by Janice Clark
The three sisters stood long and golden in the warm light slanting across the water. The skirts of their gowns rustled and crackled in the still air, silk gowns the same hue of gold as their hair. A gift from their brothers, from their last voyage to the Indies, the silk had been sent to tailors on the mainland some weeks before, and the finished gowns had arrived only yesterday. Each time the sisters moved, the silk sent out whiffs of the spices near which it had been stored on the ship: nutmeg and cardamom, bitter mace and vanilla, wafting through the clean air of the rising tide.
The strange boat floated in the little cove below the lawn, under the willows along the shore that stretched their limbs out over the water. Lydia shaded her eyes with one arm against the low sun, but in the shadows of branches could see only dark forms in the boat, hear only the creak of wet wood. She wondered vaguely why it lingered there. The harbor was filled with vessels, all coming or going but for this one. She turned away, back toward the Venture.
Stevedores hurried back and forth on the dock, loading the last provisions for the voyage. Sailors swarmed over the rigging against a slate sky. The deep-laden brig, a sturdy and well-founded two-master, rode low in the water, heavy with pine milled from local woodlands. On its next crossing to the Indies the ship would also carry oak and maple from the great forests to the north. Lemuel Stark, Lydia’s father, had in recent years made a name for fair dealing and swift passages, and word had spread; traders in timber and fur had begun to bypass larger ports to stop instead in the Stark Archipelago.
Lydia watched her brothers cut across the crowded dock, each with a crate on his shoulder. It was easy to find them; their fair heads rode high above those of other men. All the Starks shared the same long bones and sunlit beauty. Silas and Caleb had been more at sea than at home since their voices had broken and had taken readily not only to living afloat but to trading. Lydia read in their quick movements and ready bearing their excitement about departing. They would leave not a few girls sighing for them when they sailed. The brothers, crossing the gangway to get another load from the dock, caught sight of Lydia and waved.
Grandfather Stark, too, was there among the hurrying men, his own golden head gone white but still held as high as those of his grandsons. Solomon Stark, tall and straight, walked slowly around the perimeter of the ship, running his hand along the railing, checking seams, gazing up with a critical eye at the masts. He had built the brig himself a dozen years ago, much of it with his own hands, when the harbor was a boatyard and the tight, swift ships were built by the Starks for other men. He leaned over the port railing and gazed at the long sheds that lined the dock. Stacked earlier that morning with corded timber, the sheds were now empty but for the sharp lingering smell of the pine planks, all of which had been loaded on the Venture. Solomon Stark remembered when he and his sons and crew had worked the wood in those sheds, had built the great ribs and spars, not passed the wood on to other men. Now ships and harbor alike belonged to the family, but the ships were made in distant boatyards by other men’s hands.
Lydia forgot the strange boat for a time, talking with her sisters, comparing their latest beaux—for the Stark daughters were much sought after—and wondering what gift her brothers would bring from the islands this time. Though she already owned a crested cockatoo, Lydia longed for one of the bright-plumed birds that lived higher among the palms: a bird of paradise or a blue macaw. The creak of an oarlock brought her eyes back to the boat. A breeze stirred the branches of the willow and between the leaves she saw green eyes staring at her. Along the side of the hull six oars hung dripping above the water.
Lydia frowned and glared at the boat. It was of a type she had never seen before: small but broad, single-masted, and pointed at both ends. She wouldn’t have recognized it as a whaleboat. Her parents had distanced their daughters from the mercenary taint of the sea and, though she had viewed many other types of craft docked below the house or passing through the bay, no whaling ship had ever docked in the Stark Archipelago before.
She leaned and whispered in her sisters’ ears; both covered their mouths with their hands, giggling. She pulled a little notebook and a pencil from her purse, scribbled on the paper, tore it off, and folded it.
“Boy,” Lydia called out.
She leaned far over the railing, looking down toward the boat, smiling. The light on the water reflected up onto the gold silk, rippled over her face, and lit her hair. She stretched out her arm and held the folded slip of paper over the water, waving it from side to side. In the shadows under the willow the oars all dipped together in one motion and the boat slid noiselessly toward her. The backs of six youths emerged one by one into the sunlight. As they rowed closer she saw that all were small in stature, and soundly made. She wondered if they might be islanders from the South Seas, about whom her brothers had spoken. All wore formal suits of black stuff that were too tight for them. The fabric strained across their shoulders. On some jackets the seams opened as the rowers stroked back and forth. Long dark hair sprang out from their heads, streaked with sun-white that glinted each time their heads dipped to pull.
As they glided closer the boy on the seat in the bow shipped his oars, stood smoothly, and turned toward Lydia. His skin, browned by sun and salt, had a coppery sheen. His eyes did not meet hers. He bowed slightly, knuckled his brow, and reached up for the slip of paper in Lydia’s hand, but before he touched it she let it fall, spinning, toward the water. The boy reached and plucked it from the air. The rowers lifted their oars for a moment and the boat glided slowly past, below the parapet where the sisters stood. The boy unfolded the paper. He looked down at the words and then turned his face up to Lydia. Her heart jumped. His eyes were of a startling green, unblinking, with no whites showing around the irises, as though the sea had filled the sockets. She wondered if he was not able to read. He folded the paper and slid it into his breast pocket, his eyes still on Lydia as the oars dipped again and the boat gathered speed, heading for the docks.
Lydia leaned over the balustrade, holding the little notebook against her heart. “Will you be mine?” she called out after the boat, laughing. “Will you be mine?” The sisters leaned their heads together, laughing, their hair spilling down, the gold of their gowns pouring out across the water.
The boy holding the note still stood in the bow, looking steadily back at Lydia. His head turned sharply toward the water. He leaned over the side and his arm darted out, in a bright arc of spray, pulling a fat gleaming fish from the water, one finger hooked into its mouth. He grasped it by the tail, beat its head against the side of the boat, and tossed it into the stern.
• •
Lemuel Stark, too, was watching the ship make ready, glancing out the window between bouts of signing bills of lading and relaying last instructions to his sons as they came and went from the house. The door of his office stood open to the great hall at the front of the house. The high-ceilinged space was awash in light from tall windows all around. Sea air gusted through doors and windows, billowing the long white curtains, wafting across fresh-scrubbed floors and over the few simple, solid pieces of furniture that smelled of beeswax and shone in the fresh light. Servants and seamen crossed back and forth, their footsteps ringing, voices carrying clear. Lemuel’s wife ran down the stairs clutching her skirts, trailed by a maid carrying stacks of linens for her sons that had yet to be packed in the trunks that stood open by the front door. Lemuel looked up at the sound of his daughters’ laughter; three streaks of gold flashed past his office, then the east parlor door slammed. Sighing, he turned back to his ledger and scanned a column of figures.
Lemuel had been proud to provide for his daughters a future free of the hard labor of his own mother’s and sisters’ lives, lives passed cooking and cleaning for a family of shipwrights and busy from dawn until long after dark. Earlier generations of Stark women had spent their days standing over tubs of boiling potatoes or steaming clothes, patching up gouges from mallets and chisels on their men’s hands, their fair fac
es (the Starks had always possessed great beauty) roughened and red, old too soon. Lemuel’s daughters knew no toil but scales on the clavichord or sketching under the eye of a drawing master. Lemuel missed the days when his daughters would not have run past his office but instead run to him, to be hugged and praised. Perhaps it was only that they were older. It was natural that they would be less attached to him, seeing him so seldom in recent years, what with his busy days. But when he was with his daughters, at dinner or in the parlor, he sometimes felt a cool, disapproving eye on the way he held his knife or how loudly he laughed. His daughters had grown from sweet, biddable children to haughty young women. These days he was more relieved than disappointed when they ran past his door without stopping.
Putting aside his papers and rubbing his eyes, Lemuel stood from his desk and looked out at the Venture. The crew had completed watering and ballast, and the decks were cleared. His sons stood by the wheel, leaning over the binnacle, studying their charts. He was proud of Silas and Caleb, pleased with the profits that had been growing modestly but steadily for the past five years.
Lemuel had shifted the livelihood of the Starks from shipbuilding to trade five years ago. He had made the decision after a visit to Boston, to deliver the ship that he and his crew of shipwrights had spent the previous year constructing. He had been well satisfied with the new design: three-masted, square-rigged, carrying more canvas than any he had built before, trim and fast. He was eager to log its sailing time to Boston. The voyage that usually took a full day and night in fine weather, with the cutter’s prow driving the sea high and white along its flanks throughout the passage, had this time required, in equally fine weather and similar winds, only seventeen hours. He had proudly reported the time to the cutter’s buyer as he signed over its papers, and the man had been most pleased to hear it. As Lemuel strolled the Boston docks all that afternoon, waiting for the far slower sloop that had followed the cutter to take him home, he watched the loading and unloading of great shipments of goods: crates of cocoa, sugar, tobacco, barrels of molasses arriving from the Indies; salted cod, baled lumber, and textiles on their way abroad. On one dock vast blocks of ice breathed out a cloud of cold, waiting to ship to the West Indies—to cool pretty girls under swaying palm trees, the man who loaded it said with a laugh. When Lemuel heard the prices such goods were fetching in distant ports, he began to grasp the true value of fast ships such as the one he had just built. But it was not in the ships themselves that Lemuel saw his future; it was in the swift passages they enabled, the quick wits with which fortunes were being made in months, rather than the long years his trade required. He had never been wholly at ease as a shipwright, had always felt an urging toward bolder, brighter endeavors, and on the Boston dock that day he saw his chance. He determined to lay down his mallets and planes and take up bargaining and bills of lading. Now, sitting at his desk, he scanned the bill he held in his hand, well pleased with the list of figures he saw.
His mind touched on the Challenge, captained by Ephraim, his eldest son, due in from northern waters with a cargo of seal skins. The furs, in high demand for capes and chapeaux among the ladies of Europe, might prove his most lucrative shipment yet. Soon he would be able to complete the landscaping around the new house, plant box hedges and a fine allée of sapling oaks. With the proceeds from the Venture’s next voyage he might even be able to purchase a third brig, and tear down the last of the old boatbuilding sheds to build a new warehouse.
Deep in consideration of a fruit-tree orchard, he failed to hear a knock at the door, and when he looked up a young man was standing in front of his desk.
Lemuel assumed the lad was looking for a position on the crew; many such had been turned away in recent weeks, from fishing villages farther up the coast, though none had been as likely-looking as this youth. Lemuel noted with mild regret the boy’s compact body and sure stance; he looked to have the makings of a capital bosun or master’s mate. He looked, in fact, like Lemuel himself at that age, sun- and salt-toughened. It was a pity he hadn’t arrived in time to be hired on. The boy’s arms and hands were scarred from harpoon line and blade; Lemuel looked at his own hands, well groomed but still bearing the marks of chisel and mallet. The young man stood politely, eyes down, hands behind his back, shoulders and legs straining the seams of the suit he wore, sewn for some more slender boy.
Lemuel leaned back in his chair.
“Son, I’m afraid you’re too late for this voyage. Come and see me in a month or two. I’ll have something for you then, when the Challenge is back.”
The boy made no reply. He leaned and hoisted up three fat sacks of soft sharkskin, and from the first poured out a stream of gold coins that covered the desk, spilling onto the floor.
• •
The Stark sisters always spent their mornings in the east parlor. Since finally moving into the big new house, after having lived with an aunt on the mainland for months while it was being built, they had quickly chosen their favorite haunt. The room was full of fresh light and faced the new green lawn that rolled away to vistas of the scattered islands of the archipelago, away from the harbor that stank of fish at low tide. After months in their aunt’s small, smoke-darkened house and, earlier, years in the cramped saltbox their grandfather had built, they loved running through the bright and airy rooms. Most of the house was as yet only sparsely furnished with the fine old spindle chairs and benches of hickory and oak that early Starks had hewn from trees on the property, when the bitter winter cold kept them out of the boat sheds, furnishings that had been more than adequate in the far smaller saltbox. The east parlor boasted a new spinet and window hangings of heavy linen. Delicate slipper chairs of carved and painted wood with petit-point seats stood on a thick carpet around the fireplace. Here the sisters had their music lessons, played piquet, and gossiped over their embroidery frames. They hurried in that morning to practice their lessons at the spinet; their tutor was due to arrive and none of the three had practiced enough, having given over the early hours to their brothers’ departure. They ran into the parlor, arms linked, laughing and arguing about who would be first at the keys. It took a few moments for them to notice that they were not alone in the room. The girls stopped short and stared.
Two of the boys from the strange boat sat on the sisters’ slipper chairs by the fire. Their tight black jackets, each held closed by one strained button, were worn over striped seaman’s jerseys. Sturdy bare ankles showed between stretched breeches and stiff new boots polished to a high shine, gaping wide at the tongues, too narrow for the boys’ broad feet. One boy didn’t look up, intent on a small block of wood he was whittling. Pale curls of wood flew; something round was shaping from his blade. The other sat erect and motionless, staring directly at Priscilla. He clutched a small white box between his hands. The whittling boy’s legs swung back and forth; neither boy’s boots reached the floor. Their thick dark hair, though freshly oiled and combed, leapt in waves from their heads.
Lydia strode to the hearth and stood before the boys, glaring at them.
“Who let you in here?”
The whittling boy didn’t look up; curls of wood continued to fly. The boy with the box glanced at Lydia, then returned his gaze to Priscilla, who colored and hid her face against Miriam, giggling.
“If you have some business with our father, you may wait in the yard until he is free.” One hand on her hip, Lydia pointed with the other to the door. The boys didn’t move.
Lydia turned away, smoothing down the skirt of her gown and breathing deep. She strode back and forth in front of the boys, eyeing them up and down. She stopped and turned to her sisters, a smile now lighting her face.
“Sisters, clearly these gentlemen are envoys from some foreign state. Those must be the newest fashions that they wear. I had heard that a closer-fitting silhouette was all the rage on the Continent this season but never dreamed to see it so soon!”
Priscilla and Miriam stood turned away from the boys, laughing gaily behind their hands
, glancing back to see the boys’ reactions. The whittling boy held up his wood to the light from the window and turned it back and forth, one eye squeezed shut, the other appraising, then returned to his work. The boy with the box continued to stare at Priscilla.
“Prissy, does he not remind you of your Phineas? Though Phineas hasn’t this person’s knack with pomade.” She gestured at the whittler’s gleaming head. “Nor his aroma.” Her sisters burst into open laughter.
A screech came from the corner behind the settee. Lydia’s cockatoo normally presided there on its tall gilded perch while the girls were in the room. The bird was there now but a large crow was muscling it along the rod, shouldering it sideways until the rod ran out and the cockatoo fell off the end with a screech. It flapped to a distant curtain rod and hunched there, shivering. The crow lumbered back to the center of the perch, settled its wings, and regarded Lydia.
The boy with the box rose and walked to Priscilla with a rolling gait. His head, when he arrived, reached only to the bottom of her chin, which she now lifted higher. Seen so close, he was clearly older than his size implied. Though his cheeks showed no stubble, his hands were broad and sun-dark and scarred with white. He held out the little box to Priscilla. She covered her mouth with a hand, giggling, then glanced at Lydia, who looked at her sternly and motioned no with her head. Priscilla hesitated, then snatched the box. It looked to be carved out of ivory; the flukes of a sperm whale were scribed on its lid. She opened the box. Inside was a lump of waxy gray matter the size of a fist. She poked it with one finger. Its surface sprang back like flesh.
The whittling boy, without getting up, put down his block of wood and knife on the floor, reached into the breast of his jacket, and pulled out a bouquet of beach roses, crushed and sodden, smelling of wet wool and low tide. He held them out to Miriam.
