Lucy: Daughters of the Sea #3 Read Online Free PDF

our kind, dear,” her father answered quickly.
    “Mr. and Mrs. Green?”
    “Yes.” Her mother coughed slightly. “It’s an … iffy name?”
    “What? Whatever do you mean?”
    “Well, you know …” She lifted her short, thin eyebrows, which arched steeply like tiny commas over her somewhat vague hazel eyes. Her lips clamped together as if she preferred silence to any sort of explanation.
    “Your mother is trying to say … that these are not our kind of people. The … the name suggests a different race.”
    “A different race?” Lucy asked.
    “Jews — possibly.” This comment took Lucy aback. She had never heard her parents speak this way. It was something she could imagine someone like Denise De Becque saying, or Eldon Drexel. But her parents, particularly her father, were quite careful in how they spoke of other faiths.
    A different race? What exactly did that mean? Lucy wondered. It was a religion, she thought — but a race? She was confused. She had seen Jews in New York, met some. The cobbler, Mr. Hurwitz, was Jewish. So was the lady in the New York Public Library at the reference desk. Miss Gold was her name. She had been very helpful. They perhaps looked slightly different, but so did the Irish porter who had carried their trunks in the station, and so did Anna, the Swedish lady who cooked for them. But would you say they were different races? She thought about how her parents had stared at her on the wharf when she had removed her hat — their shocked countenances. It was as if she had not been stripped naked but become something else entirely — another race, another being, something not quite human — an alien apparition.
    These disturbing thoughts lingered with Lucy as she crawled into her bunk. Although she had no intention of sleeping, the rocking motion of the steamer, the swells rolling in from the vast Atlantic, were seductive. Despite the dull thrumming of the engines, she could still hear the hypnotic rhythm of the crush of the sea against the hull.
    I don’t want to play tennis. I want to swim. No one had ever taught her, but she did not doubt that she could swim. She simply knew it.
    As she drifted off to sleep, she thought about the Begats, the little doll family that inhabited the dollhouse Aunt Prissy had given her. Lucy had invented the Begats long before she ever discovered those papers in her father’s study, her adoption papers from St. Luke’s with the words “mother unknown.” So had she wondered even then who had begat her? Who was “mother unknown”?
    She had always listened so carefully in church when her father read the verses from Matthew. She had loved the rhythm, the cadences, as the people, starting with Abraham, then Isaac, Jacob, and Judas, tumbled out of that cataract that was Jesus’ original family. And the names became odder as the people, all of whom seemed to be men, were born. There was Aminadab after Aram and then Nassoon and Salmon and Booz. Occasionally a girl or woman was mentioned. In Lucy’s Begat family, it was just the opposite — mostly girls and sometimes a boy.
    Lucy’s eyes began to close. Her kin were not mythical. Somewhere, they really did exist and they had begat Lucy. Was this the edge she was approaching, a precipice over which she might peek and discover who she was and from where she had come? Discover her kind?

     
    Lucy sat bolt upright in her bunk. How could she have fallen asleep? Peering through the porthole, she could see two stars. Thank heaven it was still night. There was still time to go up on deck. She could hear the soft snores of her parents in the adjoining cabin suite. The ship was moving smoothly now. There was very little rocking motion. The wind must have died down. She put on her warmest coat, added a thick shawl, and slipped out of the cabin.
    As she stepped on deck, she knew she had stepped up to the brink, the elusive edge of another world. Wrapped in the light breeze, the scent of the sea, she gasped as she