Free The Sacred River by Wendy Wallace

up, shading her eyes with her hand, looking down at the harbor. The dockers were crowding around something on the quay.
    The gang parted to reveal a large object wrapped in sacking. It looked like a great flat-topped, spindly-legged animal, trapped and bound up with ropes. Harriet watched as the men secured it to a crane, then winched it up and swung it slowly out over the edge of the quay. Midway between the ship and the dock, the cargo lurched and slipped in its ropes, to shouts of alarm. It rocked, then stabilized and landed like a clumsy bird.
    As the crew released the piano from the sling, Harriet saw a man standing on the deck, watching. He was a head taller than any of the sailors, wearing a suit the color of sand and a straw hat. As she watched, he stepped forward and slit open part of the sacking with a knife, then lifted the lid and struck a key. A bass note resounded into the silence that had fallen. He played a couple of chords and the crew applauded.
    “What’s all the commotion?” Yael said.
    “It’s a piano, Aunt,” she said, sitting down. “A grand piano.”
    “How absurd,” said Louisa. “Don’t get sunstroke, Harriet, it’s very warm.”
    “I won’t, Mother.” Draining the sweet dregs of her coffee, Harriet looked again at the deck. The man’s hair was down to his shoulders, bleached at the ends as if by long exposure to the sun, and he stood very still. Harriet willed him to turn around; she felt curious to see his face. “Who can he be?” she wondered aloud.
    Yael had finished her seltzer water. She picked up her bag and pulled her bonnet more tightly onto her head.
    “Your grandfather never traveled, Harriet,” she said, as they walked back down the steps and joined the stream of people making their way back on board. “He has spent his whole life in England, as I believed I would do. We none of us know what plans the Almighty has for us.”

TWELVE

    The weather grew milder each day, and when the winds were sufficient, the ship traveled under sail, the noise of the engines stilled. Louisa felt as if she were neither in the world nor out of it, as if she were nowhere at all. At night, lying in the darkness with her eyes wide open, her mind turned to the girl she had been. Louisa had stifled her memory for so many years, it was as if that girl had died.
    Louisa was fifteen when she first encountered Augustus. In those days, she was a hoyden. She never wore a bonnet or gloves except to church, her skin was brown as a gypsy’s, and she clothed herself in red as often as she could, from a secret conviction that it was the color of life.
    Her mother, ever since she could remember, had insisted that Louisa was beautiful. Beatrice was clever, Amelia Newlove declared. Hepzibah had an artistic gift and Lavinia was born gentle. But Louisa was a beauty. Peering into the old oval looking glass in the hallway at home, Louisa could see no evidence of it.
    Her brows were thick as a boy’s and demanded constant close attention with tweezers. Her mouth was too large, too definitely shaped, as if it had been drawn on her face with a pencil. Her hair was impossible. Was it true, she asked silently, walking the beach alone, listening to the midair squabbling of gulls. Was beautiful what she was?
    Louisa did not know what she was. She didn’t share the trust in God that her older sisters professed. She saw no evidence of any God yet was ashamed to admit her unbelief to anyone but herself. Frightened as well, since if there was no God, for girls like the Newloves, what was there?
    Still, she knelt by her bed each night, thanking the Lord for his blessings and asking him to help those in greater need than she. Who could be in greater need than she, Louisa wondered, sliding between darned sheets in a darned nightdress, brushing sand off her knees, curling up to try to generate some warmth.
    On Sundays, after lunch, she put on her favorite dress—a hand-me-down from Hepzibah, the color of rubies—and