An elbow to the ribs was no way to wake up.
Mathilda had been a fitful sleeper right from the cradle, but Ellen would swear her thrashing had grown worse over the years, making it ever harder to share the bed. The flat, gray dawn revealed her conquest: a full three-quarters of the feather tick mattress—a feat worthy of Napoleon himself.
Frustration nearly drove Ellen to attack her right back. Who was she to doze so peacefully?
Yet her soft little face, usually animated with curiosity or mischief, was so peaceful in slumber. Long lashes rested gently on her cheeks. The white cotton nightcap had pulled askew, so that twists of honey-brown hair and rag curlers poked out like the petals of some strange flower. She’d wear a riot of ringlets to church today.
That child was so like Ellen in some ways—impatient, brash, adventurous—and yet so different in others. Ellen had fought Mama tooth and nail to leave her hair be. To take the lace off her skirts because it caught in the tree branches. To escape tedious conversations about who was courting whom, what new sheet music had come from Leipzig, and the latest efforts to rehabilitate fallen women.
But Mathilda soaked these things up. Seven years old and she already fit into the world far better than Ellen did in her twenties. She tucked a curl behind her sister’s ear with a reluctant smile. If they still had Papa’s purse, she’d have looked lovely in lace.
Ellen glanced out the window at the pale disc of a sun, half-hidden behind a layer of altostratus clouds. The chop in the harbor showed the wind had shifted from south to southeast, slogging its way counterclockwise to the nor’easter she knew was coming. But it was still a couple of days off. Today would be gusty but dry.
The glimpse of the sea stilled her heart as it always did, putting even yesterday’s shock in perspective. She regretted her jealousy. Her selfishness. Even the depth of her past guilt.
Today, she mostly felt happy for Perk. He’d set off as a boy and returned as a captain. She’d seen the change in his newly confident stance. He must be six feet tall now, broad-shouldered and barrel-chested. Though even with the new beard, she’d seen the same face that had always made her smile.
But his choice of Euphemia she didn’t follow. Had he molded himself into the social-climbing sycophant his father’d always pushed him to become? What had become of the wild-hearted boy who’d dreamed of far horizons with her?
An unwelcome memory pricked holes in her contentment—the last time she’d seen Perk, when he’d looked at her like she was a bucket of milk gone sour. She tamped it down.
“He deserves to be happy,” she whispered to herself, gripping the sill. “If Euphemia gives him that, then I’m glad for their—” She couldn’t say marriage, even to herself. “Glad for them.”
“You’d better be awake and dressed!” Mama called from behind the door.
Ellen tugged off her nightcap and crawled over Mathilda’s now-moving limbs. After six months of reprieve, she knew she was due back at church after yesterday’s grim, half-mourning anniversary—an impossible six months since Captain Papa’s passing. Propriety said she should have been going to church all along, with Mama and Mathilda, but she suspected she only won the battle to stay home because Mama had ideas turning her reintroduction into an event, so the town would give its misfit a new look, like a butterfly emerging from a chrysalis.
Ellen felt more like a hawk being forced into a dovecote.
One of Mathilda’s pinkies twitched in a dream. Still so untroubled. She’d grow up belonging in the world as it was, instead of hoping for one that didn’t exist.
Surely Ellen could delay her return until after the wedding. Perk didn’t deserve to have his nemesis ruin his big day.
The door flew open. “Up. Now.” Mama said. “Ellen, you’re to polish the boots. Mathilda, you see if the hens have dropped early eggs. Otherwise, we’ve only hasty pudding for breakfast.”
The cold air seeped into Ellen’s skin. “I’ll see to the boots,” she said, making a mental tally of supplies. Lampblack. Molasses. Goose fat. “But it’ll be for the best if I skip the wedding today.” Vinegar. Bristle brush. Soft brush. Water bucket.
“No,” Mama said. “You too. And do something with that hair of yours. Brace it with carpenter’s glue if you must. Mr. Sampson, the cabbage farmer, is coming all the way from Lynn Woods, and is intrigued to meet you.”
Ellen started, leaning instinctively toward The Virtuous Wife that hid her treasured flower. “But Lynn Woods is miles from the sea.”
She’d nearly accepted the necessity of marriage. As long as her heart wasn’t bound by the union along with her body, she even imagined she could retain some form of independence. But she’d not counted on losing every connection to the ocean as well.
“Must you seek a suitor so far off?”
Mama arched her eyebrows. She didn’t need to speak the answer: no one in town would consider it. “You could still attend church here on Sundays,” she said. “We’d see each other often enough.”
Ellen clutched the nightcap in her fist into a tight ball of cotton. “I’ll go next week,” she said. “I promise.”
Mama thought for a moment, then settled into a spot on the bed between Ellen and Mathilda, resting a hand on each knee as to impart a lesson to both at once.
“I know you don’t want to listen to a word I say. And heaven knows the rows I used to have with your papa over your navigation, but every moment you spent on the schooner drew you further from viable marriage prospects. And now here we are. You’re a hair’s breadth from spinsterhood, is the truth of it. Already well past your prime. And you must listen to me now, my girl, before it’s too late.”
“Even if that’s true,” Ellen said with a sigh, “Why must it be today?”
“You’re my daughter. My heart.” Mama looked away as if trying to hide her sadness, as if Ellen couldn’t read it just as clearly in the slump of her shoulders.
“Nothing would have spared you from the grief of your papa’s passing, but without the ability to lay him to rest—to say goodbye—you’ll always struggle to let him go.”
The hollow ache in Ellen’s chest squeezed into a tight ball of pain.
“I know how tied you are to Perkins Creesy. All the history you two had, running around like rapscallions. He may have been gone an age, but I don’t know that you’ll ever move on from him if you don’t see him married with your own eyes.”
To Euphemia Bartlett, of all people, Ellen thought, cradling the book like a pillow. Had he forgotten Euphemia was the one who’d mocked his worn coat sleeves? Who’d turned up her nose at his calloused hands during dance lessons?
But her sudden anger passed in a moody gust, leaving her with the dull ache of sadness. If Perk could surrender his dreams so completely, perhaps she was a fool for clinging to hers.
Maybe she’d have her chance to apologize after all.
Could she summon the courage?
“I’ll never understand your devotion,” Mama said, “To the boy who stole you away to Salem, unescorted, then nearly killed the both of you.”
Ellen’s shame returned in full force, and she realized it was cheating to think she could just tell Perk she was sorry and be done with it. An apology would be meaningless unless she confessed the truth to everyone who mattered.
She’d hoped her great lie would fade away with time. Instead, it etched itself into the stone of collective memory. Telling the truth now would shatter the last modicum of respect anyone had for her.
But wasn’t that the same fear that had driven her to lie in the first place?
“It wasn’t his fault,” Ellen said, approaching the edges of the untruth in a whisper.
“Don’t go blaming the weather again. It was wickedness, pure and simple. Whatever he promised to convince you to go on that reckless—”
“—He promised nothing.”
Ellen had almost hoped Mama wouldn’t hear, but she closed her mouth suddenly, forcing Ellen to continue.
“I’m the one who stole the dory.”
There were but a handful of times in Ellen’s entire life that she’d seen Mama surprised. Where Ellen could calculate numbers, Mama calculated people. She’d always been able to factor the chaos of Marblehead personalities into tidy equations, and turn them into sense. Yet her hand slipped from Ellen’s leg. She blinked hard and fast, as if her eyelashes were at war with each other.
“It was my idea,” Ellen continued immediately, terrified she’d lose her nerve. “He was afraid we’d get in trouble. I said no one would ever know. And if Mr. Doyle did notice his dory missing, I promised to take the blame. I wanted—” She’d been so sure of herself, she remembered. Overconfident. “I wanted him to see what was possible.”
Mathilda scooted closer, watching Ellen’s confession with rare intensity, forcing Ellen to close her eyes in order to finish what she’d started.
“For all he’d dreamed of the ocean, Perk had never been out of Marblehead, had never seen a proper ship—nothing bigger than the shallow draft coasters that can reach our landing. Meanwhile, every day he spent at the ropewalk seemed to hollow him out more. He told me he must become more practical. Forget about sailing and help his father grow the cordage company. I felt like I was watching my best friend waste away in front of me, like he had tuberculosis of the spirit. I thought if he could just see what could be, maybe he’d break free and follow his dreams. I’d just gotten such confidence from saving the ship at Cape Henlopen, I was sure I could do anything. Even save Perk.”
“I’d been to Salem plenty with Papa, so I knew it was filled with gigantic, ocean-going merchantmen, fresh in from wild adventures and full of dramatic tales. It’s naught but four miles from Marblehead across the water—barely an hour’s sail on a good breeze, but it might as well be another country.”
The beginning of the trip had gone so well. The joy of it loosened her tongue.
“And my plan worked. When we got there, he saw the ships, and the crates printed with Chinese characters, and he saw that sailing wasn’t just some fantasy. It was a real thing that real men did. He listened to the stories of typhoons and fire walkers and glowing water, and they let him pet the monkey—”
“What monkey?” Mathilda asked.
Ellen kept her eyes closed, but felt the smile spread across her face. “He was a sweet little guy. Black on the bottom, with a white face and shoulders. Friendly enough, he’d hopped right onto my shoulder, then kept trying to steal the pins out of my hair.” Ellen laughed. “They’d picked him up in Rio, I think. Anyway, Perk came alive again, before my very eyes. He said that he wanted to seize each heartbeat of life, not count the hours. He was so—”
Ellen searched for a way to describe his excitement without mentioning their picnic on the grass, the surprise bouquet he’d picked, his unexpected declaration of love, her overwhelming fear of ruining their friendship, or the awkward way she’d ducked from his intended kiss.
Instead, she skipped to the storm. “I was distracted on the return. Didn’t see the line squall coming until it hit. We went from near calm to facing a full gale in a bloody—sorry. In a very small rowboat. The dory was massively outmatched. It nearly flipped repeatedly, but Perk—”
She choked on the memory of him working the tiller and the bailing bucket at the same time, even as the waves grew around them until they dwarfed even the spritsail.
“Perk was amazing. He told me exactly where to sit and how far to lean to balance the forces. Sixteen years old and he got us back to the shore in Marblehead Harbor when I swear very few of those professional sailors could have managed it. It was an incredible victory to land safely on the beach at home.”
Ellen kept out the part about how she’d thrown her arms around him, ready to kiss him and declare her own feelings right back. Inside the book she clutched lay the one forget-me-not that had managed to ride out that whole storm safely in her pocket.
“Then, suddenly it was if the whole town descended. Furious. Appalled. Even Captain Papa.”
“He was worried sick,” Mama said. “We both were. Euphemia told everyone you two had gone out alone in that dory. That was bad enough. But when the squalls hit and you still weren’t back . . .”
Ellen opened her eyes, less afraid of Mama’s face than her own memories. “I only knew that Papa was angrier than I’d ever seen him in my life. He was shouting and said it had been a mistake to take me out on the Californian if it led me to such reckless behavior. How could I even think to follow a boy out to sea? I thought if I told him the truth, that I had actually led the adventure, Papa would never have taken me to sea again.”
Ellen took a deep breath and then rushed headlong into the shame before she could change her mind.
“So I lied. I told him Perk surprised me. That I’d only expected to row in the harbor, but he’d sailed us to Salem instead. It was an awful, awful thing I did. I thought I just said it to Papa, but Papa told everyone. And Perk was so angry he never even let me apologize. His father told me for six weeks he refused to see me. The next thing I knew, he’d run off and sailed away as a ship’s boy, but he never once answered my letters.”
Ellen waited for Mama’s reaction. Waited longer. Mathilda’s stunned stare was enough to melt her.
“Oh, Ellen,” Mama finally said.
Ellen had been prepared for a rebuke, an argument even, but the disappointment in Mama’s voice brought another level of pain.
“I’d thought you were so much more practical.” Mama shook her head. “Almost drowned the pair of you. Nearly ruined your reputation. And good Lord. Do you know what you did to that boy? His father almost killed him because of that trip.”
Ellen jerked back. “What do you mean?”
“We did our best to keep you out of the whole sordid affair,” Mama said. “Your Papa and I thought you’d been through enough. But you told everyone he’d kidnapped you . . .”
“Not kidnapped. That’s not what I meant. Just—”
“What did you think taking a young girl against her will would mean? The whole town knew his father tied him up in the attic for weeks. Whipped the boy nightly until he finally escaped and ran off.”
Ellen gaped. She hadn’t thought it possible to feel worse.
She didn’t owe Perk an apology. She owed him a blood sacrifice.
“I’ll tell everyone it was me,” she said, quiet but resolute. “I should have done it a decade ago, but I deserve whatever they do to me.”
“You can’t do that,” Mama said. “It’s too late. Can you not see the selfishness of relieving your own conscience by ruining not only the man’s wedding, but all of Mathilda’s future prospects? No.” Mama shook her head. “You’re going to go to church today and act as the most virtuous woman you know how to be. You’ll congratulate the bride and groom and be on your best behavior. And we’ll both hope we can get you married to Mr. Sampson before everything falls to pieces.”
* * *
The crowd swelled as they drew closer to Marblehead’s Old North Church, everyone stepping carefully over cobblestones still slick with dew.
Ellen wondered if Mr. Sampson would have ear hair. If he’d have a gentle temperament or wake with a sneer. If she could learn to love cabbage. She tried to tell herself it didn’t matter, that survival was survival, but her heart knew better.
Her stays grew viselike.
She searched for Perk’s distinctive stride as Mathilda slipped her hand into hers, icy but solid, and gave her three quick squeezes—their secret code for solidarity.
“Which way is Salem?” Mathilda asked, and for once, Ellen was glad for the distraction from her own thoughts.
“Just around the point is a larger harbor,” she answered, pointing. Was he watching her point? “Salem’s just the other side of it.”
“Do all sailors get monkeys?”
Ellen managed a laugh. “Not all of them,” she said. “But sometimes there’s a monkey or two aboard.” She squeezed her sister’s hand back, three times. “Especially if the ships have come from Brazil or India.”
The last steps up the hill and inside the church became a confusion of jostling and crowding. Mr. Lee was in a capital mood. Mrs. Washburn’s nostrils flared from some unknown slight. Mrs. Connelly tried to relate some story involving a butter churn but kept laughing too hard to finish it.
When Ellen finally took a seat in her box pew on the southwest wall of the nave, Mama motioned for others to join. She was merely being polite, making room for the large crowd, but when the Jones sisters squeezed into Captain Papa’s empty seat, Ellen felt it like a stinging betrayal. Worse, it meant Mathilda got stuck by herself all the way at the end of the pew, but it was the last thing Ellen was going to fuss about today.
She glanced at Euphemia, in her usual box at the front, wearing the same peacock-blue dress as yesterday. After all this time, after all their battles, Ellen thought, the one who’d always acted superior had been so all along.
She wondered how they’d reconnected. When they’d fallen in love. Was it her piety? Her singing? Perk didn’t care about such things, she thought. But then, what did she know of Perk anymore?
She reached for a prayer book and opened it to hide her face. Then she practiced the smile she’d greet him with—not too cheery for an apology, not too dour for a wedding. The tightness in her jaw told her that her smile was coming out as more of a snarl.
She put the book down.
“Back row on the left,” Mama whispered. “In the gray coat.”
Ellen froze, not wanting to see Mr. Sampson as a real, breathing person who—if she was lucky enough—would soon own her body, if not her soul. But Mama arched her brows, so Ellen forced a smile to her face—lest he be watching—and turned around.
There were two gray coats. Neither was over the age of seventy. Neither made her heart sing. She realized she didn’t care which one of them it was. One Mr. Sampson would do as well as the other.
She returned her gaze to the front and held herself in her closest approximation to a demure position as spirited chatter filled the nave with a hum of expectation. But to Ellen, the air already felt stale with musty wet wool.
Mother smoothed her skirts. Henry bounced little Hannah on his knee and Mrs. Doyle licked her hand to smooth Lindon’s unruly hair.
The whole time, twelve rows up, Euphemia kept her eyes fixed properly in her lap. No fidgeting. No whispering. She may as well have been a blue-clad marble statue.
The very picture of a good girl, Ellen thought. No mud-stained hems or wild hair. No ragged breaths from sprinting down the lane. Her mind bent to pleasing others, not puzzling through spherical trigonometry, just like Mama had always said.
In the end, the good girl had won.
The first clang of the church bell gave Ellen a start, but then she let the resonant notes echo through her chest. Paul Revere himself had cast that very bell, and somehow that had always seemed special. As if the sound it produced could connect her, however tenuously, to the courage of its caster.
Pastor Bartlett waited at his pulpit, smiling at his dutiful daughter as the conversations faded out like snuffed candles. Sarah Jones’s elbow dug into Ellen’s ribs as she twisted around to stare at the doors.
Ellen took a deep breath and did the same.
The whole church waited for Perk to appear.
The last harmonic tones of the bell decayed into a weighty silence.
Would his eyes still crinkle at the corners when he smiled? Would he still have that slight swagger in his walk? The years may have transformed him into someone who could court a pastor’s daughter, but she remembered how he’d once paced the docks like a caged animal, looking for any way to escape such society.
Finally, the door swung open, but it wasn’t Perk who walked through it.
Mrs. Creesy wore the telltale squint of a headache. Next to her, Patience took her hand and they strode forward, resolutely, to the family box. At her breast, Patience wore a small pin of preserved myrtle—common enough for a wedding—but woven with dried everlasting flowers.
Ellen’s mouth flew open. Why would Patience pair symbols for undying love and eternal sorrow together?
Mr. Creesy burst in next, chest heaving, shoulders hunched like a beaten dog. The same man who’d once broken three of Perk’s ribs for missing a Sunday service.
He could barely meet Pastor Bartlett’s eye.
What on earth had happened to Perk?
Ellen was half out of her seat by the time Mama grabbed her skirt and pulled her back down.
“Eyes forward,” Mama hissed. “Don’t forget you’re being evaluated.”
Ellen returned to the black tunnel of her bonnet, wondering for all the world, what looks Mr. Creesy and Pastor Bartlett were giving each other. Robbed of sight, she listened intently but heard nothing beyond a lone infant gently fussing in the back. Otherwise, not a cough, not a shuffle, not a creak.
Eventually, she heard Mr. Creesy stride down the center aisle to his box, boot heels punishing the floorboards with each step.
Then something caused a collective shuffling of feet, and a dramatic thump echoed through the church.
Ellen looked up at the pulpit. Bartlett had flung open his weighty Bible. He was preparing to conduct a Sunday sermon after all.
There would be no wedding.
Ellen swallowed her surprise. Mathilda shifted in her seat. Henry bounced Hannah.
All waited breathlessly for whatever was to follow.
“Today, we bear witness to a grievous act of cowardice,” Bartlett thundered, “And are thus all injured as a community, robbed of the opportunity to witness the lifelong vows and glad tidings of a wedding celebration.”
Ellen frowned. One could call Perk many things—controlling, pig-headed, temperamental—but coward was about the last word one could ever bend to fit him.
What could have happened?
She stole a look at Euphemia, as if she might have the answer. The bonnet wings shielded her face, but the slump of her shoulders revealed an ache of grief. Ellen knew the feeling far too well. She’d never have thought it possible to feel sorry for Euphemia, but had never anticipated such public humiliation for her either.
“The marriage which should have taken place today, we can all agree, would have been a pure and just example of God’s work,” Bartlett said. “So when a virtuous angel of a woman is so cruelly cast aside, we accept the only viable explanation. It is not Our Lord’s hand at work, but His opposite. The dark shadow we must be ever diligent to banish from the safety of our flock, lest we be pulled from our path of righteousness.
“From today to eternity, Captain Josiah Perkins Creesy is to be shunned by this community for his weakness in the face of the devil. He will certainly face the peril of divine judgement.” Bartlett’s voice vibrated, as if he was barely holding on to the fury that wanted to explode out from under him.
“But when a promising son of Marblehead is ruined before our very eyes, when he is pulled into the fires of wickedness, we must be more than shocked. We must ask ourselves whose hands the devil has been using to destroy us from within.”
Ellen looked back at the pulpit and was startled to find Bartlett’s eyes locked on her, trapping her with his stare, his face twisted in fury.
The heat rose in her cheeks. What did she have to do with a missing groom?
“Who could tempt such an otherwise stalwart a man away from such a perfect example of the innate qualities of womankind: modesty, silence, and steadfast devotion as Miss Euphemia Bartlett?” The pastor turned to indicate his daughter and Ellen breathed a sigh of relief. Bartlett’s stare had been a fluke. Merely her guilty imagination at work.
“Who but an unnatural seductress? One among us—here in this very congregation—who’s not only rejected her God-given nature, she’s rebelled against the very idea of natural obedience. Someone we all know to be the closest confidant of Mr. Creesy. Someone who most certainly whispered her vile temptations into his ear.”
His eyes returned to Ellen. This time they stayed there.
“I need not even speak her name, for you all know the woman who has lived among us not with blessed humility, but the stain of pride. Who’s striven not for the glory of beauty or the selfless nurturing that is the highest achievement of her sex, but shockingly bent her efforts toward selfish ambition.”
Ellen sat ramrod straight against his glare, desperately trying to add up the pieces that might cause Bartlett to attack her so violently out of nowhere.
Because Captain Papa could no longer protect her?
Because she’d confronted him about Fluke?
Because he felt despair over his daughter’s pain, or humiliation over his own plans being rejected? That would explain his vehemence, but how did it connect to her if she hadn’t even spoken to Perk in ten years?
“—Our Lord left us explicit instructions in First Timothy, chapter two, verses eleven and twelve in order to keep us safe from such wickedness: ‘I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.’ And again in First Corinthians, He tells us, ‘The head of the woman is the man.’ And Ephesians: ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.’ ”
Suddenly, it occurred to Ellen that Bartlett didn’t know she’d betrayed Perk’s trust. Didn’t realize Perk actually hated her more than anyone. That she was actually the last person on earth who could have prevented Perk from marrying Euphemia.
For the pastor, who else but Euphemia’s nemesis for all these years, however unintended the rivalry may have been from Ellen’s side. Who else but the harlot who’d once gone off with Perk all the way to Salem—unaccompanied? Who else but the Jezebel who dared speak out against her own pastor in the market.
“God has warned us that a woman’s sole task on this earth is to obey!” he thundered. “Not to pervert her mind with learning. Not to fraternize unashamedly with boys. Not to overexert her head with mathematics, or bewitch an otherwise promising man into the most vile, the most unforgivable betrayal of his bride on the very day of her wedding.”
Ellen gripped the prayer book until her knuckles ached. Bartlett was burning her alive for a sin she’d not committed, but there was a worse sin she had committed years ago. A different betrayal but just as unforgivable. One she did deserve to burn for.
Ellen bent her head in contrition and allowed Bartlett’s abuse to rain down on her, allowed some of it to even pierce her heart.
All her attempts to become agreeable had come to ruin. If Mr. Sampson were watching—and he would have had to be drunk or dead not to—he wouldn’t dare speak a word to her today or any other day. After today, no one in all of Essex county would give her the time of day. If she was ever to get married, she’d have to seek a groom somewhere out past the Kansas territories.
But all the while, she worried for Perk. The boy she’d known would have—had, in fact—braved a literal tempest rather than let down someone he cared about.
Wherever he was right now, she was certain he must be suffering. He was such a powerful, ambitious, hardworking, brawling, competitive person. And yet, there was also a gentle soul inside him. A tender heart. A wistful dreamer who’d so often been forced to crush his own desires.
“A willful woman brings disgrace to our community!”
Bartlett had moved past her authentic shame to his same old, tired pronouncements. Ellen tried to catch a glimpse of Mathilda, but the bonnet prevented the view. A part of her ached to reach across the Jones sisters to offer three quick squeezes, but that would only draw more attention.
“So let us be reminded what virtues we must instill in our women. A virtuous woman is modest!” Bartlett yelled. “A virtuous woman is silent!”
That’s because any woman who spoke their mind would tell you what a vainglorious windbag you are, Ellen thought.
Where was Perk? What had gone wrong?
She thought of him as a boy, braving an anthill with a stick for a sword, shouting “Give me liberty or give me death!”
Perhaps she and Perk had both been prisoners all along, just in different types of jails.
Bartlett had called him a coward, but maybe his absence today wasn’t cowardice at all. Perhaps he’d not been sweet on Euphemia after all. What if his absence was actually the utmost of bravery—fighting for what mattered most to him?
“A virtuous woman doesn’t fatigue her spirit with books, but looketh well to the ways of her household. She eateth not the bread of idleness,” Bartlett thundered.
Idleness is what the pastor had called it when Ellen was nine and he discovered she’d learned trigonometry. If the girl had extra time for such idleness, he’d argued with Papa, it would be better spent doing charity work. When he learned she’d actually corrected the boys’ teacher, he’d elevated his concern to an ‘unnatural’ behavior.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Captain Papa had said to the neighbors later, as unperturbed as if someone had decreed the sky to be orange. “Where do you think her genius comes from, if not the Lord Himself?”
If Captain Papa had been here today, he would have made a quiet joke after services to defuse the tension. To counteract Bartlett’s vehemence by showing the outlandishness of its frame. But Captain Papa wasn’t here. He wasn’t even at his polished gravestone out back. He was somewhere underneath the North Atlantic, off the coast of Savannah to her best calculation, forever sailing beneath the waves.
For the rest of the sermon, Ellen kept wishing she had a sword of her own with which to battle a seeable, knowable enemy. Not these tricky shadows, not these thundering pronouncements.
The Bartlett’s needles of fear and fury had tattooed an indelible decision onto her heart. A woman’s sole task on this earth, he’d said, was to obey.
She refused to agree.
Her only weapon against such a prison was as ironic as it was powerful.
Silence.
Come what may, she would never, ever, vow obedience to anyone. Not a husband. Not an employer. Not even a four-star general.
When Bartlett’s fury was spent, the seemingly endless sermon finally came to a close. As the congregation rose, Ellen donned her coat—then fell back onto the pew.
Perk had escaped.
From Marblehead. From the ropewalk. From his father. He’d really done it. Defied them all.
Whatever the reason for his choice not to marry Euphemia, he’d finally broken free of the weight of all their expectations for good. And this was the worst of the results? That people he didn’t like, didn’t like him back?
Could there be hope for her wild heart yet?
Church emptied faster than usual. No one wanted to linger long in discussion with Bartlett on this particular day, and Ellen least of all. She reached for Mathilda’s shoulder, to shield her from whatever scowls or shouts the pastor may have left to give, but there was no shoulder.
No Mathilda.
Ellen spun around, searching through the crowd. Mathilda was nowhere. She peeked behind the pew. Not there. Pushed her way past everyone to get outside.
No Mathilda.
And then a terrifying thought struck her.
She knew exactly where her sister had gone.
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