Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 128, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 781 & 782, September/October 2006

Cagebird by Margaret Lawrence

A historian with a doctorate in medieval drama, Margaret Lawrence has taught at several colleges in the Midwest. Her works of fiction include 1996’s Hearts and Bones, the first in a mystery series set in Revolutionary War-era Maine, which won nominations for the Edgar, Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards for best novel.

My name is Harriet Burge. On the twenty-sixth of October of the year 1883, I discovered the body of Mrs. Elizabeth Logan hanging by a curtain cord from a ceiling hook in the after-cabin of the American brig China Star, a square-rigger bound for Singapore and Hong Kong.

Mrs. Logan was but nineteen, and had married our captain, Dayton Logan, three years earlier in Maine. In my experience, unless they are besotted or bewitched, beautiful girls of sixteen do not wed sea captains of near fifty.

But Eliza was not beautiful, nor was her character striking. In fact, she had seemed to me a young woman of limited possibilities — conventional, soft-spoken, made for narrow horizons. And as Logan was said to have money, I presumed to judge them both.

I knew I was sadly mistaken from the moment I glimpsed her hanging there, with the heavy dark-green cord from the door curtains looped around her long thin neck. In death’s release, she had become breathtakingly lovely, quite transfigured. This, I thought, was the woman Logan had seen and desired, perhaps even loved. Her black hair hung loose

In addition to the ceiling hook through which the green cord was looped, there were several others, and from them hung intricate wickerwork cages of tiny, bright-eyed songbirds, hopping and twittering. When the Star called at Palermo on its way to Suez, and thence to Singapore and Hong Kong, an Italian bird-vendor had come aboard to show his wares, and Dayton Logan had bought several for his wife — finches, canaries, song sparrows.

In fact, he seemed to shower Eliza with luxuries. A little spinet stood in one corner of the cabin, and a sewing machine had been screwed to a small table for her use. The dark blue Brussels carpet with its pattern of roses and acanthus was smooth, undisturbed, and scrupulously clean. The gilt-framed mirror, the brass lamp above the long, black walnut chart table, and the polished glasses of barometer and thermometer gleamed richly.

The China Star was what the booking agent in London had called a “hen coop.” It was the seamen’s term for a ship that carried the wife — and sometimes the children — of its master aboard, and there were many of them, from whalers to packet boats, roaming the seas at that time.

To shorebound women, the life seemed bizarre. “No respectable woman would live surrounded by all those rough sailors!” my Devonshire aunt had cried. “Wife or no wife, she must be a low, immoral creature!”

“A married woman may very well civilize the crew,” I told her. “Besides, Cousin Philip sails to Hong Kong on business for his bank, so I shall have an escort. And I must go out to Papa at once, ill as he is.”

“Hmmph! If you had a grain of sense, Philip Rossiter would be your husband now, instead of being wed to that silly chit of his. Cornelia Plambeck, indeed! You mark my words, Harriet. Philip’s not over you. And strange things happen at sea.”

The voyage seemed endless. I despised ocean travel, and after eight years on Aunt’s farm, life aboard ship made me tentative and unsteady in spirit. In my familiar world of chicken feed and mousetraps and cabbages, I had had no doubt that it was right to refuse Philip’s offer of marriage three years before. He had no prospects, and I had feared the strength of my own feelings for him. I called it prudence then, but I was to learn a truer name for it aboard the China Star.

Philip had secured his post with the London and Colonial Bank a month after my refusal, and had proposed to Miss Plambeck soon after. As for myself, I was still only twenty-six, and I had a small inheritance from my mother and enough work to content me. On the farm, with my unhappy father on the other side of the world, I had at last felt perfectly complete. I did not care to marry, nor, for that matter, to love.

But once at sea, in ceaseless motion and with all that dark element of ocean breathing beneath me like a secret self, I had lost my smug certainties. Philip’s nearness, too, unsettled me. Did I love him, after all? Or did I merely want what I could no longer have?

So it was that I stood, on that terrible October morning, in the small, overfurnished after-cabin of the Star, with the shadow of Eliza Logan’s body upon me, and felt my hold upon my own destiny slipping away.

“Harriet?” said Philip’s voice, out of nowhere. “Hallie, my dearest!”

He stood motionless in the open door of the companionway, his fair hair drifting in the sea breeze, his grey eyes wide and fixed. “God in heaven,” he whispered, staring up at the body.

I did not reply. As my cousin entered the room I noticed a sound of running water from beyond the green velours curtain that concealed the captain’s stateroom and bath. But aboard ship one exists in a womb of water, the sound of it filling even one’s dreams. I stood listening, trying to sort the real from the unreal.

I did not succeed. The birds flew up again. Overwhelmed, I sank down on the long, brown plush sofa built into the curve of the stern and forced myself to take deep breaths.

“Has no one else seen her?” Philip murmured. “It’s gone eight bells. Surely Stoddard and McKenzie have been here?”

They were the first and second mates — Stoddard middle-aged, foully profane, with a face like a steamed pudding; McKenzie in his thirties, with dark auburn hair, a courtly Scots’ manner, and wide boyish eyes that reminded me of my cousin’s.

“I have seen neither of them,” I told him. “And this is the captain’s private parlor. Even they must have his permission to enter.”

“They’ll pay hob getting it now,” he said quietly. “We’ve searched every inch of the ship for him. Logan’s not to be found.”

“But,” I objected, “we won’t make port at Gabinea for another day. Unless he took a lifeboat—”

Philip knelt down by me and took my hand. “Hallie, there are no boats missing. He’s gone over the side.”

I could feel his warm breath and smell the pipe tobacco he always kept in his breast pocket. His gentleness reached so deeply into me that it frightened me, just as it had back in Devon. Control, I thought. Control yourself. I took my hand away.

“Nothing can be done at Gabinea beyond a decent burial,” he said, looking up again at Eliza’s dead body. “But there’s sure to be an enquiry once we reach Singapore. The American consul, and their maritime courts-martial. I think we must assemble what facts we can before then. Will you keep a record of anything we discover? With good records kept, we may be delayed for a shorter time, and with your father so ill—”

“Of course,” I agreed.

Philip went to the desk that was suspended from the bulkhead and rummaged for pen and paper. “What brought you here so early this morning?” he said. “I feared for you when you were not at breakfast.”

“Mrs. Logan had invited me to help her cut out a new gown,” I replied — and everything in the room testified to the truth of what I said. A length of rose-colored calico, the ten yards it would require for a decent plain gown, lay folded on the sofa, along with Eliza’s workbox, pincushion, measuring tape, a worn muslin pattern, and two pair of shears. “She said I must come early, before the table was needed for charting.”

There was a ladderback chair lying on its side just under the body, and Philip picked it up. It was not high enough to have served Eliza as a scaffold. He laid a hand on her bare foot. “She still has a little warmth,” he said. “The deed was done no earlier than first light, I should say. Logan must have come to himself and realized the horror of his crime. He’d have had to go over the side before the watch changed at six.”

“You make your assumptions very easily,” I snapped suddenly. “I have seen no proof of Captain Logan’s guilt.”

“Oh, Harriet, be reasonable. She is dead. He has disappeared.”

It was too facile, and all circumstance. “There are no signs of struggle, either about her body or within this room,” I said, “and surely she would have fought against a murderer, even her husband. If she took her own life, Captain Logan may have found her afterwards, been overwhelmed with grief, and so joined her in death. Or some third party may have done for both of them.”

He shook his head. “If she did it herself, then how did she manage? It would take a ladder, but where is it? Who put it out of sight?”

“It is a puzzle,” I admitted. “But if it was murder, why kill her in such a difficult way? Why not smother her, strangle her, slit her throat as she slept?”

My cousin was as stubborn as myself. “Very well. If she meant to die, why put out all this dressmaking gear? Why plan a new gown?”

“Even a suicide may intend to live, Philip, but she — or he — may be taken unawares. Seized in a moment.” I reached out my hand into the liquid sea-light that all but overwhelmed the room now that the sun was fully up. “My mother went off to Hastings market with a careful list of things to buy and her string bag over her arm. She turned a corner, saw an omnibus, and walked in front of it. My father exiled us both to the other side of the world, and now he will die in Hong Kong and his penance will be complete.”

“Oh, my Harriet,” Philip said. “Oh, my dear.”

He did not love his Cornelia, we both knew that. He drew me against him and kissed my hair.

I sat at Logan’s odd little desk and began my notes, as Philip, the second mate McKenzie, and a passenger called Pruitt took Eliza’s body down from its hook.

They laid her carefully on the chart table and McKenzie went through the green velours curtains to the stateroom to fetch a sheet in which to wrap her.

Mr. Pruitt went off to find something they might use to lash the body to the table, in case we met with rough seas. Once we were alone, Philip came to stand beside me. I thought him about to apologize for the liberties he had taken earlier. But I had offered no resistance, after all.

“Harriet,” he said awkwardly, “you’ve been on these tropical voyages often enough to understand. I mean, the heat — If we are in any way delayed in reaching Gabinea—”

I understood at once. “Of course. She will have to be buried at sea.”

“At Gabinea, there would be a physician to perform a simple postmortem before burial. But here — It would hardly be seemly for me to examine her. Or the Scotsman, either.”

Back in the stateroom, I was certain I could hear McKenzie sobbing.

“As I am the only woman aboard,” I said calmly, “I shall do it, of course.”

They left me alone with the body and I locked the companionway door, so that only the cagebirds could overlook us. Eliza was dressed in the plain calico wrapper she wore for sleeping. A white muslin nightdress, she had told me shyly, was too sheer to be decent if she were forced to appear before the crew, due to “some emergency.”

I drew back the blue-flowered cloth from her. There was a tiny triangular hole near the hem of the wrapper, but I did not regard it. Impossible for a woman to exist aboard ship and not spoil her clothing.

When I saw Eliza’s body completely uncovered, I was taken aback once more by her beauty and by how very young she was, how utterly clean and perfect. I discovered no sign of a beating, nor any mark of Logan’s — or anyone’s — rage.

The cord about her neck had left a cruel burn and a deep cut in the pale flesh, however, and on closer examination I discovered another mark, too — so thin a line that I at first mistook it for one of her dark hairs. It was deeper than a scratch, and I could see that it ran all the way around her throat, as though some leash had been fastened there.

I covered her again, and noted down my observations. The men were, I knew, growing impatient to come in and secure the body. But I had promised myself a private visit beyond those green curtains.

I pushed them aside and stepped into a little corridor. The bathroom opened off to the left; besides the w.c., it contained a marble basin for washing hands, into which water was piped from the ship’s main tanks. Logan’s shaving things were there, though not recently used. He had given up all personal care of himself in the week since we called in at the Palmer Islands.

But someone had surely been here when I discovered the body — the running water I was certain I had heard. The murderer — if murder it was — might have opened the bathroom tap for some reason, and then, hearing my boots on the companionway stair, made his escape in too much haste to shut off the spigot completely.

But the tap was not running now. And where had he gone? If he made for the deck, we should have met in the companionway. And there was no means of escape through the stateroom. Might he not have crossed through the after-cabin, knocking over the chair in his haste, and hidden himself beyond, in the larger forward cabin, which was the dining parlor for the mates and the captain? I had never entered that room. If there were doors leading out from it—

Still, it was all surmise. What I needed was some clue to the man’s identity. I lighted the oil lamp on the wall, took it down from its sconce, and held it to the washbasin. There were several hairs behind the tap, and I picked them out and brought them near to the light.

A few were grey — Logan’s, surely. Two were Eliza’s — long and coal black. But one — only one — was short, wavy, and dark reddish brown.

McKenzie. No one else aboard had such hair. And he had wept just now in the stateroom. Clearly he had felt more for Eliza than duty required. But he had been part of the search for Captain Logan, so unless he was able to be in two places at once, it could not have been he who set the bathroom tap running.

I extinguished the lamp and went along to the stateroom. There were many cupboards and lockers built onto the walls, and there was, of course, the swinging bed of which Eliza had once told me — an expensive feather-mattressed contraption attached to balancing-devices, so that it swung exactly as the ship moved, in storm or in calm. Another of Logan’s baffling kindnesses, to fend off seasickness.

But it was not all that intrigued me about the stateroom. A woman’s bedroom, I puzzled, and not a Berlin-work cushion or a scent bottle or a framed sampler or a china hair-receiver or a tortoiseshell comb? Who had this young woman been, after all, this odd mingling of shy girlishness and Spartan plainness? This child of barely nineteen — had her husband really known her? Had anyone?

“Old Logan was half mad, and everyone aboard knew it,” I had heard Mr. Pruitt say to my cousin. But Captain Dayton Logan had seemed to me a sensible, amiable man until China Star left the port of Tacoya in the Palmer Islands.

“Won’t you come along, Miss Burge?” Eliza had asked me on the morning we docked there. “I see the Nancy Bright is in port. That’s Mrs. Captain Thomas. I made her acquaintance in Suez, you know, and she begged I should call upon her, if we met again.”

The hen-coop wives made it a duty to know one another, and their visits were paid in great state, with parasols and best bonnets. Starved of society, they took their chance at it when they could.

But I am English, and I had not been invited by the hostess. I went sightseeing with Philip instead. And Eliza Logan, dressed in an apricot-colored gown that made her look almost handsome, went alone to the Nancy Bright.

Or did she? When Philip and I returned from our expedition, it was apparent that something more had happened that day than a mere friendly visit. Captain Logan had locked himself into one of the empty staterooms. Eliza could be heard furiously playing hymns on her spinet far into the night. And the Scotsman, McKenzie, had a bandage on his forearm.

No one saw Logan for four days and nights after that, and when at last he did appear on deck, he was unshaven and unwashed, and wore a tattered old dressing gown with his captain’s bars sewn onto the sleeve.

He never regained himself after that day at Tacoya. He had lost himself somewhere, and could not find his way back.

It was well that we had lashed Eliza’s body to the chart table, for on the same night a storm blew up. It did the China Star no great damage, but for two days afterwards we met with strong headwinds. At dawn on the third morning, with no likelihood of making port soon, the Scotsman said a prayer for the soul of Elizabeth Logan, and we gave her to the sea.

“Mr. McKenzie,” I said afterwards, catching his sleeve. “I believe I have left my sal volatile in the after-cabin. Will you unlock the door for me, so that I may search for it?”

In truth, I never carry smelling salts. I despise fainting females. But I had put on my black dress with jet beading for the burial, and with a drift of veil over my fair hair I looked, though I say it myself, like one of Mr. Dickens’ guileless heroines.

It needed only the mention of smelling salts to put the gentlemanly Scot at my mercy.

“I’ll gladly fetch it myself,” he said, “if you’ve a notion whereabouts—”

But in the instant he was interrupted by an outburst of shouting, followed by the smack of a fist and a sharp yowl from the pimply cabin boy. “Found it?” shouted the first mate, Stoddard, his face red as beet root. “Stole it, you mean, you greasy little bastard! First a good Virginia ham and two bottles of French brandy from the steward’s pantry, and now a necklace, damn your eyes!”

“I didn’t steal nothin’,” whined the boy. “If I’d’a stole it, what’d I come tell you for? Likely it was rats got that ham.”

“Rats cotton to women’s gewgaws, too, do they? I oughta whale the hide off you and dump you over the side! Little bastard!”

Just then Stoddard caught sight of me. He forgot the cabin boy and came lounging over, grinning his usual suggestive grin. “This here brat’s brung me your neck chain, lady,” he said, launching a kick at the boy as he slithered away. “’Spect you’d like it back, eh?”

It was a cheap gold chain, and broken. The two ends dangled, though the clasp remained fastened. If there had ever been a locket or a cameo, it had been lost. “Thank you, sir,” I told Stoddard, and reached out my gloved hand for it. “I shall be glad to have it again.”

But he jerked it away. “That all I get, missy?” he said, leering. “‘Thank you’ won’t keep me warm nights.”

I saw McKenzie’s fists tighten. “Give her the necklace, man,” he said, “and be quiet. Haven’t we enough trouble?”

For a moment, I was certain they would come to blows, but suddenly Stoddard burst into laughter. He relinquished the chain and I slipped it inside my glove.

Without another word, McKenzie took my arm and escorted me to the captain’s quarters. Once we were inside, he closed the door and turned the key in the lock.

“There’s no smelling salts, is there?” he said. “You’re not the kind for it.”

“Nor is this necklace mine.” I removed my glove, took out the little chain, and laid it on the brown plush sofa.

I sat down, but he stood with his hands braced on the chart table. “I bought it for her,” he said, “that day in Tacoya. If I’d known it would be the finish of her—”

He broke off for a moment, trying to recover himself. Then he began to lower the birdcages on their pulleys. The effort of concentration seemed to ease him, and he continued. “She’d never had fancies. Necklaces and such. Not even a ribbon or a bit of lace. Well, I knew how that was. My folk were the same, put on a necktie or give a shine to your boots, they called it vanity. After a time, it scours the world blank and bitter, that kind of narrowness. You have to leave it, or smother.”

He fetched seed and water for the birds, stroking one of them now and then with a fingertip. At last he turned to look at me. “There was nothing shameful between Eliza and me, Miss Burge. I never laid a hand on her, I swear on my life.”

Sailor or not, I believed him. “But her husband thought you had,” I said.

He began to haul the cages up again by their pulleys. “I took her about Tacoya market a bit that day, after I called for her at the Nancy. She was fearful quiet, and her hand was shaking something fierce. I’d have taken her straight back to the Star, but she said no, she wouldn’t go back there, not ever. I thought she and Logan must have quarreled, so I walked her round the stalls to give her time to calm herself. A vendor came up to us with a trayful of trinkets, and I begged her to choose what she fancied, and keep it for my sake, in case... Well, sailors have such notions, miss. I’ve no family that’ll own me now, and I thought, if my time came, I should like to go under thinking it might matter to somebody.”

“Did you tell her that?”

“Not in so many words. But with Eliza, you didn’t always need the words.”

“So she chose this chain from the tray.”

“There was a bit of coral strung on it, and she was fond of the color.” McKenzie drew a deep breath. “I felt — so close to her, miss. Don’t know what I might’ve done. Kissed her, maybe. And then he turned up. Logan. Out of nowhere. Maybe he saw it in my face, how I felt for her, I don’t know. But he caught sight of that coral bead at her throat, and he seized hold of her by it and pulled her up and down Tacoya docks, swearing and weeping and calling her a whore, and the chain sawing at her throat, and people staring. I tried to pull him away, but he picked up a knife from a fishmonger’s stall and he gashed my arm with it.”

“Did she say nothing?”

“‘I am what you’ve made me.’”

“Nothing else?”

“Not another word. But she pulled hard away from him, and the chain broke.”

“She went back to the Star after all. Do you think she meant to make it up with him?”

“What else could she do? Logan would’ve soon fetched her back, he’d the law on his side.”

“Did you speak to her after that day?”

McKenzie let his eyes close, as though he could not bear to look at me, or at anything that was not Eliza. “I feared what he might do to her,” he said. “I never spoke to her again.”

We were both silent for a long while after that. “What is your Christian name, Mr. McKenzie?” I asked him at last.

“Andrew.”

“A good name. Could Eliza have taken her own life, Andrew?”

“How can I say? Locked in here alone, with those bloody birds — She hated them, you know. Wanted me to let them go, but I told her they wouldn’t survive at sea. Land birds, without big enough wings.”

“Do you think Captain Logan ever loved her?”

He looked up at me. “How can you love what you don’t even know?”

“I think,” I said slowly, “that sometimes, when all practical chance of it is gone, knowledge doesn’t really come into it. One falls in love with the hope of loving.”

Not for the first time, I wished I might speak to Dayton Logan. But there were practical matters still to be clarified.

“Tell me, Andrew,” I said, “were you here in the cabin before me on the morning I found Eliza’s body?”

“Nay,” he replied, “I was above-decks with Stoddard, till Mr. Rossiter came and fetched me.”

“Well, someone must have been here. I heard water running in the basin. There was no one to turn off the tap, but when I went to look, it had stopped.”

“Aye, well, these taps have to be pumped up to get pressure. Primed, y’see. They shut off unless you pump ’em up again. Sometimes they shut off when they’re scarce used. I tried to wash myself a bit after I went looking for that sheet to wrap her in, but the tank was empty just then, and there was no water at all.”

So that was how one of his hairs had found its way onto the basin. Trying to wash off his tears so the men wouldn’t notice.

“When you searched the ship for Captain Logan,” I said, “who searched these quarters?”

“Nobody. He’d not been spending his nights here, and we didn’t wish to disturb her, not till we were certain. And then when you found her—”

“What is beyond the dining parlor? Are there other compartments?”

“Stoddard’s stateroom and m’own, and the steward’s. The ship’s kitchen and the steward’s pantry.”

“May I look into the pantry for a moment?” A conviction was growing upon me.

He led me through the dining parlor and into a narrow passage, from which a sliding door gave entrance to the little cubicle. Two walls were lined with wire-netted shelves of canned and packaged and bottled goods that reached from floor to ceiling. “What is kept on the top shelf?” I asked him.

“See for yourself,” said McKenzie, and pulled a curtain at the far side of the room. He extracted precisely what I had been hoping for — a wooden ladder, quite long enough to reach the hook from which Eliza Logan’s body had hung.

As I climbed up, my black silk skirt caught on one of the rungs, but it was worth it. On the top pantry shelf stood two bottles of good brandy. But there was space for two more.

He had needed the ladder to obtain his provisions. He had taken it from the after-cabin. Brought it back here to the pantry, where he knew it belonged. Climbed up and supplied himself with brandy.

And now, I was almost certain, Captain Dayton Logan was still somewhere aboard the China Star, living on brandy and fine Virginia ham.

When I stopped to unsnag my best gown from the slivered rung of the pantry ladder, I found caught in the splintered wood a small, three-cornered fragment of blue-flowered calico. Eliza’s wrapper had caught there just as my skirt had done. But had she climbed up the ladder by choice? Or had she been carried there — drugged asleep, perhaps, or unconscious?

I put the scrap of fabric carefully away with my notes, and said nothing to Philip of it, nor of my suspicions concerning Logan. Next day at noon, we made port at Gabinea, and my cousin went off with Andrew McKenzie to inform whatever authorities they could find.

If he was still aboard, Logan might try to make his escape now that we were in port. But something in me doubted he would bother to attempt it. His last hope was gone. Eliza was under the sea.

Feeling almost overwhelmed by all I had seen in those last few days, I went ashore myself that morning, needing the solidity of simple earth beneath my feet — or at least the solid boards of Gabinea docks. I was fending off a seller of palm-leaf fans when I heard a little girl’s voice cry out very near me.

“Bet you won’t!”

“Betcher I will!” This time, a boy, somewhat older by the sound of him.

“Won’t!”

“Will!”

“Won’t neither! I will, though!”

A chubby girl of around four years, with a head of carrot-colored hair so thick she appeared to be wearing a fur hat with braids hanging from it, came dashing out from behind a pile of barrels on the dock, put a small, sticky hand into mine, walked two or three steps with me, then laughed and ran away again.

“Ma!” shouted the boy. “’Ropa’s a-making advances again!”

“Europa Lavinia Thomas!” cried a woman’s voice in an East London accent. “Don’t you go a-rollickin’ innocent gentlefolk like that! Why, the lady’ll take you for a wild sawwage!”

The two children ran off after a man selling monkeys, and “Ma” came laboring down the gangplank with two smaller offspring clinging on to her skirts. She was plump and pleasant-faced, with hair of a less startling red than her children’s. She laughed and dusted her floury hands on her apron, whitening a baby at either side.

“I’m that sorry, ma’am,” she said. “Did she dirty yer glove? If you care to come aboard, I’m sure to have somink’ll clean it.”

“Oh, there’s no harm done,” I said, glancing down at the name of the ship on the berthing card. “I beg your pardon, but — are you Mrs. Captain Thomas?”

I had stumbled on — or been overwhelmed by — the mother hen of the Nancy Bright.

“I knowed as that poor lamb would come to grief,” she said, wiping her eyes. “And such a dreadful way to go. A-hangin’ there as if she was some turrible willain.”

We sat at tea in the after-cabin of the Nancy. It was a warm, cluttered room, full of hobbyhorses, one-armed dollies, alphabet blocks, darning eggs, issues of The Ladies’ Companion, ships-in-bottles, and music books.

She followed my gaze. “Them’s for the melodeon,” she said. “It’s somewheres under them quilt blocks.” She sighed. “I do love a melo-deon. Can’t play it, not a scrap. But it’s ever such a comfort at sea.”

“Eliza seemed very fond of her spinet,” I said.

“Ah, but it weren’t hers, not rightly. That’s how all the trouble come betwixt ’em. If I’d ever ’a thought it would end as it done—” She shuddered, and put another dollop of honey in her willowware cup. “But somebody ’ad to tell ’er. She were owed that, poor mite. No, that there pianer was Lucy’s. Logan’s other wife.”

I gulped some tea and said nothing.

“That fancy bed was ’ers, too,” Mrs. Thomas continued. “And the carpet. And the sewing machine. All ’ers. Had money, Lucy did. That’s ’ow Logan come by his share of the Star.”

“How did she die?” I said.

“Didn’t,” she replied, and took a sip of tea.

“You mean — she was murdered?”

“Oh no, my dear. Left him. Didn’t know her own mind when she married him, that’s my belief. Thought sea captains was romantic, I don’t doubt. ’igh-strung, Lucy were. I thank the Lord I ain’t strung at all. I’m kneaded like a good penny loaf, and so’s Cap’n T., and we likes it that way.”

“Where is Lucy now? Do you know?”

“Lives someplace tony. Inland. Vienner, I believe. Ships don’t dock at Vienner.”

“But they do in Maine.”

Mrs. Thomas cradled her teacup in her two hands. “Poor Eliza. Poor little mite. She never knowed Logan more’n a fortnight afore they was wed. But sixteen, she were, and a great ache in her to get out of her pa’s house. Logan took her to Boston for a week, and she said he was handsome, then, with his grey whiskers and his uniform, and he didn’t seem old to her at all. Well, I expect he felt young with her. And he’s a decent man at heart, and that lonesome all these years, you wouldn’t believe it. A clean start and a new life, that’ll be what he wanted. But it weren’t clean, were it? Couldn’t be, not with Lucy still wed to ’im. I did pity him, miss. Though, mind you, he needed horsewhippin’ for misleadin’ that poor mite like he done, and so I told him, and Cap’n T. told him, too.”

“Could he not divorce this Lucy?”

“A lady like ’er, with an uppity fambly, as everybody knowed every whisper of? They’d keep ’im in the courts a hundred years, tryin’ to get back her dowry. And he’d spent it, you see, buyin’ into the Star.”

“So. He’d have lost his ship if they divorced. And he was locked out of all normal living. No wonder he couldn’t bear to tell Eliza. He’d have lost her as well.”

Mrs. T. nodded. “Thought better of it after they was wed, that’s my belief. Takes her back to that sour old grinder of a father of hers, he does, and off he sails in the Star for a three years’ voyage. Thought she’d dreamed her marriage, that’s what she told me.”

“So when Logan returned at last,” I said, “she begged to sail with him, as you do with your husband.”

“Wanted to start a fambly. Asked me how I keeps the little ‘uns from flyin’ outa their hammocks in rough seas. But in that museum of Lucy’s—” Mrs. Thomas paused. “Perhaps I didn’t ought to say this, Miss Harriet, you bein’ unmarried. But once Eliza’d shipped out with him — Well, Logan hardly touched her in the married way after they come aboard. It was Lucy’s place, do you see, and everything put him in mind of ’er, I expect. Eliza come to me that day at Tacoya and wept, poor little rabbit.” Great tears rolled down her own face now. “God forgive me for a meddlin’ old biddy. I should never’ve told her the truth.”

I knew I ought to reassure her, ought to mouth the conventional wisdom and tell her that knowing the truth is always best. But when the illusion of loving is all there is to save you, and all there will ever be, then truth may snap you in two like a cheap necklace. Mrs. Thomas was right. She should never have told Eliza Logan the truth.

“Were Eliza and Andrew McKenzie lovers, Mrs. Thomas?” I whispered.

“I do hope so,” she said softly. “I hope to God they was.”

I did not sleep that night. Just after midnight, I rose, dressed, and made my way down the corridor, past cabin after dark cabin from which fitful masculine snores could be discerned. It seemed to go on forever, that corridor, a whole cynical universe of tiny, airless boxes from which simple human connection was forever banished.

It was very dark on deck, with only a few lanterns lighted and just one sailor on watch. I made my way to the stern rail and turned to look out to sea, thinking of my father, and of what awaited me in Hong Kong. Thinking of Philip.

I did not hear the footsteps approach me. Out of nowhere, as though from the heavy, sodden air itself, a broad hand smashed itself over my mouth. “Don’t cry out!” said Logan.

Though I could not see him, I knew at once who it was. I nodded my head, and his hand relaxed its pressure a little. “If I let you go,” he said in a hoarse, grating whisper, “you must promise not to turn around.”

I nodded again, and he uncovered my mouth. “Did you kill her?” I said. “Did you kill Eliza?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I killed her heart.”

“But you didn’t put the noose round her neck.”

“No. When I came in, she was standing on the ladder with the cord around her throat.”

I wanted terribly to turn and see his face, but I reached out a hand into the hot darkness instead. To my surprise, his fingertips touched mine, then grasped them hard. So we stood, awkward and equal.

“She never asked questions,” he whispered. “She knew only the self that was born when I met her.”

“And the other? Lucy’s husband?”

“I had not seen my wife in twenty years! She was scarcely real to me anymore. And I loved Eliza so. I could not give her up.”

“But you abandoned her to her family and went back to sea.”

“I meant to stay away, write to her, tell her the truth. Do the decent thing. But I could not. I regretted what I had done to her. But it was a kind of death for me, being without her.”

Like my father’s exile to Hong Kong, I thought. Like my refusal of Philip.

“That day on Tacoya docks,” Logan went on, “I knew from the moment I saw her that she had learned the truth. I said such things to her — It was nothing to do with that necklace, nor with McKenzie. I think I wanted her to be as guilty as I was. And I knew she was not. She could never be.”

I let go his hand and turned to look at him. His face, in the flickering light of the stern lantern, was not at all that of a madman.

“Tell me how she died,” I told him. “You must. They will ask you in Singapore.”

“I will not be in Singapore,” he said.

He shrugged, hunching his shoulders against the weight of his memory, and in my mind, I saw them both. Heard the wash of the sea against the hull. The battering of wakeful birds against cages.

“I dared not come too close,” he began, “for her feet barely clung to the ladder. I begged her forgiveness. Told her we might yet love one another. She said nothing, only looked at me, but I saw no anger in her face. And then she — stepped away, that was all. Into the air.”

It sounded two bells. From somewhere ashore, there was music and the laughter of girls who did not mind what man lay in their arms.

“I ran towards her,” Logan went on, “to lift her body up. I might have saved her. But like a fool I tripped over a chair and fell. I was too late. Too late.”

If it were Philip, I thought, if I had seen his body dangling there on that hook, what would I have done? Wept? Screamed? No. It is not my nature. I should have wanted him down from there, whatever it cost me. Wanted him once more in my arms, dead or living.

“I’m a coward,” Logan said, as though he had read my mind. “Lucy knew what I was. And all cowards are selfish. When Eliza was dead, I thought of what they might do to me. I thought of food and drink, and where I might hide till I could make my escape. I behaved like a murderer because that is what I am. It has been in me all these years, like syphilis. Turn around, now. Go back to your cabin. Do not interfere.”

He would let the sea have him, I knew that. He had been waiting all these days for me, to tell me the scrap of truth that was his story. Had he seen something in me that might understand him — a something that lived outside the cages of convention and decorum and false modesty and smothering religion?

Dayton Logan had not put Eliza into a cage. He had opened the door of the one into which she had been born and had lived all her life, and Lucy or no Lucy, they might have been happy. He had told her so. But Eliza was a cagebird, too frightened to fly.

I found myself thinking of Lucy herself, in whatever “tony” cage her uppity family had found for her. And of Philip’s wife, Cornelia, too.

I did not wait to hear the slight splash Logan’s body must have made as it slipped from the stern of the China Star into the dark, tangled waters of Gabinea docks, nor hear the cries when he was found the next morning. I did not watch as McKenzie went into the after-cabin, brought out the cages of songbirds, and let them fly away to their fate.

I left Logan behind in his darkness and went down again, into that interminable corridor of passengers’ cabins. There was a dim light under one door, and I knocked softly. “Philip?” I said. “Are you awake?”

I heard his footsteps, and in a moment the door opened. “Why, Harriet,” he said gently. “You’ve been crying. You never cry.”

“Does Cornelia love you, Philip? Is she glad to be your wife?”

He did not flinch. “Not mine in particular. It’s a game she could play with anyone. Less boring than whist. But only just.”

I laid my palm upon his tired face. “Back in Devon, I was afraid of myself,” I said, “and all cowards are selfish. I am braver now. Let me in.”

Copyright © 2006 Margaret Lawrence