If I Wait For You (9 page)

“
Whales do not eat
men.”

“
Well, I am very glad to
hear of it, Mr. Mitchell.”

Sara did not know why she was teasing
the captain. Perhaps sheer malice drove her to do it. She could
remember similar conversations with her father, the two of them
purposefully trying to goad her ever-serious mother. And part of
her knew she was doing the exact same thing now; she wanted to
annoy this pretend husband of hers.

“
You will hear many
fantastic stories,” he said, giving Mr. Mason a warning look. “Most
of which are false. I wouldn’t want you to worry needlessly.” He
gave her a tight smile.

“
What stories?” Sara leaned
forward eagerly, and she could see the glint of amusement in Mr.
Mason’s eyes. She’d been right about him, she thought, he wasn’t
mean, simply ornery.

“
A later time, Miss Dawes,”
West bit out. “Mrs. Mitchell,” he amended briskly.

Sara’s face burned with embarrassment.
Next to her, she could sense Zachary stiffen and she turned to give
him a smile so that he’d know that Mr. Mitchell’s sharp words had
not affected her. The other two men gave their captain a searching
look before turning back to their food. Sara looked up at the
skylight, pretending all was well.

“
Where are we,
exactly?”

West finished chewing before answering
her. “About two hundred miles east of Long Island.” He spoke into
his plate.

“
Truly? It seems as though
we should be much further.” Sara recalled reading accounts of ships
reaching Florida in a week, and here they’d been gone nearly that
and had barely left New England.

“
This is not a clipper. And
we are sailing southeast, not a direct line to the Caribbean. In
fact, if we do not get a wind shift in a day or so, we shall sail
to the Azores for supplies. We are not trying to set a speed
record. We are hunting for whale.” He sounded like a tired teacher
explaining a concept for the tenth time to a dull
student.

“
She don’t know, Captain.
She ain’t never been on a whaler.”

Sara looked up to find Mr. Mason
scowling darkly at the captain, then he winked at her, and Sara’s
face split into a grin.

“
That is true, Mr. Mason,”
Sara said, ignoring the tense man next to her. “And I never thought
I would be on a whaler, either. I thought I would only learn of
such an adventurous life from the tales my brother and father
spun.”

Mr. Mason leaned back, seemingly
satisfied to have Sara smiling once again. “Yer pappy was a
whaler?”

“
Oh, no. He was a carpenter
who built many of the interiors of the whaling ships. And other
ships, as well. But he heard plenty of yarns while he was working
on the ships, and he shared them all with us. I’m afraid he was
quite the storyteller, so you’ll be hard pressed to top some of the
yarns I’ve heard.”

Sara looked at her brother, who smiled
his encouragement. It seemed everyone leaned forward to hear a tale
but the captain, who instead moved his thumb across the handle of
his spoon as if he were polishing it.

“
Have you ever seen a giant
squid?” Sara asked, remembering just how her father had told the
story. She had never told a tale in her life, but suddenly found
herself drawing the officers in with her words. It was the most fun
she’d ever had, using her hands and eyes, as well as well-chosen
words, to draw a gruesome picture of a giant squid, its tentacles
slowly, slowly engulfing a ship, screaming men diving off only to
be captured by the huge and snapping beak at the center of the
beast’s body.

In the middle of the tale, Sara
sneaked a look at the captain who watched her beneath hooded eyes.
She had no idea if he were enjoying her tale. Indeed, he had more
the look of a menacing and hungry giant squid at the moment, so she
turned her attention to the other men who were so obviously swept
up in her bloody tale. When she was finished, all was silent for a
few moments before Mr. Mason slapped his palm on the table loudly,
letting out a loud laugh.

“
By gor, Mrs. Mitchell,
I’ve got to get ye to tell that tale to the greenhorns. They’ll
have nightmares for a week.”

“
No.”

Sara’s joy at Mr. Mason’s praise
disappeared with the sharp, unrelenting sound of that word uttered
by the captain.

“
I’ll not have my wife
entertaining the men with tales like some barroom wench, Mr.
Mason,” West said.

“
Oh, I do beg yer
highness’s pardon,” Mr. Mason said with a little snort. But he did
not press and Sara knew no more would be said on the
matter.

For some reason, West’s pompousness
did not disturb Sara. Instead, despite her new resolve to not care
a whit about West Mitchell, Sara could only think how nice it was
to hear him call her “my wife.”

When dinner was finished, Sara excused
herself and made her way to the aftercabin knowing she would have
the cozy room to herself for a few hours. She was exhausted and no
longer in the mood to spin tales or make anyone laugh. She felt,
quite oddly, like crying, though she didn’t know exactly why. Sara
sat upon the cushioned sofa, her head resting on the back, and
stared at the teak-paneled ceiling. Before she knew it, tears were
streaming down her face, tickling her ears, wetting her neck. She’d
just had a wonderful time, why was she crying? Then a rush of
memories assaulted her, crushed her.

How could she mourn a woman who never
loved her? She squeezed her eyes closed. That yearning she’d felt
as a little girl flooded her heart, even now hoping that she would
someday earn her mother’s love. Sara could not remember ever being
held. Or loved. Except, of course, by Zachary. But he was older and
had escaped their house as much as possible, leaving for good when
she was just fourteen.

Her father, though she loved him, was
rarely around, and when he was, it was a gruff, distant man she
saw. The only time she shared with him was at the dinner table when
he was spinning his tales. Now they were both gone, forever gone.
She’d have no more chances to make her mother love her. There would
be no more stories at the dinner table. Then a memory, sharp and
cruel, came to her. That last night they were together as a family,
her father had delighted in torturing her mother with the story of
the young man who’d been murdered practically outside their
door.

“
Heard there was some
excitement today,” John Dawes had said as he’d sawed at a piece of
pork and popped it in his mouth, chewing noisily and
opened-mouthed. His brown eyes glinted with something close to
amusement as he noted his wife’s look of disgust at his bad table
manners. He let out a noisy, liquidy burp.

Sara had looked up expectantly at her
father, who had returned just before supper from an overnight trip
to Fall River to look over a new lumber yard.

“
What excitement?” she
asked, feeling more tension between her parents than was typical.
She looked from one parent to the other, but they only had eyes for
each other, and the look was not loving.

“
Murder,” her father
growled. “A young boy.” He emphasized the word “boy” in a odd way,
as if it would have some significance to Evelyn, and Sara furrowed
her brow.

“
You’ll wrinkle your
forehead if you continue to scowl like that, Sara,” her mother
said, finally looking her way. Then to her husband, “This is not a
suitable conversation for our dinner table.”

John slurped his beer noisily, then
wiped his mouth with flourish on the back of his sleeve, a defiant
look on his face.

“
Maybe not your dinner
table. But at
my
dinner table I can talk about whatever I goddamned please,”
he said, a hard and terrible edge to his voice. He took another
drink and let out a satisfied sound. Her father, never the cleanest
nor neatest man, was particularly grubby this night. His hair,
matted and greasy, spiked up all over his head. His shirt was
stained, his cravat and collar undone and still draped about a neck
that was dark with grime and unshaved hair. It almost appeared as
if he had purposefully come the dinner table in this state to upset
his wife.

Her mother, her flawless white hands
trembling slightly as she cut her meat, was impeccably dressed, her
hair neatly gathered beneath a snood that perfectly matched the
color of her navy blue gown. Evelyn sipped her claret as if it were
the finest champagne, laying her glass soundlessly back upon the
table.

“
Throat was cut,” John said
through the heavy silence, and Sara jumped. “Wonder if he squealed
like a pig before he died?”

Even Sara, who had seen her father
misbehave before, was shocked at his obvious effort to upset her
mother, who’d gone frighteningly pale at her father’s
words.

“
Papa, perhaps…” and she
stopped when her father glared at her. His fierce look immediately
softened, and he offered a lopsided smile.

“
He was a strapping lad,”
he said, his voice softer, but somehow more vicious. “Down from
Vermont. A farm boy thinking he’d find his fortune on a whaler. He
had blond hair, blue eyes.” He nodded toward Evelyn. “Like your
mother there. They might have been…” He paused as if trying to find
the right words, and Sara sensed her mother stiffen, “…brother and
sister. He was a sociable sort. Friendly. Real friendly. Especially
to the ladies.” He smiled up at Sara’s mother who sat unmoving and
silent, as if her father were beating her into submission with his
innocuous words. “He had many, many lady friends, so I heard,” he
said with a sneer. He leaned forward, as if sharing a secret with
Sara. “Some, I’ve heard, were
married
ladies.”

Sara, her eyes wide, gasped.
“No.”

John leaned back, a merry twinkle in
his eye, and Sara relaxed. “Can you imagine, a married woman, a
much older woman, cuckolding her husband with a Vermont farm
boy?”

“
Perhaps one of the sea
captain’s wives?” Sara asked, suddenly happy to be sharing such a
scandalous conversation with her father, even if it meant upsetting
her mother. She never got to gossip with girls her own age, so busy
was she running their household, and was openly thrilled to get
some inside information on, of all things, a murder.

“
Perhaps,” he said vaguely,
and looked at Evelyn with hooded eyes.

“
Do the police have any
idea who might have killed the boy?” Sara asked, already thinking
that one of the irate husbands might have done the deed. Her father
immediately confirmed her belief, and Sara congratulated herself on
her deductive reasoning.

“
It is almost a certainty
that one of the husbands killed the young man,” he said, an odd
smile on his hard lips. “But I wonder, why he didn’t choose to kill
his wife instead?”

Evelyn stood suddenly, so suddenly,
she nearly over-ended her chair. “I believe I’ve had enough of this
lurid conversation. If you’ll excuse me.” Her voice trembled, her
forehead held a sheen of perspiration even though the night had
grown markedly cooler.

“
Papa, you really shouldn’t
tease Mother so,” Sara gently chastised.

John’s fathomless brown eyes were
pinned to the back of his hastily departing wife. Then he turned to
his daughter, blinking away that fearsome look. “It is one of my
few pleasures, Sara,” he’d said before taking a deep swallow of his
beer.

Her father had been taunting her
mother unmercifully. She could still remember how her mother’s face
had paled at his words, how she’d fled the room to escape his
taunts. My God, she thought, had her father hired men to kill that
young boy? Sara shook her head in denial, even as the truth of it
slammed into her. It suddenly seemed too conceivable. How could she
think such a thing about her own father? And yet…he’d seemed so
angry and so delighted somehow about the boy’s death.

Sara wrapped her arms around her
knees, fighting the thoughts that ravaged her mind. She’d already
lost her mother, she could not lose the kind memories left of her
father as well. Squeezing her eyes closed, she said, over and over,
“It’s not true. It can’t be true. It’s not.” And so she convinced
herself that it was not true, could not be true. For if it were
true, it would mean Sara was the daughter of a murderer and an
adulteress, and it was all too, too much to accept. She squeezed
her arms tighter about her knees and tried to give herself the
comfort she so very badly needed.

“
I just need…someone,” she
said aloud. Someone to hold me. She wrapped her arms about her,
feeling only emptiness.

Above her sudden activity pulled her
out of her self-pity. She felt the ship move beneath her, heard the
snap of sails, the shouts of the officers, footsteps pounding on
the deck, and she wondered if perhaps a whale had been spotted. The
door to the cabin swung open revealing a wind-tousled captain. He
ignored her presence and made his way immediately to the charts,
muttering under his breath about their organization.

“
I apologize for disturbing
your charts. I should have known better than to touch them,” Sara
said, hoping he would not hear the stuffiness of her
voice.

He turned, his eyes immediately
searching her face. “You’ve been crying.”