you. You are a very nice and thoughtful young woman, May.’
‘I wish that was true.’
Elizabeth only smiled. ‘Do you want me to tell you about the Captain?’
‘Um. Well, all right. Yeah, go on then.’
‘The Captain was a whaleman. He was from Maine, not very far from here, and he went down to New Bedford to sign on a ship in the fleet there. He was brave and lucky, and in time he came to command his own ship. His wife, who was then his widow and an old woman, told my grandmother all this when she first came to live on the bluff.’
‘You remember, May, I told you the Captain’s was the first house here on the bluff. Then my grandfather bought a parcel of land next to it and built a summer cottage for his wife, and old Mr Swayne built what’s now the Beams’ place.’
It was a relief for Elizabeth to talk about land and history rather than to recall the other details of those long-ago summers. The girl had startled her by making such a shrewd guess, that was all, and it was unlucky that her own reaction to it had been so unguarded.
Her guess could be forgotten again, May had said so, yet Elizabeth had the sense that the ground was shivering beneath them both, that some seismic disturbance would expose what had been buried and believed to be obliterated. It was May’s vulnerable age and the blindness of pain written in her face, and the crows’ wings of secrets that even Elizabeth couldn’t guess at that had set the tremors off. She was afraid that they wouldn’t subside into stillness again. Carefully, deliberately therefore, she concentrated for this moment on what it was safe to remember.
Elizabeth could hear her grandmother’s soft voice as clearly as if she were in the room instead of May. The old lady had loved to talk about the early days of her marriage, of the novelty of leaving Boston behind and travelling east to the coast to play at house in the cottage above the seashore. The blue-and-gold tea service had belonged to those times, and most of the heavy furniture that still filled the rooms, and the beginnings of the flower garden surrounding the house.
Even late in life the Senator’s wife had been a dreamy, otherworldly creature, made almost ethereal by long years of invalidism and cosseting by her husband and servants. She had told the story relayed to her by the Captain’s widow in languorous detail and the very words she used had stayed in Elizabeth’s mind. They murmured and whispered around the image of the island woman. White, scraped face. The poor, sad creature. Eyes set deep in the staring bone. A tragedy, and quite a mystery.
Long ago when she was a young wife and mother, the Captain’s wife had been sitting beside the window of the solid house her husband had built for her. It was within sight and sound of the sea that had made his fortune, but at the same time it turned its shoulder a little aside as if to emphasise that its hold on him had slackened now. It was a stormy evening, the last of the light just fading. The waves boiled and coalesced, and burst themselves on the shingle with furious energy. The young wife was musing on the desolation of the world beyond the windows and on the comfort within, where the stove glowed and her husband was whistling softly as he bent to some task. Their new baby lay asleep on her lap. She dropped her eyes from the window to look at the rosy little features. Then she looked up again.
She saw a face staring in at her, so close that the features seemed almost flattened against the glass. The hollow eyes were wide and staring, and the mouth stretched open in a silent howl. The wet hair, a woman’s long hair, stuck to the apparition’s forehead and cheeks like coiled black snakes.
The Captain’s wife screamed and swept the baby close to her heart. Her husband came running and looked where she pointed, but the face had already vanished. He ran out into the storm, leaving the door banging in the wind, but although he searched until the rain had soaked him to the skin there was no one to be found. He came back into the lamplight and tried to reassure his wife, telling her that what she had seen was only a trick of the light or a spectre conjured out of her own imagination. At last he was able to persuade her to follow him up the stairs to the safety of their bed and to lay the baby in her crib at the foot of it.
The storm wore itself out by the next morning. A day of stillness passed, then another and the Captain’s wife began to believe that the face framed by the snakes of hair had after all been imaginary, just as her husband insisted.
On the third day, a fisherman was passing close by the seaward side of the island. He noticed an unusual concentration of seabirds lifting and circling around a point on the hillside above the shore, and growing more curious as he watched them he turned his boat and took it in to land. He made fast and climbed the slope to where the whalers’ old stone tavern and refuge looked out to sea. In those days the cabin was already deserted and falling into disrepair because the few ships that still passed now made for Pittsharbor itself. The fisherman glanced in under the stone lintel, then walked out again into the sunlight. A cloud of birds rose with noisy cries from the trees behind the cabin and wheeled into the sky above his head. The man climbed slowly to see what it was that had drawn them in such numbers.
A woman’s body hung from a branch of one of the trees. It slowly revolved on its rope, as if the buffeting of the wings and beaks had set it turning on itself.
When the poor body was cut down and the pockets searched for clues to the woman’s identity, a piece of folded paper was found with the Captain’s name scribbled on it. The words written beneath his name read, I could not find it within myself to take the life of an infant’s father. I take my own life in its place and I bequeath you the legacy of remembering what you have done. Sarah.
Sarah was not a local woman and the enquiries that were made never revealed where she had come from nor why she had chosen to make such a sad end of herself. The Captain himself always steadfastly denied prior knowledge of her, or any of the details relating to her life and death. He had been, he said, to many strange places in his time and had seen many peculiar things that did not lend themselves to ordinary explanation. He was content to let mysteries lie. To his wife he insisted, ‘She was some poor, deranged woman in the grip of a sad fixation which cannot now be explained. A decent burial is the best farewell we can give the poor soul.’
Sarah was buried on the island. Her lonely grave was within sight and sound of the sea and some of the fishermen’s wives, who guessed at a history they would never know for sure, made it their duty to tend it. They planted herbs, which flourished in the broken ground, and at the beginning there were often fresh-cut flowers placed in a glass jar at the grave’s head. But there was no name or stone to mark the place, and over the years the mullein and catnip ran wild around it and the low grassy hump sank back into the hillside once again. The suicide’s grave was slowly forgotten, except when the Captain’s old widow recalled the history of it for her new neighbour.
Elizabeth Page Freshett had listened to the widow’s story with a shiver that made her want to forget what she had heard. She was waiting for the birth of her first child, and the image of a face staring in from the darkness at a mother and baby in the lamplight cruelly embedded itself in her imagination. There were often times after her son was born when she looked at the blank window glass as darkness fell and hurried to draw the curtains across it. But she never saw anything except a reflection of herself and the comfortable room behind her.
Her granddaughter was a different woman. The young Elizabeth was neither dreamy nor delicate and she was not especially susceptible to fears or morbid imaginings. But then she had fallen in love, and after the first delight the helplessness of her state seemed to peel her flesh raw and to leave her at the mercy of fierce influences that
