On the first chart there were two more x’s without question marks—one on the Nantucket Shoals and one precisely at the longitude/latitude of 41°36’ N and 70°36’ W, the location referred to in the letter. From the position of these three sets of x’s, lines were drawn that followed the current arrows. It made a fairly tight circle. But then she saw another very dim line, hardly visible, that stretched toward the north and east. When she took out the second chart she could see that a similar line had been drawn picking up where the line on the first chart had ended at Boston Light. The pencil markings suggested an invisible current that might flow down east, toward Maine. She moved her finger along the chart, and there she found a single ? on Simon’s Ledge. “Simon’s Ledge,” she whispered. “Why?”
She was sure the charts and the blanket were all somehow connected to her and her birth mother. It was a strange puzzle, but the central piece, the keystone, was the strand of red hair that wove it all together. The knowledge dawned on her slowly, like a radiance beginning to illuminate her brain. All of these things are linked to me!
May put away the articles in the chest just as she had found them. She even poked the little strand of hair back into the frayed blanket. Despite the lack of real evidence, the very air within the chest seemed to swirl with whispers, with deep, rich secrets. She lay her cheek against the lid as if to listen. Then she got up and placed the key back into the panel behind the Saint Anthony figure and gave the saint a slight pat to thank him, although she was not sure for what. The chest only compounded the mystery for her. She had to figure out the meaning of the things in the chest. Figure out where she had come from and where she might go. If she didn’t belong here with Hepzibah and Gar, she must belong somewhere.
After replacing the key, May set herself to washing the windows of the lantern room. It was one of those mindless tasks that freed her brain to think.
While she washed the panes, she reviewed the paltry information she had picked up. Why was her father so afraid of her entering the water? It was a real fear; he had threatened—albeit mildly—to send her to Bridgeton or Augusta. Her second question—the most important one—Who was her birth mother? Was it some woman who had died down the coast or beyond Winter Harbor? And this led to the third question—Where was she born?
Her mind went back to the sea chest, beguiling in its emptiness. Gar must have been figuring out the path, the tracks that the wreckage of the Resolute had taken. Her father hadn’t lied exactly when he had said she had been brought from down the coast—but it was far beyond Crockett Cove. And far from land. If she wanted to discover where she really came from, she needed to find the wrecked ship.
10
AN EXTRAORDINARY IDEA
NO ONE WAS AT THE DESK when May came through the door of the library. She’d picked up the new chimney and rushed across town.
“Miss Lowe,” she called out. She was impatient. She had thought all night about how she would go about her research and was eager to start. It was exciting. For the first time ever, May was embarking on a voyage—she who had never gone any farther than Bath.
She heard a rustling in the back.
“Be right with you!” A few seconds later Jean Lowe came through a door behind her desk, carrying a stack of books.
“May, how good to see you! I heard about your father’s injury. Quite a night you had out there when that schooner snagged on The Bones!”
“Yes, quite a night.” Although May was not so much thinking of that evening but of yesterday. The list of questions in her head seemed so big and unanswerable. But she had awakened that morning with a new set of questions, specific questions about the faint pencil marks on the charts.
“Miss Lowe, do you have any books about currents?”
“Currents?”
“Yes, ocean currents and winds?”
“Now, how odd you should ask.” Miss Lowe pushed up her spectacles, which had slipped down her nose, then scratched her head. Her fingers disappeared into the frizzy gray mass of hair that was pinned up and seemed to hover above her head like a storm cloud suddenly rolled in from offshore. “There was just a young man in here earlier asking for books on the same subject. I directed him to Bowditch’s book of pilot charts over at the chandlery and got him a few other volumes. But I entirely forgot about one that would have been helpful to him and I guess to you.” Her blue eyes sparkled from behind the lenses of her spectacles. “Maury!”
“Who?”
“Matthew Fontaine Maury, really much better than the pilot charts I recommended for that young Harvard man. He’s here conducting some research—tides, stars, and many things I don’t understand.” She waved her hand as if to dismiss an immense body of knowledge that was hopelessly beyond her. “Follow me.” Miss Lowe scurried around the end of the desk, and May followed her to the far side of the library. Miss Lowe turned into an aisle and began threading her way through two tall rows of bookshelves. She was talking a mile a minute as May followed.
“You see, Matthew Fontaine Maury was a Christian naval officer from somewhere down south. Virginia, maybe. He loved to read the Bible. But he had some doubts about how accurate it really was, particularly when it came to matters of the ocean and the winds. Could you rely on it word for word? You know, the biblical references to the sea.” She paused and began to walk slower as she looked up and ran her hands lightly over a row of books at shoulder height, whispering softly to herself—“Celestial navigation, compass boxing.” There were indeed dozens of books on both sides of the aisle pertaining to maritime subjects.
“Ah!” she exclaimed. “Here it is. The Physical Geography of the Sea and Its Meteorology by Matthew Fontaine Maury.” May could hear the little crick of dried glue as she opened the book. “Mercy! I don’t think anyone has checked this book out in over thirty years!”
“You mean I’m the first?” May asked.
“I expect so! The Harvard fellow would have been the first if I had thought of it. But you have the honor.”
“He’s from the university?” May had trouble imagining some Harvard man wandering through the dusty stacks of the Bar Harbor library.
“Yes, my dear. You beat a Harvard man to the punch on this.” She laughed. “My fault, I guess. Oh, I tell you, my memory!” She ran her fingers through the foam of gray hair as if to jostle her brains a bit.
May felt a little quiver of excitement run through her at the thought of being the first person to have read the book in such a long time. It was as if the book had a secret waiting just for her.
“You see, May—here is the biblical passage that started Mr. Maury off on his search for the tracks of the sea.”
“The tracks of the sea —” May repeated the words in a whisper. There was a resonance to them that was almost mystical.
“ ‘Whatsoever passeth through the paths of the seas,’” Miss Lowe read.
“Psalm eight,” May said.
“Exactly. The psalmist was marveling at the limitless grandeur of God’s creation. Now, Maury felt if the psalmist said there were paths of the seas, then by gum there must be. So he set out to find them!” Miss Lowe looked up, her bright blue eyes twinkling.
May felt herself begin to grin. “May I read it here?” she asked.
“Well, of course, but you know you can check it out and take it back to Egg Rock with you.”
“Yes, but I’m not going back for a while.”
Miss Lowe blinked with surprise. “Oh, really?” May seldom spent much time in Bar Harbor. Especially on a Saturday, when there was no school.
“I’m going to the dance—the end of the line gales dance,” May answered, dropping her eyes.
“Why, May Plum, good for you. I wondered why you were so dressed up.”
“Oh, it’s not much,” May said, smoothing her hand over the front of the calico fitted jacket that she was wearing with a soft blue wool skirt. She had sewn a flounce of lace around the collar, which gave it a festive appearance. It was cheap lace, as Zeeba had reminded her
at the time. It had edged a tablecloth someone had given Zeeba as a wedding gift and had ripped off after a few washings. But May hoped she looked better than when she had last seen Rudd. It was so easy, she thought, for boys. They never looked poorly if they were basically handsome. They didn’t have to fool with their hair, and because they grew beards, or even if they were smooth-shaven, their skin never looked blotchy if they had been upset, as she certainly had been when Rudd called.
“And that locket—so pretty.”
“My father gave it to me for my last birthday.” May touched it lightly. It was silver with a filigree of intertwining vines.
“Well, I won’t ask you what you keep in it.”
“Nothing, Miss Lowe.”
“When you do find something to keep in it, that will be your secret. You always have to keep a little something just for yourself, May.”
She thought of the sea chest, nearly empty yet silently shuddering, dark with its secrets. The emptiness of the locket seemed in some way to echo the aching hollowness within her.
“Here you go.” Miss Lowe handed the book to May. “Why don’t you curl up in your favorite spot?” She nodded toward a back corner of the library where there was a little window seat. “Make yourself at home. I have to leave in an hour or so, but you can stay here until the dance starts if you’ll just turn the latch behind you when you leave. Of course, by that time it might be too dark to read. There’s a small oil lamp you can use if you promise to turn down the wick and make sure it’s all the way out before you go.”
“Oh, I surely will, Miss Lowe. This is so kind of you!”
“Not at all, May.” She smiled, and there was just a trace of worry that seemed to dim the blueness of her eyes for a moment. “I’m so happy to see you getting out. Now that the weather is nice, I hope I’ll see you more.”
“You will!” May said brightly. The words Rudd had spoken to her came back. “I’m going to start doing a bit of living!”
Miss Lowe cocked her head, then nodded vigorously. “Good for you, May, good for you!”
May settled herself happily into the window seat, opened the book, and began reading the first chapter: “The Sea and the Atmosphere.”
“The two oceans of air and water: Our planet is invested with two great oceans; one visible, the other invisible; one underfoot, the other overhead; one entirely envelops it, the other covers about two-thirds of its surface. All the water of one weighs about four hundred times as much as the air of the other.”
Two oceans, May thought. What an extraordinary idea!
Some of the book May didn’t understand and some she did. But she loved the adventure of figuring it out. This was personal to her, much more vital than learning how to diagram a sentence or memorizing a poem. She had liked learning in school. She was a good student, but she had never felt such urgency to understand as she did with Mr. Maury and his book. If she could understand Maury, the links between those disparate objects in the chest might become clear—clear as sunlit water.
She began to grasp the interplay between the bottom of the lighter “ocean,” the one of air, and the surface of the second one, of water—the currents of both and how they each affected the other. Maury referred to two main wind currents — ones that flowed from both poles of the earth, each toward the equator. But within and between these two main currents of air was a patchwork quilt of smaller currents, “bands” he called them, of wind and water, sometimes calm and sometimes boisterous. And there were rules that governed it all — laws of physics and geography. These laws functioned somewhat like clockworks and ruled the pendulums of the wind and water of two great oceans—the invisible and the visible.
May was interested specifically in the small gyres of circulating air and water currents that worked along the New England coast, for those were what might explain the x’s that Edgar Plum had marked on the two charts.
Absorbed in the book, May completely lost track of time. It was only the guttering flame in the lantern that alerted her to how long she had been reading. The dance must have already started. She heard a knocking at the front door of the library, then the creak of the door as it opened.
“I hope I’m not too late. You still open, Miss Lowe?”
May shut the book and walked to the front with the kerosene lamp.
This must be the Harvard man, she thought. He was holding the Bowditch pilot guide to his chest. She recognized the cover. Her father kept the same one on the shelf in the parlor. When he spotted May, his gray eyes widened with surprise. He tipped his head and seemed to be trying to read the title of the book May was still clutching to her chest.
“Oh!” There was a sharpness in this single word. “It appears that Maury has quite the following in Maine.”
“I believe this is the book that Miss Lowe forgot to tell you about. I—I —” May stammered. “I was looking for books about currents, too.”
“Yes,” he said. “The Physical Geography of the Sea—not all that popular, but you apparently found your way to it.” He raised one eyebrow slightly as if to wonder at a simple island girl’s interest in such a book. He paused and thrust out his hand. “I’m Hugh Fitzsimmons.”
“The Harvard man.”
He looked down and gave a slight cough. “Yes, among other things.”
“You’re a student, Mr. Fitzsimmons?”
“A graduate student in astronomy. But please just call me Hugh. And what is your name?”
“May Plum.” She swallowed. “Miss Lowe said you were here to conduct some research.”
“Yes. I am exploring the gravitational pull of the moon on the tides, looking for a correspondence with the transits of the stars. It’s somewhat complicated —the theory.”
Too complicated for me, I suppose, May thought, somewhat indignantly.
“The analogies between what’s up there” — he pointed vaguely with his thumb—“and —”
“The invisible ocean,” May said quickly.
“You know your Maury, I see,” Hugh replied, a small smile crossing his face. “Tell me, May, have you any thoughts about Maury’s comments on the Pleiades?”
May had the distinct impression that he was quizzing her, as if he couldn’t believe a local girl could really understand Maury’s work. She cleared her throat and then looking him straight in the eye began.
“I think Mr. Maury uses Scripture to explain how those seven stars might be the center, like poles, around which Earth and all the planets move.”
He nodded. “He uses, I believe, quotes from the book of Job as well as Ecclesiastes. But it is the reference to Job — ‘Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades’—that he really uses to explain this movement. In particular he views Alcyone in the Pleiades as the pole star. He has, of course, been criticized mightily for this.” He paused and looked at May expectantly.
“I have no idea if he is right or wrong. But it seems that his knowledge of the currents of the visible ocean is fair,” she replied.
“Just fair?” His dark eyebrows shot up and, for a moment, she worried she had said something wrong. But then his face broke into a broad smile. Deep creases appeared on either side of his mouth and his eyes like parentheses. “Well, as I said, you certainly know your Maury.”
“I’ve been reading all afternoon. I should have learned something by now.”
He chuckled slightly. “What drew you to him in the first place?”
How could she answer his question? She didn’t dare tell him about the shipwreck of the Resolute and her suspicions about its connection to her own origins. She tried to sound casual. “Well, I do live in a lighthouse. There was a bad wreck end of last winter. A coastal schooner fetched up on some ledges we call The Bones. Men died. I started wondering about the currents. It was stormy, but I started to think there might be a current that drove that ship onto The Bones.” She hesitated. “Uh … well, I’m not sure. I just want to find out about such things.” She paused. “Would you like the book? I don’t want to delay
your research.”
He looked at her curiously, as if trying to understand her. “Oh, no, you keep the book for now. You seem to be getting just into it. I’m here for a while.”
“A while?” May said, feeling a wave of nervousness pass over her. How could she perform her research in front of a real university student?
“Yes, I’ve come here especially to study the Pleiades.” He smiled. “Do you know, May, that the other name for the Pleiades is Maia?”
“Maia? Why’s that?”
“In the Greek myth, Maia was the eldest of the seven daughters of Atlas for whom the Pleiades are named. I want to see how those seven bright stars walk across the sky under the tent of a summer night.” He paused, then added, “Maia was considered the most beautiful—perhaps because of the sparkle in her eyes. At least that is what makes her the most visible star in the constellation.”
May felt a thrilling tingle go up her spine as he spoke but then felt immediately foolish. She had to leave before he noticed her blushing. “I really have to be going.”
“Perhaps I could pick up the book from you next week?”
“I live on Egg Rock,” she said hesitantly.
“The lighthouse?”
The way he said it sounded to May as if it were a million miles away.
“Yes,” she replied.
“It’s not a problem, I can get there. I’ve rented a small day sailer.”