Free The Holder of the World by Bharati Mukherjee

better.
    All around her was order, continuity, contentment. Winds scraped sibilant music off the moss. Hardy columbines pushed through the tiniest cracks in the rocks. Spring grass greened afresh between dried-out stalks of mullein. Dead, fallen-off branches ringed and enriched the roots of aged elms.
    Who was crying out to her in so much anguish?
    Winds lifted the bonnet, freeing her hair to curl around her face and surge around her shoulders in tense, electric waves.
    She lunged for her bonnet, but it whirled out of reach and spiraled down to the shore and finally snagged to rest on a clump of weeds. The bonnet was lost. All the same, she inched as close as she dared to where the promontory sheared away. She crept through a thicket of violets. Sorrowful voices floated up to her.
    Three fishermen were beaching a small boat, men who pushed their prows through the horizon. Now the horizon had swallowed one of them. She recognized first of all Captain Maverick, the closest inhabitant to the scene. The men were all knee-deep in the water, stumbling on the slippery stones. Maverick pulled the boat to shore, facing her; two others pushed from the stern. She stretched closer to the precipice on her stomach, flattening tufty grass and loosening shallow-rooted lace plants from the interstices of rock.
    When the boat was beached, one of the pushers heaved a body out of the gunwales. The smith, Henry Manning, normally a silent, composed man, was screaming words into the wind, words that she couldn’t understand. This was not his part of the town. Nothing but the sheerest tragedy could bring Henry Manning to water, he who despised boats and England and had seen the courtship of Legge and his daughter as an assault upon his dearly held prejudice and authority. And now they were together, for the third man was the mysterious visitor from Ireland, Gabriel Legge, he of the rakish black eye patch, and Hannah knew only one event could bring such enemies together.
    She couldn’t see the whole body, only a hand. The hand was rigid and got in the men’s way. Henry Manning was looking older now, frailer, than she had ever seen him. He leaned his full weight on an oar and instructed the younger men. Suddenly she saw it—stuck like a pennant on a hooked pole that Gabriel Legge was sliding under the body for better leverage—a soggy fragment of Hester’s dress. Hannah, keening now with grief, scrabbled down the stony trails.
    Hester’s corpse was laid out on grass by the time she got close. The arms stuck way out of the body, stiffened in the posture of a woman who had jumped off the precipice, then tried to slow her fatal descent. The two men of her life weighted Hester’s arms down with rocks as they looked around for rope or cloth to lash them tight to her body. Henry Manning stood by the boat, mopping his angry, red neck.
    She must have bobbed for hours in brackish water. Now weeds twined her body like sea snakes. Bruises the blue of violets blossomed on her face.
    “Fine things she wanted!” Henry Manning spat in Gabriel Legge’s direction. He heard Hannah’s weeping. Hester’s eyelids were stuck open. Her lips were twisted into a bitter gaping O. Or “No!” It was as though Hester had changed her mind as the water hit her face.
    The stranger deflected Henry’s wrath away from Hannah. “Ah, what’s wrong with wanting to cultivate yourself?” Then he and Captain Maverick fell to making a stretcher out of oars and a sail. Hannah slunk away. She could not bear to stay and watch them load Hester up, like slaughtered meat, or a cabinet.
    THE DAY AFTER Hester’s funeral, the stranger, dressed in a cassock of showy blue satin with a matching, embroidered blue silk patch, called on Robert Fitch. He did not come to have furniture made. He introduced himself as Gabriel Legge of Danagadee, son of a shipowner in the business of ferrying families from the Old to the New England. He asked for, and received, permission to court Hannah. She