The Watery Part of the World (5 page)

“They only tolerate you because he's scared of you.”

“Because of who I am?”

This time his laughter was filled with mirth, or mockery. “Who you are? He don't give a damn who you are. The more you carry on about your famous daddy, the more mad he thinks you are. If he really thought you were the daughter of that bastard, he'd of thrown you over same's he did your maid.”

She thought of defending her father but realized, too late, how completely she'd exposed herself to Whaley. If her survival depended on hiding who she was, she was certainly found out now.

“All of what you see there I progged off the beach,” he said. He ladled steaming stew into a bowl and brought it to her along with a hard and slightly molded piece of bread. She dipped the bread in the broth and devoured it, speared a potato and ate without chewing.

“You worry that I'll tell them you're not so crazy,” he said.

She looked up at him, terrified suddenly that her every thought was obvious, transparent.

“Never mind that,” he said. “He spared my life as well. I got here same way you did. Against my will.”

“He boarded your ship?”

“Something like that.”

Whaley studied her in the flickering light. She looked him in the eye, something she hadn't done to anyone since she'd arrived on the island. She needed to look the part. That meant no eye contact, appropriate body language—hunched back, drooped shoulders, a shuffling, sideways gait. Once a lady came to Richmond Hill to teach her how to walk, how to eat, how to converse. Her father paid the woman, though he swore he didn't—she found the account in his ledger. He said the woman came because she felt sorry for Theo, having lost her mother, who was supposed to teach her these things. But charity made Theo feel worse. She was relieved when she'd discovered the woman's name in the ledger. Thereafter she approached the lessons with a little more energy and interest. And now the lessons were truly paying off, for everything she had been taught she simply reversed.

“Well, it doesn't look like he's got you under guard either,” she said, conscious of how liberating it was to be so rudely intrusive, now that she had so little to lose.

“They say he knows every pony on this island, every milk cow, every chicken. All these people are his spies. You think they volunteered to board you? Poor as they are? This island ain't good for growing nothing. Daniels supplies them with stock and the grain to feed it. He pays off the governor too. Not that the government's got dominion on these islands.”

If there were no rule, no government, surely she had been forgotten. To distract herself from this thought, she asked another intrusive question.

“What was your trade before you were captured?”

“I was at sea.”

“Ah,” she said, looking above her. “I might have guessed carpentry, given the excellence of this structure.”

“You make do with what the water washes up over here.”

“I don't suppose the rest of them suffer someone like yourself taking the choice items.”

Whaley smiled. “Progging for them is more a festivity. Especially if spirits happens to wash up. I've seen them feed liquor to an eight-year-old boy just for their amusement.”

“I don't think they're all bad over here, Mr. Whaley.”

“Call me Whaley.”

“I will not. What would you call me—Alston?”

“I'd call you Burr,” he said. He watched for her reaction.

She said, finally, “So you believe I'm who I say I am?”

“Why not? Everybody's got to have a father. He's good as any, I reckon.”

Oh, but he was far better. Even in light of the misery they'd both suffered in the last few years—the duel, the treason charges, his exile and onerous return to New York—she felt blessed to have such a loving and honorable father. How deeply misunderstood he was now, how wide the discrepancy between his public persona and the father he'd been to her, eternally supportive and giving. She needed the world to see those papers.

“If they were all bad, these people,” she said, “they would never have shared their food with me.”

He seemed to look right through the layers of rags she wore, spy the jutting hipbones, the taut skin stretched over the ladder rungs of her ribcage. “Fed you like a princess, did they?”

“It's just that I don't believe people are either all good or all bad.”

“I'd wager you keep better company than I do.”

“You ought not to assume because my former station was a high one—”

He interrupted. “High? Daughter of the vice president? No, miss, I never would of said ‘high.'”

“Let me finish, please,” she said, smiling. She'd not smiled since before her son got sick. She told herself it had nothing to do with this man, everything to do with a limit to misery—a point crossed, after which the mind and heart seeks to vent its displeasure by
becoming unexpectedly, blissfully surprised. “There are plenty of perfectly venal people in the circles among which I previously moved,” she said, thinking of the man her father challenged to a duel only after the slander had turned personal and, she suspected, involved not only her father's honor but her own.

“Don't doubt you there,” he said. “But you contradicted yourself. You said there isn't any of them all bad, then you said some of them is perfectly venal. I don't recall the exact meaning of that word but I'm going to venture it don't mean virtuous.”

“I may well have contradicted myself,” she said. “It's hard to think straight when you've eaten your fill for the first time in months. They say hunger makes you crazy, but I feel I had more clarity when I was in want than now, with this fire, this stew, this bread.”

“A charming excuse,” said Whaley. “Though I happen to agree with you: ain't no one all bad or all good. Daniels himself saved the likes of you. Which makes him a little less a villain.”

This seemed a good place to ask again why he too was thought to be touched when he was obviously quite rational, even intelligent in his own way. But when she asked, he said, “You'll be wanting to bed down now. Take the tick in the corner there,” he said, pointing to a bundle of moss and pine straw beneath what seemed to be a piece of sail.

“I will not take your bed.”

“Nonsense. I'm not the one's been sleeping in the mud for the past three nights. I've got a blanket, I'll pull up here by the fire.”

She nodded and stretched out on the bed. The pine needles felt as soft and luxurious as the finest goose down, but it was some time before she slept. Barring the couples who'd harbored her, she'd never slept so close to any man, much less a stranger. Joseph had his own rooms, and came to her in the night, and not every night. Whaley was close enough to touch. She could see his silhouette in the dying light of the fire. Could hear him breathing. She tried turning on her side, facing away from him, but that did not quell the mix of trepidation and excitement she felt.

But fatigue and relief not to be sleeping in wet sand, her skin raked by live-oak boughs shaken by steady wind, took over at some point in the night.

When she blinked open her eyes, Whaley was gone, but the fire had been revived, and there was a kettle boiling, a can of loose tea and a mug laid out on a stool cobbled crudely from progged planks. For the first time since she'd arrived on the island she slept later than her host. She made a cup of tea and sipped until Whaley returned with a load of wet twigs and, in a pail, two small fish.

“I reckon you're used to fish.”

“I confess I would kill for a peach.”

“Seems a trifle to murder over. Surely there's something you crave more.”

She thought about it. For years her foremost desire was for the return of the bliss she'd felt when she'd been the mistress of Richmond Hill. And then she'd lost her son, which turned her want of
a fine house and famous dinner guests childish and vain. Though he was alive still, coming for her surely, she'd lost her father after the duel and the Mexico scheme. But his glory could easily be restored. He suffered only from the usual male vanities. Envy. Pride. The failings of good men the world over. She had only a problem with his greed.

“My father made a deal with my husband,” she said into the fire.

“Pardon?”

“A financial arrangement. For my hand. I can't say I was not given to the idea of marriage, or that there were not qualities in Joseph I admired, but my father was in trouble. He has always lived as if he were rich. He is not wise in business. We were going to lose Richmond Hill—the estate we used to own on the Hudson—and my father agreed to allow Joseph my hand if he would help out with the mortgage.”

“A dowry,” said Whaley in a way that made it clear he thought there was nothing terribly unusual there.

“No, not a dowry. An arrangement. A dowry is a onetime payment. This was not that. I have a bad habit of sneaking looks at people's ledgers. I saw the payments to my father, and they continued for some years after we were married. In fact, they continued far longer than the initial arrangement called for, as I finally confronted Joseph about it, and he told me that he'd continued to keep my father afloat out of pity.”

“He lost the house anyway?”

“Yes,” she said, turning to Whaley, who had cleaned the fish and was rolling them in meal to fry for breakfast. “But there were motivations, I am certain, other than financial ones. Political clout in the Southern colonies, where my father's enlightened stance on slavery doubtless cost him the presidency.”

“Power changes a man. Even if they're not claiming to have heard women in pictures talking or moving their eyes, they lose touch with the rest of the world.”

Feeling her face grow warm, she put down her tea, moved back from the fire. What angered her the most about his comment was the way he could have been either talking to himself, about someone else—Daniels, obviously—or listening, and understanding, all too well.

“If you're going to talk about my father, you could at least call him by name,” she said.

“What your daddy's done or ain't done don't concern me nor anyone else on this island. You need to get used to that, or you'll drive yourself mad.”

Whaley laughed at his joke so loudly that she nearly smiled herself. And of course he was right. Her father's illustrious career wasn't even news here, for the news, when it came, was months late and had no effect on the lives of the islanders. She wondered if, in fact, her father meant nothing to the rest of the country—wondered if she hadn't imagined the stares as she sat in the Alston family pew of the St. James Episcopal Church in
Charleston, or exaggerated the threat of shameful treatment that led her to choose, despite Joseph's protestations, to travel to her reunion with her father by sea instead of overland, which would have taken less than a week, opposed to the two weeks it would have taken her had there not been a light tied to the head of a nag. The thought of six days cooped up in a coach with strangers who would just know by looking at her who she was had led her to choose the ocean.

That she associated the ocean with indifference amused her now that her life—and the lives of everyone on this island—was so dependent upon what the sea delivered. Whaley's lodgings might be aesthetically lacking, but its roof kept the both of them dry and warm.

“Okay,” she said, “I'll try not to drive myself mad. In the mean time, you'll help me build my manor?”

“Imagine I could lend a hand from time to time.”

“And that portrait? You'll help me get it back?” She saw no need to mention the papers, for how could she trust this man she'd just met? Such a treasure might cause a good man to change direction. As he said, power changes a man.

When she looked up at him, his affable demeanor had darkened.

“Might as well take a knife to both our throats.”

“I want it back.”

“If that portrait went missing he'd search ever inch of this island until he turned it up. He'd catch you, and he'd kill you.”

“It's all I've got from before.”

Whaley handed over her breakfast.

“You got lots from before.” He tapped his temple with a forefinger. “Way more important than paint on a canvas.”

“I don't know. I don't trust myself to remember. Not here, not as hard as it is to live.”

“That only makes a memory stronger,” he said.

Again she sensed some untold story. It was in his delivery at times, his sudden demonstrative surges, so noticeably impassioned given his phlegmatic demeanor. But now was not the time to press. It would take time, talking him into helping her get to her father's papers. And it wasn't as if she did not understand the danger. She had witnessed Daniels at what, for all she knew, might have been a routine Tuesday on the job, and it was as bloody and deeply evil a day as she'd ever hoped to witness. She stiffened at the thought of it and despite her attempts to push the memory away, it was as Whaley said: something about the island only made stronger that moment on the ship, when the door to her berth gave way and she tried hard to take her eyes off the woman in the portrait she thrust in front of her like a shield. But that woman would not break her stare, would not let her look away as her sweet French maidservant Eleanor, inches away, became two people, two sets of legs, one set unskirted from waist to knees, another bare from buttocks to boot tops. Theo did not look; she was not allowed to move her eyes from the gaze of the woman in the painting and still she
could see everything, the man jerking atop Eleanor as he slapped her face and pried open her mouth to spit into it. Two sets of hands trying to pull the portrait from her arms. Her strength godly and omnipotent so long as she did not break the gaze. Finally three men pushed the two of them—herself and the woman in the portrait—topside.

Daniels had stood calmly among the carnage on deck. He was bare to the waist and there was an epaulet of blood on his shoulder.