By The Sea, Book Three: Laura Read online

  That night Neil slept soundly, confident once more that neither he nor his mother was going to be killed, and Laura and Billy stayed up late drawing up a list of work to be done to prepare the Virginia for her longest journey yet.

  "Some of the starboard lanyards seem a touch rotted," Laura said as she noted the problem on her growing list. "And at least one of the deadeyes they're rove through is split almost in two."

  "And the middle rudder pintle looks like it might be pulling away from the transom," Billy added. "I seen it when we was fishin' off the stern the other day."

  "We can't fix that in time!" cried Laura. "Why didn't you tell me this before?"

  Billy shrugged. "Maybe it ain't serious."

  And so it went, with every conceivable repair item being added to a much-too-long list. After Billy finally went off to bed, Laura stared at her list thoughtfully. They had two weeks. She carefully tore the list into two: a primary and a secondary.

  They had two weeks.

  Laura stared some more, then tore the primary list into two and threw out the original secondary one. Yes. They could be ready in time.

  Work began on Monday. Laura sent Billy up the foremast to go over every linear inch of rigging, looking for frayed or rotten sections. After he came down she had him hoist her up in the bosun's seat to check his findings. That night they huddled over the list in the lamplit galley, backs stiff, legs aching, pelvic bones worn raw from sitting and bracing on the small oak bosun's seat high above deck level. On Tuesday they tackled the mainmast.

  Billy spent the next several days after that underwater, scrubbing the Virginia's foul bottom. There were patches of barnacles everywhere, and he hacked away at them the best he could with the breath he possessed. When he climbed back aboard at the end of the day wrinkled and exhausted, Laura winced and turned away. It had to be done.

  "Mama!" begged Neil on the fourth day. "Can I at least go for a little row around the harbor—before the sea breeze makes up?"

  Laura was patching their old and very tired gollywobbler, a light-weather sail that had seen better years. She looked up at her son—eight years old, and doing the work of a grown man—and said, "Do you think you've really fixed the leak above your berth?"

  He nodded vigorously. "Oh yes. You could see where the seam was split wide open."

  "Because we'll be taking seas across the bow a lot more of the time, and if it leaks down into your bed, I don't want you to come creeping aft into our berth, saying yours is too wet."

  Neil thought about that. "But without Daddy there will be room for me, won't there?" His eyes held hers in a plaintive look.

  Laura put down her palm and needle and sighed. "No, there won't be room for you there anymore, darling. You're much too grown-up for that. You have your own berth now, just like Billy, just like the new crew member will have. And some day when you marry, you'll have a bigger berth like I do, and your wife will stay in it with you. But for now, you get to sleep alone, just like the rest of the grown-up crew."

  Laura never knew how to handle Neil's frequent little forays for affection. He was a little too attached to her, that she knew; it was one of the reasons she had begun to think that sooner or later they would have to move ashore. But that was tomorrow's problem.

  "Anyway, you've been very grown-up about tackling your work list, and I think you've earned the morning off. Don't you?"

  The crushed look of rejection began to fade from Neil's face. "You bet I have," he agreed, somewhat mollified.

  "Do I get a hug before you go?" asked Laura, holding her arms out to him.

  A little stiffly, Neil allowed his mother to embrace him. She watched him scramble over the side for his dory, her little stripling with the sweet high voice of a child and the tortured thought processes of a Supreme Court justice. If only he didn't weigh every little thing. Ah, well, she thought, turning back to the torn gollywobbler, it's just a stage.

  The day passed for Laura like all the others that week—with one eye on the repair, one eye on the list. The only interruption came in the form of a steady stream of applicants for the job of first mate. By noon Laura had interviewed and quickly dismissed four of them: an unemployed baker, a millworker eager to see the world, and two ordinary seamen. As usual, no one had bothered to be guided by her list of qualifications. Not one among them had ever been aboard a sailing vessel.

  "I'm worried," Laura admitted to Billy after the last one had been sent politely packing. "Who in the world understands coasting schooners nowadays? What if we can't find anyone?"

  "Then you and me'll do it. Didn't we sail the Ginny ourselves, just about, when Sam busted his wrist that time?"

  "That was a downhill run in twelve knots of wind from Gloucester to Camden, Billy. I could've done that trip myself."

  "See? What'd I tell you?" He beamed encouragingly.

  "Billy—oh, Billy. Never mind." Laura tweaked his cap down over his eyes and took her lunch, a thick slab of bread smeared over with pork fat, over to a cool spot in the shadow of the foremast.

  Before she sat down for her precious midday break, she scanned Brenton Cove for Neil's dory; he'd been hovering much too close to the Rainbow, she'd noticed earlier. Sam had given explicit directions that his family were to keep their distance and let him get on with his training. Laura had understood Sam's attitude completely; but Neil, as he always did, saw rejection where there was none. To him it was a case of his father choosing the rich man's Rainbow over the poor family's Virginia; of preferring his twenty-five teammates to his single, solitary son. So whenever he could he would sneak up to the Rainbow: he wanted to know why.

  But he wasn't there now, and Laura sat down to lunch.

  The day was hazy, not quite foggy, and muggy, the kind of day that dulls the reflexes and makes reversals intolerable. Billy had been suffering a series of such reversals all morning long; he was trying to repair the Virginia's small portable donkey-engine, used to help lift heavy cargo on board. But Billy, unlike most males, was born without the necessary genes to put mechanical objects right. Every once in a while a robust curse came drifting over to Laura, who feared and despised the little engine even more than Billy did. She pretended not to hear him.

  She was leaning against the mast, eyes half-closed savoring one last moment of respite from The List, when she noticed someone sauntering down the wharf toward the Virginia. A sailor walks along a wharf differently from a lubber: he stays closer to it, somehow, as if it might lurch to port or starboard on a gust of wind. And he holds his body with a certain tension, ready to roll with the dock, should a sudden sea lift them both together on their beam-ends. It makes no difference to him that the dock is firmly anchored to the sea bottom by dozens of pilings: a sailor, a true man of the sea, is always compensating.

  When Laura had last seen the man it was dark and she had had other things on her mind than whether he derived from the land or the sea.

  Chapter 6

  "Good afternoon," he said simply, looking somehow even more disreputable in the noonday sun. "May I come aboard?"

  "There is no dance tonight," Laura said, feeling her cheeks go hot and the faded bruises on her arms suddenly throb in sympathy. "Or ever again."

  "Oh, I assumed that," he said easily. "You are Laura Powers, are you not?"

  She nodded.

  "Do you still need a mate?"

  "Why do you ask?" she said, wondering. But she felt bound to add, "The position hasn't been filled yet."

  "Good. I think I may be your man."

  Him? His confidence rankled her. So she stood up, walked over to the boarding steps as self-assuredly as she knew how, and said, "Before you even trouble to come aboard, may I ask if you've any experience on a coasting schooner?"

  "No," he answered honestly enough. "But I was mate on a schooner-yacht—she was a hundred and forty-odd feet—during the Pacific leg of an around-the-world cruise."

  "Oh." She faltered, then rallied. "But not the whole way around? I suppose you managed to pu
t her up on a reef?"

  He took in Laura's testiness, then answered calmly, "No. The owner fell overboard in Tonga—just outside the harbor at Neiafu, Vava'u—and drowned. The yacht changed hands and the new owner brought his own captain and crew."

  Tonga. Vava'u. The names sounded as ordinary on his lips as Boston and Providence.

  "Oh? How did the owner fall overboard?" she asked, without having any idea why.

  "Not because I pushed him, if that's what you mean. He was drunk."

  "Oh? So he's dead?" she said, continuing to listen to herself with amazement. "Then how can I check him out as a reference?"

  "I didn't offer him as a reference."

  "Well, if you're not going to cooperate—"

  "Lady! I thought you were looking for a first mate, not a second character for a one-man play." He allowed himself a short, ironic laugh. "This has been very ... educational. Bye." He threw her a jaunty salute and turned to leave.

  "Wait!"

  He stopped and she said, "I am looking for a first mate. If you want to talk about it …."

  He seemed to consider whether he wanted to or not anymore, leaving Laura with absolutely nothing to do but stare at her feet or try to guess how old he was. She stared at her feet.

  He came aboard, which caused her immense relief—a reaction she needed to analyze further—and they went aft to the cockpit, right past Billy, who was hovering over the donkey-engine like an irritated prospector over a balky pack mule. The two men nodded, Laura held her breath, and Billy went back to cursing the machine; he did not recognize their guest of the previous week.

  Laura sat down rather demurely (considering that she was wearing Sam's pants, drawn in at the waist with a length of manila line), took a deep breath, and launched into the interview. She explained her husband's absence and the contract in a few words, skipping the business of the angry Bahamian locals, and when her applicant signaled his interest in taking on the job, said, "I am sorry. I haven't even asked your name."

  He'd been glancing around the schooner observantly as she was speaking. Now he turned and said, "Colin Durant."

  "Colin Durant." She turned the name over slowly, like the pages of a foreign-language dictionary. His eyes, she saw, were heavily lashed, his cheekbones high. Yes, he might have French in him. But her visceral response was to distrust him, starting with his name: it sounded made up to her. "Where are you from, Mr. Durant?"

  He smiled and said, "That's a tough one. Can we start with something easier, like, can I fix that sputtering donkey-engine?"

  She set her chin in the way she had. "No, we can start with where are you from?"

  A veil dropped over his chameleon eyes, and the green in them retreated behind the brown. "I was born in Nantes, spent my childhood in Brest, my teenage years in Guadeloupe, and the time after that"—he shrugged—"all over."

  "Where did you learn to sail?"

  "All over."

  "Where did you learn to speak English?"

  "All over."

  "You don't have an accent."

  "You're not listening." He shifted into the devastatingly charming lilt of a Frenchman just off the boat: "At what hour leaves the next bus for, how do you say, the Flat Bush?"

  Startled by the transformation, Laura burst into nervous, instantly infatuated laughter. But she did not believe him. "You're an American," she insisted, still smiling.

  The eyebrows lifted slightly. "Suit yourself."

  For a moment she was silent. "What do you know about celestial navigation?" she finally asked, cool and formal once more.

  "Not my strong suit," he admitted. "I know which way is up on a sextant; I get by. On the other hand, I consider myself a positive genius at dead-reckoning," he added without a smile.

  Another Sam. Laura distrusted dead-reckoning. It was too intuitive for her, almost an art. She preferred precise observations of celestial bodies to tell her where she was on the ocean. On the other hand, her confidence did tend to sink on a cloudy day. Colin Durant, like her husband, would complement her navigational skills well. It was very annoying.

  She looked for another way out of having to hire him. Desperate as she was, at the moment Laura was ranking him dead last as a candidate.

  "Would you be comfortable going aloft?" she asked suddenly. "Billy, there, often needs help when the weather pipes up."

  He seemed amused by the question. "Would you like a demonstration?"

  "No—no, I believe you. You would have to share the crew's quarters forward, of course; there is no private stateroom for the mate."

  He nodded.

  "The food is very simple; we aren't a yacht."

  "Indeed."

  In a burst of desperate candor she added, "I feel bound to tell you that there may be trouble at the other end." She told him about the disgruntled Bahamians.

  To no avail. He wanted the job. "All right then, Mr. Durant. Naturally I will need to complete my interviews. Where may I reach you?"

  "Christ!" was all he said. Apparently it had not occurred to him that Laura would consider anyone else. But he recovered his sang-froid and said, "You can write to me in care of the YMCA here in town."

  "Thank you. I'll make a note of it."

  He chose not to use the boarding steps, but instead swung himself over the bulwarks, landing softly on both feet. Laura decided he was no more than thirty-five, still young enough not to need to ration his energy.

  He hooked his thumbs in his hip pockets and took one last sweeping look at the Virginia, no longer young; at Billy, altogether too young; at Laura, a woman in a man's domain.

  "One thing," he added. "Who's the captain?"

  Laura's cool composure collapsed like a pierced balloon. Her eyes opened wide and she said, "I am. Who did you think I was—the secretary?"

  He shook his head. "Definitely not. I don't see you behind a desk. Good afternoon."

  Billy paused on his way below decks to stare down the wharf at their departing visitor. "Does that mean he thinks you're too stupid to type?" he asked indignantly.

  "Oh, shut up, Billy!"

  ****

  When Neil returned an hour later it was to his favorite lunch: canned beans spiced with lots of molasses and mustard, and cornbread. It was part of his mother's effort to make up for having hurt him. He understood that; in fact, he was counting on it. Because he'd done something wrong on his little half-holiday. He'd broken his word to her. But if his mother was feeling guilty herself, she might not get too angry about it.

  He shoveled the beans into his mouth with a spoon so that he wouldn't miss any of the sweet juice, and studied his mother as she climbed up into the pilot berth to paint the underside of the starboard deck. She was wearing his father's pants and had her hair bound up in a red kerchief, but she looked pretty anyway. Probably it was her eyes: they were slanted and very bright. They seemed to invite you to join in a special secret, only he never could figure out what the secret was. Once his mother had whispered that she was part Sioux Indian, only not to tell. With his blond hair and blue eyes, Neil himself didn't look anything at all like an Indian. Maybe that was why he could never understand the secret.

  They talked back and forth about the Rainbow for a bit, but his mother seemed to want to change the subject, though Neil couldn't understand why. It was the most important thing in the world. And besides, he still had to confess about having gone aboard it.

  "Mama," he began cautiously, "Dad says to keep supper warm for him tonight."

  His mother paused mid-stroke in her painting and looked at him. "When did you talk with your father?"

  "I saw him when I got kind of near the Rainbow," he said, pressing a cornbread crumb into his forefinger and licking it carefully clean.

  "Just how near the Rainbow were you, exactly?"

  "Well, sort of on it."

  "I don't believe it!" she said, shocked. "What did your father say?"

  "He didn't yell or anything. He just said, have supper warm."

  "But he
isn't free until Sunday. Did he say why he was coming tonight?"

  Neil made an odd, nervous little smacking sound with his lips. "I think to talk about the trip."

  His mother's dark eyes glittered. "Neil! You didn't tell him!"

  "I didn't mean to, Mama. Honest. It just slipped out."

  Her face was flushed and angry. "Oh, never mind. It was absurd to entrust something like that—"

  Dismayed, he seized on the word. "You can trust me, Mama. You always can trust me! You know you can!"

  "Oh, yes," she said dryly. "You've just proven that." And she went back to her painting in stony silence.

  He wanted to point out that he hadn't said a word about the horrible dance party on board, but then he would be breaking his promise not to mention it. How unfair could you get?

  That night he went to bed when it was still light out, claiming that he didn't feel well. He heard a school of snappers jumping madly around the boat, but he wouldn't have ventured out of his berth even if it meant filling the whole cockpit with them.

  Eventually he heard his father's voice: "That's too much. I'm not hungry. Give me half that."

  There was a pause and then his father said, "Well? What are you up to now?"

  And then Neil heard his mother's voice, low, indistinct, the tone she used when she did not want him to hear. She knew how to speak some French, and some Swedish, and even a little Polish. But none of them did her any good in keeping things from Neil, because his father only understood English. Most of her English, anyway.

  "Are you daft?" shouted his father in response. "I said we'd go back to hauling, not you'd go back."

  His mother again, low, urgent.

  And then his father: "I don't give a rat's ass if he can hear me! He should hear this. God knows it affects him. If you think you're going to go sailing off with my son and my boat—"