By The Sea, Book One: Tess (9 page)

William Moran, taken aback by his daughter's
vehemence, said, "What's this now? Am I in the dock for some crime
I didn't commit?"

"But you
are
guilty, Father—of
putting stars in my eyes, and Will's. Now we must flush them out as
best we may, and get on with the ... the everyday of our lives.
Maybe Maggie was right; we should never have left Ireland. There's
nothing for us here."

Tess listened to her own voice and heard
something in her heart snap, like a twig underfoot in a dark,
needle-lined forest: it was her dreams of Edward Hillyard.

"Don't you
understand,
Father?" she
went on, determined to get through to him this time. "You can't
slice a dream the way you would a loaf of bread; you can't cover
yourself with a dream on a cold night, the way you would with a
blanket. Not another word of partnerships or ownerships or anything
else! You and Will and I are the able ones; we must among us feed
and care for Maggie. Three to care for one. We can do that. We
must!"

"Maggie's no better, then?" he asked
timidly, as if reality were just dawning on him.

Tess felt as though she'd thrown a pail of
water over a songbird in its cage. "It comes and goes," she lied,
and in a kinder, softer voice: "The work's too much for her at Beau
Rêve. Without it she would get better."

"She's too damn good for that crazy house,
anyway," her father muttered, making a fist. "We'll have her back
where she belongs. And what about you, Tess? Come home, girl. You
can find work as a casual. Or you could take in a little laundry of
your own. Or be a nurse! There's money to be made—"

"Stop, stop!" Tess's laugh was half a wail.
"Until we find that pot of gold, we'd best stay where we are and
save what we can. I want you to promise."

She took hold of her father's huge hand,
with its permanently blackened and crushed thumbnail, its scars
from hundreds of flying embers. "Promise me," she repeated, lifting
her gaze to his face. His hair had lately become shot with gray,
and she noticed that one eyebrow was scorched.

He looked uncomfortable, then looked away. "
'Tisn't right to make me promise. If something came up—"

"Then at least promise you'll talk to me
first."

He sighed. "What a meddlesome female you
are, Tess. What a hard woman. All right. My word. But it isn't
right
for a father to have to answer to his daughter. I
can't say I like it and that's the God's truth."

Tess smiled her most distracting smile.
"Tell me about young Will."

Her father took the bait. "Have you not
heard about the trouble at the Casino, then?"

"Nothing at all," she answered. "Has
something happened to the Tennis Tournament there?"

"It was very nearly canceled, is all. Here's
the most important match of the tournament all set to go, and them
heathens who calls 'emselves ball-boys demands a raise or out on
strike they go. That very day! So the manager throws the lot of 'em
out, and rightly so, and then hurries the word to Father Timothy
among others that he needs replacements. It was a blessed hour that
found young Will playing stickball behind the convent. Not thirty
minutes after, off he goes to a paying job."

"Good for Will! But ... won't there be
trouble with the striking ball-boys?"

"My very thought! It don't pay to fool with
the radical element nowadays. But Will says except for a cry or two
of 'scab' when he went in, it was peaceable enough. Well, you know
how boys are." He chuckled to himself. "I did my share of
name-calling back in old Eire. Oh, yes."

"Well, then," Tess said, relieved, "that's
good news to offset the bad. It's like the other week, when you
were let go, but I was moved up, and now you're up and so is Will.
Well—it all balances out, doesn't it? I suppose there are times I
worry too much." She looked around her. "I do wish I had time to
clean this place up before I go off to see Will," she added.
"Really, Father, it's such—"

"Don't say it. A mess."

"A
big
mess! I'll bring rags and soap
and some newsprint to clean the window. Do you have a bucket? And
for heaven's sake, fix this broken floorboard. Rats can come and go
like travelers on a train," she said, peering into a dark hole
under the floor.

"Lord, you truly are meddlesome. Where do
you get it from, I wonder?"

She looked up at him and grinned. "Straight
from your sister Teresa."

"Ah, there may be something to that," he
said, surveying his daughter carefully for the first time in a long
while. "Same high cheekbones—funny as I've never taken notice
before—but your eyes are brighter, though that may be youth. Your
hair's thicker—again, youth. Your mouth's quite your own, in more
ways than one, o' course. Turn to the side, girl."

Tess did. "Ha! There 'tis. Teresa all over.
Same damn belligerent chin. The Lord preserve us all."

****

Tess felt a little brazen to be outside
without a parasol, especially so when she reached the top of the
hill on Bellevue Avenue and spied a group of young debutantes
clustered in front of the Newport Casino dressed entirely and
elegantly in white, with perfectly matched lace parasols, exquisite
hats, and elbow-length kid gloves (their first pair of the day),
all calculated to compete with the genteel matches taking place on
the lawn courts within.

Something about the Casino intimidated Tess.
Built in over a decade earlier by James Gordon Bennett, Jr., after
he was nearly thrown out of the exclusive Newport Reading Room for
having goaded a friend into riding his horse onto the club's
piazza, the Casino instantly became a place to see and be seen.
Tess ducked down a side lane, intending to ask for her brother at
the back entrance.

But at the back entrance, too, there was a
small group gathered. These were all men. All things considered,
they were less intimidating than the women, and so Tess began
boldly to walk in their direction. She wasn't aware of the landau
behind her until its driver yelled, "Hey there, out of the way!" in
an urgent voice and trotted his horse within a few feet of where
she was walking.

Curious, Tess watched as the landau came to
a stop alongside the huddle of men, who broke apart to reveal at
their center a litter which lay on the ground. Someone was on it,
injured, and Tess wondered, as bystanders do, how badly the victim
was hurt. It was an awkward time to make inquiries about her
brother; Tess was about to retreat and return to Beau Rêve when she
heard one of the men say in an important voice, "All right, boys,
easy up now. Don't tip it."

But the two who were lifting the injured
person did tip the litter, slightly, and a scrap of red slipped off
it and fell to the ground. Tess identified the object without
thinking: it was a cap, a boy's golf cap. It cost twenty-three
cents at Sullivan's on Parade Corner, and it had been the only red
cap in a stack of gray, brown, and blue ones. Young Will had wanted
it desperately, and Tess had said no, it would show dirt too
easily, but Will had got around her by going straight to the top,
and his father had said, "Boy wants a spot of color on 'im, let 'im
have it." Tess had teased Will about it all the way home, calling
him a cheeky little showoff, and Will had laughed.

"Will," Tess whispered, running up to the
litter as the two men struggled without success to lay the litter
across the carriage.

"Won't work," said a third. "Lift him off
and over to me."

"
Will.
"

The official turned around. "And who might
you be, miss?"

"That's my brother!" cried Tess, horrified
to see a trickle of blood drying on the side of Will's head. There
was no smile, no bright-eyed mischief in his wan face; it was so
unlike him to be expressionless that Tess, for one insane moment,
convinced herself that it was someone else's face. Anyone else's
face.

"Will Moran is your brother?" asked the
official.

"I
said
he was, didn't I?" Tess
cried. She climbed into the landau and took her brother from the
man who was holding him.

"What happened, what happened?" she asked,
cradling him and gently lifting aside the thick black hair that
covered his wound.

Some of the other men had backed away a
respectful step or two, but all eyes were on Tess. A well-dressed
man, graying and with a pale, long face, began to speak, but the
tournament official interrupted him.

"Never mind, Dr. Lamer. No need to drag you
into this. The boy was hit with a rock, young woman, thrown by some
ragamuffin in the street. It might have been one of the ball-boys
on strike. Whoever it was got away, though inquiries are being
made. I must hasten to add that the ruffian was
not
on the
Casino premises at the time of the incident, and the Casino does
not hold itself responsible. If he
was
a ball-boy, he must
have broken away from the pack on Bellevue Avenue and followed your
brother around to the back."

He paused, cleared his throat, and added,
"It occurs to me that the bright cap made your brother's head into
an irresistible bull's-eye."

"It occurs to
me,
Mr. Thickwaite,
that the cap may have prevented a worse injury," interrupted Dr.
Larner. He turned to Tess and said, "My carriage will take the boy
home. It's good you came on the scene. I can't leave the
tournament, but I've arranged for another physician to look in on
him. Dr. Wilkes may have trouble finding your house—no one seems
quite certain where Will lives—so keep an eye out for his arrival,"
he added in a voice of kind authority.

"Yes ... yes, I'll post someone. What else
can I do? When will my brother come out of this? Will he be all
right after? How long—?"

"We have to wait and see, my dear. There's
very little we can do except see that he's kept warm and
comfortable." To the driver Dr. Larner said, "Take it slow, Jeremy.
No wild horseracing down Levin Street, mind you. Nice and slow." He
turned to the tournament official and said, "Well, Mr. Thickwaite.
Now that you've established that the Casino is not responsible, I
believe your business here is done." He inclined his arm toward the
tennis courts, and Mr. Thickwaite had no choice but to fall in
behind him. One last sympathetic grimace by Dr. Larner to Tess, and
the party broke up.

Tess directed the driver to take Bellevue
Avenue rather than Levin Street; society had by now abandoned their
carriages for their conservatories and high tea, and the Avenue was
the smoother, faster route. The driver, filled with
self-importance, screamed at everyone within hearing range to make
way, make way, as he headed south. Tess held her brother close,
compensating for the bounces of the carriage wheels. Each new bump
jolted her into deeper, hotter anger.

Lord, what is it you want from us?
she whispered, her head bent low over her brother.
Is there no
one else to amuse you? No one else for you to toy with? Leave us
alone, will you? Play your cruel little jokes on someone
else.

She encircled Will more tightly, intent on
warding off the malevolent God that seemed to be pursuing
them
.

"Will, wake up," she said softly. It sounded
so normal, like rousing him from a nap. "Are you awake?" She stared
blankly at his pale face: peaceful, undisturbed, in a spellbound
sleep.

"Oh,
leave
us," she whispered to no
one, the tears rolling down her face.

The night that followed was a twisted
hallucination, filled with wandering demons and long-lost emotions.
Mourning came: the devastating sense of loss for her mother that
Tess had been too seasick to feel at her death. And guilt, for
having hated her mother at her trial in Wrexham for petty thievery.
And sorrow, too: for Maggie's youth being eaten up by disease.
Frustration: that with all her strength, Tess was powerless to
help. But mostly Tess felt overwhelming pity, because that was all
she had to give.

A sooty lamp flickered and died somewhere in
the dingy room, lighting nothing but adding its noxiousness to the
acrid air. Will lay still unconscious on the dirty, unmade bed. His
father was cradling his head in his vast arms on the table, snoring
lightly. Tess, stiff and sore from her vigil in the rickety chair
she'd placed next to Will's bed, was bent over double, her head
dropped between her knees, stretching her spine. Demons leave at
dawn, leaving numbness behind.

****

"Ow-w! Who ... ow-w ... hit me?" They were
his first words, full of bravado and pain.

"Will!" Lightheaded, Tess fell to her knees
on the floor alongside her brother's bed. "Dear Will—someone threw
a stone at you. Father, wake up," she called softly.

"A stone! Oh-h—what a dirty trick," Will
said weakly. "And I know who—Billy Corcoran, that dirty rat." He
moaned and rolled his head a little. "Ow—it feels like my head's
been through a mangler .... " He tried to get up. "Wait'll I
get—"

"Back down, boy," his father interrupted in
a severe voice completed unrelated to the look of love on his face.
"Plenty o' time for vengeance after. You give us a turn, you did,"
he added gruffly, approaching the bed.

Tess allowed herself, at last, to burst into
tears.

"Gee whiz, Tess—it ain't anything," her
brother protested feebly.

But Tess continued to sob, and no one could
comfort her.

****

"I suppose you expect me to believe that?
What will you use for an excuse the next time you stay out all
night? That your father's been shot in a duel?" Cornelia Winward
tapped a satin shoe on a parquet floor, not at all amused.

"It's the truth, ma'am. Will nearly died.
Even now the doctor says he must be watched carefully."

"And at this rate he shall have more than
enough around him to do that. You're very close to a dismissal,"
Cornelia added angrily. She brought her forefinger within a hair's
width of her thumb.
"This
close. If Marie hadn't been here,
who on earth would've attended me? I don't feel I can trust you at
all, Tessie. Your loyalties are ill-placed. Perhaps you're too
young for this. I really think you're too young."