Blackwell's Homecoming (Blackwell's Adventures Book 3)

by V. E. Ulett

  “Are not you rather hard on the little brute beast?”

  “Aloka never treated me so.”

  “But don’t he just now,” Edward muttered, turning his head aside.

  “What did you say?”

  Edward turned further away from her, hung his head, and said nothing.

  “McMurtry!” Emma called to a ten year old boy scuffling his feet in the yard. “Keep company with Tomi and Ana if you please.”

  Emma sighed and flopped back into her seat next to Edward. She sometimes felt like fetching her brother a swipe with her shoe, and might have done but for the thought Mercedes would not like it. Then too, poor Edward had come back just in time to watch their mother die. Mercedes had lived but two weeks after his and Francis, and Doctor Park’s arrival. She looked over at Edward, his hands clasped between his knees.

  “Dear Edward, I think of her all the time. Would she bring me up for topping it the brute with my children, do you suppose? With all of them.” Emma waved her hand around, meaning to encompass her house, her yard, her life, her husband.

  There were a number of children round about them, of various ages, nearly all half-castes. Children of Europeans and natives whom neither community wanted. Aloka and Emma had taken them in.

  Edward unbent himself and stared at her for a moment with his intense blue gaze. “No, Mama was never one for nonsense, she would be proud of you. You know she would be, your heart is in the right place Emma.”

  Tears came into her eyes, as they always would these days. You couldn’t be raised by a woman like Mercedes without you learned a thing or two about kindness. She took Edward’s hand and squeezed it, grateful to him.

  Some bitterness remained in her heart though, for the way their mother had died. A world where the best and dearest of women could meet such a cruel end; drugged and in pain, with no pleasures in life left to her, speaking to them in one word sentences; was one without sense or justice. When Mercedes asked her not to bring the children with her to visit, Emma had known her mother was near the end.

  Her grandmother had died of a similar malady, and Emma wondered if all the feelings she had now were what Mercedes was experiencing in that long ago time when she’d embarked on her own ocean voyaging. Unlike Edward, Emma didn’t know much about the universe and its workings. Yet now she thought when people spoke of someone dying peacefully in their sleep, that was just a fiction. Death was a struggle, even for a small, feeble, much loved woman lying in her own bed.

  Emma wiped her face and they watched Ka‘ahumanu pass by on Beretania, in a pony trap pulled by several of her kanakas. Ka‘ahumanu was dressed in an enormous tent-like peach colored silk dress trimmed in black lace, with a great leghorn hat sporting artificial flowers from Canton perched on her head. Emma and Edward inclined their heads to the queen, they were still Ka‘ahumanu ma, Ka‘ahumanu’s people, though somewhat in disfavor. After the great storm Ka‘ahumanu had embraced the Jesus book, and become Ka‘ahumanu the Pious. She found Aloka and Emma and all the Black Savages not quite the thing. She’d booted them from the cottage next to the Mission house and church, and it was just as well. They needed far more room—for their coconuts, as Emma privately thought of the mixed race children.

  She could have provided Ka‘ahumanu a pony to go with her trap. Kanakoa had been given four horses in trade, and not knowing how to value them and furthermore appalled at the way they ate their heads off, he’d given them to Emma upon her asking. She knew horse flesh, and she was keeping the fine creatures to herself for the now. Emma was training the horses to the harness, and she might have given one to Ka‘ahumanu had she esteemed her better. But she would not have dared involve herself and Aloka by such a gift in the unhappy rivalries developing between the ali‘i.

  It seemed to her the last time the community had been united was during the memorial for Mercedes outside Honolulu Bay. Her mother had decided that, much as she did not wish to deprive them of a grave to visit, she did not like the idea of moldering in the ground. She had asked Captain Blackwell to have her body prepared in the way of the Hawaiians and her ashes scattered on the sea, the natural element of her beloved. Albion had not sailed far that day, with a great procession of native canoes and float boards, and a royal sailing canoe in company, to send Mercedes’ spirit over the rainbow.

  Immediately after her ashes were committed to the deep, another sailing canoe was lowered over the side of Albion, and Captain Blackwell left them. He looked shattered, his face tear streaked. The last thing he said to Emma was, “I don’t know how I can be expected to go on without her.” He went over the side, and paddled away in the direction of Kauai.

  “How could you let him go?” she’d demanded of Aloka as soon as they were alone together. “He’s old. Do you want to lose them both?”

  “What would you have me do? He needs to be alone with his grief.”

  For Emma that was the start of the strife, though she was beginning to acknowledge it had been there all along. She had not heeded it while her mother was alive, and they’d all been consumed with making her suffering less. Aloka was unhappy.

  He did not care for being a “jobbing, merchant captain” as he called it, for Ka‘ahumanu and the other chiefs. Sailing shiploads of sandalwood to Canton, and returning with the hold crammed with luxe goods for the ali‘i, whose chosen form of warfare had become trying to outshine one another in the way of dress and accoutrement. It reminded Emma of the little she’d seen of the behavior of ‘coming out’ in London. Factions were developing and Aloka did not like to be in the middle. On the one side was their old shipmate, now Governor Boki and the merchant community, and on the other Ka‘ahumanu and her followers and the American missionaries. Emma could not blame Aloka for his discontent.

  Yet she’d been unprepared for him to say, on the very evening of her mother’s memorial, that he thought of going to Brazil, joining Lord Cochrane’s fleet in the fight for that country’s independence. After she’d blown him up Aloka had apologized, for burdening her on that day of all days. But there it was. He missed the Royal Navy, he wanted his profession and to be a frigate commander. Aloka wasn’t as happy as she was in the islands. It was powerfully hard to face, another separation, but Mercedes had warned her. Women were the ones that held families together.

  “I’m trying,” she said out loud to Edward.

  Edward merely nodded. She shared the kind of intimacy with him that allowed them to be silent for long spaces, and then pick up a conversation at random. Tomi came charging round the corner of the house, jumped on to the porch, and leaned, panting, into Edward’s lap.

  Edward eyed him askance.

  “I know something you don’t,” the boy said.

  “My man, I make no doubt of it.”

  Ana and McMurtry arrived and joined them on the porch. Emma didn’t know how anyone could look on the poor little sod’s face, McMurtry’s that was, and not feel for the boy who looked so like Captain Blackwell’s old steward, buried now these several years. Tomi was put out by Edward’s disinterest in his news, and was scowling mightily.

  “I want to know what it is, my love,” Emma said, drawing the boy to her side.

  Tomi shook her off for the sake of his dignity before the other children, and stood up straight and important.

  “Which it’s Grandpa has come home!”

  Emma stared at him, and then she was up and flying toward shore. Thank god, thank all the gods! she thought. She ran to meet the man she’d once thought, and openly avowed to her shame, not good enough for her mother. How that had changed in the last years, in those last terrible days when he’d held Mercedes’ hand and been unerringly kind, helping to care for her. He’d done everything for her the women had. Emma heard a great whoop in a voice she knew well, and then there in the surf bringing the canoe ashore with the kanakas was her father. James Blackwell wore a long sleeved linen shirt to cover his burned scarred skin and a malo. Aloka was clapping him upon his good shoulder.

  “There now,
don’t take on so. Did you think I wasn’t coming back?” Blackwell said. He’d never expected a reception like this from Emma, tears and falling upon his breast. Her half resentful glance told Blackwell he’d said the wrong thing, that she might have thought she’d lost both parents. He hugged her close and whispered, “Forgive me. I love you, I would not hurt you for the world.”

  Emma kissed him, and stepped aside so others could welcome him ashore.

  “How do you do, son?”

  Edward was standing just out of reach of the waves. Blackwell walked up to shake hands with his grandchildren either side of him, bounding about like young hounds.

  “Better, Father, now you are here.”

  They shook in the European way and then Blackwell pulled Edward into a close embrace, and gave him the hongi salute, smiling into his face. “You’re fine the way you are, son, and I love you.”

  Blackwell stayed with Emma and Aloka and their ménage that night, not wanting to return to the house he shared with Mercedes just yet. In any case they were rearranging themselves over there, to give him back his old bedchamber on his return. There’d been one rough spot, he’d nearly broken down again, when Tomi and Ana were saying good night to him.

  “Is Grandma coming back soon too?” Ana asked in a shrill and hopeful voice.

  A great lump of emotion had leapt into his throat and he looked, dismayed, at the two expectant young faces.

  “Remember Grandma died, and when you are dead, you do not come back.” Through her tears Emma went on, gently, “We’re sad because we don’t get to see her anymore, but we could not have wished her to live longer and suffer. She stayed as long as she could, and now Mercedes will live forever in our hearts.”

  “Bless you, sweetheart,” he murmured.

  “Kiss your Grandpa now. Aloha ahiahi, Kupuna kāne.”

  Aloka swept the twins up in his arms.

  Alone with his children later that evening, Blackwell said, “I saw her in a dream.” He nodded round at them, by way of explaining his return, looking at Edward, Aloka, and Emma in turn. “I was going in by the wicket to the cemetery at Deane, when there she was just up the road. I went to her at once, in course. Mercedes put her dear little hand on my arm—I can still feel it—and she said ‘take me home, Jim.’”

  About the Author —

  V.E.Ulett

  A long time resident of California, V.E. Ulett is an avid reader as well as a writer of historical fiction.

  V.E is a member of the National Books Critics Circle and an active member and reviewer for the Historical Novel Society.

  Coming soon from V.E. Ulett, a new historical adventure series with a fantastic edge.

  About Old Salt Press

  Old Salt Press is an independent press catering to those who love books about ships and the sea. We are an association of writers working together to produce the very best of nautical and maritime fiction and non-fiction. We invite you to join us as we go down to the sea in books.

  www.oldsaltpress.com

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