By The Sea, Book Three: Laura Read online

  BY THE SEA Series

  "A riveting saga/mystery."

  --Rave Reviews

  In the tradition of Upstairs, Downstairs and Downton Abbey, BY THE SEA is a four-book series that sweeps from the Gilded Age through the Gatsby Era's Roaring Twenties and then on to the Great Depression, culminating nearly a century later in Newport, Rhode Island, wealthy and alluring "City by the Sea." Set against a backdrop of mansions, the glorious America's Cup Yacht Races, and new money, the series traces the passions and adventures of three families from three different classes.

  Book One: TESS. From the wild decadence of late nineteenth-century Newport comes the tale of Tess Moran, a beautiful Irish housemaid in one of the grand summer "cottages," who makes a dark bargain with a man of commanding wealth — and falls in love in the bargain.

  Book Two: AMANDA. Marrying American money to an English title is a tradition of its own; but Amanda Fain, a brash heiress with money to burn, has a fondness for Bolsheviks and bootleg liquor that makes her an unlikely match for the reluctant, ironic, and impoverished English aristocrat Geoffrey Seton, who has been ordered to America to find someone who can pay the bills for the family estate back home.

  Book Three: LAURA. While the Great Depression grinds relentlessly on, Laura Andersson, a Midwestern farm girl with an improbable love of the sea, embarks on a bold adventure that promises riches but delivers passion, one that threatens all she holds dear.

  Book Four: THE HEIRS is the dramatic conclusion to the four-book series BY THE SEA. Economic hard times are a distant memory in high-flying, recent-day Newport, home of the oldest and most prestigious trophy in the world, the Holy Grail of sport--the America's Cup. Here, the descendants of Tess, Amanda and Laura play out their destinies, their paths crossing in unforeseen ways: Mavis Moran, Neil Powers, his daughter Quinta, and America's Cup skipper Alan Seton all find themselves caught in a web of mystery, sabotage, and conflicting desires.

  "A quality novel [that] contains many of those little epiphanies, those moments of recognition. [Part 1, TESS,] is what makes Stockenberg's book stand out from the rash of novels on class conflicts between Irish servants and their Yankee masters."

  —Providence Journal

  "This was my first Antoinette Stockenberg novel. I read it not long after it was published ages ago, but her writing is so vivid I can still picture some of the scenes from the novel. This [was written] before the ghost or mystery plots were woven into her novels: it is purely a story of life and relationships. I have been a huge fan ever since."

  —A reader

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  By the Sea, Book Three: LAURA

  Copyright © 1987 by Antoinette Stockenberg

  Original title: The Challenge and the Glory

  Newly revised and edited, 2013

  ISBN: 978-0-9857806-9-2

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  BY THE SEA Series

  Copyright

  Book Three: LAURA, Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  More for your e-Reader by Antoinette

  About the Author

  An Excerpt from BY THE SEA, Book Four: THE HEIRS

  An Excerpt from A CHARMED PLACE

  Book Three: LAURA, Chapter 1

  Summer 1934

  Like Robert Louis Stevenson before her, Laura Andersson traveled not to go anywhere, but to go. Life to her was an excuse to move, and from the day she first stood up and teetered forward on her own two wobbly legs, she never looked back. Her mother was forever chasing after her, and her father, a Minnesota farmer all his life, used to scratch his head and wonder where his daughter could have caught the fever: wanderlust. She had it bad.

  When she was three Laura managed to climb up a rotten stepladder, across a rain barrel, and onto the back of the family plow horse. Mrs. Andersson found her daughter half hanging from the horse's mane as the good-natured mare ambled across the farmyard, scattering geese and chickens in its path. Laura told her mother that she was on her way "to the ocean." Her parents laughed softly over it that night as they lay in one another's arms and wondered which of her story books had put such notions into their little girl's head.

  When she was thirteen, Laura tried again, and this time she frightened both her parents and the other one hundred and forty-three residents of Danske out of their wits. As nearly as they could make out afterward, Laura had talked her way into the front seat of a produce motor-truck bound for Chicago. But somewhere in Fillmore County the well-intentioned driver got cold feet, and he put his passenger ashore, so to speak. The townspeople looked at Laura coolly after that, although her two younger brothers were wildly jealous of her adventure and pulled her dark braids every chance they got, and pinched her under the supper table.

  Her next real attempt to reach the ocean (no one ever took her years of whining to go abroad very seriously) came when Laura was twenty. She'd just graduated from a normal school and had already accepted a job to begin teaching in Danske in the autumn. Then came a better offer.

  "But you're still a child," her mother complained as she plucked a freshly killed chicken on the white enameled worktable in her country kitchen. "Tisn't right to go off gallivanting around the country unchaperoned."

  "I won't be gallivanting around the country, mama. I'll be gallivanting down the coast. And I will be chaperoned—at least, once we're in Havana. Aunt Olga will take perfect care of me."

  "Oh, I'm sure! A woman I've never even met! And what's she doing in Havana, I'd like to know, when by rights she belongs in Stockholm? Aunt Olga, my foot! She's only your third cousin, if that, and she's a scant six years older than you are. If your father was alive he'd tell me to my face that I was crazy, letting you go." Harriet Andersson set her mouth in a grim line and yanked another feather from the hapless chicken's breast. "Why can't you ever stay put?" she added inconsequentially.

  "Oh Mama, this is 1926! No one stays put anymore!"

  As it turned out, Laura's cousin Aunt Olga never got the chance to prove her mettle. Laura made her way, mostly by rail as planned, to New York. From there she had intended to ship with nine other passengers aboard a freighter to Cuba. But she never made it past the Virginia; she never made it past Captain Sam Powers.

  The captain, a brawny six-footer with thick sandy-gray hair sticking out from under a seaman's cap, was offloading barrels of case oil, with the help of a smallish, dullish crewman, from the deck of a two-masted coastal schooner docked not far from Laura's Cuba-bound freighter. Laura noticed the sailing vessel—so hopelessly anachronistic among the steam-driven, rust-bucket freighters—as she was picking her way along the piers, one eye on the young stevedore she'd paid to haul h
er brand-new steamer trunk for her. The Virginia was small, maybe seventy-five feet, but the offloading was going on at a frenetic pace.

  Suddenly the captain bawled out "AVAST!"

  What avast meant, Laura had no idea, but it seemed prudent to stop and find out.

  "Avast, AVAST, man! Why, yer deaf as a haddock!"

  The captain rushed toward his crewman, but it was too late: the boom tackle pennant parted, and a barrel of oil fell crashing at Laura's feet, splitting open like a watermelon and splashing her new white dress from neck to hem with case oil.

  "Oh no! OH!" sputtered Laura, looking down at her dress, aghast.

  "That about does it, Twitch. You're no more use to me than a harp seal!" the captain said angrily. "You have ten minutes to get your sea-bag out of here and now it's nine!"

  Poor Twitch hunkered down as best he could before the hailstorm and managed a timid, "But what about my wages, cap'n?"

  "Your wages be damned!" bellowed the other. "Consider yourself blessed that I don't strip you of what little you own to pay for that barrel of oil. Now git!"

  "What about my dress?" moaned Laura, conscious that her timing could have been better.

  "What about it?" roared the captain, turning on her from his quarter-deck.

  "Well, look at it—it's ruined!"

  "Hang about the docks in white, that's what happens. If I've said it once, I've said it twice: you ... girls ... ought to dress more practical."

  Something about the tone of his voice and the look in his eye told her what kind of girl he thought she was. "I'm not a girl. I'm from Minnesota," she said with frigid correctness.

  "I guess there are girls in Minnesota, too," he answered calmly, letting his glance slide along the oil slick down the front of her dress.

  "Now you just listen to me, mister: I'm not one of your dockside floozies; I'm a paying passenger bound for Cuba and I want a new dress!"

  But the good captain had cargo to unload, with or without Twitch, and after considering Laura for all of four seconds, he turned back to it.

  "I want a new dress!" It wasn't vanity that made Laura stand her ground, or even wounded pride. It was her sense, utterly Midwestern, that a person is responsible for his actions. "You won't get away with this," she added loudly when the captain continued to ignore her. "I'll speak to the port authorities."

  No comment.

  Laura turned to the fidgety stevedore who was standing beside her trunk and turned up her voice to a hundred and thirty decibels. "Where can I find the harbormaster's office?"

  "Well, by gad, she's a Minnesotan after all." It was muttered by the captain in a perfectly audible voice, and Laura turned to meet it.

  "What's that supposed to mean?"

  He pulled his cap down a little more righteously over his brow and squinted through sea-blue eyes at her. "I've heard tell that Uncle Sam gives you folk out West land for nothin', and food, and jobs as like as not. Well, out East we earn everything we get. No one's ever given me a board-foot o' plankin', or a single trunnel, come to that, if I haven't sweated for it first. And if a bolt of lightning splits my topmast in two, it wouldn't do to go whining to the 'authorities,' now, would it? But go ahead. Run to the harbormaster. Tell 'im I spoilt your frock. If it makes you feel better, tell 'im." He gave Laura a long, level look and something inside her tightened.

  "Do you have a better idea?" she demanded, with not as much indignation as she would have liked.

  "We could discuss it."

  And so began negotiations which ended in Laura's getting her white dress after all, the one she wore to her wedding ceremony two days later at the small chapel not far from the Seamen's Institute. If someone had told her that she would not be a virgin when she married, that she'd marry a man with only a grammar-school grasp of reading and writing, and no grasp at all of history or culture, that she would conceive a child at sea, bear it on land, and suckle it days later at sea again—well, she might have smiled her hazel-eyed smile and said, "I wouldn't be surprised."

  Her mother thought she was crazy and so did all of her friends. But Laura learned to navigate by the stars and to fry eggs sunnyside on a stove that wasn't always horizontal. Her pale skin darkened and her thin arms strengthened; her heart beat with a slower, stronger pulse. She forgot the names of authors and the titles of plays, but she knew the names of dozens of constellations and of every seaport between Nova Scotia and North Carolina. She learned to play the concertina, and when to coax a seamen's ditty out of her baritone husband, and when to let him be.

  And sometimes, when the night was quiet and little Neil was sleeping peacefully in his hammock and the first mate was off watch, Sam would talk wistfully of the glory days of cargo schooners and of their recent swan song, during the great Florida land boom.

  "Ay, you happened onto the scene at almost the exact moment of its collapse, looking back," he would say, his voice filled with superstitious awe. "If only you'd seen it at its peak. Lumber, pipe, granite, cement, fixtures and such, shingles and shakes—all thrown helter-skelter on the decks of leaky schooners which'd been dragged from their graves in muddy banks and forced back into service. Some of them made it down the coast in one piece; some didn't. It were a regular traffic snarl out there, in any case. As for ashore! Why, it were madness! Folks running around like headless chickens, waving money at anyone with a bit of land to sell. I heard of a snippet of dirt in Miami sold for $800 one year, and $150,000 three years later. From Palm Beach on down—madness." He'd shake his head in wonder. "I'll never know why."

  Laura would smile and stand a little closer to her husband as he nudged the wheel to port or starboard. "Because people want to be able to look out at the sea at the Virginia, and other ships like her."

  "Well, they'd best look while they can, because there's but a handful of us left, and we'll not be out there much longer, far as I can tell."

  "Yes, we will," Laura always answered with the exact same serenity. "We have a stout little ship, and you work so hard."

  "Could you be happy in a rust bucket, girl?" Sam would suddenly ask, his voice warm and urgent. "Should we go over to steam?"

  "Never! Of course not! Where's the poetry in it? And besides, the wind is free. I know how much that appeals to your Downeast temperament," she'd add in a teasing voice.

  "Ay. Well, we'll hold on, then. As long as we can. But I wish you could've seen us in the glory days."

  ****

  For three years the Virginia plied her trade, operating out of Newport, Rhode Island, and contracting to carry granite, gravel, railroad ties, shooks, ice, soft coal, quahogs and oysters up and down the East Coast, with Sam and Laura eking out a living, occasionally putting something by. All of the profits were poured back into the boat, and it showed: every year the Virginia looked a touch smarter, every year she flaunted a new bit of finery on her decks or below. These were not her halcyon days, but neither were they hard times.

  Then, in the summer of 1929, Sam went a little wild and bought a steam-driven yawl boat to pull the Virginia through the calm spots, and a rowing dory for young Neil, who at two-plus years did not yet have quite the arm span to reach both oars.

  "Don't you worry none," said Sam confidently to his wife, filling his pipe. "He'll grow into it."

  When the Crash came later that year, Newport hardly felt a thing—at first. As the market plunged and fortunes fell, some of the locals even cheered: the irresponsibly rich were getting theirs at last. Oh, there was a little belt-tightening all around: the Fall River Line, which employed thousands of Newporters on Long Wharf to maintain their fleet of steamships, trimmed down to a five-day work week. The Torpedo Station on Goat Island, a federal facility, eventually stopped making torpedoes on Saturdays. One or two trade unions took pay cuts. Still, no one really worried when the first grand estates went up for auction for back taxes and mortgage payments. Hardly any of the domestics employed in the summer cottages were locals, after all. The only Newporters affected seemed to be the butcher, the gr
eengrocer, and a shopkeeper or two.

  But as the sudden horror of 1929 rolled on into the shock of 1930, then spread worldwide for three more years of numbing despair, even Newport cried out in pain. Thousands of laborers and craftsmen were thrown out of work. Masons and plumbers, painters and carpenters were put to work "leaf- raking": grading fields, cleaning beaches, planting shrubs. The less lucky and the overly proud were turned out of their tenements and homes. Millworkers turned ugly, rioting in nearby textile towns. Newporters became afraid.

  The Virginia was not immune to the economic crisis. Contracts to haul fell off steadily. The second mate was laid off, and then the first. Sam's brother, young and inexperienced, came down from Maine to replace them; he was all Sam could afford. The Virginia whiled away her days at anchor in various New England harbors, while Sam scoured the waterfront for loads to haul. Still, Sam and Laura were reasonably self-sufficient. They paid no taxes, and the wind was free.

  Sails, however, were not free, and neither was paint. The Virginia had not been hauled out in two years. Her bottom was foul; she lumbered like a bathtub through the water, despite repeated scrubbings by Sam and his brother Billy. Her rusted iron fastenings bled freely through her peeling dark-green topsides. The patches on her sails had patches. When Billy managed to blow up the Scotch fire-tube boiler on the yawl boat through sloppy maintenance, Sam very nearly keelhauled him. They were living on the edge, and the strain was beginning to show.

  Eventually Roosevelt and the federal government began to put together a new deal for the downtrodden, and all eyes turned to Washington. But Sam refused to look. "I'll not go on the dole and abase myself before my son," he stoutly maintained. "Besides, I'd rather starve at sea than stand in a soup line ashore. But we ain't about to starve, girl: tomorrow we pick up a load of quahog shells in Bristol; we're bound for New York."