Sam had courted many beautiful women and some not so beautiful, but he had never before courted one fresh from the strawberry field. A sun hat shaded most of Hannah’s face, the handle of a small trowel hung from a pocket in her apron, a film of perspiration beaded on her upper lip, and she looked as handsome to Sam as his first memories of her.
She smelled the irises and poppies, which had little scent, and out of politeness said they smelled beautiful. Then she invited him to the house for tea. They strolled along the path from the Nauseiput dock through the cornfield, where the scarecrows stood sentinel over the crows, toward the forlorn grove of trees that protected the house. Jack’s Island now looked like a table in the midst of marshland and flat, something God had forgotten to carry away when he made the coastline.
“Your uncle gave you a great gift.”
“A great responsibility as well. We have much to do here”—she held out her hands, tanned brown and callused—“though the sun may leave me looking like an old fisherman.”
He bent down slightly to look under the brim of her hat. “Little chance of that, Widow Digby.”
“You’ve grown more skilled in seventeen years, Sam.”
For a moment, he thought he might kiss her, as he had done so clumsily that night in 1776. But it was true. He had grown more skilled in his dealings with women. After all, he had paid enough of them to learn. Still, for all his careful charting of this conversation, he ran himself straight onto the rocks of bluntness: “Did Eldredge ask for your hand?”
“I thought you came here to flatter me, Sam… then sell me a boatload of lumber.”
“They say you live in a hundred-forty-year-old fallin’-down house. The lumber’s a gift.”
She had known that they would come when her mourning was over—the widowers, the bachelors, the seafarers who had come to realize that while they were at sea, all the women had married and their youth had fled. Who among them wouldn’t take a chance with Hannah, widowed young as she was, childless, and blessed with a fine inheritance?
The Reverend Mr. Kite of Barnstable, a middle-aged widower with an odd eye and a penchant for quoting Scripture, had paid her an inordinate amount of attention. James Stubbs, a young fisherman, brought her halibut and cod after every voyage. And Eldredge Dickerson had already made his intentions known to her father.
Eldredge had the best chance. He was an honorable man, a churchgoer, and as a China trader he was gone for years at a time. That was to the good, because Hannah had plans for which a man would be nothing more than a nay-saying hindrance. But here was Sam Hilyard, looking as nervous and unpredictable as the boy who had enticed her so long ago.
She let him into her house, the first of her suitors she had so honored. “It was built by one of your ancestors. It’s very old.”
“Very old post and beam.” He pulled out his knife and probed a corner post, working downward until the knife slipped easily into the wood. Scores of slimy white bugs slithered out and fell to the floor. “Very old post and beam, very new termites.”
He said nothing of the wing chairs beside the fireplace, but he stuck his head up the flue and said it probably hadn’t been pointed since it was built. He did not notice the red curtains on the windows, but told her how small seventeenth-century windows were and how much more efficient was the double-hung design. He did not notice his flowers in a vase on the great room table, but banged his head on the door frame leading to the sitting room.
She tucked her hands into the pockets of her apron. “You’re too big, Sam.”
“The house is too small. Let me build you another one.”
“I’m happy here where I am.”
Her resistance was something he had prepared for, but he had not foreseen the midday silence, the quiet intimacy made closer by the distant crump of the waves. So he sought another blunt question from the course he had charted before coming. “Why did you marry John Digby?”
“I loved him.” She threw open the back door. Out beyond the barn, windmills turned in the breeze. Ocean and sky made their pact at the horizon.
“Did you ever think of me in Halifax?”
“I saw your ship. I saw the bloodstains. I cried… for us all.”
He stood behind her. She had taken off her sun hat and shaken out her hair, and the smell of her intoxicated him. “The British took us right out there. They came out of these creeks in longboats.”
“We had to grow up quickly.” She stepped away and went toward the barn. It was said that Quakers had met there during the persecutions, and she was often drawn to it, as if she could summon her own strength by contemplating theirs, and at the moment, she needed her strength.
But Sam followed her. “Sell me this land and let me build you a new house.”
She stopped at the barn door. “
Sell
you the land?”
“Sell me half the island. I’ll pay whatever you wish and build you a house wherever you want… a barn as well.”
“I like
this
barn.” She went inside.
“Then it shall be yours.”
“Build a house… buy my island…” She moved into the shadows as he pursued her from the sun, the young privateer stepping out of her girlhood memories. “I don’t think you know what you want.”
“I think I do.” He stalked toward her. He put his hands on her shoulders. She raised her face to his—
And Leyden Doone stepped from the shadows and hit Sam Hilyard over the head with a shovel. “You got to be careful, Miss Hannah. You ain’t seen what some fellers got between their legs.”
iv.
Sam stored the lumber beneath a sailcloth and came often to check on its seasoning. By the following autumn, they had seen more of each other than most couples ever did before deciding on marriage, but she had decided only to hold off Eldredge Dickerson’s proposal. When Sam was at sea, she mapped her calendar, so that she might imagine where he was each week. When Sam slipped into a prostitute in some port city, he imagined Hannah beneath him.
But Hannah would not allow him to build her a house or buy half the island, because those proposals were prelude to one of a more personal nature. She was not yet ready to commit herself to any man, and even if she loved Sam, she feared her father, whose disapproval of Sam was well known.
“Why do you hate him?” she once asked.
“He is not a God-fearing man.”
Hannah could not know that Solomon had killed one Hilyard because of her ideas, betrayed another out of fear, and detested a third who coveted his daughter. Those were things a man kept to himself.
In the spring of 1794, Sam sailed for South Carolina with a cargo of rum and barrel staves, which he exchanged for flour and rice. From Charleston he wrote Hannah that if they did not begin building by fall, the fine lumber would rot. Then he headed for Spain.
Hannah understood his meaning and gave it much consideration. But her father had made a promise: if she continued to oversee Jack’s Island skillfully and married a God-fearing man like Eldredge Dickerson, he would include her in the larger deliberations of Bigelow and Son.
It was during this time that she was most thankful for Leyden Doone and his shovel. She had never enjoyed her couplings with her husband. They were brief and to the point, and she had come to expect nothing more. Had she submitted to Sam that day in the barn, she might have found that not all men were so dry, and her passion might now have overwhelmed her good sense. But she kept her head… until the French Revolution threatened Sam’s.
Before reaching the Spanish port of La Coruña, Sam’s ship was waylaid by a French frigate and taken to the city of Brest. France was in turmoil, its people starving, and a cargo of flour and rice had no future but the French belly. While barrels and sacks came off the ship, Sam and the crew were brought before a citizens’ tribunal, which promised to recompense them, in due time.
Sam knew what that meant. He sent his crew home and conveyed to the tribunal his determination to wait for payment until hell froze over… or the French stopped drinking wine. Then he went to Paris, where the American envoy wrung his hands and said there was nothing he could do.
On Cape Cod, there was nothing that Hannah could do but write letters:
Dear Sam,
No seafaring metaphors. No playful words. I love you. Know that. But you are a silly, stubborn man. You do not remain in France for the money, but for the principle. And principles get people killed. Before you choose to fight for them, make sure they are worth your head. I cried for you last night. I shall cry for both of us if you lose your head.
But there was no need to cry for Sam. He spent two months holding out his hand in one revolutionary office after another, and partaking, with some disappointment and at considerable expense, in the carnal pleasures for which Paris had once been famous. He also studied the French manner of slicing through their chains with the guillotine and found it wanting.
Hundreds were ridden past his window to their death, but he watched a beheading only once.
A married couple caught his attention, middle-aged and graying, simple folk, from the look of their clothes, brave folk, from their bearing. As the tumbril took them through the screaming streets, something drew him after them. He could not guess at their offense—nor, perhaps, could they—but they stood with hands linked, eyes only on each other. In a world of madness, they had found their bearings. When they reached the platform, they went up together. They embraced without tears or a glance at the mob. Then the wife lay beneath the blade, as though settling down for a nap. After it fell, the husband did not look at the headless body twitching in the basket but went quickly to join his wife in spirit.
Sam left Paris with government bills of exchange, payable in London, and the vision of two people who knew their bearings even in death. He was hailed by the merchants of Boston and welcomed by the woman he hoped would help him to keep his bearings for the rest of his life.
“The bonnet is beautiful, Sam.”
“It ain’t Paris fashion. There ain’t much of that these days. It’s a good Boston hat, the same yellow as the one you wore to the
Serenity
that day.”
Yellow flattered her, bringing out the intense brown in her eyes. In egalitarian France, women still wore lip salve and astringent powders that scarred their skin. They plucked their brows to thin strands and piled their hair high on the top of their heads. Hannah was unadorned and all the handsomer for it, a new breed of woman, an American.
The clouds were blowing east, ragged purple remnants of an autumn storm, as Hannah and Sam went walking out behind her house. “I worried for you, Sam.”
“That’s what men and women are supposed to do.”
“Worry…?” A cloud threw a shadow across her face.
“Worry help… keep each other on course. I can build you a house by Christmas.”
“You’re not a God-fearin’ man, Sam.”
“I fear God whenever I go to sea.” The cloud passed.
“You’re not a churchgoer.” She went toward the barn, her haven of contemplation.
“I’ll take a pew in the First Church.”
“My father won’t approve.”
“He will once he sees what I pay for the land.”
“Why must you have half the island?”
“Pride. If we each own half, we start as equals.”
Sam stopped in the doorway and peered into the corners.
“Leyden is at the saltworks.” She laughed.
“Good. I’ll build the house to last, like this barn, with a foundation.” He stamped across the floorboards. Then he knelt and rapped his knuckles against a plank. “Somethin’ here.”
With a pinch bar he pried up the board. Neatly mortised into the joists was a compartment large enough to hold an abandoned mouse nest and some sort of tool wound in several thicknesses of marsh hay.
The outer layer disintegrated. The second layer, wound in the opposite direction, was better preserved. A third layer, wrapped again as the first, smelled rancid and oily.
“An axe,” said Hannah when the last strands fell away.
“A damn strange axe.” Sam smelled the residue on his fingers. “Whale oil. Somebody covered it with whale oil to keep it.”
“Look at the lettering on the shaft.”
Sam studied the four symbols engraved into the metal. “I know what it says.”
“What?”
“It’s a message from the past. It says, ‘With this axe, build Hannah a house.’ ” Then he kissed her.
v.
Six weeks later, Solomon returned from a London trip to learn that his daughter had accepted the proposal of the one suitor to whom he objected.
“We can’t reverse the sale, but we can damn well stop the marriage,” he told his son in the office of the Barnstable House.
“I tried.” Elkanah was a copy of his father and sought to heighten the effect by adopting his father’s sudden gestures, colorless wardrobe, and small potbelly. Like his father, he was slender of shoulder and chest, but the belly, which he hoped would lend stature, looked like nothing more than a pillow hung upon a coatrack. “Hannah said Sam Hilyard is the best shipmaster on Cape Cod, and we are far better served if he serves our family than someone else’s.”
It may have occurred to Solomon that this union represented a final victory over the Hilyards, but he could never allow Bigelow blood to be mingled with that of the invective-spewing Outcast of Billingsgate. “Hannah loses everything.”
“What?”
“If she marries Sam Hilyard, she loses any claim to our future. If she takes Eldredge Dickerson, I give her half of everything upon my death.”
“Half?” Elkanah nearly slipped from his chair.
“Not to your liking, but suitable to our future.”
vi.
As the days grew shorter, Sam hurried to finish the house. He broke down Jack Hilyard’s old saltbox, no mighty task, given the work of the termites; he saved what timbers were sound and burned the rest in a great conflagration of dry wood and crackling bugs.
Then he dug a foundation hole and lined it with ballast stones that rose two feet above the sand. This meant the termites would have a harder time reaching wood and beginning their work. The foundation was wide, but the house would hug the ground.