One. The Owl and the Vortex
One
The Owl and the Vortex
FIVE O’CLOCK IN THE MORNING
Boston Harbor, June 16, 1865
The figure stood alone at the prow, lit by a last-quarter moon. Black woolen coat trailing along the deck, short-rimmed cap over choppy waves of hair, corncob pipe set firmly in one corner of her mouth. Staring toward the open sea, only ten miles out.
Below were the lengths of piers where several other ships had berthed. The steamers could be heading anywhere: Liverpool, Luxembourg, Liberia. Boston Harbor was situated closer to Europe than most North Atlantic ports and connected with every major rail line at home, making the city feel like the center of the world—or at least the pounding heart of a nation. Here tea chests had once tumbled into the sea, plunging British America along with it. Here word had arrived by ship of the newly signed Declaration of Independence. And here Old Ironsides —the USS Constitution —had fortified itself for action in the War of 1812.
Today the SS China was due to depart with the tide in a few short hours. Meanwhile the solitary figure continued to stare out at the night sea, liquid-silver like mercury—the very poison that had saved her two winters ago. She had been enviably well until then, the picture of health; she feared she would never be well again. For her to make this trip and hopefully heal, the rest of the family had borrowed against her earnings. Yet even with her own debts clear, she still felt as if she owed something to the rest. Painting lessons for May, clothes for Anna’s new baby, servitude to the crabby old woman she had accompanied on board.
What if she could be someone new on this trip? She often tried on different names for size: Flora Fairfield, A. M. Barnard, Nurse Tribulation Periwinkle. Louisa—Louy—Lu. There were also the occasional amateur theatrics to help her forget who she was—the one not quite pretty, not quite good enough at writing, not quite good. Even nursing at the Union Hospital in Georgetown, a city as divided as the country, had been a kind of performance. During those short six weeks, until typhoid and pneumonia almost did her in, she had attracted the injured and suffering to her like a celestial queen. This had never happened with any of her students. God, she hated teaching. Perhaps her father, Bronson Alcott—acknowledged to be the greatest educator of his generation—had ruined it for his “golden band of sisters.” Instead, May had her art, Anna her family, and Lizzie—well, Lizzie had got what they all feared she most wanted in the end.
Chewing on the pipe, she tucked behind her ear a stray patch of the hair that once nearly brushed the floor. Her one indisputable beauty, until the doctors had shaved it off to lance the typhoid out. Like everything after the war, the hair had grown back slowly, sideways. God appeared intent on teaching that lesson to them all. There was no rising phoenix from the ashes, no lasting accolades. War, like mercury, was as much poison as cure.
Her thoughts always ended up here, at the very point of distress, until she could trot or write them out. She began to saunter about the deck as if without a care in the world—as if she really were someone else. Rounding onto the ship’s port side, she noticed a carriage stationed at the end of State Street. The stooped coachman was carrying a large steamer trunk along the length of the pier as two cloaked female figures shuffled behind him. It was barely five o’clock in the morning, far too early to arrive for eleven days at sea—ten, if the weather brought good fortune.
She swiveled about on one foot to finish her circuit of the top deck. Then, as the sun began its ascent, she flopped down onto a steamer chair and took out paper and pencil to write.
She was still writing two hours later, grateful for the mug of bitter coffee that one of the stewards had brought, when another carriage pulled up. This time two male figures descended, carrying their own shared trunk between them. These passengers were not in a hurry. One even walked with a slight limp—both looked the exact right age for war. Chewing on the pencil end just like the pipe, she carefully observed everything else about the two men: The still-boyish looks. The nicely cut clothes. The prevailing mood, which was a little lost, like her own.
Two more hours of writing passed. This was the divine afflatus she always invoked in the early morning, the vortex that descended when the idea-box was finally full. With only minutes to spare before the ship set sail, she looked up to see a man running onto the pier from the direction of the Custom House. Tall and lanky, long auburn locks, very fast. As fast as she had been as a girl, able to outrun anyone in the fields of Concord or along the shores of Walden Pond. This late arrival carried the tools of a reporter’s trade: handy notebook, pencil tucked in hat brim, well-traveled carpetbag. He bounded up the gangplank and the chief steward greeted him as if expected.
The ship horns blasted. She was about to resume her writing, certain there could be no one else left to board, when a large, well-appointed carriage pulled up. Despite the loud warning noise, its principal occupant took her time descending. She had not fled home under the cloak of darkness but wore an outfit precisely calibrated to the journey ahead: a straw hat ribboned in deep indigo and a matching blue-and-white dress with nautical flourishes. A lady’s maid and an older female companion walked in procession behind her; two coachmen struggled with several trunks at the rear. The young woman imperiously glided along the pier, her perfectly pointed chin tilted upward, and ascended the gangplank to be warmly greeted by the chief steward.
The ship horns continued; the pencil end was chewed in time; the writing stayed stopped. She watched with all the scrutiny of an owl—her sister May had painted one on the mantel back home to inspire her—as the chief steward examined the passenger list before handing it back to one of his men. With everyone on board, the gangplank would soon draw up. It was exactly nine o’clock in the morning and high tide: the perfect time to depart. From the deck chair, she spotted movement on the dock, put the pencil down in surprise, and picked the little corncob pipe back up.
She was not done watching yet.