Presently he heard a sob, and looked up.
"I'm dreadful sorry to hear you got in trouble."
She shook her head, added waves of color sweeping her face.
"Oh, no," she whispered. "It isn't that!" She patted her belly. "Not this, Captain!"
He thought it in bad taste. Wasn't it enough that she took him for a slavey? Did she have to pretend to take him for a fool as well? But he swallowed carefully, concentrating on the need for quiet, for manners.
There was too much at stake for him to let his temper snap.
Deborah was looking right at him, nothing furtive about her.
"No, Captain, it's unmaidenly, I grant you. A lady shouldn't speak up. But what else could I do? You can pick the girl you want to marry, and try to win her. I'm supposed to sit and wait. I can't even place myself in men's way. I've tried to attract your eye, Captain. I couldn't."
"You're thunderation pretty," Adam muttered.
To avoid her gaze he threw his glance to the left. Light slitted out of the Selden doorway only a few yards away, the other side of a clump of lilac, and spewed across the grass—Obadiah Selden in the front room, beyond question, going over his accounts. What a jolt he'd get if he could hear this!
"And now you're going away. So I spoke." She patted her belly again, quivering the nightrail. "But it's not this, Captain. No."
He did not reply, only stood there looking sideways at the slats of light on the lawn.
After a time he became conscious of her silence, and it occurred to him that she was waiting to hear his answer.
"I'm filled with delight," he said cautiously. "Never knew you was eying me. But—we sail at dawn."
"The sailing could be put off."
This was true. The law required that public notice of a marriage be posted fourteen days in advance, and the men had already been signed on the Goodwill, so this would-mean fourteen days of victuals for them; but it was not a large crew and Adam could find things for them to do.
Adam wetted his lips.
"Even if I was in a position to wed, which I ain't—even if we had time—your father'd never consent."
"My father would never agree to my marrying any man at all."
"That's what I mean."
"But he would have to agree if I told him I was going to have a baby by you."
Now Adam Long was no prude. The son of the late Aramead Long, whom folks sometimes referred to as "The Duchess" because of the airs she'd put on, knew his Newport, waterfront and back country alike. He'd had as much schooling as any there, more than most. He had visited, on the coasting trip. New York and Philadelphia, and also Perth Amboy in the Jerseys. He had been down to the islands. Though not much of a meeting attender, he was a child of his environment; and Rhode Island and the Province Plantations at this time were a hodge-podge—or a hot bed, if you will—of queer and generally liberal sects. In addition to the members of his own church, Adam all his life had known Seventh . Dayers, Anabaptists, Methodists, Sabbatarians, Huguenots, Congregationalists, Seekers, and the Lord only knew what else. Newport itself, notoriously, was cluttered with Quakers. Why, there were even a few Jews.
This was the frontier, after all, where men being busy called things what they were, neither they nor the women seeing much profit in concocting other names for them.
It was esteemed no sin, though indeed the preachers preached loudly against it, to be pregnant before marriage—the awkwardness entered only when the girl stayed single—and many a wife serenely boasted, afterward, that she had caught her husband by getting herself caught first.
But such a suggestion as that just voiced—saying they'd done it when they hadn't at all—Adam had never before heard. He was shocked.
"Maybe we shouldn't started talking about this at all."
"That means your answer is—no?"
"Yes, ma'am. I reckon it does."
She turned away, and the darkness engulfed her, so that Adam was left facing a blank space, agape. But he remembered his manners, and gave a little bow.
"Good night, ma'am," he called softly.
He heard a sob, that was all.
Adam had not been permitted to enlist his own crew, as a proper captain should: they were assigned to him, for one reason or other, by the money men. But Resolved Forbes, the mate, Adam surely would have signed on anyway.
Forbes was twenty, smallish, abstemious, almost ostentatiously clean. He might have been taken for a Quaker—unless you'd seen him, as Adam had, in a fight.
"Young Rellison aboard?"
Forbes nodded.
"Bond? Mellish?"
"Aye."
"Drunk?"
"Well, they're sleeping now."
"Peterson? Waters?"
"Going to have trouble with those two," Forbes offered.
Adam nodded, and hoisted his jack. He took a deep gulp.
"Aye," he said.
A lubber was bad enough, a sea lawyer was bad; and a couple of lubberly lawyers at sea would be unbearable. However, he would reach an understanding with Waters and Peterson later—off soundings.
He looked around, squinching his eyes against the smoke.
Commercially this was the center of Newport, after dark the convergence of the counting houses. Call it the town's Rialto. There was nothing la-di-da about it. The walls were unpainted. The ceiling was low. There wasn't any floor: there was just dirt, packed as hard as rock. Two quartets of long pine boards laid on sawhorses were the tables. There was a serving bar at one end, and behind that the barrels and bottles— and Blake himself. A bench ran around the other three sides. There were a few joint-stools, but most of the customers who did not use the bench sat on empty kegs or else stood at the bar. No woman ever was allowed in the place, praise God. The prices were fair, the liquor generally good. It was an orderly ordinary: you seldom saw a fight there. Yet so poor was the light—Blake was parsimonious with his candles—and so crowded the benches, causing men to lean close to one another with lowered voices, so thick, too, was the tobacco smoke, and so low the ceiling, that Blake's to an uninstructed outsider might have looked a very den of conspirators and thieves.
Farthest from bar and door alike, no more really than an end of one of the long tables, was what was known as the Adventurers' Corner. This was not meant for common seamen (who only adventured their lives) but rather for men of affairs, who adventured their money. It was here that voyages were planned, profits counted. Nothing marked it off from the rest of the room, yet no man who was not an investor in the deal-at-hand would have the temerity to cross even a corner of that space, much less to sit there.
Adam Long, who had never before been there, now as a part-owner of the schooner rated a seat in the Adventurers' Corner.
Zephary Evans was there, a lank slabsided man with lugubrious eyes. Zeph was a shrewd business man, even though he did permit his wife to lead him around by his very large long nose. Every now and then he would swoop that nose down toward his pot, at the same time half raising the pot toward the nose, and he'd make timorous contact with his ale, acting as though he expected it to explode in his face. Then he'd put the pot down, and he'd straighten and stare in somber resentment at it.
Next to Evans was Seth Selden, a smallish man with a face as malicious as that of a monkey. They did say that Seth was sprightly off soundings; but for all Adam knew of him, the man, with his ramrod back, his holier-than-thou cold eyes, truly belonged in Boston, your proper port for disapprovers. Here in the ordinary tonight, disappointed as he was, outraged to have been passed by for a younger man, Seth sat straight, mouth drawn, chin high, while his nostrils seemed to twitch as though he found the odor of the place objectionable.