There was a debate for about a decade about whether or not to allow other birders to come down to the Point. William Lee was eager to show what he’d created to experts, but no one else wanted strangers in their front yards. Finally it was decided the experts could come in spring and fall to observe the migrations, and William went up with a group he bivouacked in the servants’ houses, an area that came to be known as the Rookerie. He loved these weeks, and became an early and generous member of the Audubon Society. He bought two sets of Audubon prints. One he looked through so often that they lost most of their value. The other he had framed and hung on the wall of his study in Philadelphia.
William had no belief in heaven but he respected bones and paced out a graveyard in the meadow between his Leeward Cottage and the Hancocks’ Meadowlea. He wanted to abide by the old Quaker practice of putting the body into the ground in a simple shroud with no stone to demarcate one from another, but he bowed to the association’s desire for stones; they’d walked past the graveyards of Philadelphia too often not to want a stone for themselves. Over time a number of the Point’s residents and pets were buried in the graveyard, and in his old age William liked to walk among them. He aged gracefully, which was no surprise. He’d always had everything he wanted, including a handsome and high-minded son, Clures, to take over his share of the business, his houses, and his duties. He was briefly ill before he died, and gave explicit instructions on his deathbed, an idea man to the end. Unfortunately, his teeth had been taken out for the night, and the nurse, a local girl, who sat by him for the hour the family went to the dining room for supper couldn’t understand his Philadelphia accent, so his last words were left to the imagination. Afterward, whenever a member of the Lee family made a plan, he or she invoked William’s final intention, often as a joke. William Lee was all things to all family members, and miraculously wanted what they wanted. If only all ancestors and spirits were as accommodating.
If only all members of his family were as high-minded.
Like me, thought Agnes Lee.
CHAPTER 5 Agnes, Leeward Cottage, June 2000
“DAMMIT!” AGNES WAS UP ON TIPTOE, IN THE PANTRY AT Leeward Cottage, frustrated at being unable to reach the local pottery on the pantry shelf. Since having her four-syllable mastectomies, she couldn’t lift her right arm higher than her waist. “Sylvie, I can’t reach!”
“Hold your horses, I’m coming,” Sylvie responded, without a trace of matching urgency.
“It’s not my horses I’m worried about, it’s the ducklings.” Agnes couldn’t see the beach from the pantry, and it worried her not to know what was presently happening in the war between the ducks and the gulls. She was eager to get back upstairs to monitor the situation. Every morning all week a mother eider duck had swum into the harbor with a flock of ducklings so tiny Agnes had to focus her binos for a clear sighting. At first there had been nine, then seven, six, and yesterday five. A heartbreaking decimation of the ranks. This drama occurred every year. The ducks were, well, sitting ducks when it came to the birds of prey—perfect snacks. The gulls, otherwise adored by Agnes for their schemes and lengthy conversations, were horrible on the subject of the ducklings. Murderous and cruel. She could not stand by and let nature have its way, not on her watch. Every year she did her best to intervene.
“I need Robert to persuade those gulls to go pick on someone their own size. I’m too old for this job.”
Sylvie was in the kitchen only a few feet away. She was as old as Agnes and no more swift. She’d been the housekeeper at Leeward Cottage for nearly forty years, ever since the Circumstances moved off the Point and up the Cape. Mrs. Circumstance had continued to come in to cook for a while, but eventually Sylvie took over that chore as well. She and Agnes were alike in more ways than either of them cared to admit. Both were tall and thin, both stubborn and abrupt. Sylvie wore her scraggly gray hair chopped—possibly sawed—at her chin, and this year, she’d given up on bras. Was that solidarity or an act of rebellion? Agnes couldn’t very well tell her to put one on, though her dangling bosom was unsightly. They did well together, though—neither of them needed compliments or hand-holding. The business of running Leeward Cottage was accomplished with little drama.
Sylvie clomped into the pantry. She’d taken to wearing heavy clogs, amplifying her presence. Agnes’s cat, Maisie, didn’t like it. She was a Maine coon with a particularly fat and feathery gray-brown tail that she used to express a broad range of disapprovals and displeasures. She sauntered back toward the hallway, tail thrashing.
“That one, please.” Agnes gestured at a blue Rackcliffe plate. Sylvie reached up easily and pulled it down.
“Show-off,” Agnes said.
Sylvie shrugged.
They went into the kitchen. Agnes took an orange from the fruit bowl and slipped it into her pocket.
“Fruit, eggs, toast, marmalade, coming right up.”
“Thank you. You’ll eat with me?” Agnes eyed the plums in the fruit bowl. They were hard as stone, merely decorative this early in the summer. But the color, purple and red, with a yellow pulse beneath the skin, made her mouth water. She felt a pang of sympathy for William Carlos Williams and his swiped plum.
Sylvie poked her head in the refrigerator. “I have to go to town for some things. Add to the list if you want anything special.”
Agnes pictured a bag of M&Ms. That meant she was on edge. She didn’t write it down. “I hope Robert can help with the gulls.”
“Nature red in tooth and claw. That’s what your mother always said.”
“She wasn’t a pacifist.” Agnes had thought the expression was nature redintooth and claw. It made no sense, but she loved the sound of the word redintooth. She’d had the pleasure of giving it to a Franklin character’s suitor as a last name. Chauncey Redintooth. She amused herself naming her people. Dickens must have laughed all the time—once he got out of the workhouse.
“Good thing everyone isn’t. The bad need to be dealt with on their own terms.”
“I’m not sure we can say the gulls are bad, but I want them banished. All right, I’m going up. If Robert comes and you happen to be here, will you tell him?”
Sylvie made a noise in the range of an assent, but short of true acquiescence. That was their state of relations. Two old coots cooting around an old house. Agnes had told Sylvie many times that she should retire. The house in the Rookerie was hers for the foreseeable, and beyond that Agnes would cover her expenses into the grave. But Sylvie, like Agnes, had no interest in a life of idle comfort. She liked running the house, and running Agnes, and she was still good at it. Good enough.
“Shall I carry the plate up for you?” Sylvie asked.
“Nope.” That Agnes could manage. Nothing above the waist. She’d been told by her surgeon in Philadelphia that if he ended up removing a lot of lymph nodes Agnes might lose some range of motion along with her breasts, but she hadn’t imagined what that would be like. She brushed her hair by bending forward and batting at whatever strands she could reach.
Accompanied by Maisie, who was careful not to get in her way, she returned to her rooms and ate while peering out the window. All quiet so far. Maisie watched with her, and Agnes offered her the plate to lick. Maisie slowly dropped her gaze to the smeary surface and its few flecks of egg, then slowly raised her head again and turned to look at Agnes. Maisie’s look was one of affectionate indulgence, as if Agnes’s efforts to please and charm were appreciated but jejune. Maisie lived with Sylvie all winter, and it showed. They both believed they were necessary, and they were right.