The Watery Part of the World - Michael Parker [19]
“No, I mean he speaks to you as if he really knows you.”
Whaley stepped out of the weak light of the fire, back into the shadows of the room.
“You go to sleep,” he said.
This made her angry—she did not care to be talked to like a child—until she remembered that it was his house, that she was, essentially, a child. Defenseless, useless, a dependent who contributed next to nothing to the daily toil of surviving on the island. And he was upset, not himself. Still, it was not easy to sleep when someone ordered you to do so, and she lay there listening to him breathe and sip his drink until the light seeped in beneath the door and around the chimney and she could make out his shadow still slumped against the far wall.
She started the fire, fetched his fishing pole outside, found the leather pouch where he kept his captured crickets, slung it over her shoulder, trudged off to the sound, flat and still in the dawn quiet. She’d heard him say this was one of the best times of day to catch fish, but she’d only been fishing from a boat in the Hudson, and she’d had someone else—an older cousin, a suitor—to bait the hook. It took a full twenty minutes to get the cricket to stay on the crude hook, and another thirty before she managed to pull in two small fish. She worked out the hook with great difficulty and put the fish in the cricket box and turned to go. This was when Whaley let out his low chortle, morning-congested but so sincere and delighted-sounding that she forgot all about the night they’d had.
He was standing atop the dune, drinking from their lone mug. “You fish like a madwoman,” he said.
“These fish must be partial to lunacy.”
“Right now they’re partial to my crickets. Pull them out of that pouch before I don’t have one last cricket to show for all my hours of cricket-trapping.”
“But they’re dead,” she said. She was alongside him now and he reached into the pouch and pulled the fish out and crammed them unceremoniously in his pants pockets.
“Not quite yet,” he said. “Takes them a while.”
Back in the shack she insisted on cooking. Bemused, he allowed her to take over. She was making herself indispensable. She realized how reliant she was on his mercy.
Seated with a plate by the fire, Whaley studied his food and said, “You don’t cook much for yourself do you?”
“I had servants,” she admitted.
“I knew your husband was a gentleman,” he said, “but what exactly is his trade?”
She chewed a bite of crusty fish, swallowed, amused at how bad her manners had become. She said, “He has several rice plantations.”
Whaley nodded.
“And tea as well.”
Another nod.
“And he is the chief commander of the South Carolina Militia.”
Whaley’s eyes widened. “Military man?”
“By virtue of his being governor of South Carolina.”
Whaley’s face showed such confusion—for he thought she was joking, wanted perhaps to believe she was joking, but was led on also by some shocking filament of truthfulness in her voice—that she laughed, rather crazily.
He laughed too.
“Governor, you say? That’s good work if you can get it.”
“Oh no,” she said. “It’s a dreadful job.”
“I imagine I could get used to it.”
“You’d be terrible at it,” she said.
He grinned. “And why is that?”
“You can’t walk around the governor’s palace with fish in your pocket.”
“And why not, if you’re the governor? Who’s going to tell you not to?”
“A host of people. And you all serve them, not the other way round.”
“You sound like you’re well shy of that role,” he said.
“It’s true,” she said. She felt only a twinge of guilt in her words, for she felt at that point that she could tell Whaley anything.
Yet as she rose to clean the dishes, she realized they had not said a word about Daniels’s visit. The marked shift in his mood, from his late-night drunken melancholy to this morning’s alacrity, made her suspicious.
That night as they sat by the fire she said, “So are you going to take him up on his offer for materials to build my manor house?”
He tensed. “I’ll not be beholding to that man for things I can pick up off the beach.”
Before