King of the Sea

Chapter 25

Chapter 25

"Ten centuries! It's been timeless. But you know what I mean? Of course, I've known times when promised cargoes failed to arrive and we had to scrape around. That was idleness of a kind but it wasn't doing nothing.' "

"Nothing, is it!" She eyed him askance. "Is nothing what we're after doing?"

He sighed at the impossibility of conveying feelings and discoveries that still overwhelmed him."What I mean, I suppose, is that I've never had a week - very well, ten days that I could simply devote to... to my to our...

"To love." She settled herself in his embrace.

"To love," he murmured. "Even now it's hard just to say it: I love you." He spoke the words with an experimental lilt. "It makes me ashamed of all the years I... what's the word? Why don't I have the words for this kind of thing? All the years in which that... faculty within me, the faculty for loving ... all the years in which I allowed it to wither. I actually watched it happen and thought good! I thought all it did was get in the way." After a pause he added, "And I thought it was dead, too. Finally dead. But ..." He chuckled contentedly. "Apparently not."

"Your wife ...?" she suggested hesitantly.

"Oh yes. I loved her - once upon a time. In fact, that's what frightens me now." He hugged her more tightly. "The memory of all that. The longing that was never... the slow killing of ..." He gave up trying to plumb the awfulness of those depths and started a new, more hopeful tack. "But I'll tell you what's different this time. You! You're going to make it different."

"Tell me about it." She sat up, not leaving his arms but shedding her languor. "Even if it scalds your heart, I want to know."

She leaned her head gently against his shoulder, to remove the direct challenge of her gaze. All she heard was the breath rushing in and out of his nostrils.

you think I have no right," she offered. "No, no. Of course you do." After a reluctant pause he added, "I want to tell you. But it's not easy. These aren't easy matters to talk about. But you know when I touch you like this?"

"Unless

"Ooh!" she responded with her customary delight. "Just so!" He withdrew his hand again. "Now that is something she never does. Did, I mean. She never said ooh! like that." He hesitated.

"But?" she prompted.

He mimed Hilda's brand of distaste and, feeling the most wretched traitor, said, in her tones, "Really, Francis! Is that all you ever think about?"

Teresa closed her eyes and shook her head.

"Imagine what that does to a man," he added. "You begin to doubt yourself. There's no one you can talk to about it."

"Oh?" It appeared to surprise her. "Don't men...?"

"Not quite in that way. In fact, not at all in that way. Until I met you, I've been more than half ready to believe I'm some species of monster." He smiled and craned his neck to peer into her eyes. "I'm not, am I?"

"Ah, well now!" She chuckled and settled herself fully back into his caress. "You might be and you mightn't. And if you are, then so am I. How can anyone ever know? Nobody talks about it. So how can we ...?"

"Oh, really?" Now he seemed surprised. "Don't women...?"

"Not quite in that way." She laughed, knowing she was echoing his words. "In fact, as the man says, not at-all-at-all in that way."

"But you do discuss it? Women do?"

"Sure we do and we don't."

"How?"

"Lord!" she replied. "It's a fence you'd lepp over any way but straight. Aren't there ten ways to skin a

"Oh, are there," he commented glumly. cat?" "Well, I might be walking down the street with

Mary Feehan, say she was my best friend at home, so she was- and I might whisper in her ear, 'Mother of God, would you ever look at the muscles on that fella! if he was working with his shirt all open in the heat of summer. And she'd know what I was thinking, well enough. But I'd never say it, nor she'd never ask, neither. But we could go on talking about him like that till it rained fresh oysters."

"But you'd never actually ...?"

"There was once," she interrupted as a memory suddenly returned. "After Bridey Hoey got married last year. She married Tommy O'Gorman, a great snail of a man altogether, but he had money. His family owned the sawmills at Ballycumber.

"And?" he interjected, knowing her capacity for

rambling. "Oh yes. Well, didn't they have a honeymoon in Dublin Friday to Monday. And when she came back, Mary and me asked her what like it was. 'Oh, Laawd!" says she," Teresa spoke in tones of pretentious civility - ""Tis fiercely exaggereeaated altogether. But she must have gone some way up the mountain, for she's after having a fine little boy last month." She pecked him a quick kiss. "And what ails your hands, me darlin' Frank? They seemed quite promising a minute ago."

"I want to talk."

She was about to make a facetious reply when his seriousness broke through her mood. "About us?" She swallowed audibly.

"Yes. The future. I said these ten days have been like ... something outside time altogether, but come tomorrow and it's back to this year of grace, eighteen seventy-five, and the world and its ways. We've - as you put it - been up the mountain' so many times that we must expect...

"Around Christmas," she interrupted. "Ah. So you've thought of it."

"Before I loosened one single button. Oh Lord, but that sounds so calculating! I don't mean that. I mean, it crossed my mind and I dismissed it in the one moment." She raised her head and pressed warm lips to his bearded neck. "Oh Frank, you could cast me out tomorrow and I'd bear your child with all the love and pride in the world. God, I love you so much!" For a moment he was too choked to reply. Then,

easing her a little out of his embrace, he said, "May I walk on deck a while? Alone."

"Alone?" she echoed, slightly resentful. "I have ghosts to lay."

It was at once too cosmic and too vague to allow a

direct reply. She rose and released him with a smile.

"I'll turn in, so," she said. "Don't fall asleep now," he warned her from the door.

It was a full moon, almost directly overhead. He picked his way forr'ard, past the galley kiddley, where the glow of the banked-down fire gleamed briefly on the pans she had scoured. Someone would notice that in Boston, he realized. They'd know Cap'n Troy would never have done such a thing.

What was he to do now? How to get out of this mess?

He stood among the chains and gazed out over the silvered tranquility all about. It had snowed heavily in the dying throes of the storm, so the whole world was now either pristine white or jet black; only the sea, with its shimmering translucence, offered him something in between.