Chapter 4
I hurry out of Mr. Sanders’s office, feeling like I’ve been pulled underwater, gasping for air.
How could he withhold information like this, all these years?
I should be grateful for his charity, but what sort of man denies a girl her past?
Just as I’ve chosen to step forward, he yanks the ground from beneath me.
A scream builds in my throat, but there’s nowhere to loose it. Blind with anger, I nearly collide with a figure in the hall.
Mrs. Bonefat, our strict housekeeper, grabs me with her claw-like fingers.
“Mind your step, girl.” A silver streak jags through the front of her dark hair, which is swept into a bun.
With her dark skirts that somehow never make a sound, she makes it her business to know everything that goes on in this house.
“Excuse me,” I murmur. The scent of lilac perfume disorients me for a moment.
Mrs. Bonefat never wears perfume. Her elegant face is usually pinched into the glare of a hunting osprey, though I have once glimpsed a portrait of a kitten in her quarters.
I am surprised to see her cheeks touched up with a bit of rouge.
Freeing myself of her, I decide not to return to my chambers and plunge down the servants’ staircase.
The walls seem to be collapsing in on me.
When I at last reach the east door, I am drenched and panting.
Drawing in cooling air, I cross the street to Chapel Hill, so named for the church.
It is the highest building on the estate, and so the closest to God.
The path switches back several times to cut the steepness. How long must I wait until Mr. Sanders tells me what I want to know? He is not God and should not play him. I could leave anyway. Discover what lies beyond these islands with my own eyes, like I planned.
Your father would not want you to go to university just yet.
With my fire lit, I hardly feel winded by the time I reach the top of the hill.
Worker residences dot the adjacent slope down to the shoreline, where dockworkers unload cargo from ships.
The departing ferry carves a frothy tail in the water.
Beyond that, the opposite shore looks leagues away, though it is only about a mile across.
Past the courtyard fountain of pouring jugs, our parish priest stands with his back to me, gazing up at a ladder braced against the front of the simple chapel.
On the roof, looking down, Jeddah Nacht, the fisherman’s lanky son, is in the middle of painting the bell tower white.
He should be out with his father. Maybe he is working off a penance.
“You’ll need to put your shoulder into it,” Father Pinnyhorne calls up, his clear voice testier than usual. “Heaven has no use for slothful men. This is not a holiday.”
“Yes, Father.” With his close-shaven blond hair, Jeddah puts me in mind of a lemon. His tight eyes drift down and catch mine.
The priest wheels about. “Lucy,” he calls.
His black saturno hat, its brim wide and round like the rings of the planet Saturn, casts generous shade over his face.
He wears it every day, even though most of the year is overcast. His white dog collar has been loosened, and his minister’s coat hangs on a branch.
“Hello, Father. Do you have a moment?”
“Of course.” The priest dusts off his work gloves and drapes them over his green wheelbarrow.
I’m about to follow the priest through the open double doors when grit patters onto my head from Jeddah’s ladder. I yelp, knowing he loosed it on purpose.
“Jeddah!” The priest backtracks and looks up, likely thinking the dirt was meant for him.
I know better. As kids, Jeddah called me a mudworm—so foul, he said, even my parents didn’t want me.
After weeks of torment, I finally sketched him with ears like sails and teeth like gravestones, pinning it to the school bulletin board for all to see.
That silenced him, but his hostility only sank deeper, like a horseshoe swallowed in mud, never to be pulled free.
“Sorry, Father,” Jeddah calls down, but as the priest ducks back into the chapel, Jeddah grins down at me. I am sorely tempted to pull the rope just inside the entrance and ring the bell into that dingbat’s head.
The cool stone tiles and white walls soothe my temper, and I follow the priest to a small confession booth at one side of the nave.
Father Pinnyhorne’s black hat swivels. “I shouldn’t have yelled at him, but this day has gotten away from me,” he mutters, and I get the feeling he’s talking more to himself than me.
“After those two seal heads, our congregation is stirred up. I have been needing to plant those roses, but my entire day will be spent on house blessings.”
“I’m sorry, I should come back.”
I can see his embarrassment even beneath the brown-red clouds of his facial hair. “Forgive me, Lucy—of course not.” He crosses himself. “It is I who needs to learn patience. Please.” He gestures toward the confessional.
We take our places, him squeezing his tall frame into one side of the screen, me in the other.
Anonymous confessions are impractical for obvious reasons, but we try to maintain a pretense.
He recites his litany, and in the small, dark space I can feel my anger return to me.
I’ve certainly put many complaints into this talk box over the years.
Perhaps I’d be a better person if I’d had parents.
“I feel like doing something… violent,” I blurt out, regretting my choice of words immediately.
“All souls struggle with dark impulses. But beware of that root sin: anger. It’s always waiting to trip us up,” he says mildly. “So what is the cause today?”
“Sometimes I feel like I’m a prisoner.”
“And who is your jailer?”
I inhale the scent of lemon furniture oil and candles, sick at the thought of casting Mr. Sanders in a bad light.
Will it come back to haunt me? It is a sin for a priest to betray the confidences of his flock.
Yet while the priest might answer to God, Mr. Sanders is next in line.
Best to be vague. “Those who keep secrets from me. Secrets about my parents.”
Father Pinnyhorne sucks in his breath, and it occurs to me that perhaps he knows more about this situation than I assumed. He is the bearer of all confidences. I wiggle around on the hard bench, wishing for a soft cushion. Perhaps the hard seat is part of the penance.
Gently, the priest asks, “Do you think that perhaps there is a good reason for such secrets?”
“Is there a good reason to keep children from their parents their entire childhood?” I ask bitterly. “Even after I gave him exactly what he wanted?”
“What’s that?”
“A close-up illustration of the sea wolves,” I say, feeling a wicked sense of satisfaction that I’ve managed to reveal Mr. Sanders without saying his name.
“Sea wolves. That seems risky.”
“It was. But… I felt a strange kinship to them. It was almost like they understood what I said,” I say with a shaky laugh.
“You talked to the sea wolves?” he asks carefully, as if to hide his astonishment.
“I know it sounds loony.”
His shadow sits very still behind the screen. “Perhaps you can ask for a time frame for when he will tell you the truth,” he suggests, fully aware of who we mean.
“He said he’s ‘on the verge of discovering an important truth’ about how my father died,” I sniff. “Sounds more like a dismissal to me.”
A long moment passes in which I can’t help worrying that the priest is having his own conversation with God about my impertinence.
But at last he says, “I encourage you to reflect on all the goodness he has shown you over the years. Perhaps it will lessen the sting of what you believe to be a betrayal while the truth sorts itself out.”
My spine bumps against the hard booth. I don’t see anything good about years of wondering, or years of loss.
He recites a prayer of absolution. “For your penance, follow me.”
In the garden, he hands me a shovel. “While I go a-visiting, I invite you to dig a trench for the new snowball rosebushes.” He nods to a line of potted plants. A smile twitches his beard; then the priest rolls his wheelbarrow away.
The twenty-one gravestones of the cemetery, which count as residents Mr. Sanders’s wife, his son, and Koa’s father, stain the grass with long shadows by the time I finish digging a trench that would make even our gravediggers nod in approval.
The clock below the freshly painted bell tower reads nearly six o’clock.
At the courtyard fountain, I dip my dusty hands.
Jeddah climbs down at last, his spidery limbs unfolding. I’d nearly forgotten him. My stomach growls, empty from missing both lunch and dinner.
He stands before me, trousers sagging, rough work shirt stained with sweat. “What were you in the box for?”
“The only box you should be concerned about is the one you’ll be buried in.”
His gaze hardens, but then he shrugs. “You know, I was thinking about going to the university too.” He had been painting the schoolhouse for a penance when I told the schoolmistress about my acceptance.
“You?” I don’t bother hiding my astonishment. Everyone expects him to take up his father’s trade. “What would you study?”
“I haven’t decided. Not fishing.” For a moment his face loses its hard edges, and his squinty eyes take on a faraway look.
“It’s too late. The deadline has passed.” I’m not sure if this is true, but the thought of Jeddah following me to the university puts a stone in my boot.
“Mr. Sanders could get me in.”
I snort. “You clearly don’t know him very well.”
A memory trickles in. Not long after the tennis court incident, Daniel and Nash went with me to pick raspberries at Jawbone Beach, though for them it was more a competition to see who could get more.
Mr. Sanders emerged from the ocean after his daily swim, and he and Daniel got into a row.
Nash and I kept our distance, but it was impossible not to overhear.