The Widow's Walk
Contents
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
P.S
About the author
About the book
Read on
Also by Robert Barclay
Copyright
About the Publisher
Epigraph
The long, unmeasured pulse of time moves everything.
There is nothing hidden that it cannot bring to light,
nothing once unknown that may not become known.
Nothing is impossible.
—SOPHOCLES
Prologue
New Bedford, Massachusetts
September 1840
Her name was Constance Elizabeth Canfield, and for as long as she could remember, she loved gazing at the ocean.
No matter the weather, Constance found the froth-topped waves reassuring and filled with promise. In her world she could rely upon few things, but the waves were always there. She loved their consistency of purpose, and their constant determination to assault the rocky shoreline that lay so near her house. She also found them exciting, because they would one day bring her husband back to her. So she patiently watched and waited as they worked their welcome magic on her lonely soul.
She had invented an enticing fantasy in which she sometimes indulged while watching those never-ending waves. She liked to imagine that one of them had actually touched the hull of her husband’s ship, no matter on which of the earth’s four corners the vessel had been venturing. And, like some God-sent message in a bottle, that same wave had somehow reached her shoreline to confirm that her husband remained alive and well. Sometimes she would even pick out one such wave, thus pretending so, and watch it closely until it destroyed itself against the rocks.
These imaginings were pure foolishness, of course. But she had not received a letter from Adam for a long time, and such dreams—silly as they might seem to others—were important to her. One had to be the wife of a whaling captain to understand.
Now, she stood on the porch of Seaside, her home on the ocean. She had put her blond hair up, but the strengthening wind had caused several errant strands to caress her face. The weather was threatening, so she had donned a comforting shawl because sometimes the seawater would splash against the rocks so forcefully as to mist her porch. This was not yet one of those days, but her instincts said that it soon would be.
Just then she heard a pair of gulls cry out, and she looked up to see their feathered underbellies as they soared high above the coastline. They seemed to ride the air currents effortlessly. If only those ocean winds could make Adam’s return to me so simple as well, Constance thought.
Given the worsening weather, she had known that she would become damp and windblown. Even so, she would not be dissuaded from this twice-daily ritual, these interludes with which she always fortified herself, just before climbing the stairs to the widow’s walk that graced the roof of her beloved home. She realized without looking that the sun had nearly set, and as the wife of a sea captain she always knew the time of day without the need of a clock. Before she lost the light, she would take up her husband’s old brass spyglass and make yet another hope-filled pilgrimage; the same journey she had made each morning and evening, every day, for the last two years.
Constance lovingly touched the scrimshaw locket that hung about her neck on a gold chain. Adam had made it himself during his previous voyage. She opened it, and for the thousandth time since Adam’s latest departure, Constance looked at the small portrait that lay inside. He was a handsome man, with a dark beard and welcoming brown eyes.
Adam had been first mate aboard her father Benjamin Monroe’s ship. Benjamin, also a whaling captain, had taken an immediate liking to Adam. Their marriage was arranged by their parents, and it had not been love at first sight for the nervous bride. Adam was thirty, she had been twenty-four. But to her surprise and delight she soon came to love him deeply. He was strong and kind, and he treated her well; qualities that her unmarried woman friends had long searched for in men, but never found. Constance’s lone heartache was that she was thirty-two now, and still childless.
She closed her eyes for a time while remembering her wedding night. She had possessed no illusions about whether Adam had been with other women before. He was a roguishly handsome sea captain who had sailed much of the world, and she would have been very much surprised to learn otherwise. As for her, she had come to the marriage untouched, and to this day Adam was the only man she had ever known.
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