Afternoons with Emily Read online

  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.

  “Tomorrow, Missy Ara. The sea is not going away. Your new friend will be right here tomorrow and all the days to come,” Lettie promised.

  She had brought us chicken and cake and mango nectar in a little basket. We ate our picnic in the shade of the palms, for I was already hot and prickly from the morning’s sun. As we picnicked, tiny transparent crabs scuttled off with our crumbs.

  Back in my room, the cool linen sheets smelled of lavender. Miss Adelaide had put a new Dickens novel on my pillow. Did she know that Mr. Harnett used to do that for me? I started the first chapter of Hard Times. Then my room was brimming with amber dusk, Lettie was opening the shutters, and the sky was the color of evening. I stretched, feeling peaceful and boneless. In all my life, I had never felt so comfortable inside my own body.

  “What a fine rest!” Lettie praised me. “The sea has given you its best gift. You will be telling Dr. Hugh. It is the medicine he is wanting for you.”

  We chose the white linen supper dress, and Lettie tied it in back, since I had no waist. Then she brushed my hair into a crown around her fingers.

  “Your hair is happy in Barbados,” she told me.

  Then I — shy, stiff, standoffish Ara Chase — turned and hugged her very hard. I think I startled myself more than Lettie. I had never done that to anyone before. Proper Bostonians do not embrace; even Mr. Harnett and I did not until that last day, when we were both in tears.

  “Ah, little one,” Lettie said, patting my back. “This has been a fine day indeed.”

  The family met on the gallery in the bronze twilight; the clouds high over the eastern sea still held the last of the daylight. Dr. Hugh James was tall and thin and stooped like the blue heron we saw on the beach. He had smiling eyes like those of Uncle Thomas Bulfinch. His speech as he welcomed me was soft like Miss Adelaide’s.

  At table, the two men spoke the “big talk” of ideas, and I listened gratefully; there had been very little conversation in my life so far. I had never been included in family meals; we didn’t have them. Father, Mother, and I had not functioned as a family.

  “We never had the killings and the burnings they had on some of the other islands,” Dr. Hugh asserted. They were discussing the former slavery on Barbados and the lives of the natives when they were still slaves, some twenty years ago. I was relieved to know that young Lettie had never been a slave.

  A little sleepy from my big day, I looked around me. The large dining room was shadowed, lit only by candles in wall sconces and along the table. Each candle was protected from the constant wind by a crystal cylinder. But the centerpiece also shone: a silver bowl of enormous flowers, as creamy as a dessert. Miss Adelaide saw me studying them.

  “Magnolias,” she whispered, smiling. She was elegant in deep blue mull, like the shadows on the sea, with a little diamond constellation on
one shoulder. After she had approved my dress and hair upon my arrival at the dinner table, she had settled into the role of an interested observer, allowing the men space to fill with their expansive talk. I didn’t get the sense that she wasn’t included — she occasionally slipped in a comment or directed a turn in the conversation, but she chose an active quiet. I imagined I could learn a great deal by following her lead.

  After supper, we went out to the gallery, where there were lanterns, each with its cloud of clumsy bumbling moths. Some of these looked as big as my hand — but I soon saw they preferred the lights to me. We sat on woven straw chairs, hearing the sweet air moving in the palms and — far off — a low dull roar like a dragon breathing in his sleep.

  “Do you hear that, Ara? That’s the surf on the eastern coast,” said Dr. Hugh. “We’ll take you there after a storm. Our Barbados waves are famous! And we have another treat for you next month: a Shakespeare evening. Our neighbors come and read with us, and we’ll want you to join us. We hear you’re a fine reader.”

  “Oh, I love Shakespeare!” Mr. Harnett had already introduced me to two of the lighter plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Much Ado About Nothing. “I’d really like to read with your friends.”

  Lettie came to the gallery, and I curtsied my good nights. We went back down the grand stair, our oil lamp lighting our way through the arch and along the vaulted hall. Our shadows curved grotesquely on the ceiling. We came to my shutter door, my own beautiful, tall room — and I think I was asleep before Lettie had even untied my sash.

  The next morning Lettie brought me my eggnog and my banana — and a letter from Mr. Harnett.

  “Miss Adelaide is saving this greeting for you till after your first day at York Stairs,” she told me.

  So I began to read: “You and I worked for years together, preparing you for the new life you are starting now,” Mr. Harnett wrote. “Now you will apply all the knowledge you have in order to gain more! Every part of this experience will be a pleasure and a profit to someone with your gifts — and to others later. Every question, every new thought, will lead to another — and I will be with you always, as you are with me.”

  “Your letter-writing friend must think you are very important indeed to be sure this message reached you on your arrival,” Lettie said.

  I nodded, her words warming me. “He was my teacher,” I said. “He wants me to learn everything I can here.”

  “And so you will.” She smiled. “You can answer him that you have new teachers now. Your Lettie, the sea, and Barbados — you will learn from all of us.”

  I picked up my sandals, grinning. “Then let’s go to the sea, now! I want more lessons right away.”

  My second or third day at York Stairs, Dr. Hugh asked me to come to his hospital, a small outbuilding next to his office. This was his examining room, with glass cases full of his pills and powders and instruments. I liked the retorts, teardrop vials in stained-glass colors — and the high shelves all round the room, displaying hundreds of beautiful shells.

  I met Ella, Dr. Hugh’s nurse, tall and slender and formal in starched white. “I know you,” she whispered. “You are my cousin Lettie’s dear friend.”

  Dr. Hugh weighed and measured and tapped me, just as Dr. Jackson had always done.

  “I like what I hear,” he told me. “Our island air is working for you already! It cured me, you know. I was consumptive when we came here from Charleston. Barbados has been a favored sanatorium ever since General Washington brought his sick brother.”

  “Did Barbados cure him too?”

  “No, he wasn’t one of the lucky ones. But I was — and you will be too.”

  “Is that why you came here, Dr. Hugh?”

  “One of the reasons. We arrived just after the big hurricane of ’31, and this plantation was a ruin. Your father came to visit; he helped us design the great house. That double staircase was his idea, or should I say he was inspired by that Italian fellow Palladio?

  “Anyway, it was so striking that we named the plantation for the staircase and for Yorkshire in England, where the Carolina Jameses came from. And after a while the trade winds blew my consumption away!”

  This was exciting news to me — the possibility that this island could work its magic on me too. I vowed to inhale those trade winds very deeply!

  “Now I want to hear about what you did in Boston, Ara,” Dr. Hugh said. “Who were your friends, and what did you do together?”

  “Well, I had my book friends, introduced to me by my tutor, Mr. Harnett.” Dr. Hugh seemed very interested, so I told him a lot about our studies in the nursery. He had the same effect on me that Mr. Harnett had; I wanted to tell him anything he wanted to know and to tell it well. When I stopped for breath, Dr. Hugh smiled.

  “I surely do wish I’d had a teacher like that! Now go on and swim with Lettie. Your lungs sound mighty fine to me.”

  The days and nights settled into a peaceful natural rhythm. Every morning, Lettie drew back my netting and handed me my eggnog and my banana. Often, she first had to take the book that I had been reading when I fell asleep the night before. Then we chose the chiton for the day. Sometimes we combined colors very boldly: a deep pink tunic and violet trousers! These were my favorite clothes ever, as comfortable and forgettable as my own skin. Now I had my Roman sandals, made for me by Lettie’s uncle Gabriel.

  We explored the beaches near the great house, and sometimes my father came to Learner’s Cove; he was a fine swimmer. After a fortnight of learning with Lettie, I had become competent as well as fearless. Now Father showed me ways of moving in the water as a fish swims, without splashing. I hoped he would hold me, bending my arms for me or gripping my waist as Lettie did, but ever the teacher, he seemed to prefer demonstrating a position or stroke.

  In my weekly letters to Mr. Harnett, I tried to describe the sea — since he knew only the North Atlantic. He loved my stories about York Stairs and the James family.

  “You are having important experiences,” Mr. Harnett wrote to me. “Ones that will last your lifetime. Everyone should know the sea, and everyone should meet at least one ‘great lady.’ It is a term one does not use lightly. Since Miss Adelaide James is evidently one, she can teach you things I never could. And your friend Lettie sounds delightful company.”

  One day Lettie and I went out to the reef. She had warned me that coral was sharp and poisonous, so I was careful when I lay down on my towel. We relaxed in the sun and looked back at the dark pointed cedars and our little beach.

  “Lettie,” I decided to ask, “am I your job?”

  “You are both my work and my pleasure, Ara. Miss Adelaide employs me, but we Barbadians are free now. I would be your companion for your company, for no wage at all!”

  I was happy Lettie dropped the “Missy” when we were by ourselves.

  “Does Miss Adelaide pay you very much, Lettie?”

  “Enough so I will be a wealthy bride.”

  “And who will you marry?”

  “That will be Elijah, but he is not knowing it.” She laughed and blew seawater, as merry as another child.

  “And when will he know it?”

  “When I am telling him!”

  And she would say no more — so we swam back to shore and worked on our acropolis, which we were building beyond the high-tide mark. We had much to teach each other, it turned out. Lettie too had come to delight in the ancients, their feuds and infatuations. Her appetite for the Greek myths grew, the bloodier the better.

  “That Hades, that foolish king of Hell,” she fretted. “He should just be choosing a nice girl from his own village. Most girls would be happy to be a queen! I would marry Hades myself, except for Elijah.”

  In exchange for my myths, Lettie told me about her secret religion, and its drums and witch doctors and avenging ghosts. There were sacrifices too: bleating goats and flapping chickens. I teased her that my snobbish Olympians would never accept these barnyard offerings.

  One morning, heading for
the beach, we met Miss Adelaide in her shade hat. She had given up trying to make me wear one, and I was tanned an even café au lait. Miss Adelaide carried shears and a flat basket, so I knew she was about to make one of her flower arrangements. These were in every room of York Stairs. Some were brilliant and dominant; others were small and personal. No two were ever the same.

  “I especially like the new one in the dining room,” I told her. “I think you meant it to be a wave.”

  “You guessed!” She was delighted. “Now tell me, Ara — what is in the big copper vat on the gallery, the one from the sugar mill?”

  “This week you used branches of cup of gold. Last week’s was hibiscus and African daisies.”

  “How do you know the flower names?”

  “I ask Lettie.”

  Miss Adelaide looked at me, head tipped, unhurried and grave — as if she were choosing or deciding something.

  “Very well. That’s settled. You may watch me work. I have never allowed anyone before now. Come here early on Tuesday and Friday mornings, right after you get up. It’s a nice thing for a girl to learn, before she has her own house.”

  So on those mornings, I met Miss Adelaide at her big worktable outside the cookhouse. She rose before me, for the day’s flowers had to be cut before the dew dried. She laid sheaves of color, fragrant and moist, by the containers she had chosen: an antique bowl, a conch shell, or a Chinese dish. She completed four arrangements a morning.

  Watching, I sensed her working without a definite plan, following the flowers’ intentions. When I was allowed to ask, at the end of each arrangement, Miss Adelaide was vague. She offered no rules or maxims when I questioned her.

  “After a while, you’ll know when it’s right,” she promised me. “The flowers will tell you, if you listen.”

  So I observed quietly and tried to guess what she would do next. One morning, I watched her making a golden sunburst (lemon lilies, coreopsis, and allamanda). Naomi, the cook, came out with a question about dinner, and Miss Adelaide was briefly distracted. She went back to her massed yellow flowers and picked up a crimson rose.