Havener Sisters

Ardeana Hamlin

Description

China, Persia, and India Havener are triplets raised on the seas aboard their father's ship, the Empress. Upon his death, the sisters take up residence in a large house along the shore in Castine, Maine. After eight years of life as land-lubbers, the sisters are suddenly faced with a change in economic circumstances that propels them into new adventures-some welcome, and some not. In this, her third installment of the story that began with the best-selling novel, Pink Chimneys, Hamlin returns to the characters, setting and historical time of her beloved tale to explore the various fates of the Havener Sisters, and the challenges they face. Well-researched and engaging, The Havener Sisters will transport the reader back to the customs and country of an earlier time at the dawn of the Industrial Age in Maine.

Sujets

• Historical fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Islandport Press
• Date de parution: 05 septembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781939017864
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Other Islandport Press books
Abbott s Reach
by Ardeana Hamlin
Windswept
Mary Ellen Chase
Mary Peters
Mary Ellen Chase
Silas Crockett
Mary Ellen Chase
Contentment Cover
Miriam Colwell
Shoutin into the Fog:
Growing Up on Maine s Ragged Edge
Thomas Hanna
Nine Mile Bridge:
Three Years in the Maine Woods
Helen Hamlin
My Life in the Maine Woods:
A Game Warden s Wife in the Allagash Country
Annette Jackson

THE HAVENER SISTERS
by Ardeana Hamlin
First Islandport Edition September 2015
All Rights Reserved.
Copyright 2015 by Ardeana Hamlin
ISBN: 978-1-939017-86-4
Library of Congress Card Number: 2014959679
Islandport Press
P.O. Box 10
Yarmouth, ME 04096
www.islandportpress.com
[e-mail]
Publisher: Dean L. Lunt
Book Jacket design: Karen Hoots/Hoots Design
Interior Book design: Teresa Lagrange
Cover photo courtesy of iStock, by wbritten
Printed in the USA
For Nancy Tancredi, my friend of 60 years, and for my friends of many years, Cathryn Marquez and Janet Danforth. Full circle .
Contents
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
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
1.
China Havener had spent much of the morning going over the household accounts. Ordinarily it was a task she enjoyed. She and her sisters, India and Persia, were good at managing their income, adept at living within their means. They were sensible and thrifty, so it wasn t as if they didn t know the ins and outs of their financial status. Indeed, their current dilemma had nothing to do with extravagance. In fact, the sisters had noted a need to buy a little less tea, to mend their stockings rather than purchase a new pair, and to forego the purchase of a pretty silk flower for a hat. They did not resent making such small economies, and had done so for several years, but now things had taken a definite turn for the worse.
China and her sisters were triplets, an oddity they never thought much about except when they stood together before a mirror and gazed at their fifty-five-year-old selves, their faces identical.
China checked a column of figures in the ledger a second time. She thumbed through a pile of invoices, statements, and bills to recheck her figures. Well, there it was, plain and simple: The Empress , the ship they had been born on in 1826 and had lived on most of their lives, was bringing in much less money than it had in the past year. That came as no surprise. For years, steamships had encroached on the revenue of sailing ships. She had known it would catch up with them eventually. And now it had.
That was the thing about life; it was a long series of compromises requiring periodic adjustment to new realities. But even though she well understood that aspect of the human condition, it was quite another matter to embrace it. She also knew that embracing change in its early phases was never easy and rarely ran smoothly. She expected resistance from India and Persia, but she knew she could rely on them to discuss the matter sensibly. She went to the kitchen to find them.
I must speak with you, China said. Come to the front room with me.
Oh, dear, said India as she and Persia seated themselves near China s desk. You don t look at all happy, China. Trouble with the accounts again, I presume.
More than trouble, I m afraid, China said.
Better spit it out quickly then, said Persia, the more direct and practical of the three.
We can t afford to keep this house, China said. She ran her long index finger down the column of figures in the leather-bound ledger. As you know, since Father died, we have no secure means of income apart from the cargoes carried in the Empress , which are few and far between these days. We must begin to economize drastically. Though she spoke calmly, China knew her words came as a blow to India and Persia.
China wore a brown dress, sprigged with tiny white flowers, not new, the hem a bit frayed, perfectly good enough to wear around the house. Her hair was pulled back into a loose knot at the nape of her neck and secured with a pair of silver combs she had purchased at an outdoor market in Cadiz, Spain, many years ago. She regarded India and Persia, carbon copies of herself, trying to gauge the depth of their worry.
India and Persia glanced at one another. They trusted China s judgment and knew she wasn t making a fuss about something that didn t need fussing about. China was not a rattle-head. She thought carefully about things and was not prone to overdramatizing any bad situation.
A long, heavy silence dropped into the room. China s thoughts drifted to the problem at hand.
She, India, and Persia had been raised to consider themselves something of a miracle, though they never dwelled on the fact they were triplets, nor had they given themselves airs because of it. It was simply a fact of life, despite how unusual it was to everyone else.
They had spent a good part of their lives aboard the Empress , in the company of their mother, who had treated them as individuals and encouraged them to think of themselves as separate entities rather than as a trinity sharing the same looks, the same interests, ideas, and opinions.
No, thought China, as she gazed at India and Persia, look alike though they did, they had very different ideas about who they were as individuals, what interested them, how they felt about things. That, however, had not caused them to be at odds with one another. True, they had their disagreements from time to time, but their disputes were resolved fairly and equitably.
For the past eight years, since their father, Jonas Havener, had died in 1873, they had lived alongshore, his death making it impossible for them to go to sea any longer. Despite the fact they were skilled at navigation and knew the running of a ship and its business intimately, as women, they could not acquire the papers necessary to captain a ship, even though that was precisely what they had been born to do, and had done for much of their lives. After their father s burial at sea, when they were obliged to leave the Empress , they did so with good grace, using their knowledge to hire a skilled captain for the ship. As landlubbers, they looked for profitable cargoes for the Empress to haul up and down the Atlantic coast and, sometimes, around the world.
They took up residence in the commodious house in Castine, Maine, that their father had built for their mother in 1850. They divided up the tasks of keeping house. China kept the household accounts, India did the housekeeping, and Persia saw to the cooking, though there was much overlap in those duties, with all three helping with the cooking and cleaning.
They attended the Congregational church and helped with church suppers and bazaars. They joined the Ladies Aid and sewed baby clothes for families in need. They wrote many letters in the course of a week, staying in touch with friends they had met in far parts of the world. Sometimes, when those seafarers were in port, they came to call. Village people stopped for tea. It was a good life, if somewhat more sedate than what they had been accustomed to, or indeed preferred.
Certainly, it was a pale life compared to the one they had lived at sea. They could boast-though they did not-of being among the first white women certain islanders in the Indian Ocean had ever seen. They had been set adrift in a lifeboat when the cargo of their vessel, the one before the Empress , had caught fire and all hands were obliged to abandon ship. They had endured two weeks of privation before they were spotted by another vessel and rescued. As terrifying as that had been, it did not terrify their mother, Ruth, enough to stay alongshore, though there came a time when she asked Jonas to build the house in Castine, on a high point of ground with a sweeping view of Penobscot Bay. At that point in her life, she had told her husband, she needed to know she had a home built firmly upon solid earth where she could retreat from time to time to reclaim her land legs.
The house had been built when Jonas still made ample amounts of money carrying cargoes to and from ports around the world. The house boasted a fireplace in every one of its ten rooms. It was filled with light from well-placed windows, and each room reflected the family s seafaring past, containing dishes from China, textiles from India, rugs from Persia, furniture from Spain, and accoutrements from every part of the world. They came home to the house every few years when Ruth wanted to stay alongshore to visit relatives in Searsport, Maine, or when she felt her daughters needed to socialize with cousins and other young people of their own age. She had loved the house, but more than anything, she had loved going to sea with Jonas. She thoroughly enjoyed the adventures she had as the wife of a sea captain.
Just before she died at sea in 1855, when China, India, and Persia were nearly thirty, Ruth had charged them to take care of their father. And they had done so, even as he had receded in his grief into an eternal fog of rum, leaving the running of the ship and its business to them. They rarely went back to the house in those years, left it in the hands of caretakers, making certain it was kept in repair against the day when they knew their father, too, would give up the ghost, obliging them to give up the sea.
China glanced at the small painting of hers