when Town Meeting moves to Abbot Hall.” Amos had no love for the Town House, scene of many a row in Town Meeting, in which he always seemed to be in the minority. And he’d long ago recognized how hopeless was his earlier ambition to be elected selectman.
“Turn down State Street, Tim—” he called out suddenly to the coachman—and to Hesper he explained, “I believe I’ll have a look at the sail loft, seeing as we’re so near.” This was the sail loft he had been buying eleven years ago, the night she crossed over from the Neck with Evan. Amos rented the business out to an old sailmaker, but there was mighty little call for a sail loft in Marblehead any more, and the sailmaker was behind with the rent. Amos intended to look the premises over again, with a view to selling—if I can find a buyer, he thought glumly.
They turned down State Street and Hesper felt a constriction around the heart. Leah’s house stood in the middle of the block. She saw from Amos’s preoccupied expression that he either had not thought of this, or considered it unimportant, and she was silent, shading her face from Amos with her parasol, and staring at the house with painful interest. It looked as it always had, four-square and porticoed, a smaller edition of the handsome houses on Washington Hill. Leah’s pink and red hollyhocks were beginning to bloom at each side of the steps. There were no shutters to close, but each of the seven front windows was masked by a black paper blind, as they had been left after the burial. It seemed to her that one of them on the corner of the second floor moved a little.
They passed the house, and Hesper turned her head still watching. The three windows on the harbor side of the house were shrouded too, but as she looked she saw movement again, then one of the blinds in the upper story fluttered, the lower corner was pulled aside, and though she could not see clearly she received the impression of a gaunt, brooding face. .
Amos turned at her smothered exclamation. “What’s the matter, Hessie?”
“Is Nat back in town?” she whispered, unwilling to have Tim hear. “I could have sworn I saw his face up there at the window.”
Amos craned around and looked back at the house. There was no one to be seen, and he shrugged his shoulders. “I doubt it, but what if you did? It’s his house. No reason why he shouldn’t live in it.”
Yes, of course, Amos was right, unimaginative, practical and right. Leah’s dreadful death had happened half a year ago. Nat might very well have recovered completely from the shock in that time. And, as Amos said, if he were back what difference did it make?
And yet while she thought this another voice spoke in her mind. It said, “Go in and find out! Nat’s a human being, no matter how twisted a one. He’s never hated you. Maybe you could help him—maybe you could fend off—”
“Draw up over there by the wharf,” said Amos to the coachman. He got out of the carriage, smiling at Hesper. “I’ll be right down again.”
She nodded and watched him ascend the stairs to the sail loft. The voice in her head became silent. Silly, she thought, “makin’ a whale out o’ a minnow.” She turned her back on State Street and looked out over the harbor. It glittered with white sails. She had not seen it so filled with boats—since—since I was sixteen, she realized with shock, and the bankers and riggers were setting out in the spring. Superficially there was resemblance to that other long-past gala day. Today as then, streamers of colored bunting fluttered from many harborside windows, small boys tooted on old fishhorns and penny whistles. The rocks and ledges of Skinner’s Head and Bartol’s Head, as far as Redstone Cove, were dotted with Marbleheaders, happily ensconced with bottles of beer and picnic lunches—waiting to see the schooners sail out. But the schooners themselves—ah, they were as different from the weathered old bankers as swans from ducks. No broad beams and bulging, gaudy striped hulls on these schooners, they were long and slender and white as birch trees, and above them the unfamiliar and complicated rig seemed to Hesper as flimsy as so many pocket handkerchiefs. These toylike alien ships had brought with them a galaxy of satellites; an excursion steamer from Boston bearing Eastern Yacht Club members and their ladies, steamers from Salem and Beverley, and a hundred small pleasure craft from scattered points along the North Shore.
As she watched, the band on board the Boston steamer broke into a raucous march tune, and all the steamers blew their whistles moving out toward the starting-point at Marblehead Rock in the wake of the ten contesting yachts.
“It’s a pretty sight—” she said quietly, as Amos reappeared. “No, it doesn’t matter if we don’t see them start. We’ll get out to the Point in time to see them come home.” She paused a moment and corrected herself. “I mean finish.”
Amos did not notice the correction, nor hear the faint quiver in her voice. He had no means of knowing that for an instant she had slipped back to her girlhood, and had been standing right here on this wharf watching Johnnie sail of! in the old Diana, amongst the rest of the fishing fleet. Her heart that day had been a shrunken ball of fear, and in the breasts of all the waving, cheering women there had been the same tight ball. The horns had tooted, the church bells had rung, and the bunting had fluttered from the windows even as now, but it had been a gaiety of gallantry and purpose, not a gaiety of sport.
They drove along Front Street toward the Hearth and Eagle, and Amos pulled a newspaper clipping from his pocket. “Here’s a list of the yachts that’re racing,” he said. He ran his eye down the names of the boats, Magic, Halcyon, Romance, Madcap. “Mighty influential Boston men own ’em,” he added, impressed. “Sure hope some of them decide to build homes on the Neck.”
They both looked across the harbor to the Neck. Its rounded slopes were still barren of much vegetation except scrub pine and beach grass, but above these twenty or so new summer cottages reared their peaked and fretworked roofs against the horizon. Along the harbor beach by the ferry landing, there were a few tents and log cabins, remnant of the Nashua and Lo
well Tent Colony, which had come and dispersed during the last ten years.
“Do you remember,” said Hesper thoughtfully, “how short a time ago there was nothing on the Neck but a couple of farms, and that beach there was covered with fish flakes?”
“Progress—” Amos assented with satisfaction, but there was cause for discontent too. Why hadn’t he had sense enough to buy up land on the Neck, or in any of the town’s waterfront outskirts, while it was yet cheap? But this new and growing passion for a sea view on the part of summer people had not occurred to him. As it had never occurred to him to build his own house anywhere but inland on the highway.
Still, he thought, there’s hope yet, soon as I get straightened out a bit and can lay my hands on some cash again, I’ll buy some land.
The carriage drew up with a flourish before the side entrance to the Hearth and Eagle, and Amos stared gloomily at his wife’s old home.
One sure thing, there’d never be any market for the crazy tumbledown houses like this in town. When the old folks go, he thought, Hes and I’ll tear it down, maybe sell the land, or put up a good modern hotel. He had long since given up his earlier ideas for improving the actual structure. Just putting illuminating gas in had proved that it was hopeless. The house resisted improvement, with a nearly human cunning. There was no room to lay pipes, except in the open, the heavy oak carrying beams rejected new nails as though they had been irongirders, there wasn’t a straight line in the house, not a door, not a floor, not a ceiling, and not one room plumb level with the next.
Hesper had long known and agreed with Amos’s views, and now that she again actually saw the long hump-backed silvery old house, the vague fears and mystical aversions and hostilities with which during the last months she had endowed it, all vanished.
She descended slowly from the carriage, leaning on Amos’s arm, and walked up the beaten dirt path toward the taproom door, noting with some amusement that Susan had planted sunflowers by the picket fence. There had never been sunflowers in Hesper’s girlhood, because they somehow produced old maids. “Where sunflowers grow, beaux never go.”
