Chương 10 - The Salt Air of Tomorrow
A year later, the wind off Blackwood Sound had the same smell—dead eel-grass, wet coal, and the sharp, clean brine of sixty miles of open ocean.
I sat on the low stone wall of the east terrace, my boots resting on the gravel of the carriage turn.
The black steel braces were gone. In their place were two small, light splints of molded carbon fiber that fit inside the leather of my work boots, invisible beneath the cuffs of my corduroy trousers.
I still carried the right ash cane. It had a brass ferrule now, turned by an old machinist down at the machine shop on Pier Two, and the wood had grown dark and greasy where my palm had rubbed against the grain for twelve months.
Down in the basin, the *Corvino Star* was clearing the slip.
Her hull was fresh with black lead paint, her deck cranes were swung inboard and lashed for sea, and from her main truck, the Corvino house flag—a white anchor on a field of dark green—flew stiff in the northeast breeze.
The gravel behind me crunched.
It wasn't the dragging, fearful tread of the house staff from the old days.
Tessa walked out onto the stone, carrying a heavy stoneware jug of coffee and two thick ceramic mugs from the kitchen.
She was wearing a wool sweater the color of oatmeal, with the sleeves pushed up to her elbows, and a pair of dark corduroy trousers that had grease on the right knee from the steering gear of the launch.
She didn't ask how my back was. She didn't look at the cane.
She set the jug down on the low wall, poured four inches of black coffee into each mug, and handed one to me.
"Clara’s letter came from Boston," she said, leaning her hip against the stone beside me.
"And?"
"The surgeon says the valve is seated. She’s walking two miles a day along the Charles River, and she’s starting at the normal school in the spring."
She took a sip from her mug, squinting against the glare of the noon sun off the channel.
"She wants to know if you still have that skiff with the nine-horsepower motor."
"The skiff is at the dory shop," I said. "Matteo put three coats of copper paint on the bottom last week. He says the flounder are running in the shallows behind the light."
Tessa looked out over the water, where the *Corvino Star* was blowing her long departure blast—one deep, iron roar that echoed back from the granite face of the bluffs.
"You're late for the terminal meeting," she said.
"Let Dominic’s clerks wait ten minutes," I said. "They have comfortable chairs down there."
She smiled—that small, dry, dangerous curl of her lip that I had seen for the first time while she was washing the zinc paste off my heel twelve months ago.
May you like
She reached down, her rough, warm fingers closing around my left wrist—not to support it, not to check a pulse, but with the steady, quiet certainty of an anchor chain taking the weight of a ship in a quiet roadstead.
"Get your sticks, Corvino," she said, her voice dropping into that low, gravelly cadence that was the only music I cared to hear. "The tide’s going out, and we’ve got forty boats to turn before the dark."
