Grange House Page 3

  I stood and ran up the gangway, and I saw to my relief when I reached the top that Mr. Coates, the Grange House boatman, was coming through the boathouse, alerted by the boys, his clamming boots still muddy from where they must have found him. He passed me wordlessly down the gangway to Papa and Mr. Hunnowell. I turned and crept back again to watch.

  Mr. Hunnowell still held fast to those poor cold wrists, though he had begun to shiver.

  “We cannot pull them up,” Papa cried out.

  Without a word to either man, Mr. Coates climbed down the swimming ladder into the water. Keeping hold of the edge of the ladder with his left hand, he reached his right down the length of the bodies below the surface of the water, his hand discovering what his eyes could not.

  “Grab hold beneath her arms, Mr. Hunnowell,” Mr. Coates directed from the rungs of the ladder, and Mr. Hunnowell did so. The woman’s grip was now entirely loosened upon the man, so Mr. Coates could catch hold of the man’s torso, while Papa managed to keep tight grip upon his legs, and slowly the two men dragged and pushed the drowned man up the ladder until he was laid upon the dock.

  I cried out at whom I saw.

  Without a word, Mr. Coates and Papa helped Mr. Hunnowell draw the woman straight up from the water. I looked away, dreading who it might be. I heard the rush of water streaming from her as they set her down beside her lover. For a time, that was the only sound. I turned, and there lay Halcy Ames at my feet, her gray cloak spread wide around her poor wet body.

  Mr. Coates closed Henry’s eyes with two fingers, then softly combed the young man’s hair from off his face, revealing an ugly wound long since stopped bleeding.

  “Maisie, I think it’s best you return to the House.” My father’s voice, so gentle then, brought tears to my eyes. And I turned to go; indeed, I did not want to stay any longer. But I heard Mr. Coates say to no one in particular, “There’s a fear of more’n an accident on that face.” I halted.

  “Maisie,” Papa’s voice at my back was firm.

  I walked up the gangway and across the pier, through the hollow of the boathouse and out onto the lawn. Mrs. French came hurrying down from the house, dressed already in her tea gown.

  “Maisie! What has happened?”

  “Henry Brown has drowned, Mrs. French,” I whispered, “and—”

  “And?”

  “Halcy Ames.”

  “They are on our pier?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I nodded, sudden tears filling my eyes.

  “Mercy!” she whispered, one hand at her throat. She walked past me and into the boathouse.

  Mama and Mrs. Hunnowell stood on the piazza and waited as I walked up the lawn to them.

  “What is it?” Mrs. Hunnowell called. “We heard shouts.”

  I turned a sad face up to them. “Henry Brown is drowned.”

  “Henry? The boatbuilder’s son?” Mama asked quickly.

  I nodded. I could not say the second part.

  “But he was to be married to Cook’s daughter!” Mrs. Hunnowell cried.

  “To Halcy Ames?” I asked.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Hunnowell whispered. “After what we witnessed last evening, I felt I must discover …” Her voice trailed away. I watched her fingers hold in place the tiny row of knit work she still held in one hand as she felt behind her with the other for the wicker settee and sat heavily down.

  “Oh!” I cried, and turned back around to the harbor, my mind struggling to make clear what I had seen.

  Mrs. French was hurrying up the lawn toward us, her little dog barking and trotting after, but she said not a word to our group, immediately rounding the side of the House, her face bled of all its color.

  “Oh,” I said again softly.

  Through my tears, I watched Papa walking slowly back up the lawn to us, the fog patchy now and high above, leaving room for a morning sun. The heavy burden he had carried was repeated in his gait. Slowly, he mounted the wooden stairs, then put his hands on both my shoulders and gave them a squeeze.

  The front door swung open and the mustachioed gentleman and his wife came onto the piazza.

  “What has happened?” His voice was unnaturally high.

  Papa stepped round me to them and was outlining the catastrophe when Mrs. French appeared in the doorway. Immediately, Papa broke off his discussion and addressed her.

  “How is Cook?”

  “I’m afraid we’ve had to send for Dr. Morris.”

  “Why the deuce have you done that, Mrs. French? I am a doctor,” blustered the gentleman beside Papa.

  “Oh, Dr. Lewes, I did not think to trouble you,” said the housekeeper.

  “No bother. Let me just fetch my bag.” And the man excused himself and entered the House.

  His wife turned a worried face to Mrs. French. “Is it serious?” she asked.

  “I cannot tell; Cook appears to be in some kind of stupefied trance.” And she followed the doctor into the House.

  “Oh dear,” sighed Mrs. Lewes.

  “How wonderful it is,” Mama mused aloud, “to find that the loss of a local girl and boy can so affect the summer people.”

  “Libby!”

  She raised her eyes to meet Papa’s horrified expression. For a moment, she regarded him, and then she turned wordlessly away and picked up her shawl from off the arm of the settee and rose.

  “Poor Cook,” I said to no one in particular, recalling her greeting to me only the evening before.

  Mama hesitated an instant on the threshold of the front door, her back very straight, and then she turned round. “Yes indeed,” she agreed quietly. “She has lost her child.”

  And though she had directed her reply to Papa, he seemed not to have heard, so Mama turned again and passed into the hall. Papa was silent a moment, and then he, too, departed into the House. Only Mrs. Lewes remained behind, sunk in thoughts of her own, and then, without a word to me, she drifted past and down onto the lawn, where she took up a chair by the rocks and settled. I watched her pull a book from her pocket and, leaning, commence to write.

  Halcy! my heart cried. Halcy Ames! It was you!

  Far away, at the base of the harbor, stretched the white flank of Middle Haven. And though I could name the neat fronts of every house—Brown, Ames, Calderwood, Beverage, Warren, Vinal, names familiar as the pulls upon each door—I knew the doors would not swing open for a summer visitor such as me. House after house after house, the white faces of the town repeated upon the black harbor like palms held up to stave off my groping entry, the broad beam of the townsmen’s smiles like the uncommunicative slant of sun upon those sturdy walls.

  And Grange House, too, had long seemed closed to me in this way, but that morning a deathblow was struck to the baseboard of the place, and I heard the keening brought upon a small wind through the crack. For I had been at the window when Halcy’s ghost had come and stood—and waved.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Everyone, guest and servant, passed through the morning quietly as we could, and the hubbub at Grange House softened to a hum. Dr. Lewes, it appeared, was a mesmerist as well as a physician, and deducing that Cook would not wake without extreme measure, he spoke to her in her trance, coaxing her stunned mind back into its consciousness; Halcy’s short letter remained crushed in her hand:

  Mother, we have gone to be married. It could not wait, you see.

  The luncheon meal was hastily set and quickly taken, and the hot hours of the afternoon stretched wider in the dreadful silence of the House. Not a guest took a boat upon the water, so it was largely still, save for the fishermen. Late in the afternoon, Mama and Papa retired upstairs, and I remained upon the piazza, where we had been sitting. For a long while, I stared at the harbor, unable to cease from watching the flat sheen of water before me, as if there lay the answers. What had happened? I tried and tried to envision Halcy and Henry in the dark—secretly meeting, clasped together, setting out across the water. To marry? Marry where? Where were they fleeing to on a windless night?

  A
nd there my mind stuck—or rather, my mind could not see true. For it was Halcy as Maggie Tulliver I imagined, floating along on the treacherous torrent of the Floss; or then the beautiful, dreaming, dead Ophelia faceup among the reeds. The strange ecstasy in their dying faces settled onto Halcy’s—and seemed more real to me somehow than the plain little body I had seen this morning upon the dock.

  The laughter of girls burst open behind me, and I turned to see Cynthia Harrington and Ruth Barton had appeared in the doorway as if blown there by a pursuing wind.

  Clad in a pale green dress, unadorned save for the pearl buttons at her neck, Cynthia dashed forward, alighting herself first beside me on the settee, then rising to perch upon the wooden balustrade. The more substantial Miss Barton chose a single wicker chair and settled herself right down. There was one moment of quiet as we sat in the light shade of the piazza and watched the seagulls trail after the fishing boats in the bright open sky.

  “I would like to be married out by the lighthouse,” Cynthia burst out, her eyes turned toward the tip of the breakwater, and as she turned to look first at Ruth, then at me, her hair brushed past one cheek and then the other, a very drama of revealing and concealing, which, had I been a man, I might have found entrancing.

  “Outside!” Ruth exclaimed. “Why, only animals couple outside—you might just as well wish to be married in a barn!” And the dreadful girl’s nose crinkled in scornful merriment. “After all, where would God be if you said your vows outside, or anywhere, for that matter, but in a church?”

  “God?” Cynthia turned suddenly serious eyes on her friend. “God is the all outdoors.”

  “Oh, really, Cynthia—how positively Transcendental.” But Ruth was not to be outdone. “When I marry,” she ruminated, “I’ll walk down the very long center aisle of Grace Church filled with lit candles and roses, so the light will be soft and bright at the same time. I’ll have two little girls dressed in simple white muslin frocks trimmed with tiny green nosettes, each throwing down a carpet of petals before me.” She smiled at the sight. Cynthia hopped off the balustrade and settled into her own chair, preparing for the epic recitation she must have known would follow, the two having been friends since childhood.

  My attention wandered in and out of Ruth’s disquisition on her wedding, watching the steady procession of lobstermen rowing homeward, their wooden traps stacked in the stern of their long dories. The men called to one another over the late afternoon’s calm, and their rough voices beat under Ruth’s interminable visions. What is it propels this absorption in one’s own wedding? Ruth’s was not the first I’d heard cataloged and imagined to the last detail. Several times in the past three or four years, suddenly a conversation would shift into this scene: one girl outlining and explaining what she saw in her head to a small crowd of attentive listeners. It is the shift I find so disconcerting—without warning, there we will be, presumptive brides declaiming, instead of the three young women we are. But today this talk of silks and laces seemed to me thoughtless. Halcy Ames had just drowned for this vision. Impatiently, I burst into Ruth’s talk.

  “Really, Ruth, I should think you would remember not to sift your wedding into a day of mourning.”

  On the instant, Ruth became a picture of sorrowful consideration.

  “Oh, yes. The lovers.” And she held this pose for a moment, even reaching out her hand to squeeze Cynthia’s.

  “Just imagine the scene,” Ruth whispered. I groaned inwardly instead of diverting Ruth’s attention, it appeared I had only just tossed fresh embers atop her fire. Here again, the love story—prelude to the dress, the candles, and the little flower girls. “Halcy must have crept from her house around midnight, muzzling that old dog, and carrying a sweet little bundle of bread and chocolate for their wedding breakfast.”

  “Oh, Ruthie, do you think so?” Cynthia breathed.

  “Yes, I can almost see it,” Ruth answered. “They arranged a sign between them, I’m sure of it, and Halcy must have forgotten the sign as she approached the boat—so breathless with excitement was she—because dimly, she saw her lover waiting there at the pier. I think old man Brown must have been suspicious, for just as Halcy neared the steps to the pier, she heard his gruff hallo from the town hall piazza, where he must have gone to have a look out. Startled, she tripped, casting her bundle into the waters just at her feet, an unwitting prelude to her own dark fate.” Ruth paused impressively here.

  “Have mercy!” squeaked Cynthia.

  “How is it, Ruth Barton, that no one found such a bundle this morning?” I spoke more sharply than I intended, but her talk made me increasingly uneasy and I wished her to stop.

  Instead, she sailed serenely onward, her prow cutting in two such questions of evidence. “The waters swallowed the bundle swift and sure as though some lost soul beneath starved for the chocolate and reached out his dead hand to drag it quickly below.”

  Cynthia gave a little shriek. “And then what happened, Ruthie?”

  “Henry, too, heard his father’s call of alarm, and he flew up the intervening steps to clasp Halcy’s hands and pull her down to the waiting boat. In seconds, the two had cast off, their deftness spurred by their longing hearts and willing hands.”

  “Ruth!” I was on my feet.

  “And the father?” Cynthia prodded. Neither girl paid me heed, so wrapped were they in their fiction.

  “Well, this is the tragic part. The father, thinking that the splash of oars he heard was nothing but the tides, and not being able to see into the obscuring darkness, turned away from the pier and headed homeward, back to his warm bed. Even as he tossed and turned, settling himself back into sleep, his only son sailed onward toward his dea—”

  “Stop it, Ruth. Stop it at once!” I stood over her, now furious with this stupid girl and her story.

  “Maisie Thomas! Whatever is the matter?”

  “It’s not right, Ruth. Halcy Adams and Henry Brown are truly dead, and nobody can ever know what happened.”

  “It is only a story, Maisie,” Cynthia piped in.

  “No,” I began, my voice trembling, “no, it is not a story, Cynthia. It is—” But I found I could not finish, I was so hot suddenly, and confused. The greedy delight Ruth took in all the details she imagined was something terrible, and it called to mind my own imagination’s flight; and I was fully shamed. I excused myself from their openmouthed surprise and walked into the House, blindly seeking a place to put my head in my hands and think.

  “Well!” I heard Ruth exclaim behind me, and I imagined her exchanging a significant look with Cynthia. What was it? What was it? I found myself drawn to the protection of the high-backed settee in the front room. Suddenly, the picture of Halcy snapping sharp her dust cloth flashed into my thoughts; she had been here, often about this very room—and that image broke open the gate around my heart. There she was; there she was after all. Alive—and particular. Not a heroine, but a girl. The one I’d chattered with, and dreamed. The one I’d followed belowstairs for buttered muffins, passing a china cup of milk between us across the wooden tabletop, the hum and bustle of the busy kitchen all around. I leaned my forehead against the back of the settee and gave in to hot, silent tears for my childhood companion.

  After a bit, I heard Ruth and Cynthia’s talk start up again through the open window at the opposite end of the room. My tears eased and I sat there lulled, my cheeks cooling. One of the curtains lifted and fell in the dispersing breeze of the quiet room. A minute went by, and another. Then, drifting over the wooden ridge of the settee, came a flight of smoke rings, perfectly formed and spinning in the bright afternoon air. The rings floated for an instant together and then the gay procession disbanded.

  “Well said,” a man commented.

  I started. The wicker of his chair creaked as he rose. I struggled to press myself farther down into the pillows, listening as his slow tread crossed the room and stopped directly behind the settee.

  I looked up into the calmly considering eyes of Bartholome
w Hunnowell, now resplendent in white vest and trousers.

  “What was well said?” I asked uncomfortably, pushing myself upright. “It is not fair to spring upon me like that.”

  “No, it is not,” he agreed. “Forgive me.” But he remained where he stood, looking down; and aware of my flushed cheeks and reddened eyes, I started up, smoothing my skirts about my hips, to move from off this tiny island of unease into the midst of the room. I reached the center table safely and turned to face him.

  “What was well said?” I repeated.

  He pointed toward the windows at the front of the room. “Halcy Ames and Henry Brown should not be turned into the silly tales of girls.”

  I followed his gaze. There sat Ruth and Cynthia perfectly framed. He must have witnessed the entire scene. I flushed up again.

  “Thank you,” I said, abashed. Standing there at the table, side by side, we both watched the girls a minute more. I could not think what to do. And he did not move from his spot, nor offer a break through which I might gracefully end our tête-à-tête.

  “That is quite a handsome jersey,” I remarked at last. He looked down at his white vest, a bright crimson H emblazoned across the front.

  “Ah,” he said, now feigning solemnity, “my scarlet letter. I wear this mark of shame and travel round the world to draw forth from hiding the infernal brotherhood.”

  I snorted. “A very Ethan Brand.”

  “Do not mock, Miss Thomas.” He drew closer. “The method works! I cannot go anywhere without another one pops forward to shake my hand, speaking of fair Harvard.” He paused. “On the other hand,” he whispered to me conspiratorially, slipping the cigar back between his lips, “I also wear it for Mater. She thinks I am best situated with an H upon my breast.”

  I smiled. He grinned and bowed. “Welcome back, Miss Thomas,” he then said softly, and walked from the room.

  I stood unmoving for a long moment. Bart Hunnowell! I began to dismiss him reflexively. Only just see how the hero of the morning had slipped to patter—to become a cheerful spy upon the silly talk of girls! He was … I paused before the image of the two of us standing silently together. He was … perplexing. For there remained in him a deep, abiding quiet, a watchfulness. And when he had turned that quiet upon me, I could not rest there. I’d had to speak—or look away. The clock in the front hall chimed six. Stuff! I would go upstairs and read, I decided. It lacked only an hour until the dressing bell sounded.