CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
EPIGRAPH
PROLOGUE
1: THE WEDDING OF THE SEASON
2: THE GOOD FACE
3: AT NIGHT WE SWIM
4: A PROMISE BROKEN
5: “THE GRAND THING”
6: MISS GOODFELLOW
7: A TELEGRAM!
8: GOD & BARK
9: A PLACE OF THE MIND
10: THE THINGS SHE’D NEVER KNOWN!
11: OUT OF THE SHADOWS
12: SECRET SELVES
13: “SO YOU FOUND US”
14: THE BEGINNING OF THE END?
15: DYING BEFORE HANGING
16: “THIS IS YOUR CENTURY!”
17: A CONFRONTATION
18: “SHE IS MY KIN”
19: “HE LOVES YOUR MONEY, MADAM”
20: “I AM READY TO DIE! READY TO SWIM!”
21: SOMETHING OUT THERE!
22: MORTAL DAMAGE
23: COMING HOME
24: BLOOD AND SALT
25: ENDINGS AND BEGINNINGS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO AVAILABLE
COPYRIGHT
“I loved you, so I drew these tides into my hand and wrote my will across the sky.”
— T. E. Lawrence
“WILL THE DEFENDANT please rise.” Lucy stood up and lifted her chin slightly. Her own heart was pounding, but she felt as if she could almost hear Phin Heanssler’s at the back of the courtroom. She wanted to reach out and clasp his hand and let him know that she wasn’t terrified. It was very strange. She had the peculiar sensation of having slipped out from her own body. It was as though she were floating above herself and looking down as she might do when she was swimming and observed something interesting on the seafloor. But in this instance it was herself she was observing in the courtroom in Thomaston, Maine. She was less than a mile from the sea and yet she had never felt farther.
It seemed odd that the bailiff said the word please when he addressed Lucy, as if — despite his harsh voice — he was offering her a seat at the table for tea instead of what was about to come. The judge banged his gavel and a hush fell over the courtroom, so thick it could be cut with a knife. The entire courtroom appeared to be holding its collective breath. But Lucy felt herself drifting on a gentle current above everything — the people who crowded the benches; Phin, who looked both haggard and desperate; her sister May, who was heavily veiled and stood beside her father, Gar, clutching his arm for support, both of them trembling. Lucy prayed that no one would recognize her sister. She was relieved that Hannah, her other sister, was in Boston and could not see this … this … what might she call it — spectacle? There was not just the press of people inside the courtroom with a dozen reporters from all over New England and as well as New York, but outside the courthouse there were food vendors — sweets carts, apple carts, and on this particularly warm day apple cider being dispensed at three cents a cup from a tank on wheels.
The judge was a gaunt man, his face gouged with severe lines. Had the man ever smiled? His ears, large and red, flared out from behind thick gray muttonchop. There was, however, a grayness that went beyond his whiskers. He was gray as granite to his core. His voice rumbled up through a shield of bedrock.
The judge began to speak. “Under the law of the state of Maine you have been found guilty by a jury of your peers of murder in the first degree. It is considered and ordered by the court that you, Lucy Snow, be hanged by the neck until dead on the first day of December in the year of our Lord 1900. This is the sentence of law.” He paused and leaned over the tall bench from which he presided. “Step forward, my dear.”
Lucy shuddered. My dear! How can he call me that? It’s preposterous. He had just sentenced her to death and called her dear. Sheer idiocy. It was curious what her brain was focusing on in these moments — queer thoughts drifting through her head like bits of flotsam on a swelling sea.
She thought suddenly of the scallop shell comb that Hannah and May had helped her find so she would have one like theirs, the only possession she cared about. The authorities had taken it from her when she was arrested. They apparently thought it could be used in some way to break out of jail. She wondered where the constable had put it. And what would happen to it when she was gone?
She recalled vividly the night when she and her two sisters swam out to Simon’s Ledge and found a stretch of the seafloor scattered with scallop shells. So many to choose from. What would Hannah and May do after she died? Would they go swimming? Would they have some sort of ceremony for her, a kind of funeral? Would they swim to the Resolute to visit the figurehead with the carved likeness of their mother to seek some sort of solace? It was odd that they had found that sea-worn visage of her so comforting. But to them it was a validation of their true selves. They could trace their features in the contours of the face long scraped by years of watery tumult.
On occasion, they would swim out to the Nantucket Shoals to that ship, which hovered like a ghostly vision on the seafloor, and they would always head first to the bowsprit and embrace the only image they had ever known of their mother. Now Lucy wondered if they would whisper to her that one of her babies had died, hanged by the neck until death. A murderess found guilty in a court of law.
But my body? What will become of my body? My broken-necked body. Thrown into a pauper’s graveyard, she supposed.
Why am I thinking about all this? she wondered suddenly as she looked down from this undefined place above her own corporal being and watched herself stepping toward the bench. She started to speak. She barely recognized her own voice. But it was clear and firm.
“Your Honor, you said that I have been judged by my peers.”
“Yes indeed, twelve responsible citizens,” he replied.
She then turned toward the jury slowly.
“But these are not my peers.”
“You mean they are not female but all men, as juries always are.”
“I don’t mean that at all.”
“Then what do you mean?” An edge crept into his voice.
How does one explain that one is not quite human? Lucy thought. This judge and this jury of twelve human beings would not believe that she was part mer.
“You would never understand.”
A deep flush seeped up above the judge’s collar. His face was suddenly crimson.
“Don’t be impertinent, miss.” Miss — the word lashed out like a slap across her face. A sob was heard from the back of the courtroom. It was May.
Lucy flinched. She felt the acuteness of May’s pain. It was as if an artery connected the two sisters. It had taken them their entire lives to find each other, almost eighteen years, and now it was as if they were drifting apart. In her imagination she saw a horizon. May and Hannah were disappearing behind it, fading away. Her sisters’ hands were reaching toward her, but there was nothing for them to grasp. She was vaporizing into a blue mist, the blue mist of a void, of nonexistence. Death was not black. It was blue.
“Order! Order in the court!” The judge slammed down his gavel. “Bailiff.” A large man stepped forward. She was no longer floating. Her body and that other self had begun to knit together. The judge nodded. She felt the hard clasp of the bailiff’s hand around her arm. The gavel slammed down again, then again and again. “Court dismissed.”
Boston Evening Transcript: The wedding of Miss Matilda Forbes, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Pynchon Forbes of Boston and Bar Harbor, Maine, to Lord Thomas Lyford, the Earl of Lyford, the only son of the late Earl of Lyford and his wife, Clarissa, the Dowager Countess of Lyford, is to be solemnized at King’s Chapel. The bride shall be attended by four bridesmaids, Misses Marguerite Trilling, Elizabeth Cabot, Bettina Perkins, and Edith Thayer. Viscount Louis Duval, a cousin of the bridegro
om, is to act as best man. The ushers will be Eldon Astor; Samuel Weld; Jonathan Perkins; and Stannish Whitman Wheeler, the society painter, who has just completed the bride’s portrait. A reception at the Somerset Club is to follow.
Hannah set the paper down on the round table next to the flowers that Stannish had just brought to her. He had rented her a small flat on Brimmer Street near his own. She glanced at the wedding announcement one more time. Why had Stannish agreed to be an usher? He hardly knew the bridegroom, but he had said it was very important for business. The only reason she’d agreed to go was that the Hawleys would not be in attendance. They would have already sailed for Europe as they always did in October. So there was no chance of her encountering Ettie — her favorite Hawley when she had worked as a maid in their houses. Her favorite Hawley, yet the one she must be the most careful to avoid. Ettie knew her secret, knew she and her sisters were mer. And as smart as Ettie was, she would never understand Hannah’s attraction to Stannish.
For a long time now Hannah had felt that Ettie actually loathed Stannish. The first year Hannah had served in the Hawley household, Stannish had painted the Hawley daughters’ portraits. That was where they had first met and fallen in love. Yet Ettie did not know that Stannish had once been mer. He had been away from the sea so long that he could not return. He would actually drown. Such were the Laws of Salt. Nevertheless, the very precocious and perceptive little girl did not trust Stannish for some reason. She had once declared that he was as “oily as his paintings.”
She had winced when Ettie had said the word oily. It seemed harsh, especially out of the mouth of an eleven-year-old. It hurt. But beyond that it was wrong, inappropriate. Stannish was an artist. A great painter.
“You mean slippery?” Hannah had asked.
“Not exactly. Just all surface and light,” Ettie had replied.
This had infuriated Hannah. “Ettie, the critic Marlowe Osgood said that Stannish Whitman Wheeler’s paintings have veracity. Veracity is not being oily. It means trustworthy. That is exactly what everyone celebrates about his paintings. How he is a master of light.”
“That is the problem. A human being in real life cannot have the same values as a painting on canvas. He is superficial — all varnish.” She sneered.
There was never any arguing with Ettie. And now that Hannah was actually engaged to Stannish, she thought it best that Ettie was far away and there was no chance of meeting up with her. But what about encountering Matilda, or Muffy as the bride was called? She would recognize her, for after all, her sister Lucy was supposed to have been her maid of honor. Stannish had an answer for that as well. And the answer itself chilled her to the bone in a way that the coldest water in the deepest part of the ocean never had. He had taken her in his arms and while undoing her hair said, “Hannah, darling, I have been thinking about your appearance.”
“What’s wrong with my appearance?” She drew back from him and frowned.
“Nothing really. You are the most beautiful girl in the world.” But, she thought to herself, the problem is that there are two others just like me and one is in prison for murder. He never said that, of course, but instead went on speaking in that soft voice that was like velvet. “And if we are going to have a normal life, we are going to have to alter a few things about you. Your hair color for one. You know when I went down to Philadelphia to paint that portrait of Ethel Bainbridge? She was really not attractive in the least. But her hair was sensational. It was a deep, rich amber — like the color of very fine cognac.”
That had been the first step in Hannah’s transformation. The second step was an entirely new hairdo.
“You’re not a scullery maid anymore.”
The color rose in her cheeks. “I haven’t been a scullery maid in over a year. I was promoted to housemaid. I worked upstairs!”
“That part of your life is behind you. You have your own maid now.”
It was true. Stannish’s maid, a stringy Irish girl, came over twice a week to clean and do some cooking. This was a temporary arrangement until they got married, though that would not happen until later in the fall when they sailed to England. Stannish wanted to get married abroad, as he believed it was good for business. She was not sure how it would be good for business, but she had not questioned him. He was so ardent, how could she ever doubt his intentions? But that dreadful word Ettie had used, oily, slithered into her mind.
But they would get married, and it would be as Stannish had promised. They would go to Italy, where Stannish already had clients lining up in both Florence and Rome to be painted. And in the spring they would go to Switzerland and go hiking through the mountains. “We’ll pass through the most inspiring landscapes,” Stannish had explained. “It’s vigorous. It gets your blood going; and imagine snow-capped mountains, the Alps! And then there are sweeping meadows of wildflowers all in the same frame!” He moved his hands just as he did when he held up a painting for a client.
But hiking wasn’t swimming. The Alps, the meadows, could not compare to the subterranean seascapes of the ocean. But she was not supposed to swim; she was supposed to be weaning herself from the sea as he had done. He had told her it would be hard at first. But he had done it and she must do it as well. They must be equals in this respect if they were to live as husband and wife. And then he had recited a sonnet from Shakespeare.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
The rhythms and the words were so beautiful that the poem seemed to enfold her the way the sea did. It was heartbreakingly beautiful, the images of love as the star to every wandering bark and of love never altering, even when the edge of doom touched the deepest part of her being. This was the kind of love she envisioned. This love was ennobling. There was a grandeur to this vision of love that was irresistible.
But now she sat in a pew in King’s Chapel in Boston she felt suddenly worried. Why must he change me? Why must I change? Are not his thoughts impediments of love? Why did he need to alter me if his love be true? He fell in love with her the way she had been. Why did he want to change that now? She did not want to change him. She loved the way he saw the world. The way he painted the world. He could see colors where she could not. He could capture any light with just his brush and paints. He was an artist. His imagination was unbound. And he had helped her see so much.
She recalled walking down Charles Street on a misty night when he had her stop just beneath a gaslight that hung like a huge luminous pearl in the mist. He said he wanted to remember that light and the soft dewiness it brought out in her cheeks. She stood very still, and she could feel his eyes traveling over the landscape of her face, his gaze like the strokes of a paintbrush.
Falling in love with Stannish opened her eyes to a richer, more vibrant world, a world of light and color. She could not just see color but the colors seemed to enter her and illuminate her from within. Reflecting upon this new world allowed her to realize how much she’d discovered in the past year and a half. She had not just found her future husband but her sisters and the sea. She could never have imagined that there were so many kinds of love one could experience.
She had found worlds she simply did not know existed. There was a distinct before and after in her life. Before she had felt alone, disconnected, adrift, and powerless. But after, those f
eelings of loneliness, of estrangement, had vanished. The very idea that Stannish wanted her to change now felt like a threat to all she had discovered and valued.
King’s Chapel was a splendid old stone church that stood at the top of the highest ground in the city of Boston with all the rectitude of a Pilgrim father. The gray sterness of the exterior belied the interior, which was white with soaring Corinthian columns. But what surprised Hannah the most was the arrangement of the pews. They had been built in box formation — almost like stalls for animals — so that the occupants sat face-to-face. It was very odd and slightly claustrophobic. There were three elderly couples in her pew. No one Hannah had ever seen while serving as a maid in the Hawleys’ households either in Boston or Bar Harbor. All the women, including Hannah, were wearing a hat with a veil. She had dressed quite modestly, and one of the women gave her a slight smile of approval, for in the next pew there was a young matron with an extremely flamboyant hat festooned with feathers.
The music for the wedding march began. The first bridesmaid came down the aisle, wearing a peach silk dress overlaid with swags of lace and a modified bustle. The last of the bridesmaids, the maid of honor, was a rather plump, ungainly girl, and the peach color did nothing for her complexion, which was heavily freckled despite the layers of powder. This would have been Lucy, Hannah thought. For it was Lucy whom Matilda had selected to be her maid of honor. But girls arrested for murder were not exactly bridesmaid material. Hannah shut her eyes tightly, as it was nearly unbearable to think about her sister. The vivid image of a noose swung in her mind’s eye. Lucy’s head lopped to the side on her broken neck. Hannah tried to replace it with another. What would her own wedding look like? It seemed wrong to try to even imagine it. But she was distraught. She needed something, something to connect her to what she loved and would not disappear.
Both she and Stannish were of the same mind. They wanted it simple. It would be in a little chapel that he often painted in Tuscany overlooking an olive grove. He had already made drawings of the kind of dress she would wear. It was a lovely Grecian-style gown that fell from the shoulders in soft folds. He told her she would look like a goddess, as if “you have just stepped from a frieze on the Parthenon — none of this Charles Worth folderol.”