“I don’t get it,” Tyler said. “She kept her lover’s clothes?”
But I wasn’t looking at the trousers or the belt. I was looking at the long band of cloth: thick, sturdy cotton; ten inches wide; a dozen or more feet long. My breath came faster as I slid the fabric through my fingers. “These weren’t her lover’s clothes.”
“Who else’s would they have been?”
I thought of the painting we’d found, of the young, handsome man dressed for sea. I thought of what Sarah Barbanel had said, about whether she’d known anyone on the whaleship.Not for a very long time.I thought about how Sarah had gone off tofinishing school and disappeared from the record until she married Marcus Barbanel. “Hers.”
He stared at me.
Sarah hadn’t been inlovewith a sailor. She’dbeenone. “She could have used this cloth to bind her breasts. She could have been the young man in the painting. The chockpin wasn’t a gift—it was hers. She wore it, used it. The seashells belonged to her. It was all hers.”
“Women weren’t whalers in the 1800s,” Tyler said.
“Some were. Women disguised themselves as men to join the Civil War. And the American Revolution. Whaling captains’ wives sailed with them. Maybe Sarah never went to finishing school. Maybe she went to sea.”
“And what, continued even after getting married?” Tyler asked, still skeptical. “The quarterboard came from way after their marriage.”
“She didn’t have to have been on the ship when it wrecked. She could have sailed on it, decades before.”
“Maybe,” Tyler said slowly.
“You looked up the sailors from the time of the wreck, right? We could look up the crew from earlier, from when Sarah left for finishing school.” I pulled up the photo with the dates on my phone. “She left home in 1821 and married Marcus in 1826.”
Tyler pulled up the New Bedford whaling database, which contained crew lists for almost a hundred years. He pulled thevoyages out of New Bedford for theRosemaryin the early nineteenth century, including a departure in 1821. “We can compare the names here to the voyages before and after,” I said. “She wouldn’t have been on those—she would have been with her parents or married—but if there’s a name on this list only...”
We compared the lists, scanning for a name unique to 1821, a name a girl called Sarah Fersztenfeld might have found easy to answer to.
Sam Ferston.Sam first appeared on theRosemaryin 1821, and never again.
Sam Ferston. Sarah Fersztenfeld.
A rush of satisfied adrenaline washed through me. It all made sense. It all clicked. I leaned back and grinned. “Sam Ferston. That’s her.”
“Still conjecture,” Tyler said.
“Sure,” I agreed, searchingsam ferstonon my phone and coming up with no results. And yes, even if Sam Ferston had been around for more than one ship voyage, he might not have a huge internet footprint. But he might have a tombstone or a marriage turned up by Google. “It could be a coincidence. But it’d be a good coincidence.” I stared at the name again.Sam Ferston.
“You have to admit, it sounds pretty wild.”
“It does,” I agreed.Wild.How apt. She had been wild. I lay down flat on the floor, staring in stunned contemplation at thepeaked wooden ceiling. “I think I’m right, though. It feels right.”
Tyler lay down as well, in the opposite direction so only our heads were next to each other. “Yeah. You could be.”
“Can you even imagine? What a terrifying, brave thing to do. Disguising your identity, choosing a new one. Choosing a new life.”
“Why would she even do it?”
“Why wouldn’t she?” I gestured at the peaked ceiling, at the world beyond, at history. “Freedom. Choice. Options. She grew up in a time when girls worried about marriages and husbands if they wanted a secure future. Maybe she wanted something else. Something more out of life. Maybe she wanted adventure. Passion.”
“Seems like a pretty dangerous adventure.”
“Well, she only lasted one trip.” Was that why she stopped? Because the grueling nature of life on a whaleship, of hunting and traveling, took more out of her than she’d expected? Or had she been discovered? Had she tried something she thought would make her happy, only to realize it wasn’t at all what she wanted?
But at least she had tried.
I rolled onto my stomach, propping myself up on my elbows so I could look into Tyler’s face. The light slid across the unfinished attic, long and languid and golden. “We’ve spent all this time thinking this was about a woman who built her life around a man. Who was sad about a lost lover or a forced marriage.But we missed the whole point, the whole story. Sarah’s life was abouther.”
Tyler nodded. “Though in our defense, it was way more likely to think a nineteenth-century woman’s secrets were tied to marriage.”
