The Rathbones

by Janice Clark

  Lydia sat at her dressing table, holding a swag of pearls across her breast, regarding herself in the mirror. She frowned and dropped the pearls onto the table, into a tangle of other necklaces. She next drew a strand of amber to try against the bodice of her topaz silk gown. A dozen other gowns spilled from her closet in shades of lemon and daffodil, goldenrod, bright copper, and pale gold.

  Lydia glanced up at Bow-Oar.

  “Only a moment more.”

  She dropped the strand of amber and picked up a choker of filigreed gold.

  Bow-Oar sighed and walked to the window. The gardens behind the house were nearly complete. Fruit trees and shrubberies were laid out in stiff symmetries, copied from a design on a pamphlet from France. Espaliered pear trees spread their branches among box hedges trimmed into cones and spheres. Gravel walks progressed to marble benches where the wives would soon be able to stroll on long summer days.

  “Which do you think looks best?”

  Bow-Oar went to his wife, pulled the strand of amber from the snarl of necklaces, and fastened it around her throat. He leaned, hands on her shoulders, to look at her reflection, which glowed as brightly as when he had first seen her, the amber a deeper gold against Lydia’s honey skin. Her eyes met his in the mirror and she smiled.

  In the year after he brought Lydia and her sisters to Rathbone House, Bow-Oar’s attention had turned away from the sea. He had stayed ashore for a full year with his bride, a honeymoon on which he traveled only to her golden cove. He had urged Second-Oar and Third-Oar to return to sea in the Sassacus and the Paquatauoq; none of the other men were as capable of commanding. But they, too, preferred to continue to sleep beside their brides, and other brothers had captained the Sassacus and the Paquatauoq on their latest voyages.

  Bow-Oar had taken the Misistuck out on a training run a month ago with a crew of novice whalemen. As they passed other ships, he noticed that the captains’ spyglasses were always focused on the Misistuck’s fine rigging. He could see, too, what the captains wouldn’t have known he could discern at such distances: envy written clearly on their features, envy not only on whalemen’s faces but on those of captains of loftier vessels, of swift clippers and elegant barks. Bow-Oar longed to see such men’s faces when they beheld not flemished ropes but golden tresses. And tonight they would. He kissed his wife and went off to dress for the party.

  Miriam and Priscilla appeared in the doorway, arm in arm.

  “Aren’t you ready yet?” They pulled Lydia up from her chair, laughing.

  The wives stood together in the hall, chattering about the party. Miriam and Priscilla, in gowns of pale gold silk chiffon that floated around them as they moved, were as lovely as Lydia in her topaz.

  “I can’t wait to see! Let’s peek.” Priscilla giggled.

  “No, we promised. We don’t want to ruin the surprise,” said Lydia.

  Lydia had the invitation list in her hand. Miriam and Priscilla crowded close, eagerly scanning the names, as they had so often in the days leading up to the party. The invitations, ordered from Boston and engraved on heavy cream stock, had gone out three weeks ago:

  MR. AND MRS. B. O. RATHBONE

  request the honor of your presence at a soirée

  Rathbone House, Naiwayonk

  Saturday, September 26

  7 o’clock in the evening

  “Do you think the Packer boys will come?” said Miriam.

  “I’m sure of it! You don’t really think they could have fallen out of love with us so soon, do you?” said Priscilla. “They’ll be so jealous!”

  Lydia smiled at her sisters. She was excited to see who would be at the soirée, but she didn’t really care if any of her old suitors came. She hadn’t wearied of Bow-Oar’s embraces; she relished them more with each passing week. Priscilla and Miriam felt the same about their husbands. If only her mother were there to see how happy she was. She had written to her mother once a month since leaving home. Her mother never wrote back.

  Down the hall, groups of men were stomping up the stairs and into the parlors and dining hall. The wives heard grunting and heaving, the sounds of heavy furniture being moved. In the weeks before the party, the sounds of hammer and saw thrummed through the rafters, making the golden wives briefly wonder if the house was about to move again.

  “I can’t wait to see the new settees! Do you think they used the cream silk or the brocade?” said Miriam.

  “And the dining table, and the chairs. The mahogany will be even more beautiful than the table at home,” said Priscilla. She looked wistful for a moment but was so excited about the party that she quickly forgot. Always the most praised of the three sisters by their erstwhile drawing master, Priscilla had been encouraged by her sisters to make the careful drawings they gave to Bow-Oar, for the Rathbone shipwright to use as models for the new furniture. The table was similar in design to that in the Stark house but grander in scale. The chairs were modeled on an etching Priscilla had seen in a periodical from the Continent: dark and lustrous mahogany, lyre-backed, with graceful, tapering legs, even more fashionable than the fine walnut chairs in the Stark dining room.

  “Chestnut soup!” Lydia said, smiling.

  “And roast pheasant in port wine,” said Miriam.

  “And Bavarian cream!” said Priscilla.

  Lydia laughed and hugged her sisters. The wives had passed many a happy hour in the weeks before the party in planning the soirée. The harpist who had taught the Stark sisters was to be hired for the evening, to play her classical repertoire. There would be saddle of venison with puréed root vegetables, and citrus ices, and wines ordered from Boston. Lydia had given Bow-Oar a list of the ingredients necessary for cooking such a menu. She had worried about whether the old ship’s cook would be able to manage such elaborate dishes; he usually made only simple chowders or boiled fowl for the wives. Bow-Oar had smiled and told her not to worry.

  As the wives chattered about the menu, the bell at the top of the stairs suddenly clanged and they all jumped, startled. They laughed and hurried arm in arm down the hall.

  They entered the dining room and fell silent. The room was blindingly bright, lit by sconces set into the walls all around, candlelight doubled and trebled by the golden walls, glaring off the new furniture. The dining table and chairs were made not from the fine-grained mahogany or burled walnut of their models, but from the yellow pine and white birch at hand, in the woods behind the house—all finished in marine varnish rather than wax, so that the wood glared rather than glowed. When the wives moved closer they saw rough cross-hatched lines scribed on the wood’s surface, along the edges of the seat, and along one side of each leg. The shipwrights had mimicked the strokes of Priscilla’s pen, taking her pen’s suggestions of shadows for part of the design. The wives lowered themselves cautiously into the new chairs. When they stood again, the scribed lines caught at their gowns and loose threads floated, shimmering, around them.

  A score of whalemen stood at attention around the perimeter of the room, wearing not the white shirts and pale-gray waistcoats Lydia had ordered but starched watch coats of bright blue, with flaring lapels and large gold buttons. Near the dining table, rather than the harpist, a fiddler and a fifer tuned up and began to play. Lydia recognized the melody: a lively minuet by Bach. The notes stumbled, then faltered. The rhythm changed and the lively minuet became a brisk sailor’s jig. As the music shifted, a crow perched on the fifer’s shoulder scrawked loudly and started to shift from foot to foot. The sailors around the room began to smile and tap their feet, then remembered themselves and adopted again the stern expressions they wore on watch at sea.

  Lydia and her sisters walked all around the dining table, staring down at the steaming dishes that crowded the polished surface. A great basin of soup, green and pungent, stood at the center, served in an enormous turtle shell of mottled green and black. A bright red chain of boiled lobsters, linked claw to tail, encircled the turtle shell. Vast platters of salt pork and plum duff sat among bowls heape
d with glistening suet puddings. The table was set with a service of bright porcelain, edged in ultramarine with lavish swirls and swags of gold, and golden tableware. Crystal stemware banded in gold shone from each setting.

  Bow-Oar and his brothers entered, dressed not in the black serge jackets their wives had ordered but in thick gold brocade, fashioned into tight waistcoats and long swallow-tailed coats, with ruffled stocks of white silk at their necks. They smiled at their wives and, checking their pocket watches, began to pace the hall, taking slow, stiff steps in the tight brocade.

  Rathbone House glowed so brightly that passing ships that night mistook Naiwayonk for some larger coastal town. Mates quickly checked their charts to make sure they had not strayed off course. But no ship or skiff or sloop approached the Rathbone docks.

  The evening wore on. The fiddle and fife played to an empty hall. At two bells in the last watch, the men on duty around the perimeter were replaced by a fresh watch. At four bells, the candles in the sconces, twice replenished, guttered and burned out. Bow-Oar and his brothers continued to pace the hall; the wives dozed in their chairs. At six bells the wives retired. At eight bells, Bow-Oar and his brothers left the hall and, rather than joining their golden wives, descended to the barracks.

  During the night a group of young Rathbones climbed up from below, carried away the platters of salt pork and plum duff, and feasted below in the dark.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  LITTLE ABSALOM

  {in which Lydia fails to understand}

  1803

  ABSALOM, WHERE DID you get that? Bring it to Mother.”

  The little boy glanced up from the carpet on which he sat surrounded by toys: a tumble of building blocks, a wooden top, a hoop for rolling. Primers and picture books lay scattered on all sides. But the boy was ignoring his favorite toys and instead was bent, absorbed, over a toy Lydia had never seen. Absalom stood up, green eyes bright in a rosy face, and walked on chubby legs toward Lydia, the toy trailing behind him on a string, wheels squeaking. He dropped the string to hold his arms out to his mother, who hugged him close, then sat him next to her.

  Lydia picked up the toy and turned it in her hands. It was a little wooden boat, an ark made of birch, its rough white bark streaked with black. It was filled with carved animals: a crouching wolf; a bear rearing up on its hind legs; a deer with little antlers of horn, and its fawn; a pair of crows. Absalom squealed and stood up, grabbing the ark from Lydia’s hands. He clutched it tight and waddled to the window, thrusting the ark up onto the sill. He rocked it back and forth, a dark shape against the bright sky and water, as though it rode on the sea. His white-gold hair shone in the sun, springing in bright waves.

  Lydia sighed. When she had begun to swell with her first son, she was determined to keep him near her. She wanted Absalom to live upstairs, to play at his mother’s feet in the high bright rooms, to learn his letters, to study mathematics and Latin and rhetoric, as her brothers had. She had cajoled Bow-Oar until he agreed to allow Absalom to stay with his mother for five years. And his cousins, too: Priscilla and Miriam had borne golden babies of their own, little Jeroboam and Ezekiel. Lydia had thanked Bow-Oar and kissed him. She kept to herself her hope that, once little Absalom and his cousins had been five years upstairs, Bow-Oar would relent and let them stay.

  Before the golden wives came, the Rathbone boys had always spent little time with their mothers. On the day he began to crawl a Rathbone boy was plucked from his mother’s breast and set before a bowl of sailor’s burgoo. No sooner was he weaned than he began to pass the greater part of each day with the men. At first he only toddled along the chain of rooms, where the off-duty crew, having no task ashore but to restore their strength for the next voyage, slept or honed their weapons, or ate at the long tables that dropped down on pulleys from the ceiling beams every six bells, laden with spotted dog and toasted cheese, with salt beef and dried peas and figgy-dowdy. A cousin would lift the baby onto his knee to bounce and give him a piece of squid jerky to gum, while his tablemates sang a soft chantey. When a babe’s stance was sturdy and his walk sure, he spent part of each day on the sandy shingle with other small brothers, supervised by a retired seaman. At two, a harpoon was put into his hands, its shaft short, its blade small but keen-edged, fit to slay crabs and slow fish. On the tail of a dead mackerel he learned, at three, how to cut a neat hole, as he would later cut the whale’s tail to tow it. He and his young mates floated in a stove-in whaleboat that rested on the sandy bottom in the weak surf of low tide, bailing with small piggins, learning how to wet the harpoon line to stop it from smoking when the line ran fast and hot as the wounded whale tried to escape. At five, he hurled the log and counted off the knots. At six, he could reef and hand and steer. At seven, he was off to sea.

  Lydia wanted her son’s life to be different. She wanted to send him away to a boarding school, where he could meet sons from good families and make useful connections, where he could learn some cleaner, drier calling: barrister, or minister, or a merchant like her father and brothers, though if he chose to be a merchant she hoped her son would choose to conduct his business in a city, somewhere far from the shore.

  Bow-Oar had been whaling only once in the three years since the golden wives came to Naiwayonk. Lydia was relieved when he told her that he would soon set off on a long whaling voyage, that he would be gone for at least a year. She was pregnant again and looked forward to having her bed to herself in the coming months. Priscilla, too, was with child again.

  Lydia could no longer bear the smell of the ocean—not just the fetid odors of dead fish and rotting weed at low tide but the bracing freshness of salt air on a bright, windy day. She hated the sound of the surf on the rocks below the house, a sound that never stopped. She hated the sight of her husband when he came into the golden rooms during the day, his skin stinking of old burned oil, a smell that never left the men or their ships. She hated most that she could still not resist her husband when he came to her bed, which he continued to do every night. In his arms she still felt the same great waves of pleasure. She wondered if one night when he thrust into her she would burst open and drown.

  Little Absalom was born not in the dark below but in a high bright room, his first view not the rigging of a ship but the lovely face of his mother. Absalom was swaddled in white linen and laid not in a swinging hammock but in a pretty cradle. He was bathed and changed not by a worn wife in the dark nursery below but by Bemus, the old sailor who guarded the stairs at night. Absalom’s aunts sat at the spinet to play him lullabies. He lay in his cradle looking up at them with his father’s bright-green eyes, his arms and legs waving to the rhythm of the songs. When he was old enough to understand, his mother read aloud to him each night, tales of woodland princes and of kings who reigned in great cities far from the sea. Absalom had lived happily upstairs for nearly three years.

  But lately Absalom had been restless. There was still a worn wife in the nursery below, still fresh Rathbone sons in residence. Humility, the fifteenth wife, had succeeded Trial, who departed the year before, leaving three little boys behind. All told, a dozen whaler boys lived in the barracks below. When Absalom heard them shouting outside, he ran to the windows and craned out to see. Jeroboam and Ezekiel, a few months younger than him, were still content to spend their time playing with their mothers, but Absalom would stand at the window for hours at a time, watching the men busy at their duties when a ship was in port or gazing at the horizon when no ship was docked.

  In the past month the boys who lived below had climbed the stairs a few times and knocked, asking for Absalom to come out, until Lydia told Bemus to turn them away.

  The whaler boys began to come instead silently at night, leaving gifts for Absalom outside the door: slices of sea pie, bowls of spotted dick or lobscouse; a baleen whistle; a little cage of whalebone.

  Lydia watched Absalom playing at the window with his ark.

  “Come, darling, time for your breakfast.”

  Absalom turned ar
ound and smiled at his mother, then set the ark on the floor. He ran to the table for his porridge and milk, and spent the day making block castles with his cousins.

  The next morning Lydia woke to find the window open and Absalom gone. A grappling hook hung from the sill; a knotted rope swung in the breeze. When Bow-Oar came to her room that night, Lydia pleaded with him to bring Absalom up from below, to send him back up into the light, but Bow-Oar shook his head.

  “You have had your chance. Now he is ours.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE WEAKENED ONES

  {in which the Rathbones’ sea legs stiffen}

  1814

  THE THREE BOYS slowed down as they neared the last room. Though it wasn’t yet dawn, the hall of beds was empty; all of the men were already at the docks, readying the boats for the trials. The door to the little room at the end was always closed, and no one but Bemus ever went in there. Now he was behind them, herding the boys down the dark hall toward the room at the end, whispering in their ears.

  “He won’t see you, but he’ll know you’re there all the same. Just go in and wait for him to speak.”

  “But why do we have to go? No one else ever has to go,” whispered Ezekiel.

  “He’s never asked for anyone else,” said Bemus. “You should feel honored.”

  The boys stood in a bunch outside the door, shifting from foot to foot in the cold air, each clutching his harpoon. They had all heard the men tell stories of Moses, but the boys had never seen him. They’d only passed the little room on their way in and out.

  “He breathes through gills.” Absalom elbowed his cousins.

  “I heard he sleeps in a great big tub of water,” said Ezekiel.

  “No, he sleeps on the rocks with the seals,” said Jeroboam, stifling a laugh.