“More or less.”
He didn’t seem to want to say more about Toby. “What made you give it all up and join the army?” she asked.
“Two things: something I overheard and a woman.”
She didn’t say anything for a while because she wasn’t sure she wanted to hear this story. “Tell me,” she whispered at last.
“One day when I was seventeen I was on board one of our ships. I had been inspecting cargo and talking to the men about the trip when I overheard one of the officers talking to the captain. The officer wanted to know how I could have such a responsible job. He said I was just a kid, what could I know. The captain made me feel good because he said that even though I was still a kid, I knew a great deal about the sea. ‘Haven’t you heard what they say about the Montgomery children?’ the captain said. ‘They aren’t born. When their father wants another one, he goes to the nearest pier, throws down a net, pulls it in, and takes out another brat. It’s a wonder those kids can walk. It’s a wonder they don’t have fins for feet.’ ”
“That doesn’t seem a bad thing to say. In a way it’s a compliment.”
“True, but as I listened to the two of them chuckling, I had a vision of my life. I knew that I’d run Warbrooke Shipping forever and that when I was twenty-two or three I’d marry a local girl—if I could find one who wasn’t already related to me—and then have some of my own children.”
“Taking them from the sea?”
“Wherever children can be had. I could see myself at fifty, having trained my children and now training my grandchildren to run Warbrooke Shipping. I could see myself at eighty, still planning how I was going to get away from Warbrooke.”
“I see. And what did the woman have to do with making you join the army?”
“About the time I heard the men talking about me, a friend of my mother’s came to visit her. The woman was in her mid-thirties, I guess, and at my young age of seventeen I thought she was an old woman. She was to spend a month with us, and for the first few days of her visit I don’t guess I even looked at her.”
“What with lessons at night and working during the day, I don’t think you had time to look at girls. Did I tell you that I took my lessons in the evening also?”
“Whoever taught you forgot your arithmetic,” he said.
“My father was my teacher.”
“That explains everything.”
“Stop complaining about my father and tell me about your lady.”
He smiled. “She was a lady. Anyway, a few days after she arrived, my brothers started coming down with the chicken pox.”
“What about your sisters?”
“Carrie wasn’t born yet and Ardis went to Davy’s house to stay. My mother wanted me out of the house, too, so I wouldn’t catch it, and she told her friend that she’d better return to her home. But there was some reason that she couldn’t return, I don’t remember what, her house was being remodeled, something. Anyway, she asked my father if she could see the way Warbrooke Shipping was run.”
“And your father turned her over to you.”
“Yes, he did. I was really angry about it. I’m afraid I shouted at my father that I had work to do, hard work, and that I didn’t have time to nursemaid some old woman. And, besides that, she was a woman, what could she possibly understand about business?”
’Ring closed his eyes for a moment. “She heard me and she came marching into my father’s study and told me that she could keep up with me anywhere I went, and she challenged me to find one aspect of business that she, with her mere woman’s mind, couldn’t understand.”
“And did she? Did she keep up with you and understand you?”
“Oh, yes. She did in spite of the fact that I gave her such a hard time. When you’re seventeen and run a business as big as ours, it makes one—”
“Vain? Self-centered? Full of oneself?”
“More or less. It was a full week before I gave up and stopped trying to make her clean the Aegean stables.”
“What?”
“Your father forgot Greek fables too, didn’t he? I finally stopped making her prove herself to me, and we gradually became friends. I had no idea women like her existed. In my great wisdom I thought that all women were like my mother. My mother cares only for her family and nothing else.”
“But this woman? Your friend?”
“Her father had died when she was twenty-two. Up until that time, she said, she’d never had a thought about anything except the latest dress style or the latest present her most recent beau had given her. When her father died she found that he’d left her a ladies’ dress shop that wasn’t doing very well and a great many debts.”