Chapter Five #2
“I still can’t believe we were fooled into thinking you girls were over there learning how to garden and cook outdoors,” Owen said. “Mother acted like she was doing us this great favor, getting you out of our hair. All the while you were preparing to battle the enemy.”
“Which was you!” Maudie said.
“And who started it?”
“You did!” Julia said, laughing. “Taking over that old schoolhouse!”
William, Owen, and a few of their friends had been allowed to use the old stone building on the mainland as a clubhouse. Green with envy, seven-year-old Julia and Maudie had responded to this development with a range of tactics, including espionage and vandalism.
“That was not sufficient justification for war,” Owen sniffed. Maudie smacked his arm, and he elbowed her in return.
“I’m joking. We really were horrid to you girls. I am sorry about that,” Owen said, charmingly penitent.
“You are forgiven,” Julia replied.
“I’m not so sure,” Maudie said. Owen cuffed her again, then left to get a drink.
“I envy your relationship with Owen,” Julia said, after he walked away.
“Owen and I fight like cats and dogs!”
“No, you don’t. Or maybe you do, but it’s … I don’t know … playful. It’s not like me and William.” It pained Julia when brothers of her school friends came to visit. They all said the same things. Oh, we had the most bitter fights, but now we get along like a house on fire.
Julia and William had never been smack-and-elbow siblings.
As long as Julia could remember, it had been censorious, condescending William versus rebellious, stubborn Julia.
It was impossible to imagine their relationship improving.
They were worlds apart in temperament and attitude, and the gulf had only widened.
Ruthie Lawrence had just arrived on Haven Point, and soon she and Louisa joined them at the picnic table, rounding out the Liberty Island reunion.
Ruthie had been a rather waiflike little girl, but while she was as pretty as ever, with her golden hair and lovely features, she had developed a passion for tennis in her teen years and become quite accomplished.
She had just come from a tournament in Rhode Island.
Julia had expected Ruthie would have gotten married by now, and evidently Serena and Ambrose were eager for her to do so. But while she was still seeing Vernon Scott, she was not racing to the altar.
“I like being able to travel to tournaments all over the country,” Ruthie said with a shrug. “If Vernon can wait, then my parents can wait, too.”
After the clambake, William’s friends had planned some horrid stag event, so Maudie invited the girls over to the cottage on the Grahams’ property that she and John Franklin had occupied after they married last summer.
Pauline was spending her wedding eve there, so they planned to toast the bride and look over her trousseau.
Julia was grateful to Maudie for how well she had taken Pauline in hand. It seemed such an unlikely friendship—sturdy Maudie, a Yankee from almost as far north as one could be and still be American, and the pretty Southern orchid that was Pauline.
They all admired Pauline’s sheets, pillowcases, tablecloths, nightgowns, and handkerchiefs, most of which had been sewn by Pauline and Mrs. Powell’s clever hands. Pauline might have had to sell herself, but her habit of thrift would not be so easily broken.
The Powells were teetotalers, and Pauline always declined wine at dinner, so Julia was surprised when she accepted the glass of champagne Maudie offered for a toast.
“To the bride!” Maudie said.
They had an amusing evening, singing songs and telling stories. They told Pauline about Liberty Island, and Pauline related amusing tales about her family’s old retainer, whom they called “Uncle Robert,” and who, in turn, called them “broken-down ’ristocrats.”
There was a good deal of laughter, and Julia finally felt she had put her troubles aside. By the end of the evening, however, Pauline was very tipsy.
“Think you’ll be able to get up for your wedding?” Maudie asked.
Pauline straightened her back, looked at Maudie with feigned hauteur, and said, “Well, I hertainly sope ho!”
They all dissolved into laughter again, but Maudie declared it time for the bride to get to bed.
Ruthie and Louisa left, but Julia lingered.
“Was this the first time you’ve seen Pauline have a drink?” Julia asked Maudie, when she returned from Pauline’s room.
“Yes, but it is not her first. When I talked about serving champagne, she told me she adores it, though she never drinks in front of her mother. Did you see how she looked at that glass? It was as if she had met the man of her dreams.”
Julia thought Pauline looked a bit pale the next day, but to anyone who had not been present the night before, it could be easily written off as maidenly nerves. In fact, it was almost becoming.
Monday sparkled, a perfect day for a sail. Mina had no interest in childhood memories (she refused to believe she had ever even been a child), so Julia had not taken her to Liberty Island. She looked forward to showing it to Michael.
As soon as they were around the back of the island, with Haven Point out of view, Julia felt something slacken inside.
“It feels good to escape.”
“Was a trip to Liberty Island always an escape?”
“I thought so, though it was arguably a banishment.” Julia laughed as they turned about, tacking into the cove.
“We used to call it Jumaru, by the way, after Julia, Maudie, and Ruthie. Once Louisa arrived, she refused to let us change it to Jumarulou, so when the books came out, we relented to Liberty Island.”
They had sailed the dinghy over, so when they reached the shallow water, Michael rolled up his pants, jumped out, and pulled the boat onto the little comma-shaped beach.
He grabbed the picnic basket, and Julia led him up from the rocky shore, through the trees, to the clearing where she had spent so many happy hours.
Michael looked around in wonder. “You’d never know it was here!”
“They think there was a farmhouse here at some point, and that the trees were cleared for grazing, though nobody knows for sure.”
Gunnison Island stretched from northeast to southwest, fitting the pattern of most Casco Bay islands, which, on a map, looked like a great deity had thrown a handful of rocks sidearm into the bay.
Spruce trees blocked the view of the clearing from Haven Point.
“We could be neither seen nor heard. Which was the idea, of course.”
Julia pointed out the circle of rocks where they’d had their fires and showed him the old lookout tower. Michael’s eyes scanned the south side of the clearing, then pointed to a spot between two spruces.
“Is that where you launched the catapult?”
“Perceptive! It was like a turret. Room to launch our projectiles, and undergrowth to hide behind.” After she led him over the rest of the small island, they returned to the clearing for their picnic.
“Who came out here with you?”
“My aunt Anna for the first two summers, then our caretaker’s niece took over. She was back from the West, having left her good-for-nothing scoundrel of a husband.”
“Her words?”
“A direct quote.” Julia explained that when the scoundrel took up with a Harvey Girl, a waitress from one of the famous Harvey restaurants on the Santa Fe line, she scraped some money together and came home. “She was gratified by how indignant we were on her behalf.”
“Your aunt gave me a cryptic message. She said you can tell me the bootlegger story.”
Julia clapped her hands together, delighted. “She must trust you. This is a great secret!”
“I will take it to the grave.”
Julia explained that when they were eleven, after years of pleading, they were permitted to stay overnight on Liberty Island by themselves.
Maine had been a dry state for many years, and there were rumrunners all along the coastline.
One foggy night, they heard boat engines and yelling, followed by what sounded like a gunshot, then some cursing.
One engine grew more distant, but the other seemed to be drawing nearer. The girls scrambled to a spot where they could see between the spruces, just as a boat appeared through the fog. A man was at the wheel, holding his arm, moaning and cursing.
“So we did what any good pirate does and ran down to the shoreline.”
“Brave!”
“I believe ‘idiotic’ was the word Anna and our caretaker used. We called out and asked if the man needed help. He said he’d been winged by the revenue man.
Having frequently played smuggler, we were familiar with both terms,” Julia said.
She added, “We were always the rumrunners, by the way. Never the revenue men.”
“You knew who the good guys were.”
“Our parents’ comments on the subject had led us to see them as a rather genial sort of criminal.”
“That you are standing here today suggests this man did not disabuse you of this.”
“He was a perfect specimen, a credit to the breed. We yelled to tie up his boat. Maudie and I rowed over and fetched him. As it happened, Ruthie had taken an earnest interest in nursing, and as her mother is a committed hypochondriac, she always had plenty of bandages and the like. We’d spent many hours pretending to be gravely wounded while Ruthie treated us. ”
After Ruthie and Louisa fetched the supplies, they returned to the beach, whereupon Ruthie began ordering everyone around like an army general.
She instructed Julia to hold the lantern as she cut the man’s shirt, checked the wound to confirm that he had just been winged and that no bullet had lodged in his arm.
The man offered a flask to clean the wound, but Ruthie, affronted, informed him she would properly sterilize it.
“His name was Clem, by the way.”
Michael nodded. “Well, of course it was.”
“Honestly, I’d have preferred something like Demon Dan, but anyway…”
Julia explained that Ruthie had cleaned the wound, applied ointment and a bandage, and commanded him to lean against the rowboat and rest his arm on the gunwale.
At that point, Clem finally seemed to notice that they were four eleven-year-old girls, and asked what they were doing out there alone at night with no adults watching over them.
“A belated concern, but quite paternal. We told him we’d been camping out here for years, and that we could send up a flare if we had any trouble.
Clem told us about the new revenue man in Portland.
At one point, he referred to him as a ‘sneaky bastard,’ but he apologized, saying he knew he shouldn’t speak so. ”
“Why did you need permission to tell this story?” Michael asked, laughing.
“To this day, none of our fathers know it. At the time, my aunt said we’d never be allowed to stay out here again if they found out. Maudie almost turned her against the idea entirely when she said we’d be perfectly safe if we only had a couple of pistols.”
Michael was rolling. “Now I know why this wasn’t in the Liberty Island books.”
“I should ask your mother to do an illustration anyway,” Julia said. “We never saw Clem again, but for years after, he left us little treats on the island.”
Julia saw Michael off at the wharf, but rather than returning to Fourwinds, she made her way to the beach, lowered herself onto the sand, and watched the waves deposit pebbles and shells and then, with a great crackling sound, pull them away.
I know how you feel. Julia felt the same tug, toward this shore and away from it again.
When Mina spoke of having nothing in common with her childhood friends, Julia suspected they might not have had much in common to start with. Like a fish does not know it’s wet, when Julia was little, she had no idea how special her childhood summers had been.
It was the readers’ reaction to Liberty Island that taught her. They wrote of their envy, not just of the girls’ freedom but also of their friendship. Louisa was like a sister, and Julia knew she would always feel close to Ruthie and Maudie, too.
But now Maudie was married, and while Ruthie had held off, she would not be too far behind. Though Julia did not look down on them for it, they were following the pattern their parents had set, and she feared their lives would soon be unrecognizable to her.
And William is even worse than Father, Julia thought bitterly, considering Pauline’s fate. Jerome Demarest was materially indulgent, occasionally amused by his daughter’s antics, but like all the fathers Julia had known growing up, he was not particularly forward-thinking.
What was William’s excuse, though? Other young men were open to new ideas, and not just radicals either. Michael Seaborne, for example.
Of course Michael was just a boy when his mother gained such fame for her Liberty Island illustrations. Under those circumstances, Julia supposed, he could hardly be anything other than open to women’s opportunities.
Julia sighed, got up, brushed the sand off her skirts. As she headed up the hill from the beach to Fourwinds, she was struck by a troubling thought. If Michael Seaborne’s character could be credited to his mother’s influence, what did that say about the formation of William’s?