“What?” said Charlie, rising and walking over to her. “What?”
“So almost as an afterthought, the doctor writes of all these events that took place in the area before he arrived. One of them is a Spanish galleon that wrecked off the coast of Maryland earlier that year. After a hurricane. The wreck of La Galga.”
“‘The Greyhound.’”
“Indeed. And look right here,” she said, pointing at one passage. “The doctor notes that La Galga was believed to have been carrying ponies, because after the storm, a number of them were seen on both the mainland and Susquehannock.”
“Let me see that.” He leaned in. “Incredible!”
“This is going to be huge news among the, oh, at least ten people who care,” she said, but the excitement on her face was genuine.
“By the way, a ship from that same fleet inspired Stevenson to write Treasure Island,” Charlie added. “Everything is connected.”
Margaret looked at him and grinned.
The wind outside the library whistled, and the radiator clanked, and that was that.
Chapter Seven
Wednesday, January 20, 1954
Nanticoke Island, Maryland
Margaret huddled in her coat as she lay on the damp grass, silently watching a string of five ponies wading into a marsh. The beasts bent their necks toward the saltwater cordgrass that grew thick on the west side of Nanticoke Island. The sun rising behind them began to brighten the silhouetted scene, the beach and water emerging like a pale blue and gray canvas behind the dark outlines of the animals. A ray of light landed on the forehead of one of the larger ponies, revealing a white teardrop-shaped spot. He repeatedly snorted and bared his teeth.
“What’s he doing?” Margaret whispered to Dr. Louis Gwinnett, the head of the research team, who lay on his stomach next to her, binoculars in hand and a notepad by his side.
He leaned in closer and put his mouth next to her ear: “Don’t know,” he whispered. She raised an eyebrow at him and he smiled. The grazing ponies remained oblivious to their presence.
“Notice how distended their stomachs are,” Gwinnett whispered. “They all look pregnant, even the two males.”
Margaret blanched at his mention of pregnancy. She knew she didn’t show yet, but she was concerned that news of her condition would prompt some paternalistic impulse on Gwinnett’s part. Men seemed to treat pregnant women like invalids, she’d observed, and she had seven and a half months to go and a lot of work to do before this baby arrived; she was determined to make the most of her time while it was still her own.
“Do you think that’s because of all the cordgrass they eat?” Margaret asked, focusing on the matter at hand. “Its salt content is quite high. So they would have to drink more.”
“That’s likely it,” Gwinnett agreed. Margaret stole a look at him. With his shock of thick, prematurely white hair, deep-set, sky-blue eyes, and a jawline so sharp it could cut wood, he looked more an international captain of industry or a New England governor than a zoologist.
Teardrop, as they’d decided to call him, casually sidled up to one of the mares and began sniffing her front legs, then proceeded down to her ribs, her rear legs, and her tail. The mare looked unbothered by this attention, until, without warning, Teardrop pushed his head forward and bit the mare’s rear end, prompting her to emit a guttural shriek. She backed quickly away and took refuge between the other two mares.
The other stallion in the string, pitch-black and slightly larger than Teardrop, snorted, whinnied, then reared onto his hind legs, briefly almost standing. Roaring, he landed angrily, stomping onto the sand a hair’s distance from Teardrop, who backed up a few steps. The two stallions locked eyes. Teardrop had a decision to make.
The three mares stood frozen in rapt attention. Margaret and Gwinnett lay still on the sand, similarly enthralled. If birds were chirping, Margaret couldn’t hear them.
Teardrop gave a snort, then quickly turned tail and trotted away from the other four ponies. As quickly as the conflict had started, it came to an unremarkable end. The remaining ponies in the string continued grazing on the cordgrass.
Margaret exhaled. Adrenaline was coursing through her veins, pounding into her stomach. The raw confrontation—sex, violence, status—terrified and thrilled her.
“That was intense!” she finally said. “I could use a drink.”
Gwinnett looked at his watch. “It’s six fifteen in the morning, Mags.” He smiled. “And more important, my flask is back at the campsite.”
Half an hour later, after the ponies had galloped off, Margaret and Gwinnett walked back to their camp, where another researcher—a cheery blond graduate student named Annabelle Lane—was lighting a match from a small fire over which a pot of hot water was just starting to boil. The match blazed and she lit her cigarette. Gwinnett ducked into his tent, and Lane continued to heat water for their coffee.
“Tell me everything!” Annabelle said, and Margaret described how Teardrop had challenged the alpha in the string and been chased away.
“So where does he go now?”
“After the colts run off they all tend to find one another and then they form these roving bands of bachelor stallions.”
Annabelle rolled her eyes. “Sounds like commons on a Saturday night.” She opened a collapsible metal cup and shook in some instant coffee from a tin. She handed it to Margaret, then carefully poured hot water from the pot into the cup. “Hold on, I’ll get you a spoon,” Annabelle said.
“And some sugar, if you have it?”
Gwinnett emerged from his tent with a small flask. With Margaret’s assent, he poured a couple of sips of bourbon into her coffee.
“How’d you sleep?” Annabelle asked, handing Margaret a spoon and two sugar cubes.
“Like a baby,” Margaret said. “I woke up every hour and cried.”
Annabelle and Gwinnett smiled indulgently.
“You should get a vinyl airbed,” Annabelle suggested.
Margaret settled herself on the ground next to Annabelle. “When I was a kid, my mom and sister and I moved right near here, on the mainland, to stay with my uncle, and the three of us would sleep in a tent throughout the whole summer and into the fall. Slept soundly every night.” Margaret recalled the comfort and security she’d felt in those moments, ensconced between her older sister and mother in two sleeping bags her mom had ripped apart and sewn together, a cocoon for the three of them.
“Where was your father?” Gwinnett asked, taking a seat on a large rock.
“You ever hear of the USS Shenandoah?” she asked.
“Of course,” Gwinnett said. “I’m navy myself.” He paused, clearly aware of what her question implied. “Horrible thing.”
“What was it?” Annabelle said.
“Dirigible crash in Ohio,” Margaret said. “My dad was killed, along with thirteen other men.” She hadn’t spoken of her father’s accident since the first time she told Charlie about it, more than a decade before. She wasn’t sure why she had just decided to break her long silence—maybe being back on Nanticoke justified a moment to indulge that pain. She felt anew that sinking feeling in her chest, the fresh grief always there no matter how skilled she’d become at ignoring it.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” Annabelle said, looking down into her coffee.
“What Mags isn’t saying is that her father was a true hero,” Gwinnett said. “The military at the time was convinced rigid airships like the Shenandoah were the future of warfare because they could fly so high. And this was the navy’s first one, so it was akin to on-the-job training for its crew. Margaret’s father and the other men were truly on the front lines.”
Margaret walked to the fire to pour herself another cup of coffee. “It was a real mess,” she said. “We found out later the commander had tinkered with the design. The navy had ordered everyone to fly despite the bad weather. No one wanted to. But there was this mad race to come up with a vessel that would be the world’s best. We weren’t even in a war!”