Diann Ducharme Read online

  I guessed it would take Justus a good while to load and transport our belongings in the carts. Justus was a rail-skinny, but mysteriously strong, twenty-year-old field hand from home. He was always late, always gone when needed. When he did manage to make his appearance, it was with a guilt-free expression of contentment. I personally thought it was funny, but no one else in my family got the joke.

  I pictured Daddy on the docks, standing there in his finery while Justus loaded the cart with our numerous cases and cages of chickens. At least Hannah, Justus’s headstrong thirteen-year-old sister, was already at the cottage, readying it for our arrival. It would mean one less thorn in Daddy’s side.

  I climbed the five long steps up to the porch, my hooped dress scratching the raw wood with each step. I pulled back the screen and opened the door, which still smelled of freshly cut pine.

  “Hannah?” I called inside. “We’re here!”

  Hannah hollered her greetings from upstairs, the room where Mama and Daddy would sleep. I could hear her footsteps banging through the thin ceiling.

  The sun from the windows gave an amber glow to the parlor, which was comfortably outfitted with a wide array of antique Sinclair furniture. The rug that covered the squeaky pine floor was a tread-softened blend of beige, blue, and red, and the old mahogany dining table, which matched the accompanying glass-fronted china cabinet, was draped with a white linen tablecloth and already boasted silver candlesticks and a china bowl full of shiny green apples.

  Yet the walls were left unfinished, like a log cabin in the mountains, with no paint or plaster to cover the bare wood. No curtains were hung, and the raised panes of glass in the windows were already smudged with salt. I inhaled the scent of sea and freshly starched linen and smiled. Finery and rawness seemed to be everywhere.

  The bedroom downstairs was much smaller than my bedroom at home, but I found the room so refreshing, with its light blue and white quilts and view of the ocean through the two windows, that it didn’t seem to matter, at least for that moment, that I was sharing such a small space with my brother and sister.

  With sodden clothing and salt-stiff hair, Charlie and Martha tore through the house and tumbled onto their beds while I gazed out the window. The sun reflected off the sand, so that I had to shade my eyes, even indoors. Just the change in light would take some getting used to.

  “Tickle me, Abby!” ordered Charlie. I reached over to wiggle my fingers into Charlie’s taut midsection. He jerked into a little ball, gasping for air and adjusting his authentic pirate eye patch, given to him by a collector friend of Daddy’s. Even Martha, usually trying so hard to be a lady, tickled Charlie until he cried for mercy.

  Soon I heard the creak of the oxcart and Justus’s monotonous rambling. I went to greet them, and through the screen door I saw Mama ascending the front steps. Her tall, angular form darkened the doorway, blocking out the sparkling sunlight. She folded her parasol and gripped it easily in one pale, bony hand. She then walked slowly around the room, running a hand over the shiny wood of the dining chairs.

  Mama, with her sunlight hair and creamy, unwrinkled complexion, could have been truly beautiful. Instead, her acidity caused her small, carved features to appear demonic and skeletal rather than aristocratic.

  There was only one attribute of hers that appealed to me—her ice pick–sharp mind. Yet her big brain thought too much about everything, especially during casual conversation. Even over tea and sandwiches, she came off as socially inept and even inconsiderate, especially with well-bred women from town, who usually wanted to gossip.

  Only we knew that beneath the awkward exterior coursed something much darker than poor social skills.

  “What do you think you were doing, Abigail?” she seethed. “You’ll be the talk of society out here for the entire summer!”

  I tried to form coherent syllables for her. She expected composure and reason, especially during an argument. “I was excited to see the ocean, Mama. I wanted to compare the real thing to the image that I had in my head …”

  She calmly stood her parasol by the door and walked over to me. “No, Abigail, you ran before you utilized the bright mind that God gave you. I ask you, daughter, why do we pay good money for your clothing, if you’re going to treat it with such disrespect?”

  She jerked my arms up to inspect the sweat stains that had bloomed on the linen during my unaccustomed exercise, then bent over to see the snags and sand along the hem. Charlie and Martha peered at me quietly from the bedroom doorway.

  Her blue eyes flashed. “This dress is ruined,” she hissed. “Winnifred, take Abigail to her room at once and remove this sordid piece of clothing. I want you to wash it and mend it and take it to a young woman of Abigail’s age here on the island. A girl who will appreciate a dress of such quality, and treat it with respect.”

  Even though it stung, her anger was well-founded, and I hung my head in regret. Two months before our departure for Nags Head, Mama had ordered a dozen dresses for me, despite the current lack of money for such luxuries. Their ripples of silk and linen looked like mountains in springtime, with the lace like dustings of late-season snow.

  Winnie hurried over, looking wild with some of her rebellious curls peeking from her scarf. She cut an I-told-you-so look at me, one of her favorite expressions. Mama then glided in her layer-cake skirts over to the narrow steps leading to the upstairs bedroom, looking as regal as she did ascending the spiral staircase back home.

  Her voice had grown thin and tired, though. “Foolish girls will never become the wives of doctors. You’d better pray that Hector doesn’t hear of your vulgar display of athleticism.”

  I should have known that it all went back to Hector Newman’s courtship, a constant topic of conversation with Mama. She would never tire of it until I was finally married off.

  “No more running,” she said.

  Winnie quickly undressed me in my bedroom and, with a few sad shakes of her head, took the dress with her when she left. Suddenly exhausted, I plopped down on the little bed, still in my corset and petticoats. The rest felt so good that I stretched out, hoping the old bed was at least somewhat comfortable. And then I couldn’t help myself. I closed my eyes, even though Hannah poked fun at my belled-out hoops as she unpacked my cases.

  The room had grown warm in the afternoon sun. I didn’t mind the heat, though, since I was trying to shake out the early-spring chill that still encircled my bones. The Union-sent wind wanted to remind us, even these three years later, who it was that kicked our Southern faces into the dirt of our sin. Those cold blasts blew through the tall rooms and found us unrepentant rebels, bluing our lips and numbing our fingers and noses.

  During the war, Mama, Martha, and I had kept close to the fireplace in cold weather, knitting socks and scarves for the soldiers. I knit so much one winter that I’m sure I left blood on some of the poor men’s woolens. With Uncle Jack constantly in mind, I was one of the most active young supporters of the cause in Edenton. I recounted for him, in my countless letters, my many self-appointed responsibilities. He subsequently nicknamed me “Little Red Reb,” which made me unaccountably proud.

  Yet here, at this isolated cottage by the sea, the memories of those cold-needle days without Uncle Jack seemed hazy and hard to reach. Perhaps this Outer Banks house would help us all to forget, to wash our memories as clean as the seashells, so that we could start anew.

  At first Mama had questioned the sanity of building such a house as this. She said that if God had wished for humans to build their houses next to the sea, He wouldn’t have lined the beaches with sand that shifts its very nature with the changing tides.

  And I saw her point. I couldn’t see how a wooden house, no matter how well it was constructed, as Daddy argued it would be, would survive for long on the Atlantic Ocean’s sinking sand. But Daddy was insistent, as hopeful as I’d seen him in years. Just talking about the cottage caused his cheeks to flush and his voice to soar.

  Even so, the cottage had been a s
tretch for us. Most of our former slaves left us years ago, before the war had even ended, and Daddy had since had lots of trouble finding folks to work the land. And he preferred not to part with what was left of his money, especially if it was going to pay “lazy ingrates looking for handouts.”

  With no other options left for him, Daddy actually paid some of the straggling field hands to come to the island with a boat full of pine cut from our own land to construct the house according to plans that he himself drafted. Even with the nor’easters and such that hit the islands last fall and winter, the hands finished the cottage in six months flat. I wouldn’t call that lazy at all.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Abigail Sinclair

  June 19, 1868

  I gave humble and hearty thanks that God had been pleased to discover to me even that it was possible I might be more happy in this solitary condition than I should have been in a liberty of society and in all the pleasures of the world.

  —ROBINSON CRUSOE

  OUR FIRST FULL DAY IN NAGS HEAD UNFOLDED AS THICK AND WARM AS honey from the hive. There wasn’t a thing to do except eat, sleep, and daydream, and I imagined the days following like a stack of goose-down pillows, white and fluffy.

  No Shakespearean sonnets to learn, no Latin lessons to strain over. No more filling my head with things that had already happened, things already written. Nags Head was a whole new language.

  Anyone with warm blood in their veins would have felt the freedom, too. Charlie and Martha acted like very small jailbreaks, and Hannah was beside herself trying to keep them from sloshing into the wash too deeply. The hem of her dress was in a constant state of wetness.

  In typical fashion, Daddy had risen with the sun and left the cottage on his stallion for a day of fishing. Even though he had been all the way down at the stable, giving Justus instructions for saddling his stallion, Horatio, his booming voice had woken me from a light sleep. He had missed Winnie’s breakfast of ham and biscuits, though, so I felt I was doing better than he was.

  Mama was the only one who hadn’t taken well to the fresh air. She spent the day looking sickly and reading in a rocking chair on the porch, and I spent the day avoiding her, wearing my oldest skirt and shirtwaist. We were getting along like pie.

  After a long afternoon walk down the shore and an hour of reading Mama’s copy of Moby-Dick, I lumbered into the cottage with my hair coming loose from its pins and my forehead slick with perspiration. I couldn’t wait to clean myself up with a fresh tub of water and a cake of my favorite lavender soap. But on my way inside, I heard Daddy’s voice on the other side of the cottage.

  He was carrying on with such jocularity that I thought his companion was a good friend of his from home who had surprised us at the cottage, to see for himself our much-debated adventure. I cringed and tried to hurry to my bedroom to wash up before anyone caught sight of me looking so wretched. But as it turned out, I shouldn’t have been worried about my appearance; the man who accompanied Daddy inside wouldn’t have been fit for entry into Sinclair House.

  His deeply tanned face was disguised with streaky smudges of dirt and scruffy beard growth, and his hands and lower arms were encrusted with a layer of dark greenish grime. His hair appeared to be a shade of blond, but it was so unkempt that I couldn’t even tell what it would look like in a natural state.

  His brownish long-sleeved work shirt and trousers, which appeared to have never been washed or mended, hung shapelessly off his body. And he didn’t even see fit to wear shoes; his bare feet were two pieces of soiled leather. My tongue curled when I caught his odor of bloody fish, mixed with the scent of stale tobacco and sweat.

  Daddy, wearing his shiny riding boots, smart jacket, and top hat, didn’t seem fazed in the least by the man’s remarkable filth. He glanced at me as he stooped his imposing frame through the doorway and seemed not to notice either my improper appearance or my haste to escape the room.

  “Abigail, I’d like you to meet my guide, Benjamin Whimble. He’s showing me the best places to catch fish on the Outer Banks,” Daddy bellowed. “I tell you, I’ve never seen such a natural!”

  I guessed that this man would’ve been embarrassed to be seen in such a state, but he didn’t seem to give it a second thought. He shifted on his filthy feet and smiled sloppily.

  “Hey there, Miss Sinclair, good to meet you,” he drawled. He fidgeted with a worn cap, which he at least saw fit to remove before he came into the house.

  I clutched Moby-Dick to my chest and tried not to stare at his filthy feet. “How do you do, Mr. Whimble.”

  He snorted in glee. “Oh, you call me Ben. Ain’t no one ever called me Mr. Whimble afore, so I ain’t too used to hearing it. Fact, folks ’round here don’t even call my daddy Mr. Whimble, they just call him Tremblin’ Whimble, ’cause he makes men shake when he’s mad. And too, he’s getting on in age, so he kind of trembles when he talks now.”

  Daddy’s guffaw caught me by surprise, so that I clean forgot my manners. “Well then. I’ve got to be getting ready for supper now.”

  I scooted toward the doorway, but I hadn’t moved more than two paces when I heard him blurt, “Miss Sinclair, is that book you’re holding yours? I mean, what I meant to say is, are you reading that there book?”

  I gripped the book even tighter, cherishing the heavy feel of it in my hands. “Of course I am. Why else would I be carrying it?”

  “Oh, right. So softheaded I am,” he muttered, smacking his forehead with a dirty palm. “It’s just that I ain’t never met a gal that can read a book that big.”

  Daddy snorted. “Abigail here reads more than a young lady should, in my opinion. But her mama sets a bad example for her. Days go by and I don’t see hide nor hair of her. She’s out in the orchard reading books, living off the apples and a canteen of water.”

  Mr. Whimble grinned broadly at me, but I stood stiffly, uncomfortable with this man knowing anything that intimate about me. I made for my bedroom, leaving Daddy and Mr. Whimble talking about tomorrow’s fishing expedition.

  Back in my room, raking a comb through my tumbleweed hair, I was sorely distracted. I had never seen Daddy take to someone like that before. He was usually a tough old turkey to please. I supposed it was possible that Mr. Whimble had a certain way about him. And I hadn’t failed to notice how his blue eyes had twinkled right through the grime.

  Daddy helped all of us into the buggy and we set off for the hotel for supper. But it was slow going. The two big wheels of our buggy turned so deeply in the sand that at times old Mungo seemed to stand still, or at least wished he could. I guessed I could have walked to the hotel and eaten my meal before he had struggled through the unfamiliar sand with his load.

  But of course there was my new dress to consider, and I wanted to return to Edenton at the end of the summer with at least some of my new clothing still in my possession.

  Daddy told us, with a sad countenance, “The hotel that used to operate out here was burned by our boys during the war so the Yanks couldn’t use it. Good thing, too, since the Fed’rals swarmed all over the Banks once it fell. Then the bastards took down the Episcopal church here, used the wood for runaway-slave houses over on Roanoke Island. As if people like that need their own houses.”

  Wood was still hard to come by, these days. But taking down a church for its building materials was a new low. I wondered where the church steeple had ended up. I pictured the cross sitting on top of some shack, like a weather vane.

  “I can’t for the life of me imagine some slave and his freeloading family squatting on my land while I was off fighting the war,” Daddy huffed. “That island used to be a nice, quiet place, before the blue-bellied Yanks had their way over there.”

  I wasn’t at all sure what he was talking about. The only thing I knew about Roanoke Island was that it was the site of the first, and doomed, English colony on American soil. But no one ever interrupted one of Daddy’s tirades.

  I licked my chapped lips nervously. Listening to Daddy rant abou
t the blacks always caused my heart to shrink up inside me, like the tiny green pea under all those mattresses of puffed-up feelings—sadness, confusion, regret. I swear, I didn’t know what to feel these days.

  But Daddy had emotion enough for the rest of us. Almost every night at supper he barked over the sheer lunacy of black men being allowed to vote, and sit on juries, and even own farmland. And too frequently I heard Daddy and his many visitors, squirreled away in his study, discussing the sorry state of North Carolina politics, and how the white men—at least the white men who counted—were suffering at the Negro’s expense. Negroes even served in Congress now. No one would have ever believed it, just three short years ago.

  “So the hotel … Is it really that new?” I asked, with extra interest.

  “Built just this year. Folks say it’s just as fine as the one that burned. But no church yet, if you can believe it, so we have to have our Sunday worship at the hotel!”

  I laughed along with Daddy, but Mama said with a scowl, “That doesn’t seem right at all. First thing to get built is a business enterprise, and no thought given to a house of God. What kind of a place is this?”

  “That’s the way of the world. Money always comes first,” Daddy preached. “And the folks out here have pirate’s blood, anyhow. They can’t help their greed. It’s a perfect place for the carpetbaggers, come to think of it. Just look at all this untapped wealth.”

  He gestured around to the ocean and then over to the sound, like he was conducting an orchestra.

  The L-shaped hotel was an impressive structure for such a small island, with three rambling stories, a ten-pin alley, and a grand ballroom for nightly dancing. In the early-evening sun the white clapboard glowed like a mirage in the desert, with the brass band’s tunes pumping out the open windows.

  An amazing number of vacationers packed the ballroom. Big skirts and top hats bobbed and swept through the room. Even the children were smartly attired, though they were all to dine in a special part of the room designated for youngsters and overseen by servants in white aprons.