they that go down to the sea in ships

“I’m terribly selfish,” she tells Nat after they’ve finished exploring every inch of the Witch. They’re sprawled out on the deck as the sun streaks shades of tangerine and topaz across the sky and reflects the same colors on the water. “I want Barbados and Connecticut, Wethersfield summers and autumns and a winter without snow. I want Carlisle Bay and the Meadows. I want to be with my cousins and Hannah and Prudence and you and Grandfather’s grave. I want books that aren’t sermons and to hear John Holbrook reading the Psalms. I want the Witch and a garden with Hannah. I don’t fit just in one world or another now, Nat. I want to live in both.”

There’s a look in his too-blue eyes that still makes her shiver, and his grin is lazy as he looks at her. “Well, then. I suppose it’s a good thing you’ve chosen a life that can give you all those things, isn’t it?”

She thinks of who she could have been: the pampered wife of Grandfather’s kind but old friend back in Barbados, mistress of a rich plantation, hosting dinner parties and wearing the most fashionable silks; William’s wife in Connecticut, the finest lady in Wethersfield, presiding over the big house on Broad Street and being admired or hated by the other ladies in the Meeting House. Or maybe she could have made it back to Barbados on her own and become a governess to one of the well-to-do families, and taught children to read and write the way she did Prudence. She could have chosen any of them, but this is better.

This life, of her choosing, is so much more than she could have dreamed of.

--

Wethersfield

Her wedding isn’t anything like her cousins’ a few months later. William, overcome with generosity now that he’s going to marry the girl he really wanted all along, insists that they combine the weddings. It’s the perfect solution—William has plenty of money, and any celebration John would be able to afford would be a paltry affair in comparison. The Witch makes a special journey to take Kit from Saybrook to Wethersfield, and she brings a beautiful set of scarves she embroidered herself for each of her cousins and some linen Hannah sent along, too.

It’s a beautiful October evening—still Kit’s favorite month in Connecticut—and there’s fiddle-playing and dancing more food than even Thankful Peabody’s wedding, and Judith’s beauty flares like a jewel and Mercy’s happiness radiates to fill the whole room and Aunt Rachel, laughing, looks very much like she must have when she was the toast of her father’s regiment back in England. Kit eats till her stomach fills fit to burst and then drags Nat to dance with her until her feet hurt. It’s a wonderful night, and she’s so happy for her cousins that she can’t keep a smile off of her face.

But before all that, Kit and Nat stand up in Aunt Rachel’s company room, the very day after Nat spoke to her uncle. John Holbrook reads the words of the wedding ceremony from the Book of Common Prayer in his fine, clear voice, and Kit can’t keep a smile from stretching her face so wide she’s sure it will ache come evening. She knows she should be demure or at least solemn like Nat—well, his face is solemn, at least, even if his eyes are dancing—but she can’t help it. But there’s no one there but her aunt and uncle and cousins and John, and they’ve already made their peace with her untamed ways. She wishes Hannah could be here, and Prudence, too, but she knows her friends share her joy even if they aren’t present in body.

Kit scandalizes Aunt Rachel by insisting that she and her new husband spend their first night together on the Witch, but she can’t wait to get aboard her namesake. Nat can’t row the little boat fast enough, and she clambers in a completely unladylike fashion up the rope ladder and onto the new boards of the deck. It smells like fresh lumber and sea salt, and this is her home.

--

Saybrook

When they reach Saybrook a few days after the wedding, Hannah is working in her garden. She greets Kit with a hug and presses her weathered cheek against Kit’s young one, and somehow she doesn’t even need to be told about the wedding. “I told thee the answer was in thy heart,” she whispers, and then she winks at Nat over her Kit’s shoulder, and Kit dissolves into giggles.

Hannah’s new life is agreeing with her. Her vagueness is mostly gone now that she’s being properly taken care of, living in the little house with Nat’s grandmother and, during the summer, his mother. She has her cat with her and still makes blueberry cakes and spins her flax by the feel of it under her hands, and she almost never thinks that Thomas is still alive, though Nat tells Kit very seriously that she can’t expect their friend to be healed entirely. And Nat promises that he will still bring her presents after each of his voyages, and Kit—not to be outdone—adds that she will, too, until they’ve replaced everything she lost in the fire and more besides.

Nat has to make his interminable trips up and down the river if he wants to be able to pay off the Witch by the end of the year, and sometimes Kit goes with him, just to be near him. But mostly she spends the summer with Hannah and the Mistresses Eaton—of which she is now one herself!—working in the garden and sewing and spinning and other tasks that, somewhere along the way, Kit managed to master. There’s a little boy in the house next door who has that same hungry look Prudence always had, and he likes to sneak over and visit Hannah, and it isn’t long before Kit’s managed to procure a hornbook and primer and is teaching him his letters. She misses Prudence far more than she thought she would, especially now that she’s back with Hannah, but when Nat returns from Wethersfield there are letters in Prudence’s increasingly neat script.

Saybrook doesn’t have anything like the Meadows, but Kit finds herself content where she is for the moment. When winter comes, she’ll go to the Indies with Nat and the Witch, and then when spring comes she’ll want to visit Wethersfield again, and then she’ll come back here to Hannah and the garden, and the seasons will continue as they always have, world without end. She hasn’t felt contentment like this since Grandfather died, and it’s beautiful.

--

Barbados

Barbados is different now. Maybe it’s Nat beside her, maybe it’s her that’s changed. Whatever it is, she hadn’t expected it.

The journey isn’t nearly as long or grueling as the one that had brought her to Connecticut. This is easy enough to understand: she’s used to boredom in ways she hadn’t been on the last trip, and the ship is fresh and new without the stench of horseflesh—yet. And there’s Nat, too, whenever he isn’t absorbed with captaining, and there’s still so much to learn about him, so many little things to discover about each other. He tells her stories of growing up on the Dolphin, funny tales about the screw, scary memories of times he almost died. She hangs on every word—he’s as good a storyteller as Grandfather was—and he seems just as eager to learn about her own childhood. It had always seemed idyllic but rather lacking in drama to her, and she wouldn’t have thought that there was much about it that would be of any interest to anyone else. But she’s beginning to understand that her life was so different than anything in Nat’s experience that even tiny details that seems so insignificant to her fascinate him. She likes the way his face looks when he’s listening, eyes intent and steady on her, and she can look her fill of him without shame, though she still sometimes blushes under the intensity of his gaze. That cool, mocking detachment is long gone now, and she’s beginning to understand that it was just as much as mask to hide behind as the occasional haughtiness that she herself has retreated into in her most uneasy moments. Neither of them need that armor anymore, and that knowledge is exhilarating.

By the time they reach warmer seas, she can’t wait to introduce Nat to the island that was her home. He’s been there, of course, plenty of times, but he hasn’t seen her Barbados.

But her Barbados has changed. The colors aren’t quite as bright as they were when she ran barefoot down the beaches, but they’ve become richer, deeper somehow, and there are nuances of shade and hue that she never noticed before. The sand is still white, still powder-soft under her feet, but it’s not blinding white as she remembers but has taken on a pearlescent sheen full of subtle and shifting color. The water is still mostly turquoise, but it’s almost emerald in the deeper waters and nearly as pale as ice in the shallows. And the sky arching above is so bright that sometimes she can’t look at it, the sunshine so brilliant that it makes the shadows a deeper blue-black than the smoky grey-black of America. What she had expected to find familiar she finds instead dizzyingly new, and she feels as though Nat is discovering it with her. She breathes deep and falls in love all over again.

But there’s darkness to discover too. For the first time in her whole life, she looks at the slaves—sweltering in the plantation sugarcane fields, silent and blank-faced as they’ve been trained in the stately homes—and sees them as people. She finds all kinds of expressions on their faces, ones she recognizes from her own: weariness and love and sorrow and humor. And as she looks, she thinks that she will never complain about the smell of horse-stench that will, inevitably, cling to the cracks and crevices of the Witch soon enough.

They visit the little Anglican cemetery by the neat white church house, overrun with wild grasses and overlooking the sea. There are three neat headstones all in a line, and Nat waits at the cast iron gate while Kit pays her respects. Tears are streaking down her face by the time she rises from Grandfather’s grave, but the sea air is just as salty, and the taste of them on her tongue is like home.

But there’s happiness in Barbados, too, even if it’s not as carefree as her childhood was. She teaches Nat to swim—really swim—in the very cove where she learned herself, and as they laugh and frolic, she thinks Grandfather is very near. Nat climbs a palm and returns with a coconut, and they crack it open and drink the milk right out of it, till their faces are smeared sticky—and then when they’re done Kit hitches her skirts up around her waist and shimmies up herself to fetch down another. He laughs until his eyes darken and he kisses her deep in the sand.

Those times take the edge off of the sting of discovering that Kit Eaton, wife of a ketch captain, isn’t welcome in the same places that Katherine Tyler, niece of Sir Francis Tyler, was. There aren’t any cool drinks on spacious verandas or fancy dinner parties with damask tablecloths and cultured chatter, not for her, not anymore. Fine ladies who had always been kind to her walk right past her on the streets of Bridgetown without so much as a second glance. At first it she thinks they’re purposefully cutting her, and she flares with indignation, but Nat points out in his ironic way—no longer mocking but now tempered with obvious affection—that they almost certainly didn’t recognize her. She looks at herself in the mirror that night and takes in her body, thinner and muscled from work, her face older and finally a woman’s, her hands calloused and brown and gloveless and has to laugh. That world is closed to her now, but walking along the beach with her hand clasped in Nat’s—calloused palm rubbing against calloused palm—she doesn’t mind as she once would have.

It’s winter, and back in Connecticut the snow will be shoulder deep. She doesn’t miss the snow or the way the cold clings to everything, inescapable and cruel, the one season New England didn’t teach her to love. She and Nat go to the little church where she and Grandfather always attended Mass, and then they have a little Christmas celebration of their own on board the Witch with his crew, who have already become good friends. Kit finds a beautiful conch on the beach to take back to Hannah and a few books she thinks Mercy will enjoy—and that Uncle Matthew won’t disapprove of—and a silk petticoat for Judith to wear under her dress on Sundays. When she gets back to Connecticut, she’ll bring her own Christmas.

--

Wethersfield

Spring has a deep hold on Connecticut when they pull into harbor on the river at Wethersfield, and Nat insists, laughing at her, that he doesn’t think that she’s a terrible cousin and niece if she wants to go to the Meadows first. They’re waiting for her, the same as always, endless and quiet and so beautiful it makes her heart ache, with a certain quality to the light that reminds her Hannah’s garden and the beach in Barbados and an evening on the deck of the Witch. She lets herself fall onto the soft grasses and soak in the sound of the blackbirds down by the pond. And Nat stretches himself out beside her, and they lay in golden silence and she listens to the sound of her husband breathing and she feels her heart sliding into place here as it does in the other places she calls home.

As the sun dips low, they walk down to where Hannah’s little cottage used to be. It would be a tragic place on a grey day, but here in the golden sunlight, even the charred black remnants of Hannah’s home don’t seem so sad. There’s grass growing now where the cottage used to be, and Kit thinks maybe she should feel more than the wistfulness that’s growing inside her—maybe she should mourn for what’s come to an end. But she can’t quite manage it when she knows that Hannah is safe and happy and she’ll see her soon and that the grass will soon cover any reminder of the house that once stood here, and that’s as it should be.

Aunt Rachel cries when she hugs Kit, and Mercy’s beaming, and the hint of humor Kit could sometimes detect in John’s face is out in full force. Even Uncle Matthew seems gruffly pleased to see her, and she can even think of things to say to him now at the dinner table. She tells him about Barbados and how it has its own charter, ten whole years older than Connecticut’s, and how proud the people are of it. Judith—fetched down from their big house by John as soon as Kit and Nat arrived—wants to hear all about what the ladies are wearing in Bridgetown and Hartford, and blushes fiercely when Nat teases her about the swell of her belly. After dinner they sit out on the benches in front of the house in the twilight and it’s like the happier times they had the year Kit first came, only better because Nat is here. He and William are stiff with each other at first—remembered jealousy and jack-o-lanterns—but no one can remain unpleasant under Mercy’s gentle gaze and soon enough it’s as though he was there all along.

Kit and Nat go to see Prudence first thing the next morning, and Kit can’t hide her surprise at how tall the little girl has grown. She’s still thin, in that gangly way of children at that age, but it’s not so painful-looking as it was before, and though she’ll probably never be a pretty girl, she has a glow about her that’s even better. She can read anything now, and is bursting to show off, and Kit and Nat are both as delighted as she is. Adam Cruff is still as proud as any father ever was, and it’s clear every time Kit looks at Prudence that things in the Cruff house have changed a great deal, and for the better. Prudence announces her intentions to be a schoolmistress one day—“Like, you, miss!”—and Kit has no doubt that she’ll accomplish it.

She and Nat walk back down to the Meadows and talk, and she finds that she’s giddy with joy to be back here. The thought makes her burst into laughter, and then she has to share the joke, and they both laugh, thinking of the proud, willful, naïve girl who had looked with such dismay at Wethersfield for the first time.

--

The Witch

Nat’s ship doesn’t stay as fresh and new as it appeared the day she first saw it for very long. Soon enough the wood loses its new-lumber glows and barnacles latch onto the hull and, just as she expected, there are soon enough horses in the hull and the smell of them will never quite leave. But she falls more in love with the ship every day, and the beauty being sanded away doesn’t touch her affection. She can’t say that she’ll ever be fond of the smell of horses, but she learns to tolerate it. And every time she thinks of complaining, she remembers the stories a seaman who used to sail aboard a slaver had told her one evening at the dock in Barbados, and she bites her tongue—though she comes awfully close to screaming herself when storms toss the ship from side to side and the horses all scream in the hold. They’re safe, of course, as safe as anyone ever is aboard a ship, but they don’t know it, and their terror is almost enough to make Kit afraid. But they make it through.

Kit finds a new way to be in love with the sea. She had loved it before in Barbados as the turquoise glimmer that surrounded the island, a place to swim and wade. But now she loves being in the middle of it, keeps discovering new colors and new ways for the waves to look. She learns the different sea birds and all the old sailors’ ways of telling what the next day’s weather might hold. Just as on her first trip on the Dolphin, she spends as little time below deck as she can, preferring to be up in the open air. She learns sailors’ knots and how to navigate with the maps and compasses Nat is so fond of. She becomes as tan and weathered as any of the other sailors, and her hands are just as callused. She rolls with the rolling of the deck below her and almost never stumbles. And she never gets sick.

Nat’s crew grows to like her, even as they shake their heads at the unexpected things she does, and soon she’s as much a part of the ship as Nat himself. Hannah’s cat has another litter of kittens, and they bring a striped bit of fluff aboard and she takes to sea life just as quickly as Kit did. Ariel—named, of course, for Kit’s favorite play—likes to climb up into the bed with Kit and Nat at night, and though it’s so cramped that there’s barely room enough for the two of them, they rarely kick her out.

There are storms that are so intense that even Kit has to finally retreat down into their cabin and hold her cat closely while the gale lashes around them. And there are days, especially on the River, where they barely move and the creeping threatens to drive her quite out of her mind. But there are always books now, and Nat, and her blossoming friendships with the crew—especially the red-headed first mate whose name, like her grandfather’s, is Francis. And she never has time to get really sick of sea life, because there’s always Barbados or Saybrook or Wethersfield waiting. And after her visits there, it’s always another kind of happiness to come back aboard her namesake, Nat’s little domain, and set out to sea once again.

--

“I’m terribly selfish,” she tells Nat. “But I’m so happy that I can’t regret it,” she says, thinking of how she has found her places of peace and light and rest—the ship on a rainy day, the Meadows in the height of their summer glory, surrounded by the flaming Barbados blossoms, the sense of home that Hannah carries with her wherever she goes. “I have everything that I want.”

“It was quite a gale you went through,” he agrees. “But you made it through, no worse for wear. I just hope the Witch will prove as hearty.”

And somehow Kit knows she will.