This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2019 by Alice Hoffman

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

Published by Amazon Original Stories, Seattle

www.apub.com

Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Amazon Original Stories are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

eISBN: 9781542091459

Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

There are those who insist that mothers are born with love for their children and place them before all other things, including their own needs and desires. This was not the case with us. My mother’s name was Nora Ivie, and mine was Adeline. I had been named after a soap she’d once seen in a fancy shop, Adeline Lilac Soap, made in Paris. My mother said naming me so had been a mistake because now I thought I was better than she. She said it like a curse. Actually, she was correct, but there was a reason for this. She had ruined my father’s life, and mine, and she didn’t seem to notice. She was the sort of person who saw only herself and her shadow, and the rest of us disappeared in the bright sunlight.

In the year when I turned twelve, our lives suddenly changed. My father became ill and was unable to work. He was kindhearted and trusting, two qualities I did not inherit. He was patient as well, another trait I could not claim for myself. He’d been to sea when he was young and had collected shells from the shores of India and Africa. When he fell ill, he began to create a sailor’s valentine for my mother, setting shells into the shapes of hearts and flowers. During the time of his illness, my mother went out every night and left us alone. When my father sent me to search for her, I would always discover her in the tavern down the street with other men. She acted as though I were a stranger when I appeared. “Did you want something?” she would ask. Yes, I felt like saying. A mother.

“I need help getting home,” I’d announce, as if I were a poor orphan, not a difficult part for me to play. I did this for my father’s sake, because he didn’t deserve a wife like my mother. But I also did so because I knew she would be furious when she had to leave the tavern. She’d seem hard-hearted to her boyfriends if she shooed me away, and I suppose she wanted them to think she was something more than she was, so she went with me. Once home, she’d stop me before we went in the door.

“Don’t you tell your father a thing,” she’d warn me. “It would kill him. You’d do better if you kept your mouth shut.”

I was alone with my father when it happened, a quiet death, with no complaints. He told me I was the light of his life and that I must look after my mother when he was gone. Afterward, I sat beside him and wept. I knew that anything that might be good in my life had left along with his spirit. He’d been to places where the beaches were made of black sand with shells as large as a man’s hand or as tiny as a flea, and I hoped he had one of those beaches in mind in his last moments on earth. He’d quit the sea when he met my mother and became a cobbler to ensure he would always be close to home. It was likely the tanning chemicals had made him ill. He’d told me that my mother was so beautiful when he met her, he’d made her a pair of red shoes. Only a true beauty could get away with wearing such shoes, he said. Perhaps he was a fool, because even after all she’d done, he was most likely still in love with her on the day he died. He never did finish his valentine made of seashells.

When I went to the constable’s office to tell them my father had passed, they sent a sheriff to escort me back to our rooms. There was my mother, finally come home, playing the part of a grieving widow. She might have been an actress. She would have been good at that. The sheriff asked if she could support herself and me, and she had no answer. She had always turned to men for such things. Her boyfriends gave her trinkets and money, and she thought she was a queen because of that. But not one of them seemed to want to take her on now that she was available. What good was a widow with a child to them? After all, they had wives of their own.

My mother was sent to the local church and given a list of jobs where a woman such as herself was needed. That was how she came to be the housekeeper at the lighthouse. She was convinced a lighthouse would be exciting, better than the scullery or tavern jobs she could get in Boston. Naturally, she didn’t ask my opinion, and if she had, I wouldn’t have answered. She had told me often enough to keep my mouth shut, and now I did exactly that. I abolished all language on the day of my father’s funeral. I did it to honor my father and outrage my mother, who slapped me when I refused to answer her. Let her, I thought. She still couldn’t make me cry.

“You’ll regret this, Miss Adeline,” she said, mocking me.

Well, maybe I would and maybe I wouldn’t, but after a day and a night of self-imposed silence, I didn’t know if I could speak even if I tried.

My mother’s job took us to an island in Essex County, forty miles north of Boston, at the tip of Cape Ann. Thacher Island was made up of fifty acres of rocks, a place consumed by woe from the start. In 1635, Anthony Thacher and his beloved wife were the only ones to survive a shipwreck when a storm came up and sank the Watch and Wait as it traveled from Ipswich to Marblehead. The tragedy claimed twenty-one souls, including their own four children, along with seven of their nieces and nephews. What can you expect to build on such sorrow? Only more sorrow to come.

By the time we arrived, in 1908, there weren’t many who would bind their lives to such a remote and desolate place. The winters were brutal, with sheets of ice falling down from the sky, a pelting so sharp and brittle it could draw blood if a person was hit directly. Snowdrifts could be eight feet high, a luminous mixture of water from both the sea and the sky, so salty and heavy it was nearly impossible to shovel the paths. Ice had to be chipped off the windows of the lighthouse so that the lanterns could be seen out at sea, a job that would freeze a man’s hands in under twenty minutes. There were storms in the summer as well, astounding electrical storms that illuminated the sky with crackling blue light and caused trees to burn up when they were struck.

Two lighthouses had been built here, each with exactly 156 steps, and three lighthouse keepers were employed; a senior fellow named Jonas Ford and two others, along with their families, were the only inhabitants. No one came to meet us when we arrived from Boston on the train, so we walked three miles to the harbor in a downpour. Rain was spitting from the sky as we made our way to Loblolly Cove. I was soaking wet, and water sloshed inside my shoes. With every step I took, I hated my mother more.

“I didn’t know if I could speak even if I tried.”

A skiff had been sent to the mainland to transport us, but the man at the wheel seemed in a bad humor, likely due to having to come out in the dreadful weather on behalf of two strangers, although he glanced at my mother once or twice. I was worried when I saw how his gaze lingered. My mother had worn her finest clothes, even though we had to walk through the rain, and she acted as if she weren’t the least bit wet. I had long dark hair and was tall for my age. People didn’t think I was twelve because of the look in my eyes. I looked wild, the kind of girl who would jump out a window or leap from the skiff that was bringing us to an island of rocks. I thought about doing so, but I held myself back. The water was so cold, even in the summertime, it would probably freeze a person’s blood before they drowned. That was no way to die, for it would surely be painful to become a block of ice under your very own skin.

The fellow who brought us to the island came with his son. Father and son had the same name: Rowan. The elder Rowan Ballard was a man in his forties. He was strong and agile, and when he smiled at my mother his gloomy face changed and even I could see how handsome he was. He was the third lighthouse keeper; there were two men above him, he explained. That was why he wore the number 3 on the lapel of his uniform.

“Someone has made a mistake if you’re the third in line,” my mother said.

She was twenty-nine and still beautiful. I never noticed that about her, but other people did. Men certainly noticed. She had long dark hair; like mine, I suppose, although hers was thicker and wavy and mine was straight as sticks. Her complexion was rosy and she had pale-blue eyes, so pale you could fall into them. The lighthouse keeper stared at her when she made that remark. He narrowed his eyes, as if he wasn’t sure what she meant, and she made a face at him. “I’m never wrong, you know,” she told him. “I see big things for you.”

“Do you now?” Rowan said.

I saw how interested he was. I could tell about such things. When men were interested, they had a faraway look, as if they were trying to figure out their attraction. Was it a dream, or was it real? Did they want a woman, body and soul, or was it only the body that appealed to them? Sometimes it took them a while to figure it out, sometimes only minutes.

The third lighthouse keeper’s son, the other Rowan, who I came to call Billy Goat when I knew him better since he was always chasing after the goats on the island, was a few years younger than I. He was shy with most people but not with me. The fact that I didn’t talk brought out his chatty side. “I’m not sure your mother will like it here,” he told me. He said the conditions were so rough in the sea around us that Charlotte Fuller, the wife of Travis, the number two keeper, had her baby in a rowboat on the way to the doctor in town. The waves were so high and the current so daunting, they’d been forced to turn the boat around and come back. When they arrived, Charlotte had her baby in her arms. They named him Thacher Warren. Thacher after the island, Warren for a great-grandfather who himself had been taken by the sea.

“You think your ma could have a baby in a rowboat?” young Rowan asked me.

I shrugged and said nothing. A woman like my mother shouldn’t have children.

“My ma hates it here,” he went on. “The day she’s free of Thacher Island is the day of her redemption. She begs my father to go back to Boston.”

That made sense to me. Mrs. Ballard sounded very wise, although how a wise woman could end up here was anyone’s guess. All the same, I suspected that this woman and I would be great friends, and so it turned out to be, which rescued both of us from this rock in the sea that I soon enough learned was known as Thacher’s Woe. Some of the lost from the shipwreck were buried here, beneath the pear trees. One of the nieces must have been especially loved, and someone had built a cairn of stones over her grave, not just any stones, only the polished white ones that were not easy to find. Once I was settled in, Billy Goat and I brought flowers to her grave and stood there with our heads bowed. The sea was a dangerous enemy, and we were surrounded by it. But I remembered what my father had told me. You could grow to love something so strong and elemental, but you’d have to value the beauty of it more than you did your own life. Whenever I found a white stone, I thought of my father, and sometimes I imagined him sitting beside me, watching the glory of the sea.

The lighthouse keepers and their families shared one house. There was the man in charge, Mr. Jonas Ford, his wife, Elizabeth, their two boys and two daughters, and of course the Fullers, famous for their rowboat baby. Then there was the Ballard family. The children went to school by rowboat in the fall, and the older ones boarded with families in town, coming back to the island on Friday afternoons. My mother and I were to have a one-room cottage near the cow barn. It was a low blow to her, for the cottage was filthy and airless, but the view was remarkable. The last housekeeper to live here had lasted six months. Though the island was made of rocks, there were meadows and woods, as well as a garden planted in 1836 by a former lighthouse keeper who’d had a way with such things. Every time he’d gone to town, he’d brought back another specimen until he had created a kind of Eden. It was quite miraculous to be in the middle of the sea and yet still have pear and quince and apple trees, wild currants and gooseberries and blackberries, along with grapevines. Lupines grew wild, and there were sweet peas everywhere, pink and fragrant all summer long. The milk from the seven cows he kept were said to have saved the crews of the Ann Maria and the Royal Tarr, ships stranded on the rocky reef people called the Londoner, which had caused hundreds of shipwrecks. There were still cows, out in the pasture, and a few wild goats, impossible to catch, though Billy Goat and I tried often enough. There were seven children, and I was the oldest. It was my job to watch over the others, save for the baby, who was rarely out of his mother’s arms. My mother’s job was to help with the cooking and the heavy cleaning and laundry, which she minded a great deal. She cursed when she made their meals up in the big house. In truth, she had no talent for cookery; all the same the third lighthouse keeper, Rowan, always said it was the best food he’d ever eaten.

His wife didn’t seem to agree. Her name was Julia, and all that summer, she wrote out proper recipes for my mother. She gave my mother a black book in which to record her menus. Julia also kept an eye on me. She had seen my mother slap me when I refused to kill a chicken for supper, for it was not in my nature to do such a thing. Frankly, I’d rather starve than murder the patient hen that followed me through the grass. Julia found me crying out by the coop, holding the poor startled hen in my lap. The waves were high and a rainstorm was moving in and I wished myself to be somewhere else. I wished it so much I thought about jumping into the water. Perhaps my blood wouldn’t freeze and I would peacefully drown. My father had said he’d seen men drown and when they were recovered each seemed to have found peace. My despair was likely written all over my face, even though I tried to reveal nothing. Julia knelt beside me.

“I’ll take care of it,” she told me. She brought the hen into the barn, then brought its lifeless body to my mother so that she could pluck its feathers. “You’re the housekeeper,” I heard her say. “This is your duty to perform. If we’re to have a chicken dinner, you wring its neck.”

I quickly came to prefer Julia to my mother. I think she knew this, because whenever I came to her kitchen door to bring Billy Goat back from a day at the shore, she would give me a slice of pie.

“If you have any difficulties,” she advised, “just come to me.”

From then on, I was her accomplice.

The two lighthouses on the island had been built to distinguish their beacons from the single Boston Light, down the coast, and Plymouth Light, which was to the north, and save ships from the Londoner. The current brought ships toward the reef, and in the dark, at high tide, it was the perfect trap. The lighthouses were the warning signs in the inky night, and even in the fog sailors knew to stay away. As the summer passed, I began to feel free. I had time to myself, and I enjoyed watching over the children. I felt a sort of joy I’d never felt before. I was so unaccustomed to such emotions it took some time before I realized I was happy. The sea was ever changing, ever interesting, and I felt closer to my father. I now loved the ocean, as he had. The island was a sort of paradise for children in fine weather. I watched over the young boys and girls by the shore as they jumped in the pools left by the high tide and dug for mussels and hermit crabs. We collected seashells and bags of white stones to bring to Thacher’s niece’s grave. It was a spectacular and lonely landscape that I wished my father could see. I wished he could take off his shoes and climb over the rocks and wave to me and that he would be here in this world once again, if only for a few hours.

The children became used to me, and I suppose my not speaking came to seem quite natural; it was likely preferable. They prattled on and on to me, knowing that I was a good listener and that I never judged them. The truth of the matter was I was incapable of saying a cruel word.

“I was so unaccustomed to such emotions it took some time before I realized I was happy.”

The lighthouse keepers were too busy to have much to do with the children, and even the women had chores that would exhaust an ordinary person, from making jam to sewing their family’s clothing. My mother was to do the heavier work, cleaning the lighthouses, which must always be a brilliant white, washing floors, seeing to the mounds of laundry. I noticed that Rowan had time for my mother, despite his work. He stood in our kitchen watching her peel potatoes, a glass of whiskey in his hand, as if he were lord and master. Sometimes, on bright days, he helped her hang the laundry on the line. He slipped into our house late at night, and I saw what they did when they thought I was asleep on a pallet on the floor. They were all over each other and said things a girl my age shouldn’t hear. But I wasn’t surprised. That very first day, while he showed her our cottage, my mother had kissed him, just like that, as if they were the only two people in the world and I wasn’t standing right there, holding my suitcase.

“Oh her,” my mother said when the third lighthouse keeper had glanced at me, concerned, after their kiss. He still had some heart and soul back then. “She doesn’t even speak.”

My mother and the lighthouse keeper wrote to each other in the black book Julia had given her to plan menus. That was my mother’s way. Give her a gift and she’d grab hold with two hands and take it as she pleased. Their plans had nothing to do with recipes. They wrote about what their lives would be like if they could be together, and they made fun of Julia, calling her a cow and a dolt, amused that she had no idea of what was happening right under her nose. The book was kept hidden in the barn. It was a game, their secret to share, but they weren’t the only ones to read the messages scrawled inside. I read their words to each other, how every kiss was heaven, how nothing else in the world mattered to them. Their foul notes were filled with sex and longing and words I wasn’t supposed to say out loud, had I been able to, which thankfully I was not. How she would go down on her knees for him, how he would have her in his marriage bed, how many times in an hour they could do it, how when she drank him in, he tasted like the sea and filled her completely, how she was like a peach, a plum, a pear ready for him to eat. I suppose this is what they considered to be love. Sometimes when I sat on the floor of the barn and read their pathetic love offerings, I nearly laughed out loud. Rowan could think as he pleased, but I knew my mother. Had anyone else been around, a man with more to offer her, my mother wouldn’t have looked at Rowan twice, despite that smile of his. But he was there, and he was the only option. Mr. Ford was an old-fashioned, serious man who had been in the navy, and Travis was in love with his pretty young wife, and so she took Rowan. She took him whole, she all but swallowed him, she took him without any intention of giving him back, and after a while, it showed.

I often helped Julia as she went about her chores, and so I was there at the end of the summer when she found the book. We had gone to gather eggs. She was set to make a birthday cake for young Rowan. He was turning nine, and he was her darling. It was to be a chocolate cake. She had showed me the recipe, and the ingredients included two bars of pricey chocolate, a cup of cocoa, and four large eggs. It was September by then, and soon I would go with the other children every day on the rowboat to Loblolly Cove to attend school in Rockport. I had never been to school before and looked forward to it. I had quickly come to love this place, and I loved Julia as well, for she treated me with kindness. Once or twice I had made a mistake in front of her. I broke a piece of crockery in the kitchen, and I suppose I closed my eyes tightly, as if I expected to be slapped. Instead she merely said, “I always disliked that cup. Now I’ll have a good excuse to buy another when I get to town.” I thought that she and my father would have enjoyed each other’s company, for Julia collected shells and kept them in glass jars in the kitchen.

On the day she found their precious book, the weather was perfect and the world was golden, even the masses of seaweed on the rocks. Julia opened the first page; then she sat down in the straw and said, “Oh.” She gave a soft sob, and I couldn’t bring myself to look at her face. We brought the book back to the house, where she stored it in a bureau beneath the lace tablecloths they never used. She was older than my mother, and quiet, like me. She was pretty, but you had to search for her beauty, which was hidden in her kind eyes. When we reached the kitchen, she sat down at the table and I sat across from her. I suppose it wasn’t just their love for each other but their hatred for her that wounded her so.

“What shall I do?” she asked.

I wasn’t certain what she meant or why she would want my advice. Perhaps she didn’t want an answer, for she was asking someone who was mute by choice and therefore clearly had nothing to say. Or perhaps she valued my judgment. She took my hand in hers and said, “I’m as sorry for your troubles as I am for mine.”

I helped Julia make the birthday cake that afternoon. She was deep in thought, and she scalded herself. Of course I didn’t speak as we did the baking, but I think she knew that whatever happened next, I was on her side.

My mother was in a panic that night. She came into our cottage after she’d been to the barn and quickly grabbed my arm. Of course she blamed me. “Did you steal my book?”

I shook my head no.

“Answer me!” she demanded.

I didn’t intend to start speaking now just to please her. I looked into her blue eyes. She’d been so young when I was born that some people thought we were sisters. I was certain that I didn’t resemble her in the least.

“Maybe you’re lying and maybe you’re not,” my mother said. “All the same, there will be no school for you. That’s what you get for getting in my business.” She looked pleased with herself. “And it’s what you deserve.”

Right then I decided to help Julia be rid of her.

On the first day of school my mother went on the rowboat, along with Rowan Ballard. After November 1, the older children would stay in town all week in a boardinghouse and only come home on Fridays because the weather was too unpredictable to row back and forth each day. I, of course, was left behind while my mother took my place on the boat, saying she had shopping to do in town, although it was more likely she and Rowan were looking for a rented room where they could be alone and satisfy each other. That was the kind of thing they’d written to each other. Sometimes my mother wrote in French, a language she didn’t know. Je t’aime, she often wrote in the book. I learned later on that she had asked Charlotte Fuller to help her memorize some phrases, for Mrs. Fuller had been raised in Quebec.

I sat in the kitchen with the other women that day: Mrs. Ford, who was formidable but competent and caring, and Charlotte Fuller, whose baby was in a cradle, along with Julia, who grew quieter all the time. They were canning blueberry jam for great quantities of the berries grew wild, and the kitchen was steaming. They had all taken off their dresses and worked in their slips, which made everyone giddy. I was encouraged to take off my dress as well, so I would be cooler as the huge pots of jam cooked. I did so but was immediately embarrassed by how dingy my slip was. Out of politeness, the women said nothing about it.

“Have you never been able to speak, dear?” Mrs. Ford asked.

Julia put down a pad and pen in front of me. I looked at her, and she nodded to encourage me.

Not since my father died, I wrote.

“Why, she has beautiful handwriting!” Charlotte Fuller said.

“She’s good at many things,” Julia said matter-of-factly. It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said about me.

I would imagine my mother had a grand time in Rockport. Instead of rowing back and forth in the morning and then again in the afternoon, she and Mr. Ballard stayed away all day. She had to rush dinner, which was flounder and boiled potatoes, done to no one’s liking. It was after she cleared the plates that it all began.

“You look well fed even though the dinner was dreadful,” Julia Ballard said in a small, serious voice. “I’m sure you didn’t go hungry today being with Nora.”

You could have heard a pin drop when she said it. Everyone knew what she meant. We sat at a long wooden table, and we ate with the families, but having overheard, my mother didn’t return to take her seat. She stayed in the kitchen, waiting to see what would happen next.

“Is it your business whether or not I’m well fed?” Rowan said in a low growl.

People didn’t speak like this in front of Mr. Ford, the first lighthouse keeper, and everyone was stunned.

“You’re my husband, aren’t you?” Julia dared to say. “If I shouldn’t care, who should?”

She said it in a way that made me feel like crying. It was a simple question, with no recriminations. Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Fuller lowered their eyes and turned pale. We were all in close quarters, in the dining room and on the island. An argument could mean many things to many people and affect us all.

Rowan stood up so quickly his chair clattered onto the floor. He threw down his napkin, not liking to be chastised in front of the other keepers. “If you don’t know what would satisfy me, then you’re far stupider than I would have ever imagined.”

After that, Julia slipped into a kind of melancholy, or so the other wives said. She had taken to her bed, insisting that she was ill, but the other women believed she was worried about the state of her marriage. After all, Rowan was a handsome man and my mother was young and a widow. When I took some tea and biscuits up to her room, I saw there were bruises on Julia’s face and arms.

“What would you do?” Julia asked me.

I took the pad and pen from her night table. I was glad she’d asked for my advice.

I wouldn’t let them do this to me, I wrote.

September was a glorious month, and I was glad for the weekend, when the children were not in school and I could explore the island with them. The sky was a dome of stars at night, brilliant and bright. The wind was a living thing. There was so much to discover. We found a cave where we often played, piling up treasures: rocks and sea glass and dried flowers. All the while, I was thinking things over. My mother and Rowan Ballard had become bolder all the time. He came to the cottage nearly every night now, and I took to sleeping in the barn, which would suit me fine until the cold came on. Once, when I was late in leaving, carrying my quilt, I met him on the path. He grabbed my arms and looked at me. It was that studying look I’d seen when men looked at my mother. I was turning thirteen that month, and I suppose he noticed I was almost a woman. I resembled my mother more than I would have wished. His own thoughts must have frightened him. Ballard was quick to take his hands off me. He’d held me too close, so close I thought I might faint. My fear of him made my face flush.

“Don’t you ever say a word,” he said to me. He called me a brat and a little whore, which I thought was amusing, considering who he was sleeping with. He told me I had better behave or he’d take care of me. The next morning I slipped Julia a note.

I think you should escape.

By the end of the month I’d thought things over long enough. Every once in a while Julia came to breakfast with her lip split. No one said a thing, not even Mr. Ford. They thought what went on in a marriage was between husband and wife, but the men had all but stopped talking to Rowan Ballard. On my birthday, Julia gave me a pair of socks she’d knitted and we went out to pick the last of the raspberries. I brought a pad of paper along. My idea was simple. She would leave a note and disappear, and no one would search for her because they would all believe she had taken her own life. Mr. Ballard and my mother would be blamed for her suicide and lose their jobs as their punishment.

“She would have to do away with herself in order to have a life of her own.”

“And how do I disappear?”

I would row her to shore, then row myself back; then I’d leave the note in place. We could do it in November, when Billy Goat was at the boardinghouse in town. She insisted she would not leave without him, and so I would warn him that she would come for him before she ran away.

We thought it over, sitting among the raspberry bushes.

“Rowan wasn’t always like this,” she told me.

I guessed that he probably had been, but she hadn’t wanted to see.

“But he’s like this now,” she finally said, and then I knew she would go ahead with the plan. She feared the man who crept into her bed early in the morning, when he was done with my mother. She would have to do away with herself in order to have a life of her own.

I began to go out on the rowboat with Mr. Fuller, the second lighthouse keeper, whenever he went fishing so that I could practice rowing. After a while he said I was good at it. The currents were wicked, but I learned to stay away from the north side of the island. When the children came home for the weekend, I took Billy Goat aside and wrote a note. Someone may appear when you least expect her. You’ll be told she’s dead, but she’ll be alive and outside your window. He gave me a look, then nodded. He was nine but sharp. “I’ll wait for her,” he said.

On November 1, there was a storm. On November 2, it was Mr. Ford’s birthday and there was a celebration with Julia’s special chocolate cake and ice cream made from the goats’ milk flavored with nutmeg. Mrs. Ford played the piano, and the Fullers danced and so did my mother and Rowan Ballard, right there in front of everyone.

“What do you think of them?” Mr. Ford asked me. He wasn’t in the habit of addressing children, but I happened to be sitting next to him, and perhaps I wasn’t a child anymore. I took a pad and pen, then handed him my message.

They should be ashamed.

The third of November was clear, and the sea was as calm as glass, deep-black glass that liked to take a life or two. My father had told me the best shells could be found at such times, when the water was still. I met Julia after dark and helped her scatter her belongings on the rocks, high up enough so they wouldn’t be washed away. Her nightgown and shoes and the combs she wore in her hair. She took nothing with her, only a black dress that was kept in the back of her closet that her husband wouldn’t miss and a pair of Mrs. Ford’s old boots. We got into the rowboat and headed toward shore in the dark, not to the harbor but to a little beach nearby. Julia’s face looked pinched at first, she had lately been badly beaten, but she soon relaxed, and her hair, always pinned up, fell loose and was swept back by the breeze. She began to look like someone else—perhaps the person she’d once been. When we got to the beach, she handed me her suicide letter.

“This will either go wrong or right,” she said. “But I’m grateful to you no matter what happens next.”

She embraced me and I shed some tears, for she had been my only friend in the world. I rowed back against a rising wind, but I did well. I think my father would have been proud of me. I sneaked into the house. I left the letter on the dining room table. Let Rowan Ballard and my mother try to explain themselves now. Let them pay for their thoughts and deeds. Before I left I took the black book from its hiding place in the bureau, as Julia and I had planned. We didn’t want it falling into the wrong hands.

In the morning there was mayhem. The keepers combed the island in search of Julia and discovered her belongings at the shore. With no body in sight, Mr. Ford went for the police. Rowan Ballard had a funny look on his face, as if his dearest wish had been granted, but he didn’t want to show what he felt. My mother, on the other hand, couldn’t hide her emotions. On a day such as this, when a woman’s life was at stake, she had a smile on her face. She suggested she make breakfast, but no one took her up on her offer. The police brought more bad news. Young Rowan had been so upset he had run away from the boardinghouse after he’d been told his mother was dead.

At last the letter was read aloud by the officer, and Julia’s words were chilling to hear. She had been beaten daily and could no longer endure such violence from her husband. Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Fuller exchanged a glance that made it clear they were not surprised. It was quiet after that and no one spoke much; they simply went about their business in a silent, puzzled manner. Everyone avoided Rowan and my mother. They were guilty of something; that much was certain. Two days later Rowan went into town to post about Julia’s death in the local newspaper. He went to the boardinghouse, but there had been no sign of young Rowan, and I suppose that wasn’t his main concern. He had brought my mother with him without even bothering to ask for permission from Mr. Ford. He took out a marriage license, and he and my mother became man and wife. You should have seen the grin on her face when they got back to the island.

My mother moved into the big house, right into Julia’s room, and the other two wives were none too happy about it. She didn’t have to take orders from them anymore; she made that clear. She told them they could make their own tea and wash their own sheets. As for me, I was to stay in the cottage and take over most of her housekeeping duties. I was now the one in charge of the piles of laundry. I thought of my father as I worked; he had wanted more for me. He was the one who had encouraged me to go to school, but my mother had said a classroom was a waste of time. I began to think all hope was lost, until Travis Fuller, the second keeper, came back from running his errands in town with a letter for me.

“I guess you have a friend somewhere,” he said cheerfully.

I went to sit by the shore so I could have my privacy. I’d recognized the handwriting from the recipes she’d written out for my mother. Now I knew there was still someone in the world who cared for me.

The very next week a reporter from the Boston Daily Globe came to visit. He’d seen the post about Julia’s death and was now at work on a story. What would make a woman do such a thing, and why would her son be in such despair he would run off? When questioned about why he’d married again so soon, Rowan said a few words about how he’d had to go on despite the loss of his wife. He hoped his son would return to him, and if that should happen, the boy would need a mother. Mr. Ford and Mr. Fuller had forbidden their wives to discuss Julia’s disappearance, but Mrs. Fuller did manage to say that the first Mrs. Ballard was a very unhappy person and that God would surely take pity on her soul.

The reporter found me by the niece’s grave. I had piled on so many white stones that the cairn gleamed in the sunlight. Some people were remembered and some were not, and sitting there I remembered my father. The reporter was a young man, but he wore a suit and was rather serious. His boots slipped on the seaweed as he came over the rocks. He introduced himself as Benjamin Hart, a name I thought was a good omen.

“Up at the lighthouse, they told me you don’t speak. But they say you spent a good deal of time with Julia. What do you think happened to cause her to take her life?”

This was part of the plan. To place blame for her sorrow on those who had caused it. I went for the black book, which I’d hidden in the children’s cave, and brought it back to him. He read a few pages, then looked at me.

“Do you think this is why she did away with herself?”

I shrugged.

“Or is someone else to blame?” I could almost see him thinking. He often wrote about crime and clearly saw the worst in people. “Perhaps your mother and Mr. Ballard saw to the deed themselves, wanting us to think Mrs. Ballard took her own life.”

In that moment, I realized Mr. Hart had come here because he believed a murder had occurred. The black book could serve as proof. I felt a small thrill at the power I held, but if I didn’t let him know the truth, I’d be no better than they. As it turned out, I took after my father in more ways than I had imagined. I couldn’t be responsible for sending my mother to jail. My father wouldn’t have wished me to do so, and it wouldn’t harm Julia if people knew what had happened.

By now I carried a pad of paper in the pocket of my skirt. I wrote carefully, and I had excellent penmanship.

She’s alive.

Mr. Hart found her on November 11 in a rented room in Boston not far from the wharf. When the story was published, he wrote that Julia had been abused and had seen no other way to escape and that her husband had shown his character and his intent when he’d married another while she was still alive. To be married to two women was a crime and was treated as such. Mr. Rowan Ballard was tried and convicted of polygamy and sentenced to four years in prison. This wasn’t part of the plan; he had made his own fate and it was one he deserved. Such things took time, however, and it would be spring before he was convicted. But my mother was let go as soon as her husband, if that’s what he was, was arrested. Mrs. Ford was the one who told her she would no longer be needed, and she seemed to get great satisfaction from doing so. My mother was to pack up her belongings, which consisted of very little, although she did manage to pinch Mrs. Ford’s silver creamer. Mr. Ford and Mr. Fuller took us to the mainland through an early storm that left icicles in our hair. We hadn’t a cent to our names, but Mr. Ford took pity on us and paid for two tickets for the train to Boston.

“I’ll be glad to be out of here,” my mother said as we walked the three miles to the station. The cold was bone chilling, but I didn’t mind. My mother had taken off her wedding ring, which she’d likely pawn as soon as she was back in the city, along with Mrs. Ford’s silver. “Now that we’re off that wretched island, you can get a job and make some proper money,” she told me.

I would miss the white stones and the tide pools and the way the stars shone at night, so close it seemed you could touch them. I’d miss the goats and the niece’s grave and how the storms came in so quickly you had to run and hide. I understood why my father loved the sea and why he had left it. I closed my eyes and went through a list of everything I wished I could thank him for giving me. Patience, loyalty, trust, and hopefully, in time, kindness. By the time we arrived in Boston, I had stopped listening to my mother. She had plans for me to work in a tavern; surely they took girls as young as me, and if not, we would lie about my age. I let her talk, because talk was cheap. At North Station I took off through the crowd. I heard my mother calling for me, but by then I was running, and soon enough I was too far away to hear her voice. In the letter I’d received, Julia had written that she had a place for me where I would be able to go to school, at last, along with Billy Goat. I had their address, and if I became lost in the bustle of the city, it wouldn’t be a problem. I could ask for directions. I had honored my father and had done right by his memory, and now I was ready to speak.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Photo © 2017 Deborah Feingold

Alice Hoffman is the New York Times bestselling author of more than thirty works of fiction, including The World That We Knew, The Rules of Magic, The Marriage of Opposites, Practical Magic, The Red Garden, the Oprah’s Book Club selection Here on Earth, and The Dovekeepers. She lives near Boston.

Table of Contents

Copyright Page

Start Reading

About the Author