Bellewether
Retreating, I’d found Tyler waiting downstairs in the kitchen. He’d brought a six-pack of the beer he liked to drink and had one open in his hand, half finished. “So much for our dinner plans.”
I stopped and shot a glance at him and had to bite my tongue. I wanted to say they’d been his dinner plans, not ours. My plans had been to eat in tonight, on my own—preferably wearing pyjamas while watching an old TV movie. I wanted to say that plans changed all the time, and the mark of a grown-up was learning to deal with that. But I knew that if I lost my temper his would only rise to match it and I didn’t want to spend my evening arguing. Instead I said, “That’s okay. Mrs. Bonetti brought over potatoes and sausages yesterday, I still have those. I’ll make salad and we can have wine. It will be just like going out.”
Tyler’s tone knew better. “No, it won’t.”
We ate in silence—though his brooding didn’t stop him finishing the roast potatoes without asking if I wanted any more. But food, as always, helped his mood, and as I stood to clear the dishes he said, “I’ve been thinking. Maybe this is good, that she’s dropped out.”
“I don’t know if that’s what she’s done.”
“But if she has, it makes things easier. For us, I mean.” He set his knife and fork across his empty plate and passed it to me. “That’s why you came down here, right? To take care of the house for her until she finished school. So if she’s finished, you won’t have to stay so long. Okay, so maybe she’ll need you around a few more months until she finds a job and gets a bit more settled, but then you can come back home.”
“It’s not that easy,” I reminded him, and standing at the sink I let the taps run for a moment, having learned the water always came out scalding hot to start with. “The museum hired me for a two-year contract.”
“So you’ll break it. After all the trouble you’ve had with the board, they shouldn’t be surprised.”
“It’s not the whole board giving me the trouble, only three of them. The rest of them are nice. I like the job.”
“It’s just a job, though. Anyone can do it.”
That point stung. It wasn’t that I thought my skills were special, but I did have skills. And knowledge. And experience.
We’d had a game when I was young—an upright plastic cylinder with sticks poked through it in a kind of web, with several marbles balancing on top of them. You’d play by taking turns to very slowly and strategically pull one stick out while trying not to let a single marble drop. It wasn’t possible, of course. You couldn’t keep those marbles on that shifting web of sticks forever, and eventually one player drew the stick that made them all come crashing down. I hadn’t thought about that game in years, but now, with all the things that I’d been balancing myself today—not just with the Fall Harvest but with Sharon, Eve, and Harvey, and the disappointing news of the Sisters of Liberty turning us down, and the separate arrivals of Tyler and Rachel—I couldn’t help feeling my own web of sticks was precarious, just at the moment. And Tyler, who should have been keeping me balanced by giving support, was instead pulling out the remaining sticks, one by one.
“Well, thanks.” I tossed the cutlery into the sink. It made a satisfying crash. “I’m glad you think so highly of the work I do.”
“Whoa, slow your roll, babe. Don’t get all defensive. What I meant was, it’s a little place, it isn’t the Smithsonian. They’ll get along without you.”
With my focus on the fork that I was washing, I replied, “I don’t break contracts. I’m not leaving until mine is done.”
“But that’s just—”
“Besides,” I cut him off. “I can’t leave Rachel now.”
“Oh, I see. But you can leave me.”
“What?” I turned. “I haven’t left you.”
“Haven’t you?” He didn’t try to smooth things with The Smile. In fact his features were the furthest from a smile I’d ever seen them, and his eyes had hardened, challenging. “Because it sure as hell feels like I’m doing this all on my own, right now.”
And that was it. He had pulled the last stick and whatever I’d held in the balance came tumbling down. “Listen, I’m not the one who decided to cancel the weekend we did plan and go to Atlantic City instead, so don’t even—”
His turn to cut in. “That,” he told me, “was different.”
“You’re right. You know why? Those were buddies from work. This is family, Ty. Family.” My anger had raised a big lump in my throat but I forced the words through it. “You don’t turn your back on your family.” The thought of my grandmother made me drive that point home harder. “Especially not when they need you.”
“Yeah, well, I have needs, too, you know.”
I heard Rachel’s voice say in my mind, “He is such an ass,” and I admitted in silence he could be, sometimes. In a purposely calm voice I said, “Ty, don’t ask me to choose between you and my family.”
His chair scraped the floor as he stood. “I’m not asking you anything.”
Watching him gather the few things he’d brought with him, I wasn’t sure how I felt. Surprised, maybe, this was the way things were going to end. But the thing that surprised me the most was discovering I didn’t care. When I’d stopped caring, I wasn’t sure. I only knew that, as he turned away from me, nothing inside me stepped forward to call him back.
And then the kitchen door banged shut behind him.
That door had been one of my brother’s first handyman projects here, and it had never hung perfectly level. The bang left it even more crooked, askew on its hinges like everything else in my life at the moment.
I heard Rachel’s steps on the stairs. By the time she came into the kitchen I’d forced myself back to the dishes as though things were normal, as though Tyler’s car wasn’t audibly gunning its way up the driveway.
She asked, “Did he just break our door?”
“Not really.” I fitted the last plate to dry in the rack with precision and pulled the plug, watching the water drain out. “It was already broken.”
Lydia
There were some things that could not be repaired.
She’d learned this small and sad truth in the months and years since Joseph had returned home from Oswego. At first they had been thankful he’d come back to them unbandaged and with all his limbs, and walking; that his outward wounds had healed so soon and left no scars. But they had come to realize that where Joseph had been broken was on some deep, inner surface that could not be seen and was beyond the reach of any doctor. And along the broken places bits of who he had once been had fallen and been lost, like all the tiny chips of porcelain that had scattered in the ashes of the hearth the time her mother had once dropped a cherished platter, so that even though her father had with patience and determination pasted it together so the seams but barely showed, there still remained, along those seams, small voids and tiny imperfections where those chips had once been that could never be recovered.
To a stranger at their table it appeared the platter had been cleanly mended.
She knew otherwise.
He did not call out often from the nightmares anymore but she still knew each time they plagued him from his restless wanderings. And when his demons came by day she knew that, too, from how his eyes would brighten and his breathing grow more rapid as his body tensed beneath whatever pressures were assaulting him.
But sitting as he was now, with her drawing pencil in his hand, his papers spread out tidily across the empty dining table, it was to her as if one of those small bits had been found among the ashes and retrieved with care and fitted into place again.
She’d always liked to watch him draw his plans for ships—the lines so straight, the measurements meticulously reckoned—for beneath all that precision lay an artistry she much admired.
The Spanish captain found it of great interest. Drinking brandy with her father in the chairs across from Joseph he leaned forward on the table as he watched the plans take form. “You mean to lengthen her?”
&n
bsp; Joseph, at work, seemed too deeply absorbed to be rude or suspicious. “Yes. She’s been practically severed already just here. There’ll be no cost or effort to add ten more feet for an increase in cargo space, and,” he remarked, “she can carry more guns.”
“Guns are always a good thing,” the Spaniard agreed.
At his side, her father took a sip of his own brandy—a rare thing for him. He seldom drank and when he did preferred the rum that Daniel sometimes sent them from Jamaica, but on this day the Spanish captain had brought brandy from his private store, by way of saying thank you for their hospitality, and so her father had indulged.
She knew that Benjamin would have outdone them both had he been there, for he loved brandy, but he was not there and she did not know where he was.
She knew where Mr. de Sabran was. He had not come in to dinner either, which had not surprised her since he did not seem to care for being in the captain’s company, and Violet had reported that when she’d gone to the orchard with the dinner pails she’d found him hard at work there with French Peter.
This had irritated Lydia for reasons she could not explain. “And Benjamin is with them?”
“No. He wasn’t there.” And turning, Violet had said, “But I wouldn’t tell that to your father.”
Lydia had been in full agreement. While she’d never told a falsehood to her father, she had learned it wasn’t necessary to share every truth, if by not sharing it she could avert an argument.
They’d gone a full day now without a voice raised in the house, although she could not say how long it would continue, having noted that Mr. de Brassart seemed even more bound to speak his mind with little care or thought for consequence when he was drinking brandy.
Its presence had enticed him to stay with them in the keeping room when all the dinner dishes had been cleared away and Joseph had begun his drawings.
Lydia had mending to be done, including one of Joseph’s bedsheets that had torn along its seam from all his turning in the night, so she’d retired from the table to the comfort of her mother’s chair beside the window, where the light was best for sewing, and from where she could observe the four men and their conversation without having to take part.
Her father being mellowed by the brandy told the captain in good humour, “That’s a useful skill you have, sir. Being able to read drawings upside down.”
“A man in these times must have many skills.” Del Rio grinned. “I am better with the charts of the sea, to tell the truth. A drawing like this one I would leave to Juan. He understands such things. This was his trade before he came to sail with my father.”
De Brassart asked, “So he was never a slave?”
Captain del Rio’s voice held, as it had once before, that hard edge of cold steel as he slid his gaze sideways to look at the Frenchman. “He was born a free man, and so he remains.” He paused before challenging Mr. de Brassart with, “You as a boy read the stories of Madame MacPherson, yes? And so you greatly admire my father. Then you should, I think, remember why he never fired on galleys. Why he hated the corsairs.”
De Brassart shrugged. “I do recall that he did not approve of slavery.”
“Not approve?” The Spanish captain’s mouth curved as he raised his cup and briefly drank. “He says it is the evil of our age, and we are none of us unstained by it, and all of us will answer to our Maker in the end. This is a truth,” he said, and gestured to the room around them. “All these things we have—these clothes, this drink, even this colony—we build these things on stolen land with stolen lives, and turn their blood to gold to fill our ships. This is a truth my father knows. It’s why he stays now in his garden and no longer guards the flota,” he concluded, naming the great Spanish treasure fleet that had for generations crossed the wide Atlantic.
Joseph’s pencil stopped its course across the paper and he looked up, frowning. “But you guard it, do you not?”
Del Rio raised one shoulder. “I am not so good a man. But like my father, I will never fire on a ship that carries slaves. And like him, I know I will face my judgement. God may forgive some of us for all that we have done, but there are others who, I think, will not be easily forgiven.” Then, as if he felt the tone had grown too solemn, he raised his glass and told them, “This is why I drink my brandy now, you understand, while it is possible.”
He did a good job drinking. There was very little brandy left for Benjamin when he returned towards the ending of the afternoon. He poured the last of it into a cup and lifting it, asked Lydia, the only other person then remaining in the room, “No lectures, Mother?”
“Don’t say that.” Her tone was sharper than the sewing needle that slipped painfully into her thumb as she misjudged a stitch in the worn waistcoat she was mending. “I’m not her.”
“I know. I’m sorry. It’s the chair,” he said, and offered no more explanation knowing none was needed, for they both knew well enough who should be sitting there. “Where’s Father?”
“Carting apples from the orchard. He could use your help.”
“I’ll help unload them.” Drinking deeply he said in an offhand way, “I’ve been aboard the Spanish ship.”
She knew it was a confidence, not something he would lightly share with anyone. Behind the closed door to the kitchen came the clanking sounds of Violet scouring the milking pans, and from the smaller chamber on the far side of the wall Mr. de Brassart’s snores were keeping rhythm, but this was a rare and private moment with her brother, so she set her mending down upon her lap and gave him her attention.
He said, “She’s beautiful.” His eyes were shining with the light they only held when he was speaking of a ship. “Not like the Bellewether. Not like she was, at least. But beautiful. Ramírez took me over her from stem to stern. You know that, in his youth, he was a shipbuilder? That’s how he came to know the captain’s father. He was telling me of some of their adventures.”
“And so now you wish to run away to Spain and be a pirate hunter?”
He acknowledged her light tone by smiling slightly. It had been a warm day for October so there had been no need to light fires in any hearth besides the great one in the kitchen, but the daylight had begun to soften and a chill would settle soon in all the shadowed corners of the room from which sunlight had withdrawn, so Benjamin in silence bent to stack the wood in readiness upon the iron dogs within the fireplace.
When he paused this long, she knew that he was gathering his words; that what he said next would be serious.
He said, “Do you remember when I made a tunnel in the snow and Joseph stood on top to test its strength, and it collapsed on me?”
They’d all been very young, but she remembered.
“It’s like that,” he told her. “Every day. It’s like I’m being smothered. Like I’ll die if I don’t find a way—some way, it scarcely matters how—to just get out.” He turned his head, eyes seeking hers, imploring her to understand. “I wasn’t meant to be a farmer, Lyddie. I was meant to have a different life.”
She understood, she truly did, but, “So was Joseph,” was her soft reminder. “So was I.”
“I know, but—”
“We can’t always choose our lives.”
“And if life hands us choices? What are we to do then?” He had set the fire ready and it wanted but a spark to start it burning. As he straightened, he seemed taller and his tone was filled with new resolve. He said, “I need to ask a favour.”
• • •
Her father watched the Spanish sails that having filled this morning with the first fair wind were passing now like some pale ghost glimpsed through the screen of autumn trees. She knew he would keep pace with them along this path as long as he was able, and would climb the hill to stand above the meadow from where he could watch those sails until they were a speck of white upon the wide blue of the Sound, bound for a wider, bluer sea.
So she kept pace with him in her turn, knowing he’d find comfort in her being there.
She had not t
hought he would say yes when she had faced him privately to plead her brother’s case last night, for all she’d argued reason.
“How often in his letters,” she had asked, “has Daniel said he misses us and wishes it were possible for us to pay a visit? He’ll be happy to see Benjamin, and Benjamin will benefit from both the voyage and the time away. And it is only for the winter.”
It had helped that, near to suppertime, Mr. Ramírez had expressed his formal wish to stay behind and help with the rebuilding of the Bellewether—a wish that she suspected had as much to do with Violet as with anything, because although he had remained the model of a gentleman he could not take his eyes from her.
Captain del Rio had approved the plan. “I can return in April, or in May, before the flota sails again to Spain.”
“And,” she had told her father afterwards, “he’s promised to bring Benjamin back home with him, if Daniel has not already arranged another passage. Though in honesty he’ll be much safer on a Spanish ship than he would be on one of ours. The French don’t fire upon the Spanish.”
“We do, if you can believe Captain del Rio. And pray tell me, if the captain is avoiding British ports, how is it he intends to carry my son into Kingston harbour?”
She had not worked that through herself, so she could only tell him, “He knows Daniel. They do business with each other. They must have their ways.”
Her father had said nothing, only grunted. He’d been standing with his back to her.
“Did you not say,” she’d prodded him, but gently, “that you must allow a man to be a man?”
“I did. But Benjamin—”
“He is a man. If you deny him this, you may yet keep him here another year, but in the end,” she told him, “in the end he will leave anyway, and carry his affections with him when he does. Is that what you would wish? Is that”—she’d drawn a breath, and played a card she did not like to play, though it held truth—“is that what Mother would have wanted?”