His turn to cut in. “That,” he told me, “was different.”
“You’re right. You know why? Those were buddies from work. This is family, Ty. Family.” My anger had raised a big lump in my throat but I forced the words through it. “You don’t turn your back on your family.” The thought of my grandmother made me drive that point home harder. “Especially not when they need you.”
“Yeah, well, I have needs, too, you know.”
I heard Rachel’s voice say in my mind, “He is such an ass,” and I admitted in silence he could be, sometimes. In a purposely calm voice I said, “Ty, don’t ask me to choose between you and my family.”
His chair scraped the floor as he stood. “I’m not asking you anything.”
Watching him gather the few things he’d brought with him, I wasn’t sure how I felt. Surprised, maybe, this was the way things were going to end. But the thing that surprised me the most was discovering I didn’t care. When I’d stopped caring, I wasn’t sure. I only knew that, as he turned away from me, nothing inside me stepped forward to call him back.
And then the kitchen door banged shut behind him.
That door had been one of my brother’s first handyman projects here, and it had never hung perfectly level. The bang left it even more crooked, askew on its hinges like everything else in my life at the moment.
I heard Rachel’s steps on the stairs. By the time she came into the kitchen I’d forced myself back to the dishes as though things were normal, as though Tyler’s car wasn’t audibly gunning its way up the driveway.
She asked, “Did he just break our door?”
“Not really.” I fitted the last plate to dry in the rack with precision and pulled the plug, watching the water drain out. “It was already broken.”
Lydia
There were some things that could not be repaired.
She’d learned this small and sad truth in the months and years since Joseph had returned home from Oswego. At first they had been thankful he’d come back to them unbandaged and with all his limbs, and walking; that his outward wounds had healed so soon and left no scars. But they had come to realize that where Joseph had been broken was on some deep, inner surface that could not be seen and was beyond the reach of any doctor. And along the broken places bits of who he had once been had fallen and been lost, like all the tiny chips of porcelain that had scattered in the ashes of the hearth the time her mother had once dropped a cherished platter, so that even though her father had with patience and determination pasted it together so the seams but barely showed, there still remained, along those seams, small voids and tiny imperfections where those chips had once been that could never be recovered.
To a stranger at their table it appeared the platter had been cleanly mended.
She knew otherwise.
He did not call out often from the nightmares anymore but she still knew each time they plagued him from his restless wanderings. And when his demons came by day she knew that, too, from how his eyes would brighten and his breathing grow more rapid as his body tensed beneath whatever pressures were assaulting him.
But sitting as he was now, with her drawing pencil in his hand, his papers spread out tidily across the empty dining table, it was to her as if one of those small bits had been found among the ashes and retrieved with care and fitted into place again.
She’d always liked to watch him draw his plans for ships—the lines so straight, the measurements meticulously reckoned—for beneath all that precision lay an artistry she much admired.
The Spanish captain found it of great interest. Drinking brandy with her father in the chairs across from Joseph he leaned forward on the table as he watched the plans take form. “You mean to lengthen her?”
Joseph, at work, seemed too deeply absorbed to be rude or suspicious. “Yes. She’s been practically severed already just here. There’ll be no cost or effort to add ten more feet for an increase in cargo space, and,” he remarked, “she can carry more guns.”
“Guns are always a good thing,” the Spaniard agreed.
At his side, her father took a sip of his own brandy—a rare thing for him. He seldom drank and when he did preferred the rum that Daniel sometimes sent them from Jamaica, but on this day the Spanish captain had brought brandy from his private store, by way of saying thank you for their hospitality, and so her father had indulged.
She knew that Benjamin would have outdone them both had he been there, for he loved brandy, but he was not there and she did not know where he was.
She knew where Mr. de Sabran was. He had not come in to dinner either, which had not surprised her since he did not seem to care for being in the captain’s company, and Violet had reported that when she’d gone to the orchard with the dinner pails she’d found him hard at work there with French Peter.
This had irritated Lydia for reasons she could not explain. “And Benjamin is with them?”
“No. He wasn’t there.” And turning, Violet had said, “But I wouldn’t tell that to your father.”
Lydia had been in full agreement. While she’d never told a falsehood to her father, she had learned it wasn’t necessary to share every truth, if by not sharing it she could avert an argument.
They’d gone a full day now without a voice raised in the house, although she could not say how long it would continue, having noted that Mr. de Brassart seemed even more bound to speak his mind with little care or thought for consequence when he was drinking brandy.
Its presence had enticed him to stay with them in the keeping room when all the dinner dishes had been cleared away and Joseph had begun his drawings.
Lydia had mending to be done, including one of Joseph’s bedsheets that had torn along its seam from all his turning in the night, so she’d retired from the table to the comfort of her mother’s chair beside the window, where the light was best for sewing, and from where she could observe the four men and their conversation without having to take part.
Her father being mellowed by the brandy told the captain in good humour, “That’s a useful skill you have, sir. Being able to read drawings upside down.”
“A man in these times must have many skills.” Del Rio grinned. “I am better with the charts of the sea, to tell the truth. A drawing like this one I would leave to Juan. He understands such things. This was his trade before he came to sail with my father.”
De Brassart asked, “So he was never a slave?”
Captain del Rio’s voice held, as it had once before, that hard edge of cold steel as he slid his gaze sideways to look at the Frenchman. “He was born a free man, and so he remains.” He paused before challenging Mr. de Brassart with, “You as a boy read the stories of Madame MacPherson, yes? And so you greatly admire my father. Then you should, I think, remember why he never fired on galleys. Why he hated the corsairs.”
De Brassart shrugged. “I do recall that he did not approve of slavery.”
“Not approve?” The Spanish captain’s mouth curved as he raised his cup and briefly drank. “He says it is the evil of our age, and we are none of us unstained by it, and all of us will answer to our Maker in the end. This is a truth,” he said, and gestured to the room around them. “All these things we have—these clothes, this drink, even this colony—we build these things on stolen land with stolen lives, and turn their blood to gold to fill our ships. This is a truth my father knows. It’s why he stays now in his garden and no longer guards the flota,” he concluded, naming the great Spanish treasure fleet that had for generations crossed the wide Atlantic.