The Dawning of the Day
Read The Dawning of the Day Online
Authors: Elisabeth Ogilvie
The Bennett Island Series
An Answer in the Tide
Summer of the Osprey
Day Before Winter
Tide Trilogy
High Tide at Noon
The Storm Tide
Ebbing Tide
Lover's Trilogy
Dawning of the Day
The Seasons Hereafter
Strawberries in the Sea
Elisabeth Ogilvie
Camden, Maine
Published by Down East Books
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
16 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BT, United Kingdom
Distributed by National Book Network
Copyright © 1954 by Elisabeth Ogilvie
Reprinted 1999 by arrangement with the author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ogilvie, Elisabeth, 1917â2006
The dawning of the day / by Elisabeth Ogilvie.
p. cm. â (Bennett's Island saga ; 4)
1. IslandsâMaineâFiction. 2. WomenâMaineâFiction. I. Title. II. Series: Ogilvie, Elisabeth, 1917- Bennett's Island saga ; 4.
PS3529.G39D34 1999
813'.52âdc21
99-17860
ISBN 978-1-60893-333-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
PRINCIPAL CHARACTERS
P
hilippa Marshall
Eric, her son
Stephen Bennett, brother of Joanna and Mark
Young Charles Bennett, nephew of Stephen, Mark, and Joanna
Nils and Joanna (Bennett) Sorensen
Their son Jamie
Their daughter Linnea
Mark and Helmi Bennett
Rob and Kathie Salminen (nephew and niece of Helmi)
Jude and Lucy Webster
Their children, Rue, Edwin, Faith, and Daniel
Syd and Viola (Campion) Goward (sister of Asanath and Foss)
Their daughter Ellie
Asanath and Suze Campion
Their son, Terence
Foss and Helen Campion
Their children, Perley (son of Helen by her first marriage),
Peggy, and Schuyler
Randall and Ella Percy
Their children, Fort, Ralph, Clare, and Francis
Gregg, who belongs to no one
T
he island lay alone on the sea. Though it was less than two miles, as the gulls and cormorants flew, from the larger island to the north of it, its solitude was genuine and complete, a thing of the spirit as well as a physical reality. There were some fifty islanders, including the smallest child, and on this morning in early September, each went about his separate business as he had done for the past year and expected to do for some time to come. Each was the center of a world that revolved around him with the comforting regularity of the tides and the sun.
Though among them there were twisting frustrations, silent agonies, and secret terrors, as a group they were self-sufficient; they wanted nothing from Brigport or from the mainland twenty-five miles to the north, whose mountains made a lovely but uninviting line along the sky. Their work, their homes, and their futures were here, on the long strip of meadowland and spruce woods that rose from the Maine sea, steeply buttressed with rocks and forever salted with flying spray. Here the lobsters crawled in plenty on the clean bottom, in the dark deep waters that were guarded even from Brigport men by an invisible but powerful line. The lobstermen were rich when inshore lobstermen could barely pay for a day's gasoline. If they wanted the mainland, they went to it in their big competent boats, and when they walked the streets, everyone knew them for islanders. When they went home, they looked with complacent possessiveness on the moat between them and the rest of the world.
For them this was like any fine late-summer day. It would end as all such days ended; there was no reason to believe otherwise. When the last boat was on the mooring, the last skiff hauled up to high-water mark, when the stars appeared in the pure cold blue of the evening sky, when the lamps were lit and the men kicked off their boots and settled down to an evening of radio and knitting trap heads, when the derelict who lived in the Binnacle began to play his clarinet, the self-sufficiency of the islanders would be a thick and warming cloak against the rest of the universe. They would have no reason to believe that on this day their lives would have begun to change.
The men went out to haul their lobster traps in the early morning of this day. Most took to their boats eagerly enough. The air was fine, the horizon set in crystal. The boats bounded across the dark blue water; the wet buoys, red, yellow, white, flashed in the sun. The women got the week's washing out where the wind could blow it.
In midmorning a lobsterman's boat went out of the harbor to meet the mail boat at Brigport. She plunged proudly into the tide rip, and the wake reached the moorings and set the skiffs and the dories to bouncing on the dark glittering water. But in a little while the wake died out, and the sound of the engine was lost behind the eastern harbor point. The island settled back into the cradle of familiar things that would go on forever: the rote on the far shores, the wind blowing, the gulls over the water, and the crickets and sparrows on the land. It was a day that began as thousands of other days had begun.
T
he mail boat for Brigport and Bennett's Island had been rolling ever since she'd poked her stubby nose out past Owl's Head Light two hours earlier. The wind was northwest, and the
Ella Vye
took the boisterous seas on her quarter. She was eminently seaworthy and had been making the twenty-five-mile run across Penobscot Bay in all kinds of weather. A northwest blow in early September was nothing to her. But she shuddered with each comber that came smashing aboard, recovered herself, rushed boldly forward on a carrying sea only to pitch abruptly as if the waters had suddenly departed altogether.
Philippa had felt a mild regret when she boarded the boat that morning because she was the only passenger. Now she was glad. She could not have endured the shame of seasickness in front of anyone. It was true she had not been sick yet, but the terror of it had been with her constantly. At first she had stayed out on deck, up before the pilot-house, her arm around the mast. She had been exhilarated by the expanse of water that was a surge of dull silver in the wake and a cold pure blue-green everywhere else; she had felt excitement as the foaming crests rushed toward the boat and as the gulls had followed them out of the harbor, soaring overhead. At first, too, there had been the islands all around them, clear blue shapes that robbed the horizon of its wilderness look.
The boat's wake bubbled behind them in a constantly widening path, back to the mainland whose roofs were melting into obscurity, whose hills were purpling with distance. She looked back with the fascination of one who has entered into a strange dream and knows there is no waking.
There
was the reality, the yellowing elms rooted in the unshaking earth, the square houses that could not be changed to wilderness even by the sea gulls that came to perch on their ridgepoles.
There
was her son, tangible flesh that was hers.
Hereâhere was the narrow wet deck tilting and shuddering under her feet. The mast to which she held went up and up to pitch crazily against the blowing clouds. The bow rose and fell against a bare horizon. Her destination lay beyond that horizon, but try as she might, she could make out no faintest cloud of land against the hard clean curve of the sky.
She tightened her arm around the mast and looked behind her and up. In the window of the pilothouse the captain's face was blank mahogany. His gaze went over her head and beyond the bow as if she were not there. When she'd come aboard the boat that morning, he had been supervising the loading of the freight, rope and laths, paint, kegs of nails, crates of food, bags of grain. He had been civil to her, taking his cigar out of his mouth when he spoke and looking at her squarely.