The Rathbones

by Janice Clark

  “We were in the merchant trade a few generations ago.” Roderick stared up at the portrait. “My ancestors exported timber and fur to Europe and imported spices from the Indies. And before that we were shipbuilders. Perhaps you have heard of the famed Stark brigs?”

  The early Stark’s face didn’t resemble his descendants’ at all; its lines were clean and strong, its air purposeful where Roderick’s was vague. Flanking the large portrait were two smaller paintings, clearly by the same hand, surely the wife and children of the handsome merchant. The woman was fair-haired and pretty, with a quiet smile and clear gaze; the children, two little boys and a girl, were equally attractive, plump and fair. I stared at the portraits, trying to understand how a family’s looks could change so completely. And I wondered, watching Roderick as he gazed with a troubled look of longing at his ancestor’s portrait, how the family had so entirely sunken from active and enterprising to slothful and spiritless. I couldn’t help but consider the Starks’ unhappy progression against that of my own kin.

  I looked at the face of Roderick’s ancestor. His eyes were bright and clear, the same strong blue as Roderick’s. Behind his head the masts of many ships thrust into the sky.

  I smiled at Roderick. “Your ancestor looks happy. Maybe you could take up the old family trade.”

  Roderick stared at me, eyes wide. “Commerce? My parents would die of shame.”

  “It’s only that I noticed how interested you were in the Able. My people once sailed the seas, too,” I said. “The Rathbones were, I believe, renowned for—”

  A shriek cut through my words. “Rathbone! Did you say Rathbone?” I turned to see the elder Mr. Stark halfway across the hall, frozen in mid-descent above one of the new Egyptian chairs, glaring toward me. My voice must have echoed loudly in the lofty hall. He stood up straight, snatched a funerary jar from Miss Stark, and pitched it across the room at me. The jar smashed against a gilt armoire, inches from my head, closely followed by other missiles from other Starks.

  “Rathbone!” came the angry cry again. “Out! Get out!”

  I glanced at Roderick; he was staring at me with wide eyes and open mouth. A pair of candlesticks hurtled toward me—I felt them skim through my hair before they smashed into a mirror, shattering it. Crouching low, I started for the library, winding as best I could through the maze of furniture. I heard Crow’s cry and looked back to see him fly down among the Starks, screeching, lifting wigs, pulling pigtails, plucking the pipe from the elder Stark’s mouth and showering him with burning cinders. The Starks fell back, cringing before Crow’s flashing beak and tripping over their robes. They stumbled through their furnishings before swarming up the stairs and disappearing, a door slamming shut behind them. Meantime, I reached the library, ducked in, and closed the door behind me.

  I stood with my back against the door, waiting for my breath to slow, and listened. No one was approaching; maybe Roderick had not seen me enter the room. I breathed a little easier and looked around me.

  The Stark library was larger than the dining salon, though no brighter. Its walls were entirely filled with bookshelves, interrupted only by tall windows with drawn curtains of heavy velvet and an unlit fireplace. Each shelf was stuffed from end to end with books great and small in fine bindings. I couldn’t resist walking along the rows to admire the rich array: histories, philosophy, biography, the arts, the natural sciences. One shelf held a few dozen journals in bindings much like Mordecai’s treasured logbooks. I leafed through one and found renderings of ship hulls covered with notations. Old letters neatly grouped and tied in ribbon filled another shelf. I picked up one sheaf and blew the dust from it. The salutation, in faded blue ink, was too pale to read. Piled on the floor against the rows of shelves were stack after stack of unopened crates of still more books. Furniture cluttered this room, too, though less thickly than in the hall. The chairs and tables smelled of damp paper and mold.

  The library at Rathbone House held only a few clusters of books, their spines bleached to pale blues and grays in the sunlight that poured in through curtainless windows. It was furnished only with the crates Papa had shipped home, which stood here and there around the room. The contents of each crate had provided clues to its origin, but there was no word from Papa written anywhere within. I used to trace his path in the folio atlas, lying along its gilt-edged spine and spreading my arms to smooth down each huge page: bleeding madras from southern India; Araby bracelets, brass-belled and tinkling; the heart-shaped pods of the giant komo tree from Madagascar. The paper rippled beneath me, its edges stained as if once lapped by distant tides. There had been other creatures, too, though none fared any better than the little Peking dog: a linnet caged in silver; a hairless cat from Egypt; an ibis egg that neither warmth nor prayer would waken. The last crate came accompanied by my fledgling crows, still living. They flew above the sailor’s head as he neared our house, each clutching the end of a rope trailing from the crate, cawing.

  I would arrange these objects, those that survived, around the atlas’s borders, where they made a friendly ring around me, rising up from the edges of continents. When I lay with head on folded arms, I seemed to see my father’s voyage, my eye tracing the curve the gifts made on their way around the world back to me.

  I invented reasons for Papa’s long absence. I imagined that he and my brother had been waylaid by some South Seas race and made to serve them. They had been marooned on a coral reef, subsisting on algae and plankton. They had joined the emperor of France in his island exile.

  “What glories!”

  Mordecai’s voice startled me. I put away the little book of maps I found in my hand and hurried over to him.

  He sat cross-legged in a clearing in the middle of the floor, surrounded by stacks of books. He’d set candlesticks to form a ring of light around him. He paged through an enormous volume of engravings, a rapt expression on his face. I moved closer to see what had so absorbed him and saw a life-size stoat and her young gamboling among the reeds. He looked up at me, beaming.

  “A double elephant folio. I never dreamed of such a thing.”

  “Mordecai.” When he didn’t respond I put my hand on his shoulder and shook him. “Mordecai, we have to go. They know I’m a Rathbone.”

  Mordecai’s face slowly cleared. “Oh. Yes. Yes, we must certainly hurry.” He showed no sign of rising, instead looking longingly at the nearest stack of books and running a hand slowly along their spines.

  The handle of the door creaked. I turned to face it, waving behind my back to Mordecai, hoping he would hide behind a chair. Roderick stood there in the doorway, a troubled smile on his face, turning his pointed hat in his hands. The door remained open. I tried to peer around him but saw no one else in the hall; they must have all fled. The monkey still sat on Roderick’s shoulder, now engrossed in a sugared plum.

  “Miss … is it Palmer, or should I say Rathbone?”

  I thought quickly. “I’m not sure I understand. I only meant to say that my family knew the Rathbones many years ago.” I wished again that Mordecai had explained his plan more thoroughly to me. Why did the Starks hate the Rathbones, especially if we truly were related?

  Roderick seemed relieved, and so was I. I mastered the urge to turn around to see what had become of Mordecai, but Roderick gave no indication of having seen him. I adjusted my position, hoping to block his view of the circle of books, then remembered that he could easily see over my head; I had forgotten, for a moment, my size. I gestured behind my back, pointing vigorously toward the door, hoping Mordecai saw and understood, and began to move in small steps away from the door. I searched for words to hold Roderick.

  “Mr. Stark, you’ve been so kind. Meeting you has given me great pleasure.” I wasn’t lying; it was quite pleasant to be admired.

  Roderick leaned over, so that I couldn’t avoid looking directly into his eyes.

  The blood rushed to my cheeks. I dropped my chin to hide my face behind my braids.

  “Miss Palmer, I’m s
orry. I know we’ve only just met, but … may I at least call on you? With your parents’ permission, of course.”

  As Roderick seized my hand, something dropped to the floor—the bundle of letters from the shelf. I hadn’t realized I was still holding it. I picked up the letters and stuffed them in my pocket. Roderick, his lips to my hand, didn’t notice, but the monkey did. Shrieking, it dropped the plum, hopped off Roderick’s shoulder and landed on mine, its claws digging into me. It thrust a wiry arm into my pocket and began to pull the letters out.

  There was a sudden flurry of wings in the doorway and the monkey was upside down in the air, its tail clutched in Crow’s beak. Crow struggled to keep the monkey, far larger than him, airborne, while the monkey screamed and pulled at Crow’s tail. Roderick, trapped between them against the doorframe, threw up his arms to shield his face. I slipped out and zigzagged across the hall, making for the front door. Mordecai was there, just disappearing through the door, and in moments I, too, was outside, running around the corner and out of sight of the house.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  THE SPERM AND THE STILT

  {in which Mercy discovers Papa’s true path}

  AHEAD OF ME Mordecai’s pale head moved down the east slope of the lawn and disappeared past a border of beech trees. Though the twilight was deepening, it was easy enough to trace his path; a trail of books, which I gathered as I went, trickled behind him. I glanced back a few times, but no Stark was following us, and I breathed easier.

  Past the border of beeches the ground dipped and a new landscape appeared, a treeless terrain of broken rock, and past it the open sea. I bent to pick up another fallen book and found the ground damp, a wet circle around a few furlongs of dry sand and rocks. At high tide this must be an island of its own.

  Where before it seemed I had strayed into the Orient, I now wondered if I had been conveyed to the Cyclades. Against the pale and dusty tract, the sea seemed the burning blue of the Aegean, like the waters into which the Argonauts dipped their oars. From its rim the sun sent a spray of gold across the blue. At the center of the islet, surrounded by parched poplars, stood a small circular temple. I could see Mordecai’s shadowy form inside. An olive vine tangled among the columns that still stood; others lay broken among weeds. I climbed the temple’s shallow staircase and sat on the topmost step to rest for a moment by an intact column. I felt curiously comfortable. Looking around me, I realized that the temple was somewhat undersized, perhaps three-quarters scale. The altar, a raised dais on which Mordecai sat, appeared too small for sacrifices. A litter of bones lay scattered around Mordecai’s feet, the burned limbs of some small, forgotten offering.

  Mordecai’s portfolio stood propped against a column, bulging at its center, stuffed with stolen books. I handed him those I had recovered from his path, their authors unfamiliar to me: works of fiction by one Nathaniel Hawthorne and a Herman Melville; a volume of birds by a Mr. Audubon; a treatise by K. Marx.

  “Uncut. An entire library filled with uncut books.” Mordecai eagerly scanned the spines of the recovered volumes, flipping open a black-clad one. “Look at this one. About an Austrian monk of the name Mendel. He has studied pea plants for years and, based on his findings, claims to be able to predict the traits of offspring, whether plant or animal, from those of the parents.” He opened another. “And this Englishman claims we are descended from the trilobite by way of the ape. Can you imagine anything more captivating?”

  “Fascinating,” I said, arms crossed over my breast.

  Mordecai closed the book and brushed marble dust from its dark cover, glancing up at me.

  “I am sorry for having abandoned you to the Starks. I didn’t want the old ones to lay eyes on me. Had they seen me, there would have been no doubt that I was a Rathbone, and they would not have welcomed me.” He hesitated. “And the Starks have, I believe, good reason to hate us.” He looked up at me. “I promise, I will tell you more of them in a moment. But this …”

  He pushed all of the books aside and picked up a large linen-bound volume that lay next to him, Birds of Stream and Shore.

  “If I had gone with you I would never have found this.”

  A book of birds? I looked eagerly between the columns to the sea beyond. Wasn’t that where the open sea began, just beyond this island? Why was Mordecai not looking for the whales instead of into yet another dusty book?

  I sighed and sat down on a disk of fluted marble and waited. Mordecai knelt next to me and paged through the book, stopping at a large engraved map, spreading over two pages and bearing the legend “Oceanus Atlanticus.” I recognized the scattered masses of Europe and the great bulk of Africa, familiar from my lessons with all but the shores nearest me, which I’d always neglected in favor of those along which I might trace my father’s travels. The continents, pressed to the edges of the paper by the great Atlantic, were represented on the map only by their tips or slivers of their coasts. Anxious over the unbroken expanse of ocean, the mapmaker had here and there along coastal waters tried to divert the eye with fanciful sea creatures (which with their inadequate fins would instantly sink in any true sea). He had been afraid to venture his pen into the uncharted deeps toward the center, a blank span of blue that set off the winding red line to which Mordecai now pointed, a line whose shape looked vaguely familiar. Close to the line a white bird with black markings and a long narrow bill regarded me from a cartouche, its caption reading: “Migration Route of the Black-Necked Stilt.”

  I looked up. Mordecai stared at me expectantly. He drew a folded sheet of thin paper from his breast pocket, opened it, and held it up to the light. I recognized the drawing: It was the map of the sperm’s route that he had re-created on the Able. He slid the paper into position on the open book over the route of the black-necked stilt. Though there were a few variations in the curves, the shapes of the two maps essentially matched. Mordecai laid the book down and leapt to his feet, kicking out his legs in stiff jerking motions in a dance vaguely reminiscent of a sailor’s hornpipe. He tired quickly and sat down, panting, rubbing at his joints. He pointed at the map.

  “You see. The migratory routes. They are the same, the very same.”

  I looked at him, waiting.

  Mordecai peered down at the book, smoothing the paper with one hand. “I noticed that the old logbooks always made mention of any notable congregation of fish or fowl. Among sightings of sperm, frequent gatherings of the black-necked stilt captured my attention.” He looked up at me and tapped his forehead with a thin finger. “I have long suspected a sympathetic confluence in their routes. As I tracked the sperm, so this worthy naturalist followed the stilt!” He struck the page with his hand. “Such a gratifying corroboration!”

  Mordecai peered more closely at the paper. His smile faltered.

  “I see, however, that there are a few slight variances. Could I have neglected to adequately account for the equatorial currents? No, no, but certainly this declivity at forty-one degrees and thirty-three minutes north, seventy degrees and ninety-two minutes west may have …” He muttered over the route for a minute or two more, pulling a pencil from his pocket and jotting tiny notes on the edge of the map, then looked up, eyes shining. “We have only just missed them! According to my adjusted calculations, the whales are now some fifty-five leagues north of us, no more than sixty. We will catch them up! Surely Captain Avery will not object to carrying us a bit farther … ah!” Mordecai jumped up, squinting at the sky. “Could that be Himantopus now? I was sure I spied one earlier, this may be a straggler from the flock.”

  A bedraggled gull passed over us. I remembered Mordecai scanning the sky over the Able each time any seabird flew by.

  Beyond the island, the twilight sky was the color of lead, the sea flat and oily. Not a whitecap was to be seen, let alone a whale. My skin began to tingle and a heaviness settled into my limbs.

  Though Mordecai could name any fish or seabird’s rank in phylum or species in a flash, I was beginning to understand that he knew nothing of
what they swam in and flew over. He did not account for those things that could not be mapped: the vagaries of the wind or a sudden storm that might force a pod of whales deeper, slower; a freak of cold threading up from the deep to send a school of squid spiraling away from the whales, the whales hurrying after, away from Mordecai’s precious route. Having lived indoors his whole life, he was so untuned to the sea and its ways. Though I had only rowed my skiff along the shore, I had, I thought, more sense of the sea. I would never believe, as Mordecai seemed to, that a ship would stop and wait for us, would stand still in the sea; that the whales, too, might stop and tread water, waiting. There was one more thing for which Mordecai did not account, which trumped all the others: how a man could choose to leave his family alone for nearly ten long years. Who was to say he was on the sea at all? Or that any whales remained?

  It was easy now to wonder how I could have ever believed that Papa was on his way home. I had wanted to believe, allowed myself to believe.

  I reached over and picked up the book of birds and looked inside the cover; it had been published in 1836. Maybe whales had filled the sea twenty-three years ago; maybe stilts had flown over them in a shadowing host.

  Mordecai opened another book, smiling, marble dust drifting from the temple’s ceiling to powder his hair as he flipped the pages. He looked so happy. In his head was a misty picture of Papa sailing straight through gentle seas, a herd of sperm swimming ahead of him in a neat line within easy reach, eager for the lance and the harpoon.

  I thought of the last crates my father had sent, which had held only pieces of land-bound creatures: the tusk of a pachyderm born deep in Rhodesia; the wing of a condor that, when spread, covered me. No trace of the sea, no sand, no wisp of kelp. I looked into Mordecai’s earnest face.

  “Cousin, have you ever considered that Papa may have given up the sea? Think of the crates. The pachyderm’s tusk. The dik-dik.”