Chapter 22
The crate comes on the twenty-ninth. I’m at Blackthorn House at nine in the morning because I left my good tongs in his kitchen after prepping the Trask reception, and there’s a truck in the drive with New Hampshire plates and two men in a hurry.
In the hall there is a wooden crate the size of a chest freezer with a shipping label on it and BOSTON in the third line of the address.
Julian doesn’t explain it and I don’t ask.
That’s the deal I made with myself on the twenty-second, standing in his library with a fire going and my whole life rearranged, and it is a much harder deal to keep than it sounded.
I said I’d give him time. So he gets time, and he takes it in the form of a crate in the hall, and a man from a firm in Boston who telephones twice on the thirtieth.
The little papered door beside the bookcase in the library is standing open on the thirty-first and there are eleven journals stacked on the floor beside it in date order.
I look at them for about four seconds, then go and put the kettle on.
Christmas happens somewhere in there. It’s very good, actually, which I did not expect.
Julian comes with me to the Christmas Eve bonfire down by the harbor and stands beside me through carols, hot cider he doesn’t drink, and thirty minutes of Harriet Coyne explaining why the town used to do the whole thing better before the Parks Committee got involved. Then he comes back to the cottage.
Lucy comes for the afternoon of the day itself and eats an alarming amount of the ham. Julian is given a present by Lucy Carver, wrapped by Lucy Carver, which turns out to be a mug that says WORLD’S OKAYEST SAILOR, and I wish I could frame the look on his face.
I give him a charcoal cashmere scarf, which feels embarrassingly ordinary until he puts it on immediately and wears it for the rest of the day despite the fact that we are indoors and he is a vampire. He gives me a book. A small one, brown, with the leather gone soft.
“That is 1809,” he says. “It has salt in it, and a great deal of weather, and Amos Kell.”
“Julian, this is—”
“It’s not a loan,” he says.
I sit on my hearthrug on Christmas afternoon with my best friend asleep in the good chair and a four-hundred-year-old man on the sofa wearing the scarf I gave him and reading a book about knots.
I hold the first thing anyone has ever written about Mercy Rood, and I decide that I am not going to think about the crate until January.
January arrives on a Friday.
The Veil comes into Black Harbor at about two in the afternoon on the second, in two vehicles and a van, and by three minutes past two Deirdre Fanning has telephoned four people about it.
The welcome reception is at the Maritime Museum at six, because Mabel arranged it inside four hours flat, and I am catering it, because Mabel booked me in the same phone call and had already decided the number of covers.
“Sixty,” she said.
“Mabel, there are three of them.”
“There are three of them, Penelope,” said Mabel Libby, in the voice she uses for people who have not thought something through, and she was right. There are seventy-one people in that granite hall by half past six.
I do it properly. I want that on the record too.
I could have done a tray of supermarket cheese and a bowl of pretzels for people I have every reason to be frightened of.
Instead I do a hundred and fifty crab things that are not from Portland, and Fern Tibbetts’ parsnips as a soup in little cups, and the smoked bluefish paté that Gil Amory has been trying to get the recipe out of me for six years, because if a stranger is going to write about this town I would prefer him to write about it having eaten well.
Also because I do not know what else to do with my hands.
The first member of The Veil I meet saves me from a crime against historic hardwood. The chafing dish handle is too hot even through the towel, and I nearly drop fifty dollars’ worth of smoked mussel chowder onto the two-hundred-year-old floor when a big hand catches the edge of the tray.
“Whoa. Careful.”
He has a serious camera and an enormous coat and a general air of eagerness. His lanyard says BEN CARTER.
“Thank you.” I get the dish safely onto the burner and shake out my fingers. “You have good reflexes.”
“Occupational hazard.” He grins at me, wide and doggish. “That smells incredible. What is it?”
“Chowder. Local mussels, leek, a little cured pork.”
“Can I film it?”
“The chowder?”
“The whole spread. This is honestly the best thing here so far. No offense to the—” He looks around and lands on a glass case containing a very old harpoon. “—the harpoon.”
“The harpoon’s had a rough couple centuries. Let it have its moment.”
Ben laughs like I’ve said something genuinely funny and backs up to frame the table.
They’re going to be nice, I think. Victoria warned me they’d be nice.
The bar for outsiders in Black Harbor is not high, exactly, but it is specific: don’t call it quaint, don’t ask if we get bored, and let somebody finish. That’s it. Half the summer people fail on all three by the end of the first drink.
Rowan Pierce clears the bar in about eleven minutes.
He comes in out of the cold in a good coat and a bad hat, shakes hands with Ines Cardoso, apologizes to Mabel by name for not responding to her letter in December, and then finds Wendell Marr inside four minutes.
Wendell starts on the ditty bag.
And Rowan Pierce takes his glasses off, puts them in his pocket, leans on his elbows on the case, and listens.
All the way through. Both parts, including the part about the second cousin, which I have heard eleven times and have never once heard to the end because there is always a tray to carry.
When Wendell finishes, Rowan asks him a question about the sailmaker’s palm.
Wendell has to think about it, and I watch a man of seventy-eight be asked something he does not immediately know the answer to by somebody who actually wanted the answer.
That’s the moment I understand the size of the problem.
Because I came in here ready for a man with a microphone and a theory. What has actually arrived is somebody genuinely good at the exact thing my town needs, which is being listened to.
He’s about forty. Dark hair going grey in a way he clearly has no plans about, expensive glasses in his pocket, and a completely unfiltered laugh, which is rarer than people think.
He talks to Doris about the storm of '78 for six minutes.
He asks Theo three questions about the pub and one of them is about the beer.
He does not once say the word quaint and he does not once look at his phone.
He’s interested in everything. This is his dreadful gift, and it’s why people talk to him.
Ben, meanwhile, films everything and apologizes for it constantly.
“Sorry—sorry, is this okay? I can stop. I’m just capturing the setting.” He gestures at all of it. “This is the best building I’ve been in all year. Look at the boat. Why is the boat like that?”
“Nobody knows,” I tell him. “Nobody’s ever straightened it.”
“Nobody’s ever straightened it,” Ben repeats, delighted, into his own camera.
Lucy arrives at twenty past six with her camera bag because Mabel asked her to shoot the reception for the Society’s records. Ben Carter turns around when she walks in, and I watch a golden retriever find his stick.
“That’s a… Is that the F2?”
“It’s the F2.”
“You’re shooting a reception on film.”
Lucy raises an eyebrow. “I’m shooting a reception on film.”
“Can I—” Ben starts, and spends the next hour following Lucy around.
“Well,” Mabel says, appearing beside me, “isn’t that interesting?”
Chloe Ramirez finds me at seven, at the end of the table, while I’m arranging more crackers beside the paté. She’s about thirty, with dark curls and an overstuffed notebook in her coat pocket with a rubber band around it. She stands there for several seconds like somebody waiting to be told off.
“You’re Penny Harrington. You work in the Historical Society.”
“I’m Penny, and I volunteer at the Historical Society.”
“I was there in October,” she says. “I don’t know if Mrs. Libby mentioned it.”
“She mentioned it.”
Chloe nods slowly. “I thought she might. She made me sign the visitors’ book.” She puts her hand out. “Chloe. I’m the producer, which mostly means I’m the person who reads things.”
I shake her hand. It’s an ordinary hand. She has ink on two fingers.
“You were there for four hours.”
“I was there for four hours and I got about a page out of it, which is a good day.” She looks around the hall, at the whaleboat and Mabel talking rapidly as she steers Rowan Pierce towards a case. “Can I say something that’s going to sound strange?”
“You can try.”
“I’ve done this for six years and I’ve never had a town be pleased.” Chloe says it almost helplessly. “Usually there’s a sheriff. Usually somebody’s grandson threatens Ben in a parking lot. And I walked in here and Mabel handed me a nine-page indexed document and a cup of soup.”
“Mabel likes things to be correct. The document is hers. The soup’s mine.”
“The soup is extraordinary.”
“It’s parsnip.”
“It’s extraordinary,” says Chloe, and eats the rest of it, and for about ninety seconds I like her enormously and forget entirely what she is.
Then Rowan Pierce comes over and puts out his hand.
“You must be Penny.”
“I am.”
“Rowan. I need to talk to you about the crab things.”
His handshake is warm and firm and unhurried, and he’s looking at me like meeting me is the single best thing that’s happened to him today.
Oh no.
He’s good. He’s funny about the hotel and about the drive up from Portland and about a season they did in Kentucky where the local historical society turned out to be one man who had made most of it up.
He asks me how long I’ve had the Salt & Sage and listens to the answer.
He asks about the building being a sail loft, then asks what a sail loft actually is because he doesn’t know and says so.
Then he says, “Can I ask you about the Volkovs?”