Upon arrival, Captain Braddock handed her a heavy navy apron, plain and stiff, with one large pocket in the front.

“Yer gonna want this on whenever yer in the store… it can be a dusty place to work in.” he explained. Then, motioning for her to follow, he began to show her around the store. “Yer already familiar with the shelves, and behind the counter, here’s where you’ll find bags and scoops for measuring the tea, and then there’s the scale on the end of the counter to measure the bigger orders with.”

Katherine looked at the old-fashioned scale. It looked Victorian, with a shiny brass bowl on top and ornate brass metalwork surrounding the large dial on the front. She smiled and touched the top of the scale as she walked past, watching the needle bounce with the lightest pressure. How she would enjoy using such a piece of the past!

The Captain continued his tour, showing her where the empty jars were stored in some cupboards built into the back of the counter.

Then, he led the way through a doorway into his office. An old rolltop desk stood against the back wall, and she noticed a rectangular wooden table in the center of the room, with various orderly piles of paper on it, along with what looked to Katherine to be an old brass oil lamp, fitted with an electric bulb. Behind this resided an antique captain’s chair on wheels, which Katherine thought particularly appropriate. There were glassed-in lawyer’s cases and bookshelves around the rest of the walls, and above the rolltop hung an oil painting of a clipper ship, tossing triumphantly on stormy waves. To the left of the doorway into the office stood another door, painted the same shade of green as the shop’s front door.

“There’s not much in here you’ll need, except this—” he reached over and pointed to a clipboard hanging to one side of the door. “This will be yer’ most important job. You’ll be in charge of inventorying the tea shipments as they come in. Let me show you where you’ll take the boxes when they arrive.” He opened the green door and led Katherine down a short flight of steps into a cavernous space, flipping a switch on the wall to turn on the few antique lights that lit the center of the room.

“This is the storeroom.” He said, walking over to a stack of boxes. “Now, see, some of these boxes will have labels in other languages. They’re organized on the inventory sheet by the country they’ve shipped from. Make sure you compare them carefully and ask me if there’s any you can’t figure out. You may be able to find the name of the country somewhere on the shipping labels.”

Katherine nodded and looked around the room, wondering how such a large room had come to be used for only a few small stacks of boxes. Along the far wall, away from the light, she could just barely discern some shadowy shapes that looked like some sort of large boxes or trunks.

The Captain caught her peering off into the shadows, and moved towards the door, saying gruffly, “The Harborside’s got many little cracks and crevices, and I hope I don’t have to tell you to mind yer work and not to go nosin’ about.”

Katherine nodded, with a faint twinge of disappointment. Now that she’d been told not to nose about, she certainly would have to be careful not to. She looked back at the storeroom with a quiet sigh.

Since it was only Tuesday, with more shipments expected to arrive before unpacking on Thursday, Captain Braddock set Katherine to work dusting.

“It’s very important that the jars stay clean,” he said, picking up a dust rag and working with her. “The customers don’t seem to mind a dusty counter—although we wipe that down almost constantly—but they do hate having dust on the jars. Makes them squirm, see.”

He and Katherine dusted the jars, then she set about dusting the various nautical knick-knacks and pictures. She paused as she took down a model of a clipper ship that looked remarkably like the one in the painting in the captain’s office.

She turned around and saw the captain standing behind the counter, surrounded by jars from which he was measuring out tea for the Grand Hotel’s order.

“Captain Braddock,” she began,

“Yes?” The captain looked up sharply, as if he were startled to hear a voice other than his own in the usually deserted little shop.

“This ship… what’s her name?”

The captain put down the jar he had been measuring from and stepped out from behind the counter, wiping his hands on his apron. “Ah, that’s the Anne. She was named for the wife of the very first Captain Braddock, who built this place.”

Katherine’s eyes widened. “And this was his ship?” 

“Yes, indeed. And it had its adventures, that’s for sure.” He took the model in his hands and stroked it lovingly, while Katherine leaned carefully against the shelves, sensing the beginning of a story.

“You know what kind of ship this is, then?” He asked.

She shook her head.

“It’s a clipper. Built for speed, plain and simple. See how she has three masts, and all these sails? Clippers carried more sails than any other kind of ship back then. And the masts, see how tall they are? That helped the ship to be more aerodynamic. The sails were arranged carefully to best catch the wind and that helped the ship to be fast—a hundred knots a day faster than other sailing ships at the time. Speed was the crucial factor, because the Anne was a merchant ship, you see. She sailed to China and brought back the Harborside’s first tea shipment in 1847. They unloaded it onto the wharf out yonder, and brought it right into this very room.”

Katherine gave a puzzled frown. “But… I thought this building went up with the rest of the old downtown buildings, in 1890?”

“Ah, I can see you know yer local history. That’s right, the brick of the outer walls and the storerooms were built in 1890, but because the Harborside was already such an important part of Harborhaven, the Braddocks faced a dilemma. They wanted the Harborside to stay the same, but they knew they needed to build on.

After all, they didn’t want the Harborside to be a dumpy little wooden building amidst a sea of towering Victorian brick, and they needed more room. Business had been good, and they had to build storerooms for the cargo the Anne would be bringing back. So, being a family of resources and ingenuity, they decided to do both: they would build up, but keep the store the same.”

“How could they do both?” Katherine asked with a puzzled frown

“By building their Victorian brick storerooms around the original building.” The captain watched Katherine’s face, enjoying the changes in her expression as she processed this revelation.

“So… the brick in your office, and this storefront with the windows in it, are all from 1890, but the wooden walls in here are from…”

“1846. You see, the first of the Harborside Braddocks, Captain Jeremiah, for whom I’m named, he and his wife Anne and their three sons built the Harborside from scratch, just as the town was being settled.

“Anne and the boys sold off what stock they had been able to bring with them while Captain Jeremiah went off to China in the Anne for more. Tea had just gotten to be a big thing out here, and the Braddocks knew there would be other merchants selling it, but they were determined to get a foothold here in Harborhaven, since it was such a good place for shipping. Strategically placed, that’s what they said about it at the time.

“Well, the Anne made the Braddocks a fortune, and there was money enough for grand improvements by the time the town was really getting going, so, they decided to improve.”

Katherine hardly heard this last part of the captain’s story as she stared at the walls in wonder. She was standing in the very room in which the first Captain Braddock and his wife Anne had unpacked the very first Harborside shipment! And now, centuries later, she would be doing the same job. A thrill went through her at the thought.

“But, you know,” continued the captain, “It wasn’t an easy trip, that first one. No, not by a long shot.”

Katherine snapped back into focus at this, leaning forward in her excitement to find out what adventure had befallen the Anne on her maiden voyage.

“They had good weather on the way there, and they were able to get quite a good cargo. Captain Jeremiah even had been able to get ahold of an ornate box of tea so precious, he had to keep it with him at all times while ashore lest it be stolen. Someone had seen him with it, though, and the Anne wasn’t two days out from shore before the lookout spied a ship coming towards them. They soon heard a warning shot fired across their bow, and sure enough, if it wasn’t pirates!”

Katherine raised her eyebrows skeptically, but the captain continued.

“Now, then. These weren’t pirates like in the movies. These were the real thing, and they had been hired by another merchant to steal the captain’s precious box of tea. They boarded, and searched the ship, but the box was nowhere to be found. The pirates were furious, but Captain Jeremiah calmly told them that he had thrown the box into the sea when he saw them coming. They made another search, and eventually left, having found nothing.”

“And had Captain Jeremiah really thrown the box into the sea?” asked Katherine, once again absorbed in the tale.

“Yes and no,” he replied. “He was a sly one, Captain Jeremiah was. He had thrown the box into the sea, but the contents he had carefully sealed in a bag of waxed cloth and sewn it into the hem of one of the curtains in his cabin before they had even left the harbor.”

“And the pirates didn’t suspect a thing?”

“No. You see, the box was made out of wood, and he made sure he threw it over just as the pirate ship got close, so they would see it still floating near the ship. When they saw that, they gave up. They didn’t leave peacefully, though.”

“What did they do?”

“Well, they beat several of the crew, trying to get information out of them, and in their fury upon seeing the box floating in the water, they struck the captain and threw him overboard, unconscious. But the cabin boy, who had been hiding behind the lifeboats in terror, saw the captain go overboard and threw a rope over the side of the ship. He climbed down, and quietly eased himself into the water. The pirates never noticed a thing!

“Now this boy, you see, he happened to be a strong swimmer, and made his way to where Captain Jeremiah was floating. The boy kept the captain’s head above water until the pirate ship was far enough away the crew could safely bring them aboard. Needless to say, that cabin boy was well looked after from then on.”

He put the model back on the shelf and said with a hint of reluctance in his voice, “Well, now, I suppose we’d both best get back to our work.”

Katherine turned and began to vigorously dust the shelf behind her, not wanting the captain to regret having taken time for the story. She somehow knew that there were many more he could tell, and she began to pay closer attention to the things she dusted, wondering what story each one would reveal.

8 Secrets and Stories

Wednesday had never seemed longer to Katherine. It was no different than any other Wednesday, with the Dailies each coming in at their appointed time, and the Luncheon Society’s ever-present chatter throughout the noon hour, but to Katherine, it all seemed to drag along at a snail’s pace.