Free By The Sea, Book One: Tess by Antoinette Stockenberg

sister.
The price was high: a fine lace handkerchief. But Tess didn't care.
She craved a dose of her father's anything's-possible optimism.
    "There now!" Tess's voice was triumphant as
she flung open the door to their little garret room.
    The smile died on her lips. Maggie had
crawled between the covers, flushed and exhausted.
    "What's happened? Mother of God, what is
it?"
    "Just a little ... fit, is all," said Maggie
with a faint smile. "It will pass. Bridget …?"
    "Bridget said fine to the afternoon
off."
    Maggie cleared the phlegm from her throat.
"I don't believe it."
    "Well, you'd better believe it. A cup of
tea, and away we go," she said gently but without much hope. Maggie
wasn't going anywhere that afternoon.
    "Fine ... yes, tea …."
    Her eyes fluttered closed, and in another
moment she was asleep. It was the best thing for her, Tess knew, so
she left her asleep to make her way down to the waterfront. The
weather was fine, the distance not far. Less than half a mile
separated Bellevue Avenue from the waterfront, but every foot down
the hill marked a drop of several thousand dollars' annual income
for its inhabitants as the widely spaced Bellevue mansions of the
great financiers quickly gave way to the comfortable clapboard
houses of Newport's captains and merchants. Still farther down, the
series of streets that connected Spring Street to Thames turned
into little more than lanes, along which the shingled cottages of
fishermen and mill workers were packed cheek to jowl. No carriage
houses here; day workers couldn't afford horses. Nor had the
fishermen any use for them; their boats—their first loves—were a
mere spitting distance away.
    The fishermen's cottages and shacks were
home to the wives, but not to their men, obviously. Curtains were
clean, but chimneys needed tucking; windows were washed, but roofs
needed shingling. If any hand tilled the bits and patches of soil
under the marigolds and herbs, it belonged to a woman whose man
simply passed through their bed between trips to sea.
    The fishermen without families sometimes
rented out their houses while they were away. William Moran had
managed to find such a place for young Will and him, and that made
it possible for the elder William to find a job.
    Tess dropped down to Thames, a crowded,
bustling street lined with boat shops and bakers, cigar stores and
bookstores, hat shops, liquor stores and produce marts, newspaper
offices, druggists and dry goods shops. If you had money to spend,
borrow, or deposit, you could probably do it on Thames Street.
    Crossing Thames, Tess made her way toward
Waite's Wharf and her father's place. The house was less a cottage
than a shack, less a home than a shelter, tucked between a dark,
ill-equipped chandlery and a small fish market and cordage shop.
The shingles on the weather side had been blown off long ago, and
sheets of tin had been hammered over the skeleton. The roof quite
obviously leaked; Tess could see that the south-facing eaves
beneath it had rotted away. If the shack had ever been painted, it
was not in Tess's lifetime.
    Lifting her skirts slightly, Tess treaded
gingerly over a load of quahog shells that had been recently spread
but not yet crushed by the wheels of passing wagons into a ground
cover of small white pieces; the area reeked of the decaying
shellfish. Fishermen passed Tess, staring; a wagon driver whistled
and smacked his lips provocatively. Tess had got clear directions
from her brother a few days ago, but he had not prepared her for
the coarseness of it all, and she winced.
    I have grown used to the splendor of
Bellevue Avenue, she thought critically. I would rather not
know that this part of town exists. There was nothing so wrong
with the waterfront, but it was a man's part of the world, without
either glamour or softness. She wasn't afraid, but she felt out of
place.
    The door to the shack was of
tongue-in-groove pine, warped and peeling and with a broken latch.
Tess knocked and it swung