The Rathbones by Janice Clark

Author:Janice Clark
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780385536943
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-08-06T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

LITTLE ABSALOM

{in which Lydia fails to understand}

1803

ABSALOM, WHERE DID you get that? Bring it to Mother.”

The little boy glanced up from the carpet on which he sat surrounded by toys: a tumble of building blocks, a wooden top, a hoop for rolling. Primers and picture books lay scattered on all sides. But the boy was ignoring his favorite toys and instead was bent, absorbed, over a toy Lydia had never seen. Absalom stood up, green eyes bright in a rosy face, and walked on chubby legs toward Lydia, the toy trailing behind him on a string, wheels squeaking. He dropped the string to hold his arms out to his mother, who hugged him close, then sat him next to her.

Lydia picked up the toy and turned it in her hands. It was a little wooden boat, an ark made of birch, its rough white bark streaked with black. It was filled with carved animals: a crouching wolf; a bear rearing up on its hind legs; a deer with little antlers of horn, and its fawn; a pair of crows. Absalom squealed and stood up, grabbing the ark from Lydia’s hands. He clutched it tight and waddled to the window, thrusting the ark up onto the sill. He rocked it back and forth, a dark shape against the bright sky and water, as though it rode on the sea. His white-gold hair shone in the sun, springing in bright waves.

Lydia sighed. When she had begun to swell with her first son, she was determined to keep him near her. She wanted Absalom to live upstairs, to play at his mother’s feet in the high bright rooms, to learn his letters, to study mathematics and Latin and rhetoric, as her brothers had. She had cajoled Bow-Oar until he agreed to allow Absalom to stay with his mother for five years. And his cousins, too: Priscilla and Miriam had borne golden babies of their own, little Jeroboam and Ezekiel. Lydia had thanked Bow-Oar and kissed him. She kept to herself her hope that, once little Absalom and his cousins had been five years upstairs, Bow-Oar would relent and let them stay.

Before the golden wives came, the Rathbone boys had always spent little time with their mothers. On the day he began to crawl a Rathbone boy was plucked from his mother’s breast and set before a bowl of sailor’s burgoo. No sooner was he weaned than he began to pass the greater part of each day with the men. At first he only toddled along the chain of rooms, where the off-duty crew, having no task ashore but to restore their strength for the next voyage, slept or honed their weapons, or ate at the long tables that dropped down on pulleys from the ceiling beams every six bells, laden with spotted dog and toasted cheese, with salt beef and dried peas and figgy-dowdy. A cousin would lift the baby onto his knee to bounce and give him a piece of squid jerky to gum, while his tablemates sang a soft chantey.

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