A small crowd had come down to the beach on a windless day in early June to watch as Captain Fazakerley tested the pneumatically powered underwater craft in which the burly explorer would embark on his planned expedition to the Northern Regions. Most were from the nearby Oceania Hotel, where the captain was also staying as he made his final preparations before departure.
Among the spectators were two young women from the city, cousins, although nothing alike in appearance. One was small and fair, as though crafted from porcelain, the other was stout and dark, her curly hair escaping in unruly spirals from her bonnet. A tall young man stood a little apart from them, slightly stooped and with brownish hair that brushed the top of his unstarched collar. He was working to capture on a sketch pad the craft’s stately descent beneath the lapping waves.
“Who is that?” whispered Phoebe, the fair cousin, behind one lace-gloved hand to Sukey, the dark one, who made it her business to know everything that occurred in the immediate vicinity.
“His name’s Lindsay; he’s an art instructor,” Sukey whispered back. “He came with the Cornells, to instruct their boy, but they seem to have left without him.” Phoebe nodded once in his direction, and Sukey nodded back at her. It was understood.
When the captain’s craft safely emerged, rivulets coursing down its silver sides, some way down the beach, to the thin cheers of the remaining onlookers, Sukey detached herself from Phoebe’s side and approached the tall young man, who was stalking back to the hotel, his hands in his pockets, the drawing pad thrust under one arm.
“Excuse me,” she said, in a voice that didn’t in the least sound as though it needed to be excused. “Mr. Lindsay, I take it?”
The tall young man stopped and wheeled in her direction, as though surprised to be addressed by name. “Yes?” he said, like someone who expected to be presented with a bill.
“I understand that you arrived with the Cornell family, but that arrangement seems to have come to an end,” Sukey replied with a bland smile. “However, my cousin, Miss Phoebe Ravenscroft, who has come here for her health, is interested in taking some drawing lessons during her stay.” She indicated her fair cousin with an airy wave of the hand.
“Is she?” said Lindsay, shading his eyes in the brilliant light as he looked toward the small figure, who was sheltering from the noonday sun under a small rose-colored parasol. “It would be my pleasure —”
“First,” interrupted Sukey, “you must tell me how it came to end with you and the Cornells, and then I’ll determine whether introductions are in order.”
Lindsay paused, as if considering his options, and then he evidently decided to tell the truth, regardless of the consequences. “The Cornells were disappointed with their son’s progress,” he admitted, “but a less talented, more lazy pupil you never saw. Finally, they decided to dispense with my services, and they said that they would decline to pay my full fee, as the boy had learned nothing. We had words over that, and the result was that they left the hotel to return home this morning and refused to pay my passage back to the city, so I’m effectively stranded here, with not enough money to pay for my room and board.”
“You are in desperate straits, aren’t you?” replied Sukey. “I thought as much. Well, my cousin would be the most dedicated pupil you could ask for — and she would undertake to pay your full fee, whatever her attainments under your tuition.”
“Well, that’s — I’d be delighted,” stammered Lindsay. Then, as if a warning arm had alighted on his shoulder, he asked, “Why are you doing this?”
“It was all Phoebe’s — Miss Ravenscroft’s — idea,” explained Sukey, as she led him over to the small figure by the murmuring ocean waves. “She aspires to create art.”
“And you?” asked Lindsay.
“I’m a great appreciator of art.”
Phoebe Ravenscroft and her cousin, Sukey Mendes, had arrived from the city the month before, as Phoebe’s doctor had prescribed bracing sea air to invigorate her delicate constitution. It wasn’t well known beyond the family, but Sukey and Phoebe had met only a year ago, upon the death of Sukey’s father, when she had gone in a shabby black dress to her mother’s family, the Ravenscrofts, for assistance. Sukey’s mother had made an unfortunate marriage two decades earlier to the young man engaged to give her singing lessons, and she had been cut off by her family in consequence.
After due consideration in his ledger-lined study, Mr. Ravenscroft, Phoebe’s father, emerged with the decision to show some charity to his destitute niece by allowing her to become Phoebe’s unpaid companion. This proved to be the solution to more than one problem, and not just for Sukey, as she was well aware. Phoebe’s mother was dead, she was an only child, she was often ill and couldn’t enter society, and her father was much taken up by matters at his importing company and had little time for her, so Sukey’s arrival was a timely one.
For her part, Sukey enjoyed her improved standard of living and the companionship of her new-found cousin, for she herself was an only child as well, her mother having died soon after her birth. There were nights, however, that she missed toasting bread and cheese over a fire with her father in their lodgings after one of his performances, at which adoring female fans threw flowers at his feet and the rafters rang with applause.
Phoebe, who was spoiled in the way of rich only children, soon came to feel like Sukey had always been there, since her dark cousin took over all of the unpleasant little tasks that even privileged daughters might have to attend to, at least on occasion. In truth, Sukey was used to performing such little offices for her father, who had been absentminded in the extreme, as all great artists were, she believed.
So, when it was decided that the seaside was the best place for Phoebe, Mr. Ravenscroft had no hesitation in packing her off in the care of Sukey, who, although just a few years older, bestowed an almost motherly attention on her charge, to the Oceania Hotel, with the vague promise to join them when he could. And there they had met Mr. Lindsay while watching Captain Fazakerley test his underwater craft.
.
Mr. Lindsay’s lessons began that very week, with instructions for Phoebe to draw interesting objects discovered on the beach, while Sukey helped locate such objects and otherwise hovered in the background, holding Phoebe’s shawl should she grow too cold, despite the fact that summer was approaching.
As he observed and directed Phoebe’s work, from time to time guiding her pencil with his own hand as she labored to reproduce the intricate whorls of a seashell or the gnarled surface of a blanched piece of driftwood, Mr. Lindsay shared some information about himself, usually in response to Phoebe’s queries, for, although she was less expert in winkling out facts than Sukey, she was just as curious.
That was how they discovered that his given name was Francis, that he had been born and raised in another city to the south, that both of his parents were dead, and that his ambition was to be a great painter. At this revelation, Phoebe cried, “Oh, but you must show us your work!” They had seen many of his sketches, of course, such as the ones of Captain Fazakerley’s ingenious craft, but nothing of his more polished endeavors.
“Yes, please show us, Lindsay,” urged Sukey, for he already had become just “Lindsay” to them within the short time he had been instructing Phoebe.
Lindsay blushed. “I’m afraid that my room here is barely better than servants’ quarters,” he admitted.
“No matter,” said Phoebe. “Sukey has seen much worse, I’m sure, and I wouldn’t mind at all.” Sukey smiled in support and let the remark pass without comment.
“All right,” Lindsay agreed, and after the day’s lesson was over, he brought them to his cramped, dark room. It was in the back of the hotel, just under the attic, with the small window offering a view of the stable yard. “Of course, the light is poor here,” he said, seeming to apologize in advance as he took up a portfolio; sat on the small, lumpy bed; and spread the large leather case over his bony knees, “but you should be able to get the idea from these studies I’ve been working on …”
What Phoebe and Sukey saw, in the confines of that dim room, were vast prospects similar to the seascape that the hotel’s better rooms looked out upon, and to which they walked most days to take the air and practice drawing, but much larger and wilder, with craggy cliffs towering over frothing waves.
“Are they meant to be the view from the shore?” asked Phoebe, in some puzzlement. Her talent, as Lindsay had noted early on in her lessons, was for minutiae: the lacy detail of a leaf, the gossamer of an insect’s outstretched wing.
“That was the germ of the idea, but the place … doesn’t actually exist,” said Lindsay. “It’s a scene I created in my mind.”
“And who are they?” asked Sukey, pointing to two tiny figures, one larger than the other, the smaller enrobed in brilliant aquamarine, the taller in a sober, seaweedy shade of brown, standing in the foreground of one study, while an immense ocean raged beneath a broad, lowering sky.
Lindsay turned a darker shade of red. “Those — those are meant to be —” he began. “Us,” finished Sukey, indicating Phoebe and herself. Lindsay hung his head in silent assent.
Phoebe took the study and examined it for some time. “How clever!” she said after putting it down. “You’ve portrayed us accurately in just a few short strokes, and from behind! I wonder I didn’t see it before.”
Sukey glanced at Lindsay. “That’s because it’s not a portrait of us,” she said. “We’re just there to bear witness.”
.It was becoming obvious to Sukey that Phoebe and Lindsay were falling in love. She could see it in the way his hand would hesitate before touching her trembling one as he helped her trace an image, and in the way they would sit rapt for hours, their heads inclined toward each other, as they worked on a sketch, their low voices carried away by the wind.
In the evening, when they went down to the ballroom to hear one of Captain Fazakerley’s lectures, accompanied by magic lantern slides of artistic renderings of the Northern Regions, based on glimpses from passing whalers, on what he hoped to accomplish on his expedition (there were a great number of valuable scientific experiments that he wished to carry out, each deserving of its own lecture), Sukey observed that Phoebe was much more interested in watching Lindsay out of the corner of her eye, for it seemed that the captain’s lectures were the only times when Lindsay wasn’t entirely engrossed by Phoebe.
On the morning after the last of these lectures, at which Captain Fazakerley, in his voluble manner, had closed a slide display consisting of monumental, rough-surfaced glaciers; teardrop-shaped ice caves glittering as though the walls were studded with jewels; and billowing pastel curtains of aurora borealis, with an impassioned plea for members of the audience to pray for the safe return of himself and his men, as well as a request for generous donations to fund the expedition, Phoebe was having her lesson with Lindsay, while Sukey stood by as usual.
As she tried to draw a seagull on a rock, Phoebe’s pencil point broke. Lindsay grasped her hand in both of his and said, “There’s something I must tell you.” She looked up at him in breathless anticipation. “I wanted to tell you earlier, but I couldn’t bring myself to do so.”
“Please tell me now,” Phoebe said, placing her free hand atop both of his.
“I — I plan to join Captain Fazakerley as his expedition’s artist,” Lindsay replied in a rush. “We’ve already spoken about it at length. It will be a chance for me to see with my own eyes the kinds of geographical features I’ve only imagined until now, and —”
But he didn’t get to finish, because Phoebe had started crying, and not in the decorous, handkerchief-dabbing way that young ladies usually cry, as when bidding farewell to distant relatives after a month’s visit or when an actress in a play pretends to expire on a chaise longue. Her tears flowed, her chest heaved, her nose ran. Sukey rushed over; enfolded her in the ubiquitous, but until now superfluous, shawl; and led her away, with a sharp look over her shoulder at Lindsay that commanded him to stay where he was to await a later talk.
When Sukey returned alone a half-hour later, Lindsay was where she had left him, sitting on his jacket spread out over the sand, hands on knees, looking out at the ocean, which, despite all of his stormy studies, persisted in being calm and shimmery, almost like a mirage of water.
“I’ve given her a sleeping draught,” Sukey said. “She won’t wake for several hours.”
“If I’ve been the cause of any pain —” Lindsay began, but Sukey wouldn’t let him finish. “Of course you can’t go on the expedition,” she said. “Not after having compromised the poor girl with your attentions. She had every right to believe that the two of you had an understanding, I think you’ll agree.”
Lindsay opened his mouth to speak, but then he shut it without uttering a word. He sighed and nodded his head. “As I believe I’ve mentioned, I have no money,” he said at last, offering what most would have seen as an insuperable objection to any match.
Sukey nodded in turn. “That’s true,” she answered, “but Phoebe has an income from her mother that her father can’t touch, and if we’re careful, it should be able to keep the three of us quite well.”
Lindsay didn’t even try to argue her last point.
And that was how he came to elope with two women, first cousins whom he met at the Oceania Hotel, instead of embarking for the Northern Regions in an underwater craft with Captain Fazakerley.
^^^
Bridget Goldschmidt received her MFA in creative writing, with a concentration in fiction, from Brooklyn College in 1991. Her short fiction has been published by Flash Fiction Magazine, Every Day Fiction and The RavensPerch. She works as a trade magazine editor and lives in New York by the ocean. She last wrote for Oblivioni Magazine in July 2024.
Image by Kalyee Srithnam.