Free Colony by Anne Rivers Siddons

anything so beautiful,” I said to Peter finally, when it was obvious that he was waiting for me to tell him what I thought of this place he so loved. “And it looks like it could easily kill you. Peter, it’s all so… sharp .”
    He looked at me and smiled. “I know what you mean. But it’s just what you’ll come to love about it. It’s…all open to you. It keeps nothing back. It shows you its teeth and spine and breath, and in the end something in you rises up to meet and match it. It never coddles you, but in the end it gets the best out of you. And it gives you its best. It clears away a lot of unnecessary stuff, this coast, this place. I guess what I mean is that it’s possible to learn about absolutes here. You’ve never had that in Charleston.”
    I started to protest and then did not. He was right. That sinuous southern life, that oblique and slow and complicated old beauty, that warm thick air and blood-warm sea, that place of mists and languor and fragrant richness—it could soothe you and charm you and teach you much, but it could not cleanse and clarify. This place could. Perhaps that was what I feared most: that Cape Rosier and Retreat would ask of me a sea change that I somehow could not afford, or would fail to make.
    “I don’t think I’ll leave this place the same person as I came here,” I said obscurely, and he grinned wider and ruffled my hair and told me I was ridiculous, that I would be me, only more so, in Retreat.
    All these years later, I still do not know who was right.
    From the pitted county blacktop a sandy lane led off into the fir and birch groves that ran straight down to the sea, and there was an old gray wooden oar fastened to a post there that said, in letters faded
    nearly to invisibility, RETREAT COLONY, COVE HARBOR YACHT
    CLUB. The road was absolutely still and quiet, and the crystal-blue air was chilling as we sat there in the open car. I drew my sweater around me, shivering with more than cold. We might have been looking down into the dawn of time; no roofline or chimney or smoke rise broke the serrated line of the firs. No human voice cut the silence. Only the mewling cry of the gulls and, far away, a little hushing sussuration that I found later to be the gentle wash of the tide on the shingle beach.
    “Well, let’s do it,” Peter said, and put the car into gear. I could not muster enough breath to reply. I was, at that moment, absolutely terrified.
    Retreat has, instead of streets, a web of narrow, wildflower-fringed sandy lanes that wander through the dark woods, all of them leading one way or another to the water. The old houses are mostly gray-or brown-weathered cedar shingle, so that in the twilight all you can see of them at first is the flash of white trim and the blazing window boxes. Then your eyes adjust to the green darkness and you can pick them out, set back in that primeval forest from the lanes, bulking high against the lucent sky: tall and rambling, winged and elled old dowagers with many windows and porches, shouldering in among the great gray rocks that lie slumped like elephants on that rich black earth. All have views of the bay or the harbor, and the ones at the ends of the lanes have magnificent wraparound vistas; I often, in those early years, envied the families who had that largesse as a part of their lives whenever they chose to look at it. Liberty, our cottage, looked out to sea only over the shoulders of Braebonnie, the Potters’
    newer and larger cottage, which had been built on the very cliff overlooking the shingle beach. You could see the sea, but you did not have that wild, all-pervasive sense of it that Braebonnie and many other Retreat cottages offered.
    “It’s because Liberty is one of the three original cottages here,” Mother Hannah told me that first summer. “In those days you could only come here by packet from Rockland, and it docked down at the foot of our lane. Peter’s dear grandfather was thinking of his family’s