The Last Voyage of the Verity

The Verity took on the Thorne family the way a great house takes on dust — quietly, and all at once. Mara came up the gangway last, after the cousins and the aunts and the men with the matched luggage, and no one turned to watch her arrive. That was the usual thing. Mara was the grandchild from the branch that had married out, invited by name on heavy cream paper and expected, as far as she could tell, to want nothing and receive less.

At the top of the gangway she steadied herself with her left hand against the rail and looked up the white wall of the ship. Eight days at sea, the invitation had promised. A family reunion, it had called itself, though the Thornes had not willingly been in one room since before Mara was old enough to remember. Somewhere above, on a deck she had not yet found, old Edmund Thorne was waiting — dying, the relatives murmured, and calling them all together to settle what came after.

A steward took Mara's coat and asked, with the careful blankness of a man paid not to have opinions, whether she would care to join the family on the promenade deck, or settle in first and find her own way up.