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Doreen nodded thoughtfully, one hand touching the smooth oak staff beside her. "I'll do my best."
"If you don't mind me saying so, you're doing better than a lot of people too. Adjusting, that is," Arnstein said.
"My father's dead, I'm an only child, and my mother… well, we're not close," she said. "I could almost wish to see her face when she gets the news. No husband, no kids, no time for it yet. There are friends I'm going to miss, but it's not like they're dead. They're just not here."
Of course, we could have wiped them all out by landing here, Ian thought. He kept that firmly to himself. Nobody wanted to think about that hypothesis. Better to believe the more comforting one, that they had simply started another branch on the tree of time.
"It's fortunate that it's Nantucket, in a way," he said. "Most of the islanders were born here, and they're pretty cla
"Yeah, I get the idea some of them have hardly noticed the outside world vanishing," Doreen laughed.
"Why don't we take a turn on deck?" he said. "The stars may be different, but they're pretty."
The shy smile returned. "Don't mind if I do."
"There's a certain irony involved here," Captain Alston said next morning, looking over the bales and boxes that her ship would be taking east.
Most of the cargo was from the boutiques and souvenir shops of the town-costume jewelry and colored beads, packed in green plastic garbage bags. Ditto for the cloth, the more colorful the better. There was a fair sampling of liquor, some tools, knives, the spears…
Booze, beads, and trinkets for the bare-arsed spear-chuckers of England, she thought.
Her father would have loved this. For a moment she smiled at the memory of a big soft-spoken figure with a workingman's hard hands, swinging her up toward the ceiling. Later he'd encouraged the reading habit in a girl, and that in a dirt-poor rural setting where it was unusual for anyone. The only time he'd ever really lost his temper with her was when her marks fell off. White man wants a dumb nigger, he'd shouted. Smart black folk scare 'em. You scare 'em, girl, you scare the shit out of every one, or you'll feel my hand.
The smile died. Her family had been farmers on Prince Island since slavery days. After emancipation that had meant owning their own land, not sharecropping; her great-great-grandfather had used his back pay to buy the farm when he mustered out of the Union Army's black regiments in 1865. Not much of a farm, but it had fed them and paid their tax for generations, and they'd hung on to it through Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and the Depression. Through times when being too prosperous or too independent could get a black man hung from a tree, doused in kerosene, and burned alive while he was still kicking. When the real-estate taxes went through the roof, her father had lost the land to a consortium building a resort. Nothing much had gone right for him after that, until the cancer came and ended it.
But he would have enjoyed seeing this.
Ian Arnstein nodded. "I wish we had a specialist in the European Bronze Age," he said, rubbing at his reddish-brown beard. "I wish anyone knew anything useful about the European Bronze Age."
"You've been doing a lot of research," Alston said. She liked seeing someone who took their work seriously. "You and Ms. Rosenthal and the librarian."
"Ms. Stoddard, yes. And not finding out much. I can tell you that Stonehenge has been up for a long time, and I can tell you that the Wessex Culture buried its chieftains with gold and amber and worked bronze. I can't tell you what language they spoke, or how they were organized, or whether they were peaceful or the equivalent of Comanches."
"You're a hell of a lot better than nothing," Alston said.
They were standing on the docks, as townsfolk-turned-stevedores carried bundles up the gangways and nets full of bales and boxes swung by on pulleys rigged from a cargo boom pivoting on the mainmast. The captain of the Eagle looked eastward and smiled.
"We'll go see."
Words welled up, from a poet who'd touched something in her; she stood looking out to sea and let them roll through her mind:
What shall we tell you? Tales, marvelous tales
Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest,
Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales,
And winds and shadows fall towards the West…
Martha Stoddard stood and watched the departure. Last night's fog had lifted, leaving only a few patches drifting silver-gray against the darker wolf-gray of the ocean. Engines throbbed, sacrificing precious fuel to take the ship through the narrow cha
Orders rang out, faint across the waters. The figures of the crew were ant-tiny on the yards, their feet resting on the rope rests below. Canvas dropped, fluttered, filled out in graceful curves. The yards braced around, and slowly, slowly, the great ship moved; water rippled smoothly back from either side of her sharp cutwater. Then she seemed to bow, rose again in a burst of spray, gathered speed toward the rising sun, and left a wake creamy white across the long blue swells. The crowd on the docks cheered themselves hoarse, then gradually fell silent and began to disperse, off to the work that awaited. A few lingered until the hull of the ship disappeared behind the curve of the world.
That's that, she thought.
Oh, the ship would be in radio contact, but she was getting a new appreciation of what distance meant. Martha Stoddard had lived on Nantucket most of her life, nearly all of it except for her university days. You could feel very isolated here, especially in the winter when a storm closed down the ferry and airport and sent waves crashing up to the base of Main Street. Loneliness had never been a problem with her; she was content enough with her books and music-and oh, how she missed the music, there at a touch-and unwilling to tolerate much of the compromise that having other people in your life meant. It was only now that she realized what isolated really meant.
Jared Cofflin was among the last to turn away from the dock. Martha had a nodding acquaintance with him for many years, but they'd never really talked much before the… Event. He looked a little lost in civilian clothes, but he'd insisted that if they wanted to call him chief executive officer of the island instead of police chief, he wasn't going to wear a badge and gun. Another facet of the man revealed by the Event.
Odd that we're calling it that, she thought. Although she supposed they had to have some name for whatever it was that had happened. And don't think too much about it, don't wonder how or why or who as you lie waiting for sleep, or it will drive you mad and Doc Coleman will have to come with the needle and the soothing words…
"Wish you were off with them, then, Jared?" she said.
He started, taken out of his brown study. A rueful smile lit his bony middle-aged face, and he smoothed a hand over the thi
"You're working too hard," she said suddenly.
"Everyone's working too hard," he answered. "We have to."
"You're doing the type that keeps you from sleeping, too. Not a good thing. What did you have pla
"Spending the morning doing paperwork, and the afternoon going 'round and seeing how things are developing."
"Going to and fro in the world, eh?"
He smiled, a chuckle of genuine humor this time. "Well, Pastor Deubel has been hinting that I'm inspired from that direction," he said.
"Man's a fool," she snorted. And attracting more attention than is healthy.