Twice Loved (copy2) Read Online Free PDF Page A

began to turn his head, and there was a wary stiffness about his shoulders, as if he’d already guessed.
    Laura’s hand tightened on his arm. “Your mother... she’s not at home, Rye.”
    “Not at home?”
    But even though she sensed that he knew, the words seemed to stick in Laura’s throat. “She’s down there on Quaker Road.”
    “Qu ... Quaker Road?” He looked in its direction, then back to her.
    “Yes.” Laura’s eyes filled, and her heart ached at having to deliver yet another emotional blow to him. “She died over two years ago. Your father buried her in the Quaker cemetery.”
    She felt a tremor pass through his body. He whirled about, ramming his hands hard into his pockets, squaring his shoulders while fighting for control. Through tear-filled eyes she watched the pale, pale hair at the back of Rye’s neck fall over his collar as he raised his face to the blue sky and a single sob was wrenched from his throat.
    “Is anything the way it was before I l...left here?”
    She was torn by sympathy. It welled high in her throat, and she had a sudden overwhelming need to gentle and comfort. She moved close behind him and lay a hand on the valley between his shoulder blades. Her touch brought forth another sob, then another.
    “Damn whaling!” he shouted at the sky.
    She felt his broad back tremble and suffered at the tormented sounds of his despair. Yes,  damn  whaling, she thought. It was an inhuman taskmaster who little valued life, love, or happiness. These a whaler was asked to forfeit in the pursuit of oil, bone, and ambergris. Windjammers plied the seven seas for years at a time, their barrels slowly filling, while ashore mothers died, children were born, and impatient sweethearts wedded others.
    But homes glowed at night. And ladies perfumed themselves with scents congealed by ambergris. And they pretended that whalebone corsets could effectively guard their virtue because a stiff-spined queen across the Atlantic led the vanguard of prudishness that was spreading across the waves like a pestilence.
    The inhumanity of it swept over Laura, and unable to hold herself apart from Rye any longer, she circled his ribs and held him fast, her forehead pressed against the small of his back. “Rye darling, I’m so sorry.”
    When his weeping had passed, he asked only one question. “When will I see y’ again?”
    But she had no answer to ease his misery.
    The May wind, heedless of human misery, too, scented with salt and blossom, ruffled his hair, then skittered on to dry the caulking of yet another whaleship being readied for voyages, and to carry away the smoke from the tryworks that brought prosperity, and sometimes pain, to the people of Nantucket Island.
     
     
     

Chapter 2
     
    WHALING WAS THE  loom that wove together the warp of sea and the woof of land to create the tapestry called Nantucket. Not an islander was unaffected by it; indeed, most earned their living from it, whether directly or indirectly, and had since the late 1600s, when the first sperm whale was taken by a Nantucket sloop master.
    The island itself seemed predestined by nature to become the home of whaling, a new economic force in Colonial America, for its location was close to the original migratory routes of the whales, and its pork-chop shape created a large natural anchorage area ideal for use as a waterfront and needing no modification. As a result, the town was laid out contouring the edge of the Great Harbor and virtually rising from the rim of the sea.
    The pursuit of the sperm whale had become not only an industry on Nantucket, but a tradition passed down from generation to generation. The sons of captains became captains themselves; the sailmaker passed down his trade to his son; ships’ riggers taught their sons the art of splicing the lines that carried the sails aloft; shipwrights apprenticed their sons in the trade of ship repair; ships’ carvers taught their sons to shape the figureheads, believed to be