“Please, Rye?” With his eyes riveted on her mouth, he reached slowly for her elbow. “Please what?”
“We ... we could be seen here.” But her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright. Her breath came fast between open lips.
“So what? You’re my wife.”
“I didn’t walk down here with you for this.”
“I did.” His voice was throaty, and he tugged inexorably at her elbow, his gaze shifting to the top of the hill to make sure they could not be seen from the house. “It’s been five years, Laura. My God, do y’ know how I’ve thought of y’? How I’ve missed y’? And all I’ve had is a single kiss when I want so much more.” His eyes were an azure caress, his voice a husky temptation. “I want to take y’ right here under these apple trees, and the world be damned, and Dan Morgan be damned along with it. Come here.”
His fingers tightened. Her heart leaped crazily as he pulled her closer, closer, erasing the space between them while his blue eyes roved the features of her face and his broad hand found the curve of her waist. He pulled her flush against him, and though her elbows folded between them, she knew the instant their hips met, that Rye had blossomed as fully as the apple trees. His kiss was wide, wet, and demanding, a thorough invasion of her mouth, telling her without doubt that it would take only her acquiescence for him to invade the rest of her as well.
He groaned into her open mouth, his tongue dancing lustily over hers, his fingers feeling the sun’s heat captured in her bountiful, spice-brown hair, careful not to mess it, though he wanted nothing so much as to untether it and send it flying free in a circlet upon the grass as he possessed her the way he’d dreamed of doing for so long.
His hand drifted down her neck, found her shoulder blades, her back, her ribs—but there it encountered the firm lashing made of the very substance that had sent him onto the high seas to lose her: whalebone!
“Damn all whalers!” he cursed thickly, tearing his mouth away from hers, examining the stays of her corset with his fingertips. They started just below her shoulder blades and extended to the lumbar regions of her spine, and he traced them through the blue cotton of her dress while his breath beat heavily against her ear.
She couldn’t help smiling. “Thank God for whalers right this minute,” she declared shakily, backing away.
“Laura?”
It was the first she had admitted to wanting him. But when he would have tipped her chin up for another kiss, she would not allow it. “Stop it, Rye! Anyone on the island could happen along here.”
“And see a man kissin’ his wife. Come back here, I’m not through with y’ yet.” But again she eluded him.
“Rye, no. You must understand, this has got to stop until we can get this awful situation untangled.”
“The situation is clear. You were married t’ me first.”
“But not longest.” Difficult as it was to say, she had to make it clear she would not willfully hurt Dan.
The tumescence wilted from Rye’s body with a suddenness that surprised him. “Does that mean y’ intend t’ stay with him?”
“For the time being. Until we get a chance to talk, to—” “Y’re my wife!” His fists bunched. “I will not have y’ living with another man!”
“I have as much to say about it as you do, Rye, and I’m not ... not walking out on Dan in an emotional fit. There’s Josh to consider, and ... and ...” Frustrated, she clenched her hands together and began pacing in agitation, finally whirling on him and facing him head on. “We’ve believed for more than four years that you were dead. You can’t expect either of us to adjust to the fact that you’re not, in one hour.”
Rye’s jaw looked as hard as teak as he scowled out across Nantucket Bay. “If y’re goin’t’ stay with him,” he said icily, “just give me the word, because—by God!—I won’t stay around t’ watch it. I’ll be gone on the next whaleship that leaves port.”
“I didn’t say that. I’ve asked you to give me some time. Will you do that?”
He turned his eyes to her once again, but it took extreme effort to be so close to Laura and not embrace her ... kiss her... more. He gave a brusque New England nod, then gazed out at the bay again.
The lonely ringing of a bell buoy drifted up to them from the hidden sandbars of the shoals. The ever-present rush of the ocean to shore created a background music neither of them heard, after living their entire lives to its beat. The cry of gulls and the sound of hammers from the shipyards below became part of the orchestration of the island, taken in unconsciously, as was the scent of its heaths and marshes, the damp salt air.
“Rye?”
Belligerently, he refused to face her.
She lay a hand on his arm and felt the muscles tense beneath her touch. “The reason I walked out here with you is that I wanted to talk to you before you walk down the hill.”
He still would not look at her.
“I’m afraid I have some... some bad news.”
He snapped a glance at her, then turned away again. “Bad news?” he repeated sardonically, then laughed once, mirthlessly. “What could be worse than the news I’ve already got?”
Rye, Rye, her heart cried, you don’t deserve to return to all this heartache. “You said you were going down to see your parents, and I... I thought you should know before you got there...”
He began to turn his head, and there was a wary stiffness about his shoulders, as if he’d already guessed.
Laura’s hand tightened on his arm. “Your mother... she’s not at home, Rye.”
“Not at home?”
But even though she sensed that he knew, the words seemed to stick in Laura’s throat. “She’s down there on Quaker Road.”
“Qu ... Quaker Road?” He looked in its direction, then back to her.
“Yes.” Laura’s eyes filled, and her heart ached at having to deliver yet another emotional blow to him. “She died over two years ago. Your father buried her in the Quaker cemetery.”
She felt a tremor pass through his body. He whirled about, ramming his hands hard into his pockets, squaring his shoulders while fighting for control. Through tear-filled eyes she watched the pale, pale hair at the back of Rye’s neck fall over his collar as he raised his face to the blue sky and a single sob was wrenched from his throat.
“Is anything the way it was before I l...left here?”
She was torn by sympathy. It welled high in her throat, and she had a sudden overwhelming need to gentle and comfort. She moved close behind him and lay a hand on the valley between his shoulder blades. Her touch brought forth another sob, then another.
“Damn whaling!” he shouted at the sky.
She felt his broad back tremble and suffered at the tormented sounds of his despair. Yes, damn whaling, she thought. It was an inhuman taskmaster who little valued life, love, or happiness. These a whaler was asked to forfeit in the pursuit of oil, bone, and ambergris. Windjammers plied the seven seas for years at a time, their barrels slowly filling, while ashore mothers died, children were born, and impatient sweethearts wedded others.
But homes glowed at night. And ladies perfumed themselves with scents congealed by ambergris. And they pretended that whalebone corsets could effectively guard their virtue because a stiff-spined queen across the Atlantic led the vanguard of prudishness that was spreading across the waves like a pestilence.
The inhumanity of it swept over Laura, and unable to hold herself apart from Rye any longer, she circled his ribs and held him fast, her forehead pressed against the small of his back. “Rye darling, I’m so sorry.”
When his weeping had passed, he asked only one question. “When will I see y’ again?”
But she had no answer to ease his misery.
The May wind, heedless of human misery, too, scented with salt and blossom, ruffled his hair, then skittered on to dry the caulking of yet another whaleship being readied for voyages, and to carry away the smoke from the tryworks that brought prosperity, and sometimes pain, to the people of Nantucket I
sland.
Chapter 2
WHALING WAS THE loom that wove together the warp of sea and the woof of land to create the tapestry called Nantucket. Not an islander was unaffected by it; indeed, most earned their living from it, whether directly or indirectly, and had since the late 1600s, when the first sperm whale was taken by a Nantucket sloop master.
The island itself seemed predestined by nature to become the home of whaling, a new economic force in Colonial America, for its location was close to the original migratory routes of the whales, and its pork-chop shape created a large natural anchorage area ideal for use as a waterfront and needing no modification. As a result, the town was laid out contouring the edge of the Great Harbor and virtually rising from the rim of the sea.
The pursuit of the sperm whale had become not only an industry on Nantucket, but a tradition passed down from generation to generation. The sons of captains became captains themselves; the sailmaker passed down his trade to his son; ships’ riggers taught their sons the art of splicing the lines that carried the sails aloft; shipwrights apprenticed their sons in the trade of ship repair; ships’ carvers taught their sons to shape the figureheads, believed to be good-luck charms, that would see the ships safely back to shore; the retired shipsmith often saw his son take his place with anvil and hammer aboard an outgoing whaler.
And so it was with Josiah Dalton. A fifth-generation cooper, he had passed down his knowledge of barrel making to his son and had watched Rye sail away as he himself had done when he was younger.
Barrels were constructed on shore, then dismantled and packed aboard ships to be reassembled as needed when whales were captured. Coopers, therefore, had the advantage of plying their trade either on land or aboard a whaleship, choosing the risk of a voyage for the chance of high stakes, for a cooper’s portion of the profits—his lay—was fourth only to those of the captain and the first and second mates.
Josiah Dalton had, in his time, earned himself three substantial lays, but had, too, suffered the miseries of three voyages, so now he shaped his barrels with both feet on solid ground.
His back was hunched from years of straddling the shaving horse and pulling a heavy steel drawknife toward his knees. His hands were rivered with bulging blue veins and were widespread from clutching the double-handled tool. His torso seemed wrought of iron and was so muscular that it out-proportioned his hips, giving him the burly look of an ape when he stood.
But his face was gentle, seamed with lines reminiscent of the grains in the wood he worked. The left cheek was permanently rounded in a smile from accommodating the brierwood pipe that was never absent from between his teeth. His left eye wore a perennial squint and seemed tinted by the very hue of the blue-gray smoke that always drifted past it, as if through the years it had absorbed the fragrant wisps somehow. The frizzled hair about his head was gray and curly, as curly as the miles of wood shavings that had fallen from his knives.
Rye paused in the open double doors of the cooperage, peering in, taking a minute to absorb the sights, sounds, and scents on which he’d been weaned. Shelves of barrels lined the walls—plump-waisted barrels, flat-sided hogsheads, and an occasional oval, which could not roll with the pitch of a ship. Partially constructed barrels sat like the petals of daisies in their hoops, while the staves of the next wet barrel soaked in a vat of water. Drawknives were hung neatly along one wall while the grindstone sat below them in the same place as always. The croze—planes for cutting grooves at each end of the barrel stave—adzes with their curved blades, and jointing planes were up high off the damp floor, just as Josiah had always taught they must be.
Josiah. There he was—with a billow of fresh wood curls covering his boot, which pressed against the foot pedal of the shaving horse, clamping a stave in place as he shaped it.
He’s grown much older, Rye thought, momentarily saddened.
Josiah looked up as a shadow fell across the door of his cooperage. Slowly, he raised his veined hand to remove the pipe from his mouth. Even more slowly, he swung his leg over the seat of the shaving horse and got to his feet. Telltale tears illuminated his eyes at the sight of his son, tall and strapping in the doorway.
The thousand greetings they’d promised themselves, if only they could ever see each other alive again, eluded them both now, until Josiah broke the silence with the most mundane remark.
“Y’re home.” His voice was perilously shaky.
“Aye.” Rye’s was perilously deep.
“I heard y’d docked aboard the Omega.”
Rye only nodded. They stood in silence, the old man drinking in the younger, the younger absorbing the familiar scene before him, which he’d sometimes doubted he’d ever see again. The emotions peculiar to such homings held them each, for the moment, bound to the earthen floor, until at last Rye moved, striding toward his father with arms outflung. Their embrace was firm, muscular, crushing, for Rye’s arms, too, had known their share of pulling drawknives. Clapping each other’s backs, they separated, smiling—blue eyes gazing into bluer—quite unable to speak just yet.
An old yellow dog with graying muzzle filled the breach by shambling to her feet and lurching forward, her tail wagging in joyful welcome.
“Ship!” Rye exclaimed, going down on one knee to scratch the dog’s face affectionately. “What’re y’ doing here?”
Ah, what a sight, his father thought, to see the lad’s head bent over that dog again. “Beast seemed t’ think y’d come here if y’ ever made it back. Left the house on the hill and wasn’t anybody gettin’ ’er t’ stay up there without y’. Been waitin’ here these five years.”
Rye lowered his face, one hand on either side of the dog’s head, and the old Labrador squirmed as best she could, swiping her pink tongue at the man’s chin as Rye laughed and backed away, then changed his mind and leaned forward for a pair of wet slashes from the tongue.
He’d had the dog since he was a boy, when the yellow Labrador was found swimming ashore from a shipwreck off the shoals. Put up for grabs, the pup had immediately been appropriated by young Rye Dalton and named Shipwreck.
Finding old Ship waiting, whining a loyal welcome, Rye thought: Here at last is something the same as it used to be.
The old man clamped his teeth around his pipestem, watching Rye and the dog, joyful at the boy’s return, but sorrowed that Martha wasn’t here to share the moment.
“So the old harpy didn’t get y’ after all,” Josiah noted caustically, chuckling deep in his throat to cover emotions too deep to be conveyed any other way.
“Nay.” Rye raised his eyes, still scratching the dog’s ears. “She tried her best, but I was put off ship just before the wreck, with a case of smallpox.”
The pipestem was pointed at Rye’s face. “So I see. How bad was it?”
“Just bad enough to save my life.”
“Ayup,” Josiah grunted, scrutinizing with his squint-eye.
Rye stood up, rested his hands on his hips, and scanned the cooperage. “Been some changes around here,” he noted solemnly.
“Aye, and aplenty.”
Their eyes met, each of them saddened by the tricks five years had played on them.
“Seems we’ve each lost a woman,” the younger man said gravely. The dog nudged his knee, but he hardly noticed as he gazed into his father’s eyes, noting the new lines etched about them, the threatening tears glistening there.
“So y’ve already heard.” Josiah studied his pipe, rubbing its warm bowl with his thumb as if it were a woman’s jaw.
“Aye,” came the quiet reply.
The dog reared up and leaned against Rye’s hip, pushing him slightly off balance. Again he seemed not to notice. His hand unconsciously sought the golden head, moving on it absently as he watched his father rub the bowl of the brier-wood pipe. “It won’t seem the same, goin’ upstairs without her there.”
“Well, she had a good life, though she died sad to think y’d been drowned at sea. Seemed she never quite got over the news. Reckon she
knew you was safe long before I did, though,” Josiah said with a sad smile for his son.
“How’d she die?”
“The damps got her ... the cold and damps. She got lung fever and was gone in three short days, burnin’ up and shiverin’ both at once. Wasn’t a thing that could be done. It was March, and you know how gray the Gray Lady can be in March,” he said. But he spoke without rancor, for anyone born to the island knew its foggy temperament and accepted it as part of life ... and of death as well.
“Aye, she can be a wicked bitch then,” Rye agreed.
The old man sighed and clapped Rye on the shoulder. “Ah well, I’ve got used t’ life without y’r mother, as used t’ it as I’ll ever get. But you—” Josiah left the thought dangling as he studied his son quizzically.
Rye’s glance went to the window.
“Y’ve been up the hill, then?” Josiah asked.
“Aye.” A muscle tightened and hardened the outline of Rye’s generous mouth, then he met his father’s inquisitive eyes and the mouth softened somewhat.
“I’ve lost only one woman, lad, but y’ve lost two.”
Again the mouth tensed, but this time with determination. “For the time bein’. But I mean t’ reduce that number by half.”
“But she married the man. ”
“Thinking me dead!”
“Aye, as we all did, lad.”
“But I’m not, and I’ll fight for her until I am.”
“And what’s she got t’ say about it, then?”
Rye thought of Laura’s kiss, followed by her careful withdrawal. “She’s still in shock, I think, seein’ me walk into the house that way. I think for a minute she believed I was a ghost.” Rye turned his stubborn jaw toward his father again. “But I showed her I wasn’t, by God!”
Josiah chuckled silently, nodding his head as his son colored slightly beneath his tan. “Aye, lad, I’ll bet my buttons’ y’ did. But I see y’ve hauled y’r chest down here and set it on me floor as if y’ve come expectin’ to share me bunk.”