Diann Ducharme Read online

  a cognizant original v5 release october 21 2010

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Map

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  THE OUTER BANKS

  CHAPTER ONE

  Abigail Sinclair

  Nags Head, North Carolina

  June 18, 1868

  I walked about on the shore lifting up my hands, and my whole being, as I may say, wrapped up in the contemplation of my deliverance, making a thousand gestures and motions that I cannot describe, reflecting upon all my comrades that were drowned, and that there should not be one soul saved but myself …

  —ROBINSON CRUSOE

  I WAS THE FIRST PASSENGER OFF THE STEAMBOAT. MY FELLOW TRAVELERS had insisted, for I had spent the duration of the journey in the throes of boatsickness. Everyone, including my own mama and daddy, had watched me from afar, afraid to get their Sunday best too close to me.

  Behind me, I could hear them all lining up, eager to disembark, but I stood directly in the way, unable to make my way down the skinny pier toward land. Folks started to politely fuss at me, but Charlie and Martha, my younger brother and sister, began pushing on my backside, forcing me forward.

  Yet even as they jostled me along, I couldn’t take my eyes from the sight of the Outer Banks of North Carolina, stretching to the left and right at the end of the pier.

  Gone were the ordered, busy streets of Edenton that we had left behind. In their place was a strip of land where nature wouldn’t allow such regulation.

  Instead of brick buildings of commerce and law, there were giant dunes of beige sand that grew clear into the clouds. Instead of statues and lampposts, there were stunted and craggy trees that grew in the sand monsters’ shadows along the shoreline. Their gnarled branches blew obligingly in the brisk wind.

  Even the soundside watering town of Nags Head was unassuming, and so flat that I could see almost clear across the narrow island to the Atlantic Ocean. The hotel and surrounding white houses were tucked into the sand and foliage so nicely it was as if they had been planted there.

  But beyond all this was a shimmering in the eastern sky. I knew it was the ocean there, beneath the blue. I had never seen it in my life, and my heart began to beat faster in anticipation. I took a deep breath of the salty air, picked up my skirts, and started to run. I ran the way that I used to run when I was nine years old, when nothing mattered but the day on the plantation.

  Our housemaid, Winnie, hollered after me, but her voice was lost in the wind. I didn’t even think about Mama and Daddy, or what they’d have to say to me later. I heard Charlie and Martha scampering after me, squealing at the game. But I didn’t turn around. I just ran down the wooden pathway through the sand, my legs straining against my hoops.

  Soon, from the unfamiliar exercise, I felt myself gobbling great gulps of hot air, and drops of sweat were seeping like pricks of blood into my beige traveling dress. My heavy strawberry hair baked under my bonnet, and my hands cramped with the weight of my skirts and the bunched-up parasol.

  But I didn’t slow until I heard a rhythmic crashing and sizzling. The wooden planks came to an end in a wide plane of sand, which met naturally and directly with the object of my affection.

  “Ocean,” I said breathlessly, as the wind whipped wayward strands of hair into my open mouth. Pelicans cruised like soldiers down the war zone of water, white-capped breakers marching and ebbing back, then crashing even harder. A few large ships inched along the choppy horizon.

  Happy vacationers were everywhere. Gloved and bonneted women strolled with parasols, and the men splashed in the surf or even ventured out to swim in the rough water. Charlie and Martha whooped like orangutans and dashed past me to touch the shuddering water, feel with tentative hands whether it was warm or cold, but I couldn’t move.

  I squatted and carefully plopped down on my left hip on the sand, still sucking in the air. I must have run almost a mile from sound to sea, the entire width of the island here. My uncle Jack would have whistled his approval. To see a sight like this, he would have run along beside me, forgetting that a young lady of my seventeen years should not be running anywhere.

  I had brought along a piece of Uncle Jack, a letter that he had written to me right before he died of dysentery during the war. I hadn’t wanted to leave it at home, buried in the dresser where I kept a book of scraps, stuffed with dozens of Uncle Jack’s letters, two tintypes, and even some of his auburn hair from a forgotten brush.

  His last letter was by far the most precious to me. I tried not to handle it so much these days, because the paper was thinning out something terrible. But sometimes all I wanted to do was touch it, for I had memorized the cramped-up words long ago. And too, the letter still smelled vaguely of bark-oil tea and dirty linens, a smell that I now associated with death.

  But on this day, I couldn’t help myself.

  Keeping one eye on the children, I wiggled my reticule from my skirts and took out the letter. It whipped in the strong wind as I read.

  February 7, 1865

  North Carolina Hospital, Petersburg, Virginia

  My Dear Little Red Reb,

  You’ll have to excuse my penmanship here. I’ve been curled up on my right side for so long that my writing hand’s gone numb. This position suits me best, though, because it quiets the sizzling in my belly a bit. I tell you, sometimes I wish I had been shot clean through the skull. This quickstep is the devil’s business. You folks back home wouldn’t even know me, I’ve lost so much flesh. I bet I’m skinnier than you are. Don’t tell your daddy I said this, but I’m starting to think that he was the smart one of the both of us. I should have just stayed put. Edenton looks just like heaven in my mind, these days.

  I got this cheap paper from the blue-lipped nurse that creeps around here. I don’t like her much, mostly because of the sad look in her eyes. She’s young, just a little older than you are now. But she isn’t near as pretty as you, and like I said, she’s lacking in enthusiasm. ’Course, I’d never say that about you, niece!

  Which reminds me, your daddy said in his previous letter that you’ve been reading a lot these days. He says that you’re going to drive him into bankruptcy with all of your book buying! I’ve been trying to picture my fiery Reb with her nose stuck in a book, just like her mama, I guess. It got me to thinking that I’d like to read one of those books myself. You’re likely having a good laugh right now. But there isn’t much decent to read in this hospital. I guess folks don’t think sickly soldiers are the reading kind of men, and I must admit, I feel a little rusty at the exercise. Why don’t you send me one of your favorites with your next letter?

  It also might do you some good to get out of doors once in a while. Tell your daddy that I said to take Ace of Spades for a ride every now and then. Give the boy some sugar lumps for me, will you? I can just see you and me riding him, the way we used to. I can feel those ribbons of yours flying in my face. You never did holler, even when we were running through rivers. It’s those kinds of thoughts that get me through these awful days. I don’t see pretty Mary Virginia Spellman or even Annabelle Putnam in my head anymore. I pictur
e a pair of steady green eyes and red eyelashes, and I grit my teeth and bear it. I try not to holler.

  I sure hope I can get better and come on home to you and the family. I miss you all more than Winnie’s butter biscuits. But if I don’t make it out of this hospital, I hope you remember me kindly. Not as this run-down, sickly soldier, but as your uncle, holding you tight on the best horse I ever had.

  I’ve got high hopes for you, so don’t let me down.

  As ever, your devoted uncle,

  Jack Sinclair

  I swallowed hard and then yelled at Charlie to pull up the legs of his trousers. My siblings were already soaked to the skin, but I couldn’t muster up much of a care. I pinched Uncle Jack’s letter so tightly between thumb and forefinger that I feared it would rip in the bullying wind, but I couldn’t put it away just yet.

  The biggest regret of my life was that I never got to send Uncle Jack a book. He died before his last letter had even reached me.

  It was awful to feature someone dying from dysentery, especially Uncle Jack, who probably came out of Grandma Marian’s womb with a grin on his face. I couldn’t ever remember him acting low-down.

  Folks liked to comment on our similar dispositions and how they made us as close as any niece and uncle could be without it seeming sinful. His big hand on my head was a constant reminder of his need to father, and of my need to be parented. We knew this about each other, but never quite said so. It was just there, hovering between us as thick as the humidity on an Edenton noon in August, this paucity of attention from my own mama and daddy. We all lived in the same house, but Mama and Daddy made their true homes inside their minds, with the front doors closed to all but themselves.

  In spite of this coldness, there was a spirit in me that seeked out the heat. I’d meander through the outbuildings to find my uncle, and the slaves would point him out to me with pity on their faces. Even they knew that I was starved for affection; even they knew that Uncle Jack would welcome his niece by pulling her onto his stallion with an easy tug on her reaching arm.

  It didn’t feel wrong that I loved my uncle more than my own daddy. And when he died, I lost a father.

  The threadbare Confederate soldiers delivered Uncle Jack to us in a coffin that needed only two skinny men to carry it. And when we looked on his embalmed body before the burial, he appeared to be a child dressed in an officer’s uniform, the material bunched on him so badly. I could just imagine the disease that killed him, still hiding inside that body, nibbling and gnawing ’til there was nothing left of the once-dimpled, potbellied Uncle Jack that I’d known.

  The day after his funeral we had to put his beloved stallion down. Ace was old and sickly, but he refused to die. ’Course, we all knew that he was waiting for his master to come home. When I watched the wagon bearing his huge black body make its way down the long pathway away from the house, my tears finally started to flow.

  Now I shuddered slightly in the breeze and carefully placed the letter inside the reticule. Then I gazed up the beach, this beach that Daddy had just had to build a house on.

  Daddy had showed us the Outer Banks on a creased United States map one day after midday dinner about a year ago. He traced the tip of his long, freckled index finger down the crooked chain of barrier islands that skipped delicately from the Virginia line down along the North Carolina coast for 175 miles.

  It had always been accepted that the islands were both a blessing and a curse for North Carolina. They protected the state from all that ocean, but at the same time they hemmed it in, frustrating state commerce and travel. As such, North Carolina was an important victory for the Yankees, back during the war. When they took the state, they unlocked all the numerous waterways, giving their army access to the South and her valuables.

  The fragile Banks curve eastward from the mainland, like the beak of a falcon, to an unprecedented twenty miles into the Atlantic Ocean. At the farthest eastern tip of the beak, at Cape Hatteras, two strong currents fight like cats and dogs, causing most any ship to founder helplessly on the shifting shoals. Folks affectionately refer to the area as the Graveyard of the Atlantic, due to the countless ship carcasses that have emerged from the waves.

  Looking at that map by myself, I wouldn’t have even noticed the islands, they were so thin. They looked as if a dull writing pencil had accidentally been left on the map, creating a snaky mark. Those islands seemed so vulnerable, stuck in between the hulking land mass of America and the wide-open sea.

  Their stubborn reaching into the ocean, their blatant tempting of fate, captivated me, yet filled me with fear, and I took the map to bed that night, studying it by flickering candlelight.

  The islands weren’t far from our hometown of Edenton—just sixty or so miles due east across the Albemarle Sound. But to me they were as far away as the moon, and just as mysterious.

  I had heard that the locals there descended from shipwrecked sailors and runaways who used to lure ships to their fate by tying a lantern around the neck of a horse at night. They would lead the nag up and down the shore, the bobbing lantern resembling light from another ship. The unsuspecting sailors would steer for the light, only to founder in the shallow waters near land, where the men would ransack the wrecked ship and take its contents for their own.

  Hence the glorious name “Nags Head.” I thought that it was a right clever trick, for such simple men.

  Daddy hunted all the time back in Edenton, so much so that folks joked about Daddy’s arm being a rifle instead of mere bone. I swear, he talks nicer to his pack of hounds than he does to his own children. Needless to say, most of the meat on our dining room table Daddy shot and killed himself.

  He couldn’t wait to explore the shallow yet wide sounds and the maze of inlets that separated the Banks from the mainland. He had already hired a local guide for the summer weekends, to show him the best spots for hooking fish.

  He visited the Banks last fall to scout land for our summer cottage, and when he returned, his cart full of dead geese and ducks, he went on and on about the large numbers of waterfowl that visited the sounds on their migratory routes. And come suppertime, we all agreed that the Currituck bird meat was the most savory we had ever eaten.

  My breath recovered, I clambered to my feet and looked to the north, where a handful of rustic houses sprouted from the sand. They were recently built, defying the more sensible soundside tradition, about two or three hundred flattened feet away from the ocean. These boxy cottages looked to be constructed with precaution in mind, with no thought whatsoever to opulence.

  From what I had gathered from Mama and Daddy, the first cottage to be built on the ocean side was owned by the Dr. Pool family from Elizabeth City. I thought the Pool house must be the one whose wood had already darkened from its exposure to the endless barrage of salt and wind.

  Word had it that Dr. Pool had already purchased a ribbon of land—about fifty acres—that stretched north from the hotel property up along the shore, and was selling the lots for a dollar apiece to his friends back home. He disliked the loneliness of ocean living, or so we had heard.

  But at least those few cottages had one another for company.

  Far south down the beach, I could barely see what I knew to be our cottage. It stood alone, an arrogant outcast. And the more I gaped down the shore, the more it occurred to me how eccentric, how completely insane the cottage appeared, all alone on an expanse of defenseless sand. It looked to be the home of a madman.

  Yet at the same time it looked like some sort of miracle, a product of genius. Standing there by the sea, where nothing could live for long, it threw out a dare.

  I began to walk south down the beach, faster and faster, my shoes filling with sand, until I came right up to the cottage’s porch steps, unfolding like a silent welcome into the sand. It was even smaller than I’d thought it might be. It couldn’t have been more different from our plantation home, which was, at the beginning of the war, one of the finest homes in Edenton.

  For more than a
hundred years, the Great House back home had been called, for lack of a more creative moniker, “Sinclair House.” It was a three-story brick Georgian structure with fifteen high-ceilinged rooms. It had taken almost twenty years to build, back in the early eighteenth century. This beach cottage was just a little larger than our kitchen house.

  The squat, two-story square, covered with cedar shingles, supported an isosceles roof that sat substantially on the second floor. Wide porches embraced the cottage on all sides, and the entire structure was perched atop numerous pilings embedded in the sand. Wood shutters yawned open with prop sticks to let the ocean breezes blow through the windows, and doors appeared to open to the interior on both the western and eastern sides.

  The only thing that wasn’t tight, shingled wood was the brick chimney poking obscurely from the northeastern side of the house.

  The kitchen jutted out a bit from the southwestern side of the house, and the privy and an adjacent washhouse stood nearby. A little stable for our horses and cow had been built a hundred yards south, and the water pump had already been dug, down to the layer of freshwater that lay beneath the sand.

  With the cotton and tobacco crops already growing strong at home, Mama, Martha, Charlie, and I would live here through the beginning of September, with Daddy tending to business in Edenton during the week and visiting every Saturday and Sunday. If the cottage didn’t get washed away by the ocean, we’d return here every summer after this one. Already, I didn’t think I would ever want to leave.