By The Sea, Book Three: Laura Read online

  After a while it began to bother her that a steady string of men were slipping forward, one at a time, and coming back aft a little while later. It was customary for a man to relieve himself over the side of a boat, but surely not everyone's bladder was in the same sorry state. She noticed, too, that the men around her were not the same group who had come aboard earlier. Apparently she'd been too intent on her playing to notice. And where were Nellie and Marie?

  When Billy finally showed up she fairly threw the concertina at him and went forward to investigate. It was very dark, a moonless night. Laura was able to find her way on the Virginia's decks blindfolded, but the man she fell in behind was not. She heard him stumble—no doubt over the massive iron windlass—and swear, and she heard glass breaking and a woman's low, drunk laugh. A cloud of whiskey fumes enveloped her as she stalked angrily toward the couple.

  "What is going on here?" she demanded, her eyes opening wide to adjust to the shadows.

  "What ... ever ... do you think?" came the blurred, ironic response.

  Laura had found Nellie, at least: sitting on one of the reglued dance chairs, besotted with alcohol, her dress unbuttoned in the front down to her waist, exposing two very white, very large, very bare breasts. There was not enough black night in the universe to mask her nakedness.

  Dumbfounded, Laura stared blankly for a moment and then said in a voice low with fury, "The Virginia is not a whorehouse, you slut!"

  Nellie swung drunkenly at the air, as if she were shooing a fly, and said, "It has been ... for a while, dearie. Go back to your ... Bach, and let us play." She paused, then giggled, impressed with herself.

  Laura turned quickly around to look back at her son, standing alone and weary under the lights in the dance area forward of the mainmast, all caught up with his glass-washing for the moment. Neil—her baby—shy and at an impressionable age, forced to serve punch to Newport's most flamboyant hookers. Inconceivable. She swung back around to Nellie and her obviously unhappy customer.

  "Button up and get off. Now."

  "The hell I will. I paid for this boat," returned Nellie, a dangerous edge sharpening her blurred voice.

  Laura reached down into the flap-pocket of her dress, pulled out the crumpled dollar bills, and flung them in Nellie's lap. "Here's a refund. Now—now beat it," she cried, unsure how hard she could push this particular element of society.

  Surprisingly, Nellie backed down, too befuddled to really put up a fight. "Yahr, who gives a shit? Sorry, Harry," she said with a tired sigh, fumbling with the buttons of her dress. "Let's go back to our usual spot."

  But Harry, hot and unsatisfied, was a little more impatient than that. He turned on Laura. "And who made you the chief of police, you little …?"

  In the dark his bulk loomed over her, his voice shot through her, terrifying her. Unlike Nellie, Harry was just drunk enough to be vicious. Suddenly the immense stupidity of Laura's behavior so far hit her, like a blow to the face. She was totally vulnerable, a babe wandered into a forest of wolves.

  Nellie's disgruntled customer grabbed Laura roughly by her arm. She froze. Partly she was panicking; partly she was too mortified to cry out for help she knew would not be coming; partly she feared to have Neil come anywhere near the bow. Billy—too slight and young to be any help—was leading a sing-along with his concertina, drowning out any hope that she'd be heard in any case. The bawdy lyrics of "Fat, Fat Annie" mixed with the reeking fumes of the spilled whiskey; Laura's sense of corruption was profound.

  And yet she was not part of this scene—she was not, any more than she was part of the Bellevue Avenue scene, or the lower Thames Street scene. She would not be drawn into it, not even by force. Her spirit pulled out of its swoon; she yanked her arm angrily away from the drunken guest. "Get away from me," she hissed.

  Surprised, he hesitated a moment, then laughed a low, dangerous laugh. "Sez who? A little schoolmarm like you?" In two steps he had her again, this time firmly by both her shoulders.

  Nellie lolled stupidly in her chair, cackling drunkenly at the scene before her. "That's it, Harry. Give it to her. She needs a good pokin' … that's what," she said, hiccuping. "Husband's … away, says she. Jes' look at her ... she misses it ... waiting for it, says I. You show her."

  Reeling from the man's stench of sweat and whiskey, Laura struggled in his arms, terrified, defiant, but not nearly strong enough to resist him. Her crazy Midwestern morality took the occasion to scream at her: This is what you get! If you hadn't tried to flaunt the law, this never would've happened.

  "All right, friend. Let her go. You're getting on everyone's nerves."

  There was a scuffle and suddenly Harry was being hoisted over the bulwarks and dropped into the harbor. A splash, a howl, and the sound of panicky swim-strokes: that's how fast it all happened. Laura peered through the darkness at the rescuer who'd come from nowhere, then spied Marie coming up behind him.

  "Well, mister—you don't make a girl work too hard for her money," Marie said, sidling up to him and nudging him with her hips.

  "We're not finished," he murmured. Then he took a roll of bills from his pocket, peeled off the top one, and passed it over to her.

  They disappeared in the shadows of the bow, from whence they'd come.

  Laura, her adrenaline overflowing, turned on Nellie—still seated, though a little more sober—and in a shrill voice said, "Get your friends off this boat before I kill you. I promise I'll kill you!"

  Nellie's laugh was a weary grunt. "Sure, missy. With your feather duster." She began to gather herself together.

  "Damn you!" Laura grabbed Nellie by her wrist and dragged the woman, one breast hanging out, across the decks of the Virginia. She catapulted Nellie toward the boarding steps, then turned on her heel, marched up to her astonished brother-in-law, and slammed his concertina shut.

  "The party," she said with a heaving chest, "is over."

  A dozen startled revelers mumbled and swore, then fell in behind Nellie and began to make their way grudgingly off the boat. Laura did not wait to see them off but hurried up to Neil, spun him on his heel, and aimed him down the companionway

  "I want you to go directly below, wash your face, and climb into your berth. You're to forget everything you've seen, and if you ever so much as mention this affair, ever, I shall thrash you within an inch of your life. Do you understand me?"

  Neil's mother had never come close to laying a hand on him. The shock of her threat, coupled with what he had seen, had taken his breath away. He nodded dumbly and scrambled down the oak companionway ladder.

  Laura turned to her brother-in-law. "That goes doubly for you, Billy. Promise me. I know how you are with Sam. Promise."

  Billy was not so much frightened as vastly entertained. His rather puritanical sister-in-law, modest to a fault, had pulled aside a pretty curtain and seen the gamier side of life. Well, well. How she'd been part of the waterfront all these years ... But of course that was the problem; she'd never really been a part of it. "Sure, Laur. I'll be taking this one to my grave," he said, grinning. He pulled out a pocket watch.

  "Still early. No sense letting all this excitement go for naught." Whistling a bar of "Fat, Fat Annie," he scrambled to catch up with the motley retreating crowd.

  Laura collapsed on the chair nearest her, closing her eyes, trying to shut out a picture that she knew she, too, would be taking to her grave: of Nellie, drunk and half-naked, sprawled on a chair. A woman like that .... Neil was so close up, to a woman like that ....

  She heard a shuffle on deck and opened her eyes: it was Marie, more alert than Nellie had been, taking in the empty decks.

  "My God," said Laura exhaustedly. "You."

  "Yeah. Me." Marie pulled her slinky dress high above her knees and scrambled up and over the bulwarks. On the other side she paused, held up her middle finger to Laura, and scurried off into the darkness.

  "Nice company you keep."

  Laura turned, blushing a red more deep than any sunset, and faced the man
who was technically her hero.

  Chapter 5

  He came sauntering amidship, a study in offhand elegance. Laura saw at a glance that his clothes, worn as they were, were well cut, and that he carried them with ease. His hair was dark, his eyes—of an indefinable color—inscrutable, distanced. He needed a haircut, and a shave. He didn't—quite—look disreputable; but then, he didn't look not disreputable. He was coiling a heaving line that she'd noticed earlier in a tangle on deck; she shifted her look to the heavy monkey's fist that swung at the end of the line as he gathered up the coils.

  He frightened her.

  "I thought I asked everyone to leave," she said, her voice tense.

  "Ask, nothing. You shouted everyone off this vessel," he said with a slow smile as he hung the neatly coiled heaving line on a belaying pin.

  "Without success, obviously." She watched him cautiously as he ran his gaze up the length of the spruce mast, itself the thickness of a man's waist, until it was lost in the night sky.

  "Wants a good oiling," he commented, shifting that inscrutable look to her face.

  She took it personally, as if he'd told her her skin was too dry. "We keep the Virginia well enough," she answered tartly, emphasizing the "we."

  "That's her name? And she was built—?"

  "Thomaston, Maine."

  "Year?"

  "1872."

  "And rebuilt since then, of course."

  Laura nodded; she'd been through this sequence of questions before. "The first time, in 1903; and again when my husband bought her fifteen years ago."

  "You couldn't have been around then." The smile again; lazy, not really interested, making small talk, just passing through.

  "Her decks were rotten. It was a big job," Laura said, as if he'd never spoken. She stood up. "It's been an eventful but very long evening," she said, not without irony, hoping that he would go away. When he did not she added, "I ... I am grateful to you. But—"

  There was no question that he was enjoying her obvious discomfort. It was a dismaying situation. He stood, in no hurry, between her and her cabin. She was afraid to ask him off, but she was afraid to let him stay on. Well, damn it all! she thought helplessly. Will this night ever end?

  She watched him, still wary, as he ambled across the deck-space between them—she could not retreat without raising her skirts and climbing over the cordon. She was safe, she insisted to herself: hadn't he just satisfied himself with Marie? Like a cornered cat, she felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up as he lifted his arm and touched her right shoulder gently.

  "There will be a fair-sized bruise—one of a matching set," he added, nodding at her other shoulder. They'll take some explaining."

  Laura eased her sleeve up and was shocked to see that he was right: blood was gathering beneath the skin where each of Harry's fingers had clutched at her through her fury. So it hadn't been a dream, after all. She turned back to the stranger with a dazed look. Was this a dream, then?

  "I'm sorry I didn't come to your assistance earlier, but I ... ah ..."

  "That's all right," she interrupted, mortified by the whole conversation. "You probably dislocated his shoulder flipping him over the bulwark, and I think I broke Nellie's wrist. I call it even," she said with nervous humor.

  His brows arched appreciatively. "All in all, it sounds like you can handle things yourself."

  "I usually do. We do. I do." God. She turned away, dazzled by her own confusion.

  From behind her she heard him murmur, "They say that Newport throws a good party. I guess it's true."

  When she finally turned around, he was gone.

  ****

  Laura spent most of the night wondering how she was going to explain the bruises to Sam. She wondered about many other things: about the effect of the evening on Neil; about the kind of woman who was drawn to the waterfront, and the type of man; about her nonchalant rescuer; about her own almost laughable naïveté.

  But most of all she wondered about what Sam would say when he saw the bruises.

  At six a.m. she decided that she was awake, though she'd never been asleep. Red-eyed and haggard, she dragged herself out of her berth to make breakfast for Neil and Billy, who on Sunday liked to get in a bit of fishing before Laura hauled Neil off to whatever Sunday services were being held nearby.

  In the Powers family it was a Sunday tradition imported by Sam's mother, a Bermudian, to have a breakfast of salt cod and boiled potatoes. Laura had left the salted fish to soak overnight (nothing short of the scuttling of the Virginia could have prevented her from her routine); and now she put it in a pot to boil. Normally Neil would have been in the galley with his mother, stealing sips of her coffee and feeling grown-up. It was her special time alone with him, while Sam slept in. Today, of course, Sam would not be free from his training to join them until the afternoon; but that was not the reason that Neil had not rushed, as he always did, to the galley on this particular Sunday morning.

  Laura slid aside the hoops of the heavy curtain that separated the forecastle from the cargo area and called softly to her son. "Neil? Still asleep?" In the soft morning light she watched as her son's eyes fluttered, then remained resolutely closed.

  Billy's bunk opposite was empty; obviously he hadn't made it back last night. For once Laura was grateful. She stepped up on a bronze foothold, then sat alongside her son in his narrow, cozy berth. Sweeping the blond hairs of his head back out of his eyes she said gently, "The coffee's on."

  Neil frowned, as though he were deep in sleep, and then let his eyes flutter reluctantly open. They scanned her face, looking for an apology for her cruel treatment of him the night before, then opened wider. "Mama!" he whispered, aghast. "What's happened to your arm?"

  The sleeves of Laura's dress were shorter than she'd thought. Glancing carelessly at the ugly discolorations, she said, "Oh, that. You know how we're always getting black and blue on board the boat. I banged into something."

  "It looks like a hand," he said in a voice filled with wonder. "Does it hurt?"

  "Hardly at all," she said with a smile. "Are you getting up, sleepyhead?"

  "Did they try to"—he took a deep breath—"to kill you last night, Mama?"

  "What an idea!" she said faintly.

  His blue eyes were brilliant with tears. "I heard one of them say, 'I'll kill you.' I really did."

  It apparently never occurred to Neil that his mother—with her low, musical voice and her soft, loving eyes—could have been capable of the hysterical shrieking that had floated aft over the sounds of stamping feet and the jangle of the concertina. Not even after she threatened him. Not even after she nearly pushed him down his own companionway.

  Flushing, Laura murmured, "People—grown-ups too—sometimes scream and say things they don't mean. You know how you've shouted at Billy sometimes when you're mad at him. It doesn't mean you want to kill him."

  "But I've never said I wanted to kill him," Neil pursued with intractable logic.

  "That's just an expression, sweetheart. It means, 'I've had enough,' that's all."

  "I was scared, Mama," he confessed, sounding very ashamed but frightened still. "Will they come back?"

  "Not ever again. I promise. Now: about that coffee. Did I mention there's one blueberry cake left to go with it?"

  ****

  About an hour before Sam was due to arrive, the Virginia was boarded by a rather peculiar visitor: a neatly, almost prissily dressed gentleman of about fifty, as dainty and precise in his movements as in his dress. So innocuous was the visitor that Laura hesitated neither for herself nor for her son in inviting him aboard. He said he had come "on business," and she believed him.

  Mr. Angelina, as he called himself, settled down in a series of exquisite flutters on the cedar-decked cockpit seat and said, "I have come on behalf of my client, whom I shall not at this time name. He is having a retreat built on one of the more remote Bahama Islands, and to that end needs to have a certain amount of material—lumber, fixtures, that so
rt of thing—imported from up here. He has seen your advertisement and wonders whether your vessel would be capable of such transport."

  He crossed his legs as if he'd come to Sunday tea and leaned attentively toward Laura, waiting for her response.

  Taken aback, Laura answered, "Well, certainly she's capable—but in all candor, why would you choose a sailing schooner when you could have the material moved so much more quickly by steam?"

  He made a dismissive and rather pretty gesture. "Oh, speed is not of the essence in this case. As it happens, my client has—shall we say—alienated some of the locals by importing virtually all of his contractors from up here. Naturally you're aware that nearly all cargo down-island is still moved by sail. My client feels that a vessel such as your own can come and go more—shall we say—safely and freely than—shall we say—a steamer."

  Laura looked startled. "Oh, well—if it's a matter of sabotage!"

  "No, no, no, hardly that. Just ... possible unpleasantness." He diverted his look to the cuff of his well-pressed pants and picked off a microscopic fleck. When Laura remained silent he returned his gaze to her and said through pursed and very pink lips, "Naturally there will be compensation for that admittedly remote possibility."

  Laura found her voice again.

  ****

  As it happened, Sam was unable to spend the afternoon with them; a mechanical problem belowdecks on the Rainbow required his skills, and a messenger was sent with his regrets to the Virginia. Laura, not wishing to inform her husband by third party of their great good fortune, simply smiled happily and said, "Thank you." Sooner or later Sam would show up, and in the meantime there were advertisements to be posted in the paper and around town: if Laura was to be captain, she needed a first mate. Billy would never do: his body was agile, his brain was not.

  Laura had complete confidence in her own skills as a navigator, but she needed a backup, and she meant to have the best she could find. She could afford it. Mr. Angelina had offered her a fabulous sum to deliver his client's cargo. Laura had had to make all sorts of promises and give all kinds of warranties (meanwhile omitting to say that her husband would not be aboard), but she had a contract to show for her effort, and she was beside herself with pride and joy. She had two weeks in which to staff and prepare the Virginia. Plenty of time.