Sea Jade Read online

  The strange phrase, following all the rest, seemed of a pattern and hardly raised a question in my mind till I remembered it later. I said nothing but sat in disconsolate silence in my own corner of the carriage.

  All my high hopes and gay anticipation were being dashed by the efforts of this child, and much of the glow was gone from my day. Through the window on the leeward side of the carriage I could barely see out across the streaming landscape, but I tried to fix my attention upon it and ignore this unpleasant little girl. She would not remain ignored for long, however. Suddenly she leaned across me, gesturing.

  “There! We’re turning onto the point now. You can see the house if you look quickly.”

  I put my face close to clouded isinglass and peered out as the vehicle made its turn. I would have recognized the house anywhere from my father’s long ago description of it. There were two houses joined together, really, two-storied, with the smaller part built around a central chimney. Wealthy Bascombs had later built the large adjoining house that made a wing of the earlier structure a whaling captain had built the century before. White clapboards had been set in simple lines, giving the house dignity and grace. The smaller structure rose straight from the ground, without adornment except for its neat green shutters, while a delicately columned veranda ran about two sides of the main house. This had evidently been a later addition for it did not encompass a front doorway clearly meant to stand alone in its elegance. Slim Corinthian columns framed the door’s recess, with an elliptical fanlight above, and a few rounded steps leading up from the walk. All this was in my mind’s eye, with reality added in no more than a glimpse through a rain-streaked curtain before the carriage turned along the road that led out upon the point.

  “There’s the lighthouse!” Laurel cried in my car.

  Again I had no more than a glimpse of a squat building of gray granite with a tower rising above. I knew about the lighthouse, of course. In my father’s youth it had stood upon this headland, warning and welcoming fishing and whaling vessels as they came to port. As a boy he had often climbed its tower. Now as he had told me, it stood long unused and a fine new lighthouse had been built across the harbor.

  The carriage had come to a stop and by good fortune there was a respite in the downpour. Joseph jumped to the ground and opened the door, scattering raindrops. He exclaimed in disapproval at sight of Laurel, lifted her down without ceremony, and sent her flying toward the house. Myself he helped out more decorously, then turned back for my portmanteau and trunk.

  I scurried through a white gate set in a white picket fence, and ran beneath dripping elms up a brick walk to the doorway. From somewhere behind the house a dog began to bark, full-throated and savage. It was a sound to make the hackles rise, had I been able to attend it fully at the time. But already Laurel had thrust the door open upon an unlighted hallway, and turned to gesture me in. I picked up my skirts and hurried up the wet steps and into the shelter of the vestibule.

  It was then that the first of those strange, seemingly ordained moments of intense prescience occurred. Perhaps the child, with her hostility, had prepared me for this. My spirits had been dampened and there was an uneasiness in me where there had been none upon my arrival. I, who had expected only to be welcomed and made much of, stood suddenly hesitant upon this dark, unwelcoming threshold.

  The dim hallway was not empty as I had first thought. Three people stood there in the gloom beyond Laurel’s small figure. As I hesitated, waiting for someone to speak, to greet me, dismayed by the silence of the three as they stared at me, a sickening flash of lightning illumined the scene in utter clarity, etching the nearest details upon my sight, followed by a clap of thunder that shook the house.

  A woman in a draped and bustled gown of some dark red material stood upon the stairs, the glass cylinder of an unlighted lamp in her hands. The look she bent upon me was almost malignant. In all my life no one had ever looked at me with such hatred before. I felt the ugly stab of it shockingly. Then darkness descended, all the more blinding after the flash of light, and I could hear movement in the hall. Wind blew through in a wild gust as a door opened at the rear, and again I heard the mad barking outside. Thunder clapped, rattling panes, as lightning struck the earth not far away.

  In the second flash I saw that the other two persons were men. One stood at the opposite end of the hall, where he had just opened the door. He was dressed in yellow oilskins and must have been in the act of going out when I appeared. He had paused, as if frozen in his tracks at the sight of me. I was instantly aware of a remarkable resemblance to Laurel—he could have been taken for no one but the child’s father. In the flickering of light his dark, brooding eyes regarded me with almost as great an antipathy as did those of the woman on the stairs.

  The second man stood nearer me in an open doorway with booklined shelves visible beyond his tall figure. The flashes of eerie, greenish light, now coming close together, showed me a face both handsome and mocking. For a moment his gaze held my own as if in challenge.

  I closed my eyes against the livid flashes, the old terror full upon me. It was the only terror that had ever haunted my young life; a fear of sudden light, of light that changed and flickered. No matter what the source, such light always frightened me. I must have cried out, for the sound seemed to break the spell that held the three, releasing them from so threatening a focus upon me, releasing Laurel to speech.

  “She’s here!” the child cried. “Miss Miranda has come! I went to meet her. I’ve already told her we don’t want her here.”

  I opened my eyes at once. The man in oilskins, Laurel’s father, uttered an angry exclamation and vanished through the rear door into the storm. The second man gave me a faintly derisive bow and turned on his heel to disappear into the book-lined room. The woman came quickly down the stairs and set the lamp upon a table, concentrating upon lighting it. When she turned she offered me no hand in greeting, but stood looking at me in unblinking silence.

  I recognized the look with a start. This was exactly the way the child had stared at me in the carriage and I knew where Laurel had found the manner she imitated. But where the child’s gaze was bright and a little wild, this woman’s eyes were very different. They were deep-set and seemed enormous above prominent cheekbones. Beneath the gray-streaked auburn hair that she wore in an old-fashioned style drawn severely over her ears from a central part, one almost expected a dark intensity in her eyes. Instead, they were almost colorless, like shallow water, yet with an opacity unlike that of clear water. They were eyes that stared and yet looked curiously blind, as if this were a woman who already knew what she meant to see and would never have her mind changed by any fact that did not fit her beliefs. Held by this strange look—condemned by it—I could only stare in return and wait helplessly.

  When she spoke at last, her voice was as colorless as her eyes, yet with a curiously penetrating quality. It was a voice that would be easily heard without needing to be raised.

  “So you’ve come,” she said flatly. “Under the circumstances, we cannot pretend to welcome you, though Laurel had no business telling you whatever it is she told you.”

  “I’ve told her nothing, Grandmother Sybil!” Laurel cried heatedly. “Only that we don’t want her here.”

  “Go to your room,” Sybil McLean said. “You had no business going out in the storm. You are in disgrace again.”

  The child threw me a wrathful look, as if her disgrace were my fault, and fled up the stairs.

  “If you will come with me, Miss Heath,” the woman said, “I will show you to your room. Captain Bascomb will see you as soon as he is able. He has been very ill, you know. His heart. I hope you will excite him as little as possible.”

  He had said nothing of illness in the letter I had received. I wanted to excite no one. I wanted only to solve my problem of how to live and regain some sense of a reasonable world about me. Nothing that was happening appeared in the least real. None of it could be happening.

  In th
e hall upstairs a rail-thin woman in a black dress and white apron had just lighted a lamp against the storm. Darkness retreated as I followed Mrs. McLean’s straight back and dark red skirts up the gracefully curving stairs. She led the way to a room at the rear of the house and gestured me into it. Again the woman had gone ahead and was turning away from the lighting of a lamp.

  “This is Mrs. Crawford,” Sybil McLean said.

  The thin woman murmured words I could not hear, seeming no less hostile than the rest of the household. Then she glanced meaningfully at Mrs. McLean—almost as if she agreed with something that had not been said—and went out of the room. Only later would I realize the import of that look.

  There was no fire on the room’s cold hearth, and the storm outside made the air feel chill and clammy. Lightning flashes illumined wet panes of glass. I turned my back quickly upon glittering light, waiting while Joseph brought up my trunk and portmanteau. Sybil McLean said nothing until the man had gone. Then she turned that strange blank stare upon me again.

  “I will let the captain know you have arrived,” she said. “He will undoubtedly want to see you before supper, since he dines in his own part of the house and does not join us downstairs. That woman he has married gets his meals.”

  For all that my father had told me of Mrs. McLean’s position in the captain’s house, it seemed clear that she was no ordinary housekeeper. She had the autocratic air of one who knew her own secure place in an environment she considered superior to all others. There was a scorn and arrogance in the way she referred to the captain’s wife that made me immediately sympathetic toward the woman she so dismissed. I recalled my father’s words about Mrs. Bascomb being much set upon in this house. Perhaps we two would be friends.

  I assured Mrs. McLean that I would be ready whenever I was summoned. After she had gone, I went to the double window near the bed and tried to see out through the glass. But while the thunderstorm was moving away, the sky had darkened early and black rain still came down, making the outdoors invisible. At least the dog had stopped its wild barking. Perhaps that dark-browed man in oilskins had taken the animal with him into the storm. I wanted no more of this impenetrable world of rain and I drew the curtains across to shut me securely in.

  No warm water had been brought for my refreshment, but I poured cold from the yellow-sprigged china pitcher and bathed my face and hands in the big matching basin. I was glad to be free of my bonnet and I sought the mirror over a tall mahogany dresser in order to make myself presentable for the captain.

  My own solemn expression in the glass startled me. It was as if I had glimpsed a stranger wearing my flesh and my garments. Deliberately I relaxed the unfamiliar frown lines and pressed my lips into a smile. When I had combed out the curls at the nape of my neck and brushed the pale fluff over my forehead, I stepped out of my wrinkled travel costume and dressed myself in my favorite beribboned green faille.

  My own natural optimism was returning. Surely some dreadful mistake had been made by those in this house. It was ridiculous to think that anyone could be seriously antagonistic to one so insignificant and harmless as myself. I had allowed the flashing of a storm, the words of a child to upset and frighten me, and that would not do at all.

  Thinking of Laurel, I went to the bed to turn down the sheet and the bright patchwork quilts. Sure enough, a handful of sandy pebbles had been thrust into the center of the bed. The sight was so ridiculous that I could only laugh as I picked up the small stones and brushed sand out of the bed. As I dropped the pebbles on the dresser top, I wondered what had moved the child to so strong a prejudice against me. There seemed no sensible answer.

  Ready now, I seated myself in a ladder-backed rocker to await my summons from the captain. How strange to realize that I had come at last to the very town where I’d had my beginnings. In spite of the bewildering lack of welcome I’d received in this house, there was an eagerness in me to seek out my own unknown roots, to know more of those from whom I was descended. Particularly more of Carrie Corcoran, who had lived here as a child and as a young girl, and who had grown up to become my mother.

  My father had spoken of her often and readily, the sorrow of her loss always with him. He had told me of her Irish beauty and gaiety, of her affectionate spirit. Yet though his own words were spoken with loving warmth, it was always as though he held something back; as though in his thoughts he hesitated and did not speak fully, for all my urging.

  There had been about my father a strangeness at times. He could withdraw into long silences that shut me out and left a core of loneliness at the heart of my otherwise happy existence. I knew my father had given up the sea while still in his prime, and sensed there were times when he brooded over this parting. The meager shore job he had held for a shipping company could never have satisfied him. The loss of my mother deepened his melancholy and when the mood was upon him I ceased to exist. It was as though he turned backward to live in a time when I had no being, could play no role in his life.

  I had the feeling now that if I made my mother’s acquaintance in this place I would not only be able to fill in the missing chapters of her life, but that I might also come to know more about my dearly loved father. The captain, surely, would be able to help me in this quest, and I began to look forward even more eagerly to my meeting with him.

  When Mrs. McLean tapped upon my door, I was more than ready for my first introduction to Captain Obadiah Bascomb.

  TWO

  When I opened my door to Sybil McLean’s knock, she stood for a long moment glancing over me with that look of antipathy in her pale eyes that I could not understand. She was noting, I’m sure, my effort to remove the stains of travel and make myself attractive, but there was no approval in her for anything about me.

  “The captain insists upon seeing you now,” she said. “It would be better to wait until tomorrow, but he will not. If he becomes at all excited, you are to leave at once. You must understand that he is ill and very frail. The doctor has warned us that his heart will not sustain any great shock or strain.”

  I nodded my understanding and followed her along the central hallway to where a passage connected the newer house with the old on this second level. A door opened upon a small stair landing that fronted a great central chimney. Mrs. McLean went to one of the other landing doors, tapped upon it, then ushered me into a large, cheery room in which a fire roared and polished furniture and shining brass gave off a fine gleam. A scent of faraway places seemed to rush toward me, exotic and strange.

  As I stepped into the room I had a swift impression of shipshape captain’s quarters. Then my attention focused on the area of lamplight and firelight close to the hearth. There a wizened little man sat in a huge chair that dwarfed him, his entire person lost in a nest of quilts, so that only his head emerged from their enveloping folds.

  The shock of seeing him was great, for not by the farthest stretch of the imagination could such a man be the hero of my long-loved tales of the sea.

  “Miss Heath is here,” Mrs. McLean said, and stood aside to allow me to enter. She did not follow me into the room, but closed the door behind me and went away at once. I stood there hesitantly, aware again of a foreign scent upon the air. A scent that I could not immediately place, though I knew it was familiar.

  From his nest this brown-faced raisin of a man waggled a beckoning hand at me. “Come here!” he commanded. “Come here where I can get a look at you.”

  His voice carried a ringing quality that startled me by its contrast to the rest of him. It was a voice that still gave evidence of having roared from a quarter-deck in its day. When I moved uncertainly toward his chair, his thin hand flashed out and grasped my own with surprising strength.

  “Come down to my level, girl, so I can have a look at your face,” he ordered me.

  More than ever I wished myself elsewhere, wished that I had heeded my father’s warnings. But there was nothing for it but to kneel on the hearth rug with the fire scorching hot along one side of m
e and allow lamplight and firelight to play upon my face. A pair of bright blue eyes stared at me from beneath shaggy white brows, and the strong, ungentle hand tilted my chin this way and that.

  “You look like her!” the ringing voice said at length. “You’re the spitting image of your mother. Even your eyes are like hers, with a touch of gold in the brown. I suppose you know we were all in love with Carrie Corcoran in the old days—Nathaniel and Andrew and I. But it was the one we least expected to win out who married her in the end. It’s high time her daughter came home to Scots Harbor. You belong here, girl.”

  The Captain Obadiah of my imaginings was a tall, broad-shouldered figure, at home in a storm with the deck tilting beneath his feet. He was a figure that bore no relation to this shrunken man with a voice ten times his size. The reality frightened me a little and I had no notion what to say to him. I murmured something about being sorry he was ill and not wanting to trouble him with my problems, but he brushed my words aside and shouted over his shoulder.

  “Lien! Lien, come here! Confound it, woman, where are you when I want you?”

  From the far shadows of the big room, where firelight did not reach and no lamp burned, the strangest of figurines came forward to astonish my eyes. She was a doll-like Chinese woman, dressed in a short coat and full trousers of pale green satin brocade. There was rice powder on her face and carmine paint upon her lips. Her glossy black hair was drawn simply back into a heavy knot, the coil thrust through with a butterfly pin of gold filigree.

  My eyes dropped at once to her feet, for I knew much about China from my father, since it was a country he had loved second only to his own. This woman’s feet, encased in embroidered slippers, had not been bound into tiny “lotus buds,” so that she was able to move about as easily as I.

  She came forward, bearing in small hands a tray of gold and black lacquer, with handleless cups set upon it. Gracefully, she bent to place the tray upon a low teakwood table at the captain’s side. Again the spicy, foreign scent came to me and now I knew it was sandalwood.