Afternoons with Emily (7 page)

My father had arranged our passage on a packet through the Windwards, traveling among the islands and ending at Bridgetown
in Barbados. Cousin Daisy was joining us for the sea voyage and then continuing on to visit an English friend in Saint Kitts.
As ever, she was making a lively pattern out of other people’s bits and pieces.

Uncle Thomas came to ride down to the wharves and see us off. As the carriage pulled away from number 32, my father looked
back at Mount Vernon Street and the tall, curved pink houses.

“It’s time we left Boston, Tom,” he murmured.

Tonight, I wonder if he knew we would never sleep there again. Or that in Barbados I would finally begin to truly live.

BARBADOS

1856–1857

I
had been deeply asleep. I woke slowly to a wonder of silence. There were no shouts and footsteps overhead, no creaking and
flapping like a great bird’s wing. There was a white mist around me and a solid white cloud underneath. I was no longer in
and out of a world that slanted and heaved and twisted.

I remembered our voyage and was bitterly ashamed. I had been a terrible sailor. My father and Captain Sisson had been patient
and cheerful, promising that June was the best month at sea, that I would soon find my sea legs — but I went on retching.
There were days and endless nights of sickness, with Cousin Daisy’s worried face spinning somewhere over my bunk, and my empty
stomach heaving up the tea she tried to feed me.

Twice Father had carried me up into the bright salty wind, and I winced at the sun. Once we saw some white plumes on the horizon;
he told me they were whales. I was just barely able to say to him, “Thar she blows!”

I remembered last evening, when we landed at Bridgetown just after sunset. Cousin Daisy stood on the deck, waving good-bye.
There was a harbor with stone jetties and a wooden wharf, and a town with lit streets — and torches with ragged flames repeated
in smooth, dark water. It was unlike anything I had seen; it was hard to imagine it was real. Then came a long carriage ride
through the night and an avenue with tall pointed trees.

Then there were more torches between white columns — and curving stairs, and strange voices in a sweet stirring darkness.
Someone led me here, and someone else gave me cake and eggnog — did I actually eat?

I heard someone moving near me. I turned my head and saw a hazy figure approaching my bed and raising the netting with a delicate
dark hand. She was young and slim, with a dainty figure and skin the color of brandy in a decanter. I had never seen anyone
like her before. My eyes widened.

“Good day, Missy Ara!” She had a soft voice that rippled gently through the balmy air. “I am Lettie. I will be your companion.
We will do many pleasant things together.” Each of her words was as clear and edged as cut crystal.

“Mistress Adelaide is telling me you should be eating, so I bring you the eggnog you were liking last evening. Now, do you
know banana?”

When I shook my head, she handed me first the drink and then a curved yellow fruit — or vegetable?

“First we peel it — see! Now, does it please you?” It was a big sweet pudding, complete in itself.

“It’s wonderful! Please, might there be another?”

Lettie laughed as a dove might laugh — three charming notes.

“There is another and another. There are a hundred trees full of Barbados bananas! But first we must be settling you into
York Stairs. We will arrange your pretty dresses in their new home.” She knelt at my trunk, and I looked about the room.

This was white, all white, with a high ceiling pointed like the inside of a pyramid — a room as tall as the double parlors
on Mount Vernon Street. It held my four-poster bed with its veil of netting; a cabinet with a pitcher and bowl; and several
carved chairs. I saw a bookcase too, empty, and a chest of drawers holding a ceramic pitcher of blue and lavender flowers.

“Mistress Adelaide is welcoming you with her flowers. She is choosing the colors of our sea,” Lettie informed me as she hung
my clothes in a huge paneled wardrobe.

“These white dresses are most fashionable for a young mistress. These little suits I am not knowing. Is it the American mode?”

“They came from a picture,” I explained.

Lettie nodded as if she understood, and she shut the wardrobe. “They will be doing very well for you here.”

Lettie helped me wash, and we chose a violet chiton and trousers. She deplored my lack of sandals and promised to correct
this very soon.

We left my room and went into a long vaulted hall with many shuttered doors. I was aware of sunlight through the louvers and
air moving around me, even though we were indoors.

“These are the sleeping chambers for the family,” Lettie told me. “They are below, to be cool when we lose the trades. The
reception rooms are above, in the path of the good winds.”

This all seemed very strange, but no stranger than dressing like a Greek runner, having a gracious golden friend who talked
like a ballad, and walking through a house that was upside down.

We came to sunlight flooding through a tall archway. Everything at York Stairs soared; there were no oppressive low ceilings,
no walls crowding in to squeeze me. I would no longer be living in a chilly attic under the eaves.

We climbed what felt like a stone stair, a lesser curve than Mount Vernon Street. I did not sense an actual wind, but I noticed
the curls at my temples stirring as we walked forward a few steps in sweet lively air and reached what felt like a stone wall.

“Now, Missy Ara, here is your friend the sea, waiting for you.”

Mr. Harnett had given me my watercolors; I reviewed the names on the little tubes, trying to find the right ones. Ultramarine,
cerulean, Prussian — no single blue could approach the living, moving radiance before me.

Next I considered rainbows, which I knew quite well. I had seen a hundred from my window seat, arching unearthly over the
drab roofs of Beacon Hill. But even a rainbow would have faded against this sea. The blues and greens and violets were the
colors at the heart of flames. Luckily, there was a balustrade to protect us; it would have been so easy to fall into that
space, into that beauty offered as simply as fruit on a plate.

“The good sea will be your friend, Missy Ara,” Lettie told me, holding my shoulders lightly. “I will help to make you friends.”

I leaned back against her, believing her promise, enjoying the mul-tiple sensations: Lettie’s warmth; the scents; the blue,
blue water. When I could look away from the sea, I saw we were standing on a wide terrace, as long as the house itself. Half
was covered by the roof, extended with plain columns; the other half was open to the stunning distance and the soft, steady
wind. I held up my hand to feel it passing.

“Those are our fine trade winds,” Lettie stated proudly. “Are you breathing the sugarcane?”

I realized I was: a deep, rich sweetness pulsing in the air, the very breath of Barbados.

Lettie took me from the terrace into the rest of the house, and we soon came to the library, where my father sat writing at
a big table; large, curling pink shells held his papers down against the indoor wind. He seemed already to be entirely at
home.

“Ara, good morning! Have you had breakfast? Lettie, please could you find Miss Adelaide for us? And on your way back, would
you ask Naomi for another eggnog? We missed a good many meals coming down. We’ll be on the gallery.”

I followed Father onto the terrace. The view had changed. There were big loopy clouds over the sea now, making indigo shadows
on the brilliant water.

“This is the best room at York Stairs, and I helped design it,” Father announced proudly. “Hugh bought the plantation some
twenty-five years back, when most of it had blown away. I suppose this style is mongrel classic. The columns are from a Greek
stoa, and the stairs are pretentious enough to belong in one of Nero’s villas. But in this heavenly climate, it all works
well!”

“Of course it works! Don’t confuse the child with all that history foolishness. You designed us a plain old Charleston gallery,
just what we wanted!”

Here was a slim, graceful woman, with gray eyes in a delicate oval face. She wore her heavy silver hair in a low, soft knot.
Her flowered lawn dress was more formal than a Boston lady’s, and she carried a floppy straw hat. I thought of Father’s big
book of English portraits. Miss Adelaide James was a Gainsborough.

“Ara, good morning — welcome to York Stairs. I don’t expect you to remember us from last night, but we feel we know you already.
What a fine sleep you had on your first night with us. And here is the rest of your breakfast!” She handed me the eggnog in
a little china tumbler.

I had never heard an accent like hers, soft and blurred and somehow intimate, a voice for telling private matters.

“Adelaide,” said Father. “You and Ara must have a lot to talk about. You’ll want to tell her . . . whatever it is she needs
to know. I’ll leave you to it . . .” His voice trailed away, and so did he.

His behavior did not surprise me. My father had just handed me over to Miss Adelaide; he was eager to get back to his writing.

Miss Adelaide laid a gentle arm across my shoulder. “Let’s go and watch the sea together.” She led me to the balustrade. “You’ll
notice the colors are never the same from one moment to the next. Each time you look, there’s something different: the clouds,
the wind, the light.

“Whenever one of us comes out on the gallery, we check to see what has changed. You’re one of the family now; you’ll find
you do this too.” Her smile and her voice spoke my welcome and my inclusion.

How kind she was! In just a few sentences, she had smoothed over Father’s exit, reminded me of his past efforts for me, and
guaranteed me a place in her family and its social life. And yet it was all effortless. I was curious what she saw or knew
about me. I decided there was more to Miss Adelaide James than met the eye. She was like Elizabeth Bennet from Jane Austen’s
wonderful
Pride and Prejudice,
and I wondered if Mr. Darcy would appear too. I suddenly wondered why she was not married but knew that would be an impolite
question to ask.

“Your father says no lessons for a while,” Miss Adelaide continued. “He wants you to learn from the sea. Lettie will take
you to the beach in the mornings with a picnic. Dr. Hugh says you must rest in the afternoon, but that will be a good chance
for reading — and I’ve been collecting a secret cache of novels for us to share!”

“I love to read!” I exclaimed enthusiastically.

Miss Adelaide smiled. “Your father told me as much. Later we change for supper, which is at eight. We’ll dine together, except
for the nights when we have guests — and then we’ll want you to come in and meet our friends.”

Then Miss Adelaide looked at me seriously. “We will do all we can to make you happy at York Stairs, Ara, while you and your
father get strong again. We are very quiet here, but we try to live purposefully and with grace and good manners always.”

“The Greeks would agree with you, Miss Adelaide.”

“There speaks your father’s daughter!” A soft sadness colored her expression. “I’m afraid we’re not very used to children
here at York Stairs.”

“That’s quite all right,” I assured her, not wanting to be the cause of any discomfort. “I’m not used to being a child either.”

Father and Lettie must have arrived because I felt Lettie’s light touch on my shoulder.

“Time to introduce you to the sea,” Lettie said as she led me away.

“What did Ara mean by that?” I heard Miss Adelaide ask.

“Just what she said,” my father replied. “Poor Marian was ill for ten years, and all her family . . .” He was still explaining
when Lettie and I moved out of hearing and down the splendid staircase. It was so noble that I felt I was trailing robes of
ermine.

We took a path of crushed white shells downhill and through a grove of the dark, scratchy trees we saw from the gallery; Lettie
named them “cedar.” There were other trees too: huge bending daisies called “palms” that swayed and rattled. Ahead on the
path, between the ragged pillars of the cedar trunks, I saw glints of light gleaming and beckoning. We came out on a little
bay, sheltered by two brackets of jagged gray rock. Clear green water rippled ashore onto sand that was — impossible! — the
delicate tint of a tea rose.

“What is this place, Lettie?” I stared all around me, trying to absorb my splendid, overwhelming surroundings.

“It is Learner’s Cove; it is the sea. Is there no sea in America, Missy Ara?”

“Not like this.” I thought of the Atlantic at Nahant, near Boston, where I picnicked last year with my cousins. There was
coarse sand and hostile waves, and dark heaving water. The afternoon I went to search for Barbados in Father’s big atlas,
I had been disappointed to find our island was in the Atlantic too. I recalled our voyage down and the deep indigo swells
hissing past the ship. If these were all aspects of the same Atlantic Ocean, I decided, then this Learner’s Cove version was
the one I would use from now on.

“I’m going in,” I announced. I sat down on the amazing sand and took off my Boston shoes. “I’m going into the sea right now.”

The water invited me, and I accepted. I crossed the wet sand that reflected the sky in bright overlapping disks of rose and
lavender. I walked past the ripples frilling like petticoats and ahead into the shallow water, where the green sea and the
pink sand swirled together like the marbled endpapers of learned books. I stepped into the sea, into the morning, into Barbados,
without a moment’s hesitation.

Lettie must have been right behind me. She took my hand at the place where the waist-high water turned the pure crystal green
of a broken icicle. I looked down and saw my toenails far away, all as small and clear as on a doll’s foot. I grasped Lettie’s
hand, and I put my head under the glimmering surface.

I knew without teaching how to breathe and duck and wait, breathe and duck and wait. Soon I was floating facedown — and then
faceup. We played in the clear supporting water till my fingers were wrinkled and my eyes were bleary — and still I begged
for more. I knew I belonged here more than I ever did in Boston. I was safe; I was at home in the sea.