“How old were you?”
“Fourteen,” Polly said. “Agnes was the brave one. I thought one of the boys was cute.”
Maud laughed. “Agnes was never boy crazy?”
“No, that madness never gripped her.”
“She got off easy,” Maud said. “Where are the Abenaki now?”
Agnes took over. “They don’t exist under that name anymore. There are a number of people—groups—in Maine that are all together called the Wabanaki. But the people that came here for the summer before we did—they are gone.”
“That’s sad,” Maud said.
“Yes,” Agnes said. “By the look of the things they left behind, though, it was great while it lasted. Okay, let’s go. I need my tipple.”
They turned around and headed back the way they’d come, which Maud was to learn was the quick way. Everything looked radically different going in the opposite direction. The sun filtered through the trees now, making magic. Clemmie really should be here!
“Shh! Look.” Polly pointed to the right and upward. At first Maud focused into the distance, then realized the ten-foot-high mass in her way was the nest itself, nearly close enough to touch. It sat heavily in the crook of a tree, supported on each of four sides by a branch. There was a messiness about it, as if the eagles had better things to think about than where they lived. Two white heads bobbed out and jerked around.
“They were born late,” Agnes said. “Eagles hatch in the spring.”
“There are more permanent nests in here as well,” Polly said, peering up.
“All golden eagles?”
“Bald eagles, too. This is what Agnes’s great-grandfather sought to preserve when he set up the Fellowship. A safe habitat for all.”
“And it belongs to the two of you now?”
“In a sense, yes. And my cousin Archie,” Agnes said. “It’s an association.”
“We don’t think of it as ownership,” Polly explained, “more as a kind of stewardship. I must say ownership sits lightly on my shoulders. I can’t fully grasp that this land is mine.”
“Women weren’t allowed to own land until recently,” Maud said. “Only a hundred years or so.”
Agnes gave her a pleasantly surpised look. “That’s exactly right. We have less history of thinking of ourselves as landowners,” Agnes said.
“Look!” Maud pointed up at a great flurry overhead. An eagle’s wings whapped the air, stirring a breeze. She turned in a circle to see it best. “How glorious!”
“I’m here to protect that gloriousness,” Agnes said. “If it’s the last thing I do.”
“As God is your witness?” Polly teased.
“To hell with Scarlett O’Hara, and to hell with God,” Agnes said. “As usual, it’s all up to me.”
Maud and Polly laughed.
* * *
They never discussed what they were going to do, or how they were going to go about doing it. They simply settled into a routine, as if they’d lived together forever and had their ways. Maud had her breakfast in the solarium—“the glass room”—and reread Agnes’s manuscript stretched out on a chaise, picking out points to discuss. She explored the cabinets full of artifacts from the Sank, and studied the maps hung on the walls that showed all the scattered islands she’d thought she might be imagining the first time she saw them. She hadn’t been—there were lots. She poured through the books left out on the tables, about the flora and fauna, and the family notebooks of lists detailing what had been spotted where and when. All of it fascinated her even beyond what might appear in the memoir if she had her way. She loved it here. Sometimes she had the sense that she could simply not go home and live here forever without looking back. That if she never saw New York again she wouldn’t mind. It was this place—a match for something she hadn’t known she was missing. She hoped she’d discover what that was.
Then suddenly she’d think of Clemmie, and her whole fantasy would implode.
Agnes stayed upstairs in her study, writing. At the end of the morning she came down, they ate, then took a walk around the Point. Agnes loved wind, and Maud found she did, too. Nor could she get enough of watching the ocean shift in patterns that repeated on a large scale but were unique close up. On their return they had strong cups of coffee and went to work, or played tug-of-war, depending how you looked at it.
Agnes’s many years mostly alone hadn’t erased her early social upbringing. She was an excellent conversationalist, and Maud was quite likely to find herself back up in her room with every question she’d meant to ask in that session still unspoken. She was so sure, so clear, yet Agnes got the better of her again and again, with obfuscations hard to catch due to her seeming candor. Agnes made a good show of examining the minutiae of her feelings with disarming frankness and remembered breathtaking details of the distant past. The children of Fellowship Point came even larger to life for Maud. Still, she wanted more for the book.
“Have I told you about my career as a child playwright?” Agnes asked one afternoon.
“You know you haven’t.” Maud knew enough by then to know Agnes’s mind never faltered for even a second, she showed no mental signs of old age, and therefore she kept a perfect running record of her conversations.
“I suppose they were my first creative writings. Morality plays of a sort. I had a sense of the character flaws of my siblings and friends, or what could use improvement, and I wrote roles for them so they would act differently than they did in life.”
“That was manipulative of you.” They had a teasing tone available as part of their exchanges. “How old were you?”
“I started at eight. My play was about the day before the first Thanksgiving. The girls got to be the Indians, and the boys were the colonists. Both sides talked about what to expect.”
“Really? You wrote that at eight?”
“You are imagining more nuance than it had. The drama left much to be desired. I didn’t write things down at that point but ‘directed’—more like bossed around—my cast with great zest. They weren’t as impressed with me as I was with myself. The one thing that came out of it and that got me hooked was that I assigned Elspeth to play a mean person and I assigned Teddy Hancock to play a shy person. Their character’s goals and actions were alien to their natures, and they were forced to take on another point of view. That was fascinating, and it shaped my ideas about how fictional characters worked.”
“You’re saying that at age eight you found their acting struggles fascinating?”
Agnes shrugged.
“It’s a good story anyway. Will you write about that?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
And so forth. Up, down, back, around, sparring and circling. After two hours of this Agnes went back up to her room, for unspecified activities. Maud went out then, usually, and walked around exploring by herself.
Sometimes on her way back from her walks she stopped in at Meadowlea for an iced tea and met more of the family. The M girls could chatter and giggle forever, it seemed, without growing tired of each other. Being here, Maud could see Agnes’s point about writing a memoir evocative of the place rather than one focused on gossip about the denizens. She was getting the sense of the whole.